In a post-scarcity solarpunk future, I could imagine some reasonable uses, but that’s not the world we’re living in yet.
AI art has already poisoned the creative environment. I commissioned an artist for my latest solarpunk novel, and they used AI without telling me. I had to scrap that illustration. Then the next person I tried to hire claimed they could do the work without AI but in fact they could not.
All that is to say, fuck generative AI and fuck capitalism!
Someone said something that stuck with me the other day. "I don't want AI to create all of our art and music so we can work more. I want AI to do our work so we have more time to create art and music".
The reason for that is that you have to look at this as if you're some greedy corporate bastard.
A robot butler costs money to build and if it doesn't pan out, they're on the hook for the cost. Firing people saves money right now, and if generative art doesn't pan out, they can hire new employees that will work for less.
AI is just the latest craze to justify what these greedy bastards do all the time. The way they're fucking us is new, but the act of fucking us is as old as dirt.
It also makes a way for the poor to be able to afford to get art to make comics and other things when they otherwise would have been unable to hire artists. Generative ai also allows poor people to write code they couldn't before because they couldn't afford the help. It also gives poor people the ability to brainstorm new ideas when they can't afford a team of consultants.
It helps the poor, just like search engines and the internet. There were people back in those days scared of change as well. Gen ai is a huge equalizer or wealth and power. The vast majority of people using Gen Ai are using it for things that they never would have considered being able to hire someone to do anyway.
shh. if you can't afford to pay people, then you should just die. /s
you're quite right, and it's a shame that generative AI art is treated like a gun and not a hammer. Both can be used to kill someone. (it's not a great analogy, but hopefully people see my point about it generative AI being more than a weapon to kill artists)
First of all it concentrates power and wealth on the owners of the models (Microsoft, OpenAI) or the ones that provide the tools (Nvidia).
Yes, there is truth in it, that people who couldn't afford to pay someone to create art, or get consulting, can get this now to a certain extend (if they can afford internet access and pay the AI services they need). But this comes also at the price of lowering the income of the people who provided these services. They now need to compete in the business creation market and not in the market that they trained for. Not everyone can create and maintain a business with or without starting money, just from a skill point of view. Nor does everybody want to.
Umm what?
When I run a checkpoint at home, how do you think the creator of checkpoint is profiting or gaining any power/wealth?
This stuff is ridiculously easily self hosted and run independently of any company.
It might be "ridiculously easy" but there is a reason why linux adoption is around 3ish%.
Its because it isnt the easiest option.
The concentration of power part is not true unless people keep trying to use copyrights and the legal system to protect themselves from genai, at which point it will be true. Currently there's plenty of self hosted solutions like stable diffusion and services like the ai horde to help even people without gpu for free
You are still reliant on the models trained by these companies. This training is very expensive. And yes there are ioen source models exist (thank god) but there are also closed source models that are very successfully advertised.
And self hosting requires money and skill. This means there is a lot of people who lack both and may then use closed source models.
And it helps the poor perform heart surgery because they couldn’t afford medical school. And it helps the poor build space craft because they couldn’t afford engineering degrees.
There’s a reason some of these things are done by experienced professionals not some AI kludge. If you really want to fix the problem, allow the poor access to education so they can become professionals in these areas if they so wish. The answer isn’t some AI telling them to put glue on their pizza.
I need a cover for my novel. Hold on real quick while I get this 4 year degree and spend $80k to send an fu to the AI overlords and design it myself.
After that I’ll throw my shovels away and use spoons instead.
Or you could pay someone... There's a bunch of starting artists who work for cheap. There, saved you $79.5k Sadly your novel won't sell because it's been buried by an avalanche of ai generated books. (amazon recently limited the number of books you can self publish to only five per day... Your argument works both ways, why should I study and practice for years to learn to write my own novel (or pay you) when Ai can just generate it for me?
There's another way for the poor to acquire art for their own comics. Can you guess what it is?
This is why I focus on distribution rather than training. If you commercialize a model trained on things you don’t own/license, and it generates anything remotely infringing, you should be fully on the hook for every single incident.
But if a model is trained and distributed freely as FOSS, then it’s up to anyone running it to ensure the output is not infringing. This protects fair use while also ensuring that big companies tread more carefully when redistributing models that can violate fair use by competing with those whose work was trained on without permission and are subsequently being emulated without permission.
If the AI isn't stealing content, then piracy isn't stealing either.
Piracy isn't since it is making exact copies of yer booty
Would that not mean that AIs aren't stealing either? 🤔
It would undermine the exact point OP is making, but I understand what he means, so that still stands.
Either none of it is stealing or all of it is.
Yes, I'm pro-both. IP only benefits the ultra-rich.
Unlimited IP protections only benefit the rich. If we return copyright back to its original 25 year limit, it would actually benefit the actual artists because the corpos would have to pay artists for new ideas pretty frequently.
Haven't seen a penny arcade comics in like 15 years. Gotta say, the art style has suffered. Tycho looks like he has hydrocephaly
It may have suffered, but it's distinctive.
The webcomic space is flooded with generic "good art". If you want to stand out and build or maintain your brand - you need a unique look. Artists want their audience to be able to look at a character and instantly know they drew it.
(The best example of this is perhaps the worst human being in webcomics today. You can recognize his style in the first three lines of a face.)
I think PA was in kind of a bad place, because they were popular so early in the webcomic boom and so many people copied their style that their original art became generic. What's going to attract a new teenage reader to PA if it looks just like every other crappy "two guys on a couch playing video games" webcomic they've seen?
So PA had to change their style. And say what you will about it, there's no doubt who drew (or had an AI tool draw) those characters.
AI is a lot like plastic:
It is versatile and easy to use. There are some cases for which it is the highest quality product for the job; but for most cases it is just a far cheaper alternative, with bit of a quality reduction.
So what we end up with is plastic being used a lot, to reduce costs and maximise profits; but mostly the products it is used for are worse than they would otherwise be. They look worse. They degrade faster. They produce mountains of waste that end up contaminating every food source of every animal in the world. As a species, we want to use it less; but individual companies and people continue to use it for everything because it is cheap and convenient.
I think AI will be the same. It is relatively cheap and convenient. It can be used for a very wide range of things, and does a pretty good job. But in most cases it is not quite as good as what we were doing before. In any case, AI output will dominate everything we consume because of how cheap and easy it is. News, reviews, social media comments, web searches, all sorts of products... a huge proportion will be AI created - and although we'll wish they weren't (because of the unreliable quality), it will be almost impossible to avoid; because its easier to produce 1000 articles with AI than a single one by a human. So people will churn junk and hope to get lucky rather than putting in work to insure high quality.
For individual people creating stuff, the AI makes it easier and faster and cheaper; and can create good results. But for the world as a whole, we'll end up choking on a mountain of rubbish, as we now have to wade through vastly more low-quality works to find what we're looking for. It will contaminate everything we consume, and we won't be able to get rid of it.
It's not even the fact it's cheap and easy, it's just a bunch of idiots overinvested and now they're desperately trying to make it A Thing so they can recoup losses.
Mcdonalds tried to shoehorn it into drive thru orders. The place that popularised a set menu you select a a controlled list of items from. Wtaf.
Tax all AI companies to fund UBI.
If we had representation...
Tax all ~~AI~~ companies to fund UBI.
FTFY
You know it is curious that the common folk bear the tax burden while getting no representation and thr ownership class gets allnthe representation but evades taxes.
This echoes something I learned in history way back when we were occupied and had to contend with monarchs. Funny Numbers Or Fight!, Better Dead Than Red! Fuck Off With Your Stompy Jackboots! and such.
I feel like enjoying AI "art" is the same entertainment type as scrolling through Facebook or TikTok. Fine to kill time, but nothing that will improve our lives. In other words It's a perfect media for the future to get addicted to, and get nothing done.
To the "but what about copyright abolition" people:
There's a clear difference between someone making a meme with an image they taken out of context, or a musician using a sample taken from a song the original artist never seen a single penny from it, or an artist making a fanart of their favorite character, and the AI industry scraping all of it and selling it as a "better, more advanced replacement" of all of it.
People are still confusing art with output... Even if llms could generate a 1:1 replica of the Mona Lisa, do people think it's going to have the same value and be held in the same regard?
Generated output is a gimmick that will be used by people who have no intention of making art.
Edited: typos
Generated output is a gimmick that will be used by people who have no intention of making art.
Without getting into the definition of "art", yes, people will use generated output for purposes other than "art". And that's not a gimmick. That's a valuable tool.
Rally organizers can use AI to create pamphlets and notices for protests. Community organizers can illustrate broadsheets and zines. People can add imagery and interest to all sorts of written material that they wouldn't have the time or money to illustrate with traditional graphic design. AI can make an ad for a yard sale or bake sale look as slick and professional as any big name company's ads.
AI tools will make the world a more artistic place, they will let people put graphic art in all sorts of places they wouldn't have the time or money or skill to do so before, and that's a good thing.
Sure, my auntie will use a generator instead of paint for her yard sale poster. But we're assuming Llms are going stay free and accessible to all at zero cost. That's just not a reality we live in.
But comparing the current garbage that comes out of llms with "big name company's ads" is purposeful misinformation from a person, who is likely never done graphics design professionally.
"AI" tools will not make the world a more artistic place. Art has never been limited by tools.
I could agree that the generated stuff could make the world slightly more pleasing visually, at the cost of environment.
But easily accessible graphics weren't even the limiting factor. There are many tools online that can help you mock things up in seconds without "AI". Canva, mockups, simple websites that generate decent templates.
It's people's willingness to put in the effort, and comprehension of aesthetics, and IT literacy that are the limiting factors.
AI art has a very real place in current society. It's very useful, and is absolutely going to get better and become a normal part of the future. We're not going to avoid it, so we should work on making AI less morally fucked. The technology isn't the problem, the people behind it are. Rather than stealing art, the multi-million/billion-dollar companies behind these models need to pay artists for every single piece of art they use in their models.
the first rule of the server is to be constructive, you may want to keep that in mind when posting
control of ai by capital is bad, we all know that on this server; what are the next steps then? this is what solarpunks should ask themselves (first of all they -artists- prob need to unionize their workplace, for those not freelance, to ensure their jobs)
also those artists who used ai without telling you just want to get by their lives and are costrained by the system as you and as me
-artists- prob need to unionize their workplace
You'll have an easier time unionizing programmers. I don't mean that as snark, because most visual art can be very easily outsourced, whether it's 2D or 3D. People with audio arts are even more fucked, thanks in no small part to record labels.
I wish I had an idea to start fixing this
What happens when AI advances to the point where it can do everything it does today (and more) without using copyrighted training material?
This is inevitable (and in fact some models already use only licensed training data), so I think it's a bad idea to focus so much on this angle. If what you're really worried about is the economic impact, then this is a dead-end argument. By the time any laws pass, it will likely be irrelevant because nobody will be doing that anyway. Or only the big corporations who own the copyrights to a bajillion properties (e.g. Disney) will do it in-house and everyone else will be locked out. That's the exact opposite of what we should be fighting for.
The concept of "art" changes based on technology. I remember when I first starting fiddling with simple paint programs, just scribbling a little shape and using the paint-bucket tool to fill in a gradient blew my mind. Making in image like that 100 years prior would have been a real achievement. Instead of took me a minute of idle experimentation.
Same thing happened with CGI, synthesizers, etc. Is sampling music "art"? Depends what you do with it. AI should be treated the same way. What is the (human) artist actually contributing to the work? This can be quantified.
Typing "cat wearing sunglasses" into Dall-E will give you an image that would have been art if it were made 100 years ago. But any artistry now is limited to the prompt. I can't copyright the concept of a cat wearing sunglasses, so I have no claim to such an image generated from such a simple prompt.
I think the way forward is to label and be honest about AI.
So to your point OP, I agree, using AI art is fine, but lying about it is bad just like lying about your vendors.
You come across as anti-tech out of spite. Yes, generative AI is snake oil, but that is a question of scope and power and speculation, not utility of easy to create pictures.
I am so happy with the vast amount of free art available these days. As a blogger, it's easier than ever to find a free topical picture.
"hooray convenience, fuck your livelihood."
Is this what Penny Arcade looks like nowadays? Man I really dislike the shift in art style…Tycho looks grotesque
Oh look, it’s Mira Murati!
Is stealing the right word to use? Or would it be more accurate to say ‘scraping’ or ‘unauthorized use’?
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