[thot_experiment]

The AI hate is suuuch a meme in the art community, it's very frustrating/alienating. (Though understandably, neoliberal capitalism is also extremely frustrating, so I see why artists mad, I just wish they'd be mad at the root cause.)

((the root cause is that an economic system fundamentally based on scarcity == value doesn't make sense when applied to things that are essentially infinite, and kludgeing in artificial scarcity to make things work is not a good take))

[ben_w]

Mm. Possibly, but not necessarily.

I have a suspicion that art is to humans as fancy tails are to peacocks: the difficulty is the point.

I believe this is why we have art galleries proudly displaying oil paintings of fruit bowls, but don't do this for random food snapshots.

It's also why photographs as a category were initially dismissed (in an era that had come to praise extreme realism in paintings), but when photographers went on long trips to visit unusual places, people, and events, those photographs suddenly did count as art.

Bit of overlap between arts and knowledge shown by the wiktionary entry for the Latin "ars", so this can be extended to the way Socrates didn't like writing, and the desire for hand-made foods and durable goods over mass produced foods and products.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

[dale_glass]

> I believe this is why we have art galleries proudly displaying oil paintings of fruit bowls, but don't do this for random food snapshots.

We also have them for social/historical reasons. A museum usually isn't built around "best stuff humanity has to offer", but has some sort of more complicated angle.

Eg, a reason why you may have a fruit bowl hanging on the wall is that this particular artist has been influential, and they just happened to paint a fruit bowl. Maybe thousands of artists of the era painted fruit bowls, and maybe a dozen of those are technically more impressive, but this is the guy that got talked about a lot, or started a movement, or such, so it's this guy's bowl we're going to go with.

Museums can have many themes. They may showcase a particular artist, a particular movement, a particular theme, a particular period in time. You can build a museum of nothing but paintings of cats if you wanted to.

[vonjuice]

We have art galleries displaying things like empty canvases or toilet bowls that make a statement, it's definitely not about difficulty. The fact is that the debate about what art is is part of what makes art art, it escapes definition because part of the spirit of art is rebelling against definition.

[AlecSchueler]

> We have art galleries displaying things like empty canvases or toilet bowls that make a statement, it's definitely not about difficulty

You're under selling the difficulty of using a toilet bowl to make a convincing statement.

[thatcat]

It's a water fountain

[AlecSchueler]

That one was done over a hundred years ago, sadly. The public wasn't original and topical statements for every new opening.

[ben_w]

Mm.

I'm 50-50 split on thinking I regard that kind of art as a vehicle for tax evasion, vs. thinking the "difficulty" is the money wasted on it (which is still Veblen "look at me I'm rich I can waste money on something pointless").

[kzrdude]

We can't judge all of the art sphere just from the worst examples. Think of people who judge software by our worst examples (crypto scams, I don't know)?

[danielbln]

Why is a simple modern art piece necessarily one of the worst and examples?

[lancesells]

> art galleries displaying things like empty canvases or toilet bowls

This is so far from the norm and feels like a television lens version of artists and art galleries. Yes, Duchamp used a toilet bowl in 1917 as art which was over 100 year ago. This is known because no one had done it before and presented an everyday object as art. This is 106 years old but still referred to so you can guess it was a big deal.

My suggestion is to visit a modern art museum in a larger city and you'll see this kind of "easy bullshit art as a statement" doesn't really exist.

https://www.tate.org.uk https://www.hauserwirth.com https://www.moma.org https://www.davidzwirner.com https://gagosian.com

[vonjuice]

I have visited modern art museums. I have seen similar "low effort" pieces among a wide catalogue of high effort ones. It is evident that real artists are very prolific and are not lazy or anything like that, that was not implying that, I don't even think of it as bullshit.

My example was more about how the appearance of effort is not necessary for the viewer. Many people can look at abstract paintings and say "this is bullshit, my kid could do that!", and yet many people can also look at it and recognize beauty, and it's not because the latter group sees the piece as more effort, they're just able to parse the language of the piece better (imo).

[pawelmurias]

Those are the old school NFTs, the AI tools are for the skillfull kind of art.

[OCASMv2]

That view of art ended over a century ago with the modernist (mediocrist) movements.

Nowadays art is whatever one wants it to be (or not to be). It's just a word people use to enhance the social perception of whatever manmade creation they like.

[amelius]

> the difficulty is the point

Ok, so what does the next level of "difficult" look like?

[dale_glass]

It's an interesting question, because AI breaks the intuitiveness of this dramatically.

You can look at say, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wedding_at_Cana and quickly get that yup, this took a whole lot of time and effort.

But AI has nothing like that. Some things that look like an awful lot of work it spits out with ease, some things that sound simple can take a whole lot of fiddling.

Like the other day I was playing with DALLE3, and for whatever reason it didn't want to place things on a table.

[Dioxide2119]

In the same way that using a limited medium like some oil paints, paintbrushes, and canvas to create images = the art of painting, there will become the art of hacking / abusing / advanced prompt engineering / pushing AI to do things that are close to or at its limits of capabilities.

A: Oh so your LLM generated an image of a spaceship cockpit, so what?

B: So what? This LLM was trained on nothing but tax records from 1929!

A: :o amazing!

So AI artists do not necessarily equal 'creatives who render images using AI tooling', they may instead be 'creatives who tease out novel outputs from AIs' or something like that.

Then again, this is suspiciously close to a 'what is art' conversation, so i'll stop here.

[ben_w]

> B: So what? This LLM was trained on nothing but tax records from 1929!

I recon a sufficiently advanced AI could learn enough to do that from only that training data and some appropriate prompting.

[ben_w]

Right now, I'd guess engineering and growing custom life forms, like The Thought Emporium is doing. Not sure how long that will last for.

[wokwokwok]

> it's very frustrating/alienating

Mm. I’ve spoken to a number of artists who have expressed similar feelings of despair, frustration and anger.

There are many upset people over this technology, and calling it a meme diminishes them to meaningless copycat haters.

I don’t think that’s true; and doing it, really reallllly makes them angry.

Consider: this attitude it part of the reason why that attitude exists.

:|

If the stable diffusion folk hadn’t gone crazy cloning every art style they could and laughing about it, we could all have had a very different AI art future.

…but apparently we can’t have nice things because (some) people suck.

[Lacerda69]

IMO all of this will blow over in a few years and most artists will accept that "AI" is just another tool that one can use to create art.

It took some time for photography as well...

edit: typo

[dbrgn]

That's an interesting point. Retouching a photo after taking it used to be "manipulating reality", frowned upon by "real" photographers. Nowadays, postprocessing digital negatives and adding your own style to it is part of a normal photographer's workflow.

(However, I think the negative feelings don't come from a discussion of "real vs fake" or "classical vs new", but mostly from the point of view that using artwork as training data is stealing. I don't agree with that view, but I think it's at the core of the argument.)

[jdiff]

People have been doing post processing of photographs as long as photographs have existed.

[dbrgn]

Yes, but - at least in landscape photography - there was a divide between people using retouching to "fix" things (i.e. removing spots, making the colors more realistic, etc) and the people altering the style of the photo (e.g. by boosting or even shifting certain colors to achieve a certain look). The latter was viewed as fake by some people I knew. Today this is just part of your photography style.

[dragonwriter]

That doesn't mean there were purists arguing about it. Someone has to be doing it for the fight to exist.

[lancesells]

I'm an artist and look at generative AI as a tool that's almost always going to produce content but not art.

I refuse to use it from a moral standpoint but I also don't use any digital tools at all in the creation of my work. Even if I worked digitally I don't create art to produce pretty pictures as fast as possible. Typing in a prompt and fiddling with some things back and forth is just that.

[thot_experiment]

This comment hurts me to my very core, I actually screamed when I read it. I'm in one of the most artistically productive periods of my life right now. I've been doing multiple notebook pages of gouache and india ink a day. I also have a homebuilt plotter that I've written an entire suite of software for. I've been doing 3D graphics and photomanipulation, I've been dabbling in video editing.

AND I've been pushing what can be done with Stable Diffusion, and it's absolutely a tool to create art. The idea that "Typing in a prompt and fiddling with some things back and forth" is all there is to AI art is so fucking absurd. This is the "meme" I'm talking about. There SO much more to AI art from an artistic control perspective than the prompt, and not only that, there's so much we haven't even fucking invented yet which is clear from the rate of progress in the field. These reductive "it's not real art" are even worse than the "theft" moralizing. It's akin to saying photography isn't art because you just click a button.

> I don't create art to produce pretty pictures as fast as possible.

I create art because I like to make art, sometimes that means laboring over the placement of every line. Sometimes I need three hundred frames and there's only me and my GPU against the world. AI opens up possibilities that were completely unreachable before, just like everything else I'm able to do artistically with my computer.

[lancesells]

I'm happy you get something out of it and wish you the best. I do think it's built on theft and I do think it's a cold, lifeless medium. I think art is truth and the farther you get away from a human making something the farther you are away from the artist and feeling. A digital print will never feel as nice to me as a painting or a drawing. A handmade sculpture will always feel better to me than something produced with a mold or a 3D printer.

We're all different and again, it's great if you like making art with AI. The world needs differences, otherwise it would be quite boring.

[pxoe]

typing some text and pressing 'generate', iterating, or doing layering and photobashing, just isn't gonna be 'painting', or 'drawing', like, ever. on a fundamental level. you'll need to get over yourself asap if you're "screaming" over this

[thot_experiment]

Man I know it's pointless for me to argue but it's just like... it's wild to me that people make these comments. Do my comments give the impression that I am unaware of what drawing and painting are? I have spent thousands of hours painting and drawing.

Photography isn't gonna be painting or drawing either, it's still art that affords the artist an enormous amount of control. This is the "meme" I'm talking about. The way you talk about AI art is what's making me go AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

> typing some text and pressing 'generate', iterating, or doing layering and photobashing

It's such a self report, you have no idea what is going on, you are quick to discount it without any understanding. We are still in the infancy of the space and people are fixated with these idiotic reductive arguments. Prompt -> image is the tiniest fraction of what's possible with this technology. I wish I was better at communicating how fucking epic the set of possibilities that this opens up is, I'm sure we will see it eventually. It frustrates me to no end that people are so blind to it.

[Sol-]

Most professional artists will be unemployed and hobbyist artists using AI seems to be kind of against the point of creating art for the art of creation.

But for one-click self-expression, AI tools will certainly come in handy.

[Filligree]

It kind of depends on the type of artist. I use it to illustrate my stories, for example, and I'd be upset if someone claimed my writing doesn't count as art-

But I've spent well over a decade learning to write. I don't have any skill in drawing, and I don't earn any money from my writing. (...and last time I tried to hire an artist, they bit my head off when I offered an example of what I was after.)

So I'll use AI art, because it's that or no art.

[eMPee584]

The dawn of the post-work age! C : .. nearly everyone will become unemployed five years from now (when AGI / humanoid robots hit mainstream adoption). The economical paradigm will have to change inevitably. Now it's on us to nudge it towards a nice and chill open source economy with open access infrastructure and cybersyn-like global federated resource stream coordination instead of the competitive vortex of death, madness & despair we have now.

[Lacerda69]

Mainstream media said the same thing about nuclear energy, steam engines, integrated circuits, and a dozen other technologies since the dawn of civilization. It never manifested though, and people still work and produce like they did for thousands of years.

Humans are surprisingly adept at coming up with new kinds of work.

IMO the bigger "risk" is that we will extinct ourselves in the next few hundred years, but that is a different discussion.

[Gormo]

> hobbyist artists using AI seems to be kind of against the point of creating art for the art of creation

How do you figure that?

[vouaobrasil]

This is absolutely ridiculous and short-sighted. AI is a tool that is and always will make the creation of art less a matter of the expression of the human soul. What techies NEVER understand about art is this: that art is not just the end product for the artist but something they use to express THEMSELVES.

UNLIKE other tools, AI makes creative decisions. No other tool has done this, and moreover, its primary purpose is to take away the reliance on artists. The ultimate aim of BIG TECH is to take away this reliance so that they can be the ultimate source of cheap art, just like cheap slave labour is the ultimate source of cheap and unsustainable clothing for most people.

Therefore, AI will NEVER be a tool to create art like other tools. It is is a tool that will outcompete humans on a massive scale so that even if "normal human art" exists, it will never gain much traction or commercial viability.

To be honest, AI is absolutely sickening and companies like Microsoft and OpenAI make me sick.

[dthul]

That sounds like a very Luddite view. Why wouldn't artists be able to use AI selectively to automate "boring" tasks (such as filling the sky of an image with clouds) while still retaining overall artistic control?

[gyy52380]

Because that is not what's happening. My friends that work as illustrators for PC and mobile games say it's the exact opposite. AI is used for the bulk of the creative work - composition, posing, even the general artstyle. Illustrators are then tasked with "fixing" visual artefacts, stitching together generated images and giving the final polish. They describe it as being reduced from a creative writer to a grammar checker.

It's tempting to just say that creative work that can be automated this quickly should be automated so that artists can focus on more creative challenges, but this is not how it plays out in practice. Rather, this only allows companies to cut down costs. It is already extremely difficult to find work which will pay a livable wage as a creative. AI has already caused layoffs and negative wage pressure on remaining employees. The only thing that AI has done (at least among my circle of friends) is reduce corporate costs and increase antidepressant prescriptions.

[dbrgn]

When I watch a video like the demo-video for the Krita plugin we're discussing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QDPEcVmdLI), I do see a lot of creativity happening. The person is using stable diffusion as a tool to achieve the look, style and composition they want. The skill to be able to use such a model for creating art is definitely an acquired skill, and I would definitely consider it a form of art.

Of course there will be people just clicking "generate" on a website. But isn't that the difference between consumer and artist? Everyone can press the shutter button on a digital camera to take a snapshot. But the artist knows how to use light, angle and technology to create a photograph with the looks and composition that they intend. (If you compare snapshots from amateur photographers and from professionals, the differences are astounding. And it's not just about the cost of the equipment.)

Certainly, there will be jobs – especially the rather repetitive jobs – that will be replaced by the use of AI, just like stock photos replaced jobs of certain photographers, or just like industrialization and automation replaced the jobs of a lot of craftsmen and artisans. But craftsmen and artisans are still around, and they are paid a lot more than they used to be paid, as long as they provide added value on top of the generic products available on the market!

[vouaobrasil]

The problem with many technophiles is that they have a very distorted view of what they create. They often think it's going to do good because it's so cool but once that tech is out in the real world, it just mostly causes damage.

If you're interested, feel free to reach out to me because I am starting an anti-AI coalition.

[syntheweave]

That's actually a problem for the business model of mobile games. A consumer can - or very soon will be able to - pick up AI tools and cut out the middleman org churning out these illustrations, just like they cut out the professionals. It won't be too long before games are made that advertise "put your original characters in the game", and it won't be some complicated character creation tool - it'll be generative stuff.

There's a lot of "but wait, there's more" in what's happening around AI.

[Almondsetat]

>My friends that work as illustrators for PC and mobile games

You mean your friends that work to produce generically pleasant looking props in order to maximize player retention and profits?

It seems like artists complaining about AI don't actually work like artists but more like office drones

[barrkel]

It's commoditization again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25765864

[vouaobrasil]

I am a luddite and I agree with most luddite sentiments.

Most of this generative AI is NOT about using AI for boring tasks, and have you ever even tried to draw clouds? Not easy. Everyone draws clouds differently, which you would know if you ever tried to draw anything.

Moreover, AI as a societal phenomenon goes way beyond AI drawing clouds.

[dthul]

> which you would know if you ever tried to draw anything

I know exactly how hard it is to draw anything because I tried a bunch of times, and failed. I for one am happy that I can now express my creative ideas, which I couldn't do before due to missing talent / practice.

[ben_w]

> Most of this generative AI is NOT about using AI for boring tasks, and have you ever even tried to draw clouds? Not easy. Everyone draws clouds differently, which you would know if you ever tried to draw anything.

Perlin noise on a plane, can be either in line with the camera or off at an angle. Nice effect. Very easy. I don't even count myself as a proper artist.

Clouds can obviously be hard when you have a specific cloud formation in mind — but "just" a random cloud, to the standards of most who will observe it, is much easier.

And of course, there are plenty of free photographs of clouds, and Photoshop has had plenty of filters — even from the days before people had broadband, let alone what people now call AI — to turn those photographs into different styles.

[__loam]

Stop using a group of people who was slandered and murdered by ultra wealthy factory owners as a derogatory term.

[bsenftner]

You're almost there. Few recognize that Art is human communication. Most just want a pretty or awe inspiring image, or an illustration to supply the consumer's lack of imagination.

Perhaps with commercial art, pragmatic bread and butter art being automated and pooped out by noncomprehending, non-communicating consumers the job of real Art that communicates the frontiers of human experience using rich metaphor and on the edge of language and reason can work without having to also deliver hallmark nonsense.

Yeah, the economics to allow this are all fucked. But if you're an artist communicating your human experience, that does not matter, it's a part of your work.

[skeaker]

The reduction of "techies" to emotionless robots is an unfair generalization. The inappropriate and wildly inaccurate comparison to slave labor is out of line.

Even taking your arguments at face value, it doesn't really make sense: Let's agree and say that AI can never make "real art." How does AI art existing prevent human-made art with the intent of self expression from existing? You say it will make human art less commercially viable, but that's hardly related to the expression behind the art. Human art has just as much expression whether or not it is a commercial success. Is your argument about financial viability or expression? Would you agree that having deep human expression enhances the value of a piece of art? Are you aware that artists who focus wholly on expression were already stereotypically "starving," even before AI art was a thing?

[Lacerda69]

I use any tool available to create art and express myself, so I does not really matter what you think of it. Art is a very subjective thing anyway and we can argue for hours what "art" really is. But here are some of my thoughts regarding your comment, I think they apply to many others in this thread as well.

>UNLIKE other tools, AI makes creative decisions. No other tool has done this

If you use any other tool or technology (for example certain oil paint, canvases, sculpting material, motif, etc.) that also implies a creative decision.

>its primary purpose is to take away the reliance on artists

That is not true. It might be the purpose that some people ascribe to it, but it is a technology & a tool.

Humans decide what its purpose is, its purpose is not inherent to the technology itself.

You can use Imagen to create very personal and individual self-expression. With open source models that you can tweak and train yourself there are many possibilities to get an individual result. I guess you only looked at things like Dall-E and came to the conclusion that this would replace artists.

The same thing people said about photography aka "This is just a technology to replace portrait painters/landscape painters etc."

If you learn more about how Imagen works you will understand that there are many possibilities to make it your own and create meaningful self-expression.

>even if "normal human art" exists, it will never gain much traction or commercial viability.

There is 0 indication of that. Why do you think that?

FWIW the current art "market" is what makes me sick, so I am happy for any tech or idea that demolishes it and makes room for something new and creative.

[Gormo]

> What techies NEVER understand about art is this: that art is not just the end product for the artist but something they use to express THEMSELVES.

And yet artists have always used tools and adapted themselves to the qualities of those tools. Paints, paintbrushes, canvases, chemicals, instruments of all kinds inform the end result just as much as the artist's initial intention.

Jackson Pollock's most famous works were produced by splattering paints on a canvas. Sure, he selected the paints, the canvas, and the trajectory and velocity of the splatters, but his works are as much the expression of stochastic fluid dynamics as they are of his vision.

Nothing is stopping people who see handcrafting every intricate detail of their work as an expression of their innermost sense of self from continuing to do so just as they always have.

If that's what they're getting out it, why should it bother them that people who do just want to obtain the end product for their own purposes are getting it from someplace else?

[ben_w]

> AI is a tool that is and always will make the creation of art less a matter of the expression of the human soul

I firmly disagree. I have a very strong imagination, but I never had time (and still don't have the time between full-time work and needing to learn German) to develop the skills to turn what I can imagine into artefacts that others can enjoy by my own hand. AI gives me the means to turn some of what I imagine into things I can share — not everything! (SD is so terrible at dragons, even the basic body plan is all over the place) — but it can help with many things.

> its primary purpose is to take away the reliance on artists. The ultimate aim of BIG TECH is to take away this reliance so that they can be the ultimate source of cheap art, just like cheap slave labour is the ultimate source of cheap and unsustainable clothing for most people.

IMO the purpose is fully automated luxury communism.

Stable Diffusion is free, so "Big Tech" (which would here have to include a small German academic spin-off) can't reap huge rewards from this, just like there's no huge business case for yet more video call services or social networks — too much competition for the money.

Finally, just yesterday I was watching a year-old video from a german robot supplier that's undercutting "cheap slave labour" for clothing.

[GeoAtreides]

> fully automated luxury communism

It's actually "fully automated luxury gay space communism", all words are important there. Also, in the Culture series, arguably the seminal series about the "fully automated etc.", there's a whole scene about AI producing art (i.e. nobody cares or think it's interesting)

[ben_w]

The original literary reference might have been, but as written it's the title of a book:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Automated_Luxury_Commu...

> there's a whole scene about AI producing art (i.e. nobody cares or think it's interesting)

As I recall, this was a conversation between an organic person and a Mind, a specific category of AI that's quite capable of running several billion uploaded human consciousnesses simultaneously in real time, and it was the Mind who was saying that yes, they could make far better music, but they didn't want to.

[vouaobrasil]

So I suppose your need to create AI diversions is more important than the need of others to feel a sense of purpose through their work through their actual talent that you don't have? Good thing you have a full-time job....

Big Tech will benefit immensely from AI. Even if Stable Diffusion is free, it will spurn the development of new computers and new technology to run models like Stable Diffusion, so even not immediate things benefit big tech.

Fully automated luxury communism is a rather bleak future, and it will take us away from being stewards of the environment, and instead consume as many resources as possible.

Finally, even if you are doing something relatively harmless with Stable Diffisuion, many other people will use AI for malicious purposes.

[ben_w]

> So I suppose your need to create AI diversions is more important than the need of others to feel a sense of purpose through their work through their actual talent that you don't have?

Not so. Sense of purpose is important.

Your sense of purpose conflicts with the opportunity of everyone else to express themselves as they wish.

How familiar are you with utilitarian ethics, and the "mere addition paradox" criticism of it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox

> Good thing you have a full-time job....

For now. The LLMs will come/are coming for mine, just as diffusion models and GANs eat at the jobs of graphical artists.

> Fully automated luxury communism is a rather bleak future, and it will take us away from being stewards of the environment, and instead consume as many resources as possible.

It's (currently) pure Utopianism, taking on whatever hopes the proponents want it to have no matter how unrealistic. I therefore think you're arguing on the basis of which team it's associated with, without understanding the details of what it is you hate.

> Finally, even if you are doing something relatively harmless with Stable Diffisuion, many other people will use AI for malicious purposes.

Oh absolutely. Whole can of worms there.

Can say the same about basically every tech way back to the wheel, fire, and pointy stick, though unlike most using this analogy I am well aware of the problem of induction (in particular the turkey and the farmer), and don't claim that it will all work out just because it has so far.

AI in general could make us immortal, with lives of leisure and free from all suffering… or it could turn us all into paperclips to maximise shareholder value.

[dragonwriter]

> UNLIKE other tools, AI makes creative decisions

No, it doesn’t.

That's just an anthropomorphization of “produces deterministic results of its inputs that are practically intractable to compute by other means”. But Stable Diffusion doesn’t “make creative decisions” any more than POV-Ray or (pre-Generative fill) Photoshop.

[vouaobrasil]

I agree, but I'll be more precise: AI may not make creative decisions, but it generates something that approximates a creative decision to a sufficient level that people are willing to use it as a replacement for real creative decision.

There. My argument works without modification but with this more precise definition.

[eMPee584]

Wait till "THEY" learn engineering and architecture ; )

[ganzuul]

Focusing that will into something actionable seems like an important task. When artists talk about their rights it would be prudent if we also talked about our duties.

The meaning of art, the art of intelligence, is being recreated after it was gruesomely vivisected by postmodernism... We better not let the narrative come with a price tag.

[skeaker]

> I don’t think that’s true; and doing it, really reallllly makes them angry.

It is in some cases. Obviously not all of them, but there is definitely bandwagoning going on. Go on any social platform where this is up for debate and ask why they have this position, and you will be mocked or ignored while they fail to formulate any actual reasoning for their belief.

[dotnet00]

It really just highlights the massive gap between artist's impressions and the 'techbros' talking about how it's just another tool. It's clear that many techbros really just don't understand art. A few weeks ago there was a post here about how the majority of art involved in a game is never seen by the public, where someone had asked what could be done to make this process more efficient so less 'waste' art needed to be produced. I think this thinking that this approach to AI generated 'art' has a similar disconnect between artist and techie.

Techbros see the tool and talk on and on about how it'll optimize workflows and how it's just another tool, cloning artstyles and patting each other on the back for automating another task, while completely ignoring the concern from artists about having basic ethical concerns trampled over in the name of disruption and progress.

[scotty79]

> reallllly makes them angry.

Reality makes them angry.

[mock-possum]

More of a moral panic than a meme

[RobotToaster]

A moral panic is, in the original definition of the term, a meme.

[whywhywhywhy]

It’s more just ridiculous because the same community is completely fine with photobashing and “paint overs” (aka tracing) and “fan art” (aka profiting from IP you don’t own).

[flxy]

I don't know what sort of artists you know, but of all the artists I know, nobody is "completely fine" with tracing. It is okay but still frowned upon when people do it for "practice" without publishing the result, but anything that even looks remotely like it is traced gets called out and further investigated incredibly quickly.

And as for fan art, a lot of companies explicitly allow art based on their IP, as long as it's used/published by the artists themselves and the commercial rights to the work aren't sold to some other company. In Japan, there is a whole industry based around derivative works, Doujin - self-published works, that works off of what is essentially a code of honor. Companies don't go against the artists, as long as said artists adhere to certain guidelines on what they're allowed to depict (eg. no NSFW content.) Many franchises have become a lot more popular due to fan art/derivative works alone (ie. Touhou Project, Fate Series.)

[jwells89]

Tracing is particularly unacceptable in professional settings. There’s been several cases, some even somewhat high profile, where manga and comic artists have found themselves in hot water as a result of engaging in the practice.

[charcircuit]

>Tracing is particularly unacceptable in professional settings.

Tracing is a fundamental skill in a professional settings for consistency, speed, and quality reasons. In torepaku it is the paku (pakuri) part that is not acceptable.

[raincole]

Photobashing was hated to death when it was new. Now it's the norm (for environmental concept art at least). AI will go through the same process.

[neoromantique]

AI is the norm for concept art already, it's too useful for it not to be.

[bsenftner]

I've had the situation where long term friends contact me with a child/teen either entering or graduating art/animation/film school and want me to give advice to their kid. My background is 3D graphics, animation, film VFX, video games, and AI - from the software developer and digital artist sides.

Every one of those conversations has been their kid telling me they will never touch AI, AI is evil, AI is the death of art and artists, and they refuse to see it any other way. One is graduating this year, wants to be a concept designer for high concept film and games: a role that is leaning heavy into generative art simply for the variations it generates. They refuse to discuss how their intended industry already uses and is adopting AI generative art en mass.

Times when I wish I had the eloquent voice of another.

[opyate]

I don't get AI hate. It's nothing other than "technology hate".

As a web developer who started out in 2001/2002, I watched as custom web design jobs dried up, and more and more people (and ahem artists) started using online tools to create a templatised website on the cheap.

Did I throw a tantrum? Nope! I learned to do backend dev so I could make my own automation tools.

Seriously, just embrace these new superpowers already.

[deely3]

I get AI hate. How many AI models out there created with clear consent from authors of source materials? Zero?

[tavavex]

Who decided that they should have the power to rule over this? Not only does it appear to be legal, but deciding that dataset compilation is inherently immoral and consent-violating would represent a draconian expansion of IP law that almost no individual should agree to. If I perform statistical research and count the most common English words based on many books, should I be liable to go and ask every author if they're okay with me analyzing their works? If I see a thousand character designs and then pick up some cues and ideas to create my own, should I pay a licensing fee?

[deely3]

You stretching my words in so many directions... Relax, its just a comment, no need to feel vindicated.

[voitvoder]

They are only superpowers until you have made enough AI art to see how pathetically limited and un-creative midjourney is.

This is all a lot of nothing. A year ago at this time I thought we had reached the art singularity. Now after thousands of images, seeing any AI art makes me want to puke. It is just the same shit over and over and over because it is so limited in what it can actually make.

In the long run all AI art will do is make people appreciate human art more. Any human artist against AI art is an idiot.

It is not like web design or anything else. AI Art is a giant decentralized PR and unintentional advertising campaign that will show how awesome human artists are and how overhyped AI is.

In a few years people will view AI art as useless, shit, scriblings of non-artists. Why? Because that is exactly what it is.

[bayindirh]

I don't agree. I take photographs as a hobby, and share them, just for showing them off.

They're generally licensed with CC-NC-BY plus no derivatives (akin to GPL), but I don't want my images to be taken to a training set to feed a generative model without my consent, because you're violating the license terms I put on it.

Same is valid for my code. I stopped using GitHub, because it devours any and all open repositories regardless of its license and without asking for consent.

This is not about scarcity, but respect and ethics mostly. At least, from my perspective.

[cwillu]

For what it's worth, CC-NC is not akin to the GPL, at all.

The GPL says “you can sell this if you want, but whoever you sell it to can still do whatever they want with it, subject to the same terms.”

CC-NC says “you can't do whatever you want with this”

Which isn't to say that you're wrong to use whatever license you like, just that it's very much not similar in spirit to the GPL. Protecting the right of others to make derivatives of the thing being licensed is, in fact, the entire point of the license.

[bayindirh]

By akin, I didn't mean it's functionally equivalent.

GPLv3 is one of the strongest copyleft licenses for software out there, forcing re-sharing of changes while preventing any source closing. CC-BY-NC is the strictest CC license which allows sharing, with credit, with no commercial use and no derivatives.

Hence I tried to aim for "I'm selecting the one of the most strict license for sharing my photos, as I do the same for my software, yet AI systems disregard my license every occasion and just rip what I put out without my consent or consideration of the license I use for these, hence I refuse to use, or support AI models which are fed like this".

Hope this helps.

[cwillu]

You can apply CC-BY-NC to software, people have done it. And it's recognized as _not_ being an open license, it's at best an “open-access” or “source-visible” license, because of the usage restrictions.

The entire point of an open-source license is that you're _preventing_ people from restricting modification and derivative use. The whole point of the AGPL was to prevent a hack that companies found to abuse the software's license and prevent derivative use of their changes.

I'm not saying you're morally in the wrong for choosing a license that doesn't permit commercial use, but I _am_ saying that it's contrary to the spirit of the license you're claiming it's akin to.

Hope this helps.

[livrem]

CC-BY-SA is much closer to GPL.

[kranke155]

Yet this terrible economic system you describe determines whether these people can afford food, rent and their children's education.

Yeah it must be a meme.

[dahhowl]

Surely, there exists no other economic system where a percentage of the world's population is allowed access to food, rent and education for their children.

And there certainly doesn't exist any where the entirety of the world population can be given access to these things.

[kranke155]

You're talking about hypotheticals, I'm talking about reality.

Saying "these silly people are obsessed with their economic system, which is pointless!" makes no sense if those same people live or die by that system.

[misnome]

They aren’t CS graduates so they can’t really be human or have thought processes. Literally stealing their work to pad a VC linesheet must honestly be the most altruistic of options.

[ben_w]

Your snark would be slightly harder hitting if not for the fact that freshly minted CS grads demonstrate approximately the same skill as LLMs when it comes to turning feature requests into code.

The "G" in "AGI" is "general", as in "can do all things" — Ask not for whose job Bell Labs tolls, it tolls for them all.

(And now I'm reminded of someone, ages ago now, who was boasting about how good he was at matching all the `new`s and `delete`s in his C++ code, or possibly even `malloc`s and `free`s, being completely oblivious to the existence of STL smart pointers…)

[boppo1]

Artist here. It's totally reasonable for artists to be mad about models being trained on their work without informed prior consent.

Anger about using AI is less justifiied.

[thot_experiment]

I'm more of an artist than a hacker, and

> mad about models being trained on their work without informed prior consent

This is the "your mind has been poisoned by a corporate view of intellectual property" take. The idea that copyright should extend this far is horrifying, it is another step toward stifling and controlling creative expression. The problem is capital being rewarded way more by IP law than labor, something that isn't going to be fixed by giving people more and broader ways to own things.|

You'll be surprised how recent the idea of owning ideas is.

[boppo1]

Well I should be more clear. I don't mean by informed consent "they put it in the TOS and it's software I have to use so I'm boned". I mean more like "I use Blender, Krita, and Procreate and none of them do that bullshit. As long as there's a notification on software that scans my work so I can avoid it, I'm happy. If I want to opt-in to contributing to a model at some point, that might be cool."

I guess I should worry a bit that important software without worthwhile alternatives might start to do this, but I don't think the blender foundation will as long as Ton is alive, and I bet the same for Krita. Procreate I'm a little less confident about, but only a little, as they know who their main userbase* is and they know how those people feel about AI.

*Arguably there are more people with Procreate that barely know how to draw than people who do. BUT part of Procreate's appeal is that it's software that 'the pros' prefer to use. If the talented artists start publicly dumping on Procreate, the people who can't draw will slowly but surely follow those artists to whatever their preferred software becomes.

[ajuc]

Would you object to somebody looking at your images and imitating the style? How is AI different?

[dotnet00]

Have you ever actually looked into people who do that? They put in a lot of effort into understanding the original creator, their intent, process, materials etc. The copies are still very much art as they are expressions of the imitator's feelings towards the work. Performing studies of popular art by trying to replicate it is a powerful tool for learning precisely because it allows you, as an artist, to understand how the original artist thought, helping you learn to think like an artist and leading you to develop your own ideas and means of expression.

AI is none of that.

[ajuc]

> AI is none of that.

How do we know? We can do art Turing Test - have 3 real artists and an text/image generation AI train on somebody's art. Have it generate the images and answer questions about the art.

If you can't tell which one of them is AI - would you conceed they are "all of that"?

[boppo1]

>Would you object to somebody looking at your images and imitating the style?

Yes. It's quite difficult to do so, however. The people capable usually have better things to do with their skills.

[whelp_24]

The claim that people don't copy art styles or even that it's rare is ridiculous. Opwm tumblr and you will immediately be presented with a counterexample.

[boppo1]

I mean if you're talking about throwaway 4chan/twitter-anime, that's a different tier of art. I'm talking artists more like Jeremy Lipking or Jose Lopez Vegara.

[loki-ai]

It is not just in the art community: check the currently top post and see how many devs are saying they would never use AI on their work. They hate and are alienated as much as any artist.

[__loam]

It's super rich to call artists being mad at a labor alienation machine, alienating for being mad at it.

[gumballindie]

Is it though? Veryone I know in the art community is quite pissed at copyright violations.

[hafriedlander]

I have tried to explain "you're not mad at generative AI, you're mad at late stage capitalism" before.

Most people aren't really willing to smash the state though (I understand, that's where all my stuff is) so look for less drastic ways to protect themselves.

[Gormo]

Agreed that trying to create artificial scarcity is not good (and isn't really compatible with any ethical system, least of all "neoliberal capitalism"), but it should be pointed out that natural scarcity is an a priori fact of nature that economics itself is our method of dealing with, and is not a normative contrivance of any "economic system".

I'm not entirely sure how any of this relates to artists agitating against AI, unless they are themselves seeking to create artificial scarcity to prop up the market value of their services, now that the supply of art ability is no longer as constrained as it previously was.

[pxoe]

you're a meme. do you "see" why artists are mad?

it's quite simple. artists offer to make their art for a price, as a 'service'. then, something comes in, that pirated their previous works, and offers to make imagery in that art style for free (or at a low low price), undercutting and displacing that artist.

really it's a 'yet another spin on piracy'. cause that's just the 'services' part, besides the 'selling works/artwork' which has long been rife with piracy, but the 'pirating what's been offered as a service' thing is new. piracy expanding into 'services' field as well. services (particularly those that rely on someone specifically taking their time to do something, and not just 'press button, service gets performed unattended') are scarce. there's only so many hours and so much time in one's life.