Scholar

The End of Art: An Argument Against Image AIs

98 posts in this topic

3 hours ago, Scholar said:

And you seem to still think there is a distinction between human and God. There is no such thing as God's creative vs human creativity. It is the same process. How foolisht is it to accuse artists to steal from god, when they are stealing from noone but themselves.

You are the one who's inventing distinctions between God and machines.

By your logic, AIs are stealing from noone but themselves.

Maybe watch my Double Standards episode and my Understanding Bias episode.

God vs machine is a duality. << there's your error

Edited by Leo Gura

You are God. You are Truth. You are Love. You are Infinity.

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24 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Maybe watch my Double Standards episode and my Understanding Bias episode.

These would be good videos for you to watch and review thoroughly @Scholar. Once you have them integrated, maybe you can get back to doing some real art with improved tools at your disposal.

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On 27.11.2022 at 4:43 AM, Leo Gura said:

You are the one who's inventing distinctions between God and machines.

By your logic, AIs are stealing from noone but themselves.

Maybe watch my Double Standards episode and my Understanding Bias episode.

God vs machine is a duality. << there's your error

AI's are not stealing, they aren't doing anything consciously at all. They aren't referencing images either, they are sampling them.

If I work as a concept artist for some big company, I am not allowed to just use photo's that I don't have a license to in a photobashing process, even if the end results becomes unrecognizable. Fundamentally, the violation of rights occurs at the point of training these MLA's, because you are using data that you have no license for to create a product. If I as an artist create 100 images, those images are my data, and I ought to have the right to sell the licenses for these images for others to create MLA-based product. Or I might not want for people to use my data at all, and that should be fine too. Or maybe I want to create my own AI with my own images, so that I can actually contribute to the evolution of art by expanding the latent space of the AI's. Instead, everyone can take my art for free and then create product with it, which then they can sell for money? That's insanity. These MLA's run on visual information, so that visual information is literally the oil they burn to fuel the imagination of the AI's. That's oil I have ownership over, because I have created that oil.

The comparison between artists references other art or photos, and AI's that are products designed and created by people, and do not reference, but sample the actual data I have ownership over, is simply not apt.

 

This is just so stupid. Imagine I took your videos and reuploaded them, telling you "Well, I am Leo, we are all god, therefore I created this video in the first place, so I can use it!". I think you are the one with the Double Standard here, because if someone appropriated your intellectual property, you'd be furious. AI's can exist, but we ought to do this ethically. We know that AI's do not reference art like humans do, they don't reference at all. They are a set trained model based on certain data they was sampled, not referenced. Either way, the AI fundamentally is not an individual making choices. The way it creates is fundamentally different from how humans create art, any expert on machine learning will tell you this.

Your attitude in regards to this is just so irresponsible, but at this point that does not surprise me, because you have demonstrated this kind of immaturity more than once now.

 

How pathetic I am that I am even engaging with your red herring of trying to make this about spirituality. Utterly absurd.

 

On 27.11.2022 at 5:13 AM, thepixelmonk said:

These would be good videos for you to watch and review thoroughly @Scholar. Once you have them integrated, maybe you can get back to doing some real art with improved tools at your disposal.

I will not be using tools as they currently stand. If someone will create an AI that is based on ethically acquired data, I will gladly experiment with it.

And AI is, as it currently stands, not really a tool for me. It does not actually extend my creative capacity, it replaces it. But again, people who are unfamiliar with the creation of visual art will think that we just shit out images after we quickly imagine them in our heads. That's not how art is created. All you guys seem to care about is the destination, when the journey in the creation of art is one of the most essential things about it.

 

AI will not make visual art more valuable, it will actually trivialize it completely. What you thought of as a beautifully painted image before, which you would have felt awe for, will now be nothing to you, because you will get used to it as a standard.

The experience of beauty and awe you feel when seeing a beautiful piece of art does not come from some sort of intrinsic value that art has. It comes from the contrast between the mundane and the beautiful. If everyone can shit out master pieces at the click a buttom, it is no longer a master piece.

 

More, Faster, No Mastery, No effort, Destination over Journey. That's all I am seeing here, and it will do as much for mankind as Mcdonalds and Hollywood Action Blockbusters do. The artist who spend dozens of hours to create pieces filled with intention will see no more recognition, because their work was appropriate by a machine that can shit out soulless visual noise that you cannot even know whether is plagiarized or not, by the millions.

I want everyone to be drawing, to explore their own imagination and give actual expression to it. Rather than that, we are seeing peoples imagination being replaced by machines, and the consciousness-connecting process of creating art will be replaced by a hyperautistic, results-oriented process that turns images into something as trivial as breathing.

The entire point of being an artist is to be immersed in the process of creation. Something I wish everyone could get a taste of. But now, with people having the option to tell AI's what to imagine, to tell AI's what to create, people will not pursuit that anymore.

 

Why don't we create AI's that watch movies for you and play games, to summarize them so that you yourself don't have to watch them? Why don't we create AI's that experience life for you and then summarize to you how it was, and all the conclusions it arrived at that you no longer have to think about. Because that's what life is all about, arriving at the destination! It's not like that if you have too much of a good thing, it could possibly become a negative!

 

I'm just blown away by how much people on this forum lack wisdom and consciousness, including their leaders.

Edited by Scholar

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@Scholar

34 minutes ago, Scholar said:

Oh look, at least someone agrees:

 

   Good for him, let this be an example of integrity. 

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Quote

More, Faster, No Mastery, No effort, Destination over Journey. That's all I am seeing here, and it will do as much for mankind as Mcdonalds and Hollywood Action Blockbusters do. The artist who spend dozens of hours to create pieces filled with intention will see no more recognition, because their work was appropriate by a machine that can shit out soulless visual noise that you cannot even know whether is plagiarized or not, by the millions.

Welcome to fucking progress my dude. If you follow this argument to its logical conclusion you should just return to the stone age and live off the land, draw your art on cave walls with bone dust and dye. Most of the things in your field of view as you read this were items of technology that replaced other people's jobs in the past.

You live in a world that exists because it has smashed and destroyed the jobs of the past by trivialising them. Yet newer challenges always arise that operate at a higher level of abstraction and require newer and more creative ways of thinking.

How can you be so arrogant as to think that your profession should be exempt from technological progress while living in a world and society that was built completely upon hyper-technological progress?

Quote

Why don't we create AI's that watch movies for you and play games, to summarize them so that you yourself don't have to watch them? Why don't we create AI's that experience life for you and then summarize to you how it was, and all the conclusions it arrived at that you no longer have to think about. Because that's what life is all about, arriving at the destination! It's not like that if you have too much of a good thing, it could possibly become a negative!

If it's not about the end product then stop monetising your art and do it for free. You'll still be able to do that no matter how good AI art becomes. You just might not be able to make a living doing it, but you won't be the first profession to fall to technological progress and you won't be the last.

Edited by something_else

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3 minutes ago, something_else said:

How can you be so arrogant as to think that your profession should be exempt from technological progress while basically living in a world and society that was built upon hyper-technological progress?

lol exactly this

1 hour ago, Scholar said:

And AI is, as it currently stands, not really a tool for me. It does not actually extend my creative capacity, it replaces it. But again, people who are unfamiliar with the creation of visual art will think that we just shit out images after we quickly imagine them in our heads. That's not how art is created. All you guys seem to care about is the destination, when the journey in the creation of art is one of the most essential things about it.

Countless real, professional artists are already out there in the world using this technology to speed up their workflows and massively extend their creative capacities. Just goes to show what a nonsensical bias you have.

1 hour ago, Scholar said:

AI will not make visual art more valuable, it will actually trivialize it completely. What you thought of as a beautifully painted image before, which you would have felt awe for, will now be nothing to you, because you will get used to it as a standard.

The experience of beauty and awe you feel when seeing a beautiful piece of art does not come from some sort of intrinsic value that art has. It comes from the contrast between the mundane and the beautiful. If everyone can shit out master pieces at the click a buttom, it is no longer a master piece.

Don't push your nonsense onto us. This is nothing more than you choosing to trivialize your own art. You can have fun with that, more power to ya. The rest of us will continue enjoying the beauty around us as we always have.

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9 minutes ago, something_else said:

Welcome to fucking progress my dude. If you follow this argument to its logical conclusion you should just return to the stone age and live off the land, draw your art on cave walls with bone dust and dye. Most of the things in your field of view as you read this were items of technology that replaced other people's jobs in the past.

You live in a world that exists because it has smashed and destroyed the jobs of the past by trivialising them. Yet newer challenges always arise that operate at a higher level of abstraction and require newer and more creative ways of thinking.

How can you be so arrogant as to think that your profession should be exempt from technological progress while basically living in a world and society that was built upon hyper-technological progress?

I don't think so. Progress is good if it enhances our life's. Blind technological progress for the sake of making everything effortless and replacing humans is not wisdom, it's just blindly following todays hyper-achievement and results oriented paradigm.

It's just boring to discuss with you when you are more keen on creating a strawman rather than engaging in this discussion in an insightful manner. It is obvious that you have no interest in expanding the scope of your perspective. I never said I was against technology, artists, including me, have benefitted and used technological progress. We are in fact the people who are naturally at the forefront of innovation, and we in fact are the ones who inspire the future of mankind, by creation visions of those potential futures.

 

I'm not arrogant at all, I specifically told you why I think the way this technology is being employed is unethical and unwise. Are there ways to employ and use this technology with wisdom and love? Of course there are. But using nuclear weapons just because we can invent them, and cloning people just because it's progress, is not smart. Instead of arguing with things I have never said, why don't you engage with the substance of what I have been saying?

In fact, if you want to be the one drawing art on caves, the attitude you hold is the best way to get there.

 

I'm trying to make a rule about not engaging people who are not having discussion in good faith, so I will give you one more chance. Next time, instead of creating conclusions from position you presume I hold, I want you to make an effort to actually understand my position in a charitable manner or ask clarifying questions.

 

2 minutes ago, thepixelmonk said:

Countless real, professional artists are already out there in the world using this technology to speed up their workflows and massively extend their creative capacities. Just goes to show what a nonsensical bias you have.

I never disputed that artists are going to be using AI. Improving your workflow does not actually mean giving expression to your genuine imagination. Of course artists will scramble and try to adopt these technology. Artists are forced to adopt all kinds of creativity-destroying and soul-crushing processes to make a living in the highly competitive environments we exist in today. I don't think that extends their creative capacities, I just think it creates more output, and more output is more profit for the companies.

Just look at most veterans in the entertainment industry. I bet you don't know the name of a single one, but let me tell you, they are not a happy bunch for the most part, and even though they are creating amazing imagery, they are completely burned out from the amount of images they have to output. Now, the expectation will rise, and everyone will be forced to adopt AI.

AI art will benefit a specific set of artist who focus on a specific part of their creativity, whose way of creating and whose particular biases lend themselves to the way AI's function today. Like I said, for the companies, these AI's are wonderful. Cheap art is good art to them. But in regards to connecting people to consciousness and love, these AI's will not benefit the creatives. They will do the opposite, they will disconnect them from their self, and instead of their own imagination, the AI will be imagining the images for them.

 

10 minutes ago, thepixelmonk said:

Don't push your nonsense onto us. This is nothing more than you choosing to trivialize your own art. You can have fun with that, more power to ya. The rest of us will continue enjoying the beauty around us as we always have.

Right, I'm sure you are an art lover.

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2 hours ago, Scholar said:

Fundamentally, the violation of rights occurs at the point of training these MLA's, because you are using data that you have no license for to create a product.

Except this is false. These AI were trained on licensed image databases from companies like Shutterstock.

Companies are even coming up with schemes where artists are paid a bit if their image is used as part of an AI maxing process.

These problems are all solvable in the same way YT paids musicians if someone upload a video with some of their music.

But fundamentally you are still wrong because your brain contains images of many artists which it then uses to create your art.

The problem is that you are not allowing for fair use because you are so protective of your art. This is not how society works. The whole point of society is to inspire each other.

Read the law on fair use. Fair use exists for a reason. You cannot just hoard very bit of your art and not allow it to enter into people's brains. An AI is just a brain. Your brain does not create art out of thin air. It needs a substrate of images to mix. You are using the very same mechanism to create your art that you denounce the AI for using. These AI are literally reverse engineered from brains.

Edited by Leo Gura

You are God. You are Truth. You are Love. You are Infinity.

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1 hour ago, Scholar said:

Right, I'm sure you are an art lover.

Of course I am. Literally everybody enjoys art in some form. This is such a ridiculous holier-than-thou comment.

Edited by thepixelmonk

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1 hour ago, Scholar said:

I'm trying to make a rule about not engaging people who are not having discussion in good faith,

It’s not like you are arguing in great faith either. You also write in a fairly arrogant/denouncing manner. And I argued with the substance of your point plenty of times previously but I don’t think we will see eye to eye on that. Leo’s argument above is similar to mine but written far more eloquently and concisely so debate against that if you want substance.

The general impression I get from you on this topic is really similar to old conservative factory workers scared of losing their jobs to machines, that is the core point of my admittedly pretty aggressive post above. Progress is inevitable and your opinions about stopping it are like grains of rice in the grand scheme of things

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1 minute ago, something_else said:

The general impression I get from you on this topic is really similar to old conservative factory workers scared of losing their jobs to machines, that is the core point of my admittedly pretty aggressive post above. Progress is inevitable and your opinions about stopping it are like grains of rice in the grand scheme of things

This is exactly it. What you see here is simply the current low-hanging fruit of the art industry feeling threatened by natural progress and the necessity to adapt.

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1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

Except this is false. These AI were trained on licensed image databases from companies like Shutterstock.

This is not true Leo. Most models have been trained on LAION, including Stable Diffusion and I am pretty sure Midjourney, too.

https://laion.ai/blog/laion-400-open-dataset/
 

Quote

 

WARNING: be aware that this large-scale dataset is non-curated. It was built for research purposes to enable testing model training on larger scale for broad researcher and other interested communities, and is not meant for any real-world production or application.

We have filtered all images and texts in the LAION-400M dataset with OpenAI‘s CLIP by calculating the cosine similarity between the text and image embeddings and dropping those with a similarity below 0.3. The threshold of 0.3 had been determined through human evaluations and seemed to be a good heuristic for estimating semantic image-text-content matching.

The image-text-pairs have been extracted from the Common Crawl web data dump and are from random web pages crawled between 2014 and 2021.

 

The Dataset is basically just random images grabbed from the internet, independent of copyright. The Company that is working on Stable Diffusion funded the creation of this databases with fair-use exemption because it was a research purpose only dataset.

They then uses that dataset to train the open-source model Stable Diffusion, disregarding any potential violation of copyright laws. Stability AI, the company, is now valued at 1 billion dollars.

 

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

But fundamentally you are still wrong because your brain contains images of many artists which it then uses to create your art.

The problem is that you are not allowing for fair use because you are so protective of your art. This is not how society works. The whole point of society is to inspire each other.

Read the law on fair use. Fair use exists for a reason. You cannot just hoard very bit of your art and not allow it to enter into people's brains. An AI is just a brain. Your brain does not create art out of thin air. It needs a substrate of images to mix. You are using the very same mechanism to create your art that you denounce the AI for using. These AI are literally reverse engineered from brains.

No, my brain does not contain pixel perfect images of artists that I then use to create art. That's not how you learn art, lol. Jesus Christ Leo, how can you spout such complete nonsense with such confidence?

When artists learn from other artist, they look at certain images and look at them through their subjective lense. They might use some solutions to visual problems they are working on, but they don't literally look at the image and somehow absorb it and can then draw that image. That's not how any of this works. The amount of information you can take from an individual piece of art, is extremely limited, that's why it's considered fair use.

Humans do not sample art, they reference it. But like I said, you are so deeply ignorant of this topic that it's not really worth to have this discussion with you. You just have no clue what you are even talking about.

 

And you don't even have a good grasp of fair use, here you go:
 

Quote

 

The four factors of fair use:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes

Courts typically focus on whether the use is “transformative.” That is, whether it adds new expression or meaning to the original, or whether it merely copies from the original.

2. The nature of the copyrighted work

Using material from primarily factual works is more likely to be fair than using purely fictional works.

3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole

Borrowing small bits of material from an original work is more likely to be considered fair use than borrowing large portions. However, even a small taking may weigh against fair use in some situations if it constitutes the “heart” of the work.

4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work

Uses that harm the copyright owner's ability to profit from his or her original work by serving as a replacement for demand for that work are less likely to be fair uses.

 

https://support.google.com/legal/answer/4558992?hl=en

Take a look at Nr. 4.

Taking inspiration from the work of other artist and learning from them is sustainable and fair use because it does not render the initial work valueless. No artist in the world can learn how to draw like Kim Jung Gi, no matter how long he tries. There will always be discrepencies. The way artist create their art is as unique to them as their handwriting or their voice, it's an extremely individualized process. And even if you tried to copy another artist and were successful, you would still have to compete with him in the market. With AI that is fundamentally not the case, as soon as you appropriate the image of another artist, you render that artist uncompetitive, by means of his own work. That is fundamentally not fair us. And it's not inspiration, nor reference. It is sampling, it is the using of the data, pixel by pixel, of the work to create a product you call AI.

In a world in which AI exists, all that matters is the latent space that AI has to generate art. The latent space that AI has will be determined by the sets of images it was able to use. Meaning, the images are everything, they are everything of value in this new system. The capacity of the AI is directly related to the images used. So, that's where all the values is, that is the oil of the 21st century. If people can just grab these images for free, which are like I said, extremely valuable and essential to these models, you discourage people from actually further exploring visual information the way artists do. The only reason why you have such amazing art on Midjourney and StableDiffusion is because of the art it is derived from. Not compensating artists for that, and stealing the IP is just theft. It has nothing to do with fair use. And like I said above, the artists fundamentally have license to that data, to that metaphorical oil. To compare AI to humans is just absurd. I don't know where you are getting your information from, but you really need to put more effort into finding better sources.

And AI is not a brain at all. You actually need to prove that before you throw out all copyright laws. Does the AI change when it is creating new images? If I never look at another piece of art or image again, and I just sit down and draw for 10.000 hours, I will improve signifantly. An AI does not improve as it creates more images. It's not even remotely close to a brain, you are just so deeply misinformed. And the fact that you are spouting this misinformation with this kind of confidence undermines you as a person in my eyes. That's just disappointing.

 

And my brain can create art out of thing air, that is what makes the brain fundamentally different from these AI's. These AI's can only express themselves in the latent space between certain datapoints. I, as a human, can be a caveman from tens of thousands of years ago, look at a bear, and go to a cave and draw an abstraction of that bear. Something the AI cannot do. It can only draw with the latent space of two images, and is extremely prone to overfitting.

 

TbKiRz4.png

https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03860

 

Please don't be an ignoramus on this, just admit that you are talking out of your depths. You're behaving like an NFT bro.

And like I said, these AI's do not mimic art creation, they mimic if anything certain parts of visualization, which is an unconscious process. But that is a different topic and I have no hopes you have even the basic understanding to have that conversation.

It's not good for creativity if all work can just be appropriated and used without any fair use consideration. And clearly, you don't even know what fair use entails and what it's limitations are. You don't give a shit about any of this, all you want is virtue signal about your supposed high consciousness position of seeing the progress in everything. Not everything can be just blindly accepted as progress, especially when it would be so easy to do all of this ethically. The artist have license to their images, and you can't just use those images against their consent to create a product.

Capitalism only works when property laws were protected. That's how capitalism started. If you don't protect people's properties, they won't give a fuck about being productive. Why would I, as an artist, ever release my art that I worked decades on to refine, that would be a unique addition to the latent space of the AI, if I gain literally nothing from that?

 

Edited by Scholar

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1 hour ago, Scholar said:

Uses that harm the copyright owner's ability to profit from his or her original work by serving as a replacement for demand for that work are less likely to be fair uses.

This is your own fear at work.

These AI do not take away from your ability to profit from your art. That's like saying electric cars shouldn't exist because they take business away from gas cars. That's just how all business works.

Talking to you on this topic is impossible because you are so biased and driven by survival.

Edited by Leo Gura

You are God. You are Truth. You are Love. You are Infinity.

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28 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

This is your own fear at work.

These AI do not take away from your ability to profit from your art.

Talking to you on this topic is impossible because you are so biased and driven by survival.

Can you actually respond to a single thing I am saying instead of trying to mind-read me so you don't have to engage? I clearly have shown how you are wrong about multiple things you just claimed, and just ignore that? Have you no integrity? Admit you were wrong, and be a little more humble.

If you think these AI's will not significantly damage artists potential to generate profit, when they literally take the images of artists and make it so those AI's can generate images of that same style within seconds and for free, you are just delusional. Markets work by supply and demand, and you just made the supply free. No way that will not affect profits.

 

You actually cannot have a discussion of substance, all you can do is talk about everyone elses psychology like some sort of cult leader.

 

And you sneaky weasel! I didn't even notice it, but you moved the goalpost. We never were talking about making AI's illegal or anything of the sort. I am saying that using copyrighted images as training data is unethical. You can still create AI, you just have to do it ethically. That way, there is business for artists and the AI creators. How is that not fair? Why would that be unreasonable?

These people are taking the images of everyone without compensation and generating billions of dollars of value with it, while probably putting most of those artists out of jobs in the near future. You really think that it's sane to say that is just fine and dandy?

Edited by Scholar

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   I think this link to the consilience project is valuable at this point, before we go deeper into this discussion between users supportive of A.I and are okay outsourcing their visual art pieces, and users against A.I image generators and are not okay outsourcing their visual art pieces. I especially get that feeling and understand it, and it can effect the quality of conversation happening here as all sides facing this issue are spiraling downwards the quality of discourse, which is why this is important. Check out the website and go to the article on good faith versus bad faith discussions:

https://consilienceproject.org/

   

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Artists aren’t the only ones losing to AI. Many doctors will be paid less and nurses etc. most fast food/bottom level people will be eliminated, all drivers and much much more. Then we will just have to sit back and fuck :)

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Every ending is a new beginning. With AI real art will blossom. Previous human art will be seen as primitive monkey business. 

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@StarStruck

2 hours ago, StarStruck said:

Every ending is a new beginning. With AI real art will blossom. Previous human art will be seen as primitive monkey business. 

   Are you in the moral right to use A.I to take a style from a dead artist?

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