Kickstarter bans AI-generated art enthusiast group "Unstable Diffusion" and refuses to deliver their successfully raised $56k funds

[Kisai]

5 hours ago, Helpful Tech Witch said:

It’s always interesting looking at so art discussions because people have such extreme opinions with the least actual logic

 

Yeah, and to be completely fair, there IS only some very thread-bare legal logic.

 

From "can I use it?", Fair use permits the limited use of materials for research purposes. So designing software and a model, falls under that. But also anything generated by that model is not entitled to copyright protection (and rightfully shouldn't be.) The model is derived through training on materials that may or may not be copyright protected, may not be licensed at all, correctly, or maybe they are licensed. There is no way to tell because the model doesn't actually contain ANY image data. The conditions to re-create the training data is extremely difficult and can only come about from over-fitting something into the weights of the model.

 

I've personally seen how overfitting slowly erodes a model (not an image model, a TTS model) and such is the reason why if you wanted to make a commercial-grade, model, you need to actually curate all the input data to avoid that overfitting, not just remove material you don't want to ever appear, even by accident (such as medical records or CEI.) You could reasonably use plenty of training material, even copyrighted input data, but you have to make sure those keywords attached to that data are correct, and not the only image with those keywords. 

 

From the other end of the argument, Artists wish everyone would ask permission, but what they really mean is "they will never give permission." This is a very frequent, common, problem with people who do work-for-hire artwork. Outside the United States, countries like Canada, Japan and Australia have "moral rights" that basically destroys any "fair use" consideration. Now Canada and Australia tend to align with the United States when it comes to Fair Use, but it is still a possible thing that these countries can go to Google and say "stop using my images, it's a violation of my moral rights" because they simply resized it. What's the first step that the AI training does? It resizes the image to 512x512 because that's the biggest thing that can be trained on a conventional GPU. To actually create render a 512x512 image? 8GB.

 

Oh and don't think that you can just tell stable diffusion to create a 1024x1024 image and get a higher definition version of the input prompt. No, what happens is it creates a new 1024x1024 image that looks like garbage with the same color palette of the 512x512 one. So "AI Upscaling" is what's done to actually get a larger image, and that's a separate AI image processing thing altogether. Without the AI actually being trained on 1024x1024 images, it can not actually produce one. It will extrapolate (not "inpainting", not "AI rescaling") it into basically a 512x512 image and then if you've ever seen what a fractal looks like, well that's pretty much what I've seen Stable diffusion spit out when prompted to do anything other size.

 

Since copyright can not be given to a "prompt"'d AI, because it doesn't actually compose anything. It's not eligible for copyright. It should remain so until an AI actually develops something that better resembles a "minds eye" and can compose a scene like a human. Which it can't presently do because it doesn't understand what is actually in the image.

 

Which I have to state, every time. The AI is not "intelligent", it's essentially doing the same thing "auto-complete" does on your phone or web browser. Just with a much bigger database. Text, ASR, TTS, OpenCV, AI Art Generation, GPT,  it's all about "guessing based on the language model". Sometimes you can have a really good model that works really well with one domain of knowledge, and then it extremely underperforms in another.

 

A lot of the problems with people not understanding AI come down to not knowing when they are using it in the first place. Thus they do not know the limitations, and we're back to the entire problem of people believing the AI can replace them, when that may only be true in a very, very, very specific instances where it had been trained to replace them, specifically. No general purpose AI art generator is going to result in jobs lost. Not even concept artist jobs. If some big corpo decides they are going to fire all their marketing staff and replace it with an AI that generates all their marketing materials, they're going to be in for a very rude awakening when they fail to even get the AI to recognize, let alone use, their own logos and pantone colors.

 

How do you protect yourself from "the AI art generator bogeyman"

 

- Don't make or upload art without a license stipulation that it's not to be incorporated in any database, index, or otherwise, regardless if it's online or offline. That means it shall not appear in Google Images, or stock photo systems, either.

- Don't put artwork on "art websites" to get jobs. Only put fluff artwork on art sites that represent the variety of styles you can draw, and you would not get mad if someone shared it to facebook a million times. Don't use them as extensive portfolio sites. Use your own site for that, and make sure it's your own server, and not shared with other people who might undermine your work.

- Do use watermarks, especially across faces, hands and chest areas on humanoid characters. Sure, AI's may be able to recognize watermarks to exclude it, but they may also learn to erase watermarks. So that means you need to not be lazy as well, and make sure watermarks are unique per image.

- Don't put source-quality artwork on Twitter. Ever. AI aside, people routinely steal things straight off twitter and then post them on Fiverr to scam people and then have the balls to post their fiverr listings to twitter with those images. AI only muddies this up, because someone can theoretically take a WIP posted to twitter/youtube/twitch/picarto/etc let an AI finish the image before the artist can, and then try to claim the original artist is a scammer (which has happened at more than once, cause people suck sometimes. Neither of these are the first example I've seen either.)

- Always record timelapses of your work. Especially if you're pitching something. Because we're at a state now where people will "absolutely not deal with AI generated art", and if your WIP's don't show the progression from nothing to something, then they will pass over you for someone who can.

 

Where is AI art potentially useful and legally not dubious?

- scratch artwork, as I alluded to in an earlier post here. Basically a bunch of "replace-me" assets that you use as a stand-in while you work on other parts of the project.

- disposable artwork, this can apply to Animation, visual novels, video games in general, and even in the background of things like animation, comics, movies and film where it's just set decoration and not actually meant to be seen up close. If you just need something in that 32-pixel space that you're not that picky about. I'm sure AI generated trees in a forest, aren't more interesting than photos of them.

 

And to address the "tracing / plagiarism" argument again. Do you know how many artists I've seen endorse "Tracing to learn" and then make the argument the AI can not do the same? Sorry, but that IS exactly the same thing. The AI will never learn how to interpret, and neither does a human if all they do is trace other peoples work. And again, I have seen people and corporations try to pass off plagiarized artwork, including companies like Disney on commercial merchandise. It's not just counterfeit merchandise from east asia. You should stop tracing peoples artwork when you turn 13, and actually practice. An AI can not do this, because it lacks the ability to "think/imagine".  If you ask it to produce something that it has a very narrow reference library for, it will likely produce the same image with very little variation each time. 

 

If you ask a human who has never seen X subject, they will produce what they imagine X to be. If you ask an AI, it will produce whatever has been tagged as X, or garbage. There is no creation going on. And someone who traces artwork can not do that either.

[12345678]

the irony is that they are sponsoring it while trying to prevent it

 

art wasn't never a good market anyway. about all the copyright system and whatever they are mostly bullshit, designed to protect bigger industries, if something has a market it will be copied anyway 

 

[LAwLz]

5 minutes ago, 12345678 said:

designed to protect bigger industries

This is what worries me about the anti-AI movement.

They seem to be pushing for the idea that an art style should be protected and not allowed to be copied. The issue with that is that if their style is protected from being copied, then so should all the big companies as well.

If I am not allowed to study their art style and create images that resembles it, then they shouldn't be allowed to for example study Disney's art style and create images in that style.

 

All of a sudden we have opened up for even more corporate control of the art world.

All privileges and rights an individual artist tries to get, will also be given to massive corporations like Disney. 

[12345678]

23 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

This is what worries me about the anti-AI movement.

They seem to be pushing for the idea that an art style should be protected and not allowed to be copied. The issue with that is that if their style is protected from being copied, then so should all the big companies as well.

If I am not allowed to study their art style and create images that resembles it, then they shouldn't be allowed to for example study Disney's art style and create images in that style.

 

All of a sudden we have opened up for even more corporate control of the art world.

All privileges and rights an individual artist tries to get, will also be given to massive corporations like Disney. 

you might be right, although that's the daily basis, bigger industries don't usually "innovate" unless there's some pressure to do so, usually they just clone stuff that has marketshare and make their daddy lawmakers make laws to prevent competition; you don't get big long lasting industries without any extra help, and they are known to go hand to hand with any lawmaker 

 

as I see right now it's mostly industries/elites who are trying to make a buck over tools that might damage their marketshare, because let's be honest, art wasn't never an honeypot market, there are really few people that do profit from it, usually thanks to networking

 

if I need to predict what will happen is either:

economical support

a lobby like the medicine/architecture industry but for artist, so there are less licensed artists in the market that can operate legally 

fewer industries being able to use generative tools over "safety" reasons 

 

[Avocado Diaboli]

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

This is what worries me about the anti-AI movement.

They seem to be pushing for the idea that an art style should be protected and not allowed to be copied. The issue with that is that if their style is protected from being copied, then so should all the big companies as well.

If I am not allowed to study their art style and create images that resembles it, then they shouldn't be allowed to for example study Disney's art style and create images in that style.

 

All of a sudden we have opened up for even more corporate control of the art world.

All privileges and rights an individual artist tries to get, will also be given to massive corporations like Disney. 

I recently saw this YouTube short that perfectly illustrates this point:

 

 

To be honest, I see a the worry surrounding the current AI tools around art and especially coding with a lot of amusement. Making art or writing code has been becoming easier and easier as times has gone on, thanks to technological advancements. And many of those same technological advancements have made tons of industrial sectors redundant, and especially people on the coding side have had this smug attitude about it whenever their progress has made entire sectors of the industry redundant. The implicit verbiage has been "why don't you learn coding? You can make 200 grand a year like me and make other people redundant", all while living in the belief that they will never be made redundant.

 

This is similar to a lot of criticism of AI art, the focus that it isn't creative, it doesn't make anything new. That's also true for 90% of artists, they make what's familiar. The truly visionary people who progress art movements in the future will still do so, they'll find new ways to express themselves, new styles to explore. And they'll be using AI tools for that as well. Any person that tells you AI art isn't a valid tool in the creative process has no idea how the creative process even works. And that stuff will feed the future AI models too, just as much as a reference book from some painter or a song book by a band or composer you've been stealing getting your inspiration from.

[Kinda Bottlenecked]

3 hours ago, LAwLz said:

If I am not allowed to study their art style and create images that resembles it, then they shouldn't be allowed to for example study Disney's art style and create images in that style.

 

You, the living person are allowed to study the style. Where the gatekeeping starts is that if you want to call yourself an artist. The "studying" is to be done by you and only you. Not anyone else and not an AI. That is the consensus I mostly see in the paradigm of Art.

[12345678]

11 minutes ago, Kinda Bottlenecked said:

 

You, the living person are allowed to study the style. Where the gatekeeping starts is that if you want to call yourself an artist. The "studying" is to be done by you and only you. Not anyone else and not an AI. That is the consensus I mostly see in the paradigm of Art.

the problem that I see is the mole of stuff that it can output in one time, whereas paid artists are slower

 

although finding the right keywords and outputs it's a process that's slow as fuck, you're better off drawing it from 0 if you have something specific in mind

the output even if it's close what are you looking for is shit

unless you do use specific models that are trained (again slow as fuck) you don't get good outputs, but the downside is that you're limited to that style

 

I could be wrong but that was my short experience with ai tools

 

[Kinda Bottlenecked]

11 minutes ago, 12345678 said:

the problem that I see is the mole of stuff that it can output in one time, whereas paid artists are slower

 

although finding the right keywords and outputs it's a process that's slow as fuck, you're better off drawing it from 0 if you have something specific in mind

the output even if it's close what are you looking for is shit

unless you do use specific models that are trained (again slow as fuck) you don't get good outputs, but the downside is that you're limited to that style

 

I could be wrong but that was my short experience with ai tools

 

 

What's missing is the amount of time that the artist took to get to the point that they have enough experience and skills to produce a piece that is of quality. Which is years upon years of studying and creating. 

 

Relative to the amount of time it took for the average ai user to create a piece, it actually is tiny compared to traditional artists.

[LAwLz]

41 minutes ago, Kinda Bottlenecked said:

You, the living person are allowed to study the style.

Why should only humans be allowed to study and copy others, and why shouldn't computers be allowed to do the same thing?

And who wrote that law/rule? I get that that might be what artists want, but that might not be the outcome if they try and push for rules or legislation.

I don't really see a logical reason for allowing humans to do something but not machines.

 

 

46 minutes ago, Kinda Bottlenecked said:

Where the gatekeeping starts is that if you want to call yourself an artist.

To me, someone using an AI image generator is as much of an artist as for example a photographer or music producer (who does things digitally).

It's not any less an "artist", but it's not the same say category of "artist" as someone who draws. Hell, I'd say someone who does vector graphics is not the same type of artist as someone drawing on paper either. 

 

There are a lot of definitions of what art and artists are. Personally, and judging by most dictionaries, an artist is someone who creates art. And definitions of "art" are usually a variant of "creating something that expresses an idea or thought".

I think a person who creates images through AI programs fits the definition of an "artist" if we go by those definitions. They have an idea or thought they want to express, they use a tool to create something that matches that idea, and they can present it to others. An artist making art.

I couldn't find any definitions of "art" or "artist" that included things like "you have to have spent X number of hours on it", "you're not allowed to use certain tools", or anything of the sort when looking up definitions.

[NumLock21]

3 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Why should only humans be allowed to study and copy others, and why shouldn't computers be allowed to do the same thing?

And who wrote that law/rule? I get that that might be what artists want, but that might not be the outcome if they try and push for rules or legislation.

I don't really see a logical reason for allowing humans to do something but not machines.

Machines can learn, it's called Machine Learning.

Artist can take inspiration from other artist and add their own style into the mix, and it'll be their own work. The problem with these people that have no artistic abilities what's so ever are taking the easy route by typing a few keyboards into an AI art generator based on works from actual artist, since that's how AI learns by feeding them images, and then wanting to use that to make a quick profit.

 

Some related tweet to this AI art

 

[Kinda Bottlenecked]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

Why should only humans be allowed to study and copy others, and why shouldn't computers be allowed to do the same thing?

And who wrote that law/rule? I get that that might be what artists want, but that might not be the outcome if they try and push for rules or legislation.

I don't really see a logical reason for allowing humans to do something but not machines.

 

There is no law that dictates who/what studies anything. But it is universally understood that one should not be lazy. You as the producer should study the material and have knowledge about what you produce.

 

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

To me, someone using an AI image generator is as much of an artist as for example a photographer or music producer (who does things digitally).

It's not any less an "artist", but it's not the same say category of "artist" as someone who draws. Hell, I'd say someone who does vector graphics is not the same type of artist as someone drawing on paper either. 

 

There are a lot of definitions of what art and artists are. Personally, and judging by most dictionaries, an artist is someone who creates art. And definitions of "art" are usually a variant of "creating something that expresses an idea or thought".

I think a person who creates images through AI programs fits the definition of an "artist" if we go by those definitions. They have an idea or thought they want to express, they use a tool to create something that matches that idea, and they can present it to others. An artist making art.

I couldn't find any definitions of "art" or "artist" that included things like "you have to have spent X number of hours on it", "you're not allowed to use certain tools", or anything of the sort when looking up definitions.

 

It is surprising that you would consider that. There are many broad terms for creatives. Artist, designers photographers and what not. One thing that they have in common is that they acquire knowledge on their specific fields. 

 

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

To me, someone using an AI image generator

 

The keyword here is using. Yes you can argue that everyone is a user of the respective software but the biggest difference is the knowledge to assemble something from those tools.

 

What's flawed in this logic is that someone exclusively using ChatGPT to write codes will be considered a programmer without acquiring basic programming concepts. 

 

I as both a programmer and an artist do not wish to cheapen either of them. Banning AI is unnecessary but it will be important to have a definition of someone who practices in the field and someone who is a user.

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, Kinda Bottlenecked said:

 

I as both a programmer and an artist do not wish to cheapen either of them. Banning AI is unnecessary but it will be important to have a definition of someone who practices in the field and someone who is a user.

 

What needs to happen is proper labeling. From both the AI learning side, and the output side of all visual, audio, textual, and data works. If you fail to label something that is generated by machine learning as being "generated from X model, rendered by Y software" then you're just being dishonest.

 

A lot of my present experience involves TTS ML, but it's the same damn thing. The model itself is pure GIGO (Garbage-In, Garbage-out), if you produce a software that uses a specific model to generate visual or audio works, and then try to claim you made it yourself. You will be called out on it. 

 

Present visual artwork generators have some very trademark mistakes, such as the inability to draw hands, which is a direct result of hand poses not being labeled in the input data, thus the ML training is learning that there are these shapes that appear in all these humanoid images, but it doesn't have much of an idea of what they should look like.

 

As I once mentioned on twitter. You and I may disagree on what breed of dog, a dog is, but we both agree it's a dog and not a cat. The AI can not even do this. It only knows "dog" from visual data that has been tagged dog.

This is all tagged "dog" A significant amount of them are Golden Retrievers, and a not insignificant amount of them aren't even dogs. A good third of them are meme's. This is, for what it's worth, the garbage that Stable Diffusion and Dall-E learns on.

 

"AI Art Generator"'s will never be good without starting from a good database of "correctness" 

 

Just like TTS and ASR AI's will never be good just learning from 19th century public domain texts. You do need some data that isn't pubic-domain due to copyright expiry in order for the AI to know anything about the last 200 years. Especially since audio recordings haven't existed before 1948 in any significant way. Only books and paintings that are currently in museums have existed in this state.

 

No color photos have existed before 1935 either. Which again goes back to the problem of "consent". Artists certainly don't ask for consent to reference other works, and when they go too far, only then do they get in trouble for it. There is an entire sub-section of artwork that is whole-cloth created, and that is still heavily using known symbols in artwork. Likewise there are plenty of artists who are using 3D models they yoinked off Sketchfab as references, or even tracing over those models in their 2D works.

 

And yet they have the gall to say the AI is not permitted to do the same. The AI can do it, faster, cheaper, but without the understanding of why, and without the necessary knowledge to compose a scene or composite the image. That's the human's job.

 

 

[mr moose]

21 hours ago, Kisai said:

Consider there are no "funds" here, everything was refunded.

 

Kinda besides the point, seeking damages or satisfaction from an event require that damage be done,  Even if kickstarter refund all the money there is nothing stopping CR owners from suing kickstarter or UD and there is nothing stopping unstable diffusion suing kickstarter.    Not that I deem either to be likely given the situation, but people were throwing around fair use as if it is an excuse or green light.  I was merely pointing out that it is a defense.

[Kinda Bottlenecked]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

No color photos have existed before 1935 either. Which again goes back to the problem of "consent". Artists certainly don't ask for consent to reference other works, and when they go too far, only then do they get in trouble for it. There is an entire sub-section of artwork that is whole-cloth created, and that is still heavily using known symbols in artwork. Likewise there are plenty of artists who are using 3D models they yoinked off Sketchfab as references, or even tracing over those models in their 2D works.

 

This would be a false equivalence since the common consensuses is that artists are highly liberal with "permissions" should another artist like themselves wish to reference or study from. Tracing over from one medium to another is usually seen as transformative.  All of what you have listed are how the artist studies. Unlike the AI user, there is no study and no research. There is no understanding of what composes a piece of artwork.  

 

The same thing happens when you use code from stack. Will you seek the permission of every single author of the code before using them? Of course not, because we simply don't require that. 

 

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

And yet they have the gall to say the AI is not permitted to do the same. The AI can do it, faster, cheaper, but without the understanding of why, and without the necessary knowledge to compose a scene or composite the image. That's the human's job.

 

The AI is not permitted to do that because artists are not permitted too. Bad actors are regularly called out for tracing art below acceptable levels and the community has become self regulating in that way. There is a certain level of threshold that you need to cross. 

 

You have to admit that the datasets that are scrapped from the internet are on a scale that is beyond human. And this factor is why AI should be held to higher standards which I am sure most agree with. 

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

 

No color photos have existed before 1935 either.

 

 

https://allthatsinteresting.com/first-color-photos

 

Yes they did, even patented processes for it.

[Avocado Diaboli]

12 hours ago, Kinda Bottlenecked said:

What's missing is the amount of time that the artist took to get to the point that they have enough experience and skills to produce a piece that is of quality. Which is years upon years of studying and creating. 

 

Relative to the amount of time it took for the average ai user to create a piece, it actually is tiny compared to traditional artists.

8 hours ago, Kinda Bottlenecked said:

I as both a programmer and an artist do not wish to cheapen either of them. Banning AI is unnecessary but it will be important to have a definition of someone who practices in the field and someone who is a user.

So? As I mentioned before, plenty of stuff has been becoming easier through technological advances. Are you less of an artist or programmer because you profit from that? Can you even call yourself a programmer and artist if you didn't start out with the most primitive ways of creating, if you didn't take the most laborious route to being creative? Did you ever program by punch card? Have you ground up bugs and plants to mix your own pigments to paint? Is someone using a DAW to make music less of an artist than someone investing thousands of hours learning to play the instruments themselves? Is a photographer less of an artist than a painter? Is a Python programmer less of a programmer than someone coding in assembly? Why this gatekeeping?

 

And I say this as someone who has been making music for over 20 years and writing it for over 10 years. As someone who has been creative in visual media from photography to digital 2D art to 3D modelling to video production. As someone who can rightfully say to be a very amateurish programmer. 

 

To me these attempts to draw a line in the sand are futile. And they always become very revealing when people have to admit that they drew the line right next to the spot where they get to claim to be a true Scotsman.

[LAwLz]

9 hours ago, NumLock21 said:

Machines can learn, it's called Machine Learning.

Artist can take inspiration from other artist and add their own style into the mix, and it'll be their own work. The problem with these people that have no artistic abilities what's so ever are taking the easy route by typing a few keyboards into an AI art generator based on works from actual artist,

9 hours ago, Kinda Bottlenecked said:

There is no law that dictates who/what studies anything. But it is universally understood that one should not be lazy. You as the producer should study the material and have knowledge about what you produce.

Do I understand you both correctly that you make the distinction because of the amount of work required to create said piece?

In other words, you value an image more if someone had to practice their craft for 10 years before they could achieve something compared to if they didn't need to practice more than 1 hour. Correct? 

[NumLock21]

30 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Do I understand you both correctly that you make the distinction because of the amount of work required to create said piece?

In other words, you value an image more if someone had to practice their craft for 10 years before they could achieve something compared to if they didn't need to practice more than 1 hour. Correct? 

It seems you’re not getting the point of what it means to be an artist. It doesn’t matter how long that artist took to draw that artwork or how many years of art experience they have under their belt, it’s about actually picking up a tool and to start drawing with your own hands on a blank canvas, not to type a few keywords and have “someone or something else” do it for you.

 

To make it easier for you to comprehend, I value an artwork of stick figures that took a minute, drew by a kid with their own hands on a piece of paper, be it a physical or digital drawing, then some person who just type in some keyword and have an AI draw for them. If you drew a squiggly line on your own then I’ll say you are an artist, compared to someone who didn’t and uses AI to do it for them.

[Avocado Diaboli]

6 minutes ago, NumLock21 said:

It seems you’re not getting the point of what it means to be an artist. It doesn’t matter how long that artist took to draw that artwork or how many years of art experience they have under their belt, it’s about actually picking up a tool and to start drawing with your own hands on a blank canvas, not to type a few keywords and have “someone or something else” do it for you.

 

To make it easier for you to comprehend, I value an artwork of stick figures that took a minute, drew by a kid with their own hands on a piece of paper, be it a physical or digital drawing, then some person who just type in some keyword and have an AI draw for them. If you drew a squiggly line on your own then I’ll say you are an artist, compared to someone who didn’t and uses AI to do it for them.

But why is one creative action more valuable than another one? The spark of creativity of writing a prompt for an AI is still an impetus that drove the generation of the work. Me telling ChatGPT to write me a text adventure made that text adventure a reality. The AI didn't do anything it wasn't told to do. I was the person with the idea behind making it a reality. Me telling Stable Diffusion to create an image of Sonic in the style of Beksinksi was just as much of a creative decision as painting it myself. You seem to value skill more than creativity. That's all well and good, but then you need to admit that writing a prompt for an AI that returns a pleasing result is also a skill in and of itself.

[Gamer Schnitzel]

The EU needs to put a ban on all this disgusting furry porn and animated trash. It literally is aimed primarily at children. Steam is filled with groups where underage people share this. It also fucks up their brain so hard that they become absolutely incompetent and can no longer be a part of society. Go one step further and exclude anyone under 16 from the internet. If it keeps going this way the system will literally just crash when all the current boomers retire and there is barely anyone with a brain to take their jobs.

[LAwLz]

5 minutes ago, NumLock21 said:

It seems you’re not getting the point of what it means to be an artist. It doesn’t matter how long that artist took to draw that artwork or how many years of art experience they have under their belt, it’s about actually picking up a tool and to start drawing with your own hands on a blank canvas, not to type a few keywords and have “someone or something else” do it for you.

 

To make it easier for you to comprehend, I value an artwork of stick figures that took a minute, drew by a kid with their own hands on a piece of paper, be it a physical or digital drawing, then some person who just type in some keyword and have an AI draw for them. If you drew a squiggly line on your own then I’ll say you are an artist, compared to someone who didn’t and uses AI to do it for them.

First of all, I don't like your condescending tone. You saying things like "I'll make it easier for you to comprehend" makes your comment come off as very smug. Maybe that's not your intention, but that's the way I interpret it.

 

Okay, so we both agree that it doesn't matter how long something takes to create or learn in order to be "an artist". That's good. You can become an artist in an hour, or you can become it over the course of many years. You agree with that, correct?

 

 

What I don't get is where exactly you draw the line between an artist and a "non-artist". If you think a child spending 5 minutes drawing a stick figure in a software program is art, why do you not think someone spending hours tweaking input prompts in an AI program to create an image that fits their vision is art? Is it about how much of the work is done automatically that is important to you?

[Kinda Bottlenecked]

56 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Do I understand you both correctly that you make the distinction because of the amount of work required to create said piece?

In other words, you value an image more if someone had to practice their craft for 10 years before they could achieve something compared to if they didn't need to practice more than 1 hour. Correct? 

 

That is incorrect. Time isn't the requirement. Time however is a good measure of what you have done to study said field. I value the work of an artist who practiced for one year the same as someone who took 10. What is universal between them is that both took the time and effort to study the medium.

 

As I said previously, you would not consider me a programmer if I exclusively used ChatGPT to generate codes without bothering to learn any coding principles or the language. The reality is you cannot have it the lazy way. 

 

1 hour ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

So? As I mentioned before, plenty of stuff has been becoming easier through technological advances. Are you less of an artist or programmer because you profit from that? Can you even call yourself a programmer and artist if you didn't start out with the most primitive ways of creating, if you didn't take the most laborious route to being creative? Did you ever program by punch card? Have you ground up bugs and plants to mix your own pigments to paint? Is someone using a DAW to make music less of an artist than someone investing thousands of hours learning to play the instruments themselves? Is a photographer less of an artist than a painter? Is a Python programmer less of a programmer than someone coding in assembly? Why this gatekeeping?

 

And I say this as someone who has been making music for over 20 years and writing it for over 10 years. As someone who has been creative in visual media from photography to digital 2D art to 3D modelling to video production. As someone who can rightfully say to be a very amateurish programmer. 

 

To me these attempts to draw a line in the sand are futile. And they always become very revealing when people have to admit that they drew the line right next to the spot where they get to claim to be a true Scotsman.

 

You should not attempt to misrepresent my arguments by changing what I'm standing for. Yes tools will make learning things easier. However I am not arguing that we have to gatekeep and protect traditional dogma. What I am saying is that we should define clearly what is and is not. 

 

If we were to follow your logic, I too am a music producer because AI can write scores for me. 

 

3 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

I don't consider you a programmer unless you write out the ones and zeroes yourself. You didn't bother learning machine language or how a processor physically works. You made it easy for yourself with layers upon layers of abstraction. You are lazy and not a programmer. Prove me wrong.

 

Although this is meant to be condescending and an attempt to rouse an argument. You'll see that we are in agreement here since you do not consider me a programmer if I can't write in binary. Which is where I'm coming form. The same way I do not count ai users as artists or producers or programmers is the same way it is in reality.

 

If I were to commission you produce a track for me because I do not possess the knowledge to do so. Does suddenly make me a music producer too? Of course not. In this exchange I am the commissioner or the one who asks. You are the producer not purely because you can carve a primitive instrument from stone or play analogue instruments. It is because you have the knowledge to produce music. 

 

Replace you with the AI and you have the same situation.

 

36 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

What I don't get is where exactly you draw the line between an artist and a "non-artist". If you think a child spending 5 minutes drawing a stick figure in a software program is art, why do you not think someone spending hours tweaking input prompts in an AI program to create an image that fits their vision is art? Is it about how much of the work is done automatically that is important to you?

 

It is the same way one is not an artist because they can assemble and organize reference images in pureref but because they know the concepts and principle of what makes a good composition. The AI user has become a patron of the AI service the same way a commissioner patronizes an artist for an art piece. 

 

Before anyone else takes this the wrong way, I am once again not arguing to ban AI but to impose standards and define what is and is not. That way we can move forth with AI existing in society.

[Avocado Diaboli]

5 minutes ago, Kinda Bottlenecked said:

As I said previously, you would not consider me a programmer if I exclusively used ChatGPT to generate codes without bothering to learn any coding principles or the language. The reality is you cannot have it the lazy way. 

I don't consider you a programmer unless you write out the ones and zeroes yourself. You didn't bother learning machine language or how a processor physically works. You made it easy for yourself with layers upon layers of abstraction. You are lazy and not a programmer. Prove me wrong.

[LAwLz]

52 minutes ago, Kinda Bottlenecked said:

That is incorrect. Time isn't the requirement. Time however is a good measure of what you have done to study said field. I value the work of an artist who practiced for one year the same as someone who took 10. What is universal between them is that both took the time and effort to study the medium.

I am just trying to see if I understand your stance correctly. So what matters to you is that someone studied the field, not how long they studied it. Correct? It doesn't matter how much time they put in, just the fact that they put some time into it.

 

How would you value a really good photography if it was taken by a child who had never touched a camera before? Let's also say it was done on a smartphone with everything set to auto (including the AI pre- and post-processing). They might never have studied the field, but because of the processing happening on the phone and the guidelines presented (for example some smartphones gives indications of how you should hold it, and how to frame things) they still manages to produce really good pictures.

Do you not value their pictures because you don't think they studied the field enough?

 

What if you saw a fantastic picture but didn't know how it was made? Would you think less of it if you later discovered that it was made by an person who never studied the field? 

 

 

To me, it sounds like you value the process more than the end result. I think that's fine if that's how you feel, but I don't like the tone you seem to have that your interpretation of artist is the only true one, when you draw seemingly arbitrary and curvy lines to include everything you like but exclusive everything you don't like.

 

 

I as a (hobby) photographer would be handicapped if I didn't have the modern tools available to me. I would be very confused and lost if someone handed me a Daguerreotype camera. Not only would I not understand how to operate the camera, even if I managed to somehow take a picture I wouldn't have any clue on how to develop the plate afterwards. I 100% depend on a computer such as the DSP interacting with the CMOS for me, interpreting the values it spits out, running the debayering algorithm, maybe running some anisotropic diffusion function on it, and so on. I could probably set some values manually such as white balance, but even then I would have to rely on software to actually control it for me. I can give simple instructions to the camera what I want but actually carrying those instructions out would be completely out of my control.

Without tens of computers involved in the image processing chain of a modern day camera, I would be completely lost, and so would 99,9% of photographers. Are those photographers not artists because they rely on computers, algorithms and other software to carry out the tasks the photographer asks the computer to carry out for them? It is theoretically possible to do the math required to do all those tasks using pen and paper, but I don't think anyone actually knows how to do it.

[NumLock21]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

First of all, I don't like your condescending tone. You saying things like "I'll make it easier for you to comprehend" makes your comment come off as very smug. Maybe that's not your intention, but that's the way I interpret it.

 

Okay, so we both agree that it doesn't matter how long something takes to create or learn in order to be "an artist". That's good. You can become an artist in an hour, or you can become it over the course of many years. You agree with that, correct?

 

 

What I don't get is where exactly you draw the line between an artist and a "non-artist". If you think a child spending 5 minutes drawing a stick figure in a software program is art, why do you not think someone spending hours tweaking input prompts in an AI program to create an image that fits their vision is art? Is it about how much of the work is done automatically that is important to you?

For me to come out as smug, that was not my intention, sorry about that.

 

I draw the line between an artist and non-artist is by the amount of time they put into the work manually, filters in programs don't count. If you drew in Photoshop and used filters like motion blur, emboss, brighten up your image, etc, then you are still an artist because you actually took your time, skills, and creative mind to draw that picture, it's okay to use tools to aid in your artwork. An non artist is a person who doesn't even try and just uses some tool to do everything automatically for them. This also applies to everything else out in the field.. If you use AI to do the things you want and not bother learning it yourself, then you're not a professional in that specific field, you just took the lazy way out.

This doesn't mean AI is bad, it has its place. Let's say a person wants to decorate their room with some cool art work, they have an idea in their mind, but they're not artistic enough to bring their thoughts out into the real world, then it's fine for them to use AI to help them with that.