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!
Oh look, it’s Mira Murati!
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.
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.
That guy was a fucking asshole and horrible person.
But yeah he draw good; let him lead.
I only take artistic advice from perfect humans myself
If the AI isn’t stealing content, then piracy isn’t stealing either.
AI doesn’t steal art. It creates new and unique images, it just uses existing art as inspiration… Like what real artist do.
This is a deliberate misunderstanding I have seen repeatedly. They don’t mean the AI stole art. They mean the training data used to train the ai stole art and is now being used to lever artists out of the workforce because it’s cheaper.
The online scrapers just add whatever can be publicly viewed to their datasets. I fail to see how this is any different from actual artists going on the internet to view art to inspire and influence them. Regardless, what exactly do these artists demand? They can’t fight technology and win, this is a futile battle that has been fought and lost many times before. AI art isn’t going anywhere, it’s here to stay and it’ll only get better. No amount of anti-AI posts is going to change this. What exactly is the ultimate goal here?
There was a lot of stuff that could be publicly viewed that was still under copyright or similar. We spent a good 20 years having artists developed and distribute portfolios online to be marketable to firms. And now the firms have essentially taken their work for free, used it in a way that there aren’t really any protections against legally speaking, without any warning, and monetized the models to make money. All while cutting those same artists out of jobs because the LLM is cheaper.
The ultimate goal is you don’t take something someone made without their knowledge, use it to make profit for you and then tell me to get rekt when I want what I should be entitled to.
These artists aren’t a monolith. Most of them aren’t even unionised. This tech had a varied history but to most of the public this tech is like a year old. They want protections. They want to continue in the career path they made sacrifices to follow. They want a lot of things but the point is regulation would be a good start.
What is the ultimate goal of Generative AI? Because I don’t see a way forward where it’s unregulated use will be beneficial with no detriments to the people upon whose work it was built.
When you start getting into the specifics, it becomes way more complicated. How exactly should these AI companies notify people that their content is being used for their model? First of all, they’re not actually the ones harvesting the data. That scrapers tend to be independent… so these artists are going after the wrong people, unless you expect the AI company to parse through all the data they use to find the rightful owners of everything and ask for their consent, which isn’t really viable, let alone practical. Let’s suppose the artists do go after the scrapers, how exactly do they notify people that their content is being used? The content is collected by an algorithm, how are they supposed to reliably identify the rightful owners of content and ask for their consent? Do they just send automatic messages to any email or phone number they find?
How about this, what if an artist is posting their art on a platform, like say for example Reddit, and that platform agrees to allow the data to scraped and used for AI data training? Does the platform company own the data on the platform or the individual artist? If it is the latter, what’s stopping platforms from modifying their TOS to just claim ownership of anything posted on their platforms? Again, what is the ultimate goal here?
The point is that while I agree that AI has to be regulated, the criticisms and proposed regulations have to specific and pragmatic for them to mean anything. This general hatred of AI and whining by artists and other groups is just noise. It’s just people trying to fight against technology, and as history has shown us before, they will inevitably lose. New technologies have always threatened and displaced well established workers, careers, and industries. For example, lamp lighting used to an actual job, but as the technology improved and light bulbs became a thing, lamplighters became a thing of the past. They tried very hard to resist the change and managed to do so for awhile, but it was a losing battle and they eventually faded away. Economics and technology always win.
That’s kind of the key here, these generative AI’s are the light bulbs of our era. They’ve already replaced a bunch of jobs and radically changing entire industries. There’s no ultimate goal with them and there’s no fighting them. Pandora’s box is open and it’s not going to close. This new technology is still at it’s infancy now, but it’s going to rapidly expand, evolve, and adapt to a bunch of different situations. Whle regulations can help guide this freight train of a technology in the right direction, they can’t stop something with no brakes. As it gets adopted by more and more people and used in more and more spaces, it’s going to alter how we do things kind of like how smartphones or social media did. We have no choice but to evolve with them or else we’ll become the new lamplighters.
Receiving stolen property is still a crime. You can’t hire an independent contractor to draw you Disney characters and use the IP to make money. That’s still illegal.
@atrielienz @SleezyDizasta my opinion is if I, as an artist, can look at publicly posted content and use that to inform my own unique work then why shouldn’t an AI be able to? If I try to sell a drawing of bugs bunny, then WB can sue me, but I can sell as many bugs bunny inspired rabbit drawings as I want. That should be the rule for an algorithm too.
But that’s not what these generative AIs do. They use actual content for training, but all generations are unique… Just like actual art
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.
Exactly, rules restricting training data are the only way the rich can stop open source models benefitting us all so it’s kinda suspicious there’s a grass roots movement pushing for it…
db0 take
Yes
So don’t strengthen IP laws. Strengthen labor and antitrust laws.
Say: “You can’t use someone’s own creative work to compete against them in the same market”
Creators get a modicum of protection. The power-grab by the ultra-rich faces a major setback. FOSS models keep on truckin.
Say: “You can’t use someone’s own creative work to compete against them in the same market”
So just IP laws then? Also would this not literally ban learning
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.
I really hope more people start believing this. Our current copyright system has been abused and bought by the rich and screws over both consumers and small artists, but “copyright of any form is terrible” is harmful to artists too.
I don’t care if it’s harmful to artists. “Artist” is not a real job, it’s something you nepo-babies can do in your free time outside of cooking McRibs or mining Lithium like the rest of working class folks.
I’ve never paid for digital content and I ain’t about to start.
This is a joke. It has to be.
“Didn’t you know the proletariat is supposed to be miserable?”
Artists aren’t proletariat if their job is “artist”.
IP protections don’t protect anyone but the rich in any form, Disney have been caught selling T-shirts with art outright stolen from small artists online buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo and their only punishment was that they had to stop, no admission of liability and they got to keep all the money they made. Hell the guy who invented the underlying concept behind the TV never saw a penny because a radio company decided that it was their invention and managed to drag it out in courts until the patent expired.
Except when they do protect creators.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell_v._Home_Depot_USA,_Inc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns#Intermittent_wipers
Often times, when an artist get caught with plagiarism, the publisher drops them before it even go to court. After all, why would the publisher pay an “artist” who’s not really drawing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarnate_(comics)
Who exactly are you talking about with the TV patent? Farnsworth had the patent for the CRT TV and I don’t remember ever hearing about a dispute over it. Also, dragging the court battle until the patent expires doesn’t mean the offending company wouldn’t still be on the hook for past violations. Something about this story doesn’t add up.
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.
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.
dirtbag
“hooray convenience, fuck your livelihood.”
“hooray convenience, fuck your livelihood.”
This is literally how everyone behaved when bank tellers were replaced by ATMs, when coal diggers were replaced by drills, when daily laborers were replaced by tractors, when Morse code operators were replaced by the telephone, when travel agents were replaced by websites, when warehouses and factories started delivering you your Amazon package in 1 day instead of 5 because they replaced humans with machines…
And now that technology is coming for artists instead of all the other jobs it replaced so far, now you wanna go back to the way things were?
Get with the times. I don’t wish this situation upon anyone, it’s devastating to see your profession reduced to a few clicks, but it’s silly to say “nah, THIS change is crossing the line”. Hundreds of millions of people before you lost their job to new tech. Let me know when you hire a town crier instead of whipping out your phone and searching for the news, and I’ll hire you for a painting instead of getting AI to apply some paint-like filters on a photo. Until then, I’m sorry but your job is in the process of being rendered obsolete, like so many others before it.
Thing is, without art to train on Gen AI is useless. So it steals training data, from artists. Then it steals work from the same artists by using the stolen data.
Tell me, where will the new training data come from when artists are not publishing because they aren’t getting work?
If you use Gen AI, it is obvious and makes you look like a no-tallent hack, and a grifter.
Who said this is where I draw the line? My job isn’t under threat from AI until it can actually reason, which an LLM will never achieve. Or at least, we’d better hope not because professorGPT is just a confident moron at the moment. That’s not how the foundational technology works. It may be able to amalgamate something convincing enough to pass for people who don’t care, but it will never understand art. Hell, it can barely produce usable code and that is with the tremendous benefit of defined syntax, which art does not have.
Drills didn’t have to steal the expertise of diggers to operate, and the diggers became the drillers because they knew where to dig and how to not die in the process. Telephones didn’t immediately cut out skilled labor and many became switchboard operators. Day laborers are still hired every day? Do you even understand how dumb your argument is?
Gen AI has nothing without being fed source material, if that material is not being paid for or in the public domain, it is just plain theft. Any other argument you want to make is going to have to reconcile with that fundamental problem first. Until then all you’re doing is advocating for the wealthy to own everything because you get to say “but it’s convenient, fuck the consequences.”
Also the irony of championing AI in a solarpunk community of all places. The current model is as bad as it could be through the lens of solarpunk ideology.
As a blogger
You realize you’re next on the AI chopping block, right?
I think that day has long since passed. Blogs don’t show up on search results anymore unless you’re amazing and lucky, which I’m not. Meh. :-)
Most are crap ad mills anyways trying to game SEO Only interesting ones I’ve read in the past couple years are technical deep dives where the creators don’t even care to put ads on it.
You’re absolutely right, which is why Orcrist here shouldn’t be encouraging the use of AI.
Yes, generative AI is snake oil, but that is a question of scope and power and speculation, not utility of easy to create pictures.
“Sure, AI can’t fully replace human artists, but that’s just because the technology hasn’t advanced far enough yet.”
Haven’t seen a penny arcade comics in like 15 years. Gotta say, the art style has suffered. Tycho looks like he has hydrocephaly
I feel like I could cut glass with his chins. I stopped reading ages ago as well, so when I found myself back on their site for some reason, it was pretty shocking.
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.
I stopped reading this comic back in the mid 00s because they didn’t read the Wikipedia editing guidelines, and they got scolded when they edited things incorrectly, so they tried turning their audience into getting revenge on Wikipedia somehow.
Simmer down Ted Kazynski, AI is good and actually helps the poor and hurts the rich that’s why megacorps like the RIAA want to ban it. Open source non profit models run locally that trvialize violating IP and remove gatekeeping from the art industry is the closest thung to socialism we’ll ever see.
Call me an optimist but I think the closest thing to socialism we’ll ever see is socialism, not a cool new app.
Yeah the art community hated desktop publishing too. People who spent decades working with moveable type were made obsolete.
The problem is not that creativity is easier, the problem is our industrialist masters are all too eager to replace us from the artist to the driver to the lawyer to the task laborer to the engineer.
This isn’t a new problem. The reason Disney only does CGI and live action movies now is because the cell animators unionized.
It’s not the technology. It’s the system that lets you die for the grace of profit-minded industrialists.
With the US on the brink of autocratic rule, it’s really time to take seriously the notion of communist revolution.
IMHO what makes it more appealing now than 20 years ago is the bonkers inequality. We could do a really bad job at socialism and still be better off than we are today. We’re just flushing trillions of dollars worth of value down the toilet on pointless nonsense that only like 100 people want.
So during the Great Depression (about a century ago) the industrialists were totally happy, and Hoover was on board with them. The people were seriously thinking about doing that thing Lenin was trying over in the Soviet Union, because really anything was better than eating flour paste and living in cardboard and stacked paint cans.
According to Behind the Bastards in their two parter How The Rich Ate Christianity, FDR’s New Deal was in order to give capitalism another chance since it really was doing the people wrong, and Hoover and his industrialist pals really hated it.
(Christianity at the time was also on team-pinko, except they believed it was the responsibility of wealth and industry to just be relentlessly charitable, so at the time the industrialists had no allies in the Church. The current right wing guns-and-money Christian Nationalism is the product of a decades long propaganda campaign to turn the faith into a pro-wealth, pro-capitalism ideology. And the Catholic Church and Protestant ministries alike bought into it.)
App? Is that really how you lot see tech? Apps on a phone spoonfed you by a corporation? No wonder you fucking hate it lol I would too, it’s just sad. I don’t use apps or corporate products as I can, that’s why I like GenAI, it’s pure expression of the socialist politics of open source software.
No, just the impression I got from what you said. Emphasis on the socialism, not on the computer program.
We practice it where we can. Right now IRL is bust, but the internet has been a bustling hive of communal activity for the betterment of all humanity, open source GenAI included.
Tax all AI companies to fund UBI.
If we had representation…
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.
Tax all
AIcompanies to fund UBI.FTFY
Andrew Yang should’ve been president
“Ummm then we’re not an AI company”
Land Value Taxes are better for this in literally every way.
You’re right. Don’t tax entities that have massive sales but work out of a small office, like an AI powered company might
/s
I like my idea because it will discourage greedy wasteful destructive nonsense and at least get something for public benefit.
Unlike extraction enterprises.
Money is what they listen to and worship. That’s where it hurts.
If we want to address all of those, then we’ll need higher pollution taxes too. Going after just one abstract category of greed will just encourage them to bullshit it into another category.
We’ve needed those for decades, it needs to be very expensive.
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.
Link to the full Penny Arcade comic: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2024/07/01/jobophage
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 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
You’ll have an easier time unionizing programmers
Ye I’ve been since the start until some months ago in the Italian chapter of tech workers coalition because of this :P
I wish I had an idea to start fixing this
I do have ideas but the thing is that almost no one can fully save other people. Like the unionizing thing: we tried to unionize from outside but just doesn’t work if people inside don’t hammer everyday. We can think about cooperative models but even if we start a coop people will have to jump in your ship they can’t just keep the comfort of the status quo
It’s hard but my protip is that everyone should first acknowledge every kind of own power in their own life. Then think how to use it. For example I don’t have much but I happen to have some rural land. I’ll probably make a community space out of it but first I need to ensure myself some other basic survival power lol (basically, I want to go back to studying to then have a useful job for the society I envision)
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.
Sounds like if you want to be able to actually protect yourself from potential infringement, you’re going to require your artists to record themselves creating the art the entire process. And that video itself would be part of your defense
Now that sounds dystopian as fuck. Because at scale this will involve human workers being tracked all the time and limited in their freedom. Ironically an AI might be used to track what workers do in such a scenario.
Having them send over the project file (like PSD file) without having flattened any of the layers probably is enough.
Is this what Penny Arcade looks like nowadays? Man I really dislike the shift in art style…Tycho looks grotesque
