Ask Lemmy

I heard a bunch of explanations but most of them seem emotional and aggressive, and while I respect that this is an emotional subject, I can’t really understand opinions that boil down to “theft” and are aggressive about it.

Why the anger?

How do you earn a living yourself? Or even better, what is your most precious hobby? Whatever it is that you love doing for the love of it (that's the definition of a hobby) try imagining being told one day, out of the blue: 'Guys, my fancy but completely soulless computer can do as good as many of you. And it can do it in seconds. Wanna compete?'

Now, imagine it's your job and not your hobby, the way you earn your living (and pay your rent/mortgage and those always more expensive bills) and imagine being told 'That way you used to earn a living? It's gone now. It instantly vanished in a magical cloud of 1 and 0s. This AI-thing can do in mere seconds something that would take you weeks and it can do it well enough that quite many of your customers may not want to spend (a lot more) money to pay you for doing the exact same job even if you do it much better. How happy would you feel about that?

So, yeah, like you said it's kinda 'emotional' topic...

is there an argument against models that were legally trained?

Being 100% sure there exists such a database that contains no stolen creation, and then that AIs were indeed restricted to it for their training is already something worth debating and doubting (the second it is not open source), imho.

There had been a similar problem a few centuries ago, when photography first appeared many painters rightfully considered photography a threat to their business model as one could have their portrait (edit: or have a picture of a landscape) made in mere minutes (it was a longer than that, early days photography was far from being as quick as we know it but you get the idea).

What happened to them and their practice?

1. Some painters had to find rich sponsors that were OK to pay in order to get a portrait that would be more unique than a pĥotography (I know what I would prefer between having my photo taken by even a decent photographer or, say, a painted portrait made by Sargent), others found niche domains were to could still earn a living, while others simply went out of business.
2. Others decided painting could be much more than just being realistic like it (mostly) was before photography became a thing and they quickly started offering us amazing new kind of paintings (impressionism, abstract painting, cubism, expressionism,...)

And here we are in the XXI century. Painting is still doing fine in its own way (exposed in art galleries and in the home of rich people). There is also a lot more hobbyist painters that will paint all they can including realistic scenes no matter how much 'better' a photo could be. They don't care. Next to those, there are many photographers taking countless photos (many of which being worthless too), some of them trying (and many failing) to earn a living selling them.

is it something past the saying that AI art is lifeless?

Maybe it will get better, most probably it will, but so far I feel real sad for people that are unable to see, to feel and to understand how lifeless and how clueless AI art is.

Edit: typos (yeah, this was handwritten without the help of any AI :p)

When a comedian becomes good enough at doing a Stephen Hawking impression, you don't suddenly expect them to start publishing science studies.

So hear me out... I think AI could be financially very helpful to artists, while giving them a chance to do more meaningful work. Businesses buy a ton of stock photos, graphics and art. An artist could create a library of original digital pieces (they probably already have it) and use that for the source of new AI generated digital content, which in turn would go back into the source library. This reduces the cost/time associated with soulless stock/business content, but positions the artist to maintain a revenue stream. With the extra time, the artist could work on their preferred pieces or be commissioned to do one-offs.

AI feels like a Lovecraftian horror to me. It's trying to look authentic, but it's wrong on a fundemental level. Nothing's the right shape, nothing's the right texture, nothing's consistent, nothing belongs together... But somehow, nobody else has noticed what should be blatantly obvious! And when you try to point it out, you get a hivemind responding that it's good actually, and you're just a luddite.

But let's assume AI stops being awful in a technical sense. It's still awful in a moral sense.

Artists are poor. That's a well known sentiment you see a lot and, given how many times I see commission postings, it's pretty accurate. That artist needs to work to live, and that work is creating art.

AI is deliberately depriving these artists of work in order to give the AI's owner a quick, low quality substitute. In some cases, it will copy an artist's style, so you're deliberately targetting a specific artist because they're good at their job. And it's using the artist's work in order to replace them.

You can't understand why people don't like being stolen from by corporations, and why others don't want to buy stolen work?

You can't understand the difference between digital piracy, humans taking media from corporations for personal use, and the above, corporations taking from humans for commercial use?

I think as long as all the training data and the results are public and free to use and modify there is no moral problem beyond artist livelihood which is sad but just a part of life. Jobs have come and gone for as long as humans exist, its something we have to accept long term.

So far artists themselves are still very good at catching even high quality AI pictures tho. AI models produce something that only looks like human art on the surface, but it still misses lots of things. In many cases it wont replace existing art because often the human and the story behind art is what makes people appreciate it.

For professional artists, AI art is taking away their livelihood. Many of them already lived in precarious conditions in a tough job market before and this is only getting worse now, with companies increasingly relying on cheaper AI art for things like concept art etc.

For me, as a hobbyist and art consumer, the main issue is AI art invading "my" spaces. I want to look at Human-made art and have no interest in AI-generated content whatsoever. But all the platforms are getting flooded with AI content and all the filters I set to avoid it barely help. Many users on these platforms roleplay as real artists as well and pretend their art isn't AI, which annoys me quite a bit. I don't mind if people want to look at AI art, but they should leave me alone with it and don't force it down my throat.

Why would you need an argument beyond AI art is lifeless?

From an artists view, it basically makes them obsolete. Sucks. Also, legally trained AI has a lot less training data, therefore worse output and so illegal models will always be preferred.

From a tech view, AI does not create anything new. It remixes. If we remove artists, which will happen as AIs are simply cheaper, we won't have anything new. From there on, you can imagine it like that: An artist creates images that are 99-100% of what the goal was, dictated by clients or digitally identified by tags, due to logic, reason, creativity and communication. And they only get better. With AIs, they have like 90% accuracy, due to technical limitations. And once a generated image, which only has 90% accuracy, is used as training data for new images, it only gets worse.

For example, if there are enough images with 6 fingers, created by AI, in training data, that will become the norm.

Basically, authors, artists etc. will be obsolete for a few years, until the AI bubble mostly collapses and quality is so bad that companies and individuals hire professionals again. Then AIs will be used for low-requirement things only again, eg. private memes or roleplay.

So artists are probably angry because they are replaced by much inferior things, that leeched off of themselves and will be gone in a few years anyway. AI just does not make sense, in most cases.