…care to contribute a link to their favorite site for an AI activity? I’d be really interested in seeing what’s out there, but the field is moving and growing so fast and search engines suck so hard that I know I’m missing out.
Cure my FOMO please!
…care to contribute a link to their favorite site for an AI activity? I’d be really interested in seeing what’s out there, but the field is moving and growing so fast and search engines suck so hard that I know I’m missing out.
Cure my FOMO please!
Transformativity is part of fair use. What AI datasets do is much akin to researchers dissecting corpuses (I’m a linguist, data scraping is what we’ve done in the field for 300 years). When you put something out there, you allow for the possibility that people will see your work and incorporate it into their mental catalog of art and artistic process. Just because a computer does it doesn’t make it magically not OK.
Either information wants to be free or it doesn’t. If you pirate shit then you have no ground to stand on for complaining about AI training.
Hey I got no problem with referencing art, but one should at least give credit for works referenced. Also, the AI isn’t actually sentient, so it’s just a generative algorithm; it’s not actually creatively making derivative works.
So piracy isn’t I feel a 1:1 comparison. At least in most forms of software piracy, the pirates still leave in the credits/splashscreen/whatever.
There is no functional difference other than the fact that a computer is doing it. It analyzes the common features of the source(s), determines how to square that with the prompt, and generates the image.
We already have machines that invent things for us. A machine that makes art is no different on first principles.
AI as a tool is not what I object to; what I object to is merely using AI to lazily slap together content without actually having creativity be the onus behind it, and then calling it art on the same level of art that does.
In short, there has to be an artist for something to be art; and for there to be an artist, there must be creativity, which requires sentience. Whether that sentience is from a true AI or a human is irrelevant, as long as it is there. If there is no creativity behind the “art”, then generative AI in this case is not a paintbrush, but an assembly box pumping out bobbles.
A human has to supply the prompt. That satisfies the input-of-the-artist criterion. The AI doesn’t randomly gurgle out images; you have to actually ask it what you want to see. (And very often it doesn’t give you what you’re looking for, so you have to get creative.)
The human actually has to have an idea of what they want? It’s not just pressing a button, wait a bit, and there we go?
Is that what you’re saying?
Am I understanding you correctly?
Yes. You have to direct the AI. Like, I told it to draw me Stalin as Captain Ahab on the deck of the Pequod (it makes sense in context) and I got this. It was the only of the four options that looked good. But I had to ask it for this specifically.
So you didn’t just say “Draw Stalin as Captain Ahab on the deck of the Pequod”? You actually had to utilize some creativity for how it would actually look?
Yes. For the posted image specifically, I requested a Norman Rockwell-style painting.
With Midjourney at least, it gives you four options and the ability to alter (“vary”) those options. If none suit your taste, you can rerun or change the prompt. In addition to specifying things in the prompt itself—there’s a wide latitude, left to its own devices it defaults to a kind of digital art style but you can override this with hard-coded options and/or specifying genres and media; I frequently use “oil painting on wood”, for instance, and you can specify styles (cubism, op art, abstract art, futurism, newsreel, photorealistic), color palette (dark, light, vaporwave, monochrome), media (giclée, daguerreotype, airbrush, tempera, canvas, wood, tintype, charcoal, ukiyo-e), and artists (da Vinci, Bosch, Escher [Escher produces fascinating results more often than not], Tanguy, Mead, Beksiński)—there’s a few arguments you can apply to the query. The one I remember offhand is, I think it’s called, “niji”, which specifically forces an anime-esque aesthetic.
DALL•E is similar, even showing you four options you can vary—but it’s much less robust in what it can do.
The tradeoff is, and this is why AI won’t be some silver bullet, the AI can’t take criticism. It can only handle so much information at once, and you’re kind of stuck with what ot gives you. A real person can be instructed much more precisely, and doesn’t have the pitfall of drawing hands awfully or making logical mistakes (multiple/impossible limbs and mangled hands are a frequent issue).
Here, give me a prompt and I’ll demonstrate. I have many credits to spare this month, I’m happy to show you.
…except when a person is doing it, they’re doing their own thing to it. They take an idea or two and filter it through their own lens and stylise it
Think about it like this - when you do data scraping, you’re still interpreting the results. You’re looking at the data and going ‘ok from this I can draw X and Y conclusions based on this and that’. AI art is like if we removed you from the process - we just shoved all the data into a black box and it goes ding “X is Y”. If you asked it why that’s so, it wouldn’t be able to tell you. You can’t see how it works so you have no idea if it’s reasoning makes scientific sense. It would not be admissible in a paper.
…don’t most people kinda agree you don’t pirate from small artists where piracy is actually hurting them? There’s like, honour along thieves when it comes to piracy, and this is stepping all over the little guy who’s actually hurt by this just to get your grubby little hands on something you think you’re entitled to
What do you think a prompt is? You’re telling the computer “I want to see this, spit it out.” I can ask Midjourney to draw me the Empire State Building in the style of Van Gogh. It’ll spin the gears and spit out the image requested. (Actually, I’ll do that right now and edit it into the comment. Here it is.) How is that not a derivative work?
RE: Piracy, I’ll quote Sean McGuire, an artist for Marvel: