The Artificial Intelligence Thread

[Nilokeras]

No, that's the practice your critique of AI is endorsing.

Either (1) art is for everyone, in which case, either:

(1.1) it must either be monetised in a way that doesn't involve an employer/worker (or patron or client) relationship, or
(1.2) it isn't monetised at all,

or (2) art isn't for everyone, in which case you can make a living off it.

Anyone can create art. I can get out a pen and paper and start drawing. It will be bad, of course, because I'm not good at drawing, but it is still art. You're conflating the artisanal work of an artist and the practice of creating art writ large.

Suppose we had robots that could do all the jobs necessary to sustain human life. *snip*

I do not care about your fantasy world. We are talking about the world we actually live in right now.

Work for hire art isn't creative in this sense. It's being told to produce something based on a brief, and if the brief writer (or, worse, the brief writer's boss) doesn't like it, you're either told to start again or you don't get the client and the brief's given to someone else to try. You are producing someone else's vision and the final say on everything to do with it, is someone else's. You didn't come up with the concept, you don't hold a copyright, you can't adjust the concept (without permission)... you're no different to a factory line worker: if you can't find joy in the mechanics, you're going to be demoralised.

Work for hire is absolutely still creative. Going from employer brief to finished product is still creation, even if it is at the direction of someone else. We don't say the portraits of the Flemish masters weren't creative works of art just because they were commissioned by Johannes von Kluuunkj or whoever.

Go on, make us something. Prove that prompt engineering deserves the scare quotes. It's not like your point relies wholly on the lack of skill of producing AI Art or anything, right? Oh, it does? Hmm...

The dichotomy between skilled and unskilled labour comes in the bargaining power it affords a worker. A skilled labourer is someone who carries training and ability with them beyond that which an employer could reasonably train a total neophyte to do. A digital artist can walk out from a job and take their portfolio and skills with them to be hired somewhere else. If their employer wants to replace them, they have to find a new digital artist with a comparative level of skill: they cannot hire Joe Random and train them from scratch to be a digital artist.

You can feasibly teach Joe Random to be a prompt engineer though, because that job requires much less training, in a pure quantitative hours-of-practice sense, to do than a digital artist. That's why it's de-skilling labour. It's classic Fordism: the replacement of a skilled labourer into piece work carried out by people who require less training, have fewer transferrable skills and who are reliant on equipment controlled by capital to carry out their work.

[Forsher]

No, that's the practice your critique of AI is endorsing.

Either (1) art is for everyone, in which case, either:

(1.1) it must either be monetised in a way that doesn't involve an employer/worker (or patron or client) relationship, or
(1.2) it isn't monetised at all,

or (2) art isn't for everyone, in which case you can make a living off it.

Anyone can create art. I can get out a pen and paper and start drawing. It will be bad, of course, because I'm not good at drawing, but it is still art. You're conflating the artisanal work of an artist and the practice of creating art writ large.

No, I'm being elitist. I'm excluding your bad drawing from the category art, because it is bad.

Suppose we had robots that could do all the jobs necessary to sustain human life. *snip*

I do not care about your fantasy world. We are talking about the world we actually live in right now.

No, you absolutely are talking about a fantasy world until proven otherwise. What's more, you're talking about the same fantasy world I just described.

Work for hire art isn't creative in this sense. It's being told to produce something based on a brief, and if the brief writer (or, worse, the brief writer's boss) doesn't like it, you're either told to start again or you don't get the client and the brief's given to someone else to try. You are producing someone else's vision and the final say on everything to do with it, is someone else's. You didn't come up with the concept, you don't hold a copyright, you can't adjust the concept (without permission)... you're no different to a factory line worker: if you can't find joy in the mechanics, you're going to be demoralised.

Work for hire is absolutely still creative. Going from employer brief to finished product is still creation, even if it is at the direction of someone else. We don't say the portraits of the Flemish masters weren't creative works of art just because they were commissioned by Johannes von Kluuunkj or whoever.

The claim is not that they're not creative. The claim is that they're not joyous expressions of creative freedom but instead the products of the creative mind of Johannes von Kluuunkj or whoever.* The claim is that they're wage slavery. Hence the discussion of what artistic expression in a world where no-one had to work would be like. Hence the comparison to factory line workers in this very paragraph.

*Though there is a difference between following a brief and being asked to provide an arbitrary painting. The best case scenario, in other words, is just being asked for something, not asked to follow a vague brief. I was mistaken before.

Go on, make us something. Prove that prompt engineering deserves the scare quotes. It's not like your point relies wholly on the lack of skill of producing AI Art or anything, right? Oh, it does? Hmm...

The dichotomy between skilled and unskilled labour comes in the bargaining power it affords a worker. A skilled labourer is someone who carries training and ability with them beyond that which an employer could reasonably train a total neophyte to do. A digital artist can walk out from a job and take their portfolio and skills with them to be hired somewhere else. If their employer wants to replace them, they have to find a new digital artist with a comparative level of skill: they cannot hire Joe Random and train them from scratch to be a digital artist.

You can feasibly teach Joe Random to be a prompt engineer though, because that job requires much less training, in a pure quantitative hours-of-practice sense, to do than a digital artist. That's why it's de-skilling labour. It's classic Fordism: the replacement of a skilled labourer into piece work carried out by people who require less training, have fewer transferrable skills and who are reliant on equipment controlled by capital to carry out their work.

Does it, though?

That's the whole point. Your entire point rests on this single asserted premise. That it's not skilled labour. And it's weird that you're asserting it because it's not hard to test.

You've seen me describe the leaps and bounds in quality between October 2022 and January 2023. Imagine the advances made since then (aside from hands)? You could be convinced by my appendix and still find that you're correct, purely because of developments I hypothesised could exist. It wouldn't be hard to do. Given your antipathy to all things AI, I assume you've still able to get a free trial at Midjourney? The cost to you, if you're right, is literally nothing beyond possibly having to make a Discord account/find your password and think up something to create. It'll take five minutes (I can't remember how long it takes to generate the art). And you don't even really have to conceive of a prompt... you could just use one of my prompts or possibly even find a tested prompt.

(Also, Midjourney might be controlled by capital, Dall E whatsit also, but Disco is literally in Google Collabs utilising a service provided for free... and if you've got a good enough machine and more understanding of Python than I do (I tried and failed), you can do it locally... and while there is a paid version of Stable Diffusion, you can use that for free, too, running locally... and I managed that, as you've seen.)

[Senkaku]

(Also, Midjourney might be controlled by capital, Dall E whatsit also, but Disco is literally in Google Collabs utilising a service provided for free...

How charitable of Google, the famously socialist philanthropic enterprise, to do this without any expectation of any kind of reward…?

Anyone can create art. I can get out a pen and paper and start drawing. It will be bad, of course, because I'm not good at drawing, but it is still art. You're conflating the artisanal work of an artist and the practice of creating art writ large.

No, I'm being elitist. I'm excluding your bad drawing from the category art, because it is bad.

Didn’t Ratatouille teach you anything as a kid? Jeez

The claim is not that they're not creative. The claim is that they're not joyous expressions of creative freedom but instead the products of the creative mind of Johannes von Kluuunkj or whoever.* The claim is that they're wage slavery.

*Though there is a difference between following a brief and being asked to provide an arbitrary painting. The best case scenario, in other words, is just being asked for something, not asked to follow a vague brief. I was mistaken before.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone else ever conceptualize commissioned artwork this way. It’s just perverse. No one credits artworks this way in the real world, there’s a reason it’s Vermeer and Rembrandt who we remember rather than Johannes von Kluuuynjk or whoever. Next you’ll tell me the Pope should get credit for the Sistine Chapel ceiling because he shouted at Michelangelo about it.

[Ifreann]

A song that uses artificial intelligence to clone the voices of Drake and The Weeknd is being removed from streaming services.

Heart On My Sleeve is no longer available on Apple Music, Spotify, Deezer and Tidal.

It is also in process of being pulled from TikTok and YouTube, but some versions remain available.

It follows stinging criticism from publishers Universal Music Group which said the song violated copyright law.

The music publisher said platforms had a "legal and ethical responsibility" to prevent the use of services harming artists.

The track simulates Drake and The Weeknd trading verses about pop star and actress Selena Gomez, who previously dated The Weeknd.

The creator, known as @ghostwriter, claims the song was created by software trained on the musicians' voices.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-65309313

There seems to be at least two new AI news stories everyday lately...

I don't see how using a computer to simulate a voice is "artificial intelligence".

[Forsher]

(Also, Midjourney might be controlled by capital, Dall E whatsit also, but Disco is literally in Google Collabs utilising a service provided for free...

How charitable of Google, the famously socialist philanthropic enterprise, to do this without any expectation of any kind of reward…?

I have no idea what kind of reward Google wants from Google Collabs. Maybe it has ads but I have an ad blocker.

No, I'm being elitist. I'm excluding your bad drawing from the category art, because it is bad.

Didn’t Ratatouille teach you anything as a kid? Jeez

I would rewatch the movie if I were you.

Good cooks can come from anywhere =/= anyone can cook. It was spelled out very explicitly. The film is absolutely endorsing an elitist message. If it helps, this is the same guy that wrote a movie on the theme of "if everyone is special, then no-one is".

The claim is not that they're not creative. The claim is that they're not joyous expressions of creative freedom but instead the products of the creative mind of Johannes von Kluuunkj or whoever.* The claim is that they're wage slavery.

*Though there is a difference between following a brief and being asked to provide an arbitrary painting. The best case scenario, in other words, is just being asked for something, not asked to follow a vague brief. I was mistaken before.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone else ever conceptualize commissioned artwork this way. It’s just perverse.

It's just honest.

If I ask for a painting of a guy and dictate to you what he should wear, the composition of the piece, the size, the materials and then burn the painting and hire someone else because yours wasn't good enough, you don't have any kind of creative control. In some sense, you're no more a creative force than an Amazon warehouse employee who isn't even allowed to decide how to load a trolley. Or, of course, a computer program. Like I said, the argument Nilokeras is using, is anti-creative freedom and pro-wage slavery.

People don't talk about historical paintings in this way because usually the artist had creative control (at least, I've never seen anyone suggest otherwise), and the patron just wants a painting.

You ever wondered why we have the phrase "creative control"? It's because a lot of commissioned art doesn't work like this and a way of referring to the tension needed to be created. Classic example: movies.

[Emotional Support Crocodile]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-65309313

There seems to be at least two new AI news stories everyday lately...

I don't see how using a computer to simulate a voice is "artificial intelligence".

It's the machine learning needed to train a computer to speak recognisably as a particular person.

[Ifreann]

I don't see how using a computer to simulate a voice is "artificial intelligence".

It's the machine learning needed to train a computer to speak recognisably as a particular person.

So not artificial intelligence.

[Senkaku]

How charitable of Google, the famously socialist philanthropic enterprise, to do this without any expectation of any kind of reward…?

I have no idea what kind of reward Google wants from Google Collabs.

…not even a guess? No ideas at all? I’m actually laughing

I would rewatch the movie if I were you.

A Pixar binge would probably be more fruitful than posting, I guess

Good cooks can come from anywhere =/= anyone can cook.

Not everyone can be a great artist =/= only great artists are artists. You don’t need to link the monologue, I remember it embarrassingly well for an adult of my big age. Nilo’s drawing or my cooking might be subject to deservedly far harsher criticism than Vermeer’s or Julia Child’s, but bad art is still art.

People don't talk about historical paintings in this way because usually the artist had creative control (at least, I've never seen anyone suggest otherwise), and the patron just wants a painting.

You’re honestly really making my morning, I don’t think I’ve encountered such bemusing and ludicrous takes on art and art history since I last spoke to a Yale business major. Michelangelo and the Pope literally got into screaming matches about that ceiling!

[Forsher]

It's the machine learning needed to train a computer to speak recognisably as a particular person.

So not artificial intelligence.

Unusually you've got a valid point, but this ship has sailed.

[Forsher]

I have no idea what kind of reward Google wants from Google Collabs.

…not even a guess? No ideas at all? I’m actually laughing

I'm beginning to suspect you haven't used Google Collabs.

I would rewatch the movie if I were you.

A Pixar binge would probably be more fruitful than posting, I guess

Good cooks can come from anywhere =/= anyone can cook.

Not everyone can be a great artist =/= only great artists are artists. You don’t need to link the monologue, I remember it embarrassingly well for an adult of my big age. Nilo’s drawing or my cooking might be subject to deservedly far harsher criticism than Vermeer’s or Julia Child’s, but bad art is still art.

What do you think "I'm being Elitist" means?

People don't talk about historical paintings in this way because usually the artist had creative control (at least, I've never seen anyone suggest otherwise), and the patron just wants a painting.

You’re honestly really making my morning, I don’t think I’ve encountered such bemusing and ludicrous takes on art and art history since I last spoke to a Yale business major.

So, you're saying that the Pope didn't have creative control and Michaelangelo did and the Pope wasn't happy about it. Good. Glad we're on the same page. If you want to be obtuse, be smarter about it.

I suppose it's possible you have no idea what the fuck the word usually means. In which case, Jesus Fucking Christ.

[Nilokeras]

No, I'm being elitist. I'm excluding your bad drawing from the category art, because it is bad.

Why is a drawing not art if it's 'bad'?

The claim is not that they're not creative. The claim is that they're not joyous expressions of creative freedom but instead the products of the creative mind of Johannes von Kluuunkj or whoever.* The claim is that they're wage slavery. Hence the discussion of what artistic expression in a world where no-one had to work would be like. Hence the comparison to factory line workers in this very paragraph.

*Though there is a difference between following a brief and being asked to provide an arbitrary painting. The best case scenario, in other words, is just being asked for something, not asked to follow a vague brief. I was mistaken before.

Producing paintings for wealthy Flemish cloth merchants is still labour, yes. That's never been in contention. The degree of control and latitude for expression however is very different, as you admit fully.

Does it, though?

That's the whole point. Your entire point rests on this single asserted premise. That it's not skilled labour. And it's weird that you're asserting it because it's not hard to test.

I know it's not hard to test, because you're purposefully avoiding doing the actual comparison. Add up the number of hours you've spent learning how to give a good prompt to Stable Diffusion in order to produce a landscape painting in the style of Rembrandt. Compare that to the number of hours of learning and practice it would take you to learn how to do that painting with oils on a canvas. Which is larger?

The answer, obviously, is the second.

[Emotional Support Crocodile]

It's the machine learning needed to train a computer to speak recognisably as a particular person.

So not artificial intelligence.

Machine learning is a sub-discipline of artificial intelligence, so it's arguable.

[Senkaku]

…not even a guess? No ideas at all? I’m actually laughing

I'm beginning to suspect you haven't used Google Collabs.

Why might it be in Alphabet’s interests to let people use Google Collabs?

A Pixar binge would probably be more fruitful than posting, I guess

Not everyone can be a great artist =/= only great artists are artists. You don’t need to link the monologue, I remember it embarrassingly well for an adult of my big age. Nilo’s drawing or my cooking might be subject to deservedly far harsher criticism than Vermeer’s or Julia Child’s, but bad art is still art.

What do you think "I'm being Elitist" means?

It means you’re offering bad takes on art and culture with unmerited confidence in your own taste and expertise, usually.

You’re honestly really making my morning, I don’t think I’ve encountered such bemusing and ludicrous takes on art and art history since I last spoke to a Yale business major.

So, you're saying that the Pope didn't have creative control and Michaelangelo did and the Pope wasn't happy about it.

Not exactly lol— but hey, if you spent half as much time reading art history as you apparently do training your models or whatever, you might actually be able to contribute something valuable to the culture someday. Do you think artists in various media today don’t have creative disagreements with their patrons and never have any creative control? Do you seriously think all pre-20th century artists always had total creative control, as if that isn’t something people have wrestled over since the beginning of time?

I suppose it's possible you have no idea what the fuck the word usually means.

A weasel-word inserted to give you an escape hatch when confronted with the absurdity of the ahistorical generalization that you jammed it into? Even then, it’s absurd on its face and carrying the weight of the whole sentence on its shoulders; degrees of creative control have always differed and still do depending on the work, the patron-artist relationships, etc..

[Forsher]

I'm beginning to suspect you haven't used Google Collabs.

Why might it be in Alphabet’s interests to let people use Google Collabs?

What do you think "I'm being Elitist" means?

It means you’re offering bad takes on art and culture with unmerited confidence in your own taste and expertise, usually.

So, you're saying that the Pope didn't have creative control and Michaelangelo did and the Pope wasn't happy about it.

Not exactly lol— but hey, if you spent half as much time reading art history as you apparently do training your models or whatever, you might actually be able to contribute something valuable to the culture someday. Do you think artists in various media today don’t have creative disagreements with their patrons and never have any creative control? Do you seriously think all pre-20th century artists always had total creative control, as if that isn’t something people have wrestled over since the beginning of time?

*yawn*

Definitely go binge some Pixar movies. And failing that read what I fucking write, not whatever nonsense you concoct in your own head.

EDIT: in hindsight, Senkaku's attempts to own me have done an absolutely fantastic job of substantiating my point about creative control. It's kinda what happens when you don't fucking read and instead just pursue pointless vendettas.

[Forsher]

No, I'm being elitist. I'm excluding your bad drawing from the category art, because it is bad.

Why is a drawing not art if it's 'bad'?

This has nothing to do with anything.

Should I have said "good art"? Clearly. Or perhaps "art people like looking at". It doesn't matter. Your critique that I'm confusing the artisanal effort of a working artist and the practice of producing any old rubbish (to quote from Senkaku's favourite movie) is sidestepped in either situation. You know that I'm not talking about the fruits of your labours or even of what I can do with a pen and paper, but instead of stuff the arbitrary observer likes.

If your point was that there's no such thing as good and bad art, I could understand why you care but you accept the existence of good and bad art. It's so pointless.

The claim is not that they're not creative. The claim is that they're not joyous expressions of creative freedom but instead the products of the creative mind of Johannes von Kluuunkj or whoever.* The claim is that they're wage slavery. Hence the discussion of what artistic expression in a world where no-one had to work would be like. Hence the comparison to factory line workers in this very paragraph.

*Though there is a difference between following a brief and being asked to provide an arbitrary painting. The best case scenario, in other words, is just being asked for something, not asked to follow a vague brief. I was mistaken before.

Producing paintings for wealthy Flemish cloth merchants is still labour, yes. That's never been in contention. The degree of control and latitude for expression however is very different, as you admit fully.

Which is just another way of sidestepping the point... your problem with AI art is just an argument for exploiting artists but it's good exploitation because it's people who will be exploited.

Does it, though?

That's the whole point. Your entire point rests on this single asserted premise. That it's not skilled labour. And it's weird that you're asserting it because it's not hard to test.

I know it's not hard to test, because you're purposefully avoiding doing the actual comparison. Add up the number of hours you've spent learning how to give a good prompt to Stable Diffusion in order to produce a landscape painting in the style of Rembrandt. Compare that to the number of hours of learning and practice it would take you to learn how to do that painting with oils on a canvas. Which is larger?

The answer, obviously, is the second.

I'm not paying money to prove your point.

And I've used Stable Diffusion for a grand total of about seven hours. And I wouldn't say I've learnt how to produce a good prompt. That was pretty much the entire point. I literally wrote a whole appendix showing you some of the best pieces I've managed to make (ask for) and explaining how they're either flukes or not actually what I wanted.

As far as I'm concerned, I've proved my point. I am not good at prompt engineering. Here have a look at most of the Midjourney artworks I got during my trial (there was some kind of upload error). You can't see my prompts by you can tell by the obvious repetition of ideas that I wasn't getting what I wanted. You can find out if Midjourney has got better at being a genie, but I'd have to pay money to do it.

Here's all of the Merlin, Nimue and God series from my October experiments with Stable, barring more upload misfortunes. You'll notice the complete lack of any kind of Arthurian reference.

Here's some different Merlin and Nimue stuff, this time based directly on the source material, from the January experiments. You won't recognise anything from these pictures because, again, either it simply can't do what you say it can, or I'm not any good at using Stable Diffusion.

And in case you think all these fucking images are insincere, have a read of this. Note the date. That's an incomplete "poetic adaptation" of the source material. Here's a 2021 continuation as a hypothetical film series. At this point this might be sounding kinda familiar. This is because I made you read a film sequel to a different continuation just the other week. I cannot stress, enough, how much I want this to work. But look at what I get. I. Am. Not. Good. At. Prompt. Engineering. I haven't learnt it and the amount of time I've spent on it cannot be used to demonstrate the level of effort required* to become good at prompt engineering.

And, of course, I already showed you a lot of stuff from the thing I spent a lot more than seven hours working with Disco Diffusion on. Of course, I do think I was better at using Disco but, alas, I don't have ready access to any of my outputs from Disco.Here's however many pictures from approximately sixty seconds of one of the video compilations I made. You will note the quite different subject matter... so when I say I was better with Disco, perhaps I was just more conscious of what it could do well.

What you, Nilokeras, can do, however, is determine if the technology has got to the point where you don't need to have talent at anything. If it can, fantastic, your point is made. If it can't, no problem, Forsher already demonstrated that the technology is getting better... you need only wait. In the meantime, read the thing that I learnt about Midjourney from.

*Though, I'm inclined to agree with Ego/Brad Bird. You've either got it, in which case you can get better, or you don't, in which case you cannot. But if you do have it, you might not need to learn anything to already be incredible.

[Shavervia]

I would rather live with the bleeding edge of technological advancements then face a state mandated safety zone, while it and "academics" can play at the razors edge without me.

[Nilokeras]

This has nothing to do with anything.

Should I have said "good art"? Clearly. Or perhaps "art people like looking at". It doesn't matter. Your critique that I'm confusing the artisanal effort of a working artist and the practice of producing any old rubbish (to quote from Senkaku's favourite movie) is sidestepped in either situation. You know that I'm not talking about the fruits of your labours or even of what I can do with a pen and paper, but instead of stuff the arbitrary observer likes.

If your point was that there's no such thing as good and bad art, I could understand why you care but you accept the existence of good and bad art. It's so pointless.

You haven't sidestepped it at all, because you're fundamentally not 'democratizing' art at all. These algorithms are trained on art that was produced by real human artists, stolen off the internet with no compensation to their creators, and which will be used to destroy the means by which said artists make money to support themselves. It's enclosure on a huge scale: digital artists being replaced by an algorithm that was trained, in part, by their own work, and whose creators will reap a tidy profit from charging access to it.

I'm not paying money to prove your point.

And I've used Stable Diffusion for a grand total of about seven hours. *snip*

See what you've done there is prove my point. You can produce art through Stable Diffusion or whatever that is probably, as far as video game company production workflows are concerned, 'good enough' with seven hours of practice. That image now gets passed on to someone else who can touch up the work - which also requires much less practice - and move on to the next stage of production.

[Forsher]

This has nothing to do with anything.

Should I have said "good art"? Clearly. Or perhaps "art people like looking at". It doesn't matter. Your critique that I'm confusing the artisanal effort of a working artist and the practice of producing any old rubbish (to quote from Senkaku's favourite movie) is sidestepped in either situation. You know that I'm not talking about the fruits of your labours or even of what I can do with a pen and paper, but instead of stuff the arbitrary observer likes.

If your point was that there's no such thing as good and bad art, I could understand why you care but you accept the existence of good and bad art. It's so pointless.

You haven't sidestepped it at all, because you're fundamentally not 'democratizing' art at all. These algorithms are trained on art that was produced by real human artists, stolen off the internet with no compensation to their creators, and which will be used to destroy the means by which said artists make money to support themselves. It's enclosure on a huge scale: digital artists being replaced by an algorithm that was trained, in part, by their own work, and whose creators will reap a tidy profit from charging access to it.

No, what we've got now is an enclosure. A system by which a common resource (art) is closed off and protected by economic contracts.

And it's being replaced by three paid services, one of which is also available for free, and however many other Google Collabs are out there.

The destruction of their livelihoods and democractisation aren't inconsistent. If you democratise a dictatorship, the dictator loses their livelihood, too. What you're describing is an entirely different problem. You're trying to find a way of making "more people can make more art that more people like" as a non-existent thing when it so obviously could soon be the case. What you should be doing is arguing "the democratisation isn't worth the cost". You see how those aren't the same positions and require radically different arguments, right?

I'm not paying money to prove your point.

And I've used Stable Diffusion for a grand total of about seven hours. *snip*

See what you've done there is prove my point. You can produce art through Stable Diffusion or whatever that is probably, as far as video game company production workflows are concerned, 'good enough' with seven hours of practice. That image now gets passed on to someone else who can touch up the work - which also requires much less practice - and move on to the next stage of production.

They should lose their jobs if that's what they're turning in.

Hardly any of that stuff is useful as concept art. In case you hadn't noticed, what I wanted and was unsatisfied with was its value as concept art.

Some of it you could rework... the composition is tolerable, there's some level of isolationable detail... but most of that is just plain junk. It's really fucking cool that a computer can make it, but whether it's recognisable as the prompt is a complete crapshoot (after seven hours, anyway).

Everyone, tell me what is that you think these two are:

You haven't got a clue, do you?

[Nilokeras]

No, what we've got now is an enclosure. A system by which a common resource (art) is closed off and protected by economic contracts.

Art does not grow on trees - it is the product of human labour. Why are you entitled to the product of their labour?

The destruction of their livelihoods and democractisation aren't inconsistent. If you democratise a dictatorship, the dictator loses their livelihood, too. What you're describing is an entirely different problem. You're trying to find a way of making "more people can make more art that more people like" as a non-existent thing when it so obviously could soon be the case. What you should be doing is arguing "the democratisation isn't worth the cost". You see how those aren't the same positions and require radically different arguments, right?

It's certainly an interesting argument to posit that the existence of people who have a skill that you don't represents a dictatorship. And its corollary, that 'democratization' is best pursued through allowing a large corporation to subsume that skill and force those skilled people to take up unskilled work.

They should lose their jobs if that's what they're turning in.

Hardly any of that stuff is useful as concept art. In case you hadn't noticed, what I wanted and was unsatisfied with was its value as concept art.

Some of it you could rework... the composition is tolerable, there's some level of isolationable detail... but most of that is just plain junk. It's really fucking cool that a computer can make it, but whether it's recognisable as the prompt is a complete crapshoot (after seven hours, anyway).

It doesn't matter if you're satisfied with it. It matters if your non-artist manager thinks its good enough to lay you off as a digital artist - which is already happening.

[Forsher]

No, what we've got now is an enclosure. A system by which a common resource (art) is closed off and protected by economic contracts.

Art does not grow on trees - it is the product of human labour. Why are you entitled to the product of their labour?

But it's not their labour, is it?

The artists most people care about have been dead for decades, if not centuries. With rare exceptions of people you'd think would've died decades ago but in reality just managed to be really old. Some art is literally thousands of years old.

Are you about to turn around and suggest that copyright should be indefinite? I doubt it. The thing is, if you don't, you've got doublethink.

The destruction of their livelihoods and democractisation aren't inconsistent. If you democratise a dictatorship, the dictator loses their livelihood, too. What you're describing is an entirely different problem. You're trying to find a way of making "more people can make more art that more people like" as a non-existent thing when it so obviously could soon be the case. What you should be doing is arguing "the democratisation isn't worth the cost". You see how those aren't the same positions and require radically different arguments, right?

It's certainly an interesting argument to posit that the existence of people who have a skill that you don't represents a dictatorship. And its corollary, that 'democratization' is best pursued through allowing a large corporation to subsume that skill and force those skilled people to take up unskilled work.

It would be an interesting argument. If someone made it. No-one here has.

They should lose their jobs if that's what they're turning in.

Hardly any of that stuff is useful as concept art. In case you hadn't noticed, what I wanted and was unsatisfied with was its value as concept art.

Some of it you could rework... the composition is tolerable, there's some level of isolationable detail... but most of that is just plain junk. It's really fucking cool that a computer can make it, but whether it's recognisable as the prompt is a complete crapshoot (after seven hours, anyway).

It doesn't matter if you're satisfied with it. It matters if your non-artist manager thinks its good enough to lay you off as a digital artist - which is already happening.

Which doesn't establish the actual fucking point.

Did it take skilled labour to get to that point? That is what you're trying to assess. Whether or not that is the case. Why the fuck don't you just see what Midjourney produces with no training time from you?

What that link demonstrates is skilled people in competition with other skilled people. It's more like the difference between someone who can use information technology and someone who can't, than something which previously couldn't be stuck in a factory line and something that now can (the analogy you've been using).

[Nilokeras]

But it's not their labour, is it?

The artists most people care about have been dead for decades, if not centuries. With rare exceptions of people you'd think would've died decades ago but in reality just managed to be really old. Some art is literally thousands of years old.

Are you about to turn around and suggest that copyright should be indefinite? I doubt it. The thing is, if you don't, you've got doublethink.

It absolutely is their labour. The scraping algorithms that power things like Stable Diffusion don't discriminate between copyrighted and not-copyrighted material.

And of course let's dissect that 'the artists most people care about have been dead for decades, if not centuries' bit. Do you think the right to not have your work stolen is contingent on people liking your work? Do I have the right to copy Simon Stalenhag's paintings and re-sell them because nobody cares about living artists, apparently?

Which doesn't establish the actual fucking point.

Did it take skilled labour to get to that point? That is what you're trying to assess. Whether or not that is the case. Why the fuck don't you just see what Midjourney produces with no training time from you?

What that link demonstrates is skilled people in competition with other skilled people. It's more like the difference between someone who can use information technology and someone who can't, than something which previously couldn't be stuck in a factory line and something that now can (the analogy you've been using).

It's not a one-to-one replacement of skilled work with unskilled work. As the article explicitly says, it's companies firing 10 digital artists and replacing it with three 'prompt engineers' or a touch up artist. That's the destruction of digital artist work.

[Nilokeras]

The Washington Post, in conjunction with researchers with the Allen Institute for A just released their findings in analyzing the contents of Google's C4 dataset - a massive collection of text scraped from some 15 million websites and used to train models like Google's own competitor to ChatGPT. Not surprisingly, there are some problems:

Not far behind were kickstarter.com No. 25, which lets users crowdfund for creative projects, and further down the list, patreon.com No. 2,398, which helps creators collect monthly fees from subscribers for exclusive content.

Kickstarter and Patreon may give the AI access to artists’ ideas and marketing copy, raising concerns the technology may copy this work in suggestions to users. Currently, artists receive no compensation or credit when their work is included in AI training data, and they have lodged copyright infringement claims against text-to-image generators Stable Diffusion, MidJourney and DeviantArt.

The Post’s analysis suggests more legal challenges may be on the way: The copyright symbol — which denotes a work registered as intellectual property — appears more than 200 million times in the C4 data set.

...

Also high on the list: b-ok.org No. 190, a notorious market for pirated e-books that has since been seized by the U.S. Justice Department. At least 27 other sites identified by the U.S. government as markets for piracy and counterfeits were present in the data set.

They also include a tool to search through the corpus at your own leisure to find sites. Amusingly for all of us, both 'nationstates.net' and 'forum.nationstates.net' are in the dataset, providing some 1.4 million and 650 000 'tokens' to for Google's use, each representing a unique word or phrase.

[Emotional Support Crocodile]

Michael Schumacher's family plan to sue magazine after it publishes an 'interview' with him created by AI.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/65333115

Michael Schumacher's family are planning legal action against a magazine which published an artificial intelligence-generated 'interview' with the former Formula 1 driver.

Schumacher, a seven-time F1 champion, suffered severe head injuries in a skiing accident in December 2013 and has not been seen in public since.

Die Aktuelle ran a picture of a smiling Schumacher, 54, on the front cover of its latest edition with a headline of "Michael Schumacher, the first interview".

A strapline underneath reads "it sounded deceptively real", and it emerges in the article that the supposed quotes had been produced by AI.

The family have confirmed to news agency Reuters that they are planning to pursue the matter legally.

Following his skiing accident, Schumacher was placed into an induced coma and was brought home in September 2014, with his medical condition since kept private by his family.

Despicable gutter journalism uses machine learning to reach new lows.

[Kerwa]

Michael Schumacher's family plan to sue magazine after it publishes an 'interview' with him created by AI.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/65333115

Michael Schumacher's family are planning legal action against a magazine which published an artificial intelligence-generated 'interview' with the former Formula 1 driver.

Schumacher, a seven-time F1 champion, suffered severe head injuries in a skiing accident in December 2013 and has not been seen in public since.

Die Aktuelle ran a picture of a smiling Schumacher, 54, on the front cover of its latest edition with a headline of "Michael Schumacher, the first interview".

A strapline underneath reads "it sounded deceptively real", and it emerges in the article that the supposed quotes had been produced by AI.

The family have confirmed to news agency Reuters that they are planning to pursue the matter legally.

Following his skiing accident, Schumacher was placed into an induced coma and was brought home in September 2014, with his medical condition since kept private by his family.

Despicable gutter journalism uses machine learning to reach new lows.

That’s a journalism problem really, not AI per se.

(And journalists in respectable newspapers make up quotes more often than people think).

[Emotional Support Crocodile]

Geoff Hinton, pretty famous if you have ever read any books on AI, has quit his job at Google warning of the dangers posed by AI chatbots.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65452940

A man widely seen as the godfather of artificial intelligence (AI) has quit his job, warning about the growing dangers from developments in the field.

Geoffrey Hinton, aged 75, announced his resignation from Google in a statement to the New York Times, saying he now regretted his work.

He told the BBC some of the dangers of AI chatbots were "quite scary".

"Right now, they're not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be."

Dr Hinton also accepted that his age had played into his decision to leave the tech giant, telling the BBC: "I'm 75, so it's time to retire."

Dr Hinton's pioneering research on deep learning and neural networks has paved the way for current AI systems like ChatGPT.

But the British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist told the BBC the chatbot could soon overtake the level of information that a human brain holds.

"Right now, what we're seeing is things like GPT-4 eclipses a person in the amount of general knowledge it has and it eclipses them by a long way. In terms of reasoning, it's not as good, but it does already do simple reasoning.

"And given the rate of progress, we expect things to get better quite fast. So we need to worry about that."