I heard a bunch of explanations but most of them seem emotional and aggressive, and while I respect that this is an emotional subject, I can’t really understand opinions that boil down to “theft” and are aggressive about it.
while there are plenty of models that were trained on copyrighted material without consent (which is piracy, not theft but close enough when talking about small businesses or individuals) is there an argument against models that were legally trained? And if so, is it something past the saying that AI art is lifeless?
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AI feels like a Lovecraftian horror to me. It’s trying to look authentic, but it’s wrong on a fundemental level. Nothing’s the right shape, nothing’s the right texture, nothing’s consistent, nothing belongs together… But somehow, nobody else has noticed what should be blatantly obvious! And when you try to point it out, you get a hivemind responding that it’s good actually, and you’re just a luddite.
But let’s assume AI stops being awful in a technical sense. It’s still awful in a moral sense.
Artists are poor. That’s a well known sentiment you see a lot and, given how many times I see commission postings, it’s pretty accurate. That artist needs to work to live, and that work is creating art.
AI is deliberately depriving these artists of work in order to give the AI’s owner a quick, low quality substitute. In some cases, it will copy an artist’s style, so you’re deliberately targetting a specific artist because they’re good at their job. And it’s using the artist’s work in order to replace them.
Yes, this. This particular comment best summarises how I feel about the topic.
Why would you need an argument beyond AI art is lifeless?
AI art proved beyond a doubt that death of the author was always 99% bullshit justifying media illiteracy. Now that we have art without an author and it is totally void of expression.
Death of the author is the idea that reader interpretation matters more than author’s intent, and it’s absolutely fair for media analysis. Sadly, too many people bundle it together with the idea that the author didn’t mean anything at all.
Heck, “the curtains were blue” applies authorial intent that there was no meaning behind the curtains. The death of the author reading shows that the curtains had a symbolic reason to be blue.
Who uses the Death of the Author to justify media illiteracy? I think you may be misunderstanding what the term means?
When people say “the author is dead”, what they mean is that, when interpreting a piece of art, it doesn’t matter what the original artist meant to say with it - for the purpose of the interpretation they are dead and you cannot ask them what they meant.
It’s always a personal matter what you see in art, any interpretation that makes sense to you is valid, even if it may not be what the artist intended. (That does not mean you can bullshit your way through poem analysis in school, different situation)
It’s always a personal matter what you see in art, any interpretation that makes sense to you is valid
No, the thing that the author was trying to express has far greater validity than whatever the reader makes up. If that wasn’t the case, AI art, where the author lacks any intent, wouldn’t seem so lifeless.
That presumes you can read the author’s mind. It’s impossible to tell with 100% certainty what an author meant to say. You can make assumptions and some can be more plausible than others and people can agree that one interpretation seems more valid than another but that’s it. When a work of art is released into the world, the author has no authority over its meaning.
A good artist of course can make certain intentions very obvious and control, to a certain degree, what the recipient feels. That’s what you’re perceiving as missing in AI generated pictures.
So often I have friends read a book or watch a movie and say “I don’t really get it, it doesn’t make sense, I didn’t really like it” and then some time later they’ll come back and say “actually, I read the Wikipedia article about it and now I understand. The author actually intended it to be about [xyz]”
Um, what? If those themes and ideas were not evident in the original story, then what does it matter what the author intended? Surely the author also intended to write a cohesive and understandable story (and evidently failed, for you). Surely the author intended to convey those themes in the story itself. You didn’t enjoy the movie, you enjoyed reading the Wikipedia article about the movie.
If author intention actually matters to non-meta media analysis, then that totally undermines anything the author actually does to convey the ideas in the work itself.
If (to make a specific example) my friend watches Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg and concludes only from the Wikipedia article about it that it’s abstractly about Oshii’s loss of religion, then that totally ignores everything in the movie that does or doesn’t convey those themes just to create a shallow interpretation based on what the author was allegedly trying to do.I get what you’re saying and I make that same criticism sometimes, but
- works don’t exist in a vacuum, context is part of any work of art, and sometimes that means reading the plaque next to a painting, sometimes that means looking something up on wikipedia.
Nobody outside of historians would be able to interact with like 80% of historical art if supplemental information wasn’t valid.
- You don’t have to be moved at the first moment you look at a piece of art for that art to be moving.
I’m not prepared to say that death of the author is entirely invalid, or even that the viewer has to accept the author’s intention, only that understanding or at least sensing that is a vital aspect of art.
I mostly agree although rather than saying author intention is a vital aspect of art I would say it can be, but that the raw, uninformed experience is almost always more important
Because it means nothing to me. sorry to disappoint but I don’t even understand that argument, I saw plenty of AI images that looked full of life to me, so what does that even mean that it is lifeless? Maybe explain it instead of just being condescending about it.
When a human creates art, there is some intent on it, some emotions they felt when they decided the color pallete, the form… The fact that someone created it and that there’s some story behind it gives the piece weight.
Why is an abstract monument created by humans something other humans like to see, and doesn’t happen the same on a landslide? Because there’s a story behind it.
AI art is lifeless because there’s no intent behind it, you don’t appreciate the skill of the author behind it. It’s just prompt mastery and anyone can replicate it, it’s cheap.
It’s like comparing human made sculptures with 3d printed sculptures, if 3d printers could create details and work in big sizes. It’s cheap.
Okay, I guess I just don’t connect to that argument because intent and understanding the artist is rarely a thing I look for in day to day art. 99% of the images I see that make me feel anything do so because of the imagery itself plus sometimes my own experience that might come to mind from it.
It’s the difference between having a friend, and having an AI friend.
I disagree strongly on that argument. I’ve seen many examples of AI generated images that have genuinely made me stop, and shake my head in amazement.
That says more about you than about AI.
No. I watched a video recently of one of the best figure tutors around. Upset with AI. As he critiqued them, multiple times he struggled to tell if it was AI or not. Now, if one of the top YouTube figure drawing instructors struggled at times to identify the difference in his attack against the tech, I’m pretty comfortable saying that it can absolutely move you.
Give us some examples of moving AI generated images.
The thing, even with human-made art, is that what’s “moving” is highly personal. Maybe accept that their experience is different from yours?
Art is a form of communication, to hear that someone can be moved by expressionless AI slop is kinda like hearing someone had an enlightening conversation with a dog.
Like sure I can imagine someone can interpret a dog’s barks to mean something, but it’s still a bizarre scenario that says more about the person than it does the art.
Some people find religious rapture from seeing the Virgin Mary’s image on a grilled cheese sandwich. The human brain is a strange and wonderful thing.
When you can’t tell if a machine made it, and it moves you personally, then what invisible metric are you defining, and judging it on?
Same metrics anyone judges art by, what it says to them. This is incredibly context dependent.
Show me the art and if just showing it to someone is insufficient, explain it to me.
As an artist who has had her art stolen before for usage in an AI output, being against any and all art theft is the default and perfectly reasonable standpoint for an artist. On some art websites, AI generated images fall under the rule against art theft. This is because AI models scrape artists’ work without their consent, and the output of a prompt is reliant on the amalgamation of the aforementioned scraped artworks. I’ve personally seen some AI images in which the mangled remains of artists’ signatures are still visible.
The best analogy I can offer to explain why this is theft is that typing in a prompt into an AI image generator is like commissioning an artist to draw something for you, except the artist turns out to be someone who traces people’s art and picks stolen artwork to trace from to match the prompt, and then claiming that it was you who created the image.
From an artists view, it basically makes them obsolete. Sucks. Also, legally trained AI has a lot less training data, therefore worse output and so illegal models will always be preferred.
From a tech view, AI does not create anything new. It remixes. If we remove artists, which will happen as AIs are simply cheaper, we won’t have anything new. From there on, you can imagine it like that: An artist creates images that are 99-100% of what the goal was, dictated by clients or digitally identified by tags, due to logic, reason, creativity and communication. And they only get better. With AIs, they have like 90% accuracy, due to technical limitations. And once a generated image, which only has 90% accuracy, is used as training data for new images, it only gets worse.
For example, if there are enough images with 6 fingers, created by AI, in training data, that will become the norm.
Basically, authors, artists etc. will be obsolete for a few years, until the AI bubble mostly collapses and quality is so bad that companies and individuals hire professionals again. Then AIs will be used for low-requirement things only again, eg. private memes or roleplay.
So artists are probably angry because they are replaced by much inferior things, that leeched off of themselves and will be gone in a few years anyway. AI just does not make sense, in most cases.
Artists are not becoming obsolete, that is just wrong.
I haven’t seen an AI make an convincing oil painting yet :-)
I think what most people think of as “artists” is actually the job they sometimes do, like layout and graphic design etc. That isn’t going obsolete either, it’s just new tools to help, and maybe the demand will be lowerbecause of it.
Physical artists won’t, especially those doing plastic art. Most modern art is now digital though, contracted for various things, professionally and privately.
And for oil paintings, AI creators are going to find a way. This is capitalism after all.
And with new tools for design, either you’ll be just replaced entirely or you’ll get paid a lot less because “you just ask ChatGPT” or “I could do that with tool X for free”.
Physical artists won’t, especially those doing plastic art.
Why would they be safe with 3D printers being a thing?
That’s kind of its own category of art: designing 3D-Printed stuff.
I mean stuff like cutting wood or doing something out of bricks etc.
What difference does the medium make? The people who think AI pictures are good enough or even better than art made by humans will be perfectly fine with generating 3D models and printing them if they want any kind of sculpture.
I think he meant painting and the like when saying “plastic arts”, not doing art with plastic.
Or so I guess.
Plastic arts is sculptures, three dimensional things like statues. Nothing to do with plastic, the material. It just so happens that 3D printing is a type of plastic art that uses types of plastic as its medium.
Not only 3D things, it englobes paintings too, some add photo & film even.
If that’s the case, it’s a language barrier thing. The equivalent to “plastic art” in my native language excludes paintings.
I haven’t seen an AI make an convincing oil painting yet :-)
Maybe not for you, but search for oil painting prints on amazon and you’ll find tons of AI generated stuff. The average Joe already can’t tell the difference.
An oil painting print is lika a video of fireworks.
What if I use tens of thousands of light-up drones flying in the sky to create a virtual display, and then I use that display to create a 3D image of a fireworks show?
Believe it or not, straight to jail!
This response assumes an artist wants to be a professional artist, that wants to make a living from it. There are MANY artists, that have no interest of turning their source of joy, into a source of income, and all that comes with it.
Exactly. I have no intention of selling my art and I object strongly to it being used by some company for their own profit. That’s mine, wtf makes them think they can use it, regardless of its current monetisation status?
Art is largely about feeling and emotion, but you insist on rejecting arguments that are arguing about emotion.
Interesting.
You can’t understand why people don’t like being stolen from by corporations, and why others don’t want to buy stolen work?
You can’t understand the difference between digital piracy, humans taking media from corporations for personal use, and the above, corporations taking from humans for commercial use?
For professional artists, AI art is taking away their livelihood. Many of them already lived in precarious conditions in a tough job market before and this is only getting worse now, with companies increasingly relying on cheaper AI art for things like concept art etc.
For me, as a hobbyist and art consumer, the main issue is AI art invading “my” spaces. I want to look at Human-made art and have no interest in AI-generated content whatsoever. But all the platforms are getting flooded with AI content and all the filters I set to avoid it barely help. Many users on these platforms roleplay as real artists as well and pretend their art isn’t AI, which annoys me quite a bit. I don’t mind if people want to look at AI art, but they should leave me alone with it and don’t force it down my throat.
If you worked hard, learned a craft, and spent countless hours honing it and I took your work without asking you and used it to enrich myself and my talentless tech bro buddies, how would you feel?
It would suck, but I wouldn’t blame others for enjoying a service that they perceive as convenient. Of course I would blame you for theft/piracy, as I think artists should against illegally trained models.
You don’t make LLMs with the enormous amount of training data they require to work well without theft/piracy.
Are you starting to understand why people are upset about this?
It’s a form of coattail riding. It’s no different from tracing.
I have a 1 hour video from a digital artist/ programmer that will tell you essentially why it being lifeless matters.
Essentialy, everything before AI was either of mechanistic natural beauty, derived from biological chemical, physical processes, like the leaf of a plant the winding of rivers the shape of mountains etc. ,or it was made by human desicions, there was intentionality thought and perseverance behind every sentence you read, every object you held or owned, every depiction you would look at.
And this made the thing made by humanity inherently understandable as a result of human descion making, creativity, you might not agree with the causes and the outcomes of those decisions, but there was something there to retrace, and this retracing this understanding, made it beautifull, unique or interesting.
Same with the natural objects and phenomenon, you could retrace their existence to causes, causes that unfold a world in their own right, leading you to ask questions about their existence, their creation, their process.
In this retracing, these real links to people, to land and to nature lies the real beauty. The life so to say is them being part of this network for you to take a peek into, through their art, their creation, their mere existence.
Now we have a third category a thing or text or image that exists solely because an imitation machine, an AI is able to crate it, and it can fulfill some profit motive, there is no thought and no intentionality behind this writing this art and so on, it’s a result of statistical models which are built on what existed in the real world, and robs most if not all of these building blocks by just existing. It fills their place, it takes the energy they needed, the intelligence and decision-making they can create, and uses it to replace them, gradually over time.
And it doesn’t really give back, it doesn’t create value in the sense that we can retrace and understand what it makes, it’s a statistical result, there are no causes to peek into besides pretty boring math, and a collection of data it was trained on, a collection so big and varied that looking at it’s entirety might as well just be looking at everything, it tells us nothing, it doesn’t lead us to ask what there is behind it in the same way.
So hear me out… I think AI could be financially very helpful to artists, while giving them a chance to do more meaningful work. Businesses buy a ton of stock photos, graphics and art. An artist could create a library of original digital pieces (they probably already have it) and use that for the source of new AI generated digital content, which in turn would go back into the source library. This reduces the cost/time associated with soulless stock/business content, but positions the artist to maintain a revenue stream. With the extra time, the artist could work on their preferred pieces or be commissioned to do one-offs.
But why would they do that when they can just generate the content, no artist required?
Because it is not as good, doesn’t have a consistent style (needed for branding), and may put the business at risk of law suits. So, buying stock images is preferred.
It doesnt matter if its half the quality if its 1% of the price. Heck, even 0.1% of the price
I do a fair amount of stock images purching, and the stance of the businesses I work with is that it isn’t worth the risk of suit and embarrassment to get a slightly cheaper image that isn’t as good. It might not be universally true, but that has been my experience at F500 companies.
There are a lot of local businesses that I could immediately tell had ai images on their website. Smaller shops, that probably also dont know the negative connotation with ai, or just dont care
Think of AI creations as being like the TV dinners of the creative world. Is it cuisine? No. Is it productive? Not very much. Is it wrongful to make/eat? Not technically, and I’m not one to cancel, but even someone who isn’t a part of the backlash would rank it below the alternatives.
I think as long as all the training data and the results are public and free to use and modify there is no moral problem beyond artist livelihood which is sad but just a part of life. Jobs have come and gone for as long as humans exist, its something we have to accept long term.
So far artists themselves are still very good at catching even high quality AI pictures tho. AI models produce something that only looks like human art on the surface, but it still misses lots of things. In many cases it wont replace existing art because often the human and the story behind art is what makes people appreciate it.
