Ok, dumb question time. I’m assuming no one has any significant issues, legal or otherwise, with a person studying all Van Gogh paintings, learning how to reproduce them, and using that knowledge to create new, derivative works and even selling them.
But when this is done with software, it seems wrong. I can’t quite articulate why though. Is it because it takes much less effort? Anyone can press a button and do something that would presumably take the person from the example above years or decades to do? What if the person was somehow super talented and could do it in a week or a day?
They are copying your intellectual property and digitizing its knowledge. It’s a bit different as it’s PERMANENT. With humans knowledge can be lost, forgotten, or ignored. In these LLMs that’s not an option. Also the skill factor is a big issue imo. It’s very easy to setup an LLM to make AI imagery nowadays.
They are copying. These LLM are a product of their input, and solely a product of their input. It’s why they’ll often directly output their training data. Using more data to train reduces this effect, that’s why all these companies are stealing and getting aggressive in stopping others stealing their data.
So, before the invention of the camera, the most valuable and most popular creative skill was replicating people on canvas as realistically as possible. Yes, we remember famous exceptions like Picasso, but by sheer number of paintings the most common were portraits of rich people.
After the cameras took that job away, prevailing art changed to become more abstract and “creative”. But that still pissed off a lot of people that had spent a very long time honing a skill that was now no longer in demand.
What we’re seeing is a similar shift. I think future generations of artists will value color theory, composition, etc. over specific brush stroke techniques. AI will make art much more accessible once enough time has passed for AI assisted art to be considered art. Make no mistake: it will always be people that actually create the art - AI will just reduce/remove the grunt work so they can focus more on creativity.
Now, whether billion dollar corporations deserve to exploit the labor of millions of people is a whole separate conversation, but tl;dr: they don’t, but they’re going to anyway because there is little to stop them in correct economic/governance models.
Artists who rips off other great works are still developing their talent and skills. They can then go on to use to make original works. The machine will never produce anything original. It is only capable of mixing together things it has seen in its training set.
There is a very real danger that of ai eviscerating the ability for artists to make a living, making it where very few people will have the financial ability to practice their craft day in and day out, resulting in a dearth of good original art.
There’s a simple argument: when a human studies Van Gogh and develops their own style based on it, it’s only a single person with very limited output (they can only paint so much in a single day).
With AI you can train a model on Van Gogh and similar paintings, and infinitely replicate this knowledge. The output is almost unlimited.
This means that the skills of every single human artist are suddenly worth less, and the possessions of the rich are suddenly worth more. Wealth concentration is poison for a society, especially when we are still reliant on jobs for survival.
AI is problematic as long as it shifts power and wealth away from workers.
Just as an interesting “what if” scenario - a human making the effort to stylize Van Gogh is okay, and the problem with the AI model is that it can spit out endless results from endless sources.
What if I made a robot and put the Van Gogh painting AI in it, never releasing in elsewhere. The robot can visualize countless iterations of the piece it wants to make but its only way share it is to actually paint it - much in the same way a human must do the same process.
Does this scenario devalue human effort?
Is it an acceptable use of AI? If so does that mean that the underlying issue with AI isn’t that it exists in the first place but that its distribution is what makes it devalue humanity?
*This isn’t a “gotcha”, I just want a little discussion!
It’s an interesting question! From my point of view, “devaluing human effort” (from an artistic perspective) doesn’t really matter - humans will still be creating new and interesting art. I’m solely concerned about the shift in economic power/leverage, as this is what materially affects artists.
This means that if your robot creates paintings with an output rate comparable to a human artist, I don’t really see anything wrong with it. The issue arises once you’re surpassing the limits of the individual, as this is where the power starts to shift.
As an aside, I’m still incredibly fascinated by the capabilities and development of current AI systems. We’ve created almost universal approximators that exhibit complex behavior which was pretty much unthinkable 15-20 years ago (in the sense that it was expected to take much longer to achieve current results). Sadly, like any other invention, this incredible technology is being abused by capitalists and populists for profit and gain at the expense of everyone else.
Google has been doing this for years for their search engine and no one said a thing. Why do you care now that it’s a different program scanning your media?
Generative AI is incapable of contributing new material, because Generative AI does not sense the world through a unique perspective. So the comparison to creators that incorporate prior artists work is a false comparison. Artists are allowed to incorporate other artists work in the same way that scientists cite other’s work without it being plagiarism.
In art, in science, we stand on the shoulders of giants. AI models do not stand on the shoulders of giants. AI models just replicate the giants. Society has been fooled to think otherwise.
Generative AI is a tool. It is neither a creator nor an artist, any more than paintbrushes or cameras are. The problem arises not with the tool itself but with how it is used. The creativity must come from the user, just like the way Procreate or GIMP or even photography works.
The skill factor is certainly lower than other forms of artistic expression, but that is true of photography vs painting as well.
I am not trying to say all uses of generative AI are art, anymore than every photograph is art. But that doesn’t mean it cannot be a tool to create art, part of the workflow as utilized by someone with a vision willing to take the time to get the end product they want.
Generative AI doesn’t stand on the shoulders of giants, but neither does a camera.
So try doing Disney style animation and similar character and similar style story line. And start profiting from it. Lets see if the “Disney” the “corporation” will remain silent or sue you to oblivion.
I don’t hate him. Its just that when corporation steals individual idea or data its for research and stuff. If its other way around, us as individual will have to face lawsuit.
So i hope they sue nvidia and other big corporations who are harvesting our data for AI.
Thats the thing, nothings being stolen. Beauty and the Beast didnt up and disappear because Bluth and Fox Studios made Anastasia. Theres style similarities but it is undeniably its own work. Dont even think about the style sharing going on in the thousands of Anime out there.
If someone studies Van Gogh and reproduces images, they’re still not making Van Gogh - they’re making their art inspired by Van Gogh. It still has their quirks and qualms and history behind the brush making it unique. If a computer studies Van Gogh and reproduces those images, it’s reproducing Van Gogh. It has no quirks or qualms or history. It’s just making Van Gogh as if Van Gogh was making Van Gogh.
There are tons of artists that copy others very closely. There are plenty of examples of A.I. making all kinds of unique and quirky artwork despite drawing from artworks. Feels like you’re backing into the grey area of option so that you can stick to a framework that fits a narrative.
tl;dr: copyright law has always been nonsense designed to protect corporations and fuck over artists+consumers
but now corpo daddy and corpo mommy are fighting, and we need to take sides.
and it’s revealing that copyright law never existed to protect artists, and will continue to not do that, but MUCH more obviously, and all the cucks who whined about free culture violating laws are reaping what they fucking sowed.
Ok, dumb question time. I’m assuming no one has any significant issues, legal or otherwise, with a person studying all Van Gogh paintings, learning how to reproduce them, and using that knowledge to create new, derivative works and even selling them.
But when this is done with software, it seems wrong. I can’t quite articulate why though. Is it because it takes much less effort? Anyone can press a button and do something that would presumably take the person from the example above years or decades to do? What if the person was somehow super talented and could do it in a week or a day?
They are copying your intellectual property and digitizing its knowledge. It’s a bit different as it’s PERMANENT. With humans knowledge can be lost, forgotten, or ignored. In these LLMs that’s not an option. Also the skill factor is a big issue imo. It’s very easy to setup an LLM to make AI imagery nowadays.
Your first sentence is truth
Your first sentence is false.
Proof? I am fairly certain I am correct but I will gladly admit fault. This whole LLM thing is indeed new to me also
They are copying. These LLM are a product of their input, and solely a product of their input. It’s why they’ll often directly output their training data. Using more data to train reduces this effect, that’s why all these companies are stealing and getting aggressive in stopping others stealing their data.
So, before the invention of the camera, the most valuable and most popular creative skill was replicating people on canvas as realistically as possible. Yes, we remember famous exceptions like Picasso, but by sheer number of paintings the most common were portraits of rich people.
After the cameras took that job away, prevailing art changed to become more abstract and “creative”. But that still pissed off a lot of people that had spent a very long time honing a skill that was now no longer in demand.
What we’re seeing is a similar shift. I think future generations of artists will value color theory, composition, etc. over specific brush stroke techniques. AI will make art much more accessible once enough time has passed for AI assisted art to be considered art. Make no mistake: it will always be people that actually create the art - AI will just reduce/remove the grunt work so they can focus more on creativity.
Now, whether billion dollar corporations deserve to exploit the labor of millions of people is a whole separate conversation, but tl;dr: they don’t, but they’re going to anyway because there is little to stop them in correct economic/governance models.
Artists who rips off other great works are still developing their talent and skills. They can then go on to use to make original works. The machine will never produce anything original. It is only capable of mixing together things it has seen in its training set.
There is a very real danger that of ai eviscerating the ability for artists to make a living, making it where very few people will have the financial ability to practice their craft day in and day out, resulting in a dearth of good original art.
The machine will never produce anything original. It is only capable of mixing together things it has seen in its training set.
This is patently false and shows you don’t know a single thing about how ai works.
There’s a simple argument: when a human studies Van Gogh and develops their own style based on it, it’s only a single person with very limited output (they can only paint so much in a single day).
With AI you can train a model on Van Gogh and similar paintings, and infinitely replicate this knowledge. The output is almost unlimited.
This means that the skills of every single human artist are suddenly worth less, and the possessions of the rich are suddenly worth more. Wealth concentration is poison for a society, especially when we are still reliant on jobs for survival.
AI is problematic as long as it shifts power and wealth away from workers.
Just as an interesting “what if” scenario - a human making the effort to stylize Van Gogh is okay, and the problem with the AI model is that it can spit out endless results from endless sources.
What if I made a robot and put the Van Gogh painting AI in it, never releasing in elsewhere. The robot can visualize countless iterations of the piece it wants to make but its only way share it is to actually paint it - much in the same way a human must do the same process.
Does this scenario devalue human effort? Is it an acceptable use of AI? If so does that mean that the underlying issue with AI isn’t that it exists in the first place but that its distribution is what makes it devalue humanity?
*This isn’t a “gotcha”, I just want a little discussion!
It’s an interesting question! From my point of view, “devaluing human effort” (from an artistic perspective) doesn’t really matter - humans will still be creating new and interesting art. I’m solely concerned about the shift in economic power/leverage, as this is what materially affects artists.
This means that if your robot creates paintings with an output rate comparable to a human artist, I don’t really see anything wrong with it. The issue arises once you’re surpassing the limits of the individual, as this is where the power starts to shift.
As an aside, I’m still incredibly fascinated by the capabilities and development of current AI systems. We’ve created almost universal approximators that exhibit complex behavior which was pretty much unthinkable 15-20 years ago (in the sense that it was expected to take much longer to achieve current results). Sadly, like any other invention, this incredible technology is being abused by capitalists and populists for profit and gain at the expense of everyone else.
Easier than that:
Google has been doing this for years for their search engine and no one said a thing. Why do you care now that it’s a different program scanning your media?
Generative AI is incapable of contributing new material, because Generative AI does not sense the world through a unique perspective. So the comparison to creators that incorporate prior artists work is a false comparison. Artists are allowed to incorporate other artists work in the same way that scientists cite other’s work without it being plagiarism.
In art, in science, we stand on the shoulders of giants. AI models do not stand on the shoulders of giants. AI models just replicate the giants. Society has been fooled to think otherwise.
Generative AI is a tool. It is neither a creator nor an artist, any more than paintbrushes or cameras are. The problem arises not with the tool itself but with how it is used. The creativity must come from the user, just like the way Procreate or GIMP or even photography works.
The skill factor is certainly lower than other forms of artistic expression, but that is true of photography vs painting as well.
I am not trying to say all uses of generative AI are art, anymore than every photograph is art. But that doesn’t mean it cannot be a tool to create art, part of the workflow as utilized by someone with a vision willing to take the time to get the end product they want.
Generative AI doesn’t stand on the shoulders of giants, but neither does a camera.
So try doing Disney style animation and similar character and similar style story line. And start profiting from it. Lets see if the “Disney” the “corporation” will remain silent or sue you to oblivion.
Damn you musta hated Don Bluth
I don’t hate him. Its just that when corporation steals individual idea or data its for research and stuff. If its other way around, us as individual will have to face lawsuit.
So i hope they sue nvidia and other big corporations who are harvesting our data for AI.
Thats the thing, nothings being stolen. Beauty and the Beast didnt up and disappear because Bluth and Fox Studios made Anastasia. Theres style similarities but it is undeniably its own work. Dont even think about the style sharing going on in the thousands of Anime out there.
If someone studies Van Gogh and reproduces images, they’re still not making Van Gogh - they’re making their art inspired by Van Gogh. It still has their quirks and qualms and history behind the brush making it unique. If a computer studies Van Gogh and reproduces those images, it’s reproducing Van Gogh. It has no quirks or qualms or history. It’s just making Van Gogh as if Van Gogh was making Van Gogh.
There are tons of artists that copy others very closely. There are plenty of examples of A.I. making all kinds of unique and quirky artwork despite drawing from artworks. Feels like you’re backing into the grey area of option so that you can stick to a framework that fits a narrative.
tl;dr: copyright law has always been nonsense designed to protect corporations and fuck over artists+consumers
but now corpo daddy and corpo mommy are fighting, and we need to take sides.
and it’s revealing that copyright law never existed to protect artists, and will continue to not do that, but MUCH more obviously, and all the cucks who whined about free culture violating laws are reaping what they fucking sowed.
agreed.
What if banksy sued anyone who shared or archived photos of his wall art, that wouldn’t make sense