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this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Imagine fighting against the tools that will drive all of us into the future because of your own personal ego. People who actively try to limit the ability of others to advance our knowledge and capacity as individuals deserve to find themselves left behind in the dust.
These people are the same wannabe gatekeeper 'traditional artists' that complained about cameras being invented, or digital imagery, or photoshop. These people will deride anything that is beyond their chosen personal scope of what is 'OK to be art'.
We try to stand on the shoulders of giants who came before us and use their knowledge to do what they couldn't, and these pathetic parasites of humanity try to trip the giant.
Knowlege should be free, anyone who actively prevents others from learning and doing and advancing are troglodyte remnants of a bygone era, you're the punch card operators that refuse to learn how to write code, the taxi driver that refuses to use nav systems, the pilot that refuses to leave their propellers behind, the builder using a hammer instead of a nailgun.
As someone who values freedom of access to knowledge I find these people utterly pathetic in their ego driven attempts to hamstring humanity. I've been a digital artist for 25 years, and I hear the same shit from traditional artists all the time when you'd bring up photoshop, all tools have their place and AI can't replace traditional artists because we still need traditional artists to come up with concepts and styles for training data. AI assisted creation processes benefit from traditional art skills, knowing composition helps make better images, knowing cinematic terminology makes it easier to replicate those things. These people just refuse to advance their own skill sets. You'd give them a lighter and they'd deride you for not rubbing sticks together for an hour.
It's ego driven hubris and I hope all of these people who fail to adapt get left behind.
Strongly disagree.
If artists don't want their data, their art being scraped by giant machines without any human oversight for profit they should be within their right to opt out. If they cannot opt out, why not poison the ill-gotten gains.
If the corporations behind these Machine Learning Algorithms were altruistic or open source, like Wikipedia is, perhaps I'd see your point. But not wanting your art to be sucked into a black hole to then be sold to others without credit or compensation I find more than fair.
Being someone with a foot in both worlds gives me a slightly robust viewpoint on this topic, so I try to chime in whenever I see this argument pop up. For reference, I have an MA in Visual Effects and a BS in Applied Mathematics, and work closely with artists and technologists in my job. I say this to support my credibility.
All in all, I advise to avoid blaming the AI engineers (most of whom are altruistic in their motives) and the users (most of whom just want to have fun and play) and focus on the politicians and profiteers. They are the real villains in the story, and also the ones who seem to manage to stay under the radar.
With the opt-out bit I was trying to get at consent, I should've worded that better.
I don't know what exact argument to use, but a machine using art to "learn" feels very different from a human doing the same.
Does an author get to request consent before you read their book? Or is consent implied because they published it?
Consent is granted by your purchase/borrowing of the book, that's how that works.
If you acquired the text through unintended means I doubt the author would (generally) consent to your reading of it.
So if I have legal access to view it, I have consent to lend that capacity to someone else?
This comment deserved to be separated from the other discussion. I am studying some LLM stuff as a side project for myself and the author of the book I am reading was discussing the history of AI training a bit in the chapter I was reading. I personally did not realize that LLM models dated back to the very early 200X years. The whole "training on works of art" dates all the way back to the earliest days using non-licensed books and manuscripts in addition to emails, text messages, blog posts, news articles, etc. Scraping whatever content is needed to train an AI from the internet without really worrying about permission is very much so nothing new. It is just something that came to the forefront of the cultural zeitgeist with the release of SD and the clamor of attention it got.
I think the reason it was never really worried about is precisely how destructive the whole process is. The "Vectorization" step that is common to most if not all AI training algorithms fundamentally disassembles whatever the input is and applies statistical methods to make it something a computer can understand. How many times was each word used, what are the odds of two colors being next to each other, how many times did person A tap their foot? Once this is done, the original work is gone. There are no discernable features of the source material save for perhaps words that are unique to that, but most of the time those are filtered out, so even those are gone. That vector is what the AI is actually trained on, not the original work. All the sources are are chaos to derive statistics from. Nothing more, nothing less.
It is a humanist perspective. We feel uneasy about it because it is something that we thought was ours and maybe a couple of other animals.
In abstraction (boiling the idea down to the most basic form it can be stated), something that is not a human learned from our art to do it as well as we can. What the something is is borderline immaterial.
(being really careful not to strawman with this) If we select a description of something else that is doing the learning and see if it leaves an uneasy feeling. Maybe a bacterial colony was genetically engineered to have a sort of memory that allowed them to remember images that the colony had been on in the past and when exposed to a disorganized pigment environment, they would redistribute the pigment into a pattern similar to the images they had experienced previously. So scientists culture billions of bacteria and print off tens of thousands of images then expose the colony en mass to them. Now the colony can recreate many many art forms.
Is that the same, better, or worse than a computer? On one hand, the computer method gives access to everyone. There are profiteers, but there are also FOSS solutions that do not harvest data or transmit your personal info home. With the bacteria example, the spread may be smaller and slower, but you better believe that every major publisher and marketing firm would be lining up to purchase the Bactereo-5000 printer that could replace their entire art department the same as many are doing with Stable Diffusion.
When you contribute to society you don't get to opt out of having your contribution used.
Someone writes a book or makes a piece of art there's nothing in the world stopping a human from using that inspiration to create. Why would I want to limit the tools that make my work flow easier from making my work flow easier?
If you want to keep your ideas to yourself then keep them in your head.
Someone else using my work as inspiration is different from ripping my works off.
A machine learning algorithm falls in the latter category in my opinion.
Then perhaps you should look at using them so you can waylay your fears with knowledge.
I should look into using said algorithms?
I know what they can do, but if that's through ripping off the work of others I'm not sure I like it.
Would you pay an artist if you knew their work was traced?
Here, first you need tools, these are FOSS:
https://www.dexerto.com/tech/how-to-install-stable-diffusion-2124809/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBpD-RbglPw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYNd0vAt5jk
Then you'll need to know the basics of using Stable Diffusion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBpD-RbglPw
You'll want access to community resources:
https://civitai.com
That'll get you started. Should see you sorted for the next month of learning. Once you've got the basics of using Stable Diffusion (one of many image gen software) and you have the software under control you can start looking at using custom training models for getting the styles you want and learn how to start getting the results similar to what you want, they won't be good, most will be trash, then you'll need to learn about ControlNet, this will get you introduced to wireframe posing, depth maps, softedge, canny, and a dozen other pre-processing tools, once you start getting things that look kinda close to what you want you'll learn about multi-pass processing, img2img generation, full and selective inpainting, and you'll start using tools like ADetailer to help try generate better looking hands faces and eyes, and then you'll need to get into learning how to use Latent-Couple and ComposableLora so you can start making accurate scene placements and style divisions. Don't worry about the plethora of other more complex tools, you won't need those at the start.
I know how to get my hands on things. Just because I haven't used it doesn't mean I can't form an opinion on the ethics behind it.
Oh but it does. Until you understand the practical and real world usage and application of the technology, and it's limitations, you're talking out your ass. Opinions are like assholes, everyone's got one and most are full of shit. I prefer objective reality over the imaginings of perpetually offended but wilfully ignorant people.
So I challenge you to recreate a traditional masterpiece with AI that is of the quality that traditional artists would respect in a style so accurate to be indiscernable for the real thing. I'll see you in undefined years, then congratulate you on accomplishing your task and respect the amount of knowledge and skill it would take to accomplish such a feat.
What the fuck are you on about. Do you have some sort of superiority complex?
I don't need to prove my knowledge to you just because I haven't generated any images myself. I can be aware of all the other applications and limitations of such a tool. I'm not arguing that it isn't useful.
I'm arguing artists should have a say in whether their work gets absorbed into the black box or not. And if they don't get that choice, fair on them for trying to poison the system. Shouldn't have taken without asking if you didn't want that to happen.
And I'm saying you're wrong. Terrorists don't get to blow up social infrastructure because they don't get what they want. And you seem to miss the part where I'm one of those artists.
You're the sort to tear down babylon or burn the library of alexandria because they stored a copy of your work for the posterity and benefit of humanity.
I didn't miss that part. You're free to do with your art whatever you want.
But just because you are okay with your art getting repurposed for whatever doesn't mean others have to be.
And if the library were to store a copy of my book it'd come with royalties and credit, unlike whatever is going on with image generators.
Now if libraries were to stock an illegal copy of my book, I'd get pretty pissed about that. If they did that to all of the other writers as well I wouldn't even have to burn it down because the lawyers would do it for me.
But lone artists on the internet don't have a massive publisher to back them up.
Why do you hate libraries? Does DaVinci get royalties when I replicate his engineering work?
And no, DaVinci doesn't. That's why copyright expires and items go into the public domain after a set amount of years.
A "set" amount of years massive corporations have been all too happy to push back, but that's another conversation.
So you're OK with burning down libraries as long as it's for Capitalism, makes more sense...
Please quote me the part where I said or implied I hate libraries.
You've been defending people's right to burn them down all thread.
I have, at no point, implied legitimate businesses/organizations should be burned down.
No you implied that other structures of communal data storage should be burned down; but for some reason you disingenuously disassociate those to others because of some self-perceived definition over what is legitimate knowledge.
AI is a librarian, datasets are the library. You want to set fire to the stacks, fuck everyone else's hard work.
If AI were a librarian I'd be able to go there and find the works of whatever artists they kept copies of. Last I checked, that is not the case. Are you sure you know how these machine learning algorithms work?
If the AI is set fire to, all of the artists still keep their individual works or art on whatever websites they were before they got scraped.
If you can't define their individual works are they really there?
I can read and absorb Nietzsche, yet you won't find his books in my head.
You know nothing on the subject and it shows.
I absolutely know much on the topic. Please read my comments elsewhere in this thread for a strong break down of the issues and how AI actually works. Btw, the source of my authority on all of it is having a Master's degree in art, working in a professional art field, having a BS in Applied Mathematics, and building AI's as a hobby. I live in literally every aspect of this debate.
TL:DR - AI models are never trained directly on source material. Sources are fed into statistical analysis algorithms that utterly destroy the sources and derive info that computers can understand in a process called Vectorization. The AI is then trained on those vectors. Then, when a prompt is given, the algorithm takes it apart as an input in a process called Tokenization. From the input, in an algorithm that goes beyond the scope of this, an output is given that statistically satisfies the model. So even in the usage process, the AI never actually directly works on human inputs.
Cool, so do I. I've been a software developer and digital artist for 25 years. I now use AI tools to assist my work flow for both.
Fun. Apologies for misinterpreting your comment.
They shouldn't post their art online then. I draw digitally and on other mediums. I have used AI as a base when I have an idea but need a visual representation that matches what I see in my head and work off of that. That is what AI tools are meant for. You do have lazy hacks who just pump out ainart and don't alter it or barely alter it and sell it.
There's no point in complaining about AI. Adapt and learn to use the tool. Just like trad artists bitched when digital artists began being recognized as artist like they should have been. Different medium same outcome.
Same energy "oh you don't like capitalism? Then why do you participate in it".
Just because someone wants to share their work with others online doesn't mean others should be allowed to indiscriminately absorb it into their black box.
Isn't that what you do when you use your eyes to view the image? Indiscriminately absorb it into your black box? Consent was provided through publishing.
Y'all said the same shit 'bout NFTs and look what happened with those
these models are not tools of the future unless all the the research and code is public.
There's open source tools.
but no chat models that are as good as gpt4 yet
You can download and run gpt-4 locally for free.
Stable Diffusion is open source. LLaMA is open source.
Support those and not Midjourney/OpenAI/Bard/etc.
I'll agree with you if copyright gets abolished. Until then creators have rights.
Creators do have rights to their works, but I can view their works and make something entirely derivative, and have rights to that myself. This is no different with AI. AI can only do so much, and it's ability to imitate is a facsimile not a direct one to one. Not one of those artists would make something with AI using their own images as training and be impressed by the results unless their results are so mediocre to be so easily duplicated to perfection. It's also still just a tool. Yes you can create AN image with a simple prompts and AI. But to create anything of specific use or value still takes time and knowledge and skills, utilising hundreds of gigabytes of training data, models, specific trained data sets for styles, all based on the creators ideals as to what they are trying to achieve, and that's not to mention the weeks and months to learn said skills as well as the use of other digital modelling and imaging software to construct poses, depth maps, scene construction, and a dozen other pre and post-processing actions. I worked with photoshop and was told my work was worthless because it wasn't traditional, 25 years ago, now if you turned your nose up at photoshop image generation you'd be looked at as a caveman, it's basically industry standard. AI is just another tool in the digital image generation playground, anyone scared of it either no longer values their own talent, or refuses to adapt to the times.
You're confusing freedom of access to knowledge with the application of said knowledge here. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the rest, but I don't like you calling this "freedom of information" when it's clearly not, and is much better described as a kind of technological progressivism. What I mean is the idea that technology always progresses forwards, improving society as it goes forward. So, all technology ought to make people's lives better, even though that's not always true. I've been reading "The evolution of technology" by George Basalla for a philosophy course, and in it Basalla makes it clear that a lot of things that are commonly thought of technology, like that it necessarily comes from science and that it's most times revolutionary, arguing that they aren't always inspired by science, and isn't always discontinuous. So I don't think that this is as straight forward as you make it out to be. (it's actually a good read and I definitely recommend it. Basalla actually draws upon many different examples to showcase his points, and even accepts when no general theory can be proposed, for instance, to describe how novelty arises) I understand that AI has its place, but I would argue that AI isn't being used in the right way most times. Rather than being something used as a tool, it's being used as a replacement for artists. Again, I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you here, it's just I think you're being harsh and making wild accusations, like claiming "These people just refuse to advance their own skill sets", which makes me want to try to refute this.
Anyways I'm done with my stupid rant, I guess.
No, it's being used as a replacement for old artists, just like we stopped hiring painters to paint window signs and advertising and now we print them on fancy technology that puts images on paper like magic. Just like we stopped using hand drawn architectural designs, and those that had the old skills needed to learn new skills. Just like morse code operators gave way to the radio operator, and sketch artists gave way to photographers, and traditional artists who made way for digital artists, like the dumb phone to the smart phone, new tech, new skills, new abilities to do more with the experience and knowledge of others. Now you need an AI prompt artist with a plethora of AI and digital image related knowledge and skills.
Yeah. Watching white collar working get upset about AI is very eye-opening.
They legitimately believe that it's okay to replace blue-collar workers with automation, but not white-collar ones. They don't actually care about progress. They care about doing as little work as possible while making as much money as possible.