[kmeisthax]

The thing about AI art is that, absent lots of prompt engineering, seed grinding, and touchups, you're likely to have a bunch of images that are obvious tells if your entire project is AI. Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves.

There's also another advantage to having a "no obvious AI art" policy; and that's to cut down on spam. AI is extremely useful to people who want to spam art platforms.

[tavavex]

> Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves.

The gap of being distinguishable from manually drawn images is still closing - we don't know if it'll ever reach the threshold, but the amount of effort required to stamp out all the wonkiness from an AI generation has been going down ever since the first viable algorithms appeared.

I don't think that this was an anti-spam policy - Steam already manually reviews all new applicants that want to publish a game, so they don't need to forbid anything to turn it down. I'm guessing that this policy was because they don't want to be entangled in IP legislation if some copyright exception is carved out to forbid the use of generative AI.

[krainboltgreene]

> The gap of being distinguishable from manually drawn images is still closing

People have been trumpeting this since day one of Stable Diffusion releasing, but I'm seeing the same output quality as that day and I've been keeping up.

[tavavex]

Just because the pace of progress isn't exponential (like what some people would want to believe) doesn't mean it isn't happening. I remember getting an early invite to DALL-E 1 all the way back, and while I don't use it anymore, the modern improvements made seem very substantial. From plain comparisons of different versions where the same inputs produce substantially better outputs, to the mere fact that the latest version can actually generate decent, often discernible text at all (something that people joked would be impossible from AI to achieve) shows that some progress is being made.

The reason why it's not as visible with Stable Diffusion is because a lot of the technologies around it circle the same few foundational SD models - people build on top of them, add new ways of interacting with them, but ultimately, the same thing underlies them all. Community support is seen as more important than cutting-edge tech, which is why something like Stable Diffusion XL hasn't even seen universal adoption yet.

[krainboltgreene]

I'm telling you the progress isn't happening based on my own consistent observations of various releases across multiple platforms. The only people who don't seem to agree with me are those who have the art literacy of a highschooler and think "discernible text" is a improvement.

As an aside, no one said AI couldn't achieve drawn generated text, that's been possible for years prior to stable diffusion.

[PixyMisa]

In just the past two years it's gone from obvious horrors like hands attached directly at the elbow to much more subtle errors like chair legs that cross over each other like an Escher drawing or doorknobs adjacent to the hinges.

Human artists might have to become used to tracking provenance. If you work with traditional media, that's easy: Here's the painting. For digital artists, software can publish encrypted, timestamped brushstroke-level histories of the work if we need that level of proof.

[numpad0]

IME, if GenAI ever reaches human parity, whatever that amounts to, the relevant subgenre of art will just move into surrealism. Invention of paintbrushes didn't kill art.

[luqtas]

the fight about AI is using copyrighted stuff for its weights... i wonder which % of artists that wouldn't tweak or use heavily AI that has a transparent/ethical data-base (read it: they didn't added anything proprietary without authorization)

[numpad0]

It's been tried. Numerous times. There's a reason why GenAI controversy is stuck at ethics and filled with rage, the generated images just aren't that great and so that part isn't so controversial.

[kmeisthax]

There's a lot of AI "artists"[0] who think their text2image prompt generations are equivalent if not better than actually drawing or photographing an image.

Part of becoming an artist is learning how to evaluate your own work, break it down, and critique the shit out of it. When you jump straight to generating art with an AI, you skip the criticism step, which means you don't have a sense of taste and you haven't really explored what your preferences for style are.

A lot of AI art generators default to an extremely cinematic, "Hollywood" art style - i.e. exactly the sort of thing that is trying to look impressive to people who don't know better, and will make them overlook all the fundamental mistakes in the image.

[0] Normally I wouldn't scarequote "artist" here, given that actual artists do use AI tools where it makes sense.

[jwells89]

And this will continue to be an issue until ML models have achieved something resembling sentience, because many of these tells are the result of the model not truly comprehending the subject matter and thus struggling to maintain internal consistency in everything from geometry and kinetics of human bodies to lighting and physics.

Less obviously, ML models also lack the ability to bake in intent. In human made pieces, everything is as it is for a reason; it’s communicating something. In ML generated pieces, things are the way they are because that’s what’s statistically likely for the type of generated image.

[PixyMisa]

Absolutely correct. This is a far more obvious problem in text models, because you end up with internally flawless arguments as to why your next scuba diving vacation should be in Ulan Bator.

With art, it's more subtle, because there there's no single reference point that lets us determine if an artwork is "true". There are the glaring errors that everyone can agree on - notoriously, human hands - but those cases are improving rapidly.

[johnnyanmac]

>Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves.

Microsoft and every other tech company is indeed investing billions in the tech. I'm sure each company can fund the entire (woefully underpaid) art industry by themselves, let alone the 10 or so tech hubs altogether.

But they are happy to throw money at AI instead for the payoff of being the next big tech brand.

[nothercastle]

That also devalues the work of the original creators whose work got knocked off by ai and they should be compensated for the damage done

[Gigachad]

This has never happened ever in history. So many jobs were devalued by new machines. And the people doing them were never compensated.

[fho]

> Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves.

That's basically the argument why Jason Allen should have been allowed to win the art competition, is it?

It's not that he typed "award winning painting" into Midjourney and the image was the result.

He tried hundreds of seeds, selected one that he liked and refined it over countless iterations with infilling until he was satisfied with the result.

I honestly don't see how this is fundamentally different from other art forms.