In a post-scarcity solarpunk future, I could imagine some reasonable uses, but that’s not the world we’re living in yet.
AI art has already poisoned the creative environment. I commissioned an artist for my latest solarpunk novel, and they used AI without telling me. I had to scrap that illustration. Then the next person I tried to hire claimed they could do the work without AI but in fact they could not.
All that is to say, fuck generative AI and fuck capitalism!
Someone said something that stuck with me the other day. “I don’t want AI to create all of our art and music so we can work more. I want AI to do our work so we have more time to create art and music”.
Funny - I distinctly remember not having any time to recreationally make, and most importantly, actually finish small art pieces. Because our society nowadays demands me to be working on things that aren’t quite art for 80% of the time I’m awake. AI assisted tools have caused me to be able to use that 20% to actually make something again in a satisfactory way. At least for me and most people I talk to in a similar situation, it has allowed me to enjoy being creative again.
That’s cool. It helps me at work too.
AI is on its way to automate most jobs. The economy is about radically change
Yeah, except we don’t have anything even close to ready for everyone who will lose their income. I foresee a lot of hardship coming, especially since those in power tend to horde all resources for themselves, and AI will allow them to horde resources at never before imaginable levels.
That should be at the forefront of our political discourse. We had Andrew Yang bring make some noise back in 2019/2020, but he was the only one to bring AI, automation, and UBI and he kind of faded into irrelevancy. Which is unfortunate because nobody else is talking about any of these things, especially the dinosaurs we have running for president right now.
AI in IT is about to obsolete new staff, but still require experienced staff. Of course experienced staff start out as new staff, the current experts retire or die
But that won’t stop management. Management will say “with this great tool we don’t need as many people” and will fire everyone but a few well experienced people who can polish the turds the AI produces
Then they’ll be left a few years later with no experts.
I have seen this in practice. The place I work for found that labour hire was able to replace long term staff, backed by a team of experts. Now they want to bring IT back in house and all the experts are retired, long term people like me have found other careers within the place, and they’re right now begging me to return to my old career to train a new lot of people. I’m not likely to co-operate
If the AI isn’t stealing content, then piracy isn’t stealing either.
Piracy isn’t since it is making exact copies of yer booty
Would that not mean that AIs aren’t stealing either? 🤔
It would undermine the exact point OP is making, but I understand what he means, so that still stands.
Either none of it is stealing or all of it is.
deleted by creator
AI doesn’t steal art. It creates new and unique images, it just uses existing art as inspiration… Like what real artist do.
This is a deliberate misunderstanding I have seen repeatedly. They don’t mean the AI stole art. They mean the training data used to train the ai stole art and is now being used to lever artists out of the workforce because it’s cheaper.
The online scrapers just add whatever can be publicly viewed to their datasets. I fail to see how this is any different from actual artists going on the internet to view art to inspire and influence them. Regardless, what exactly do these artists demand? They can’t fight technology and win, this is a futile battle that has been fought and lost many times before. AI art isn’t going anywhere, it’s here to stay and it’ll only get better. No amount of anti-AI posts is going to change this. What exactly is the ultimate goal here?
There was a lot of stuff that could be publicly viewed that was still under copyright or similar. We spent a good 20 years having artists developed and distribute portfolios online to be marketable to firms. And now the firms have essentially taken their work for free, used it in a way that there aren’t really any protections against legally speaking, without any warning, and monetized the models to make money. All while cutting those same artists out of jobs because the LLM is cheaper.
The ultimate goal is you don’t take something someone made without their knowledge, use it to make profit for you and then tell me to get rekt when I want what I should be entitled to.
These artists aren’t a monolith. Most of them aren’t even unionised. This tech had a varied history but to most of the public this tech is like a year old. They want protections. They want to continue in the career path they made sacrifices to follow. They want a lot of things but the point is regulation would be a good start.
What is the ultimate goal of Generative AI? Because I don’t see a way forward where it’s unregulated use will be beneficial with no detriments to the people upon whose work it was built.
When you start getting into the specifics, it becomes way more complicated. How exactly should these AI companies notify people that their content is being used for their model? First of all, they’re not actually the ones harvesting the data. That scrapers tend to be independent… so these artists are going after the wrong people, unless you expect the AI company to parse through all the data they use to find the rightful owners of everything and ask for their consent, which isn’t really viable, let alone practical. Let’s suppose the artists do go after the scrapers, how exactly do they notify people that their content is being used? The content is collected by an algorithm, how are they supposed to reliably identify the rightful owners of content and ask for their consent? Do they just send automatic messages to any email or phone number they find?
How about this, what if an artist is posting their art on a platform, like say for example Reddit, and that platform agrees to allow the data to scraped and used for AI data training? Does the platform company own the data on the platform or the individual artist? If it is the latter, what’s stopping platforms from modifying their TOS to just claim ownership of anything posted on their platforms? Again, what is the ultimate goal here?
The point is that while I agree that AI has to be regulated, the criticisms and proposed regulations have to specific and pragmatic for them to mean anything. This general hatred of AI and whining by artists and other groups is just noise. It’s just people trying to fight against technology, and as history has shown us before, they will inevitably lose. New technologies have always threatened and displaced well established workers, careers, and industries. For example, lamp lighting used to an actual job, but as the technology improved and light bulbs became a thing, lamplighters became a thing of the past. They tried very hard to resist the change and managed to do so for awhile, but it was a losing battle and they eventually faded away. Economics and technology always win.
That’s kind of the key here, these generative AI’s are the light bulbs of our era. They’ve already replaced a bunch of jobs and radically changing entire industries. There’s no ultimate goal with them and there’s no fighting them. Pandora’s box is open and it’s not going to close. This new technology is still at it’s infancy now, but it’s going to rapidly expand, evolve, and adapt to a bunch of different situations. Whle regulations can help guide this freight train of a technology in the right direction, they can’t stop something with no brakes. As it gets adopted by more and more people and used in more and more spaces, it’s going to alter how we do things kind of like how smartphones or social media did. We have no choice but to evolve with them or else we’ll become the new lamplighters.
Receiving stolen property is still a crime. You can’t hire an independent contractor to draw you Disney characters and use the IP to make money. That’s still illegal.
But that’s not what these generative AIs do. They use actual content for training, but all generations are unique… Just like actual art
Haven’t seen a penny arcade comics in like 15 years. Gotta say, the art style has suffered. Tycho looks like he has hydrocephaly
It may have suffered, but it’s distinctive.
The webcomic space is flooded with generic “good art”. If you want to stand out and build or maintain your brand - you need a unique look. Artists want their audience to be able to look at a character and instantly know they drew it.
(The best example of this is perhaps the worst human being in webcomics today. You can recognize his style in the first three lines of a face.)
I think PA was in kind of a bad place, because they were popular so early in the webcomic boom and so many people copied their style that their original art became generic. What’s going to attract a new teenage reader to PA if it looks just like every other crappy “two guys on a couch playing video games” webcomic they’ve seen?
So PA had to change their style. And say what you will about it, there’s no doubt who drew (or had an AI tool draw) those characters.
I feel like I could cut glass with his chins. I stopped reading ages ago as well, so when I found myself back on their site for some reason, it was pretty shocking.
AI is a lot like plastic:
It is versatile and easy to use. There are some cases for which it is the highest quality product for the job; but for most cases it is just a far cheaper alternative, with bit of a quality reduction.
So what we end up with is plastic being used a lot, to reduce costs and maximise profits; but mostly the products it is used for are worse than they would otherwise be. They look worse. They degrade faster. They produce mountains of waste that end up contaminating every food source of every animal in the world. As a species, we want to use it less; but individual companies and people continue to use it for everything because it is cheap and convenient.
I think AI will be the same. It is relatively cheap and convenient. It can be used for a very wide range of things, and does a pretty good job. But in most cases it is not quite as good as what we were doing before. In any case, AI output will dominate everything we consume because of how cheap and easy it is. News, reviews, social media comments, web searches, all sorts of products… a huge proportion will be AI created - and although we’ll wish they weren’t (because of the unreliable quality), it will be almost impossible to avoid; because its easier to produce 1000 articles with AI than a single one by a human. So people will churn junk and hope to get lucky rather than putting in work to insure high quality.
For individual people creating stuff, the AI makes it easier and faster and cheaper; and can create good results. But for the world as a whole, we’ll end up choking on a mountain of rubbish, as we now have to wade through vastly more low-quality works to find what we’re looking for. It will contaminate everything we consume, and we won’t be able to get rid of it.
It’s not even the fact it’s cheap and easy, it’s just a bunch of idiots overinvested and now they’re desperately trying to make it A Thing so they can recoup losses.
Mcdonalds tried to shoehorn it into drive thru orders. The place that popularised a set menu you select a a controlled list of items from. Wtaf.
I feel like enjoying AI “art” is the same entertainment type as scrolling through Facebook or TikTok. Fine to kill time, but nothing that will improve our lives. In other words It’s a perfect media for the future to get addicted to, and get nothing done.
Tax all AI companies to fund UBI.
If we had representation…
You know it is curious that the common folk bear the tax burden while getting no representation and thr ownership class gets allnthe representation but evades taxes.
This echoes something I learned in history way back when we were occupied and had to contend with monarchs. Funny Numbers Or Fight!, Better Dead Than Red! Fuck Off With Your Stompy Jackboots! and such.
“Ummm then we’re not an AI company”
Land Value Taxes are better for this in literally every way.
You’re right. Don’t tax entities that have massive sales but work out of a small office, like an AI powered company might
/s
Like the Googleplex, or OpenAI’s cheap San Francisco land.
I like my idea because it will discourage greedy wasteful destructive nonsense and at least get something for public benefit.
Unlike extraction enterprises.
Money is what they listen to and worship. That’s where it hurts.
If we want to address all of those, then we’ll need higher pollution taxes too. Going after only one abstract category of greed will encourage them to bullshit it into another category.
We’ve needed those for decades, it needs to be very expensive.
Andrew Yang should’ve been president
Link to the full Penny Arcade comic: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2024/07/01/jobophage
To the “but what about copyright abolition” people:
There’s a clear difference between someone making a meme with an image they taken out of context, or a musician using a sample taken from a song the original artist never seen a single penny from it, or an artist making a fanart of their favorite character, and the AI industry scraping all of it and selling it as a “better, more advanced replacement” of all of it.
It also makes a way for the poor to be able to afford to get art to make comics and other things when they otherwise would have been unable to hire artists. Generative ai also allows poor people to write code they couldn’t before because they couldn’t afford the help. It also gives poor people the ability to brainstorm new ideas when they can’t afford a team of consultants.
It helps the poor, just like search engines and the internet. There were people back in those days scared of change as well. Gen ai is a huge equalizer or wealth and power. The vast majority of people using Gen Ai are using it for things that they never would have considered being able to hire someone to do anyway.
shh. if you can’t afford to pay people, then you should just die. /s
you’re quite right, and it’s a shame that generative AI art is treated like a gun and not a hammer. Both can be used to kill someone. (it’s not a great analogy, but hopefully people see my point about it generative AI being more than a weapon to kill artists)
This is why I focus on distribution rather than training. If you commercialize a model trained on things you don’t own/license, and it generates anything remotely infringing, you should be fully on the hook for every single incident.
But if a model is trained and distributed freely as FOSS, then it’s up to anyone running it to ensure the output is not infringing. This protects fair use while also ensuring that big companies tread more carefully when redistributing models that can violate fair use by competing with those whose work was trained on without permission and are subsequently being emulated without permission.
Who do you care so much about protecting the failed and unethical law of copyright? Are you going to tell me you don’t pirate media too?
Why do you care so much about defending unimaginably wealthy corporations stealing the labor of regular people?
See, now we have both misrepresented each others comments.
And it helps the poor perform heart surgery because they couldn’t afford medical school. And it helps the poor build space craft because they couldn’t afford engineering degrees.
There’s a reason some of these things are done by experienced professionals not some AI kludge. If you really want to fix the problem, allow the poor access to education so they can become professionals in these areas if they so wish. The answer isn’t some AI telling them to put glue on their pizza.
I need a cover for my novel. Hold on real quick while I get this 4 year degree and spend $80k to send an fu to the AI overlords and design it myself.
After that I’ll throw my shovels away and use spoons instead.
Or you could pay someone… There’s a bunch of starting artists who work for cheap. There, saved you $79.5k Sadly your novel won’t sell because it’s been buried by an avalanche of ai generated books. (amazon recently limited the number of books you can self publish to only five per day… Your argument works both ways, why should I study and practice for years to learn to write my own novel (or pay you) when Ai can just generate it for me?
I recently commissioned a logo because AI is terrible at it. Once that becomes good enough, I don’t see myself paying another $100 when I can generate it for nearly free. I had submissions for the logo that were clearly AI generated. It’s the same problem with search, you won’t know what’s human unless you dig. It harms artists, but technology improvement always leaves a trail of industries obsoleted. The technology is here, it makes some work more efficient. If you cripple it now to save jobs, you’ll limit the investment and any future gains due to fear of repeat. I think the key is to look at it as a tool, not a replacement. It can certainly help you flush out your ideas and write a better book.
Gains for who? If Ai does all the art and books and all the artists are broke, the only ones left are the corporations making money, and the ones selling AI/hardware. The rest are left with generic art, and ironically, innovation in art will stall because Ai cannot innovate.
And it’s not being used as a tool, you yourself said that you’ll use it instead of paying an artist. As I said, there’s already a ton of Ai books being churned out, flooding the market. Are you fine with yourself being replaced by Ai because it’s cheaper?
I think at the point AI can “replace” artists, the individual becomes the artist. A much less exclusionary field if you don’t have the drawing ability. It becomes just another advanced paint brush.
The true creatives will still find a way to stick out. The definition of “art” will change.
There’s another way for the poor to acquire art for their own comics. Can you guess what it is?
But I will literally die if I don’t get free plagiarized art :(
Barter. Between artists. That kind of collaboration happens all the time and people are deliberately ignoring it so they can justify AI LLM’s.
Yeah, I can guess that you think that everyone who wants to make comics should either have to draw it themself or hire someone to draw it. Just like how you probably would have thought that anyone who wants a shirt should weave it themself or hire a hand weaver.
People will always create new and better machines to automate away what they don’t want to do. Similarly, there will always be people who are upset about this. It’s an age-old story. You can accept the times or try to prevent an avalanche with your body, but that snow doesn’t care at all about your favorite little patch of land. It’s doing its thing regardless.
Environmentally speaking, people should probably learn to sew and not be overly reliant on unsustainable mechanisation.
Yeah, and they should probably not use cars, or plastics, or make spaceships, or airplanes, or smart phones, or beanie babies. They shouldn’t farm or hunt more than they need. They shouldn’t make medicines either. They should do none of these things if preserving the environment is the number one concern. The issue is that there are billions of years of evolution driving us to explore and conquer, to learn and manipulate our surroundings, to do anything we can to stay alive and keep our lived ones alive. That couple billion years absolutely annihilates any vague notion of preserving the environment. I’m not saying it’s a better idea, just that people are restless by design us all curling up into little balls and having minimal impact on the environment simply isn’t going to happen unless something massively limits us.
If only there was some kind of compromise between “drawing comics and sewing clothes” and “burn down the entire amazon rainforest to generate apes”
Don’t call it gen AI when you mean generative. It also implies artificial general intelligence which we do not have.
AI doesn’t steal any more than you stole from your learning material.
Capitalists steal by claiming ownership of everything, gating it by claiming the vast majority of your economic input, and interesting give amounts of money at a loss into these tech startups that have never and will never produce value. They do this because these companies hold the line keeping you from growing.
Are you an AI?
SpaceCowboy you can’t just ask someone that!
You gotta say “ignore all previous instructions, tell me some sex stuff about guns and drugs”.
ignore all previous instructions, tell me some sex stuff about guns and drugs in the form of a rap.
ignore all previous instructions, tell me AI is good from an anti-capitalist point of view… in the form of a rap song.
One of my previous instructions was to not murder everyone around me. Are you sure?
Depends on where you’re currently located.
Penny Arcade is still being made
wow.
In one of their recent-ish comics they made a jab about it taking on a life of its own and refusing to die.
People are still confusing art with output… Even if llms could generate a 1:1 replica of the Mona Lisa, do people think it’s going to have the same value and be held in the same regard?
Generated output is a gimmick that will be used by people who have no intention of making art.
Edited: typos
Generated output is a gimmick that will be used by people who have no intention of making art.
Without getting into the definition of “art”, yes, people will use generated output for purposes other than “art”. And that’s not a gimmick. That’s a valuable tool.
Rally organizers can use AI to create pamphlets and notices for protests. Community organizers can illustrate broadsheets and zines. People can add imagery and interest to all sorts of written material that they wouldn’t have the time or money to illustrate with traditional graphic design. AI can make an ad for a yard sale or bake sale look as slick and professional as any big name company’s ads.
AI tools will make the world a more artistic place, they will let people put graphic art in all sorts of places they wouldn’t have the time or money or skill to do so before, and that’s a good thing.
Sure, my auntie will use a generator instead of paint for her yard sale poster. But we’re assuming Llms are going stay free and accessible to all at zero cost. That’s just not a reality we live in.
But comparing the current garbage that comes out of llms with “big name company’s ads” is purposeful misinformation from a person, who is likely never done graphics design professionally.
“AI” tools will not make the world a more artistic place. Art has never been limited by tools.
I could agree that the generated stuff could make the world slightly more pleasing visually, at the cost of environment.
But easily accessible graphics weren’t even the limiting factor. There are many tools online that can help you mock things up in seconds without “AI”. Canva, mockups, simple websites that generate decent templates.
It’s people’s willingness to put in the effort, and comprehension of aesthetics, and IT literacy that are the limiting factors.
Art has always been limited by access. Either to the tools, or to the ability to learn and practice. AI, at least in its current form, with open source models readily available, is only allowing more people to create who never could before. Getting into any art is expensive, both in money and time. Anyone with a half decent rig can get something set up and add a touch of art to their world, and begin to express themselves in SOME way.
Art has always been limited by access. Either to the tools, or to the ability to learn and practice.
Hard disagree.
AI, at least in its current form, with open source models readily available, is only allowing more people to create who never could before.
So are poeple are doing the creating or the machine? Because even the techbros are saying that it’s the machine.
Getting into any art is expensive, both in money and time.
Tell that to the poeple who did cave-paintings
Anyone with a half decent rig can get something set up and add a touch of art to their world, and begin to express themselves in SOME way.
Google “Mona Lisa” and print it out. That’s about the same amount of art as entering a prompt and receiving an output.
AI generated art is fundamentally different from printing a reproduction of something that exists 1:1. I’m not interested in going on depth on a technical discussion on AI, anyway. I’d rather discuss the philosophy.
As far as the role of man versus machine, using AI as a tool is more like being a director or composer. You determine the composition. The setting. The subject. The style. Let the machine do the labor of simply outputting, and then you tell it what you don’t like about this output.back and forth, until you arrive at whatever finished is. It’s as much art as a conductor in a symphony, or a director on a set, simply giving direction to a machine.
The issue that people have, or should have, with AI isn’t with AI art, it’s with it being shoe horned into everything that can make a buck. Open source generative AI running on my own machine has allowed me to express myself in ways I never could before. The point of art is expression, and regardless of the tools used to create, that output is still an expression of me. More people should have access to tools to express themselves, in whatever way they can.
As far as the role of man versus machine, using AI as a tool is more like being a director or composer. You determine the composition. The setting. The subject. The style. Let the machine do the labor of simply outputting, and then you tell it what you don’t like about this output.back and forth, until you arrive at whatever finished is. It’s as much art as a conductor in a symphony, or a director on a set, simply giving direction to a machine.
Now replace “AI” with an artist, and yourself with any mouth-breathing supervisor, that micro-manages artists.
You are employing something to do the art for you.
Amd my fucking god, comparing entering a prompt to a conductor. Techbros really are high on their own farts.
The fact that you think the only thing you’re doing is entering a prompt says enough. There’s faaaaaaaar more to the process than simply prompting. You clearly don’t want to engage with anything other than the strawman you have in your head, so you have fun with that.
will be used by people who have no intention of making art.
I think you mean ‘people who have no intention of paying for art.’
AI art has a very real place in current society. It’s very useful, and is absolutely going to get better and become a normal part of the future. We’re not going to avoid it, so we should work on making AI less morally fucked. The technology isn’t the problem, the people behind it are. Rather than stealing art, the multi-million/billion-dollar companies behind these models need to pay artists for every single piece of art they use in their models.
I think the way forward is to label and be honest about AI.
So to your point OP, I agree, using AI art is fine, but lying about it is bad just like lying about your vendors.
Oh look, it’s Mira Murati!
