The End of Art: An Argument Against Image AIs

[Scholar]

 

He makes a very interesting case. I'm curious what your thoughts are, but please watch the video before you respond because if you don't, your arguments might have already been addressed in it.

[Danioover9000]

@Scholar

44 minutes ago, Scholar said:

 

He makes a very interesting case. I'm curious what your thoughts are, but please watch the video before you respond because if you don't, your arguments might have already been addressed in it.

   It's a decent video, posted it on @Space thread on A.I. ruining art.

[Danioover9000]

@Scholar    The tricky key question that's tough to tackle in that video, is how do those A.I. drawing software companies, if this is true that they are copywriting and stealing images from the open-source internet, how would even one company begin to compensate each artist?

   Roughly speaking, an A.I program that's open source has access to a billion + images on the internet. A BILLION PLUS!! And some of these companies are relatively new to having a business modal and dealing with A.I. drawing programs, where do they get the funds to compensate a billion plus artists?? 

   What Steven Zapata fails to understand, is the magnitude of this problem, that the internet still isn't as democratized as the real-world societies that we live in. There's no central government body on the internet to add or subtract infrastructure for other users and online communities, and compared to real-world human history, the internet does not have regulations and policies at scale to deal with 100,000 and so communities, not just artists, using the program. Most cases it's decentralized and privately owned web domains, and furthermore, I think the process of notifying each of those billions of artists, along with reviewing each one's right for royalties, is gonna be extremely tedious, so tedious that no sane company is going to risk getting bogged down with trying to be equally fair and equally distribute payments to those artists that readily reply, and to those that are still pending. Also, this problem is more complicated because of the increasing number of online and other businesses using those A.I., either open sourced or privately owned and must pay first, that none of those business is incentivized to risk slowing down to bend over for billions of artists if it hurts their race to gain more profit over their company competitors.

   It's a similar dynamic to the vaccine companies racing against Covid 19 like Pfizer and other businesses. There are at least 2 or more possibilities: the company chooses to do the 5-year trial to fully proof the vaccine and know all its side effects or choose to cut corners and save 2 less years to mass produce and mass deliver vaccines to those countries affected by the Covid 19's ridiculous infection rate. If a company does the right thing and keeps conservative, then it can full proof a vaccine in 5 years and is ready to be mass produced, the cost: 5 more years of this virus killing 10 million and infecting 100 million more people, and 5 more years of lockdowns and inflation rates and closed down stores. Or the alternative is rushing the trials, save 2-3 years and get the vaccine mass produced and available ASAP to affected countries willing to receive, the cost: discovering potential side effects along the way, and looking like incompetent fools in the future.

   Damned if you and your group does, and damned if you or your group doesn't. Out of the frying pan, and into the oven. Stuck between a rock and a hard place. Fucked and skewered while getting roasted. I don't know, so many idioms. ?

[Scholar]

10 minutes ago, Danioover9000 said:

@Scholar    The tricky key question that's tough to tackle in that video, is how do those A.I. drawing software companies, if this is true that they are copywriting and stealing images from the open-source internet, how would even one company begin to compensate each artist?

   Roughly speaking, an A.I program that's open source has access to a billion + images on the internet. A BILLION PLUS!! And some of these companies are relatively new to having a business modal and dealing with A.I. drawing programs, where do they get the funds to compensate a billion plus artists?? 

   What Steven Zapata fails to understand, is the magnitude of this problem, that the internet still isn't as democratized as the real-world societies that we live in. There's no central government body on the internet to add or subtract infrastructure for other users and online communities, and compared to real-world human history, the internet does not have regulations and policies at scale to deal with 100,000 and so communities, not just artists, using the program. Most cases it's decentralized and privately owned web domains, and furthermore, I think the process of notifying each of those billions of artists, along with reviewing each one's right for royalties, is gonna be extremely tedious, so tedious that no sane company is going to risk getting bogged down with trying to be equally fair and equally distribute payments to those artists that readily reply, and to those that are still pending. Also, this problem is more complicated because of the increasing number of online and other businesses using those A.I., either open sourced or privately owned and must pay first, that none of those business is incentivized to risk slowing down to bend over for billions of artists if it hurts their race to gain more profit over their company competitors.

   It's a similar dynamic to the vaccine companies racing against Covid 19 like Pfizer and other businesses. There are at least 2 or more possibilities: the company chooses to do the 5-year trial to fully proof the vaccine and know all its side effects or choose to cut corners and save 2 less years to mass produce and mass deliver vaccines to those countries affected by the Covid 19's ridiculous infection rate. If a company does the right thing and keeps conservative, then it can full proof a vaccine in 5 years and is ready to be mass produced, the cost: 5 more years of this virus killing 10 million and infecting 100 million more people, and 5 more years of lockdowns and inflation rates and closed down stores. Or the alternative is rushing the trials, save 2-3 years and get the vaccine mass produced and available ASAP to affected countries willing to receive, the cost: discovering potential side effects along the way, and looking like incompetent fools in the future.

   Damned if you and your group does, and damned if you or your group doesn't. Out of the frying pan, and into the oven. Stuck between a rock and a hard place. Fucked and skewered while getting roasted. I don't know, so many idioms. ?

The argument for this was made in the video. With the music AI this is already the case, because there it is more obvious that the AI is actually stealing certain segments of the copyrighted music. The same is true for the visual AI's, just that you cannot copy right the complexities of shapes and compositions because visual art is more complex than music.

It doesn't really matter whether or not it's going to be difficult, in the end you are stealing copy righted art so you train your models for commercial use.

 

Obviously this is the most profitable way of doing it, if the lawmakers don't stop this madness. The point is that it is unethical, and that the lawmakers ought to be doing something about it, and for that you need public support. The purpose of the video was to make arguments why we should pursuit these ethical issues.

Of course, if you give a corporation the chance to enslave you, they will do it, because they only care about money. But right now it's about making the ethical argument and getting people to agree on it, so that we can strive to create new laws.

[Danioover9000]

@Scholar

18 hours ago, Scholar said:

The argument for this was made in the video. With the music AI this is already the case, because there it is more obvious that the AI is actually stealing certain segments of the copyrighted music. The same is true for the visual AI's, just that you cannot copy right the complexities of shapes and compositions because visual art is more complex than music.

It doesn't really matter whether or not it's going to be difficult, in the end you are stealing copy righted art so you train your models for commercial use.

 

Obviously this is the most profitable way of doing it, if the lawmakers don't stop this madness. The point is that it is unethical, and that the lawmakers ought to be doing something about it, and for that you need public support. The purpose of the video was to make arguments why we should pursuit these ethical issues.

Of course, if you give a corporation the chance to enslave you, they will do it, because they only care about money. But right now it's about making the ethical argument and getting people to agree on it, so that we can strive to create new laws.

   Okay, it's an ethical issue. Let's assume we all unanimously agree with it being unethical, the whole art community and the young generation agrees. Great, so, what are our options going forward with dealing with these corporations using A.I. drawing/music/dancing programs? One possibility is a stronger and bigger government...but most young people don't like a stronger, bigger government, right? Most of the Zoomers to millennials have a anti big brother view, like they're some degree of Libertarian. Yet, we need to actually make the government stronger and let it have more control over the internet, the open sources and enforce regulations against more predatory forms of capitalism of the big companies...but some of those big companies fund parts of the government...and again, even the businesses themselves are incentivized against slowing down and rewarding every single artist using their A.I. programs, while their competition delays that or ignores the royalties for profits, which means the government has to step in more and design policies and regulations that effect the economy, markets and business taxes...but if they tax businesses too much, that puts pressure on local to big businesses to go do business elsewhere outside it's country....

   Assuming we all agree and are ready to take steps, what do those steps look like to you?

[something_else]

19 hours ago, Scholar said:

It doesn't really matter whether or not it's going to be difficult, in the end you are stealing copy righted art so you train your models for commercial use.

Are you stealing copyrighted art if you let it inspire future art that you as a human create?

Should you compensate every artist who’s art you ever looked at because it has influenced your brain and impacted future art that you create? 

Because that’s kind of what’s happening with AI art models

Something to think about

[Danioover9000]

   Also, can we stop and appreciate Steven Zapata's drawing ability? It's quite amazing what he can do with pencils.

[Danioover9000]

@something_else

2 minutes ago, something_else said:

Are you stealing copyrighted art if you let it inspire future art that you as a human create?

Should you compensate every artist who’s art you ever looked at because it has influenced your brain and impacted future art that you create? 

Because that’s kind of what’s happening with AI art models

Something to think about

   If an artist that draws uses many tools, and wants to explore A.I. drawing programs for experimentation, to just try it out for a week, am I potentially stealing a weeks' worth of 100,000s of artworks from 100,000 of artists?

   I think the main issue, is trying to make most businesses incentivized to reward artists over time, because the issue is that there's 10 billion or so images in for example googles database. The question becomes, can anyone business survive long term if they prioritize royalties and refunding those billion plus artists? If they can't survive even 1 year of doing that, the majority of small to large business ain't gonna be doing that. So, how do you encourage them to do that, when it's in their best interest to not reward artists at scale total? Maybe overtime, reward a selection of artists?

   Very deep implication, concerning creativity geniuses, is that a large portion of our art consumption, even we don't give credit to all our sources of inspiration and sources of aspiration. That's largely subconscious, and we only ever do give credit when it's due, when it largely influenced us to go that direction, so that 1 or 10 artists gets the shout out, but the billions of other artists that draw, or do music, or fight, or dance, don't, simply because they were not titillating enough to get me inspired to aspire to that level of mastery and creativity. So, this issue also is a metaphysical, epistemic and existential one especially to human beings. Can we give credit to every single billions of artists?

[DreamScape]

It's still worth doing, you can't draw what's on your mind via robots. even though their art may be better.

[Danioover9000]

@DreamScape

1 hour ago, DreamScape said:

It's still worth doing, you can't draw what's on your mind via robots. even though their art may be better.

   Use or not use A.I. programs? Use more traditional analogue drawing, or digital drawing? For clarification.

[Scholar]

8 hours ago, something_else said:

Are you stealing copyrighted art if you let it inspire future art that you as a human create?

Should you compensate every artist who’s art you ever looked at because it has influenced your brain and impacted future art that you create? 

Because that’s kind of what’s happening with AI art models

Something to think about

Did you watch the video? What AI does and what humans do when creating and getting inspired by art is fundamentally not the same.

The AI's basically take an image and relate certain keywords to the shapes found within that image. When you generate a new image, it will create shapes based on on a seed and other parameters. It will generate a series of images, and at each point of the image it will ask the network of relationships, in relationship to the prompt, what kind of shape is most likely to exist next to the shapes currently existing on the image.

It does not understand what it is drawing, it does not understand composition, anatomy, object relations and so forth. It has no interprative lense, it is not inspired, it is not studying art. It is literally taking the shapes within an image, extracting them into a network of relationships, and using that exact set of information in the process of image generation. Again, all that is happening is that it is looking at the shapes it has created (most likely given the networks of relationships related to certain keywords) and then iterating and saying "What is the most likely shape that I have extracted from the sets of images that would be placed next to all the shapes currently existing on this canvas?".

That's fundamentally different from how humans create or learn from other artists. And in the music industry this is very clear. Because of the lack of complexity, the AI's would commit copy right infringements if they were to train on copy righted music. That's simply because music is less complex, and rhythmical relationship are far easier to note and analyze. Meaning that, with music AI's, it would become very apparent that all the AI does is say "If this were music made by artist X, what is the most likely rhythm that music would have? What is the most likely series of notes that would exist next to this set of notes?". Because individual parts of copy righted music can be copyrighted, unlike with art, you would very quickly infringe on the rights of those artists. Because all the AI does is use those very information it has found in the initial training set, and use that to generate new information that will be the most "most likely result" based on the prompts given.

 

For this process it is not inspired by the initial training set, it is literally using the network of relationships of shapes found within the images it was trained on. So no, it's not what is happening with AI art whatsoever. And making it seem like that is just flawed thinking.

 

Take the example of recently deceased Kim Jung Gi. Here is his artwork:

 

 

 

Here is an image generated by an AI trained on his art:

 

If you look closer at the image, you will notice it completely lacks coherence. That's because it is not actually creating a scene, with people in in a busy market place. It is creating shapes based on training data that are most likely to exist next to other shapes. It doesn't know what a head is, what a line is, what a person is or what a market is. All it does is put down shapes based on a prompt, then put down more shapes that it feels most likely would exist at that point given the information that is related to the initial prompt.

 

 

Fundamentally, the AI cannot create novel information. If you give the AI images of all objects in the universe, other than art, it will never be capable of ending up at where Kim Jung Gi is here. It will never be able to draw a stick figure. Why? Because it does not know what a stick figure is, it does not know what a human is, it does not know what any of the objects are. All it knows is visual relationships correlated to certain keywords, and even that it doesn'T truly know, like a calculator doesn't know what math or numbers are.

This is 40.000 year old art. The AI could never create this if it did not have these shapes in it's training data. It it had photos of all animals, all objects, all it could create is photorealistic images. It would never venture into stylization, because those shapes do not exist in it's training set.

 

There can be no abstraction without understanding. What this means is that the AI cannot ever generate new art that is not a combination of previously existing art. This is not true for humans, because humans do abstract, and humans do have understanding, and because the process of art creation is fundamentally different in humans than in AI's. While a calculator might imitate and be very proficient at math, it is not doing what the human is doing when he is calculating something.

 

If AI was to reign, and somehow develope enough coherence to actually create genuinely coherent art, then it would halt the evolution of art, for the reasons I have mentioned above. If AI art existed before art styles were invented, no art styles would have ever existed. Why would it? People would have never created the art, and put in thousands of hours to create abstractions and idealizations and so forth. What AI art will do, is flood the internet with art which only has human spirit within it because it is imitating the art of people who have human spirit in them.

If you look at the art above, you can see the human spirit not because someone has learned from another artist, but because it was a human who created it. A human who knew what he was creating, a human who could abstract, understand, and then engage in the creation of genuinely novel information.

This is not just because the AI's are not yet ready yet, but because they are not individuated consciousness. In other words, the reasons why the AI cannot create new information is because it's metaphysical limitations. But for that to be discovered scientifically, it might take hundreds if not thousands of years. For as long as that is not the case, we will stumble in the dark, and be imitating forces on nature and deluding ourselves we have surpassed the wisdom of hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

 

Another point would be very easy to make, even if I was wrong about everything above. The difference between an artist getting inspired and creating art is that the artist does not nullify the value of the artist he is studying. I can study Iain Mccaig for my entire life. One, I will never be truly able to create art like Iain Mccaig, I will always have individual biases within my art that I will never get rid of, because I am human. I will never be able to replace the effort Iain Mccaig puts into his art, meaning even if I studied decades to copy Iain Mccaigs style perfectly, I would still have to put in the effort to create the art, therefore not nullifying his life work and his value as an artist. If I was a God, and I could look at all artists and copy their styles effortlessly, then create trillions of images that nobody can compete with, rendering them all homeless, that would be unethical. The only reason why we allow other artists to get "inspired", by each other is because of human limitations, and because the way you study art is fundamentally different from the way AI's do it. You would, of course, know this if you were an artist.

Ever artist that studies the greats of the past and present, cannot help but add his own voice to that art. He is not just taking these images and saying "Oh look, I have these shapes now, what is the most likely shapes next to the shape if this was a drawing by Iain Mccaig?". The fact that people are framing these things as comparable is mindblowing to me, and it shows me that schools have failed in educated people about art, but that is not very surprising to me considering the level of art education I experience myself in school.

An artist will understand the process of other artist, sure they will get inspired, maybe they will try to understand the way certain shapes are expressed, but humans are humans. We cannot help but inject our own voice into what we create. Nobody can become a second Iain Mccaig, because nobody is Iain Mccaig. To be Iain Mccaig, you have to have the genetics and the life path of Iain Mccaig. That's what makes his art what it is. If he had different dispositions, his style would look differently. And with his dispositions he added new, novel information to the world of art. He is not just a mixture of previous art styles. His art contains an imprint of his own unique consciousness, his unique sense of appeal, his unique way of understanding the world, his unique way of learning how to draw and how to try to create the illusion of life, probably even the unique anatomy of his body. All of these are factors, limitations, which create new art that humans can relate to.

Without people like him, these AI's could do nothing but photorealism, because that's all that would exist. Photos of objects.

Edited October 23, 2022 by Scholar

[Leo Gura]

@Danioover9000 God is suing every artist for copyright infringment. Ya'll been stealing from nature since the dawn of time and calling it your own. How shameless of you. How dare you copy God!

Edited October 23, 2022 by Leo Gura

[thepixelmonk]

Some people like to cry on internet message boards about robots.

Real artists are out in the world busy perfecting their craft: 

 

[Hello from Russia]

Such a bad understanding of what art is. Art is not about just technical mastery

[Tyler Robinson]

2 hours ago, Scholar said:

Did you watch the video? What AI does and what humans do when creating and getting inspired by art is fundamentally not the same.

The AI's basically take an image and relate certain keywords to the shapes found within that image. When you generate a new image, it will create shapes based on on a seed and other parameters. It will generate a series of images, and at each point of the image it will ask the network of relationships, in relationship to the prompt, what kind of shape is most likely to exist next to the shapes currently existing on the image.

It does not understand what it is drawing, it does not understand composition, anatomy, object relations and so forth. It has no interprative lense, it is not inspired, it is not studying art. It is literally taking the shapes within an image, extracting them into a network of relationships, and using that exact set of information in the process of image generation. Again, all that is happening is that it is looking at the shapes it has created (most likely given the networks of relationships related to certain keywords) and then iterating and saying "What is the most likely shape that I have extracted from the sets of images that would be placed next to all the shapes currently existing on this canvas?".

That's fundamentally different from how humans create or learn from other artists. And in the music industry this is very clear. Because of the lack of complexity, the AI's would commit copy right infringements if they were to train on copy righted music. That's simply because music is less complex, and rhythmical relationship are far easier to note and analyze. Meaning that, with music AI's, it would become very apparent that all the AI does is say "If this were music made by artist X, what is the most likely rhythm that music would have? What is the most likely series of notes that would exist next to this set of notes?". Because individual parts of copy righted music can be copyrighted, unlike with art, you would very quickly infringe on the rights of those artists. Because all the AI does is use those very information it has found in the initial training set, and use that to generate new information that will be the most "most likely result" based on the prompts given.

 

For this process it is not inspired by the initial training set, it is literally using the network of relationships of shapes found within the images it was trained on. So no, it's not what is happening with AI art whatsoever. And making it seem like that is just flawed thinking.

 

Take the example of recently deceased Kim Jung Gi. Here is his artwork:

 

 

 

Here is an image generated by an AI trained on his art:

 

If you look closer at the image, you will notice it completely lacks coherence. That's because it is not actually creating a scene, with people in in a busy market place. It is creating shapes based on training data that are most likely to exist next to other shapes. It doesn't know what a head is, what a line is, what a person is or what a market is. All it does is put down shapes based on a prompt, then put down more shapes that it feels most likely would exist at that point given the information that is related to the initial prompt.

 

 

Fundamentally, the AI cannot create novel information. If you give the AI images of all objects in the universe, other than art, it will never be capable of ending up at where Kim Jung Gi is here. It will never be able to draw a stick figure. Why? Because it does not know what a stick figure is, it does not know what a human is, it does not know what any of the objects are. All it knows is visual relationships correlated to certain keywords, and even that it doesn'T truly know, like a calculator doesn't know what math or numbers are.

This is 40.000 year old art. The AI could never create this if it did not have these shapes in it's training data. It it had photos of all animals, all objects, all it could create is photorealistic images. It would never venture into stylization, because those shapes do not exist in it's training set.

 

There can be no abstraction without understanding. What this means is that the AI cannot ever generate new art that is not a combination of previously existing art. This is not true for humans, because humans do abstract, and humans do have understanding, and because the process of art creation is fundamentally different in humans than in AI's. While a calculator might imitate and be very proficient at math, it is not doing what the human is doing when he is calculating something.

 

If AI was to reign, and somehow develope enough coherence to actually create genuinely coherent art, then it would halt the evolution of art, for the reasons I have mentioned above. If AI art existed before art styles were invented, no art styles would have ever existed. Why would it? People would have never created the art, and put in thousands of hours to create abstractions and idealizations and so forth. What AI art will do, is flood the internet with art which only has human spirit within it because it is imitating the art of people who have human spirit in them.

If you look at the art above, you can see the human spirit not because someone has learned from another artist, but because it was a human who created it. A human who knew what he was creating, a human who could abstract, understand, and then engage in the creation of genuinely novel information.

This is not just because the AI's are not yet ready yet, but because they are not individuated consciousness. In other words, the reasons why the AI cannot create new information is because it's metaphysical limitations. But for that to be discovered scientifically, it might take hundreds if not thousands of years. For as long as that is not the case, we will stumble in the dark, and be imitating forces on nature and deluding ourselves we have surpassed the wisdom of hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

 

Another point would be very easy to make, even if I was wrong about everything above. The difference between an artist getting inspired and creating art is that the artist does not nullify the value of the artist he is studying. I can study Iain Mccaig for my entire life. One, I will never be truly able to create art like Iain Mccaig, I will always have individual biases within my art that I will never get rid of, because I am human. I will never be able to replace the effort Iain Mccaig puts into his art, meaning even if I studied decades to copy Iain Mccaigs style perfectly, I would still have to put in the effort to create the art, therefore not nullifying his life work and his value as an artist. If I was a God, and I could look at all artists and copy their styles effortlessly, then create trillions of images that nobody can compete with, rendering them all homeless, that would be unethical. The only reason why we allow other artists to get "inspired", by each other is because of human limitations, and because the way you study art is fundamentally different from the way AI's do it. You would, of course, know this if you were an artist.

Ever artist that studies the greats of the past and present, cannot help but add his own voice to that art. He is not just taking these images and saying "Oh look, I have these shapes now, what is the most likely shapes next to the shape if this was a drawing by Iain Mccaig?". The fact that people are framing these things as comparable is mindblowing to me, and it shows me that schools have failed in educated people about art, but that is not very surprising to me considering the level of art education I experience myself in school.

An artist will understand the process of other artist, sure they will get inspired, maybe they will try to understand the way certain shapes are expressed, but humans are humans. We cannot help but inject our own voice into what we create. Nobody can become a second Iain Mccaig, because nobody is Iain Mccaig. To be Iain Mccaig, you have to have the genetics and the life path of Iain Mccaig. That's what makes his art what it is. If he had different dispositions, his style would look differently. And with his dispositions he added new, novel information to the world of art. He is not just a mixture of previous art styles. His art contains an imprint of his own unique consciousness, his unique sense of appeal, his unique way of understanding the world, his unique way of learning how to draw and how to try to create the illusion of life, probably even the unique anatomy of his body. All of these are factors, limitations, which create new art that humans can relate to.

Without people like him, these AI's could do nothing but photorealism, because that's all that would exist. Photos of objects.

Digital media has already ruined art. You have a thousand million digital copies of Mona Lisa in the market. Isn't that copyright issue? AI didn't change things much.. You already had copyright infringement happening since a long time. 

 

[something_else]

13 hours ago, Scholar said:

The AI's basically take an image and relate certain keywords to the shapes found within that image. When you generate a new image, it will create shapes based on on a seed and other parameters. It will generate a series of images, and at each point of the image it will ask the network of relationships, in relationship to the prompt, what kind of shape is most likely to exist next to the shapes currently existing on the image.

It does not understand what it is drawing, it does not understand composition, anatomy, object relations and so forth. It has no interprative lense, it is not inspired, it is not studying art. It is literally taking the shapes within an image, extracting them into a network of relationships, and using that exact set of information in the process of image generation. Again, all that is happening is that it is looking at the shapes it has created (most likely given the networks of relationships related to certain keywords) and then iterating and saying "What is the most likely shape that I have extracted from the sets of images that would be placed next to all the shapes currently existing on this canvas?".

Ehm, sort of. This is a huge simplification. The AI isn't just copying shapes from source material. Neural networks are hierarchal and learn relationships all the way from individual pixels, to lines, to colours, to basic shapes, to complex shapes, and to entire objects and styles. Each layer of the model works at different levels of abstraction, quite similar to how your neurology works.

My profile picture is some AI art actually, and it's a good example. I generated it years and years ago using a deep dream model. On each zoom, it passes the image through deeper and deeper (more and more abstract) layers in the network to generate more abstract imagery. I had to crop and jump frames to fit it under the limit for the site so you miss a lot of the detail. But here's the full thing. You can see how it has learnt representations of things at different levels of abstraction and is not just copying directly from source.

And diffusion models are learning to convert random noise + text prompts into structured images, which means the process is so chaotic and unpredictable that you will get unique results that are composed of lots of distinct patterns of art that the model has learnt. Essentially the model is learning abstract representations/patterns of art which it can mix and match, it's not just learning how to copy shapes.

It's exactly what your brain does. Your brain is an abstraction machine, just like a neural network. Your brain is just far more powerful at abstraction and can source experience from more places at the moment.

It understands composition, anatomy and object relations, just not as well as a human does. Really, the fundamental difference is that a human can integrate emotion and a wider range of experience into the art, which obviously the machine cannot do yet.

But the fundamental issue I was talking about was that of citing, credit and copyright. You as a human have looked at tons of art throughout your life and had tons of unique experiences that influence your art, yet you are not required to cite every single piece of that when you produce a new piece of art. Why should it be different when an AI does it?

Edited October 24, 2022 by something_else

[Danioover9000]

@Leo Gura

13 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

@Danioover9000 God is suing every artist for copyright infringment. Ya'll been stealing from nature since the dawn of time and calling it your own. How shameless of you. How dare you copy God!

   Wait! Why are you picking on me Leo? Did you mean @Scholar instead of me? 

[Leo Gura]

3 minutes ago, Danioover9000 said:

@Leo Gura

   Wait! Why are you picking on me Leo? Did you mean @Scholar instead of me? 

Oops! Yeah, maybe, although aren't you guilty of this kind of logic too?

You are sneaky.

Edited October 24, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Danioover9000]

@something_else

1 hour ago, something_else said:

Ehm, sort of. This is a huge simplification. The AI isn't just copying shapes from source material. Neural networks are hierarchal and learn relationships all the way from individual pixels, to lines, to colours, to basic shapes, to complex shapes, and to entire objects and styles. Each layer of the model works at different levels of abstraction, quite similar to how your neurology works.

My profile picture is some AI art actually, and it's a good example. I generated it years and years ago using a deep dream model. On each zoom, it passes the image through deeper and deeper (more and more abstract) layers in the network to generate more abstract imagery. I had to crop and jump frames to fit it under the limit for the site so you miss a lot of the detail. But here's the full thing. You can see how it has learnt representations of things at different levels of abstraction and is not just copying directly from source.

And diffusion models are learning to convert random noise + text prompts into structured images, which means the process is so chaotic and unpredictable that you will get unique results that are composed of lots of distinct patterns of art that the model has learnt. Essentially the model is learning abstract representations/patterns of art which it can mix and match, it's not just learning how to copy shapes.

It's exactly what your brain does. Your brain is an abstraction machine, just like a neural network. Your brain is just far more powerful at abstraction and can source experience from more places at the moment.

It understands composition, anatomy and object relations, just not as well as a human does. Really, the fundamental difference is that a human can integrate emotion and a wider range of experience into the art, which obviously the machine cannot do yet.

But the fundamental issue I was talking about was that of citing, credit and copyright. You as a human have looked at tons of art throughout your life and had tons of unique experiences that influence your art, yet you are not required to cite every single piece of that when you produce a new piece of art. Why should it be different when an AI does it?

   Because human artists are in the business of communicating divine and spiritual truths, through their drawing. So, of course it is threatening when a robot is trying to take that purpose and take the process away from artists. Arguable, the most enjoyable of artwork is the art working process and the result as well. It's just bad and lazy if robots and A.I. do all human work for us, especially creative processes.

[Danioover9000]

@Leo Gura

1 minute ago, Leo Gura said:

Oops! Yeah, maybe, although aren't you guilty of this kind of logic too?

You are sneaky.

   Well, actually... I am guilty! ? I posted Steven Zapata's video on @Space A.I. is ruining art thread, so @Scholar must have got inspired to make a more concrete thread to build a more convincing case against A.I. use. So, I copied that video for that thread, then @Scholar copied that video to make his thread, and Steven Zapata must have copied those images he's drawing from his memories and imagination. Yeah, the issue of copying and copyright is a deep and convoluted one.