Some thoughts on "AI generated art"
Added 2022-12-21 20:35:35 +0000 UTCWahoo! It's-a-me, Thought Slime! Sliming at you with a hot and fresh video about the latest fuckin' thing we all gotta worry about. The newest of the various catastrophes that have the potential to fuck everything up for everyone. Slop on over and hog out on this sweet watch!
Comments
"much of the tech sector behind these tools has had a somewhat adversarial 'here comes the future motherfuckers, whether you want it or not' attitude toward artists outside of it, and that's fucked up. " As well, it's symptomatic of that "fuck you, you get a bell and whistle while we rapidly increase wealth disparity, isn't the future wacky!!! Fuck apps, give us a better life. But that isn't hypercapitalist enough ;_;
Phrenological
2022-12-23 05:03:09 +0000 UTC(i wrote a big ass critical thing in the comments of the video, im gonna post it here as well just cause i've got some strong opinions on this issue, if this is rude of me please take down the comment, i'm not trying to be an asshole) the fundamental problem with this video is that it refuses to treat image synthesis tools as what they are. tools. each and every question it ask about, say, stable diffusion, can be asked about blender, can be asked about photoshop, can be asked about a brush, can be asked about a pencil. there's always a person on the other end, and there's still people on the other end of image synthesis. these people are artists. they have artistic tendencies and particularities, same as artists who work in any other medium. it is a fundamental misunderstanding of how these tools are actually being used by artists to frame them as replacements for an artist, and not as tools in the hands of artists. if you search it out (and yes, admittedly you will probably have to sift through quite a bit of techbro and blockchain bs to find it) you can find artists using these tools to create genuinely interesting art. the label 'ai' should honestly be done away with completely, it's technobabble marketing jargon going off of the fact that these tools are based on neural networks and machine learning and it atributes to the machine an intentionality and an intelligence that it does not have. and artists working in this medium have proposed the alternative term 'image synthesis', in part to better capture that, yes, these are tools used by people to create art, they are not replacements for artists. at the same time, there is an absolutely real labor threat issue here, right? we can all see that if i am, say, a publisher wanting an illustration for a cover, and a person using midjourney can give me something acceptable in a fraction of the time (and for a fraction of the cost) it would require of someone using photoshop or a pen and paper, that's a labor problem for those people. and since i hope we can all agree we'd all love to see people continue making stuff with photoshop and pens, that's a problem. artists using current digital and traditional tools might be at risk of being displaced in the market by people using image synthesis. and, honestly, i'm not sure how to address this, sort of just going 'abolish capitalism' (which, fuck yes, but also i'm not sure how to do that). but imo if we frame it this way, we can see that the problem with image synthesis is not the technology itself, it's the position it's threatening to take in the market and in the power structures of capitalism. there's a decent analogy to be drawn here between this stuff and the invention of photography. it seems fairly obvious to me that photography is a good and cool thing to have invented. it's a wonderful creative field, full of interesting artistic possibilities. but the fact of the matter is that when it was invented, photography displaced working artists in several fields, because for some of the purposes that their art was being sold for, photography did the job faster and cheaper. so the problem was never the technology of photography in and of itself, it was the use of it by capital as a cost cutting measure that was the problem. there's a meaningful difference here, i think. a technology can be rotten to the core. for instance, cryptocurrencies as a technology are rotten to the core. the specifics of how and why they're fucked up are intrinsic to what they are. this isnt the case for photography, and i dont think it's the case for image synthesis either. but that doesnt mean that there arent some real fucked up and suspicious people behind this tech. the clown himself, elon musk, is a cofounder of openai, and in general the tech industry is full of bastards. also much of the tech sector behind these tools has had a somewhat adversarial 'here comes the future motherfuckers, whether you want it or not' attitude toward artists outside of it, and that's fucked up. and now let's get to the stuff that's been dominating the discourse, intellectual property and plagiarism. the push to strengthen ip in response to image synthesis is (understatement of the decade) worrisome. putting aside both that intellectual property is abhorrent as a concept (ideas are infinite and owning them is absurd, culture must be free, ip is landlord shit) and that in practice it rarely if ever protects the creators in the first place, the fact of the matter is that what these tools do cannot be meaningfully called plagiarism, unless you're also willing to call inspiration plagiarism. if training a neural network on a set of images and creating more images using that neural network is plagiarism, then so is being inspired by something. the influence of any given image on the end result is similarly small, they have both similarly undergone a process of being abtracted into information before forming something original in response to a person's intent. obviously they're not the same thing, but there's a strong analogy there. the way in which art made with image synthesis tools is derivative is not different to the way in which all art is derivative. the plagiarism issue is a red herring that's being used by people who do not have the best interests of artists at heart to distract from the labor issue.
dnys
2022-12-22 23:54:00 +0000 UTCalso i'm sorry this reply is so long
Jess
2022-12-22 21:40:38 +0000 UTCI'm an ML engineer as like my real life job and an artist as my hobby (and I'd love to do that full time.) I've been kind of hopelessly yelling about this for two years-- ML is very good at specific things, but it is better at tricking people into thinking it is good at things. This video is a really good explainer! You explained the technical details well! One of the reasons I got into ML is because I think it's interesting and has good applications, and it's disheartening to me that it's being used for propping up capitalism-- but that's what everything does. Part of me feels like it's a nice way to release artists from having to create corporate schlock, but a lot more of me feels that until we have socialism or at least a universal basic income we're automating away some of the only creative and fulfilling careers for artists and creatives out there. I appreciate this video a lot and will probably link it to people who think they can replace all their workers with AI.
Jess
2022-12-22 21:40:17 +0000 UTCAI generated art is worth it just for the fun TikTok videos of people using the Manga AI filter. All eleventy million of them.
Slazenger Kincaid
2022-12-22 18:32:04 +0000 UTC
