As an artist, I think it is a net negative for us. Disregarding the copyright issue, I think it’s also consolidating power into large corporations, going to kill learning fundamental skills (rip next generation of artists), and turn the profession into a low skill minimum wage job. Artists that spent years learning and perfecting their skills will be worth nothing and I think it’s a pretty depressing future for us. Anways thoughts?
I just keep wishing cryptobros would quit fucking up the things I have interests in. I love the idea of generative art, and was excitedly chatting with my partner over a music video someone had done that their GAN uncannily nailed the vibe of the song it was ‘videographing’-- and then they started telling me about how linked to crypto it’s become, how artists are using it to fake commissions(?!), how these networks are built on massive caches of stolen art and photographs-- and just like robotics, my interest in it deflated and I felt like I’d lost something else to these libertarian leeches.
I don’t see AI art as being fundamentally different from other forms of art. In particular, I would liken it to photography where the artists guides the AI to produce scenes that they find to be aesthetically pleasing or to convey some idea they want to share. If we consider photography to be art, then I don’t see why AI generated art would be any different.
AI assistance can also save artists a lot of time. For example, you can already make a rough sketch of something and have the AI fill in the details for you. I see this as evolution of tools like Photoshop which save a lot of time producing different effects that were labour intensive to create previously.
I would argue that art predominantly lies in what the artist is trying to convey, as opposed to the technical skill itself. From that perspective, I think that AI assisted art lowers the barrier for people to convey their ideas. I see that as a net positive.
Regarding the question of jobs, I think that’s entirely a problem with the capitalist system. A lot of artists toil to produce things like advertisements, which are completely soulless and I generally would not consider to be actual art.
I was leaning towards being opposed to AI art, but you’ve convinced me the other way.
I imagine the same debates that happened twenty years ago will come round again, on whether digital art is really art. I’d say so. It seems much more obviously art than something AI generated, but there will be fine art buffs who reject it.
And before then, there would have been a debate on natural or artificial pigments or the virtues of rabbit skin glue over a synthetic alternative, and so on.
The employment thing is the problem, rather than the technology. But that’s not new. It’s even a meme to be a starving artist.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to finish this cave drawing.
PS There’s a good podcast episode on art history. RevLeftRadio,I think. Could be Proles of the Roundtable. Spoiler to hide sensitive description:
spoiler
The episode talks about a pigment made by crushing Egyptian mummies. The damn Europeans had no fucking respect.
I think it’s interesting. Certainly as someone with no artistic talent who role-plays and often needs references for settings, items, characters it stands to potentially make my life a lot easier for that.
I agree with what China is doing, namely that all AI generated visual works should require mandatory watermarking built into the process doing it. It shouldn’t be some big ugly thing that distracts from the work, quite the contrary I believe it should be tiny and unobtrusive or even invisible to the naked eye but I believe we should protect the efforts of human artists by allowing people to identify what is and isn’t AI generated visual imagery.
The watermarking is also essential for combating disinformation which even if the whole western world were to fall tomorrow and socialism established worldwide by 2030 would still be an issue from lingering reactionaries for many many decades.
I do agree that it is like industrialization in what it will do to certain professions. People still hire tailors to create special pieces, you just need a lot of money to afford that, some minimum wage person had little hope of hiring a personal tailor for custom pieces before or after the fact but now has access to affordable clothing. It will be the same with art. Sucks if you’re an artist but the automobile and steam engine sucked for those whose profession was stabling and shoeing horses too, yet we can’t hold back progress. People will still commission artistic works, it’ll just revert to being very skilled artists and very wealthy people.
There is going to be an adjustment period. What we need is not to ban AI art but to adopt socialism. A society that reaches communism or even the high stage of socialism will not need fear from this. No artist will starve because computers can generate art and there will likely if anything be a resurgence of moderate and low skilled people creating art as a creative endeavor in newly found free time once exploitation has ended. Oh people will still use computer generated art for their DnD games or this and that but with so much free time and unlocking of human potential, no one is going to ask a computer to paint the ceiling of a great new building of the people or a train station, they’ll have local artists do so.
Capitalists are not about to allow banning of a cost-cutting measure any more than they would have allowed banning the steam engine or mechanical factories to save the jobs of workers. They’re just not. So what we need once again is a new economic mode, we need socialism. That will harmonize everything. Until then, things continue to decay, conditions get worse for workers, all workers. And all we can do is try to have solidarity with and support one another. But not to go around acting like luddites, that if we smash the machines we can change things. This course is set, it has been done, it will continue to be done. All we can do is push for regulation under this situation and of course push for socialism.
Sucks if you’re an artist but the automobile and steam engine sucked for those whose profession was stabling and shoeing horses too, yet we can’t hold back progress. People will still commission artistic works, it’ll just revert to being very skilled artists and very wealthy people.
Can’t believe I’m reading this take on a communist website. If you’re arguing from a capitalists’ standpoint, then there’s the counterpoint that the existing art generators are full of copyrighted artwork taken without the authors’ permission, and so they should be deemed illegal (this would be true under socialism as well tbf). Then further generators would only be allowed to use either public domain or properly licensed artwork as its training set, which will inevitably lower the variety and quality of the outputs (sorry programmers).
From a communist standpoint we should stand in solidarity with the artists whose livelihoods are being put in risk and oppose unethical AI art.
Capitalists are not about to allow banning of a cost-cutting measure any more than they would have allowed banning the steam engine or mechanical factories to save the jobs of workers. They’re just not.
This is fundamentally different because the generators were fed basically every artwork on the internet, no matter if they were copyrighted or not, in order to make the thing work. They should have never been able to become public services, much less PAID services, and should have been restricted to academic circles as proofs-of-concept, due to the blatant and massive copyright infringement taking place. This is allowed to go on because artists are usually poor and have no individual leverage, but say, if tomorrow an AI movie generator was released that was fed every Hollywood movie ever and could output a Marvel-quality blockbuster with just a prompt and enough time, believe me, shit would be sued to destruction in days.
Artists should be collectivizing right now and preparing a lawsuit against those operating AI art generators fed on their copyrighted artwork. So yes, the proverbial machine can be smashed in this case, if only because it infringes copyright law in such a massive way.
Copyright is bad actually and should be abolished. It constrains creative potential and is a relic that has been weaponized under late capitalism to an extreme end. Intellectual property is disgusting nonsense.
Why should a genius invention that derives from an earlier idea entitle the holder of the earlier idea to all the money or most of it? Why should someone who sits on something they filed be able to demand someone who comes up with a practical use for it pays them money?
And why should someone’s kids or estate or some company be able to hold the rights to someone’s art and charge royalties for decades after their death?
We should have publicly funded research universities and laboratories that should churn out ideas for all to use and take in whatever direction they’d like.
I agree the capitalists are ignoring their own rules to plunder and create a machine for creating money without (as much) labor but they’ve never really been strict about following their own rules and it’s kind of an odd move to whine that they’re dishonest and not following the capitalist IP theory and rulebook.
Artists should be collectivizing right now and preparing a lawsuit against those operating AI art generators fed on their copyrighted artwork. So yes, the proverbial machine can be smashed in this case, if only because it infringes copyright law in such a massive way.
You think you can use the master’s tools to tear down his house while he just stands idly by and shrugs? It’s possible they could win a short-term victory but you are using the bourgeois legal system under the bourgeois government. But only if the bourgeois think they can use it exploit the proletariat further, to impoverish and hurt most people. If need be they could arrange very cheap licensing or hire artists to feed the machine, you’d at most set them back a bit. They can after all draw from many public domain artworks from dead artists, from artwork done by corporate artists under contract, and so on and so forth. Consider the manga artist who creates for some publication. They license all their work to them and that corporation can form an agreement to sell access for fractions of a cent per drawing to AI generators, perhaps in the hope of replacing their artists someday or perhaps just for some quick cash.
And it’s an odd legal argument you need make in service of it too. Can artists sue other artists who as art students studied their art for techniques which they copied? That’s what the AI company lawyers will say. Because the AI is doing something similar though a bit more direct. You can’t point to an exact lifting from a given work so much as broad learning from styles, trends, and themes and re-using them.
But all of art for all of human history has been taking from others, their themes, themes in nature, inspirations, idols looked up to. Which is why I find this idea dangerous. If the art was available for public viewing, is an artist who looks through deviant-art profiles and learns a style from them and then opens their own store a thief as well? Why not?
I’d almost fear more a ruling in the favor of the artists to prevail against that argument, a nightmarish dystopia where you’re fined or billed for your eyes wandering to a copyrighted work that you haven’t subscribed to a plan to view. A total monetization of all art, ideas, etc to an extreme draconian degree.
There’s no difference between a human looking at a piece of art or an AI doing it. I’m a human, and the art I create is influenced by art I’ve seen. It took Gundam to show me the beauty in cargo lifts.
There is a difference. You’re a human, not a machine. Don’t compare yourself to one. We artists don’t compare ourselves to them, either. But you’re right in that, to a layperson, AI art seems to evoke the same emotions as human art. But you know why that is? Because AI art is also human art, just remixed by a machine. The problem is that the machine can’t tell you its sources because either the programmers didn’t care about coding in credits and only took copyrighted artwork in bulk as raw material, or it’s very hard for the neural network algorithm to tell you how it came up with an output.
On the topic of inspiration, we as artists love it when other artists are influenced by us. “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” as they say. If another artist likes us they’re also a fan. That’s great. But we’re not fond of an AI pretending to be us in front of non-artists, because 1. it’s just a program that took our art (without permission) from its database because it was tagged as appropriate, and 2. it doesn’t even give us credit. I mean, as far as we know, the programmers who coded the AI didn’t even take one look at our art, they just mass downloaded whole websites and our art came along with them. We don’t like that.
Edit: Whoever downvoted me, at least refute my points.
I think it’s a typical case of automation, just in the field which was not even imagined to be possible by most people. If anything, it should be a impulse for artists to realize they are not some bourgeoisie freelancers or whatever, not safe from capitalism, but the proletarians they always were.
In particular, I think the problem is not the technology itself(it rarely is; in my opinion, it is always the application of the technology), in the same sense that advances in automation of production are. The problem is capitalism - under capitalism, automation causes people to lose their jobs and thus their livelihoods, and under socialism, automation decreases the amount of work humans must do and instead leaves them able to explore other hobbies that are not tied to their livelihoods.
There are certainly actual applications of AI art technology that are interesting and/or could be useful, and I think turning it into just a question of “AI art good/bad” is not a particularly insightful question and one that does not really get to the root of the problems with AI art.
Yes of course, in socialism art was heavily supported by state - in such situation AI wouldn’t be problematic at all, it would be just making art more accessible to masses who lack talent, persistence and free time for it.
Actually, it will do exactly the same in capitalism, most probably even more since capitalism is gating art anyway, but also with more casualties along the way.
This is similar to what I understand. Artists used to think they were this royalty of society, one of the courtiers of kings or whatever, and when kingdoms ceased to exist, they started to think they all can become Picassos with ruling as capitalist class. Nope, this is the reality.
