(OC) AI 'art' and the future

[u/SylvieXX]

Could be controversial but I'm just gonna say it... I don't like AI... and for me it was never about it not looking good. There are obviously more factors to this whole thing, like about people losing jobs, about how the whole thing is just stealing, and everything like that but I'm just focusing on one fundamental aspect that I think about a lot... I just wanted to draw what I feel...! 🥲🥲 Sorry about the cringe but I actually live for cringe 💖

[u/Pink-Fluffy-Dragon]

Art is more meaningful when it's made by a real person <3 it doesn't have to be perfect.

[u/SylvieXX → u/Pink-Fluffy-Dragon]

Yes absolutely... 💝 art is meaningful because there is an artist behind it...!

[u/ryanvango → u/SylvieXX]

So this is the heart of the issue, really. And its why I don't think AI art is as bad as people think. Yes, it will automate out a lot of jobs. all technological progress does that. but people are especially upset about art because in great art the artist has put themselves in to the piece. the artists story is a major part of the painting or sculpture or whatever. AI, by definition, can't replicate that. It can't fake human experience. Patrons of that kind of art will never go away. and the ones who do, didn't appreciate the art to begin with. There will always always always be a desire for human made art.

[u/aCleverGroupofAnts → u/ryanvango]

You hit the nail on the head. The evidence is in all the people constantly complaining about AI art, it won't ever truly replace artists because clearly nobody wants it to (aside from soulless capitalists). An AI can create beautiful melodies but we know there is no meaning behind the words it sings, so it doesn't move us.

[u/Keljhan → u/SylvieXX]

I 100% agree, especially for comics like yours. But I do find it surprising that all your examples are what I would consider entertainment, rather than art. I don't think people would watch Audrey Hepburn fighting 3x Jackie Chan for the social commentary, but I do think it would be very fun to watch. Maybe there's place for both?

[u/ifandbut → u/SylvieXX]

AI doesn't just magically make art. It took millions of humans putting work into creating AI. It takes a human to use the tool...

[u/MfkbNe → u/Pink-Fluffy-Dragon]

A picture says more than a thousand words. If an artist made a picture they put various details in them, some even subconcious, giving it hiden meanings. If an AI does it, it will just put some random things in it that weren't suposed to have any meaning.

[u/jkurratt → u/MfkbNe]

"AI, make an image with hidden meanings that actually makes sense".

[u/ifandbut → u/MfkbNe]

Does a photographer control every pixel of the sensor? Does a painter control every movement of each bristle?

The answer is no.

How is that any different from occasional random artifact in an AI image?

[u/tyrenanig → u/ifandbut]

The difference is the intent behind it. A painter may leave a mark with purposes. AI just imitates that, “there’s usually a mark here, with this pattern” so it puts it in.

[u/dogjon → u/ifandbut]

Are you a sociopath, do you lack empathy or something? How do you not understand that art has more meaning when there was another real person behind every brush stroke, every little decision? Can you not imagine someone else putting time and effort into something and why that is more valuable than a soulless AI copying what others did before?

[u/just_a_whiny_bitch → u/ifandbut]

Because humans know that human hands don’t have three fingers. It’s those little intricacies that AIs don’t understand yet, and might (hopefully) never will.

[u/ryanvango → u/just_a_whiny_bitch]

oh boy you may be behind the times. the fingers thing has mostly been corrected for. Its getting really difficult to tell AI art from human art, and even scarier its getting really hard to tell an AI photo from a real one.

but beyond that, if your argument is that AI doesn't do the thing right that's why it sucks, then will you change your stance when AI can fool you? because I promise it will. It likely already has. will AI be better than human art when it makes 0 mistakes?

[u/ifandbut → u/Pink-Fluffy-Dragon]

AI art is made by a real person. A person programmed it. A person built the circuits. And a person ran the command.

No different from using a coffee maker. You still make the coffee, you still make the art.

[u/Poobslag → u/ifandbut]

This is a perfect analogy, but not really one in favor of AI art. It's like calling a hot pocket a "home cooked meal". ...Okay technically you're right but honestly you're kind of selling me on home cooked meals more than you're selling me on hot pockets

[u/wolfpack_charlie → u/ifandbut]

It's more like all of the people who's work was scraped off the internet and congealed into something by model. That's who really "made" it, if we're discussing artistic credit. 

But the algorithm by design obfuscates that so they can't be credited like they deserve. And they have no ability to opt out of their art being modified and distributed in this way. 

So in practice it's actually quite different from a coffee maker. Only thing in common is that it cheapens and commodifies art.

[u/The-Name-is-my-Name → u/wolfpack_charlie]

That isn’t how it works. It doesn’t craft using pieces of your pixels. It uses patterns to make stuff similar to its training data.

Now, it still works similarly enough that unconsented training data scoops are still a slimy scummy business, but it’s not all stealing. That’s just people wanting to be more in-the-right than they are.

[u/wolfpack_charlie → u/The-Name-is-my-Name]

Diffusion-based models are highly prone to overfitting the training data, and generated images often match training samples very closely.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13188

In this work, we show that diffusion models memorize individual images from their training data and emit them at generation time.

Make no mistake: this is not analogous to human creativity and inspiration. This is just plagiarism. Art licenses already exist, and you do NOT have the right to modify and redistribute art that is not public domain/CC0, or that you have not purchased a license for.

[u/The-Name-is-my-Name → u/wolfpack_charlie]

I considered mentioning that.

Yes. When you make a machine that’s purpose is to simulate an output, based upon data given to it, and the machine isn’t designed to perfectly always avoid copying the input data, there is a good chance that it will find the most similar data input and just output its rendering of that.

Common glitch. Not malice. Not intentional. Not stealing.

That glitch hardly makes it a pure plagiarism machine. It makes it legally hazardous to use, but plagiarism isn’t all it does, unlike what you seem to be suggesting.

.

Tl’Dr: Just because a machine is capable of copying its source data too closely doesn’t mean that it’s only plagiarizing its source data, or “picking and choosing” pixels of its sources. That’s honestly a rather stupid thing to state, no offense. Like, how do you go from paraphrasing—quotation glitch to “oh yeah this thing must be only capable of using the data from its source inputs.” That’s so, so dumb. It’s not using your images, it’s making a separate rendition of those pixels because it overfit the data that was stolen from your artwork.

In human terms, it’s painting a second Mona Lisa, not printing the original off a copier. Not that it can truly be compared by such ensouled, anthropological analogies (sarcasm), but you get the picture.

[u/wolfpack_charlie → u/The-Name-is-my-Name]

“picking and choosing” pixels of its sources

“oh yeah this thing must be only capable of using the data from its source inputs.”

That's odd that you're quoting me on things I didn't say. 

By the way, if you paint a copy of mona lisa and claim it as your own, then that is still plagiarism. 

If you read the source I linked to, the generated images that closely match the training data are also completely unique pixels from the source images. 

[u/The-Name-is-my-Name → u/wolfpack_charlie]

Yeah, I know it’s plagiarism. What I’m saying is that it doesn’t mean that it’s the same form of plagiarism as copy-pasting. It’s impressive to me the AI can recreate its data in its own attempts (or it would be, if it weren’t having done that for years). It’s a problematic outcome, of course, but it shows progress.

Plagiarism by the form of painting an exact copy due to not-seeing-the-need-to-change-it is a major step forward from copy-pasting, but you seem to act like the machine is only capable of plagiarism and will always only be capable of plagiarism.

I mean, at that point, you should just be angry at all artists for their subconscious inspirations. …Not that how AI operates and how us humans operate is comparable at all, for we are soulful minds of unbounded creativity. (On a serious note, though, I do not intend to anthropomorphize AI when I make comparisons, I merely lack words to describe these “non-inspired” inspirations of these codes. They don’t think like humans, not at all, they simply do what is likely to produce the correct output)