AI art and AI chat

It probably hasn't escaped anyone that AI art bots have rapidly become better and better lately, to the point of it being difficult to tell what is AI generated and what is made by real people in many cases.

At the same time, we hear about chat bots that can conjure texts that sometimes look better than what many people could produce themselves.

Amazing, right?

But there are big criticisms and problems that might become more serious. For example, the art bots were trained on existing art without permission from the human artists. And now, the progress is starting to hinder the normal work of real artists, who might feel hopeless about skills they practiced for years and the hours they spend on an artpiece being matched by robots in seconds (except for fingers, bots can't do hands right...). Even if one likes the idea of AI art and can see good uses for it, there is no doubt that the business and monetization of it currently has ethical issues.

So, how do you feel about AIs becoming "smarter and smarter" so rapidly, and what are your thoughts on their uses in art / text / both? Discuss! Keep in mind to be respectful.


(the icon art is a masterpiece drawn by yours truly btw, 100% original non-AI)

So the chat stuff is whatever - to me the only big issue I've seen right now is I believe there have been some uses for coding that have been a little problematic? Otherwise it very much feels like it won't ever properly replicate or better something that we would produce with the same level of cohesion.

The AI art side of things however, has really proven to be quite an issue. Artists are suddenly finding themselves out of more and more sources of commission, because as much as most of the currently generated art actually does have a fair few flaws in it if you scrutinise it, it's 'good enough' for people to be using for a wide range of things. One example I saw recently was actually an author using AI-generated art for their latest book, instantly removing the commission from whatever artist would've produced it.

I'd love for there to be something in place to try and curb this issue, because the idea of AI-generated art and stuff is really such a cool one, however my biggest worry is that soon everything in media is going to be replaced with these AI-generated pieces of art and in theory, the AI is probably going to just keep going to a point where it just generates the same thing over and over?

TLDR; cool to see tech has got to this point, but we need to pull in the reins a little before it gets too out of hand.

it saddens me that ai art is becoming an issue even at conventions, where real artists are getting booted from having a table in favor of people selling ai art

My current avatar is actually AI-generated by a simple prompt. I'm amazed at what art generators like Midjourney are capable of (the official gallery is just incredible). I mainly use it for inspiration purposes, like prompting story ideas, since the spontaneity is great for that. However, while it's been nice to see my visions materialise this way (albeit imperfectly), I'm disheartened that it's taking away from the hard work of real artists. Even for myself, I feel this sense of defeat in terms of my digital art, because even if I eventually become as good as the AI, I can't compete with the spontaneous, wacky creativity, which I think is the AI's most appealing point. It's just so much easier to type in a prompt and generate all the images you could want, right when you want them.

Many people who pour their lives into art, who make a living from it, will be increasingly side-lined for this reason. "Why pay this artist good money and wait around for results when a $15 subscription gets me whatever I need in a flash?" Also, it's very addictive.

Another thing that worries me is people using AI to generate art and then claiming that as their own, after touching it up a bit. How would anyone be able to tell? I've already witnessed several people confessing to this. It bothers me a lot. And like Riki mentioned, the AI is sourcing from existing artwork without permission (if you add something like "Pixiv" in your prompt, this really shows).

In that sense I suppose it's hypocritical of me to brandish AI art in avatars and such. What do people think regarding the ethics of this kind of thing?

There are definitely concerning things about AI and how it is trained/used. Github had this "pilot" thing that was trained on repositories stored on site. The problem: repositories have different licenses that need to be taken into account. But an AI doesn't care about that stuff, it only looks at the code and copies coding practices and the likes.

DeviantArt at some point introduced an interface that allowed AIs to scan images on the site. They also introduced an option that excludes images from being scanned. The problem: not only do you need to set the option manually for every image you uploaded to dA. It is also turned off by default. So, if people want to protect their art from these AIs, they need to manually go through their (sometimes hundreds of) old images and set the option.

At work earlier this week, a colleague of mine showed me an interaction he had with Chat GPT. It basically started with the prompt that he wanted to organize a meeting to discuss architectural stuff (we're programmers).

And then he told it to rephrase the paragraph so it was in third person.

And then he told it to add that this meeting is important and they shouldn't delay.

And then he told it to emphasize why this meeting is important and why they shouldn't delay it.

I emphasized the 'why' in that last prompt because the result was gob-smacking. He never gave it a prompt to use for importance, why the meeting was important, but the AI generated something specific yet abstract enough that it fit the prompt perfectly and looked very well articulated, just like an email that a software engineer would send to their colleagues to discuss architectural design.

In terms of AI-generated art, it actually came up with another colleague shortly after this. He was of the mind that it was a good thing, and honestly made some pretty bad arguments at why it was good ("why would you hand-wash clothes if you have a washing machine?"), and the horrible realization came up that programmers are next. There's already AI that can generate basic but very usable code, sooner or later a software developer will be defined by how well they can use these tools rather than how well they can actually code... Horrifying stuff. I have absolutely zero faith in governments to reel in corporations and ensure that AI is not abused, so I believe we're in for some very interesting times with AI in the future.

I think that there are many layers to this problem (and they all boil down to capitalism) but here are some thoughts on the subject:

1. "AI art is not real art" is a common argument but it's also, as said by aspiringwarriorlibrarian on Tumblr, "boring, pedantic, relies on defining the undefinable and an ever changing goalpost of what Real Art is." The real focus should be that in most instances it's fueled by art theft and / or other unethical practices.

2. AI Art is only really a symptom of deeper problems. Someone mentioned book covers, but I remember seeing people roasting some romance book covers lately because they looked like they were created with Canva free assets - and in fact you could do a fairly faithful recreation using only that.

The real problems are the devaluation of the arts (and the humanities to a certain extent) and late stage capitalism both creating a sense of "we need to squeeze every penny" and a society in which whole industries are so close to monopolies / oligopolies that many companies really do need to squeeze every penny or they'll go under.

3. I'm not particularly worried at "AI taking programmer jobs" not because "programming couldn't possibly be done by an AI" but because if you can write a rigorous enough description of what you want the computer to do and the computer understands it, you are programming. The AI would essentially just be a higher level language.

4. As much as I hate to sound like an accelerationist, the AI crises (together with climate change) will effectively do just that. We're reaching a point where our systems will fail and crumble and we'll need to figure out what to do next.

tl;dr: AI art is fueled by art theft but the real problem is capitalism.

Also, I was reminded of another example today and thought I'd post here.

So there's this digital model called Shudu. In theory there's nothing wrong with that, it's basically a V-Tuber avatar kind of thing.

Except Shudu who portrays a black (and from the indigenous Ndeele people of Africa) woman was created, is operated by and generating profit to white American men.

The same thing happened with a different "digital influencer" I can't quite remember right now. Jarvis Johnson covered this in his channel.

So there's another example of problems with AI art / digital art. And it's also part of why interacting with art not directly tied to any one creator in the Internet nowadays is all kinds of dicey.

https://twitter.com/FurphyRL/status/1610727035134935052

saw this tweet come up in my feed and honestly it intrigues me. a lot of artists and graphic designers use photoshop, illustrator, and indesign to make their content, so if it is true that adobe is planning to use data from creations (assuming unknown users have that setting on), would they get credited?

perhaps it could be something as simple as adobe finding new ways to implement preset gradients as well for all we know

Tsutarja said:

https://twitter.com/FurphyRL/status/1610727035134935052

saw this tweet come up in my feed and honestly it intrigues me. a lot of artists and graphic designers use photoshop, illustrator, and indesign to make their content, so if it is true that adobe is planning to use data from creations (assuming unknown users have that setting on), would they get credited?

perhaps it could be something as simple as adobe finding new ways to implement preset gradients as well for all we know

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Yeah, I don't think it's going to be anything major considering they have a near monopoly on so many different artistic industries, but the creation of this setting and it being opt-out instead of opt-in doesn't bode well.

AI art is... look it's just not art. We can argue that it's pedantry, but in order to be art there has to be sentient and sapient creativity behind it and actual effort has to go into creating it. If you feed prompts into a program and let it do all the hard work (off the backs of actual artists, which we'll get into later), you're not an artist. You're a person with access to a program that does everything for you. That's not to say that AI art isn't cool as hell. It's visually striking and it's amazing what the technology is capable of. From that perspective, I'll probably always be in awe of it.

The reality though, is that while it's cool, it's also problematic. I'd say much more problematic than the coolness really justifies. AI art programs function by analysis the art created by actual, hard-working people, breaking it down and then imitating them. This is a problem because like 99% of the time these programs are taking/being fed the original art without the consent of the creator to then replicate their style much faster than they can produce it themselves. It's incredibly predatory and unethical and anyone who is profiting off of this technology can take a long walk off of a very short pier. On a related note, if you make AI art and then try to pass it off as your own creation, you aren't much better.

Things get a little murkier with personal use. I try not to get as bothered by that, because it's ultimately just people having fun. The reality though, is that every time you choose to make something with an AI art tool, that's a time you aren't commissioning an artist to do that instead. It probably doesn't seem like much at the time, but given how saturated things are with AI art, clearly a lot of people are doing this - including people using AI art for professional jobs instead of hiring. That adds up and that means that artists, who are already notoriously underpaid, are losing income.

The more that I learn about AI art and the more I see the impact it's having, the less and less I can really find it justifiable and ethical. At least, not in its current form. I'm not going to hold it against people who use it unknowingly, but I do hope that as this information becomes more prevalent people can start making informed decisions and maybe some of those people make the informed decision to pay a real artist instead.

For myself, I will likely still prefer going to places like Fiverr and working with artists directly for commissions there, for stuff I specifically would like. But, if I need something quick and dirty, like a logo for a small project I'm working on to familiarise myself with some coding language or framework, I'm gonna give the art AI a try. It's been a mixed bag but on the rare occasion, I happen to use a prompt and get a really awesome picture out of dall-e !

Look, after trying DALL-E mini, I've erred on the side of wanting art-generating AIs to be obliterated from existence altogether. I'm very sensitive to the Uncanny Valley effect in general, and I can't even begin to describe the soulless quality that some of these pieces give off. Granted, I know some technically gifted human artists who can't put a dime of soul in their art to save their lives either - but if anything, art-generating AIs just exacerbate that problem, because they take samples from said pieces of art and set them as their standard.

This... does not bode well in a future where human artists have to compete with AI. Even way before art-generating AIs were in vogue, I had dropped out of the Tw*tter rat race because I noticed that my art improvement was driven by the amount of feedback and visibility I got, rather than my own personal standards. Ergo, I felt as if I were literally and figuratively selling my soul. Now imagine artists, on a large scale, having to do that to even survive in this landscape and be able to compete with art-generating AI. It's not a very encouraging picture.

Now that I'm devoting myself more to my teaching career, I'm also worried about how we're going to fight back against AI-generated essays. I'm not precisely against banning them because it will only encourage students to seek them out anyway, but at some point we will need training on how to distinguish well-written essays by human students from AI-generated ones. Guess I'll keep up with the news to see how this particular aspect of AI develops.

Mintaka☆ said:

Look, after trying DALL-E mini, I've erred on the side of wanting art-generating AIs to be obliterated from existence altogether. I'm very sensitive to the Uncanny Valley effect in general, and I can't even begin to describe the soulless quality that some of these pieces give off.

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This is true, although the technical aspects of AI art and the wackiness of it can be amazing, it still holds this bleak, soulless quality that holds no appeal at all once you're aware of it. I especially dislike the hyper-realistic AI generated faces, so eerie. 😬 Nothing compares to the individuality and essence poured into real art, because regardless of skill, the "soul" is what makes us love it.

The chat is actually pretty cool. It helps me with a lot of things and clarifies some stuff. I use it mainly to study and/or to find some information, but I often also check out on google, because sometimes it gives incorrect information. But, overall, it's a very powerful tool.

Mintaka☆ said:

This... does not bode well in a future where human artists have to compete with AI. Even way before art-generating AIs were in vogue, I had dropped out of the Tw*tter rat race because I noticed that my art improvement was driven by the amount of feedback and visibility I got, rather than my own personal standards. Ergo, I felt as if I were literally and figuratively selling my soul. Now imagine artists, on a large scale, having to do that to even survive in this landscape and be able to compete with art-generating AI. It's not a very encouraging picture.

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AI art is actually unlikely to change the market that much in the near future.

While you don't have to put the effort into rendering the artwork yourself with AI art, it can't read your mind and it's fundamentally a computer. You still need to input the magical words in the right combination for it to give you what you want without visible artifacts. This can take hours, specially for models that don't have real time generation, and is often not intuitive for the user to figure out.

And as it turns out, even with the terrible labor laws of the US, the dollar is really expensive in the world scale. It will, more often than not, be cheaper to outsource the work to an artist in the global south since their rates, even after putting in currency exchange taxes and the artist's gringo tax, will likely be cheaper than putting some intern to spend hours trying to generate whatever you want.

Like, a quick search showed me that artists in my country are doing fully rendered, fully shaded work for 10 ~ 13 dollars. That's less than 2 h of US federal minimum wage, less than 1 h even in some states, and it comes with a human being that will make creative decisions and will offer revisions instead of being an inscrutable black box that you have to work around. And that's in my country which is "rich" among the underdeveloped countries, if you pick a poorer one you can get even better rates at the cost of having a Spanish speaking intern or making do with Google Translate or something like that.

It's the same basic principle for why despite the technology for sewing robots being a thing for a while now, most countries outsource their textile needs to a sweatshop in poorer countries. It's not because they "want to preserve human jobs", it's because automation is more expensive than underpaying people.

And of course, AI art is awful if you need to keep any kind of cohesion, such as keeping the same characters or background across different scenes. So ironically enough big corporations - that are all about brand cohesion - can't benefit that much (if at all) from AI art.

People buying art for personal reasons are also, as a group, famously incapable of properly stuff. Anyone that has ever done some kind of commission work for people that involved some kind of creative vision will tell you that the clients are very picky but can't say what they actually want, and even the commissioners themselves will often admit that they have trouble expressing themselves. That's not the type of people that will want to spend hours wrestling with the generator to get the picture they want.

(And of course, the most popular and lucrative use-case of art - erotic art - is more or less safe by default since companies don't really want to train on porn / will outright forbid erotic prompts from appearing.)

Of course things can change and as the technology advances, the impact may grow, but the best possible thing you can do to improve the life of artists is 1) fight for increasing the minimum wage since the more expensive paying any kind of laborer to just play around with the computer to find the magic words, the more appealing offloading the work for a freelancer becomes and 2) fight for UBI since with UBI even if artists get less work it will matter less and less, and it means more people have disposable income for buying art in general.

Just generally fight for more socialist-leaning policies in general since "feel like selling your soul to survive" is an extremely common thing under capitalism, in all fields, regardless of creativity or not (although some jobs are a lot more soul sucking than others, like retail).

EDIT: I forgot to say but one job that is actually more at risk due to AI influence are copywriters and other kinds of technical writers.

The repetitive nature of corporate writing and the fact that people generally have an idea of how to edit non-fiction means those jobs are in a very precarious situation.

Welp, did you hear about the Netflix short where AI art was used to generate the backgrounds? There's a whole storm about it on the internet now. The artists who edited the AI creations into reasonable shapes were credited only as "+ Human".

example article reporting on it:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvmqkv/netflix-anime-dog-and-the-boy-ai-generated-art

Self-copying (hah!) from my comment on the subject of AI art on Mod Lounge:

I can run down the quick list of issues with AI art current trend via this analogy: AI Art is to Art what Che Guevara T-shirts sold on discount is to political (and social) identity: a perversion via the machine of capitalism, an appropriation to banalize the effort and value of creating and to kill the social capability of small actors to participate in the market, all to consolidate the power of those who can apply economy of scale to inundate the market with political slogans, pixelated character NFTs or whatever.

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The honest truth is that, like all technologies like this before, this is developed and offered as a drug deal for a lock-in vendoring mechanism (see: the kerfuffle with Adobe) that also has the side effect of increasing the power gap between companies and artists looking for jobs, so that wages and benefits can be reduced. After all, "if you don't agree to work for $.4 an hour and sign this waiver on all union and OSHA rights, we can just have an AI take your work from the internet and serve it to us".

Unfortunately because the scales are already so heavily tipped against the worker, just about the only solution I can see to stuff like this is legislation (yeah, we all know how that one is gonna turn out, see: Disney and copyright law) social uprising. Burning down megacorps, millennials killing Yet Another social network / industry, and what else. But that's there, not here.

Now, it's true a change in consumer culture is also needed. After all, this situation primarily exists because we underpay and undervalue artists and art in general (and Humanities, as has been said above). Personally I'm all up for opening more direct and, well, open, marketplaces connecting digital artists and potential consumers. And I do mean direct marketplaces: none of that "paypal holding transfers for 12345 years until you send them SSN and urine sample", "sender refused because of living in a state not up to date with current KYC law", "seller blocked because artwork is of fictional minors engaging in fictional violence assisted with fictional elemental creatures spamming Surf + EQ" and all that crap.

Honestly, it's time to gather the Mysteriously Wealthy Furries to the discussion table and figure out how *they* are maintaining the artwork marketplace. inb4 it turns out they were all using quasi-AI and are actually Protogen fans

I was gonna post this in the Emotion thread, but I figured out it would be more fitting to post here.

Some of you may know there's an animated sitcom called "Nothing, Forever" that is 100% AI-generated and streamed on Twitch 24 hours a day. Well, earlier today, the Twitch channel that hosted it was banned for 14 days due to the AI making transphobic jokes.

First off, this showcases the dangers of letting an AI learn from uncurated, unregulated content, thus making it a vehicle for hate speech. Add to that the fact that this series is marketed as a parody of Seinfeld, which already was quite out of date with social sensitivities, and you've got a recipe for disaster. What frightens me the most, however, is the very concept of an AI-generated TV series. In the same article I linked, there are a few clips of it. None of it looks like it has any soul or original thought put into it. The characters don't even have discernible faces, the voices sound much like the automated text-to-speech snippets that are often slapped on TikTok videos, and never have the obviously fake laugh tracks rang more true than in this abomination. It's. Fucking. Terrifying. And all the while, even so-called opponents of AI are eating it up because, I don't know, it's supposed to be funny? There's nothing funny about an AI generating potentially harmful content for this wide an audience.

Anyone know how we can petition Twitch to extend the ban indefinitely? I know they probably won't do it because money makes the world go round, but seeing as how many oppose AI here, it would be worth the shot.

I'm honestly against AI art as a whole. Real people work hard on their art and for a computer to steal from them to make something from it is just something that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. the Dall E Mini stuff was fun in the beginning, but now that it's gotten to this point where it's stealing from artists, I'm just... no.

I don't have much to say about stuff like Chat GPT. It's probably a fad that won't really last, though.