That’s not very nice.
If photography is art, so is AI image generation. If one can see something in the natural world they had no part in creating, and get an idea, a spark of creativity, and then choose a camera, choose the angle, choose the framing, set the configurable aspects of the camera such as shutter speed, exposure time, what type of film, what lens to put on, and produce a photograph, perhaps several, perhaps even a dozen attempts to get it just right, and the final result can be placed in a gallery alongside paintings and sculptures and Jackson Pollocks without a single modern art snob batting an eye, how then is that any different from someone with the same spark of creativity tuning a prompt for a model they’ve become deeply familiar with, seeking to bring the inspiration in their mind’s eye into the real world where others can see and experience it too?
I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but it bears repeating for those who haven’t - photography was not initially considered a form of art. But photographers didn’t seem to care too much, and neither did the layperson, so here we are again, having the same old argument about another new art form made possible through a technology that invokes Clarke’s law.
Yeah the reason I joined this instance was because I thought there was supposed to be less hot air bullshit like this. I think people got this hateful take already when it was shoved down everyone’s throats everywhere for a couple of years now when it’s not even relevant to the discussion. That horse has been flogged all the back to Hades and back a hundred-fold already.
edit: typo
People falsely conflating fiddling with prompts with being an artist are clowns I agree but I think AI has a legitimate place as a secondary part of an artistic process. I remember the uproar about autotune in music but in reality it’s often used much as a guitarist might use an effects pedal, there’s nothing wrong with transforming art you created yourself with AI I think as long as you’re upfront about what you’re doing and not trying to pass off skills you don’t have. I think the dodgy parts are people being dishonest about what they’re doing artistically and of course using models built from training sets of questionably licensed IP such as in the case of DeviantArt.
Just to be an irritating pedant (I work in this space, not AI art but on a software team making heavy use of our proprietary AI toolset) the scraping of people’s art only happened once when these models were created to begin with. When they generate images from a prompt they’re not accessing a perfect database of people’s artwork rather it’s more like each artwork that’s part of the training set influences the shape of an enormous mountain by a tiny shovel’s worth of rock and the prompt throws a ball down it in a given direction once the mountain has finished being shaped by billions of tiny digs; the output is the path that ball takes. That’s why the vast majority of AI art kind of looks like arse; it’s like trying to learn music by listening to an entire orchestra at once rather than each instrument individually. The AI knows nothing of the intermediate steps in creating a piece so it can only try and imitate the finished original.
I think the solution is to train AI art models only using public domain licensed artwork and perhaps Creative Commons themselves writing a license that specifically excludes scraping for AI models for artists who wish to publish under a CC licence but object to AI art models for whatever reason.
Religious people are gullible? Wow, you don’t say.
That fucking thing is not even Baphomet
That was my immediate reaction as well, thank you. Most of the generated images aren’t even significantly Luciferian in appearance such that they should be mistaken as such. These people are primed to hate anything that looks remotely evil to them. Zomg a figure with horns! 😱
There’s a part of me that always wonders what would happen if some folks dressed in black cult-like robes would hold a public prayer in front of a school/kindergarten in order for the children to be welcomed into Satan’s warm embrace.
Technically it’d be legal, right? Freedom of speech + freed of religion, ez pz.
But I think a lot of people would flip their shit and I gotta say, from an outsider’s perspective, that would be pretty fucking funny to watch.
Iirc, the Satanic Temple has done some things like that, usually in reaction to a specific equivalent act by an evangelical organization. They don’t do it often, I don’t think, because the backlash can end up being more harmful to the cause, but you’re not the first to suggest it.
I saw a post the other day saying our boomer like trait will be not being able to recognise AI generated content.
Our kids are going to think we’re idiots.
“The blinks are too regular dad, geez!”
The amusing part is that we can’t even guess (accurately) what the actual tell will be. Somehow I don’t think the time gap between blinks is going to be it. I’m betting it’s going to be slang-based. There’s a reason kids use slang readily, and it’s often to separate the worlds of adult regulators and the ‘more free’ children/teenagers. Imagine AI trying to keep up with the slang, but just like adults, it will be unable to use it in the same way with all the pseudo-information packed into it.
