(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/The-Name-is-my-Name]

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)