Setting aside the usual arguments on the anti- and pro-AI art debate and the nature of creativity itself, perhaps the negative reaction that the Redditor encountered is part of a sea change in opinion among many people that think corporate AI platforms are exploitive and extractive in nature because their datasets rely on copyrighted material without the original artists’ permission. And that’s without getting into AI’s negative drag on the environment.
People talk about A.I. art threatening artist jobs but everything I’ve seen created by A.I. tools is the most absolute dogshit art ever made, counting the stuff they found in Saddam Hussein’s mansions.
So, I would think the theft of IP for training models is the larger objection. No one thinks a Balder’s Gate 3 fan was gonna commission an artist to make a drawing for them. They’re pissed their work was used without permission.
Have you just woken up from a year long coma? AI can create stunning pictures now.
Yeah and there are tons of angles and gestures for human subjects that AI just can’t figure out still. Any time I’ve seen a “stunning” AI render it’s some giant FOV painting with no real subject or the subject takes up a 12th of the canvas.
The problem is artists often make their actual living doing basic boiler plate stuff that gets forgotten quickly.
In graphics it’s Company logos, advertising, basic graphics for businesses.
In writing it’s copy for websites, it’s short articles, it’s basic stuff.
Very few artists want to do these things, they want to create the original work that might not make money at all. That work potentially being a winning lottery ticket but most often being an act of expressing themselves that doesn’t turn into a payday.
Unfortunately AI is taking work away from artists. It can’t seem to make very good art yet but it can prevent artists who could make good art getting to the point of making it.
It’s starving out the top end of the creative market by limiting the easy work artists could previously rely on to pay the bills whilst working on the big ideas.
You should check out this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF, and this one by Katherine Klosek, the director of information policy and federal relations at the Association of Research Libraries.
Using things “without permission” forms the bedrock on which artistic expression and free speech as a whole are built upon. I am glad to see that the law aligns with these principles and protects our ability to engage openly and without fear of reprisal, which is crucial for fostering a healthy society.
I find myself at odds with the polarized argumentation about AI. If you don’t like it, that’s understandable, but don’t make it so that if someone uses AI, they have to defend themselves from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment. Those accusations are often times incorrect or made without substantial evidence.
I’m open to that conversation, as long as we can keep it respectful and productive. Drop a reply if you want, it’s way better than unexplained downvoting.
Yes, using existing works as reference is obviously something that real human artists do all the time, there’s no arguing that is the case. That’s how people learn to create art to begin with.
But, the fact is, generative AI is not creative, nor does it understand what creativity is, nor will it ever. Because all it is doing is performing complex data statistical analysis algorithms to generate a matrix of pixels or a string of words.
Im sorry, but the person entering in the prompt to instruct the algorithm is also not doing anything creative either. Do you think it is art to go through a fast food drive through and place an order? That’s what people are objecting to - people calling themselves artists because they put some nonsense word salad together and then think what they get out of it is some unique thing that they feel they created and take ownership of. If not for the AI model they are using and the creative works it was trained on, they could not have created it or likely even imagined it without it.
People are actively losing their livelihoods because AI tech is being oversold and overhyped as something that it’s not. Execs are all jumping on the bandwagon and because they see AI as something that will save them a bunch of money, they are laying off people they think aren’t needed anymore. So, just try to incorporate that sentiment into your understanding of why people are also upset about AI. You may not be personally affected, but there are countless that are. In fact, over the next two years, as many as 203,000 entertainment workers in the US alone could be affected
You want to have fun creating fancy kitbashed images based off of other people’s work, go right ahead. Just don’t call it art and call yourself an artist, unless you could actually make it yourself using practical skills.
Also, good luck trying to copyright it because guess what, you can’t.
Yes, using existing works as reference is obviously something that real human artists do all the time, there’s no arguing that is the case. That’s how people learn to create art to begin with.
But, the fact is, generative AI is not creative, nor does it understand what creativity is, nor will it ever. Because all it is doing is performing complex data statistical analysis algorithms to generate a matrix of pixels or a string of words.
Im sorry, but the person entering in the prompt to instruct the algorithm is also not doing anything creative either. Do you think it is art to go through a fast food drive through and place an order? That’s what people are objecting to - people calling themselves artists because they put some nonsense word salad together and then think what they get out of it is some unique thing that they feel they created and take ownership of. If not for the AI model they are using and the creative works it was trained on, they could not have created it or likely even imagined it without it.
I’d like to ask you what experience you have with generative art, because I’d like to explain a bit of what I know,
There’s also a spectrum of involvement depending on what tool you’re using. I know with web based interfaces don’t allow for a lot of freedom due to wanting to keep users from generating things outside their terms of use, but with open source models based on Stable Diffusion you can get a lot more involved and get a lot more freedom. We’re in a completely different world from March 2023 as far as generative tools go. Take a quick look at things work.
Let’s take these generation parameters for instance:
sarasf, 1girl, solo, robe, long sleeves, white footwear, smile, wide sleeves, closed mouth, blush, looking at viewer, sitting, tree stump, forest, tree, sky, traditional media, 1990s \(style\), <lora:sarasf_V2-10:0.7>
Negative prompt: (worst quality, low quality:1.4), FastNegativeV2
Steps: 21, VAE: kl-f8-anime2.ckpt, Size: 512x768, Seed: 2303584416, Model: Based64mix-V3-Pruned, Version: v1.6.0, Sampler: DPM++ 2M Karras, VAE hash: df3c506e51, CFG scale: 6, Clip skip: 2, Model hash: 98a1428d4c, Hires steps: 16, "sarasf_V2-10: 1ca692d73fb1", Hires upscale: 2, Hires upscaler: 4x_foolhardy_Remacri, "FastNegativeV2: a7465e7cc2a2",
ADetailer model: face_yolov8n.pt, ADetailer version: 23.11.1, Denoising strength: 0.38, ADetailer mask blur: 4, ADetailer model 2nd: Eyes.pt, ADetailer confidence: 0.3, ADetailer dilate erode: 4, ADetailer mask blur 2nd: 4, ADetailer confidence 2nd: 0.3, ADetailer inpaint padding: 32, ADetailer dilate erode 2nd: 4, ADetailer denoising strength: 0.42, ADetailer inpaint only masked: True, ADetailer inpaint padding 2nd: 32, ADetailer denoising strength 2nd: 0.43, ADetailer inpaint only masked 2nd: True
To break down a bit of what’s going on here, I’d like to explain some of the elements found here. sarasf is the token for the LoRA of the character in this image, and <lora:sarasf_V2-10:0.7> is the character LoRA for Sarah from Shining Force II. LoRA are like supplementary models you use on top of a base model to capture a style or concept, like a patch. Some LoRA don’t have activation tokens, and some with them can be used without their token to get different results.
The 0.7 in <lora:sarasf_V2-10:0.7> refers to the strength at which the weights from the LoRA are applied to the output. Lowering the number causes the concept to manifest weaker in the output. You can blend styles this way with just the base model or multiple LoRA at the same time at different strengths. Furthurmore you can adjust the UNet and Text Encoder by adding another colon like so : <lora:sarasf_V2-10:1:0.7> for even more varied results. Doing this allows you to separate the “idea” from the “look” of the LoRA. You can even use a monochrome LoRA and take the weight into the negative to get some crazy colors.
The Negative Prompt is where you include things you don’t want in your image. (worst quality, low quality:1.4), here are quality tags and have their attention set to 1.4. Attention is sort of like weight, but for tokens. LoRA bring their own weights to add onto the model, whereas attention on tokens works completely inside the weights they’re given. In this negative prompt FastNegativeV2 is an embedding known as a Textual Inversion. It’s sort of like a crystallized collection of tokens that tell the model something precise you want without having to enter the tokens yourself or mess around with the attention manually. Embeddings you put in the negative prompt are known as Negative Embeddings.
In the next part, Steps stands for how many steps you want the model to take to solve the starting noise into an image. More steps take longer. VAE is the name of the Variational Autoencoder used in this generation. The VAE is responsible for working with the weights to make each image unique. A mismatch of VAE and model can yield blurry and desaturated images, so some models opt to have their VAE baked in, Size are the dimensions in pixels the image will be generated at. Seed is the number representation of the starting noise for the image. You need this to be able to reproduce a specific image.
Model is the name of the model used, and Sampler is the name of the algorithm that solves the noise into an image. There are a few different samplers, also known as schedulers, each with their own trade-offs for speed, quality, and memory usage. CFG is basically how close you want the model to follow your prompt. Some models can’t handle high CFG values and flip out, giving over-exposed or nonsense output. Hires steps represents the amount of steps you want to take on the second pass to upscale the output. This is necessary to get higher resolution images without visual artifacts. Hires upscaler is the name of the model that was used during the upscaling step, and again there are a ton of those with their own trade-offs and use cases.
After ADetailer are the parameters for Adetailer, an extension that does a post-process pass to fix things like broken anatomy, faces, and hands. We’ll just leave it at that because I don’t feel like explaining all the different settings found there.
https://youtu.be/-JQDtzSaAuA?t=97
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtbEuERXSqk
Not all selfies are art, but you can make art with cameras. I think the same applies here.
People are actively losing their livelihoods because AI tech is being oversold and overhyped as something that it’s not. Execs are all jumping on the bandwagon and because they see AI as something that will save them a bunch of money, they are laying off people they think aren’t needed anymore. So, just try to incorporate that sentiment into your understanding of why people are also upset about AI. You may not be personally affected, but there are countless that are. In fact, over the next two years, as many as 203,000 entertainment workers in the US alone could be affected
This EFF article by Katharine Trendacosta and Cory Doctorow touches on this. I think it’s worth a read.
You want to have fun creating fancy kitbashed images based off of other people’s work, go right ahead.
This is misinformation, and not how the technology works. Here’s a quick video explanation,
Just don’t call it art and call yourself an artist, unless you could actually make it yourself using practical skills.
This is just snobbery that people have always used to devalue the efforts of others. Punching down and gatekeeping won’t solve your problems, the people you’re really mad at are above you.
Art is about bringing your ideas into the world, anything beyond that is fetish. Spending hundreds of hours learning a skill isn’t art, it’s work. While I believe the effort invested in a work can contribute to its depth and meaning, that doesn’t make them better than works without as much effort.
cont.
Part 2
Also, good luck trying to copyright it because guess what, you can’t.
This looks like it’s set to change. The US Copyright Office is proactively exploring and evolving its understanding of this topic and are actively seeking expert and public feedback. You shouldn’t expect this to be their final word on the subject.
It’s also important to remember Copyright Office guidance isn’t law. Their guidance reflects only the office’s interpretation based on experience, it isn’t binding in courts or other parties. Guidance from the office is not a substitute for legal advice, and it does not create any rights or obligations for anyone. They are the lowest rung on the ladder for deciding what law means.
Let’s keep it civil and productive. Jeering dismissive language like “Also, good luck trying to copyright it because guess what, you can’t.” isn’t helping your argument, they’re just mean spirited. Let’s have a civil discussion, even if we disagree. I’m open to keep talking, but I will quit replying if you continue being disrespectful.
That won’t get you into art school but it also won’t get you kicked out.
*adjusts horn-rims* yesyes very neat do you have anything else to say but that you’re whimsical?
There are so many possibilities for AI art, to say it’s all bad is painting it all with one brush
“I feel like a lot of the anti-AI people just… want there to be less beautiful art in the world,” one Redditor replied in the same thread.
The beauty of, what, mutations caused by a nuclear accident?
This was the craziest quote to me:
“I hope someday being anti-AI is seen as ableist,” another mused.
WHAT.
Just…FUCKIN WHAT.
These people just want to be able to sell their AI art alongside other artists, because they “spent 6 hours to get only 5 images” is obviously on par with someone who has spent years honing their skills and craft the create art on a canvas or other blank medium.
Some AI art is pretty interesting, but let’s not equate it being the same as someone with actual creative talent.
Yeah like also, if you’re doing art for validation – you’re not doing art.
Honestly, just pass a law saying you’re not allowed to use a model that was trained using non public domain material.
Voila, AI can be permitted without robbing existing artists and artists still have a monopoly on new material.
This just in: thieves realize law means that they aren’t supposed to steal, theft rate collapse to 0%.
Also those signs at school campuses saying they are a “no gun zone” means school shootings are officially a thing of the past. Phew, why didn’t we think of this earlier?
This just in, local dumbass forgets that the point of it being a law is to throw assholes who do it anyways in jail for being the assholes they are!
AI art is like the speech synthesiser that came with Amiga’s Workbench. Amusing for yourself to make it say swears, but of no interest to anyone else.
I think there are interesting aspects of AI art. It takes a real artist to properly instruct an AI to create something new, different, and interesting. When I think of modern art, a lot of art snobs were dismissive of it because “it’s not art.” I think we will see the same opinions of AI art change as new, different, and interesting artwork is made.
Thing is, generated art is not new or different. It’s a machine amalgamation of existing works. The only vaguely interesting bits are how it mangles body parts into some kind of Cronenberg horror.
Humans certainly don’t make new things out of nothing. They also take from different sources and combine them together to make something new, whether that’s direct inspiration or on a more abstract level through the brain.
Learning models aren’t generating art any more than GIMP or Photoshop is. It’s the person behind the tool that makes the art, not the tool. There’s certainly an art to prompt smithing.
I feel like a lot of people dismiss generated art simply because it’s new (and because as a byproduct is spits out dozens of junk pieces before getting anywhere good). I don’t see how it’s that different from someone using photo-editing software built with dozens of algorithms instead of a ‘pure’ drawing pad, or someone using a drawing pad instead of a pencil, or someone using a pencil instead of chalk. It’s a tool, and a great one at that in comparison to many digital tools for artists.
I think there already is AI art but it’s not the art that everyone is talking about, it’s not your run-of-the-mill fantasy illustration prompt but people exploring what can be made with tools like that.
Rather than focusing on emulating traditional illustration, they invent their own processes and that is the work.
Yeah no one will ever have any use for synthesized voice. It’s like the drum machine, just a silly gadget which will never have any impact on music…
Hmmm.
Ai image gen will continue to improve, a kid born today will likely grow in a world where they’re completely used to game render engines using generative ai, where they design complex and beautiful virtual worlds, and where art lessons focus more on design and expression than technical skill (which people interested in will learn with thy help of ai tools).
You’re welcome to feel however you like about new technologies but don’t tattoo your idea that ai image gen is just a fad because it won’t age well.
Eh the haters will be the minority eventually.
Had someone claim I ripped off another artists work. When I went to look at the artist it wasn’t even similar.
People are just outraged and looking for any excuses, it’ll simmer down in a year or two.
I’m having fun making it and seeing what others come up with, that’s all that matters to me in the end.
Going to be honest with you, your art is fine.
Just fine.
Not great though. Not exceptional. Not really new or exciting.
Just what anyone with a weak prompt and an llm can do.
It’s ok.
I’m glad you are enjoying making it.
I never said it was great.
And what art is new or exciting these days? Everything is derivative of everything else.
I take it you spend time going to galleries or the theatre? That you engage with art at the source…
Because if you said something as fucking stupid as “and what art is exciting these days” whilst only consuming media through a screen, that’d make you look and sound really daft.
