On this topic, I am optimistic on how generative AI has made us collectively more negative to shallow content. Be it lazy copypaste journalism with some phrases swapped or school testing schemes based on regurgitating facts rather than understanding, none of which have value and both of which displace work with value, we have basically tolerated it.
But now that a rock with some current run through it can pass those tests and do that journalism, we are demanding better.
Fingers crossed it causes some positive in the mess.
We have to deal now with periods of crap content, until people will fatigue and became aware of the shitty ai things made for quick bucks.
The problem is that because the production costs of the crap content will now be near zero, it will always be profitable to create as long as there is just a fraction of the consumerbase falling for it.
It is never going to stop on its own because of lack of demand, it is going to continue and something drastic will have to be thought up to create an internet where everything isn’t buried in AI generated crap.
Exactly
I hope it has same effect than mechanization for menial work. It raises the bar for what people expect other people to do.
Long term it helps reach a utopia, short term there will be a lot of people impacted by it.
One of the better tooling ideas I’ve heard is from a friend of mine who does board game development. One of the problems is going back and forth with the artist over what’s wanted. With an AI image generator, he can get something along the right lines, and then take it to the artist as an example.
Yeah, I just noticed that with generated music getting better I feel more demanding towards the music I listen to.
I recently realized that I have some basic bitch music tastes and could likely listen to ai generated instrumentals for a long time
The problem is that quantity is no longer going to be a problem, it can be created for virtually nothing, so basically just a tiny profit will be enough to warrant it in the outlook of those responsible for it.
Now endless shallow spam, which slightly resembles something worthwhile, can be generated in an instant, because it will generate a meagre profit. It is already happening on the book market for example. Amazon is flooded with AI generated books, and proper authors are simply buried in the mountains of generated spam which is at best nonsensical but at worst genuinely misinforming.
Perhaps consumers will become more discerning in the future (although to be honest not much in the present suggests that will be the outcome), but it will never remove the increasing mountains of spam, because it will be produced for as long as just a fraction of people buy into it. And this will be applicable to everything on the internet. If we thought commercialisation and spam was bad now, we have seen nothing at all yet.
So even with proper discernment, it will take a lot of time and effort just to locate something earnest and worthwhile in the generated spam.
I remember when photoshop became widely available and the art community collectively declared it the death of art. To put the techniques of master artists in the hand of anyone who can use a mouse would put the painter out of business. I watched as the news fumed and fired over delinquents photoshopping celebrity nudes, declaring that we’ll never be able to trust a photo again. I saw the cynical ire of views as the same news shopped magazine images for the vanity of their guests and the support of their political views. Now, the dust long settled, photoshop is taught in schools and used by designer globally. Photo manipulation is so prevalent that you probably don’t realize your phone camera is preprogrammed to cover your zits and remove your loose hairs. It’s a feature you have to actively turn off. The masters of their craft are still masters, the need for a painted canvas never went away. We laugh at obvious shop jobs in the news, and even our out of touch representatives know when am image is fake.
The world, as it seems, has enough room for a new tool. As it did again with digital photography, the death of the real photographers. As it did with 3D printing, the death of the real sculptors and carvers. As it did with synth music, the death of the real musician. When the dust settles on AI, the artist will be there to load their portfolio into the trainer and prompt out a dozen raw ideas before picking the composition they feel is right and shaping it anew. The craft will not die. The world will hate the next advancement, and the cycle will repeat.
When it comes to AI art, the Photoshop/invention of the camera argument doesn’t really compare because there’s really 2 or 3 things people are actually upset about, and it’s not the tool itself. It’s the way the data is sourced, the people who are using it/what they’re using it for, and the lack of meaning behind the art.
As somebody said elsewhere in here, sampling for music is done from pre-made content explicitly for use as samples or used under license. AI art generators do neither. They fill their data sets with art used without permission and no licensing, and given the right prompting, you can get them to spit out that data verbatim.
This compounds into the next issue, the people using it, and more specifically, how those people are using it. If it was being used as a tool to help make the creation process more efficient or easier, that would be one thing. But it’s largely being used by people to replace the artist and people who think that being able to prompt an image and use it unedited makes them just as good an artist as anybody working by hand, stylus, etc. They’re “idea” guys, who care nothing for the process and only the output (and how much that output is gonna cost). But anybody can be an “idea” guy, it’s the work and knowledge that makes the difference between having an idea for a game and releasing a game on Steam. To the creative, creating art (regardless of the kind - music, painting, stories, whatever) is as much about the work as it is the final piece. It’s how they process life, the same as dreaming at night. AI bros are the middle managers of the art world - taking credit for the work of others while thinking that their input is the most important part.
And for the last point, as Adam Savage said on why he doesn’t like AI art (besides the late-stage capitalism bubble of it putting people out of work), “They lack, I think they lack a point of view. I think that’s my issue with all the AI generated art that I can see is…the only reason I’m interested in looking at something that got made is because that thing that got made was made with a point of view. The thing itself is not as interesting to me as the mind and heart behind the thing and I have yet to see in AI…I have yet to smell what smells like a point of view.” He later goes on to talk about how at some point a student film will come out that does something really cool with AI (and then Hollywood will copy it into the ground until it’s stale and boring). But we are not at that point yet. AI art is just Content. In the same way that corporate music is Content. Shallow and vapid and meaningless. Like having a machine that spits out elevator music. It may be very well done elevator music on a technical level, but it’s still just elevator music. You can take that elevator music and do something cool with it (like Vaporwave), but on its own, it exists merely for the sake of existing. It doesn’t tell a story or make a statement. It doesn’t have any context.
To quote Bennett Foddy in one of the most rage inducing games of the past decade, “For years now, people have been predicting that games would soon be made out of prefabricated objects, bought in a store and assembled into a world. And for the most part that hasn’t happened, because the objects in the store are trash. I don’t mean that they look bad or that they’re badly made, although a lot of them are - I mean that they’re trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in a sink. Things are made to be consumed in a certain context, and once the moment is gone, they transform into garbage. In the context of technology, those moments pass by in seconds. Over time, we’ve poured more and more refuse into this vast digital landfill that we call the internet. It now vastly outweighs the things that are fresh, untainted and unused. When everything around us is cultural trash, trash becomes the new medium, the lingua franca of the digital age. You could build culture out of trash, but only trash culture. B-games, B-movies, B-music, B-philosophy.”
That is precisely it. Generative AI is a tool, just like a digital canvas over a physical canvas, just like a canvas over a cave wall. As it has always been, the ones best prepared to adapt to this new tool are the artists. Instead of fighting the tool, we need to learn how to best use it. No AI, short of a true General Intelligence, will ever be able to make the decisions inherent to illustration, but it can get you close enough to the final vision so as to skip the labor intensive part.
Don’t apologize, this level of discussion is exactly what I came to the table hoping for.
I will say, my stance is less about the now and more about the here to come. I agree wholly with the issues of plagiarism, especially when he comes to personal styles. I also recognize the vivid swath of other crimes that this tech can be used for. Moreover, corporations are pushing it far too fast and hard and the end result of that can only by bad.
However, I hold a small hope that these are just the growing pains, the bruised thumbs enviable when learning to swing a hammer. We forget that photoshop was used to cyber bully teens with fake nudes. We look past the fields of logos made by uncles that didn’t want to pay for a graphic designer, the company websites made by the same mindless managers that now use AI to solve all their problems. Eventually, the next product will come and only those who found genuine use will remain.
AI is different in so many ways, but it’s also the same. Instead of fighting for it’s regulation, we need to regulate ourselves and our uses of it. We can’t expect anyone with the power to do something to have our best interest at heart.
Not the same thing, dog. Being inspired by other things is different than plagiarism.
And yet so many of the debates around this new formation of media and creativity come down to the grey space between what is inspiration and what is plagiarism.
Even if everyone agreed with your point, and I think broadly they do, it doesn’t settle the debate.
The real problem is that ai will never ever be able to make art without using content copied from other artists which is absolutely plagiarism
But an artist cannot be inspired without content from other artists. I don’t agree to the word “copied” here either, because it is not copying when it creates something new.
Humans learn from other creative works, just like AI. AI can generate original content too if asked.
AI creates output from a stochastic model of its’ training data. That’s not a creative process.
What does that mean, and isn’t that still something people can employ for their creative process?
LLM AI doesn’t learn. It doesn’t conceptualise. It mimics, iterates and loops. AI cannot generate original content with LLM approaches.
Interesting take on LLMs, how are you so sure about that?
I mean I get it, current image gen models seem clearly uncreative, but at least the unrestricted versions of Bing Chat/ChatGPT leave some room for the possibility of creativity/general intelligence in future sufficiently large LLMs, at least to me.
So the question (again: to me) is not only “will LLM scale to (human level) general intelligence”, but also “will we find something better than RLHF/LLMs/etc. before?”.
I’m not sure on either, but asses roughly a 2/3 probability to the first and given the first event and AGI in reach in the next 8 years a comparatively small chance for the second event.
We’ll soon see whether or not it’s the same thing.
Only a 50 years ago or so, some well-known philosophers off AI believed computers would write great poetry before they could ever beat a grand master at chess.
The formalization of chess can’t be practically applied. The top chess programs are all trained models that evaluate a position in a non-formal way.
They use neural nets, just like the AIs being hyped these days.
This argument was settled with electronic music in the 80s/90s. Samples and remixes taken directly from other bits of music to create a new piece aren’t plagiarism.
I’m not claiming that DJs plagiarise. I’m stating that AIs are plagiarism machines.
And you’re absolutely right about that. That’s not the same thing as LLMs being incapable of constituting anything written in a novel way, but that they will readily with very little prodding regurgitate complete works verbatim is definitely a problem. That’s not a remix. That’s publishing the same track and slapping your name on it. Doing it two bars at a time doesn’t make it better.
It’s so easy to get ChatGPT, for example, to regurgitate its training data that you could do it by accident (at least until someone published it last year). But, the critics cry, you’re using ChatGPT in an unintended way. And indeed, exploiting ChatGPT to reveal its training data is a lot like lobotomizing a patient or torture victim to get them to reveal where they learned something, but that really betrays that these models don’t actually think at all. They don’t actually contribute anything of their own; they simply have such a large volume of data to reorganize that it’s (by design) impossible to divine which source is being plagiarised at any given token.
Add to that the fact that every regulatory body confronted with the question of LLM creativity has so far decided that humans, and only humans, are capable of creativity, at least so far as our ordered societies will recognize. By legal definition, ChatGPT cannot transform (term of art) a work. Only a human can do that.
It doesn’t really matter how an LLM does what it does. You don’t need to open the black box to know that it’s a plagiarism machine, because plagiarism doesn’t depend on methods (or sophisticated mental gymnastics); it depends on content. It doesn’t matter whether you intended the work to be transformative: if you repeated the work verbatim, you plagiarized it. It’s already been demonstrated that an LLM, by definition, will repeat its training data a non-zero portion of the time. In small chunks that’s indistinguishable, arguably, from the way a real mind might handle language, but in large chunks it’s always plagiarism, because an LLM does not think and cannot “remix”. A DJ can make a mashup; an AI, at least as of today, cannot. The question isn’t whether the LLM spits out training data; the question is the extent to which we’re willing to accept some amount of plagiarism in exchange for the utility of the tool.
If AI’s are plagarism machines, then the mentioned situation must be example of DJs plagarising
The samples were intentionally rearranged and mixed with other content in a new and creative way.
When sampling took off, the copyright situation was sorted out and the end result is that there are ways to license samples. Some samples are produced like stock footage hat could be pirchased inexpensively, which is why a lot of songs by different artists have the same samples included. Samples of specific songs have to be licensed, so a hip hop song with a riff from an older famous song had some kind of licensing or it wouldnt be played on the radio or streaming services. They might have paid one time, or paid an artist group for access to a bunch of songs, basically the same kind of thing as covers.
Samples and covers are not plagarism if they are licensed and credit their source. Both are creating someing new, but using and crediting existing works.
AI is doing the same sampling and copying, but trying to pretend that it is somehow not sampling and copying and the companies running AI don’t want to credit the sources or license the content. That is why AI is plagarism.
Ray parker’s Ghostbusters is inspired by huey lewis and the new’s i want a new drug. But actually it’s just blatant plagiarism. Is it okay because a human did it?
This is true but AI is not plagiarism. Claiming it is shows you know absolutely nothing about how it works
Correction: they’re plagiarism machines.
I actually took courses in ML at uni, so… Yeah…
At the ML course at uni they said verbatime that they are plagiarism machines?
Did they not explain how neural networks start generalizing concepts? Or how abstractions emerge during the training?
Please tell me how an AI model can distinguish between “inspiration” and plagiarism then. I admit I don’t know that much about them but I was under the impression that they just spit out something that it “thinks” is the best match for the prompt based on its training data and thus could not make this distinction in order to actively avoid plagiarism.
Please tell me how an AI model can distinguish between “inspiration” and plagiarism then.
[…] they just spit out something that it “thinks” is the best match for the prompt based on its training data and thus could not make this distinction in order to actively avoid plagiarism.
I’m not entirely sure what the argument is here. Artists don’t scour the internet for any image that looks like their own drawings to avoid plagiarism, and often use photos or the artwork of others as reference, but that doesn’t mean they’re plagiarizing.
Plagiarism is about passing off someone else’s work as your own, and image-generation models are trained with the intent to generalize - that is, being able to generate things it’s never seen before, not just copy, which is why we’re able to create an image of an astronaut riding a horse even though that’s something the model obviously would’ve never seen, and why we’re able to teach the models new concepts with methods like textual inversion or Dreambooth.
there’s only seven stories in the world
There isn’t. That’s a completely nonsensical statement, no serious scholar of litearture/film/etc. would claim something of the sort. While there have been attempts to analyse the “basic” stories and narrative structures (Propp’s model of fairy tales, Greimas’ actantial model, Campbell’s well-known hero’s journey), they’re all far from universally applicable or satisfying.
there’s only seven stories in the world
This, to me, sounds like the opinion of someone who doesn’t read for entertainment. No, manga does not count.
If your only exposure to stories are TV shows and movies… yeah it’s gonna seem like there aren’t very many types of stories.
No, manga does not count.
“Nuuuuh, the most diverse medium with the wildest stories doesn’t count!! I’ll poopy my pants if you count it”
It is baffling that you would step forward and suggest that manga is somehow better than Japanese literature. Even further baffling are the people upvoting this.
As I said, the opinions of people who have never read for entertainment.
Edit: This is coming from someone who follows JJK leaks.
This sounds like the kind of shit you’d hear in that “defending AI art” community on Reddit or whatever. A bunch of people bitching that their prompts aren’t being treated equally to traditional art made by humans.
Make your own fucking AI art galleries if you’re so desperate for validation.
Also, this argument reeks of “I found x instances of derivative art today. That must mean there’s no original art in the world anymore”.
Miss me with that shit.
