zlacker

>>dredmo+(OP)
I've been finding that the strangest part of discussions around art AI among technical people is the complete lack of identification or empathy: it seems to me that most computer programmers should be just as afraid as artists, in the face of technology like this!!! I am a failed artist (read, I studied painting in school and tried to make a go at being a commercial artist in animation and couldn't make the cut), and so I decided to do something easier and became a computer programmer, working for FAANG and other large companies and making absurd (to me!!) amounts of cash. In my humble estimation, making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done. Art AI is terrifying if you want to make art for a living- and, if AI is able to do these astonishingly difficult things, why shouldn't it, with some finagling, also be able to do the dumb, simple things most programmers do for their jobs?

The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing...

>>meebob+kc
Artists have all my sympathy. I'm also a hobbyist painter. But I have very little sympathy for those perpetuating this tiresome moral panic (a small amount of actual artists, whatever the word "artist" means), because I think that:

a) the panic is entirely misguided and based on two wrong assumptions. The first is that textual input and treating the model as a function (command in -> result out) are sufficient for anything. No, this is a fundamentally deficient way to give artistic directions, which is further handicapped by primitive models and weak compute. Text alone is a toy; the field will just become more and more complex and technically involved, just like 3D CGI did, because if you don't use every trick available, you're missing out. The second wrong assumption is that it's going to replace anyone, instead of making many people re-learn a new tool and produce what was previously unfeasible due to the amount of mechanistic work involved. This second assumption stems from the fundamental misunderstanding of the value artists provide, which is conceptualization, even in a seemingly routine job.

b) the panic is entirely blown out of proportion by the social media. Most people have neither time nor desire to actually dive into this tech and find out what works and what doesn't. They just believe that a magical machine steals their works to replace them, because that's what everyone reposts on Twitter endlessly.

>>orbita+Z62
You are demonstrating that lack of empathy. Artist's works are being stolen and used to train AI, that then produces work that will affect that artist's career. The advancement of this tech in the past 6 months, if it maintains this trajectory, demonstrates this.

>>thorde+P92
So who's that mythical artist that hasn't seen and learned from the works of other artists? After all, these works will have left an imprint in their neural connections, so by the same argument their works are just as derivative, or "stolen".

>>_0ffh+Qh2
These are not artists being inspired by the works of other artists, these are programmers taking the work of artists and then claiming to create original works when in fact they are automatically generated derivatives.

Try telling one of the programmers to produce a work of art based on a review of all of the works that went into training the models and see how it works out.

>>jacque+km2
What distinguishes a derivative from an original work? What is it about AI-generated art which makes it so clearly derivative, in your mind?

>>brian_+2w2
That the process is automated. That is one of the important tests of originality, that something is not created in a mechanical fashion.

>>jacque+QA2
> that something is not created in a mechanical fashion.

I wonder if the nerds have shot themselves in the foot here with terminology? I suspect the nerd’s lawyers would have been much happier if the entire field was named “automated mechanical creativity” instead of “artificial intelligence”. It’d be kinda amusing to see the whole field of study lose in court because of their own persistent claims that what they’re doing is not just “creating in a mechanical fashion” but creating “intelligence” which can therefore be held to account for copyright infringement. Shades of Al Capone getting busted for taxes…

>>bigiai+AD2
Good point, I had not thought of that, but terminology really matters with stuff like this and you may well be right.