We all know what it means when Midjourney churns out pictures that look like your art: their model got trained on your stuff. I think it’s time for Jason Allen to go full uroboros and sue Midjourney for using his art without permission.
this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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They're so close to figuring it out but don't have that much self awareness, or perhaps just have cognitive disonance about it.
AI artist Jason Allen
Absolute degenerate.
I have also spent some time screwing around with AI art generators. No way I'm addressing my self as an artist for it. AI art can be useful in certain situations such as whipping together a stupid meme to share between some friends. It's not any talent involved, and it's not something you should consider as copyright worthy.
Creating nice art is available to anyone. It just require some creativity and talent if you want to love of it. Being an artist is not some basic human right. As plenty of "artists" believe.
Right? I used to think Kinkade was the pompous narcissist. That anyone would consider themselves an AI "artist" is absolutely wild.
i mean, it IS art. you are just using a tool that makes it much much easier to put your mind into the screen.
art is a process not a thing on a screen. get rid of the tension between idea and realisation and you get rid of most of what is interesting about art. (besides i'm sorry for your mind if your imagination is adequately represented by the output of stock image generators.)
ai art is also a process, albeit a different one. its not easy to get good creative results.
i'd tend to agree if we were talking about something that is actually interesting instead of an incredibly generic piece of kitsch art.
hence why you need actual creativity
wow look at this one, too good to headbutt a screen like is tradition
my doctor said it was causing problems in my head or something so i stopped
AI artists are just the new version of "fractal artists" who for the most part just pick a color palette and run a Mandelbrot generator until they find an appealing image.
It's not nothing but it's not going to get you very far.
Now do pour painting
sign a toilet bowl
I had a bit making an exception for the value of "fine art" because that can get weird, like “unmade bed with a bunch of trash around it” or a signed urinal.
But I seem to have left that part on the cutting room floor.
If a piece of purely prompt-generated AI art hits a price like a shark in formaldehyde I strongly suspect it'll be some kind of inorganic AI industry insider self-dealing to hype up the AI art market, similar to the big Beeple NFT sale.
I think it might be worth reflecting on exactly why Fountain seems to "get weird;" it had a context and complaints about it are part of that context. I liked this recent video which explores the politics of Fountain.
I just mean "weird" in terms of “valued far higher than the average person might expect” but I'm not implying that that value isn't merited. I'm not one to dismiss a Rothko.
Okay but the shark in formaldehyde is fucking awesome to see in person.
It's a shark! In formaldehyde!!
Yeah I'm not dismissing that. It's a big ass shark in a tank.
Or the guy who made a cast of his own head using his own frozen blood, that's kept in a special refrigerated display case.
yeah, Hirst can be a bit of a hack and the names of the pieces are super cheugy but he's definitely made some really evocative stuff
Some AI artists actually take the time to touch up the image in something like phtoshop once they get the idea they want but there are still problems with the image.
As the images get better though that might stop
Thank heavens we have people like you to police who gets to be called an artist or not...
Your position seems to be that art is whatever the US Copyright Office deems worthy of copyright.
I instructed the Ford dealer to sell me a new Focus with leather interior and aluminum wheels. I am a car designer and manufacturer. I made this.
I'm not getting your point?
Yes you are
You're posting too much without reading, please come this way to the egress.
Thank heavens we have people like you to police who gets to be called the police...
It's not a protected title. Go to town with it.
But it's diluting the value of it if you carry no talent but want all the recognition.
So the value of art is directly tied to talent in your opinion?
What's next, value of products being directly tied to their quality??
What're you defining 'value'? Monetary, sure but what of emotional value? What're you defining as 'quality'? What's high quality art to you? What's valuable in your view? I garuntee that's not the same for everyone.
True J. Benzo Peterson vibes
What do you mean by VALUE? What do you mean by QUALITY? What do you mean by PRODUCTS?? What do you mean by WHAT???
Very true, since it's all relative no one should ever make an aesthetic judgement. No one should have thoughts about the value of art. No one should have any reaction to art other than an acknowledgement of its existence.
Tbf it’s more about their necessity than quality.
You think it's not?
No, the value of art is specific to each individual. A picture made by someone with no talent can be of enormous value to someone because of what it means, the relationship they have with the creator, the emotions it makes them feel etc.
Tieing value to talent suggests that a picture by someone who has trained for 5 years is somehow more 'valuable' than a picture by someone who has only trained for 4. Why? What metric is being used to determine 'value'? What metric determines 'talent'? Art is entirely subjective. To try and define it's value is missing the point, because it means something different to everyone.
What are you doing, bro
What do you mean value?
Emotional value? No. Many parents value their small child's drawings.
Market value? Mostly yes. Especially in commercial art like art commissioned for book covers. Untalented artists aren't going to be very successful.
"All Allen could copyright was what he did to the image himself" - so if he trained the model himself, would that make the work copyrightable? Does that mean midjourney has the copyright of all the images created with it?
so if he trained the model himself, would that make the work copyrightable?
I think if he "trained" the model on art he himself created you might have an argument.
Not in the US, there art can only be created by a human.
If it's created by an algorithm or animal supernatural being it's public domain.
Interesting facts:
- when photography was invented there was a debate whether photos can be copyrighted
- if you claim to have written down something revealed to you by a supernatural entity, it's public domain
- the following image is public domain because it was taken by a monkey
The image gatcha does not create a new copyright. There might be a copyright in a complex prompt (do you feel lucky in court?) Mere "sweat of the brow" does not generate a new copyright in the US, so e.g. retouching work on a photo does not generate a new copyright and photos of a public domain artwork do not create a new copyright.
This doesn't touch on the old copyrights of the stuff Midjourney trained on to make its computer-mediated collages. Those copyrights still exist.
Does the computer-mediated collage launder the previous copyrights? The answer is "do you feel lucky in court?"
It's Tornado Cash, but for pictures of Garfield with a machete.
North Korea: "AUGH MY EYES"