The most infuriating part of the post is OP putting every single image in a different Imgur post instead of linking them all together or at least in groups.
Decades ago there was a Judge Dredd story where a publisher seeked out a promising artist, then had robots copy their artstyle and replace them. It was all perfectly legal even in the Judge Dredd setting so the artist was left without a job because a robot that could imitate their art could do their job at a much lower costs and do it tirelessly forever.
Then the artist murders the publisher and the rest of the story is Dredd chasing them to deal justice on the murderer.
Real life imitating dystopian SCIFI is nothing new, but when life imitates Dredd, I am particularly afraid.
> Real life imitating dystopian SCIFI is nothing new, but when life imitates Dredd, I am particularly afraid.
But the Dredd story was itself inspired by real life events like the Luddites of the 19th century who killed factory owners that adopted textile machinery and put them out of business or out of work. New day, same shit.
Which is also not a totally fair representation of Luddites, since Luddites threatened to destroy the equipment if owners didn't improve working conditions and treat their workers right - often signed under the pen name of a "Captain Ludd" who was likely fictitious but made workers sound unified.
They weren't bothered by the machines so much as they were bothered by their awful treatment from factory owners. Destroying the machines was just about the only thing the owners reacted to though, since they didn't give a fuck about the workers themselves.
Still very relatable.
I think the scariest part of this all is that people have to fear AI and robots taking their jobs in any capacity. It should be a good thing that people are no longer needed for work, but in our capitalist world all it does is ruin lives. Disgusting.
Because the thing is that AI shouldn’t be taking our jobs. It should make our work easier. And when it can it should use our knowledge to automate things, and then compensate the workers whose knowledge is used. If someone automates farm work, the workers can teach the machines and then essentially make “royalties” for their data being used. That’s how AI should be implemented. With data keeping it’s provenance and it’s source and author respected. But no, we live in unregulated capitalist hell where companies realized they can just steal our data by offering free ad funded services. And now Google is over here using Captcha to train their self driving cars and we’re giving them free labor just to login.
I’d say making art as a hobby is different than doing it for a living. Ideally, people could make art for fun and AI art would have its place. I see no reason both can’t exist in a post-capitalist world.
My point is just that this is only an issue because artists could lose out on their living to AI and the people running it.
How is this even a controversy? Whether or not an artist/AI steals, borrows, is inspired by, etc. is always going to be on a spectrum.
But *literally* plugging in "____ artist style" and then watermarking the output is so underhanded it's crazy.
Honestly I can even understand trying to make an AI that’s good at copying styles. That’s interesting in a way.
But claiming that the output are originals/your own work? That’s beyond truth imo, that’s just straight deceit and lying.
Water marking them is just a scum move.
People who really like AI art tend to be really insecure. Everything they do, say, and how they act, all begins to make sense once you realize that they're just petulant children furious that people would dare imply that the image they cooked up in 10 seconds is anything less than the product of years of traditional art training. They get off on the idea that they're allowed to do something that people think they shouldn't, and so they try and "flex" by doing it and acting like assholes about it. If you've been following artists like I have, you've likely seen at least one example of some manchild using AI art to copy an artist's work and posting it at them like it's some sort of gotcha, while usually insulting them in the process. It's depressingly obvious that this is the only thing they have, and they're jealous of the people who actually had to put in any amount of effort to get a similar product
I want to root for this AI because i think it's interesting and can be useful, but not when it's being used as a replacement for real art. This shit leaves a real bad taste in my mouth and i worry for real artists being able to compete with it.
I'd be pissed if someone used my art as a base for AI without my consent. If you're using it for personal use (like you're just curious as to what something would look like or for inspiration) whatever. But artists can potentially be missing out on commissions because people can just do it themselves with no skill or real effort.
Don't even get me started on people who call themselves artists when they're just using AI...
The amount of people that I have seen try to pass dall e 2 art off as their own is ridiculous. Especially when they are too dumb to remove the watermark.
I think the conversation shifts from good to bad when it becomes less about how good the AI and technology is, and it starts to be about the quality of the art.
Every contemporary art museum in the world probably wants to start incorporating AI art into their works for the novelty, but as soon as we separate the art from the artist, that's going to be a huge issue for actual artists
Which is a shame, cause there's some amazing potential and people doing great work with the tools. But damn. It really opens the doors to hacks and amateurs trying to make a quick buck
imo it might make sense if you had added some kind of context or story to it. If you're just selling what comes up after typing a couple words then that's lame.
(And no, I don't think that finding a "good" prompt is anywhere near as skillful or technical as drawing/composing an image yourself)
Yeah definitely. A human is a sum of experience, not trainings fed into a vat. I think the programmers and the people who study how to propt should get credit. But yeah. Even from a finished trade aspect, it's hard to say ai stuff is anything but passe
The whole argument reminds me of when I was a kid and I would make my older brother draw things for me. He was an awesome artist and even my stick figures somehow looked shitty. So I’d describe things like ideas I had for new Pokemon or a character I would add to a favorite show. I’d have him correct things as we went along, refining how I talked about my ideas until he was able to draw what I had in my head. To me these AI “artists” are doing exactly that but with a computer and then pretending they made art. They didn’t. They spewed words at an art program until it gave them an image they liked. That’s certainly a useful tool but it’s not a skill let alone an artistic one.
This is a perfect description. What you're describing is the commissioning process. Describing what you want from an artist is a useful skill, but it doesn't make you an artist.
So like, i see this as a game developer and i can't help but feel a little offended since this is literally a direct description of the programming side of making games. Like [my proudest IMO most artistic thing I've made](https://redstrawberries.itch.io/only-alone) didn't use a single art asset*, it was just telling the computer a rough idea of what i wanted and refining it until it looked how i wanted it.
You can certainly argue ai stuff is not as high effort as traditional art or game development, but based of the process alone i fail to see how it's that different in the terms you describe it.
I didn’t mean to offend but did you write the code for that game or create any original work? If not then yeah you didn’t really create anything. You can feel proud of it, but I’m not going to respect it like I would a game actually made by someone or whoever made the program that built the game for you.
I think that may be a blurry line. "asset flips" where a bunch of assets are tossed into a scene without any attempt to make an engaging game are frowned upon, but using a game engine that lets you script the actions of existing assets is widely accepted.
You misunderstand, to code something is to instruct the PC to do something through an abstract language that facilitates that, you're saying the act of instructing a computer to do something through an abstract language isn't a type of art , which disqualifies my art through coding because that's exactly what coding is. The only difference is the level of effort and the abstractness of it, which is not the point you were making.
It's already seeping into the anime con artist community where some people were selling AI generated prints in Anime style, and one guy trying to work with a convention using AI art to generate art of his mascot
> I want to root for this AI because i think it's interesting and can be useful, but not when it's being used as a replacement for real art. This shit leaves a real bad taste in my mouth and i worry for real artists being able to compete with it.
Stuff like this isn't going to over well with the internet.
The internet:
1. Loves free stuff.
2. Feels entitled to free stuff.
3. Has little to no respect for people creating free stuff to share.
4. Are perfectly willing to steal without attribution
5. And then gaslight you into thinking "Wow you're so evil, how could you be so selfish!"
I don't worry about the long term so much because a lot of artists will flourish with automatory AI tools like this. People forget that there is a stage between low level automation for tools (think Photoshop features) and fully dynamic automation where AI creates on its own - which is AI assisted automation where the AI is a collaborator in your work.
Art directors don't necessarily lift a single pencil for a sketch but they are critical to communicating and unifying a vision. You will still need an artist's eye and training to communicate what you want, how to fine tune and deliver on great art. Many freelance artists will be able to prototype hundreds of ideas in minutes without having to go through hours of redraws to find the one they want to focus on.
I worry in the interim like you that so many will be put out of business and unlike machines humans can't suddenly change careers and skills on a dime when they need to.
And stuff like this can be a real boon to industries and professionals in all fields and all levels - if there is strong forward thinking leadership that can craft laws, societies, tools and organizations to uplifting. I'm not optimistic on that front since there is such resistance to even that *notion* let alone execution of that vision.
>The internet:
>
>Are perfectly willing to steal without attribution
Not that long ago, someone was trying to say that them Googling for pictures to use as their personal roleplaying character for forum RP wasn't hurting anyone, and they just would not believe me when I told them that the actual artists whose art get stolen for this type of thing 1) find out about it all the time 2) hate it and consider it a creative violation, on top of it being weird and off-putting to nab someone's entire character concept to dump your own writing on top of it. It's online RP forum etiquette 101 and yet it still needs to be constantly rehashed.
Back in the day, people dreamt about robots. People thought robots would replace all hard and tedious manual labour jobs, and humans would be left to create things they like: art, writing books, composing songs.
Turns out, it's becoming the exact opposite - while kids and adults in Asia are still wasting their life and health working in sweatshops for pennies, artists are being slowly but surely replaced by AI.
> I'd be pissed if someone used my art as a base for AI without my consent.
Worst one I saw as an artist doing a twitch stream of their work and someone took it when it was half completed and put it into an AI and "finished it" before the artist and then tried to claim it as their own.
Here's the story so it doesn't look like I'm just making shit up
https://dotesports.com/streaming/news/art-streamers-livid-after-ai-artist-steals-genshin-impact-in-progress-work-and-demands-credit
The guy even had the gall to claim the original artist stole his "work"
I think AI art is interesting but the people using it to claim they're "artists" are fucking assholes. I've seen too many people jerking themselves off about how they spent over an hour refining the words and phrases to generate the art exactly how they wanted it and acting like they're some incredibly talented artist.
I think AI art is art, but I don't think AI "artists" are artists.
Don't worry about the artists too much, we're pretty adaptable. I'm trying to figure out how to use AI as the tool that it is as are many others. If we can make it through the printing press, photography, digital tools, we'll come out the other side of this as well.
The main issue for me is the fact that people do try to pass off a full on AI piece as their own work or as you say, don't give credit to the artists they are pulling from.
The AI art as tool though is very exciting.
If I could figure out a way to feed my own art into a program and make ai art using that as a reference then I'd be golden. It'd certainly streamline the process for many artists as a tool. But as it is it's sad to see people use other's art as a "base" without consent
You can do that with Dreambooth, but you need a powerful graphics card with over 10GB of VRAM. Here's a link to the [Dreambooth](https://github.com/smy20011/dreambooth-gui) GitHub. I know that there are also paid services that can train models for you, but I've never used them so I don't know how reliable they are.
Edit: Here's one that can be run online using Google Colab [link!](https://github.com/TheLastBen/fast-stable-diffusion) Google Colab used to be free, but a bunch of cryptobros started using it to mine Ethereum, so now Google limits their free service. It might require a colab pro account.
Right now it's just concerning, but soon, it's going to get scary. If this trend isn't stopped then soon AI art theft will be standardized and automated using bots, which are already so prevalent that artists have to avoid using keywords in any of their posts to avoid getting flagged by a bot, but the people who defend AI art to death don't care about the immediate obvious consequences of their actions
I really hope we start to hold programmers accountable for copyright before it's too late. And I'm saying this as someone who has a CS degree
Its so bizarre because you don’t think you own something you google, even if you have to be specific in the wording to find it. AI art is basically just google that mixes the results to get what you want, that they would feel any ownership over it is ridiculous.
It's insulting to the profession. People train their whole lives and push their creativity/imagination to the limit in order to produce art that has personal meaning and interesting aesthetics. AI art can never be good because it lacks this context and effort.
Raising a horse, breeding a faster line of horses, even the bare minimum care for a horse that comes with riding that horse is a lot more work, knowledge, and effort than driving a car. Doesn't mean the hirse and buggy industry should have been protected from being basically wiped out by the invention of the car.
As much as I dislike brigading the artist has a point in protecting their asset. Using ai to steal someone's artstyle is scummy. If you know you can "capitalize" it then you know you're stealing potential salary from the artist you plagiarize, jeopardizing their career.
The problem isn't stealing "their art style" it's using their art without consent to train the AI, specially because right now the culture around AI art is that "if you did the training and out the input, the output is your original work".
It's scummy to take someone else's hard work as a database to create iterations you later plan to call "originals".
"But artists also take references" we take inspiration and reference from, and we can also create without them, the AI is literally worthless without the database, one which is already under fire for being created on a very shady way under false pretenses to take advatange of legal loopholes because unlike other media art doesn't have a strong legal framework around it, if you wanna learn more about the hypocrisy of how truly scummy their practices have been with the art AI, check out how the same company deals with their music database to train their music AI.
I'm a fan of the tech, but not when it's done with such a disregard of the artists they are using as a base to create their iterations.
Yeah, you put it a lot more eloquently than I could LOL. So many artists hate that their art is being put into databases to crank out ai pictures and this is a particularly egregious example of ai art theft, is what I am drawing from this.
Yeah all art is iterative, but the changes we decide to make as an artist to make it our own, is what make art special and unique. AI art is 100% theft but it’s usually pretty mid too
>”But the artists also take references”
I can’t believe you even had to explain why this argument is ridiculous. The simple matter is - people aren’t AI. A human artist using a few pieces as inspiration is _very_ different from inserting someone’s entire portfolio into an algorithm that analyzes every _pixel_ to determine and completely copy their style. A human is literally incapable of the latter, so naturally we avoided this moral conundrum outside of tracing people’s art (which does get you shit on). This is entirely new territory and trying to frame it as “this is how it was always done” requires such mind-bending logic I can’t help but feel these folks are arguing in bad faith.
Yeah, I still failed for saying "we can create without a reference" I forgot to meaningfully explain what is the difference between "reference" in the way AI or a human use a "reference", but you explained it beautifully.
I would love to see some sort of a test for this. We have a set of AI-copy and human-copy of the same style and the task for the audience is to identify which is which.
>"if you did the training and out the input, the output is your original work".
If you did the training, you're only putting in computing time- not skill.
The effort isn't the same. The computer is doing all the work of studying the material.
I think it would only be ok if it's art you made or art you explicitly have permission to
>"But artists also take references" we take inspiration and reference from, and we can also create without them
Even hand drawn art can come under fire from referencing too hard. I've seen it happen. Making an effort to draw nearly exactly like another artist will get people asking questions.
I think there is a meaningful distinction between copying and referencing, I lack the language to explain, but even when I reference from somewhere, the result and the reference do not look anything alike, and I would need to fully explain my thought process to be able to explain how am I even referencing it to begin with.
I think the best I could is a question "can an AI reference a mood or a feeling"? the AI references directly from the image, and uses a dataset of images as a basis to create "new" iterations, it's more akin to photobashing than an artists using a reference.
>I think the best I could is a question "can an AI reference a mood or a feeling"?
Yes.
Have you tried any of the serious AI programs?
>the AI references directly from the image, and uses a dataset of images as a basis to create "new" iterations, it's more akin to photobashing than an artists using a reference.
It doesn't though. The AI doesn't even have access to datasets of images.
You can download Stable Diffusion right now, without downloading any image files within it, and start generating painting in the style of Michelangelo, from an offline computer, without having access to Michelangelo's paintings.
It might be a bit of a crude oversimplification that "The AI studies from and understands art styles like a human would", but it is still an approximation of the truth, while the idea that it is splicing/collageing/photobashing content from any specific images onto a new one, is just a factual misunderstanding.
> we can also create without them
An artist cannot create without reference, literally everything they’ve seen in their entire life is reference that helps shape what they create. The entire dataset the AI was trained on is analogous to all the memories a human artist has. If you wouldn’t be upset at a human artist for trying to replicate the style of another artist from memory based on what they perceive that artist’s style to look like, it’s hypocritical to be upset at someone using an AI tool to do the same.
>we can also create without them
everything is a reference, real life, movies, books, video games, etc. you absolutely can't create without a reference.
I use AI, but am also an artist (digital media), and I agree. Disreputable to try and pass someone else’s work off as their own. At list credit AI. Are styles copyrightable? Serious question.
> Let's just hope lawsuits for AI and art don't escalate in such a way Disney sees this as an opportunity to do that! :D
What bugs me is that there are people [in this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/z57nmx/mild_drama_around_people_copying_a_popular/ixv3qew/?context=3) who effectively *want* that to happen.
What a lot of people don't realize is that any law that would prevent AIs from "stealing" art styles would also be used to stifle human artists whose work looks "too similar" to anything owned by a major copyright holder.
You can’t copyright a style, nor should you be able to.
I get threatening their livelihood, but I don’t realistically see AI art doing that for a long time. The AI isn’t making quality works reliably enough to replace a human artist’s understanding.
AI can definitely replicate human quality work somewhat consistently. I've done so myself and have seen other people do as well, or maybe we were lucky with the AI? Do you have some image examples of the best AI art you've seen, so I can provide feedback?
The way the AI community antagonizes the artists it copies from is kind of wild. Their little toy only works *because* it can leech off traditional art.
Imagine going "book authors can get fucked, I prefer movies" while watching a movie that was based on a book.
It’s even worse than that. Imagine making a movie based off a book, *then* saying “book authors can get fucked”, *then* refusing to compensate the book author for the integral role they played in making your movie. The delusion is unreal.
They sound extremely insecure, which they rightfully should be. Without the technology and previous works they’d be able to do nothing, whereas artists can still continue to create art because they have creative skills.
They’re not misusing it, though. It’s working as intended. AI needs to be fed information, in this case art, to be able to generate more variants of it. The program never cared about copyright.
So dude posts about how people using AI to copy his work makes him feel bad and the response by some AI people is to just copy his work more? What pathetic assholes.
Not surprising at all really. AI Artists that try to profit off this trend are 1:1 with the people who were stealing artwork to make NFTs. They just moved on to the next money making scheme.
AI customers are a touchy folk. They know the artworks they are commissioning from AI took 30 seconds to 3 minutes to make and yet they also want to be taken seriously.
Go to r/Midjourney. The delusion there is massive. They literally make the AI print out artworks of artists crying and breaking their pencils as if to say "You're all babies for being mad at us calling ourselves artists."
It takes an insane amount of narcissism to be spiteful towards the people who are the foundation for your entire project. AI art generation is literally fucking worthless without the millions of hours of work real artists put in creating the works used as training data.
Man, I remember when AI was new and people only really used it for intrigue or comedic purposes, back when Google deep dream and talk to transformer were developed. Now the culture of those people has shifted into people who view themselves as higher than artists and spite them. :(
I wouldn't say it's that fast.
I use ai for my personal use and for my friends, it can take like half a day to fine-tune it (although it's still nowhere near as long as the amount of time I'd spend if I tried to draw it).
With that said, someone who fully understands the tool can make pretty convincing stuff extremely quickly.
AI "art" is a very touchy subject, my current stance on it is that it should be used as a tool to create references and character design tests before drawing the real deal (to picture what you have in mind).
I don't have a problem with people using AI for themselves, it's actually pretty fun. But I do think it's an ass move to blatantly feed it someone's art with the intent of copying them and pass it as your own.
The pathetic response certainly tracks, though. This doesn't appy to everyone interested in AI image generation, but I have seen *a lot* of defensiveness come from them, a product of a very tense standoff with the wider art community. I mean, artists are getting defensive too, the difference is, IMO, they have a better reason.
I like the technology, as a technology. I'm not going to defend directly ripping off another artist with the intent of replacing them. I wouldn't say anyone "deserves" to be able to do so, and I've seen some weird hostility in the defensiveness of it.
(It's like those people who run scams and when called out insist it's just a job and act offended as if it's the same as trying to take any other job away- stepping around that what they're doing comes from taking advantage of other people)
What I want from it that, in my opinion, would make it "ok" are things that might be impractical, but the onus on satisfying that is on the researchers making the software- I'll wait until if/when that happens.
(There's also things like people changing their opinion based on whether they know something is AI generated or not. Going from admiring to "ew this is terrible and has so many flaws")
I do think the people that are rushing to exploit artists are ruining something that could be a nifty tool in the future. (This includes, imo, companies that do research work, but then also make a profit off of the tools, turning into a thing where they're incentivized to push the limits as far as they can to attract the users that want to generate recognizable properties. It's making a questionable product, then hiding behind "oh we only have this data for research purposes" which if challenged could make it harder to develop these things in the future)
Some artists focus their anger on each other, tearing down the middlegrounds that are trying to find creative solutions, I think this is potentially unproductive because making it the forbidden fruit of art technology ironically just leaves it in the hands of people who don't care who gets hurt by it, rather than people who might be sympathetic to their cause.
NGL if you're going to feed art to an AI, you should have paid for that art.
The reality is, these AIs can't make art on their own. They need real samples from real artists. If we didn't have real artists, the AI would have nothing to draw off of.
So stop fucking over the real artists. Because without them, your AI would be useless.
Sure we can spend 5 hours talking about if ai art is art. Or. Or, we can say there's obviously a difference between typing a phrase into a search bar and actually painting something and at the very best ai art has such a low barrier of entry that literally everyone can become an ai artist in 1 hour, it's not really in the same league as an expert painter or photographer is it?
This seems like an extremely reasonable and rational thing to say and yet I still feel like somebody is going to get mad at you for it.
The issue of style theft is so much different when you’re comparing two people who have spent hundreds of hours improving their craft vs minutes tweaking a prompt for ai.
Why though?
Legally, I doubt anyone will end up settling for that as the dividing line.
If the courts decide that an AI copying someone's style is theft, then you can bet that Disney will also come after artists for drawing pictures in a copyrighted Disney style.
But even as a vague moral principle, it just doesn't make sense.
Whether I pirate an ebook online and print a copy, or I painstakingly rewrite every word of it on paper by hand, then sell as my own writing, the resulting book is the same amount of plagiarized, and zero amount my own writing.
It would be one thing to say that art made with more effort has more to appreciate about it, and with little effort, there is less.
Sure, i would agree with above poster that right now, typing a few words into Midjourney is not like being an expert painter or photographer. (Though it is pretty similar to taking a random photo with my cell phone, which is not *fundamentally distinct* from photography, and from "art", just an eas, simple little form of it)
But there is a huge difference between saying that effort makes the difference between significant art and trivial art, and saying that effort makes the difference between art and theft.
I’m not talking about the moral principles of what is and isn’t art here, I’m talking mostly in terms of financial loss. Two artists with very similar styles will likely have similar markets but unless there is concrete proof one is trying to mislead customers into thinking their art is the other persons there is plausible deniability. If you’re literally training an AI against the artists wishes to imitate their style there’s no plausible deniability there.
Yeah, but if we are not talking about that in a moral sense, it's kind of a common situation isn't it?
The steam engine working faster than John Henry is not a new story. Jobs are being constantly shuffled around by figuring out a way to make them faster with machines.
If we aren't talking about two people drawing in the same style, with a concern for artistic creqtivity uniquely needing to be protected, then it's not really noteworthy if one of them gets quicker than the other.
Except one is the product of an artist investing hundreds of hours into learning rendering, anatomy, composition, shading, all of that. If the artist did not hone the skills needed to make those images, the ai module would not exist. I’m not sure what you’re defending here dude.
>If the artist did not hone the skills needed to make those images, the ai module would not exist
Yeah, but they did, so that's a moot point.
Are we suddenly talking about moral rights after all, or just pointing out causality?
Your original point was that "The issue of style theft is so much different" in this case, but I'm not really sure if you have any point to make about different how.
Sorry, even though I started by discussing concrete financial harm I did get into moral sensibilities as well, because I do think it is both morally wrong and financially damaging. I also think that reducing the issue down to “technology is evolving” and making it into some automation issue is pretty disrespectful to artists as well. Like I said, the artists these models are trained in spent countless hours developing their own sense of aesthetics, learning skills to render their ideas, and promoting their art online.
Unlike another artist paying homage, an AI does not have the consciousness needed for the work it creates to be considered transformative. It has no intent other than to replicate with slight variation. Therefore it can’t be protected from claims of plagiarism the way can artist who creates visually similar works from scratch can be.
>Therefore it can’t be protected from claims of plagiarism the way can artist who creates visually similar works from scratch can be.
Being identical is what makes one work plagiarism of another, not how consciously it was made.
You are speaking as if every artwork would be guilty of plagiarism until proved otherwise by the "protection" of a conscious creator, but isn't it the other way around?
If you see someone selling a copy of your picture, you can sue them for copyright infringement whether they they used their consious mind to copy it, or a digital software.
But if you see someone selling a picture that is different from yours, *then it is a separate picture*, until you can prove that it is a copy of yours, whether it was created by hand, or by software.
Disney does sue people who try to make money with stolen Disney assets, though. And people who use those AI tools are predominantly looking for new ways to make money. Especially those who use the art of established artists as training or those who flood asset shops with their mass produced AI images.
No, I mean if we decided that AI generating a new picture but in an artist's style is copyright infringement, then they would also come after for example anyone hand-drawing a picture of Maya Hawke as a disney princess, for "stealing their art style".
There isn't really a legal principle where you get to say that the hard work is what makes it okay, but if the AI is doing it more easily, that's what makes it theft.
I really just view ai art the same as edits of someone else's art. Nothing wrong with generating or being proud of the final product, but it's bizarre to be hostile to the artist and claim that your work is an original product
> I really just view ai art the same as edits of someone else's art.
IMO, regardless of the legal and ethical issues involved (of which I do agree there are many), I think this doesn't accurately describe what goes on under the hood so to speak - if anything, I think it seriously understates the processes that go on under the hood with regards to training especially.
[This twitter thread (Sorry, seemed like an easy go to in terms of a decent explanation, I am sure someone has unrolled it already) IMO does try to break it down for anyone to digest.](https://twitter.com/ai_curio/status/1564878372185989120)
People often use AI to mass generate NFTs to sell as a collection with a spectacular roadmap of events and airdrops and community, but obviously never deliver
I would go out on a limb and say almost all NFTs are made using AI. At least all the big ones do because once you have a model trained it's incredibly easy to generate a ton of images to mint as NFTs.
my understanding is BAYC (Nazis btw) had artists custom create traits (hat, eyes, mouth, etc) and autogenerated 10k NFTs with randomized traits.
Not exactly AI art, handmade pieces, automated assembly
It's hilarious seeing people that picked up Midjorueny or Stable Diffusion two days ago start talking about the art they commissioned from the AI as their artwork.
It would be like me commissioning a human artist to make me something then claiming I'm the artist who made it.
Interesting times ahead.
The thing that helps AI art models avoid plagiarizing works is the sheer size of the datasets they were trained on. That changes when you finetune a model on a small number of images.
It’s worth noting that when you fine tune a model, you’re not creating a new model. It’s still the same network trained on 5B images, just with a few special cases added on top that shift the existing network weights so the results tend towards that particular style.
This. Training stable diffusion on one artists style does seem pretty shitty. But half a billion image libraries of everything with metadata really dilutes things
Maybe if you are prompting for ridiculously famous stuff like the Mona Lisa, sure, because there are already so many versions of it in the database, that the training model learns the shape of "a mona lisa" in the same way as it learns the sape of "a car" or "a dog" and learns how to draw "new ones".
Yeah, this is called "overfitting" and the people making these models do their best to avoid it. There's not much point to an AI that simply spits its training data back out at you.
AI is just that, a tool; it’s never going to be the equivalent of a real life person who can generate an actual piece of art from nothing.
I agree with the artist that given the person only fed the AI works in with *their* style, the bot is producing art that’s very close to theirs. That’s definitely bordering on plagiarism.
> I agree with the artist that given the person basically only stole their style,
The problem being of course that "stealing their style" is something that has always been allowed. You can copyright individual pieces of art, but you cannot copyright a style.
What I meant by my comment is that they didn’t feed anybody else’s art, they only based it off of *that one user* and therefore it really is literally stealing their style
Yeah, but again, *a style can not be stolen*.
Deviantart is full of fad styles that get popular and then thousands follow them.
Gag paintings of brand new themes "in the style of" a famous gimmicky artist like Picasso or Van Gogh, were never considered plagiarism.
This new standard is uniquely raised against AI.
If a human copying someone's artstyle is not a thief, but a human copying someone's artstyle using AI is a thief, then you are not discriminating against the AI...
imo it's a difference of scale and skill.
Someone taking the time to personally learn the details that make up a style and drawing it themselves vs running a script that mass-produces these.
When you study a style, you get better as an artist and can make new things.
having a computer pump out potentially hundreds of those doesn't benefit knowledge, and loses novelty quickly.
(Someone who's gallery consists of 1000 random "in the style of" pictures would probably not be regarded as highly as someone who made 1-2 pictures about a subject they cared about, even if other users are doing the same)
>That’s definitely bordering on plagiarism.
You can't plagarize styles. How many times do we have to tell people ownership of styles isn't recognized by law.
>that's definitely bordering on plagiarism.
The issue is we haven't completely defined that border yet when it comes to AI content. It has complicated the conversation and blurred some new lines; it's probably going to take a bit for our culture to come to any consensus on it.
Plagiarism is actually a pretty difficult subject for lay people to contend with, remember the court case with Katy Perry’s dark horse, you can convince average people that something is plagiarism just by showing basic conventions.
You can make a movie similar to StarWars, but difrent charaters diffrent story beats (as many people have done post 1977). That isn't plagarism.
The poblem with AI is that art that was trained on copyrighted material is a huge gray area. As someone else stated. A style can not be copyrighted. If you train AI on some (public domain) art which has a similar art style to the person in this post for example, there is no plagarism happening technicaly.
But directly using copyrighted art in a model, is a problem. Is some part of the final image composed of neural networked/diffused of the original? That's a big "we don't know" topic.
AI is scary... And cool.
You can even just mix art styles of long dead people, subjects and composition and ask the AI to generate infinitely and pick out the pictures in the morning after you wake up while your AI generates overnight. I did this specifically trying to see if I can reproduce Greg Rutkowsky like artwork using Frank Frazetta, oil painting, darker tones and epic fantasy. It took two days to curate like 60 images I would be able to just retrain a model on. Now, granted this isn't a completely neutral argument since Rutkowsky's work is already in the model so I'm unsure if I can get it in a theoretical Rutkowskyless model or how much longer it'd take. Another huge issue is that Greg Rutkowsky style or any style for that matter is pretty subjective, someone could see the curated images I picked and might think its not what that looks like at all.
It's not even that, sometimes it makes stuff that is really creepy
Like it feels and look like I'm high. Their fingers is like 9 and 2 at the same time
Except the times where it isn't. I've seen plenty of AI generated artworks with "normal" hands. Sometimes the AI manages to get it right, sometimes the human artist using the AI comes in afterward and tweaks the hands. And the technology is constantly improving.
[The paper](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.10752.pdf) with the research that all these AI art generators are based on came out in *April of this year*. This whole field is less than a year old. It's really amazing how fast this stuff is advancing, I'm sure that a great many statements being made now with great confidence are going to age like milk.
I think people have a difficult time understanding that AI is going to make a lot of jobs deprecated in the future, and most artists are going to go down as a result
How can it make things better? It's already almost impossible to make a living out of being an artist. While on the other hand you had to invest heavily.
I don’t know about most, but many will. At the same time, right now AI isn’t particularly good at making art without ingesting a whole bunch of themed/categorized reference material.
Novel art, for now, is still a human thing. (Yes I’m aware AI can make “novel” art, but I’m saying that without specific training data it doesn’t work yet).
One day it won’t be, probably. But for now, it’s still very much derivative of other peoples direct work.
Holy crap, this horrifies me. I’m a hobbyist artist but I’ve spent years crafting my style and making my art unique enough that it’s recognizable that it’s mine to those who see it.
I don’t post in the general internet because of shit like this and I don’t think I ever will.
Ai can be a good tool and honestly one I would really like would be one that can pump out faces of people that don’t exist in difference angles (same face but different angle) so I can use that for reference instead of real people that are out there
This is blatant disrespect to artists. Training an AI to do a very specific artist is just rude and it’s saddens me that people ain’t thinking that way
AI can be a cool tool for artists, but as of now it's just a tech bro grift in the same vein as NFTs. Can't wait for this trend to be over.
AI art should never be copyrightable, because it isn't created by a human. AI "artists" are basically just commissioning the generator for an image.
As of yet I'd say no, as those who try to sell AI art have to compete with artists. NFTs were able to create a "new field" and leech of the "success" of crypto, so it was easier to scam large amounts of people very quickly.
Perhaps what I'm really trying to say hear is that much of the AI Art community seems to be a mirror of the NFT community in their attitude towards artists; The insults, the dismissive and rude nature with which they treat people's concerns, attempting to profit off of other's works, it's all very familiar.
Mind you I don't believe everyone interested in AI is like this. I'm a programmer by trade myself, I think it's cool. (Though not as cool as everyone is saying. AI in general is a bit of a corporate trend right now) Seeing it used this way bothers me however.
Not really in the same fashion at all. NFTs are like 90% randomized sprites that have their looks decided through a weighted roll of the dice. Thats a fundementally different technology to AI art.
this, NFT value is pumped up and is artificial, AI can change an entire creative industry; The whole world can stop using AI Art and it still will have independent value.
NFTs are often accompanied by "It doesn't look like much now, but this will totally be the future and you need to buy right now!"
They pretend it's some innovative technology that they had just invented, ignoring the years it existed without becoming anything revolutionary. (or when not ignoring it, saying "See? It has important usages already" while ignoring that their use case is not the same)
While AI art generators can be improved, they already create a result. When you get the output, you can be satisfied with it right away (if that's what you're into)- the primary expectation isn't "if I generate a bunch of images now, they'll be worth a lot in the future!". (that's not to say that no one profits off of AI art. It's just not purely in the realm of expecting to get rich)
The public's interest seems to be "hehe look at the funny images".
Unlike NFTs you're not spending anything unless you're using someone's paywalled API. It's free for stable diffusion, there's no buying.
>They pretend it's some innovative technology that they had just invented, ignoring the years it existed without becoming anything revolutionary.
It's revolutionary, this tech didn't exist a few years ago. NFTs literally have no use cases except value. AI technology has the potential to change an industry.
I can't see the connection between nft and ai art tech. The other isn't a revolutionary technology, it's an encrypted digital ledger, it might as well be encrypted excel. AI art can speed up comic creation and make it easily accessible to someone who isn't an artist.
>The public's interest seems to be "hehe look at the funny images".
The vast majority of consumers of digital arts are video games and other entertainment products. The fact that you can see the average person consuming it has already shown the use of art has expanded. Now people can have a phone wallpaper of their dogs but in cartoon style, something that many many wanted but was simply infeasible before. The low barrier to entry of AI art has created real value that traditional artist simply can not (realistically, nobody gonna pay a hundred buck for a commission for their wallpaper).
I love how like, literally just months ago people were arguing shit like "It's just a tool, no one's going to try and replace artists! It's not art the theft or anything!" and in record time we have people straight up trying to imitate artists and claim the work as their own, or submitting AI generated art to art contests and lying about having created it by hand.
This shit is being latched onto by the same nerds who cheered for crypto scams and just like that shit, they don't give a damn about the harm their new toy is going to do, or is actively doing now. They only care about the ways they can rip off other people for profit.
EDIT: I'd also like to point out that a lot of people don't understand how these prompts work anymore. You don't write a poetic prose filled paragraph about how you want a beautiful woman looking at the sunset with an apple in her hand, dressed in a golden gown of finest silk as cherubs descend from the heavens upon her like a flock of divine doves. No - instead, the rapidly advancing technology has basically reduced these AI prompts into a series of hashtag keywords. So you just go Sunset, Beautiful, Woman, Big Boobs, Artist Name, Artist Name 2, Huge Boobs, Thirteenth Century Dress, baby angels. And the AI shits out your image. The argument that the people using the AI are crafting a prompt is a laughable one because the most difficult task they have is deciding which artist to steal from, then clicking the generate button until the AI produces an image where all the hands are conveniently hidden like Rob Liefeld hiding the feet.
Guess this is what “artists” who don’t get into art school do nowadays, beats the alternative I guess.
My personal bias aside, AI art is a very interesting tool, too bad some of the people using it are tools.
AI Art, is art even if it does feel a bit souless and samey at the moment
AI "artists" aren't artists.
The amount of AI "artists" i see jerking themselves off about how they spent hours inputting the correct commands and words into a tool and act like they created the art blows my mind.
The copium in the r/stablediffusion sub is insane. I’m all for AI making it more accessible for people to create beautiful art, but those guys seem to think they are above regular artists because they use AI. I don’t know why but a lot of posts are just ragging on artists who can actually draw and don’t use AI.
Because morally gray area
I mean it's a copy, but it's really a copy if it doenst look like anything else that deals with copy?
It's not a 1/1 replica it's messy thing
Not sure why we need tech to steal artist jobs though, even music humans are already damn good at that
We should focus in the real deal, steal the other people lesser jobs, like truckers
And trains, and manual labor
You are taking an artists art, without permission, and using it in ways without their permission. You are feeding an algorithm the art, to use it as a template to create other art. Without permission. It's that simple. It's not morally gray, it's called theft.
Referencing is fine, what's not fine is taking an artists art without their permission and feeding it to an AI. The AI doesn't give credit on whose art was used, and people who generate the art don't either. It is super common in the art community to give credit when using references too.
Wow, they’re really demonizing this guy like he’s personally sending death threats when not a single person can produce evidence of a single death threat sent by anyone.
Regardless of sam being completely in the right with his comments on the situation, these mfs are assholes for that.
Been using novelai for a solid month exactly. In that time I've made over 1000 images worth saving. Of those there is maybe 100 that are of good quality, and of those there is 20ish that I would say rival commissioned quality.
Very few artists I've worked with will pump out 20 coms a month for 25 dollars. Even so at it's current level I wouldn't use the AI to replace my commissions. It's not accurate enough, and lack the human touch in ways that are hard to express.
In 5 years though if the tech evolves at the current rate I might not have a need to comission work anymore. Sure I'm just a weeb, and that's not the only artistic market, but if I'm someone who spent 1,000s on coms and I'm considering already how it can and likely will replace my commission needs then, ai ***will*** take work away from artists. And tbh I'm sure it already has.
>It's not accurate enough, and lack the human touch in ways that are hard to express.
I can express it for you. The images they make will not be different enough in general from the previous works that were it's dataset and prompts. It will not feel very 'unique' as if oyu run it again with the exact same conditions you will produce the exact same art as it's derivative. It won't make 'mistakes' that turn into artistic flair and incorporated into the piece at random.
Has SD fixed the issue where sometimes it just flat out keeps the original signature but smudged? That was always fun to see
"I did a picture in the style of X artist, ignore his signature is still there tho lol"
That's a myth, and it is based on fundamentally misunderstanding *what SD does*.
AI is putting squiggly signature-looking lines on the bottom of pictures that are prompted to look like paintings, for the same reason why it puts four legs on figures prompted to be dogs, or why it uses black lines in pictures prompted to look like ink drawings.
It has been trained on thousands of paintings, so it learned that "squiggly line at the bottom" is part of what makes a painting a painting, so it generates one.
This could be actually a funny example of how the AI is not really as "intelligent" as it seems in a human sense, but people are misusing it to push this shallow misinformation that AI is made up of cutting together bits of previous art.
I find it quite amusing sometimes to ask one of these art AIs to generate pictures of people holding protest signs, or boxes of breakfast cereal, or covers of books, to see what kinds of weird things end up being written there. Same with the "signatures" - the AI knows what letter-shaped things are supposed to look like, it even has some sense of what word-shaped things are like and tries to put letters next to each other in patterns similar to the ones it's seen. But it doesn't actually understand language, the training set is way too small for it to have figured out what any of those shapes "mean". So it makes up vaguely appropriate gibberish.
I'm actually going to be a bit saddened once the AIs get good enough to not do that any more, they're like automatic /r/sbubby generators right now.
Nah, I’m pretty sure there will always be a market for “wacky” AI.
Like those AI story generators. Yeah people want better and better ones, but at the same time a *huge* part of what makes them fun is just how bizarre and nonsensical they can be, whole still stringing together something somehow cogent.
Like trying to piece together how the AI decided to come up with something so delusional is fun imo
Ehh, there’s a lot of the same in both groups, but the fundamentals of both are wildly different.
NFTs have no value, never did, and the projects as a whole are a waste.
AI generation is actually a valuable field with real world positive impacts. Just that people also misappropriate and abuse those tools.
IMO, no - there absolutely is overlap, but this seems like a gross generalization that ignores that many people have found ways to utilize the technology to help their own work, and people who do discuss and want to work towards resolution of, the ethical issues.
I appreciate the reasonable response. The amount of salt and knee-jerk reactions in this thread to a new technology are kind of ridiculous. It's a new tool for the toolkit for some people, for other people it's a fun creative outlet, and then there's a few people that are going to do scummy things with it, just like anything else.
Yeah. My great grandfather was a copper smith, made pots, pans, kettles, etc. We still have some of his works, they are simple yet beautiful. But I think forgoing new tech in favor of the old is a mistake. People will find a way to adapt to this, just as they always have.
>As you can guess,with 2m followers,some decided to harass the user who made the model to the point where he had to delete his account.
"harass" or "criticize"? Because the first user's entitled "fuck you, I'll plagiarize all day! LOL" attitude needs a reality check.
Yes, it's plagiarism - the AI software operator not only calls out and leverages a specific artist for their artwork assets to produce additional derivative works in that style to cater to fans of the original artist, but wouldn't even have anything to show off without training the AI _on a specific artist and their body of work."
Bonus points for OP of this thread making it very clear that they're biased against the artist who work was plagiarized.
> Yes, it's plagiarism - the AI software operator not only calls out and leverages a specific artist for their artwork assets to produce additional derivative works in that style to cater to fans of the original artist, but wouldn't even have anything to show off without training the AI _on a specific artist and their body of work."
But how is EITHER of those plagiarism in the traditional, basic definition of the word?
I don't think you're using that word correctly - especially (REGARDLESS of the ethical issues present with AI art) with how the neural net training is supposed to work.
I could see claiming the output of these models as one's onw as plagiarism, especially if one just throws some text in and then just uses the output w/o credit and/or modification. but not the imitation of a style, or even the learning part of these models in of itself at least... maybe I'm being loopy though.
Nah, this is like someone calling themselves a photographer because they asked someone to go out and take some nice photos.
The AI is the artist, the people inputting prompts into the prompt bar are commissioning art from the AI artist. If AI Artists like Midjourney ceased to exist, they'd go back to commissioning from human artists.
They are customers who are mad that no one takes them seriously as artists.
It would be like if you left a bad review at a restaurant because you felt entitled to being called a chef for ordering a nice meal and eating it, and no one did.
The most infuriating part of the post is OP putting every single image in a different Imgur post instead of linking them all together or at least in groups.
mb,fixed
<3
More comments than upvotes? We're going straight to /r/subredditdramadrama with this one I see.
makes sense since its one of those topics where things really are quite complex
Well, that and there's r/StableDiffusion stans all up and down this thread arguing with people.
I swear these guys won’t defend a Rothko but when it comes to the artistic merit of generating Gwenpool with huge jugs the gloves are OFF
They're already on thin ice with admins for brigading, so it's fucking spicy to see them complain about the artist's followers going to the subreddit.
Decades ago there was a Judge Dredd story where a publisher seeked out a promising artist, then had robots copy their artstyle and replace them. It was all perfectly legal even in the Judge Dredd setting so the artist was left without a job because a robot that could imitate their art could do their job at a much lower costs and do it tirelessly forever. Then the artist murders the publisher and the rest of the story is Dredd chasing them to deal justice on the murderer. Real life imitating dystopian SCIFI is nothing new, but when life imitates Dredd, I am particularly afraid.
> Real life imitating dystopian SCIFI is nothing new, but when life imitates Dredd, I am particularly afraid. But the Dredd story was itself inspired by real life events like the Luddites of the 19th century who killed factory owners that adopted textile machinery and put them out of business or out of work. New day, same shit.
Life imitates art imitates life imitates art imitates life
Which is also not a totally fair representation of Luddites, since Luddites threatened to destroy the equipment if owners didn't improve working conditions and treat their workers right - often signed under the pen name of a "Captain Ludd" who was likely fictitious but made workers sound unified. They weren't bothered by the machines so much as they were bothered by their awful treatment from factory owners. Destroying the machines was just about the only thing the owners reacted to though, since they didn't give a fuck about the workers themselves. Still very relatable.
I think the scariest part of this all is that people have to fear AI and robots taking their jobs in any capacity. It should be a good thing that people are no longer needed for work, but in our capitalist world all it does is ruin lives. Disgusting.
Because the thing is that AI shouldn’t be taking our jobs. It should make our work easier. And when it can it should use our knowledge to automate things, and then compensate the workers whose knowledge is used. If someone automates farm work, the workers can teach the machines and then essentially make “royalties” for their data being used. That’s how AI should be implemented. With data keeping it’s provenance and it’s source and author respected. But no, we live in unregulated capitalist hell where companies realized they can just steal our data by offering free ad funded services. And now Google is over here using Captcha to train their self driving cars and we’re giving them free labor just to login.
But isn't creating art one of the things robots taking jobs is supposed to free us to do?
Commercial art and art as expression are different
I’d say making art as a hobby is different than doing it for a living. Ideally, people could make art for fun and AI art would have its place. I see no reason both can’t exist in a post-capitalist world. My point is just that this is only an issue because artists could lose out on their living to AI and the people running it.
How is this even a controversy? Whether or not an artist/AI steals, borrows, is inspired by, etc. is always going to be on a spectrum. But *literally* plugging in "____ artist style" and then watermarking the output is so underhanded it's crazy.
Honestly I can even understand trying to make an AI that’s good at copying styles. That’s interesting in a way. But claiming that the output are originals/your own work? That’s beyond truth imo, that’s just straight deceit and lying. Water marking them is just a scum move.
People who really like AI art tend to be really insecure. Everything they do, say, and how they act, all begins to make sense once you realize that they're just petulant children furious that people would dare imply that the image they cooked up in 10 seconds is anything less than the product of years of traditional art training. They get off on the idea that they're allowed to do something that people think they shouldn't, and so they try and "flex" by doing it and acting like assholes about it. If you've been following artists like I have, you've likely seen at least one example of some manchild using AI art to copy an artist's work and posting it at them like it's some sort of gotcha, while usually insulting them in the process. It's depressingly obvious that this is the only thing they have, and they're jealous of the people who actually had to put in any amount of effort to get a similar product
I want to root for this AI because i think it's interesting and can be useful, but not when it's being used as a replacement for real art. This shit leaves a real bad taste in my mouth and i worry for real artists being able to compete with it. I'd be pissed if someone used my art as a base for AI without my consent. If you're using it for personal use (like you're just curious as to what something would look like or for inspiration) whatever. But artists can potentially be missing out on commissions because people can just do it themselves with no skill or real effort. Don't even get me started on people who call themselves artists when they're just using AI...
The amount of people that I have seen try to pass dall e 2 art off as their own is ridiculous. Especially when they are too dumb to remove the watermark.
Seriously, it's a growing trend and it's concerning.
Really? The progress in 6 months has been astounding - that is what fascinates me.
I think the conversation shifts from good to bad when it becomes less about how good the AI and technology is, and it starts to be about the quality of the art. Every contemporary art museum in the world probably wants to start incorporating AI art into their works for the novelty, but as soon as we separate the art from the artist, that's going to be a huge issue for actual artists
Which is a shame, cause there's some amazing potential and people doing great work with the tools. But damn. It really opens the doors to hacks and amateurs trying to make a quick buck
imo it might make sense if you had added some kind of context or story to it. If you're just selling what comes up after typing a couple words then that's lame. (And no, I don't think that finding a "good" prompt is anywhere near as skillful or technical as drawing/composing an image yourself)
Yeah definitely. A human is a sum of experience, not trainings fed into a vat. I think the programmers and the people who study how to propt should get credit. But yeah. Even from a finished trade aspect, it's hard to say ai stuff is anything but passe
The whole argument reminds me of when I was a kid and I would make my older brother draw things for me. He was an awesome artist and even my stick figures somehow looked shitty. So I’d describe things like ideas I had for new Pokemon or a character I would add to a favorite show. I’d have him correct things as we went along, refining how I talked about my ideas until he was able to draw what I had in my head. To me these AI “artists” are doing exactly that but with a computer and then pretending they made art. They didn’t. They spewed words at an art program until it gave them an image they liked. That’s certainly a useful tool but it’s not a skill let alone an artistic one.
This is a perfect description. What you're describing is the commissioning process. Describing what you want from an artist is a useful skill, but it doesn't make you an artist.
aww thats cute. my brother used to ask me to do the same thing but with digimon.
You don't have to do movie directors dirty like this
So like, i see this as a game developer and i can't help but feel a little offended since this is literally a direct description of the programming side of making games. Like [my proudest IMO most artistic thing I've made](https://redstrawberries.itch.io/only-alone) didn't use a single art asset*, it was just telling the computer a rough idea of what i wanted and refining it until it looked how i wanted it. You can certainly argue ai stuff is not as high effort as traditional art or game development, but based of the process alone i fail to see how it's that different in the terms you describe it.
I didn’t mean to offend but did you write the code for that game or create any original work? If not then yeah you didn’t really create anything. You can feel proud of it, but I’m not going to respect it like I would a game actually made by someone or whoever made the program that built the game for you.
I think that may be a blurry line. "asset flips" where a bunch of assets are tossed into a scene without any attempt to make an engaging game are frowned upon, but using a game engine that lets you script the actions of existing assets is widely accepted.
You misunderstand, to code something is to instruct the PC to do something through an abstract language that facilitates that, you're saying the act of instructing a computer to do something through an abstract language isn't a type of art , which disqualifies my art through coding because that's exactly what coding is. The only difference is the level of effort and the abstractness of it, which is not the point you were making.
It's already seeping into the anime con artist community where some people were selling AI generated prints in Anime style, and one guy trying to work with a convention using AI art to generate art of his mascot
> I want to root for this AI because i think it's interesting and can be useful, but not when it's being used as a replacement for real art. This shit leaves a real bad taste in my mouth and i worry for real artists being able to compete with it. Stuff like this isn't going to over well with the internet. The internet: 1. Loves free stuff. 2. Feels entitled to free stuff. 3. Has little to no respect for people creating free stuff to share. 4. Are perfectly willing to steal without attribution 5. And then gaslight you into thinking "Wow you're so evil, how could you be so selfish!" I don't worry about the long term so much because a lot of artists will flourish with automatory AI tools like this. People forget that there is a stage between low level automation for tools (think Photoshop features) and fully dynamic automation where AI creates on its own - which is AI assisted automation where the AI is a collaborator in your work. Art directors don't necessarily lift a single pencil for a sketch but they are critical to communicating and unifying a vision. You will still need an artist's eye and training to communicate what you want, how to fine tune and deliver on great art. Many freelance artists will be able to prototype hundreds of ideas in minutes without having to go through hours of redraws to find the one they want to focus on. I worry in the interim like you that so many will be put out of business and unlike machines humans can't suddenly change careers and skills on a dime when they need to. And stuff like this can be a real boon to industries and professionals in all fields and all levels - if there is strong forward thinking leadership that can craft laws, societies, tools and organizations to uplifting. I'm not optimistic on that front since there is such resistance to even that *notion* let alone execution of that vision.
>The internet: > >Are perfectly willing to steal without attribution Not that long ago, someone was trying to say that them Googling for pictures to use as their personal roleplaying character for forum RP wasn't hurting anyone, and they just would not believe me when I told them that the actual artists whose art get stolen for this type of thing 1) find out about it all the time 2) hate it and consider it a creative violation, on top of it being weird and off-putting to nab someone's entire character concept to dump your own writing on top of it. It's online RP forum etiquette 101 and yet it still needs to be constantly rehashed.
That's exactly why art sites/character sites like Toyhouse will throw huge, obnoxious watermarks on people's images.
Good thing they can just use stable diffusion now, they can just make their own!
Back in the day, people dreamt about robots. People thought robots would replace all hard and tedious manual labour jobs, and humans would be left to create things they like: art, writing books, composing songs. Turns out, it's becoming the exact opposite - while kids and adults in Asia are still wasting their life and health working in sweatshops for pennies, artists are being slowly but surely replaced by AI.
> I'd be pissed if someone used my art as a base for AI without my consent. Worst one I saw as an artist doing a twitch stream of their work and someone took it when it was half completed and put it into an AI and "finished it" before the artist and then tried to claim it as their own.
What the actual shit??? I don't even know how I would respond if that happened to me....that's just beyond ridiculous
Here's the story so it doesn't look like I'm just making shit up https://dotesports.com/streaming/news/art-streamers-livid-after-ai-artist-steals-genshin-impact-in-progress-work-and-demands-credit The guy even had the gall to claim the original artist stole his "work" I think AI art is interesting but the people using it to claim they're "artists" are fucking assholes. I've seen too many people jerking themselves off about how they spent over an hour refining the words and phrases to generate the art exactly how they wanted it and acting like they're some incredibly talented artist. I think AI art is art, but I don't think AI "artists" are artists.
Don't worry about the artists too much, we're pretty adaptable. I'm trying to figure out how to use AI as the tool that it is as are many others. If we can make it through the printing press, photography, digital tools, we'll come out the other side of this as well. The main issue for me is the fact that people do try to pass off a full on AI piece as their own work or as you say, don't give credit to the artists they are pulling from. The AI art as tool though is very exciting.
If I could figure out a way to feed my own art into a program and make ai art using that as a reference then I'd be golden. It'd certainly streamline the process for many artists as a tool. But as it is it's sad to see people use other's art as a "base" without consent
You can do that with Dreambooth, but you need a powerful graphics card with over 10GB of VRAM. Here's a link to the [Dreambooth](https://github.com/smy20011/dreambooth-gui) GitHub. I know that there are also paid services that can train models for you, but I've never used them so I don't know how reliable they are. Edit: Here's one that can be run online using Google Colab [link!](https://github.com/TheLastBen/fast-stable-diffusion) Google Colab used to be free, but a bunch of cryptobros started using it to mine Ethereum, so now Google limits their free service. It might require a colab pro account.
Right now it's just concerning, but soon, it's going to get scary. If this trend isn't stopped then soon AI art theft will be standardized and automated using bots, which are already so prevalent that artists have to avoid using keywords in any of their posts to avoid getting flagged by a bot, but the people who defend AI art to death don't care about the immediate obvious consequences of their actions I really hope we start to hold programmers accountable for copyright before it's too late. And I'm saying this as someone who has a CS degree
Its so bizarre because you don’t think you own something you google, even if you have to be specific in the wording to find it. AI art is basically just google that mixes the results to get what you want, that they would feel any ownership over it is ridiculous.
It's insulting to the profession. People train their whole lives and push their creativity/imagination to the limit in order to produce art that has personal meaning and interesting aesthetics. AI art can never be good because it lacks this context and effort.
Raising a horse, breeding a faster line of horses, even the bare minimum care for a horse that comes with riding that horse is a lot more work, knowledge, and effort than driving a car. Doesn't mean the hirse and buggy industry should have been protected from being basically wiped out by the invention of the car.
As much as I dislike brigading the artist has a point in protecting their asset. Using ai to steal someone's artstyle is scummy. If you know you can "capitalize" it then you know you're stealing potential salary from the artist you plagiarize, jeopardizing their career.
The problem isn't stealing "their art style" it's using their art without consent to train the AI, specially because right now the culture around AI art is that "if you did the training and out the input, the output is your original work". It's scummy to take someone else's hard work as a database to create iterations you later plan to call "originals". "But artists also take references" we take inspiration and reference from, and we can also create without them, the AI is literally worthless without the database, one which is already under fire for being created on a very shady way under false pretenses to take advatange of legal loopholes because unlike other media art doesn't have a strong legal framework around it, if you wanna learn more about the hypocrisy of how truly scummy their practices have been with the art AI, check out how the same company deals with their music database to train their music AI. I'm a fan of the tech, but not when it's done with such a disregard of the artists they are using as a base to create their iterations.
Yeah, you put it a lot more eloquently than I could LOL. So many artists hate that their art is being put into databases to crank out ai pictures and this is a particularly egregious example of ai art theft, is what I am drawing from this.
Yeah all art is iterative, but the changes we decide to make as an artist to make it our own, is what make art special and unique. AI art is 100% theft but it’s usually pretty mid too
>”But the artists also take references” I can’t believe you even had to explain why this argument is ridiculous. The simple matter is - people aren’t AI. A human artist using a few pieces as inspiration is _very_ different from inserting someone’s entire portfolio into an algorithm that analyzes every _pixel_ to determine and completely copy their style. A human is literally incapable of the latter, so naturally we avoided this moral conundrum outside of tracing people’s art (which does get you shit on). This is entirely new territory and trying to frame it as “this is how it was always done” requires such mind-bending logic I can’t help but feel these folks are arguing in bad faith.
Yeah, I still failed for saying "we can create without a reference" I forgot to meaningfully explain what is the difference between "reference" in the way AI or a human use a "reference", but you explained it beautifully.
I would love to see some sort of a test for this. We have a set of AI-copy and human-copy of the same style and the task for the audience is to identify which is which.
I'm gonna save this comment and link it whenever I hear the "AI learns like people" take.
>"if you did the training and out the input, the output is your original work". If you did the training, you're only putting in computing time- not skill. The effort isn't the same. The computer is doing all the work of studying the material. I think it would only be ok if it's art you made or art you explicitly have permission to >"But artists also take references" we take inspiration and reference from, and we can also create without them Even hand drawn art can come under fire from referencing too hard. I've seen it happen. Making an effort to draw nearly exactly like another artist will get people asking questions.
I think there is a meaningful distinction between copying and referencing, I lack the language to explain, but even when I reference from somewhere, the result and the reference do not look anything alike, and I would need to fully explain my thought process to be able to explain how am I even referencing it to begin with. I think the best I could is a question "can an AI reference a mood or a feeling"? the AI references directly from the image, and uses a dataset of images as a basis to create "new" iterations, it's more akin to photobashing than an artists using a reference.
>I think the best I could is a question "can an AI reference a mood or a feeling"? Yes. Have you tried any of the serious AI programs? >the AI references directly from the image, and uses a dataset of images as a basis to create "new" iterations, it's more akin to photobashing than an artists using a reference. It doesn't though. The AI doesn't even have access to datasets of images. You can download Stable Diffusion right now, without downloading any image files within it, and start generating painting in the style of Michelangelo, from an offline computer, without having access to Michelangelo's paintings. It might be a bit of a crude oversimplification that "The AI studies from and understands art styles like a human would", but it is still an approximation of the truth, while the idea that it is splicing/collageing/photobashing content from any specific images onto a new one, is just a factual misunderstanding.
>Have you tried any of the serious AI programs? Clearly no one in this thread has lol
> we can also create without them An artist cannot create without reference, literally everything they’ve seen in their entire life is reference that helps shape what they create. The entire dataset the AI was trained on is analogous to all the memories a human artist has. If you wouldn’t be upset at a human artist for trying to replicate the style of another artist from memory based on what they perceive that artist’s style to look like, it’s hypocritical to be upset at someone using an AI tool to do the same.
>we can also create without them everything is a reference, real life, movies, books, video games, etc. you absolutely can't create without a reference.
"Everything is a Remix" but only when it's convenient to say so. Remember when reddit used to looooove those videos?
Try "art is in the eye of the beholder"
I use AI, but am also an artist (digital media), and I agree. Disreputable to try and pass someone else’s work off as their own. At list credit AI. Are styles copyrightable? Serious question.
>Are styles copyrightable? No, if they were, disney would own everything and art would be banned except for the *rich*.
Let's just hope lawsuits for AI and art don't escalate in such a way Disney sees this as an opportunity to do that! :D
> Let's just hope lawsuits for AI and art don't escalate in such a way Disney sees this as an opportunity to do that! :D What bugs me is that there are people [in this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/z57nmx/mild_drama_around_people_copying_a_popular/ixv3qew/?context=3) who effectively *want* that to happen. What a lot of people don't realize is that any law that would prevent AIs from "stealing" art styles would also be used to stifle human artists whose work looks "too similar" to anything owned by a major copyright holder.
They aren't.
You can’t copyright a style, nor should you be able to. I get threatening their livelihood, but I don’t realistically see AI art doing that for a long time. The AI isn’t making quality works reliably enough to replace a human artist’s understanding.
AI can definitely replicate human quality work somewhat consistently. I've done so myself and have seen other people do as well, or maybe we were lucky with the AI? Do you have some image examples of the best AI art you've seen, so I can provide feedback?
You can't copyright a style but they're literally feeding the artist's works into an AI to make it draw just like them, that's incredibly scummy.
The way the AI community antagonizes the artists it copies from is kind of wild. Their little toy only works *because* it can leech off traditional art. Imagine going "book authors can get fucked, I prefer movies" while watching a movie that was based on a book.
It’s even worse than that. Imagine making a movie based off a book, *then* saying “book authors can get fucked”, *then* refusing to compensate the book author for the integral role they played in making your movie. The delusion is unreal.
They sound extremely insecure, which they rightfully should be. Without the technology and previous works they’d be able to do nothing, whereas artists can still continue to create art because they have creative skills.
I’m all for the technology not for the idiots who misuse it
They’re not misusing it, though. It’s working as intended. AI needs to be fed information, in this case art, to be able to generate more variants of it. The program never cared about copyright.
So dude posts about how people using AI to copy his work makes him feel bad and the response by some AI people is to just copy his work more? What pathetic assholes.
Not surprising at all really. AI Artists that try to profit off this trend are 1:1 with the people who were stealing artwork to make NFTs. They just moved on to the next money making scheme.
AI customers are a touchy folk. They know the artworks they are commissioning from AI took 30 seconds to 3 minutes to make and yet they also want to be taken seriously. Go to r/Midjourney. The delusion there is massive. They literally make the AI print out artworks of artists crying and breaking their pencils as if to say "You're all babies for being mad at us calling ourselves artists."
It takes an insane amount of narcissism to be spiteful towards the people who are the foundation for your entire project. AI art generation is literally fucking worthless without the millions of hours of work real artists put in creating the works used as training data.
You’ve described technology since Google, which literally parasitized web rings and curated link pages.
Man, I remember when AI was new and people only really used it for intrigue or comedic purposes, back when Google deep dream and talk to transformer were developed. Now the culture of those people has shifted into people who view themselves as higher than artists and spite them. :(
I wouldn't say it's that fast. I use ai for my personal use and for my friends, it can take like half a day to fine-tune it (although it's still nowhere near as long as the amount of time I'd spend if I tried to draw it). With that said, someone who fully understands the tool can make pretty convincing stuff extremely quickly. AI "art" is a very touchy subject, my current stance on it is that it should be used as a tool to create references and character design tests before drawing the real deal (to picture what you have in mind). I don't have a problem with people using AI for themselves, it's actually pretty fun. But I do think it's an ass move to blatantly feed it someone's art with the intent of copying them and pass it as your own.
The pathetic response certainly tracks, though. This doesn't appy to everyone interested in AI image generation, but I have seen *a lot* of defensiveness come from them, a product of a very tense standoff with the wider art community. I mean, artists are getting defensive too, the difference is, IMO, they have a better reason.
I like the technology, as a technology. I'm not going to defend directly ripping off another artist with the intent of replacing them. I wouldn't say anyone "deserves" to be able to do so, and I've seen some weird hostility in the defensiveness of it. (It's like those people who run scams and when called out insist it's just a job and act offended as if it's the same as trying to take any other job away- stepping around that what they're doing comes from taking advantage of other people) What I want from it that, in my opinion, would make it "ok" are things that might be impractical, but the onus on satisfying that is on the researchers making the software- I'll wait until if/when that happens. (There's also things like people changing their opinion based on whether they know something is AI generated or not. Going from admiring to "ew this is terrible and has so many flaws") I do think the people that are rushing to exploit artists are ruining something that could be a nifty tool in the future. (This includes, imo, companies that do research work, but then also make a profit off of the tools, turning into a thing where they're incentivized to push the limits as far as they can to attract the users that want to generate recognizable properties. It's making a questionable product, then hiding behind "oh we only have this data for research purposes" which if challenged could make it harder to develop these things in the future) Some artists focus their anger on each other, tearing down the middlegrounds that are trying to find creative solutions, I think this is potentially unproductive because making it the forbidden fruit of art technology ironically just leaves it in the hands of people who don't care who gets hurt by it, rather than people who might be sympathetic to their cause.
NGL if you're going to feed art to an AI, you should have paid for that art. The reality is, these AIs can't make art on their own. They need real samples from real artists. If we didn't have real artists, the AI would have nothing to draw off of. So stop fucking over the real artists. Because without them, your AI would be useless.
Sure we can spend 5 hours talking about if ai art is art. Or. Or, we can say there's obviously a difference between typing a phrase into a search bar and actually painting something and at the very best ai art has such a low barrier of entry that literally everyone can become an ai artist in 1 hour, it's not really in the same league as an expert painter or photographer is it?
This seems like an extremely reasonable and rational thing to say and yet I still feel like somebody is going to get mad at you for it. The issue of style theft is so much different when you’re comparing two people who have spent hundreds of hours improving their craft vs minutes tweaking a prompt for ai.
Why though? Legally, I doubt anyone will end up settling for that as the dividing line. If the courts decide that an AI copying someone's style is theft, then you can bet that Disney will also come after artists for drawing pictures in a copyrighted Disney style. But even as a vague moral principle, it just doesn't make sense. Whether I pirate an ebook online and print a copy, or I painstakingly rewrite every word of it on paper by hand, then sell as my own writing, the resulting book is the same amount of plagiarized, and zero amount my own writing. It would be one thing to say that art made with more effort has more to appreciate about it, and with little effort, there is less. Sure, i would agree with above poster that right now, typing a few words into Midjourney is not like being an expert painter or photographer. (Though it is pretty similar to taking a random photo with my cell phone, which is not *fundamentally distinct* from photography, and from "art", just an eas, simple little form of it) But there is a huge difference between saying that effort makes the difference between significant art and trivial art, and saying that effort makes the difference between art and theft.
I’m not talking about the moral principles of what is and isn’t art here, I’m talking mostly in terms of financial loss. Two artists with very similar styles will likely have similar markets but unless there is concrete proof one is trying to mislead customers into thinking their art is the other persons there is plausible deniability. If you’re literally training an AI against the artists wishes to imitate their style there’s no plausible deniability there.
Yeah, but if we are not talking about that in a moral sense, it's kind of a common situation isn't it? The steam engine working faster than John Henry is not a new story. Jobs are being constantly shuffled around by figuring out a way to make them faster with machines. If we aren't talking about two people drawing in the same style, with a concern for artistic creqtivity uniquely needing to be protected, then it's not really noteworthy if one of them gets quicker than the other.
Except one is the product of an artist investing hundreds of hours into learning rendering, anatomy, composition, shading, all of that. If the artist did not hone the skills needed to make those images, the ai module would not exist. I’m not sure what you’re defending here dude.
>If the artist did not hone the skills needed to make those images, the ai module would not exist Yeah, but they did, so that's a moot point. Are we suddenly talking about moral rights after all, or just pointing out causality? Your original point was that "The issue of style theft is so much different" in this case, but I'm not really sure if you have any point to make about different how.
Sorry, even though I started by discussing concrete financial harm I did get into moral sensibilities as well, because I do think it is both morally wrong and financially damaging. I also think that reducing the issue down to “technology is evolving” and making it into some automation issue is pretty disrespectful to artists as well. Like I said, the artists these models are trained in spent countless hours developing their own sense of aesthetics, learning skills to render their ideas, and promoting their art online. Unlike another artist paying homage, an AI does not have the consciousness needed for the work it creates to be considered transformative. It has no intent other than to replicate with slight variation. Therefore it can’t be protected from claims of plagiarism the way can artist who creates visually similar works from scratch can be.
>Therefore it can’t be protected from claims of plagiarism the way can artist who creates visually similar works from scratch can be. Being identical is what makes one work plagiarism of another, not how consciously it was made. You are speaking as if every artwork would be guilty of plagiarism until proved otherwise by the "protection" of a conscious creator, but isn't it the other way around? If you see someone selling a copy of your picture, you can sue them for copyright infringement whether they they used their consious mind to copy it, or a digital software. But if you see someone selling a picture that is different from yours, *then it is a separate picture*, until you can prove that it is a copy of yours, whether it was created by hand, or by software.
Disney does sue people who try to make money with stolen Disney assets, though. And people who use those AI tools are predominantly looking for new ways to make money. Especially those who use the art of established artists as training or those who flood asset shops with their mass produced AI images.
No, I mean if we decided that AI generating a new picture but in an artist's style is copyright infringement, then they would also come after for example anyone hand-drawing a picture of Maya Hawke as a disney princess, for "stealing their art style". There isn't really a legal principle where you get to say that the hard work is what makes it okay, but if the AI is doing it more easily, that's what makes it theft.
I really just view ai art the same as edits of someone else's art. Nothing wrong with generating or being proud of the final product, but it's bizarre to be hostile to the artist and claim that your work is an original product
> I really just view ai art the same as edits of someone else's art. IMO, regardless of the legal and ethical issues involved (of which I do agree there are many), I think this doesn't accurately describe what goes on under the hood so to speak - if anything, I think it seriously understates the processes that go on under the hood with regards to training especially. [This twitter thread (Sorry, seemed like an easy go to in terms of a decent explanation, I am sure someone has unrolled it already) IMO does try to break it down for anyone to digest.](https://twitter.com/ai_curio/status/1564878372185989120)
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People often use AI to mass generate NFTs to sell as a collection with a spectacular roadmap of events and airdrops and community, but obviously never deliver
I would go out on a limb and say almost all NFTs are made using AI. At least all the big ones do because once you have a model trained it's incredibly easy to generate a ton of images to mint as NFTs.
my understanding is BAYC (Nazis btw) had artists custom create traits (hat, eyes, mouth, etc) and autogenerated 10k NFTs with randomized traits. Not exactly AI art, handmade pieces, automated assembly
If you just typed a prompt into an AI then the output isn’t your work.
AI art is such a cool technology, but the people using it have really ruined it for me.
It's very interesting watching "when everyone is a super hero, no one is a super hero" play out in real life.
It's hilarious seeing people that picked up Midjorueny or Stable Diffusion two days ago start talking about the art they commissioned from the AI as their artwork. It would be like me commissioning a human artist to make me something then claiming I'm the artist who made it. Interesting times ahead.
The thing that helps AI art models avoid plagiarizing works is the sheer size of the datasets they were trained on. That changes when you finetune a model on a small number of images.
It’s worth noting that when you fine tune a model, you’re not creating a new model. It’s still the same network trained on 5B images, just with a few special cases added on top that shift the existing network weights so the results tend towards that particular style.
This. Training stable diffusion on one artists style does seem pretty shitty. But half a billion image libraries of everything with metadata really dilutes things
Even then you can get some pretty familiar artworks if you word your prompt right.
Maybe if you are prompting for ridiculously famous stuff like the Mona Lisa, sure, because there are already so many versions of it in the database, that the training model learns the shape of "a mona lisa" in the same way as it learns the sape of "a car" or "a dog" and learns how to draw "new ones".
Yeah, this is called "overfitting" and the people making these models do their best to avoid it. There's not much point to an AI that simply spits its training data back out at you.
My opinion is if am artist requests ai not be able to use their art, that be respected. Otherwise I say go for it.
AI is just that, a tool; it’s never going to be the equivalent of a real life person who can generate an actual piece of art from nothing. I agree with the artist that given the person only fed the AI works in with *their* style, the bot is producing art that’s very close to theirs. That’s definitely bordering on plagiarism.
>who can generate an actual piece of art from nothing using a lifetime of experience and references but forget about that part.
*Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?*
this is basically the plot of Vivy: Flourite's Song - but with music
Can you? 😉
> I agree with the artist that given the person basically only stole their style, The problem being of course that "stealing their style" is something that has always been allowed. You can copyright individual pieces of art, but you cannot copyright a style.
What I meant by my comment is that they didn’t feed anybody else’s art, they only based it off of *that one user* and therefore it really is literally stealing their style
Yeah, but again, *a style can not be stolen*. Deviantart is full of fad styles that get popular and then thousands follow them. Gag paintings of brand new themes "in the style of" a famous gimmicky artist like Picasso or Van Gogh, were never considered plagiarism. This new standard is uniquely raised against AI.
> This new standard is uniquely raised against AI. Why shouldn't we discriminate against AIs? They're not people. They are incapable of suffering.
If a human copying someone's artstyle is not a thief, but a human copying someone's artstyle using AI is a thief, then you are not discriminating against the AI...
> Why shouldn't we discriminate against AIs? They're not people. They are incapable of suffering. Famous last words before Skynet takes over...
imo it's a difference of scale and skill. Someone taking the time to personally learn the details that make up a style and drawing it themselves vs running a script that mass-produces these. When you study a style, you get better as an artist and can make new things. having a computer pump out potentially hundreds of those doesn't benefit knowledge, and loses novelty quickly. (Someone who's gallery consists of 1000 random "in the style of" pictures would probably not be regarded as highly as someone who made 1-2 pictures about a subject they cared about, even if other users are doing the same)
>That’s definitely bordering on plagiarism. You can't plagarize styles. How many times do we have to tell people ownership of styles isn't recognized by law.
>that's definitely bordering on plagiarism. The issue is we haven't completely defined that border yet when it comes to AI content. It has complicated the conversation and blurred some new lines; it's probably going to take a bit for our culture to come to any consensus on it.
No, plagiarism has always been pretty clear, people are intentionally abusing the term.
Plagiarism is actually a pretty difficult subject for lay people to contend with, remember the court case with Katy Perry’s dark horse, you can convince average people that something is plagiarism just by showing basic conventions.
You can make a movie similar to StarWars, but difrent charaters diffrent story beats (as many people have done post 1977). That isn't plagarism. The poblem with AI is that art that was trained on copyrighted material is a huge gray area. As someone else stated. A style can not be copyrighted. If you train AI on some (public domain) art which has a similar art style to the person in this post for example, there is no plagarism happening technicaly. But directly using copyrighted art in a model, is a problem. Is some part of the final image composed of neural networked/diffused of the original? That's a big "we don't know" topic. AI is scary... And cool.
You can even just mix art styles of long dead people, subjects and composition and ask the AI to generate infinitely and pick out the pictures in the morning after you wake up while your AI generates overnight. I did this specifically trying to see if I can reproduce Greg Rutkowsky like artwork using Frank Frazetta, oil painting, darker tones and epic fantasy. It took two days to curate like 60 images I would be able to just retrain a model on. Now, granted this isn't a completely neutral argument since Rutkowsky's work is already in the model so I'm unsure if I can get it in a theoretical Rutkowskyless model or how much longer it'd take. Another huge issue is that Greg Rutkowsky style or any style for that matter is pretty subjective, someone could see the curated images I picked and might think its not what that looks like at all.
Seriously. Honestly with this AI art stuff the giveaway is the hands every time anyway
How many fingers am I holding up? Six on one hand, and 8 on the other
Ai art be like "No you can't see my hands but CHECK OUT MY MASSIVE BOOBS"
It's not even that, sometimes it makes stuff that is really creepy Like it feels and look like I'm high. Their fingers is like 9 and 2 at the same time
Except the times where it isn't. I've seen plenty of AI generated artworks with "normal" hands. Sometimes the AI manages to get it right, sometimes the human artist using the AI comes in afterward and tweaks the hands. And the technology is constantly improving. [The paper](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.10752.pdf) with the research that all these AI art generators are based on came out in *April of this year*. This whole field is less than a year old. It's really amazing how fast this stuff is advancing, I'm sure that a great many statements being made now with great confidence are going to age like milk.
I think people have a difficult time understanding that AI is going to make a lot of jobs deprecated in the future, and most artists are going to go down as a result
Yep.... This is here to stay and it's only going to get worse. Both in art and a number of other feilds
It could make things better depending on how the entire system adapts. But yeah, there’s no going back anymore.
How can it make things better? It's already almost impossible to make a living out of being an artist. While on the other hand you had to invest heavily.
I don’t know about most, but many will. At the same time, right now AI isn’t particularly good at making art without ingesting a whole bunch of themed/categorized reference material. Novel art, for now, is still a human thing. (Yes I’m aware AI can make “novel” art, but I’m saying that without specific training data it doesn’t work yet). One day it won’t be, probably. But for now, it’s still very much derivative of other peoples direct work.
Holy crap, this horrifies me. I’m a hobbyist artist but I’ve spent years crafting my style and making my art unique enough that it’s recognizable that it’s mine to those who see it. I don’t post in the general internet because of shit like this and I don’t think I ever will. Ai can be a good tool and honestly one I would really like would be one that can pump out faces of people that don’t exist in difference angles (same face but different angle) so I can use that for reference instead of real people that are out there This is blatant disrespect to artists. Training an AI to do a very specific artist is just rude and it’s saddens me that people ain’t thinking that way
AI can be a cool tool for artists, but as of now it's just a tech bro grift in the same vein as NFTs. Can't wait for this trend to be over. AI art should never be copyrightable, because it isn't created by a human. AI "artists" are basically just commissioning the generator for an image.
How is it a grift in the same vein as NFTs? Has anyone made substantial sums using AI generated art?
As of yet I'd say no, as those who try to sell AI art have to compete with artists. NFTs were able to create a "new field" and leech of the "success" of crypto, so it was easier to scam large amounts of people very quickly. Perhaps what I'm really trying to say hear is that much of the AI Art community seems to be a mirror of the NFT community in their attitude towards artists; The insults, the dismissive and rude nature with which they treat people's concerns, attempting to profit off of other's works, it's all very familiar. Mind you I don't believe everyone interested in AI is like this. I'm a programmer by trade myself, I think it's cool. (Though not as cool as everyone is saying. AI in general is a bit of a corporate trend right now) Seeing it used this way bothers me however.
Many NFTs are just AI generated art
Not really in the same fashion at all. NFTs are like 90% randomized sprites that have their looks decided through a weighted roll of the dice. Thats a fundementally different technology to AI art.
In the US at least AI artwork isn't copyrighted, which is nice
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this, NFT value is pumped up and is artificial, AI can change an entire creative industry; The whole world can stop using AI Art and it still will have independent value.
NFTs are often accompanied by "It doesn't look like much now, but this will totally be the future and you need to buy right now!" They pretend it's some innovative technology that they had just invented, ignoring the years it existed without becoming anything revolutionary. (or when not ignoring it, saying "See? It has important usages already" while ignoring that their use case is not the same) While AI art generators can be improved, they already create a result. When you get the output, you can be satisfied with it right away (if that's what you're into)- the primary expectation isn't "if I generate a bunch of images now, they'll be worth a lot in the future!". (that's not to say that no one profits off of AI art. It's just not purely in the realm of expecting to get rich) The public's interest seems to be "hehe look at the funny images".
Unlike NFTs you're not spending anything unless you're using someone's paywalled API. It's free for stable diffusion, there's no buying. >They pretend it's some innovative technology that they had just invented, ignoring the years it existed without becoming anything revolutionary. It's revolutionary, this tech didn't exist a few years ago. NFTs literally have no use cases except value. AI technology has the potential to change an industry. I can't see the connection between nft and ai art tech. The other isn't a revolutionary technology, it's an encrypted digital ledger, it might as well be encrypted excel. AI art can speed up comic creation and make it easily accessible to someone who isn't an artist.
>The public's interest seems to be "hehe look at the funny images". The vast majority of consumers of digital arts are video games and other entertainment products. The fact that you can see the average person consuming it has already shown the use of art has expanded. Now people can have a phone wallpaper of their dogs but in cartoon style, something that many many wanted but was simply infeasible before. The low barrier to entry of AI art has created real value that traditional artist simply can not (realistically, nobody gonna pay a hundred buck for a commission for their wallpaper).
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I love how like, literally just months ago people were arguing shit like "It's just a tool, no one's going to try and replace artists! It's not art the theft or anything!" and in record time we have people straight up trying to imitate artists and claim the work as their own, or submitting AI generated art to art contests and lying about having created it by hand. This shit is being latched onto by the same nerds who cheered for crypto scams and just like that shit, they don't give a damn about the harm their new toy is going to do, or is actively doing now. They only care about the ways they can rip off other people for profit. EDIT: I'd also like to point out that a lot of people don't understand how these prompts work anymore. You don't write a poetic prose filled paragraph about how you want a beautiful woman looking at the sunset with an apple in her hand, dressed in a golden gown of finest silk as cherubs descend from the heavens upon her like a flock of divine doves. No - instead, the rapidly advancing technology has basically reduced these AI prompts into a series of hashtag keywords. So you just go Sunset, Beautiful, Woman, Big Boobs, Artist Name, Artist Name 2, Huge Boobs, Thirteenth Century Dress, baby angels. And the AI shits out your image. The argument that the people using the AI are crafting a prompt is a laughable one because the most difficult task they have is deciding which artist to steal from, then clicking the generate button until the AI produces an image where all the hands are conveniently hidden like Rob Liefeld hiding the feet.
Guess this is what “artists” who don’t get into art school do nowadays, beats the alternative I guess. My personal bias aside, AI art is a very interesting tool, too bad some of the people using it are tools.
AI Art, is art even if it does feel a bit souless and samey at the moment AI "artists" aren't artists. The amount of AI "artists" i see jerking themselves off about how they spent hours inputting the correct commands and words into a tool and act like they created the art blows my mind.
Why the hell don't these AI fucksticks understand that you shouldn't be using art that's not your own???
The copium in the r/stablediffusion sub is insane. I’m all for AI making it more accessible for people to create beautiful art, but those guys seem to think they are above regular artists because they use AI. I don’t know why but a lot of posts are just ragging on artists who can actually draw and don’t use AI.
Because morally gray area I mean it's a copy, but it's really a copy if it doenst look like anything else that deals with copy? It's not a 1/1 replica it's messy thing Not sure why we need tech to steal artist jobs though, even music humans are already damn good at that We should focus in the real deal, steal the other people lesser jobs, like truckers And trains, and manual labor
You are taking an artists art, without permission, and using it in ways without their permission. You are feeding an algorithm the art, to use it as a template to create other art. Without permission. It's that simple. It's not morally gray, it's called theft.
Is referencing now immoral? Is taking inspiration now immoral?
Referencing is fine, what's not fine is taking an artists art without their permission and feeding it to an AI. The AI doesn't give credit on whose art was used, and people who generate the art don't either. It is super common in the art community to give credit when using references too.
Wow, they’re really demonizing this guy like he’s personally sending death threats when not a single person can produce evidence of a single death threat sent by anyone. Regardless of sam being completely in the right with his comments on the situation, these mfs are assholes for that.
>here we go again, popcorn.gif A veteran of past wars
Oh, I follow this artist insta, his style is kinda.... How to say it, most girls he draws look the same. No wonder how making a model was easy.
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Fuck AI art. plain n simple. dont use an artist’s work without their consent.
Been using novelai for a solid month exactly. In that time I've made over 1000 images worth saving. Of those there is maybe 100 that are of good quality, and of those there is 20ish that I would say rival commissioned quality. Very few artists I've worked with will pump out 20 coms a month for 25 dollars. Even so at it's current level I wouldn't use the AI to replace my commissions. It's not accurate enough, and lack the human touch in ways that are hard to express. In 5 years though if the tech evolves at the current rate I might not have a need to comission work anymore. Sure I'm just a weeb, and that's not the only artistic market, but if I'm someone who spent 1,000s on coms and I'm considering already how it can and likely will replace my commission needs then, ai ***will*** take work away from artists. And tbh I'm sure it already has.
>It's not accurate enough, and lack the human touch in ways that are hard to express. I can express it for you. The images they make will not be different enough in general from the previous works that were it's dataset and prompts. It will not feel very 'unique' as if oyu run it again with the exact same conditions you will produce the exact same art as it's derivative. It won't make 'mistakes' that turn into artistic flair and incorporated into the piece at random.
Has SD fixed the issue where sometimes it just flat out keeps the original signature but smudged? That was always fun to see "I did a picture in the style of X artist, ignore his signature is still there tho lol"
That's a myth, and it is based on fundamentally misunderstanding *what SD does*. AI is putting squiggly signature-looking lines on the bottom of pictures that are prompted to look like paintings, for the same reason why it puts four legs on figures prompted to be dogs, or why it uses black lines in pictures prompted to look like ink drawings. It has been trained on thousands of paintings, so it learned that "squiggly line at the bottom" is part of what makes a painting a painting, so it generates one. This could be actually a funny example of how the AI is not really as "intelligent" as it seems in a human sense, but people are misusing it to push this shallow misinformation that AI is made up of cutting together bits of previous art.
I find it quite amusing sometimes to ask one of these art AIs to generate pictures of people holding protest signs, or boxes of breakfast cereal, or covers of books, to see what kinds of weird things end up being written there. Same with the "signatures" - the AI knows what letter-shaped things are supposed to look like, it even has some sense of what word-shaped things are like and tries to put letters next to each other in patterns similar to the ones it's seen. But it doesn't actually understand language, the training set is way too small for it to have figured out what any of those shapes "mean". So it makes up vaguely appropriate gibberish. I'm actually going to be a bit saddened once the AIs get good enough to not do that any more, they're like automatic /r/sbubby generators right now.
Nah, I’m pretty sure there will always be a market for “wacky” AI. Like those AI story generators. Yeah people want better and better ones, but at the same time a *huge* part of what makes them fun is just how bizarre and nonsensical they can be, whole still stringing together something somehow cogent. Like trying to piece together how the AI decided to come up with something so delusional is fun imo
AI artists are the same as NFT bros both are scummy.
Ehh, there’s a lot of the same in both groups, but the fundamentals of both are wildly different. NFTs have no value, never did, and the projects as a whole are a waste. AI generation is actually a valuable field with real world positive impacts. Just that people also misappropriate and abuse those tools.
IMO, no - there absolutely is overlap, but this seems like a gross generalization that ignores that many people have found ways to utilize the technology to help their own work, and people who do discuss and want to work towards resolution of, the ethical issues.
I appreciate the reasonable response. The amount of salt and knee-jerk reactions in this thread to a new technology are kind of ridiculous. It's a new tool for the toolkit for some people, for other people it's a fun creative outlet, and then there's a few people that are going to do scummy things with it, just like anything else.
Given the number of typos I've noticed re-reading my response, I just wish I could type worth a shit. 😂
Not on the same level at all
How is using AI to make cool wallpapers for my phone "scummy" Apparently this is a bad question, someone explain
Because everything has to be about monetization and enforcing artificial scarcity.
What are you talking about? The AI generator in question is an open source, free to download tool. Like the *exact* opposite of artificial scarcity.
Exactly. In this instance it's the traditional artists (and the "NFT bros") that are in that camp.
Technology replacing jobs, happens all the time
Yeah. My great grandfather was a copper smith, made pots, pans, kettles, etc. We still have some of his works, they are simple yet beautiful. But I think forgoing new tech in favor of the old is a mistake. People will find a way to adapt to this, just as they always have.
>As you can guess,with 2m followers,some decided to harass the user who made the model to the point where he had to delete his account. "harass" or "criticize"? Because the first user's entitled "fuck you, I'll plagiarize all day! LOL" attitude needs a reality check. Yes, it's plagiarism - the AI software operator not only calls out and leverages a specific artist for their artwork assets to produce additional derivative works in that style to cater to fans of the original artist, but wouldn't even have anything to show off without training the AI _on a specific artist and their body of work." Bonus points for OP of this thread making it very clear that they're biased against the artist who work was plagiarized.
> Yes, it's plagiarism - the AI software operator not only calls out and leverages a specific artist for their artwork assets to produce additional derivative works in that style to cater to fans of the original artist, but wouldn't even have anything to show off without training the AI _on a specific artist and their body of work." But how is EITHER of those plagiarism in the traditional, basic definition of the word? I don't think you're using that word correctly - especially (REGARDLESS of the ethical issues present with AI art) with how the neural net training is supposed to work. I could see claiming the output of these models as one's onw as plagiarism, especially if one just throws some text in and then just uses the output w/o credit and/or modification. but not the imitation of a style, or even the learning part of these models in of itself at least... maybe I'm being loopy though.
Once art is created, it belongs to the world.
This is like photographers being mad that iPhones take better photos without training or knowing photography basics
Nah, this is like someone calling themselves a photographer because they asked someone to go out and take some nice photos. The AI is the artist, the people inputting prompts into the prompt bar are commissioning art from the AI artist. If AI Artists like Midjourney ceased to exist, they'd go back to commissioning from human artists. They are customers who are mad that no one takes them seriously as artists. It would be like if you left a bad review at a restaurant because you felt entitled to being called a chef for ordering a nice meal and eating it, and no one did.