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Norithics

The AI 'Art' Issue

So I'm sure you've seen the buzz: machine learning algorithms are being "trained" to "create art." An interesting application of the technology, but the phrasing used by enthusiasts purposely leaves a lot of the details out.

"Training" in this case means "scraping together tons and tons of pieces of art off of the internet without any of the aforementioned artists' permission" and "creating" means "editing together in a convincing singular image." This isn't my opinion, this is an inescapable fact; it's how the technology works. Without samples, it has nothing to draw on, and as well- and this is crucial for people to understand- the machine does not comprehend concepts. It does not know what an elephant is. It doesn't understand what "people" are. The reason why it's able to create the image is because you're throwing one lever that throws seven levers that throw a thousand levers, and they're all attached to cropped images of what's being asked for. That's how machines work- they can't conceptualize, they just approximate through imitation. The actual impressive part is being done by artists who are almost entirely uncredited.

Defenders of this state of affairs have several arguments they like to rely on when criticism comes their way.

- "It's not stealing, it's just like how you learned art!"


It really isn't though. The machine can't create anything it hasn't seen. To be clear, most of the actual good, impressive pieces created aren't original at all- you do the research on them and find out that it's mostly just a singular piece done by a real artist with a little editing to make it fit certain parameters. Because of course it is, the machine doesn't know or understand what's aesthetically pleasing, it's just getting there by accident because everything you fed it looks nice. Oh and if you really think it isn't cutting and pasting things together, why do the artist signatures end up in some of them?

- "Getting permission would be impossible, you shouldn't have put your art up on the internet if you didn't want it downloaded."

This is a really crafty sleight-of-hand argument that presupposes we wanted to be stolen from. What a nice, comforting thing to think to yourself while you're robbing us blind! Of course it intentionally forgets that in order to get commissions, you have to have examples of your art- and to get noticed enough to get business, you have to upload said art. Especially in the modern attention economy, it's impossible to compete without a constant stream of new uploads. As artists, this is the concession we have always made. We do it because we have to and we understand that. That is not blanket permission to take our art and do whatever the hell you please with it like those fly-by-night T-shirt image printing websites that scrape DeviantArt and Twitter! We all know this.

- "You're just mad because your job's being automated. Your art will be better once you stop doing it for money!"

Listen.
Nobody wants to stop doing art for money more than me. This business isn't easy. It's exhausting on a physical and mental level to be your own worker, boss, PR man, advertiser and accountant all in one- all on platforms that are inherently hostile to you. I would love to do art just for myself and my friends.

But I live in Capitalism. Not the state of buying and selling things: that's Commerce, we've had that for thousands of years. I live in a system where I have to sell my labor to eat, to survive. We all do. All this "disruptive technology" is attempting to "disrupt" is the value of that labor, short-selling creativity so that the neat luxuries we make can be had for free.

And you know what?
Here comes the third act twist.
I want that too.
I want to abolish copyright and unchain creatives. I want everyone to be able to create freely regardless of IP or original work, to trace and edit and copy and do whatever they like.

But again, I live in Capitalism.
So I can't morally back that action. I cannot ethically say that we should throw caution to the wind and throw everyone's work into the bucket and go wild, because unfortunately right now there are consequences for it. We cannot put the cart before the horse on this: if you want total creative freedom, we can't get it under this economic system.

Footnote:

If you want to throw every single piece I've ever done into your robot picture slurry generator, do it. I give you this permission expressly (for my art only, don't use me as a moral justification to steal from others); I don't care. What makes my art special isn't the lines or the color blending or the shape of the faces (or let's be real, the butts). It's the one thing in the machine prompt that's always left blank: The Ideas. You can't teach a machine to be creative.

EDIT: This video makes several more good points about the ends of this technology.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjSxFAGP9Ss
Viewed: 957 times
Added: 2 years, 6 months ago
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ScottySkunk
2 years, 6 months ago
this is a good post.
Launny
2 years, 6 months ago
thank you
NeksusCat
2 years, 6 months ago
Preach!
Very well put and said.
It's been bugging me for days for a propper answer to those insane logical gymnastics these "AI Bros" doing to justify their actions, cuz it always danced on the edge lf my mind and couldn't fully form, nor did I care enough to think it through.
Seth65
2 years, 6 months ago
Well put overall, especially the last part. Though I do find the phrasing of the middle argument to be a bit disheartening, implying that artists only post work as advertisement for commissions and they wouldn't post it otherwise. Personally, I'm of the mind that art isn't art until it gets out there in the world. As you say in your third point, we live in a capitalist society, so I get that posting work has the dual purpose of also advertising, getting the word out about yourself to potential customers. But I think that if you were guaranteed a decent steady pay, but you had to toss your work into a furnace once you were done, there'd be a lot less people keen on making art their career.

This isn't to argue you're necessarily wrong, and most certainly not to argue the AI guys are right, just that it's a surprising attitude to hear from you.
Norithics
2 years, 6 months ago
Well the reason that sounds so unreasonable is because it's not what I said. I said "we don't have a choice but to upload our art if we want to survive in Capitalism, ergo we cannot be blamed for uploading said art; it's required." I did NOT say "we would not upload our art for others to enjoy anyway if we didn't have to do this." These two thoughts don't follow one another.
Seth65
2 years, 6 months ago
I suppose the wording and focus on it paints it as the primary motivator. Usually stating how one is forced to do something implies that there's a solid desire to do the opposite. I understand now you're simply stating facts rather than trying to imply anything, though I think there's a better way to approach it as money isn't the only reason people are peeved when their art is stolen.
SenGrisane
2 years, 6 months ago
Whenever you write about something it's really well written. Thank you!
JackieTheBunny
2 years, 6 months ago
I'm not exactly the best at explaining my thoughts all the time, but I'll try my best.

I agree 100% with the points you've made in this post. In my opinion, AI "art" is not art; it will never be art... In and of itself. However, I still feel AI could be cool if it was just. Done. Right. If they simply created an AI and fed it images from artists who CONSENT, it would make a great reference tool. Can't picture that pose? Type it in, and get a ref spat out to use.
TehZee
2 years, 6 months ago
Couldn't have said it better myself.
Smolfoks
2 years, 6 months ago
The way I see things going is that the background lurker types who don't interact with anyone outside of closed circles who don't buy art, keep active on any platform or really participate in the art scene outside of trying to rip as much porn from sites as possible will use art AI to try to squeeze as much crappy free content out as possible while the foreground folk who actually upload and get art from names they enjoy will continue to do so.

Unless things involving this specific kind of AI suddenly get a massive demand, I don't foresee much changing, at least in the visible future. I think this is going to be a fad for a bit and then either taper off into irrelevancy or find a niche purpose elsewhere.
supersonicz
2 years, 6 months ago
tbh, if i could run the ai local on my PC i'd run your art just to see what it spat out, see if I could get some prompts that you could use for something better. but I cant, cuz it *needs* to be online for everyone to see and use.
DiogenesShandor
2 years, 6 months ago
How is that different from how you make your own images? You have to see a lot of examples of a thing to get an idea of what it looks like.

edit:
If the machine isn't creative than neither is anyone else.

edit:
And I bet a lot of animals people are drawing on this site the artists have only seen in other drawings; not even photographs, just other drawings
Norithics
2 years, 6 months ago
Because I can make things I haven't seen. I can imagine things that don't exist and have no comparable images to craft from. I can compose an image, I can utilize positive and negative space, I can make small decisions that add to the realism or surrealism of an image on the fly. Your AI will only ever imitate the results of art- it will never be able to understand how to evoke a feeling.
DiogenesShandor
2 years, 6 months ago
Have you noticed, for example, that all the echidnas on this site look reminiscent of Knuckles or Julie-Su, both of whom are extremely stylized and look nothing like a real echidna? Or how any time anybody tries to draw an Velociraptor they wind up drawing a featherless Deinonychus instead, because almost everyone's main (and often only) refrence for them is Jurassic Park and its imitators?
drader145
2 years, 6 months ago
I never quite realized exactly what these A.I.s do, and I work in the Tech Sector. Knowing that these machines are essentially scraping Google Images - while not surprising in hindsight - is kinda shocking. I guess that's kinda the point though? Have the process so far in the background the nobody questions how it works. It just does.

Gonna start being a bit more wary and conscious of these kinds of developments now. Thanks for giving me something to think about as I continue my career!
DiogenesShandor
2 years, 6 months ago
The OP makes it sound like its making some kind of collage. It's not, that's not how these systems work. Even your own brain has to be trained with existing images to know what something looks like
Norithics
2 years, 6 months ago
It's a mural. We've had them for centuries.
Also, explain the goddamn artist signatures. Like come on.
Norithics
2 years, 6 months ago
The biggest element is the one of consent. One of the most popular prompts for these things is "trending on ArtStation," which should tell you all you need to know about the moral dimensions of this.
kamimatsu
2 years, 6 months ago
If an ai writer were to get consent, and were not to use anything they did nlt receive consent on, would that particular instance be okay?
Norithics
2 years, 6 months ago
Of course. As I said late in the journal, I wouldn't even care if it scraped absolutely everything in existence as long as it wasn't taking the food out of the mouth of artists who already have it hard enough.
kamimatsu
2 years, 6 months ago
That's fair
DiogenesShandor
2 years, 6 months ago
The most viable way to disrupt the system itself is to disrupt a critical mass of its subsystems. Eventually a tipping point will be reached where society will be forced to reevaluate the concept of labor. But that point won't be reached any time soon if people keep obstructing it.
Norithics
2 years, 6 months ago
Fucking over artists isn't going to make the revolution happen faster, and any idea to the contrary is tankie wank.
Resua
2 years, 6 months ago
I agree it isnt art, but the process used isnt being described correctly.

The NN is 'trained' on images containing a keyword.  It develops patterns that images containing that keyword have, then starting from a sample image of some sort, it compresses and applies random noise.  (This is why they generate a specific resolution of output, they were trained with that resolution as input.)  After enough steps of noise, the model attempts to remove the noise, more and more steps, to 'generate' the image itself.  That's where these silly kind-of-signatures come from, turning noise into an image, using patterns it was trained on.  The sample image can be entirely unrelated, or literally just random noise.

Setting all this aside, legally, they are 'transformative.'  They are not recreating an existing image, though the generated image will contain patterns of other images.  But what they output is not something that previously existed.

They are NOT 'creative.'  The NN doesnt understand it's output or the Input.  And the way this type of NN works, it never will.  It's not really an AI in the 'thinking' sense.  It cannot 'fix' what you don't like about an image, it cannot make changes without using this generating process, and it does not create an idea out of whole cloth.  There may well be other tools layered on this in the future, but the core of the NN is not creative, its a pattern engine.
ElfenSciuridae
2 years, 6 months ago
I agree with you 100%!
Norithics
2 years, 6 months ago
Images are patterns, though. You take an image's "pattern" and you've taken the image. It's... I don't understand why anyone would care about this distinction.
Resua
2 years, 6 months ago
So, here's what makes this seem like magic or just 'copy pasting' to people.  The concept is actually pretty tricky to explain without throwing around huge math terms.  Even to me, who actually has implemented and trained NNs!  Because its not taking the image itself, it's not like it copy-pastes or clips it out and saves it in memory.  That's really the biggest misconception here.  It's not storing parts of the image, there is no way to recover the image from the training data.  What the Diffusion NN is storing is the pattern of probabilities of noise.  A picture might explain it easier.

This is what the NN is fed.  The image on the left is a training image, the images moving towards the right are what it is training on. Adding layers of more and more random noise to the training image.  What it wants to do, is go from Right, to Left, by ONLY undoing the noise.  So it calculates probabilities for each step, and integrates that into it's network.  Then train it on say.. 10000 images of cats, turning into noise.  Now it has a NN  that tries to make noise into 'cats.'   THis is actually fairly simple and a cellphone has enough compute power to do such a simple NN.  Just expand the concept out to add more keywords, etc.

The gist is, it DOESN'T actually contain the data it was trained on.  It cant copy-paste or retain the image, because that data simply isnt there.

That said, I dont think it's ethical to be using artwork or images without permission to train an NN, let alone a commercial product, or to imply that it's output is 'your own art' simply because you put in some keywords or masked of some areas of an eimage you liked, or uploaded someone elses creative work to get reverse noise filtered.
DiogenesShandor
2 years, 6 months ago
That's what I've been trying to say, but people don't seem to want to listen.
Norithics
2 years, 6 months ago
... Yeah, no, I understood what you meant- I'm just not dazzled by the idea that it does things the hard way. Without the image on the left, it does not function, full stop, correct? Then what difference does it make?
Resua
2 years, 6 months ago
TehZee
2 years, 6 months ago
Copying is copying.... Regardless of whatever mathematical mumbo-jumbo is used to justify it...
Without the source images, it has nothing, period...
DiogenesShandor
2 years, 6 months ago
In any case, forbidding the use of unlicensed copyrighted works in training the bots would only be a temporary setback. There are millions - or likely even billions or trillions - of public domain works out there as well as a huge number of creative commons works that can be used under simple easy to meet conditions that don't involve payment or negotiation
ElfenSciuridae
2 years, 6 months ago
I remember back in the 1980s some computer programmer wrote some "AI Program" that wrote poetry and then published the book based on what the program wrote as "poetry."

First of all, it was the most stupidest thing I ever read - all 150-something pages of it. As for "AI" for those of us who can remember, there was a BASIC Program called "ELIZA, The Computerized Therapist." It was a simple message parser that ripped apart your inputs and turned them back into questions that demanded more details. There was no AI in it, just an algorithm that did little but look up key words and added to them to make questions - nothing more. This AI was based on "ELIZA" and was fed random generated questions and turned them into nonsensical statements that the programmer said was "AI Generated Poetry."

Really? AI Generated Poetry? My Crusty Balls says that it is not!

This AI Generated art is that. Given the basic rules of a program like Photoshop/GIMP, Blender/Maya, Inkscape and throw in the basic rules of backgrounds and how the human form is put into such a back ground situation, and add rules to add furry features to it, and generate does not make it art.

This AI Generated art has some human intervention to it. It is not something that the computer did on its own. In its data banks it has examples of "Person sitting on the ground" and the human programmer says that it wants a Anthro Furry sitting on a grassy field and it will go through the data bank to get the background of the grassy field, add a layer for the person sitting on the field and then add Athro Furry features on the person and it is done. This is all Template driven, with millions of templates for the computer to work on.

The major point in this is that there is no imagination from the computer to do this. It can not see that it plans to do other that select and choose from what it was told what to do. In this, this is what destroys it as being art, as it is not. Art is derived from the mind and the imagination, not from a template. People as artists have imagination, a computer, no matter how complex its AI is, does not have an imagination. That is the difference and that is what destroys this as Computer Generated Imagery and not as "Computer Generated Art."

Know The Difference!
DiogenesShandor
2 years, 6 months ago
Neural networks don't work like ELIZA at all. Eliza just pulls words out of the input and inserts them into standard templates. AI doesn't actually contain any of the original training data that was fed into it, it just uses that data to form an concept of what different sorts of things look like
ElfenSciuridae
2 years, 6 months ago
Eliza is a program that ran on a 8bit computer from the 1970s/1980s though it was originally written on a mainframe in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Today's Neural nets are simulated on hundreds of servers on fast networks, or on a Super Computer like a Cray. There is no comparison at all in terms of the hardware.

But Neural Nets learn through "Machine Learning" and "Big Data," which is fed to it in massive amounts. But it is still a program processing data. Hardware could make the computer to be able to talk, but it takes software to make that software sing. There is a difference between the two. It is still parsing data and making logical deductions based on its root program.

A brain is not running a program, it is acting upon what it has learned over its life and its experiences. Neural Nets do not have a life, it does not learn by experience. It learns by what it is programmed to it and the data it is told to process. That is a major difference between the two.
DiogenesShandor
2 years, 6 months ago
" ElfenSciuridae wrote:
People as artists have imagination, a computer, no matter how complex its AI is, does not have an imagination.


What if someone ran a brute force atomic scale simulation of a human brain? That would have all the mental capacities as a flesh and blood human. We don;t habe the processing power or sufficiently detailed recordings of the structure of the brain yet, but that's the only thing stopping it from being done, and once it is done it would be pretty much impossible, (barring a defect in the hardware, the brain scan, or the design of the way the particles are simulated), for it to NOT have the capacities of a human
ElfenSciuridae
2 years, 6 months ago
HA! Every brain simulation ever created, whether it was Soviet Union/Russia, China, US American, etc., all have one thing in common: They all went insane, fell into a depression and terminated themselves months or even days after their creation and have been turned on. Digital Psychologists (Yes, there is a thing), all determine that the reason why these simulations terminated themselves is because of Sensory Deprivation. Some will even will even throw in that they were "lonely" as they were a unique construct. But when thrown this question, these So-Called Experts could not give an answer.

The question is: "Why do these simulations commit suicide because of Sensory Deprivation, when a person who is blind, deaf and paralyzed from the neck down want to continue to live?"

A simulated brain no matter how fast it can "Think" is no match for the real thing. A living brain is partly the sum of its lifetime experiences, a simulated brain has no life time of experience to have it as part of its sum.
DiogenesShandor
2 years, 6 months ago
I don't know what you're on about here. AFAIK no brain simulation project has ever successfully gotten past the level of rats and mice, that's all we have the processing power for
TehZee
2 years, 6 months ago
.....Pretty sure nobody has actually done that yet outside of science fiction....
CocoMania
2 years, 6 months ago
"If you want total creative freedom, we can't get it under this economic system"

Couldn't have said it better 👏
DiogenesShandor
2 years, 6 months ago
Because having to hire and pay a professional is a barrier
Resua
2 years, 6 months ago
Other way around, creative artists (and indeed, everyone) needs money to work and live in our current society.  Everyone is held back by that.  There's a lot of art that never leaves one's mind, things undone or left uncreated, and science that goes unresearched because money fuels it all.
Norithics
2 years, 6 months ago
Above all the biggest concern. I've been an advocate of letting people use my characters, works, etc. in whatever way they see fit because I believe in Creative Freedom and it doesn't hurt bespoke personal commission business. All the same, we're stuck under the yoke, and that's why people have to be protective.
ShanetheFreestyler
2 years, 6 months ago
As soon as you mentioned copyright, my mind instantly jumped to Disney and how they fucked up copyright laws for decades. And the ironic part is half of their works were adaptations of other works that fell into public domain under far less time than anything Disney ever made will.
MacDragon991
2 years, 6 months ago
I feel weird about the AI art situation myself.  Part of me thinks of it as a really neat tool to help visualize some designs or bases that I can adapt to my own work, but also I do see the stigma behind it as well not stealing bits from other's work.  
Resua
2 years, 6 months ago
Yes and no.  It needs an image set, once, to train.  Once it's trained then it uses random noise to generate images, by trying to convert the noise back into an image using the developed NN.  It's trying to convert randomness, back into what it was trained on.  It's a massively complex algorithm, but that is ultimately all it is.  Making random noise into a cat. There is no need for an input image.  While there are ~1024 intermediate steps, plus a Convolutional NN driven upscaler,this is an example result.

Again, this is why I argue it is not art, and it is transformation, not creation.  It's just random noise ran though what is basically a noise filter designed to remove noise in a way that generates an image.  But it is also not just tracing, or copying and pasting or gluing and stretching.

That said, I don't know what some of these NN's that people here use are doing.  Mine starts with random noise, but I CAN start it with an image of a cat (or really, anything?) and add random noise to said image, then have the NN denoise it closer to a full image.  In which case, the output will be loosely based on the input, depending on how much noise is added.  It's one (dishonest) way you can guide an NN to a specific goal.  I appreciate the Irony. (Deepfake image)

You've seen and taken part in this kind of training, too.  Teaching a NN how to recognize things needed to operate a car.  Every time you do a captcha with cars, trucks, pedestrians, crosswalks, road signs, or stoplights, you're contributing to the training of a vehicle driving NN.

None of this is me trying to justify using artists work to train an NN for a product, as I have maintained, I feel it's unethical and stealing.  But it's difficult to argue against something if you don't understand it, and someone shows up wowing the crowd with pictures and diagrams and progressions that are misleading.  Or worse yet, someone discredits you because you make a minor mistake.

So:  YES, the NN uses images for training.  NO, the images are not retained or integrated as objects into the NN.  NO, the output isn't copyright of those who's images were used to train the NN (Under current copyright law, as this is transformative.  For example, the Obama yes we can, etc.)  And unless the persons who run the NN input someone else's art as the source noise, what it makes isn't derived from any single art piece.  It is transformed from random noise.

I suspect it wont be long before there's some case law formed around this.  Very thorny.
Exelbirth
2 years, 6 months ago
I always viewed these algorithmic things as advanced copy/paste machines.  Fun for personal use, but attempts to sell what it makes is no better than going to an art museum, making traces of everything, and trying to sell those.

Perhaps one day we will have a true AI that can conceptualize.  If we ever do, I hope it creates art, so we can see how a true AI views the world.
astralHaze
2 years, 6 months ago
my main though is what if artists started drawing some terrible pieces of intentionally aesthetically unpleasing art to sabotage ais
like ai people can still work around it, but it'd still probably screw over the laziest
Volcanincuss
2 years, 6 months ago
I can't use it to make shit, all I want to do is make some model sheets, it fuckin sucks :(
Relee
2 years, 6 months ago
I've got a lot on my mind, reading that. I kinda have like, counter-arguments or counter-points for everything you said, but I don't want to start a fight or come off as combative, and I don't know if you want to have a discussion about all that or not. You replied to my journal before you posted this, I dunno if I inspired it or what.

I did make some points in my reply to your reply there. I really don't know if you're right or I'm right, and I would like to get to the bottom of it. I did watch that vid about how these things work and were designed, and it makes sense to me that even though they can't understand what the thing is that's being requested, they can understand what its properties are, and make a new image using the properties it understands. It's like the programs used for facial recognition and object recognition in image processing, only backwards. I guess you know that if you watched the vid I linked, though. And like I said, I don't know if they all work like that or what. Only the most recent ones are open source, most of them are very confidential, and I haven't examined the open source ones in detail yet.

Anyways I don't want to say more without you saying you're okay with talking about it. I don't know if you're mad as heck and don't want to discuss it, or if you're actually super chill and interested in that sort of thing. You know I don't want to hurt people or leave them starving or whatever, I hope. I also hope I didn't already say too much, if you don't want to talk about it!

So, would you like to hear counterpoints and such, and have a discussion? You can also counter my counterpoints and so on, until we figure it out or get tired of it.

All the best either way.
LoZeed
2 years, 6 months ago
I personally liken AI art to low quality fast food, sure it's edible but it's a bad idea to constantly indulge in it and it can screw up your tastes for the real thing.
(Often I use crappy ai renders as a jumping off point for my own art)
Furman
2 years, 6 months ago
to tell you the truth the AI are can be amazing and the most cursed stuff I have ever seen in my life I'll look now and again but normal art will always be what you what it to be
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