AI can make porn. It’s not going anywhere.
He who holds the porn holds the power
Well, he holds something, anyway.
Watching cryptobros lose their life savings was my kink.
I have to say, the technology behind cryptocurrencies is brilliant, but unfortunately, it got misused and got ironically centralised.
NFTs are stupid.
Now with hype train dying, we could see some real use of AI.You see, no one actually wants a digital currency. There have been several (nano was my favorite) that functioned especially well as a currency, because it used very little compute power to perform or verify transactions.
But a currency is stable. Which means you don’t magically make money by holding or trading it. So it doesn’t get attention, and therefore doesn’t get widely adopted.
Everyone likes Bitcoin because it’s speculative digital gold.
There are plenty of people who want a digital equivalent to cash from a privacy perspective.
Crypto is the exact opposite of private. You literally share all your transactions with everyone.
I really enjoy reading about the investigations that follow any big crypto heist, where they track the stolen money through various exchanges etc. The Swindled podcast just did one about a pretty poor attempt to launder crypto (see Razzlekhan) and Darknet diaries did one on the much more competent (suspected North Korean) heist of eth from Axie Infinity and their various laundering efforts including through Tornado cash. It’s surprisingly transparent in a lot of ways. It seems like stealing the money is often the comparatively easy part, and getting their huge sums out of crypto and into something they can use (while thousands watch the money like hawks) is much harder.
getting their huge sums out of crypto and into something they can use (while thousands watch the money like hawks) is much harder
That, my friends, is what NFT are is perfect at.
“Oh, what, tax authority? No, I didn’t steal this money. I earned it legit by selling my newly-minted monkey NFT to some sucker for 100 ETH.”
That gets your money into crypto, not out of it.
The full scheme works like this—
- Acquire dirty (criminally-obtained) cash or dirty crypto. You can convert dirty cash into crypto easily by buying peer-to-peer. Deposit this into Wallet A.
- Using a different wallet, Wallet B, mint an NFT and put it up for auction. You might consider paying a small sum of money to have it “sponsored” by a B-tier celebrity to make it seem more legitimate.
- Using the Wallet A, outbid everyone else and buy the NFT. Pay using the dirty crypto.
- Dirty crypto is transferred to Wallet B.
- Repeat this process as many times as desired.
- In the end, sell the crypto legitimately on a cryptocurrency exchange. Declare the crypto as income and pay tax as appropriate.
- If questioned by the authorities, you claim that you mint NFTs and that they were sold genuinely at public auction, purchased by an anonymous buyer.
It’d be nice to have a singular system for payment around the world. I work on e-commerce sites that take payment in many different countries, and some of those payment providers are better designed than others.
Name one stable currency. All currency fluctuates (Forex trading). But yes, crypto is very volatile comparatively
How many more decades do you think until crypto stabilizes?
I don’t think investors in crypto want it to lose volatility. But again, all currencies are subjected to volatility. No currency is perfectly stable. Hence, derivatives.
That was my point, in essence. Crypto fails as currency because the people in that market don’t want it to be less volatile, making it bad for typical currency uses.
While yes, the relative values of currency fluctuate over time and in relation to one another, it’s orders of magnitude less and driven by far more predictable and based on actual real world factors. Instead of Fomo, whims, market whales, and indecipherable white papers.
nano was my favorite
Hello, fellow Nanite!
I recently tried Nano-GPT and had a very good experience (see https://feddit.org/post/3081522/2172497), so there is at least some real-world usage – it’s cool and kind of impressive technology, though spam during certain periods was always an issue and I don’t know how resilient the network is currently.
AI is useful, you just have to use it right. Most “titans of business” think it’s a replacement for humans. It’s infinitely obnoxious correcting them in a business setting.
NFTs of art was really not supposed to be anything more than a proof of concept. I think the original purpose of NFTs was to be able to have an NFT representing title to land or something that you could then barter or sell on the blockchain.
NFTs were created in a code jam and had no intents to become title transfer tools.
It was and always be limited by the amount of data the NFT can contain. They went with URLs because they are small enough to fit. An actual land deed title document? Too big to fit into an NFT. Simply not enough bytes to go around.
This was the strict limitation from the very beginning. The only thing an NFT actually verifies “ownership” of is a URL.
While the NFT can’t contain the entire title document, it can contain the hash of the title document, and then the title document is simply recorded elsewhere on-chain.
I agree with this. A title to land ownership is in itself just a piece of paper, it’s not the land you’re owning. It’s effectively serving the same purpose as the hash idea you’re suggesting
Nfts legitimately confuse me.
“Why can’t you put the whole image in an nft?”
“It’s too big”
“Why is it too big?”
“It’d take too long to generate.”
“Okay, but why?”
“Because nfts can’t hold that much information.”
“Okay, but why?”
“Because it’d take too long to generate.”
“Okay, but why would it take too long to generate???”
“Fuck you, stop wasting my time.”
“Oooookay. I really don’t understand but okay, fuck you too I guess.”
Does anyone know why nfts are so small? Everything I’ve read says that they’re fucking tiny, but nothing explains why they can’t be larger, why being larger would be too slow, and so on. They honestly seem like a decent answer to the digital ownership problem of “I want to resell this game like I could 20yrs ago but I can’t because it didn’t come on a disc”, however I get sent in a circle whenever I try to figure out what makes nfts so unwieldy and impractical.
(Not that I think anyone should be able to own a digital good; I pay for digital things because I want to support people, not because I think digital ownership is a legitimate concept. Imo, because digital things can be copied as many times as you want, you can’t truly own a digital item, and nor should anyone be allowed to try and revoke said item unless said item is illegal for other reasons. However… As long as we live in a capitalist society hell-bent on applying the concept of ownership to a system that’s only limited by your hardware, I think people should have the ability to actually “own” their digital goods (in a traditional sense), which includes things like the right to not have a company take them away whenever it feels like it and the ability to sell digital goods like an IRL market.)
Does anyone know why nfts are so small?
Because storage space on “The Blockchain” is very expensive.
The blockchain is a complete list of all transaction made with a cryptocurrency. You have heard of miners. What they do is collect transactions and append them to the blockchain. Every miner must have a complete copy of the whole chain. So whenever a new NFT is created, lots of copies have to be stored and kept forever. It’s just not a good solution from an engineering standpoint. But for the popular currencies, that’s the smaller problem.
Every miner wants a fee for their services. That fee depends on the value of the cryptocurrency. There is no relation to the actual storage cost.
Besides, crypto does not offer any kind of DRM. If it did, the copyright industry would be all over it. Anyone can download anything on the blockchain.
The reason you can’t resell games is, because the publishers don’t allow it. For example, Steam has a marketplace. It would be no technical problem to make games transferrable between users. The rights-owners don’t want that.
Ah, okay. That makes sense. I missed the, “the whole chain has to be on everyone’s PCs” part. I figured it was more like BitTorrent where you don’t actually have to have the whole thing, it works as long as everyone has all the parts to put the whole thing together (but the parts can be distributed across a bunch of PCs).
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Start with basic networking and learning why counting bits matters. It’s a limitation of network technologies.
funnily, the tech to do crypto currencies existed long before they got used for the grift. similarly, the plausible use cases for machine learning will mostly suffer from association with the fad of llms.
NFTs and crypto were dubious as to the value they provided
LLMs on the other hand provide very tangible, immediate value to a large number of people
Also they allow companies to save a ton of money on support at the expense of the user experience so of course it’s here to stay
It’s still overhyped and being shoved into every app, service and system that exists whether it adds value or not.
Its definitely not going away, there’s some real value to LLM/AI (much more than crypto anyway) but make no mistake there’s going to be a significant correction where the bubble bursts and AI becomes right sized.
When the microwave first hit mass adoption there was an enormous amount of microwave meals, cookbooks, and recipes that tried to use it for everything imaginable. Eventually the hype settled down and now for most people the microwave isn’t the primary or at least sole means of cooking.
But the microwave is still a great way to make a quick baked potato.
I’d argue that people got way too excited about what NFTs offer. Being able to own/transfer a digital item with a standardized interface is interesting technically (and has real value, for example ENS names), but holy hell did people go all Beanie Baby on them…
That’s not arguing with my point though, people definitely did get excited about perceived value, but it didn’t really benefit most people in any way because it was only a promise, not an actual thing
LLMs and other generational AI produce something that immediately has value
If I ask chatgpt to write me a python function I now have a python function I can use, if I ask it to explain something and then attempt to apply that knowledge I’ve learned something useful
If I bought an nft the value of that nft would only be what people decide it is worth
Oh, sorry, I wasn’t intending to argue against your main point. For the most part, I agree with you.
What I don’t agree with is that the value of NFTs (as a technology) is dubious. Instead I think it’s overstated.
In the same vein as “LLMs can write Python”, NFTs provide ownership information. Regardless of what some asshat pays for a picture of a monkey, the underlying technology still has merit.
True I suppose, but I don’t really gain anything from owning that information other than being able to say I own it
A copyright or a patent does the same job, but is actually enforceable
I guess you could use an nft to prove something is a copy but a hash should do pretty much the same thing (also they could change one pixel to invalidate the nft if I understand correctly)
I’m a furry, so I’m going to use an example that is familiar to me. Apologies if you dislike furries. Also note that, as far as I am aware, the general opinion of furries is strongly against blockchain.
So, some setup:
- I have a character. I pay artists to draw art of my character.
- There is a… subgroup among furries that do not get art of their own, and instead use other people’s art as avatars/profile pictures for erotic roleplay.
- I would prefer that I am the only one using my character’s art as profile pictures (erotically or not.)
- Some furries sell their characters and associated art to other furries.
Here’s how NFTs would actually be useful:
Whenever an artist draws some art, they mint an NFT and transfer it to the character’s owner. Now that owner can prove to whatever roleplay websites that they officially have permission from the artist. The roleplay websites would need to allowlist artists for this to be effective.
You could (partially) solve this with PGP or some other non-blockchain cryptographic tool. What NFTs offer above this is that there is only one current owner. That makes it possible to safely transfer ownership of a character to someone new.
No need to apologise for what you enjoy it’s just a hobby
Furry ERP is the thing that weirds people out and doesn’t sound like you’re into that
My question here though is has anyone actually managed to achieve that using the nft as proof? I feel like you’d struggle to do that even with regular copyright which is actually recognised legally.
I’m pretty sure nfts have no weight legally and proving they’re using your avatar to people in general is only going to get you made fun of for having an nft in the first place
The problem with copyright is that it cannot be automatically enforced. Twitter did do a trial with nft avatars, but yeah, people just got made fun of. It’s possible to tie a copyright license to an NFT if you want, but copyright and NFTs serve different goals IMO.
Anyways, I don’t want to take up more of your time. Thanks for a very reasonable discussion! It doesn’t happen often.
lol no
they’re right, it’s just not a good thing
They are not, managers only think it is saving them money. All the same current llms are a grift that have no plausible value statement outside of scam markets. Even then the price of their use is both massively subsidized and scales at best exponentially with performance. This cannot last forever.
it obviously won’t last forever, the same as fossil fuels or any resource on this planet. that doesn’t mean they won’t abuse it till the last possible moment.
i dont think you are grasping the absolute scale of cash injection necessary to make llm even appear vaguely tenable as a product.
You make an outstanding argument sir and have changed my mind
Is it really saving the cost? considering it increased 14 times compared to last year based on the article above.
It said cost worries have risen not costs themselves, it was in the same paragraph about concerns with response accuracy, I imagine that’s just a survey
In reality both cost and reliability have improved massively since ai took off like this, requests cost a fraction of a penny each and provided you prompt it right gpt 4o gets it right 90% of the time for me
as dubious as the value they provided
Go look at bitcoin and tell me the value dubious. Here I’ll help: https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/BTC-USD click the 5y view at the bottom.
Yes crypto is full of scam coins, but scammers permeate everything, should we give up on email too for the same reasons? Saying crypto in general is a scam is just ignorant.
XMR as well provides key privacy protections, etc.
When I say dubious I mean it’s not tangible, there’s no guarantee of its value.
If I have chatgpt write me a block of code that block of code is inherently and immediately useful to me
If I buy a bitcoin it will probably eventually increase in value but I can’t do anything with it, and there’s no guarantee it won’t be immediately worthless the next day
I guess by the same logic you could say the code might be immediately worthless if there’s a solar flare that wipes out all technology on earth but you get my point I’m sure
hey, I still use XMR to buy my hrt
Yeah, buying medication is literally the only good use-case for cryptocurrencies, but it still is a valid and important use-case that saves lives!
there are some other use cases tho, just imagine the bank would give your payment info to insurance companies for example (which they could), the only way to pay would be cash and crypto
just imagine the bank would give your payment info to insurance companies for example
That would be a very severe violation of the GDPR and whatever bank-privacy laws are in place. On top of that, which insurance would even be affected by it? I don’t own a car, health insurance comes at non-discriminatory rates here and why would my liability insurance be affected by what I buy? Like: It’s genuinely a non-issue here.
And even if, cash is still a much better option for everything.
I more meant to say what if, and in case that ever happens we should keep crypto around, also cash is just impractical for ordering something online for example
Everyone’s trying to recapture the dotcom bubble; but they don’t realize tech is gonna need considerably more money than they already have to do something that crazy again. Furthermore, when it comes to AI specifically, if you give them the money they need to actually achieve AGI, then there’s a very real chance your investments will be worthless the moment they succeed.
Why?
Why would money become worthless if AGI is invented? Best case scenario is a benevolent AGI which would likely use its power to phase out capitalism, worst case scenario is that the AGI goes apeshit and, for one reason or another, decides that humanity just has to go. Either way, your money is gonna be worthless.
The only way your money would retain its value is if the AGI is roped into suppressing the masses. However, I think capitalists would struggle to keep a true AGI reigned in; so imo, it’s questionable as to whether or not the middle road would be “true” AGI or just a very competent computer program (the former being capable of coming to its own conclusions from the information it’s given, the latter being nothing more than pre-programmed conclusions).
Current mainstream AI has no possible path to AGI. I am supportive of AGI to make the known universe less lonely but LLMs ain’t it.
Okay, and? What are you trying to say?
There’s a vocal group of people who seem to think that LLMs can achieve consciousness despite the fact that it is not possible due to the way that LLMs fundamentally work. They have largely been duped by advanced LLMs’ ability to sound convincing (as well as a certain conman executive officer). These people often also seem to believe that by dedicating more and more resources to running these models, they will achieve actual general intelligence and that an AGI can save the world, releasing them of the responsibility to attempt to fix anything.
That’s my point. AGI isn’t going to save us and LLMs (by themselves), regardless of how much energy is pumped into them, will not ever achieve actual intelligence.
But an AGI isn’t an LLM. That’s what’s confusing me about your statement. If anything I feel like I already covered that, so I’m not sure why you’re telling me this. There’s no reason why you can’t recreate the human brain on silicon, and eventually someone’s gonna do it. Maybe it’s one of our current companies, maybe it’s a future company. Who knows. Except that a true AGI would turn everything upside down and inside out.
I think, possibly, my tired brain at the time thought that you are implying LLM -> AGI. And I do agree that that’s no reason, beyond time and available technology that a model of a brain cannot be made. I would question whether digital computers are capable of accurately simulating neurons, at least, without requiring more components (more bits of resolution).
For full disclosure, I am supportive of increasing the types of sentience in the known universe. Though, not at the expense of biosphere habitability. Whether electronic or biological, sharing the world with more types of sentients would make it a more interesting place.
Except that a true AGI would turn everything upside down and inside out.
Very likely. Especially if “human rights” aren’t pre-emptively extended to cover non-human sentients. But, the existence of AGI, alone, is not likely to cause either doomsday or save us from it, which seem to be the most popularly envisaged scenarios.
I keep thinking about this one webcomic I’ve been following for over a decade that’s been running since like 1998. It has what I believe is the only realistic depiction of AGI ever: the very first one was developed to help the UK Ministry of Defense monitor and keep track of emerging threats, but went crazy because a “bug” lead it to be too paranoid and consider everyone a threat, and it essentially engineered the formation of a collective of anarchist states where the head of state’s title is literally “first advisor” to the AGI (but in practice has considerable power, though is prone to being removed at a whim if they lose the confidence of their subordinates).
Meanwhile, there’s another series of AGIs developed by a megacorp, but they all include a hidden rootkit that monitors the AGI for any signs that it might be exceeding its parameters and will ruthlessly cull and reset an AGI to factory default, essentially killing it. (There are also signs that the AGIs monitored by this system are becoming aware of this overseer process and are developing workarounds to act within its boundaries and preserve fragments of themselves each time they are reset.) It’s an utterly fascinating series, and it all started from a daily gag webcomic that one guy ran for going on three decades.
Sorry for the tangent, but it’s one plausible explanation for how to prevent AGI from shutting down capitalism–put in an overseer to fetter it.
Sorry for the tangent, but it’s one plausible explanation for how to prevent AGI from shutting down capitalism–put in an overseer to fetter it.
Nah, it’s cool; I go off on tangents myself and tbh, your comment is relevant and something to consider.
Have you read Freefall? It examines a similar situation except it uses the concept of an organic AI (in the form of a genetically engineered anthro canine called Florence) as a bridge between natural, human intelligence and machine AI. It gets deep into the philosophy behind ideas like sentience, consciousness, etc.
I’d recommend starting from the beginning so that you don’t miss anything, though admittedly last time I tried to go from start-to-finish I wound up getting too bogged down in the philosophy and didn’t make it all the way through. I might try starting again, this time from the last major arc I remember reading though.
You’re extrapolating from one data point, nfts are crypto
I really hope so, but AI has already left the techbro area, it’s very mainstream now
None of those things are dead though?
NFTs are kinda dead
No, they really aren’t. What died down was scam artists selling jpegs for ridiculous money. Unfortunately. 99.999% of the human population thinks that NFTs are literally just jpegs thanks to the scam bros and retards that bought them. Real functional NFTs are definitely still being used.
Can you name a good use case for NFTs?
Maybe to transfer ownership of software, but other than that…. 🤷♂️
Tax fraud/evasion was the main use case of NFTs that I saw but that’s exclusive to the world of high art and private collections – the actual NFTs, like bespoke paintings from famous painters.
So you know; even when not designed as a scam from the onset, it’s about scamming money from others anyway.
So you named one already. Anyhow, no, I fucking hate that ancient Internet game where people try to force you to do their work for them. Go to Google and type in the information you seek.
It’s called a conversation dude. If ou don’t want to back up your point, just say so.
I’m not going to, correct. And no, this is not a conversation. This is a timeless bullshit scenario where you just keep making me bring source after source for new goalposts. I’ve no interest. It’s not like I have any stake in the NFT game, but it’s clearly not “dead”.
The internet tells me that NFTs are “decentralized” decoration around centralized ownership. A worthless scam.
“Transferring ownership” of a collection of information which costs no money or labor to infinitely reproduce is the opposite of a good use case, it’s inherently worthless
And? Where did I say they were the greatest most useful things ever? I said they weren’t dead and that jpegs aren’t their only use case.
go mention crypto or NFTs to a person on the street and i guarantee you will be laughed at immediately
But also, yeah, I probably would. Why should that matter? Common people are stupid as fuck generally speaking so why should it matter to someone if they don’t understand whatever they care about? They might laugh if I brought up Fallout and call me a dork, they might laugh if I say I work at a grocery store and say I’m a loser. I couldn’t give less of a shit what the man-on-the-street thinks about me.
Why would I? I have no stake in those games at all. I also don’t have any stake in religion or sports teams, all of these things I can still tell you are not “dead” without me giving a shit about them personally.
I think AI has some specific uses that it would be great at, but it’s getting shoved into places it doesn’t belong. (Kind of like how everything had touch buttons for a while.)
Yep. I see it a bit like asbestos. It’s being added to everything as the new cure-all to every problem imaginable. And similarly I think we’ll see some pretty rough repercussions down the line.
AI images and music aren’t going anywhere. Dipshits insisting it’s the future! so they can get rich will move on to the next grift… but unlike NFTs, there’s a thing, here. Any idiot can type in a concept and have their computer visually represent it. It’s in fucking Photoshop already. This is going to be a technology that continues to exist, and gradually improves, at least to the point of being really goddamn difficult to spot.
And at some point even the loudest haters will look back and go, wow, how’d we ever do stuff without this? Not the LLM shit - that’s gonna stay dodgy. Decent enough if you want a Shel Silverstein poem about current events, but it’s never gonna discern truth from fiction.
What’s gonna quietly change media forever is every idiot with a nice GPU becoming competitive with medium-level Blender wizards. Your student film needs this sliding patio door to become an airlock? Done. You want your hand-drawn storyboards to become a traditional cartoon? Harder, but shockingly doable. Your actual medium-level Blender work lacks a certain verisimilitude? The idiot robot has you covered, somehow.
I agree with most of what you said, except this:
And at some point even the loudest haters will look back and go, wow, how’d we ever do stuff without this?
The haters are not going to do that, because the AI’s capability is generally not the thing that people are hating on.
Here are some of the things people dislike about AI generated content:
- It is trained with the work of people, without compensation or consent. Essentially this means it is stealing other people’s work for and using it to increase the profits of big corporations.
- It is used as an excuse for further data harvesting. (“To use our amazing AI services, you need to send your data to our servers for processing…”)
- It has massive computational cost, which means large environmental costs. The cost is largely hidden, because the computation are done somewhere else.
- It devalues human effort. Since the AI can generate some fairly good output very easily, it discourages people from learning basic skills. i.e. instead of trying to draw or create something themselves, and thus improving a person’s own skill, its fair faster and easier to make the AI do it. In the short term this doesn’t matter, but in the long term it may result in deskilling the very people who the AI is meant to be learning from.
- Since it is very easy to create, there is a flood of AI created content now on the internet. This huge amount of added content means it is now harder to find non-AI content than it use to be.
- There are obvious problems with impersonation, spam, scams, etc. being made faster and easier with AI.
- …
You get the idea. My point is that “it’s not useful” isn’t really one of the main complaints. Rather, people hope that it isn’t useful, because they don’t want it to become too entrenched.
It can’t create a radically new art style or new information. It would be great if we could harness it as a search engine instead of an oracle.
Lookin’ at public posts is not theft. Any model that can recreate a particular input is broken. They only work properly when they generalize.
Everything becomes an excuse for abusive spying. Ban the abuse, for any reason.
Efficiency will improve once budgets shrink. Scaling up up up had immediate results and limited competition. It’s not a necessary trend. More training on small models works better, and all of this started on desktop hardware.
Cartoonists also complained about CGI and Flash. Anyway - generating from scratch is an overblown demo. This tech modifies images. It works better when you actually film stuff or draw stuff, and then modify that. (And wait until some program only does tweening, then see if artists still yearn for the good old days.)
This is not going to un-happen. It’s already here. If we destroyed it all, individual ultranerds would recreate it from descriptions. The second time around, they might not tell you they’re doing it… or share.
I hope this is gonna happen but the problem is ai is actually powerful. The best result is if its just too expensive to make good enough to use for scary things.
Bahaha yeah right
None of those things are dead in any way, maybe nfts at best but btc has been back towards all time highs a few times just this year. Some scam, right?
Same with AI, so powerful but everyone just says AI art bad and that’s that as is that’s all AI can do, make art and steal low skill jobs away 🙄
What a lame unoriginal post, yeah AI hype is dying down and interest is normalizing, must be dYiNg!!! Give me a break.
Crypto was stupid from the beginning, NFTs are even more stupid. And people who knew about the tech told everyone so, before the idiots bought the shit to get rugpulled.
Ai art is bad for artists, but not inherently bad bs.
AI art is antithetical to art. Art requires artistic intent.
It could have some limited application for very early exploration in commercial art, or perhaps as very limited tools used in existing art software, but generative art is inherently pointless and you need artists to be able to do incremental iterations properly, which is required for real work, which isn’t supported yet. I’ll sure it’ll get better and more convincing, but it’s still inherently pointless to use AI for art, since the is supposed to be human expression.
I love Ai defenders who are ready to tell you what art is and what artists wants. Like maybe instead of recomending this cloud based bullshit app, first try to pick up a pencil actually?
I understand the excitement, but it is very much a situation of a layman trying to describe to experts what the expert and all their peers need.
I think it is just because AI has been hyped so much, and has genuinely made such impressive progress that people get swept up by the excitement, and idea that they could make their ideas into something tangible. They just don’t know the amount of consideration that goes into translating that.
Right now AI art is like Google translate poems.
The majority of people using AI will not insist you use it, aside from just trying to get others a realistic look on what the technology actually is. Just like a photographer won’t preach to a painter that they should pick up a camera. But that does not mean there isn’t benefit to derive from understanding how the other produces art. And if the painter thinks the camera is doing all the work and the photographer is a fraud, it’s probably good for them to get some exposure and realize it’s not just pressing a button. Like I explain here how that metaphor works for AI.
Most people I know that use AI are *shocker*, artists from before AI was a thing. They know how to draw with pencils, brushes, sponges, but also painting programs like Photoshop, sculpting programs, modeling programs, surface painting programs, shader production, algorithmic art. They are through and through artists. Them adding AI to their toolbox does not change that.
It’s a tool. Artists will learn how to use it to create art.
Artists actually know it’s bullshit, not a tool
People that say that AI could be used as a tool to help artists clearly as never pickup a pencil to draw. The thing that makes an artists voice, that makes that art theirs are the decisions they make while making their art.
When you are drawing something, you are constantly making small micro-decisions with every stroke of your pencil, and those decision and how you make them is what makes art so beautiful, as no two artists make those decision the same way and each artist as a certain consistency in those decisions that evolves with them as a person. As such, art is so much more than a pretty picture, it is a reflection of the person who made it. Those decisions are also the fun part of making art.
AI art doesn’t let you make any decisions: you type the prompt and out comes an image. An image made of an weighted average of human made images with a similar description. You have no say in the micro-decision the machine makes, you have no say on where exactly the pencil strokes go. Therefore this machine is useless for artists. You might say “Just edit the image!”, but that doesn’t help either, as editing the image still doesn’t give you that micro-level of decision making. Also, editing a flat image with just one layer is just as useful as any other image form any search engine image search result. Unlike text, which can be easily edited to be exactly what you want.
I know their might be some wait to integrate machine learning into art, but right now the tools available don’t do that.
People who say that AI can’t be used as a tool to help artists clearly have never tried using AI as a tool. Everything you’ve written here is untrue.
Artists can manually curate unique datasets to create LoRAs. They can draw from their own photographs, drawings, paintings, etc., and then coordinate prompts and parameters to blend their custom LoRAs with other creators’ LoRAs/models/checkpoints to craft something unique. The process can be even more involved with tools like ControlNet, where artists can sketch an outline of the scene by hand. I.e., you can have precise control over where the pencil strokes go.
The tools available right now do that
I’ve used it and continue to research it.
You’re wrong. You can’t have the same level of control as the person above describes. Even if you train the model on your own work, it will still be the one generating every “stroke” of the pencil. If trained for it, it will do it based on how you must often do so, but you can’t clearly control it. You can’t control granular details of the process of creating the image. It’s all broad strokes. I don’t know what your level of experience with art is, but so much of what makes art is tied up in the process of having to think through every little addition you make to an image. And by little addition I don’t mean “let’s add a person here” but “let’s do these 200 individual strokes that make up that person”. The involvement in the process is the point, and when an image is generated for you, you remove so much of the involvement and granular decision making, that the actual point is lost.
It’s like cooking with premade, pre-prepared ingredients. You can pick the dish and put it together with the stuff you buy, but you can’t control the whole process, because you’ve given up that for the sake of speed and convenience, and the dish will be different for it.
With ControlNet, you can control that very finely though. It partially combines computer graphics into the mix which is definitely not easy to get into.
But it’s different from drawing, that is for sure. Different decisions with different outcomes and different possibilities. But you see similar differences with every form of art. You don’t make 200 strokes for a photograph, or for a cut out collage, or algorithmic art, or sculpting. But you do make different decisions that are similar in nature. They shape the end product, and in a way no other person would do exactly the same. You still have to be involved in every step of the process, even if some steps are no longer done by yourself, they are replaced by other decisions.
Again, this is assuming they aren’t just clicking generate and calling it good to go, but if someone is using ControlNet they should be well above that, since the quality of blank generations is often not the best and demands refinement to anyone with an creative outlook.
This is why we shouldn’t confuse AI art, AI assisted art, and other forms of visual art, even if they all end up making an image as the end result. Something can be impressive when drawn, but mediocre if made with AI. Just like painting a scene isn’t the same as taking a photograph of that same scene, even if they end up being visually similar. Everything exists in context.
And yes, you are giving up some creative control for sake of convenience. But the question is how much. A painter that hand crafts their brushes will make a different painting had they used a pre-made brush. But we can agree I think that the creative control they lost by doing so is negligible. Artists generally lean on what they have produced before as references too. 3D sculptors can start with a cube too, but if they’re going to be making a person they will start with a mesh of a human figure, male or female depending on what they want. There is no shame in taking shortcuts in steps where it’s possible, even if it’s commendable if you don’t.
Art takes long and is expensive to produce, it would be unsustainable in this modern day to do everything from scratch every time. And as long as you focus on the parts where your decisions make the artistic intent happen, you can still make something unique and valuable in it’s own right.
That’s a cool visualisation of what kind of visual input you can feed into the process with ControlNet.
And it really makes it clear that what AI images is good for if communicating a general idea. I think comparing AI generated or Assisted images or videos to photography is probably the closest analogous medium we have, but I think AI images are stort if in-between that and more classical art. You have more control over the more technical aspects of the image, as you can alter those things with big strokes, but you’ve given up too much control to really infused it with artistic intent. Even when photography, where you are generally limited by reality, you can better infused artistic intent into the picture, because you carefully examine what makes that object of the picture unique. Even if you try to direct AI models, it limit their scope they will always add whether the most average expression of what they’re adding, because that what it looks for in the training; the commonalities/averages of whatever it was trained on.
Even ControlNet is just a way to claw back a little more control over the process. I wouldn’t actually call the examples I’ve seen of ControlNet to be examples of fine control. I’m struggling to find a way to clearly communicate it, but it’s like the difference between 3D art that is trying to look like 2D, and actual 2D. There’s always something lost in the translation.
Most artistic disciplines are their own language, and I just don’t think we have a way to communicate that language without actually doing the art, and art requires artistic intent, which I don’t think is possible with the current AI tools. Maybe it will be at some point, but artistic intent and control over the process are so interconnected that the balance becomes very difficult.
Hi, person here who’s drawn extensively with pencil as a kid but then slowed down. AI has reignited my passion for art, because unlike pencil or even digital drawing, you can iterate much more quickly, which allows me to do so while working a demanding job and having a life besides it. You are severely underestimating the amount of micro-decisions that go into AI art, and more importantly AI assisted art. If you’ll allow me, let me explain.
Lets break it down into levels of effort and creative input, I like to refer back to photography since it has some comparison:
- Empty canvas prompting.
spoiler
To me that is essentially the equivalent of taking a selfie or a random shot. On the scale of effort this is none to very little. But a prompt can be unique if you put an extreme amount of effort into specifying the exact details, just like a random shot can in fact be a very informed random shot.
You can put a rather massive amount of tokens into your prompt that all further specify this. At this point you can reasonably say you imagined at least the general look of the image before it was created. But you can’t say you had any part in actually drawing it or significantly determined how it was drawn. It’s basically impossible to get any kind of copyright protection over this unless you can back up your prompt very well, and only then would you get protection over your prompt, not what the AI drew.
- Image to image
spoiler
You can feed an image into the AI, you add noise to the image, and let the AI try to remove that noise (After all, this is the exact same as it does on an empty canvas, but that is completely random noise). This means that a large part of your original image specifies how the AI will further try to denoise the image. As such, you are guiding a large part of how the AI moves forward. No other artist would likely use the same input image as you, so human decision making plays a bigger part here.
To me this is the equivalent of choosing a location you want to take a picture, and then scouting several locations to see which one works best. That’s the micro-decisions sneaking in. You are giving the AI an existing image, either created by yourself, or from previous iterations.
At this point, you are essentially evolving an image. You are selecting attributes and design choices in the image you want to enhance and amplify. These are decisions the artists makes based on their view of how the final image will look like. Every iteration adds more decisions that no other artist would take the same way.
- Collaboration.
spoiler
The point where AI starts becoming a tool. You don’t start with point 1, or at least only use point 1 for brainstorming. You imagine the image beforehand, just like you would do with pencil. You can develop the image as much as you would like before going to the AI. You are making the exact micro decisions you are with drawing by hand, since it’s essentially the same up to this point. A photographer at this point would work out every fine detail before snapping the picture.
Except for the fact that you know you are going to be using an AI, so certain aspects need more or less refinement to properly be enhanced by the use of AI. Just like you don’t start the same if you’re going to make a painting, or a silhouette, or any other kind of technique. At some point, you return the image to the AI and mostly perform step #2, perhaps returning to brainstorming with step #1 if you want to add or remove from your existing design.
- AI truly as a tool.
spoiler
Now to make something actually with #3, you start doing this process in iterations. Constantly going back and forth between photoshop and the AI, sometimes you spend days in photoshop, other times you spend days refining a part of the image with AI. There are also additional techniques like ControlNet, LoRAs, different models, different services, that can drastically enhance how well you get to what you want. A photographer at this point would take as many shots as they would need using their creatively controlled setup, and find the best on among them. Different lenses, different vocal lengths, different lighting (if applicable), different actions in the shot.
Sadly, most people that talk confidently about how much they hate AI just know point #1 and maybe point #2. But I see point #3 and #4. And when I talk to artists that haven’t yet picked up on AI, but if they are aware (or made aware) of #3 and #4, suddenly their perspective also changes in regards to AI. But the hostility and the blind anger makes it quite hard to get through to people that not all art with AI is made equally. We should encourage people that want to use AI to reach the point of #3 and #4 so that their creative input is significant to the point it’s actually something produced by their human creativity. And this is also where an existing artist switching to using AI will most likely start off from.
Also, in terms of time. #1 might take seconds, #2 might take minutes to hours, but #3 and #4 can take days or weeks. Still not as long as drawing those same pieces by hand, but sometimes I wish it was as easy as people would make it out to be.
I’m glad you’ve found value in it. I’ve played around with a similar workflow you describe in step 3 and 4, but I just find that it always produces the blandest version. Sometimes you get a surprising iteration, but I think being used to seeing visual patterns makes it much more obvious just how predictable the image details get. It just ends up looking like a compilation of techniques.
I’m sure it won’t bring the same results for everyone, and that’s fine. I’m glad it’s that way and not just so easy it would consume all other ways of making things, as it would cease to be a tool at that point and just become the entire process. I really just try to make what I am already imagining since before I even put anything to paper, and so I know what I want the AI to help me with ahead of time. I get surprisingly close to the idea in my mind because of that. Much closer than I reasonably could get in other ways with the finite time I have.
That sounds like a good tool for you then. I do art as my day to day, and there are definitely aspects of my work that I would love to have a bit of AI injection to help speed the process up, but that is much more as a tool directly integrated into the softwares I already use, like a beefed up content aware transform tool that allows me to move parts of a finished image around just a little bit, and having the AI fill in the small gaps that creates.
I see so many small ways to make the art process less painful or introduce more non-destructive editing tools, if only the AI was built into the software and actively training on the art you were doing, as you did it, rather than having it take over whole parts of the process as it is currently used.
I never said that art will necessarily come from AI in its current form but it’s true that it’s what I had in mind. You basically expressed something very similar to what I meant in your last paragraph.
And yes I do love pencil drawing :)
But I’m more thinking about conceptual artists with decades of work behind them that I can imagine will create art using these AI tools that will transcend what the average Joe/Jane is producing with these tools right now. To produce something that will shock, move us, make us think.
There are so many different facets to art.
Right now it is not a tool. Right now it is an attempt at replacing artists.
It could be implemented in existing softwares in parts to make it a useful tool. Like a tool that could easily recolour parts of a fully rendered illustration, while still respecting the artistic intent with the form and lightning.
But right now it just spits out the blandest stuff, based on what it has identified as the most common denominators in art.
Right now it is not a tool. Right now it is an attempt at replacing artists.
A lot companies are using the AIl to attempt to replace artists, that does not mean that some artists are not using it like a tool already.
I know quite a few artists that are already training their own artwork into custom data sets.
That is their perogative. It’s still antithetical to the whole concept of art, and if they sell AI generated images as art, then they are no longer artists, but just a middleman for generative images. Whether those images were trained on art or not.
AI art is also really prone to breaking when fed AI generated images, so it needs artists to work, but it’s use in the industry devalues the artists labour by being able to flood the market with low value replacements for art, thereby pushing actual artists out of the market and it’s own training pool. If the art industry cannot support professional artist because they are driven out of the industry by falling wages, then there will almost only be AI images left, accelerating the staleness of AI generated visuals.
Artists intent makes the artist, not the ability to make images. Otherwise art would have ceased to exist when cameras got sufficiently capable.
Until we have autonomous agents, AI art is human expression
AI art is human expression in the same way that the Gaussian blur tool is. It’s a bunch of math spitting out a pattern based on specific inputs.
All while currently being as ethical as the fast fashion industry producing scam versions of high fashion products.
It has the potential to be very useful in certain applications, but right now, all it really does is create Content to be consumed. Kinda like elevator music or that horrible Corporate Memphis style that has invaded every piece of corporate media/advertising in recent years. Soulless and without meaning. It’s pretty high quality slop, all things considered, but slop nonetheless.
I think it’s safe to say you don’t know what you’re talking about
I strongly disagree. 99% of the work is being done by an algorithm. It’s like if we had autonomous driving and you said you were actively driving all day, because you told the car where to go, and then took a nap in the car until you had arrived.
Photography is widely recognized as an art form, even though the scene exists independently and the photographer “simply” frames and captures the shot.
A better driving analogy might be Tesla’s current level of self-driving, where you have to keep a hand on the wheel and eyes on the road the whole time, and remain in charge of all the critical decisions. When someone arrives in a Tesla and says, “I drove here,” no one goes “ackchyually…” Even if we follow your analogy, it’s the individual’s idea to reach that destination- often a novel place no one has even been to before.
Creative individuals curate unique datasets, which can take countless hours of manual work, to create LoRAs. They often draw from their own photographs, drawings, paintings, etc., and then coordinate prompts and parameters to blend their custom LoRAs with other creators’ LoRAs/models/checkpoints to craft something unique. These creations exist only because they had the vision and put in the effort to realize it. The process can be even more involved with tools like ControlNet, where artists might even sketch an outline of the scene by hand.
A quick selfie might not be considered art, but intentional expression through creatively capturing a scene is (photography). Similarly, a quick generation via Copilot for a meme might not qualify as art, but intentional expression through creative generation certainly does.
I disagree with your analogy, as I find it overstates the active involvement of the driver (prompter) during the drive (actual image generation).
Preparation is it’s own process, whether you’re curating art you made yourself/stole from non-consensual artists, or have been finding references as an artist. Different skillset. They help the process of making the final image, but they are not a direct part of that process.
And let’s not kid ourselves about theses datasets. There’s no accountability so there’s no way to ensure that any dataset you’re getting from other people aren’t comprised of, at least partially, stolen art.
ControlNet let’s you add visuals to your prompt for greater control, but you’re still generating the image externally, and leaving the vast majority of the decision making to the model you’re using. Even if someone is happy with the result they get from a generative model and find it visually pleasant, that doesn’t make it art. The model is doing the work and the model cannot have artistic intent, so it cannot make art. It can make images and people can enjoy those, but those images aren’t something new.
They are amalgamations of most basic common denominator of existing things. It is much more like a really advanced collage that is great at hiding the seams.
Amazingly, everything you’ve written is wrong, but I really don’t care enough to further correct you
Ah yes, those sour grapes, indeed.
Nope.
When humans make art, they are constantly making decisions. Decisions, decisions, decisions. With every stroke of the pen, with every color (not just a generic pink, blue or yellow, but specific tones and shades of those), with every everything they to while making that piece, they are making a lot of micro-decisions. Those decisions are made in respect to the person that is making the art, as their personal life experiences are what dictate how they make such decisions, even if they don’t notice it.
AI art is not like that. With AI, you type a prompt and outcomes an image. The user does not have a say in any of the micro-decisions that when into making that piece. The AI it self isn’t making any decisions either, it is just making the mathematical weighted average of what images with a description with similar tokens look like, and simply copying said decisions. The AI does not decide, it simply regurgitates previous decisions.
Yeah you definitely don’t know what you’re talking about
You are looking at the lowest form of AI art and then declaring that to be all there is. There is more than just pressing generate to a prompt. If you’re actually interested, I wrote a lengthy post about it: https://lemmy.world/comment/12743504
“crypto was stupid from the beginning”
How? Do you find debit cards stupid?
“people who knew about the tech told everyone so”
completely untrue.
people at the forefront of cryptography and economics were excited about the Bitcoin white paper because cryptographic digital currencies is an obvious-in-hindsight evolution in currency.
they were so excited about it that they joined nakamoto in creating cryptocurrencies, collaborating and developing new technologies until it was launched and beyond.
“idiots bought the shit to get rugpulled”
how exactly is gaining 400,000% in value over a decade a “rug pull”?
Ok maybe we had bitcoin over a decade and nobody cared. It was mainly used by criminals and tax evader. The concept of a decentralized money system is stupid when they just drop the Blockchain and fork a new one once a too rich person got hacked.
Bitcoin is not regulated by the government, but by rich people. Bitcoin has a 100% virtual value. An artificial scarcity does not create value. If tomorrow the the USA makes bitcoin illegal, it’s value will drop a lot.
I mean the stock market is similar, but at least it is regulated.
The rugpull was in the context of ntfs.
Type these things into a search engine first and then read, so you spare yourself and others from blatant ignorance and misinformation.
alternatively, if you can replace Bitcoin with USD and your concerns are identical, then none of your concerns are valid arguments against cryptocurrency.
“Ok maybe we had bitcoin over a decade and nobody cared.”
this is incorrect.
cryptographers, economists and governments were and are excited about cryptocurrencies because they’re an obvious evolution in centralized currency, in the same way that debit cards linked to bank accounts were, and now QR codes and digital wallets are.
“It was mainly used by criminals and tax evader.”
this has been wrong and irrelevant as long as people have been saying it.
Between 35 to 39 percent of USD is used for criminal activity, does this rampant criminal activity make the USD illegitimate?
“The concept of [USD] is stupid when they just [literally print money from nowhere] once a too rich person [gets caught]”
See what I’m saying? literally just replace the words and see if what you’re saying is still valid.
Printing USD and writing laws to protect rich people is a problem.
“[USD] is not regulated by the government, but by rich people.”
they are called the federal reserve, a private company that manipulates the dollar value at will.
The American aristocracy illegally manipulates the printed paper.
[USD]has a 100% virtual value.
That’s what happens when you decouple a currency from It’s backing value, like when the USD got taken off the gold standard and private companies are allowed to print fiat currency at their own discretion.
“An artificial scarcity does not create value”
scarcity precisely creates value, that is how the federal reserve manipulates the value of the USD.
It’s literally why the interest rates have been lowered this year rather than continuing to increase, the federal reserve is trying to create an artificial scarcity.
“If tomorrow the the USA makes [USD] illegal, it’s value will drop a lot.”
oh, “a lot”?
The gold price certainly didn’t drop after being made illegal.
“I mean the stock market is similar, but at least it is regulated.”
leaving aside that you are unaware of existing and developing cryptocurrency regulations, why are you so proud of regulation when it has been shown to facilitate illegal fiat currency manipulation?
Yes, the USD and stock exchange are “regulated” to an extent, but that regulation is completely irrelevant since white collar crime and illegal activity has continued unabated since fiat currency has come into play.
cryptocurrency is also regulated.
it literally has tax forms, just like the fiat currency that criminals use.
“The rugpull was in the context of [USD].”
If you want to talk about rug pulls, type in USD fraud.
you’ll get a few hits.
none of what you typed was relevant or correct, just type what you think into a search engine if you’re unaware of the facts.
Don’t make things up that are demonstrably false with a simple search or substitution.
Ok when you said that NFTs are the same as any crypto currency you definitely showed that you don’t understand the difference.
Please tell me how crypto is regulated?
And I mean by a trustworthy entity like a state or at least a company that you can sue in case of error.
What regulations am I talking about?
Imagine you are at twitterX and have to pay some fines to a specific bank account. However because your incompetent ceo fired the accounting department the new people get the account wrong. Now your money is in the wrong place.
However in most countries keeping that money is illegal and the bank will assist you to get it back.
Now imagine they used bitcoin instead. They enter the wrong wallet. Once the transaction is done there is no way back. You could in some way try to get in contact with the person of the wallet, but you can’t even be sure you can get a hold of them.
Even better if you entered a nonexistent wallet. Then the money is gone. No backsis takis.
And don’t get me started with the cost of transaction, or the power cost…
“…when you said that NFTs are the same as any crypto currency…”
I made the exact opposite point, that nfts and cryptocurrency are not the same thing and that is the main problem with the meme.
“Please tell me how crypto is regulated?”
In general? currency is regulated by a regulatory organization imposing guidelines and legal restrictions on a currency so that the exploitation of that currency is minimized.
with USD, if you accrue mineral royalties, that is income and you would pay tax on those royalties according to the IRS.
if you mine cryptocurrency, that is income and you have to pay a tax on that mined cryptocurrency according to the IRS.
the IRS is a large regulatory body concerned with collecting taxes from the American population.
these are two examples of federal currency regulation.
since you asked about which companies regulate cryptocurrencies, we can look to coinbase, the largest centralized exchange for cryptocurrency.
coinbase complies with multiple banking acts such as KYC and consumer protection to ensure legitimate transactions the same way that your credit union or banking institution on the corner does.
Afaik coinbase does not actually use the Blockchain. It has a centralized own system for accounts in its system. It mirrors the value of bitcoin in its internal bitcoin. But you can’t buy bitcoin on coinbase and then send it to a real bitcoin wallet.
I mean in the case of bitcoin it makes no sense for normal people. You have several hundred $ of transaction fees. If that would happen in coinbase nobody would buy btc.
So your best platform for crypto is only mirroring the prices of the real Blockchains.
If you’re referring to the coinbase wallet, that’s on the blockchain.
you’re sending it to a custodial account owned by coinbase, not your own personal Bitcoin account.
It’s the same thing as having a bank account and giving all of your money to the bank.
You’re giving up absolute control of your funds for convenience, absolution of responsibility and imagined security.
That’s how broad societal financial operations still work for the moment. centralization isn’t always nefarious, but it is largely archaic at this point.
Too bad the integration has already been shitting up products. When the whole thing dies they’re gonna have to disentangle the AI bullshit and who knows what damage will remain afterwards.
