[NitpickLawyer]

> rightfully criticised because it steals from artists. Generative AI for source code learns from developers

The double standard here is too much. Notice how one is stealing while the other is learning from? How are diffusion models not "learning from all the previous art"? It's literally the same concept. The art generated is not a 1-1 copy in any way.

[oneeyedpigeon]

IMO, this is key to the issue, learning != stealing. I think it should be acceptable for AI to learn and produce, but not to learn and copy. If end assets infringe on copyright, that should be dealt with the same whether human- or AI-produced. The quality of the results is another issue.

[magicalhippo]

> I think it should be acceptable for AI to learn and produce, but not to learn and copy.

Ok but that's just a training issue then. Have model A be trained on human input. Have model A generate synthetic training data for model B. Ensure the prompts used to train B are not part of A's training data. Voila, model B has learned to produce rather than copy.

Many state of the art LLMs are trained in such a two-step way since they are very sensitive to low-quality training data.

[thatswrong0]

> The art generated is not a 1-1 copy in any way.

Yeah right. AI art models can and have been used to basically copy any artist’s style many ways that make the original actual artist’s hard work and effort in honing their craft irrelevant.

Who profits? Some tech company.

Who loses? The artists who now have to compete with an impossibly cheap copy of their own work.

This is theft at a massive scale. We are forcing countless artists whose work was stolen from them to compete with a model trained on their art without their consent and are paying them NOTHING for it. Just because it is impressive doesn’t make it ok.

Shame on any tech person who is okay with this.

[NeutralCrane]

Copying a style isn’t theft, full stop. You can’t copyright style. As an individual, you wouldn’t be liable for producing a work of art that is similar in style to someone else’s, and there is an enormous number of artists today whose livelihood would be in jeopardy if that was the case.

Concerns about the livelihood of artists or the accumulation of wealth by large tech megacorporations are valid but aren’t rooted in AI. They are rooted in capitalism. Fighting against AI as a technology is foolish. It won’t work, and even if you had a magic wand to make it disappear, the underlying problem remains.

[tstrimple]

It's almost like some of these people have never seen artists work before. Taping up photos and cutouts of things that inspire them before starting on a project. This is especially true of concept artists who are trying to do unique things while sticking to a particular theme. It's like going to Etsy for ideas for projects you want to work on. It's not cheating. It's inspiration.

[blackbrokkoli]

It's a double standard because it's apples and oranges.

Code is an abstract way of soldering cables in the correct way so the machine does a thing.

Art eludes definition while asking questions about what it means to be human.

[danielbln]

I love that in these discussions every piece of art is always high art and some comment on the human condition, never just grunt-work filler, or some crappy display ad.

Code can be artisanal and beautiful, or it can be plumbing. The same is true for art assets.

[NitpickLawyer]

Exactly! Europa Universalis is a work of art, and I couldn't care less if the horse that you can get as one of your rulers is aigen or not. The art is in the fact that you can get a horse as your ruler.

[viraptor]

In this case it's this amazing texture of newspapers on a pole: https://rl.bloat.cat/preview/pre/bn8bzvzd80ye1.jpeg?width=16... Definitely some high art there.

[kome]

I agree, computer graphics and art were sloppified, copied and corporate way before AI, so pulling a casablanca "I'm shocked, shocked to find that AI is going on in here!" is just hypocritical and quite annoying.

[IshKebab]

Yeah this was probably for like a stone texture or something. It "eludes definition while asking questions about what it means to be human".

[perching_aix]

That's a fun framing. Let me try using it to define art.

Art is an abstract way of manipulating aesthetics so that the person feels or thinks a thing.

Doesn't sound very elusive nor wrong to me, while remaining remarkably similar to your coding definition.

> while asking questions about what it means to be human

I'd argue that's more Philosophy's territory. Art only really goes there to the extent coding does with creativity, which is to say

> the machine does a thing

to the extent a programmer has to first invent this thing. It's a bit like saying my body is a machine that exists to consume water and expel piss. It's not wrong, just you know, proportions and timing.

This isn't to say I classify coding and art as the same thing either. I think one can even say that it is because art speaks to the person while code speaks to the machine, that people are so much more uppity about it. Doesn't really hit the same as the way you framed this though, does it?

[surgical_fire]

Are you telling me that, for example, rock texture used in a wall is "asking questions about what it means to be human"?

If some creator with intentionality uses an AI generated rock texture in a scene where dialogue, events, characters and angles interact to tell a story, the work does not ask questions about what it means to be human anymore because the rock texture was not made by him?

And in the same vein, all code is soldering cables so the machine does a thing? Intentionality of game mechanics represented in code, the technical bits to adhere or work around technical constraints, none of it matters?

Your argument was so bad that it made me reflexively defend Gen AI, a technology that for multiple reasons I think is extremely damaging. Bad rationale is still bad rationale though.

[Jensson]

The images clair obscur generated hardly "eludes definition while asking questions about what it means to be human.".

The game is art according to that definition while the individual assets in it are not.

[tpmoney]

> Art eludes definition while asking questions about what it means to be human.

All art? Those CDs full of clip art from the 90's? The stock assets in Unity? The icons on your computer screen? The designs on your wrapping paper? Some art surely does "[elude] definition while asking questions about what it means to be human", and some is the same uninspired filler that humans have been producing ever since the first the first teenagers realized they could draw penis graffiti. And everything else is somewhere in between.

[booleandilemma]

You're just someone who can't see the beauty of an elegant algorithm.

[saubeidl]

Speak for yourself.

I consider some code I write art.

[theshrike79]

The obfuscated C competition is definitely art