I’m rambling but I think generative AI is NFTs. It’s just the next dumb thing that a subset of tech companies hype up and desperately try to squeeze shareholder value out of. The line must go up. Everything must be a disruptive technology that’ll revolutionize whatever so the stock price sees a bump. It’s why every fucking thing is jamming AI into it now because it’s the current magic stock price increase hack. The whole “we need regulation to prevent AI from becoming too smart and killing us all” is straight up sci-fi bullshit and a smokescreen doing double duty of distracting lawmakers from creating meaningful legislation for the actual harms of AI right now while simultaneously enforcing the idea that we’re on the cusp of SkyNet.
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I agree there’s 100% a bubble, I agree most free online tools are on somebody else’s dime and eventually that’ll slow down or stop altogether, I agree there’s not nearly as much money in this as lots of people think there is. We do not differ on this.
I just don’t think that makes the art bad. First of all, even with existing current technology, here already exist very nice pieces of art that can be created locally on a gaming computer or something, the artist I follow most closely runs Stable Diffusion fully locally. Second of all, “scale it up” isn’t the only way AI art can get better, and is not at all what I was thinking of here in terms of improvement. AI’s already capable of creating very high-fidelity images, the issue isn’t that it “doesn’t know what things look like”, the issue is that it’s hard to get exactly what you want.
And that can be solved with, like, first of all people getting better at using the tech, that’s free and takes no computing power - there’s real skill and trickery involved in getting What You Want and those skills will proliferate over time. People are already good at using the tech, they’re just not what you’re seeing on your feeds or hwat have you. And the second is tools that allow for more finer control that make it easier to Get What You Want. I talked about the Krita AI Diffusion tools above - those allow for fine control and run locally.
Like, digital art got much better on average over time because people got much better at using the art programs. The computers that run them also got higher-power, but I’d bet people are making better original MS Paint art than they did years and years ago because people know the tech well, y’know?
I think a major point of difference here is that… like… I also agree that AI-as-pitched-by-AI-companies is stupid and I don’t give a shit about it. I just also see a different thing, AI-as-used-by-the-independent-artists-I-follow, which doesn’t have all this… concept baggage that you give it. Me liking reachartwork’s art doesn’t mean I think OpenAI isn’t going to fucking crash and burn. She’s doing something different.
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I agree that there’s a similar hype bubble phenomenon I just think that there is a useful product at the core that’s being inflated intensely by people who want to make money, or are stupid. And I think you’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
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what if we’ve all been hallucinating generative ai
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god i hope so
it would be a funny heresy if i didn’t think the whole brain in a vat argument was fucking stupid. and this is just from the same cloth. who cares if the world is a mass hallucination, it affects literally nothing about how we should act
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it doesn’t matter whether or not the plane of reality i operate in is the “realest,” it’s the realest reality that i’ll ever have access to. it might as well be real
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Yes because there’s an original sin situation with the training data that cannot be rectified without also making most of these tools significantly worse. Spiderverse artists used AI they trained on their own artwork. A disabled person does not have license to use something built on artwork used in a way the artist did not agree to. Stealing a car may lower someone’s barrier to entry for car ownership, but it does not make it okay to steal the car. Yes there’s a lot more nuance here, but that’s ultimately my position on it. Whether or not what can produced using these tools is art is a separate conversation (and I would assume the answer is “yes” given the right context).
I have different definitions of stealing than you do
And also there exist fully public domain models that are perfectly fine
You can unknowingly create a derivative work or reproduce a near perfect copy of an existing work. That’s a pretty big issue.
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This is too personal-philosophical shit for us to have a super productive discussion on I think. But my opinion is this can just happen with normal art too, in the human brain
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Isn’t all human art also imitations of existing works created by prior knowledge of something already in existence?
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i agree dear may may (i love u btw 
) do u remember my funny post about my excel sheet of my fol friends not liking my posts enough and 3 strikes for in-person consultation? wasnt my fault 
But like it doesn’t matter, because public domain models exist, as far as I am aware all of the art that reachartwork makes is based off of fully public-domain models (for example the sort of… almost medieval-style art that she does so much of is, well first of all it’s a personal style choice, second of all it’s just easier to make because lots of old-ass art is in the public domain) and it is good art! It is very nice art!
(gore warning for the link)
These are the most recent images on her blog that are appropriate to post here
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Unintentionally is somewhat difficult because of how precisely you’d have to remember without any significance subjective interpretation and somehow forget the original work existed, but sure.
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Like you can agree or disagree on what’s Beautiful but the model is certainly not incompetent for being fully public-domain (again this is off of her own claims which I cannot myself prove)
Also Adobe Firefly exists and is trained off of only images Adobe has the rights to.
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Aren’t our brains just incredibly complex computers anyway? I mean, the only difference I can see is that humans create their art from a larger variety of sources than artifical intelligence.
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Fully licensed content. The points about AI being “poisoned by hte original sin” of copyright infringement just, like, don’t hold up to the existence of these models. And, for the most part, nobody ever revises their stance to be “actually, only copyright-infringing AI is poisoned”
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I agree with this but I also don’t think it’s an argument that convinces anybody who doesn’t already agree
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