AI assisted art

[Sc0ut]

I don't mean to spoil the fun, but as an artist I want to point out that the way AI programs learn is by "scanning"^{* or well, dissecting them into pieces they can label} images available online without the creators' consent - they cannot paint from scratch, or at least not yet, with the technology we have now. As such, they are making money based on our work without our consent and without giving us anything in return - which is ironically illegal for another person, but not for a company who maintains an AI, somehow. I don't feel great telling people not to use AI image generators because I know it's a creative outlet for people without a lot of time or without skills to draw, and I don't think that is *in principle* a bad thing to have. But as long as the tool is developed in such an unethical way, I would urge everyone to think twice whether you want to give traffic and visibility to those sites.

And to those who question whether it's harming artists' job: as a small fry professional artist, I can confirm it does already. I've started seeing AI generated work in facebook ads and illustrating stories in online magazines that otherwise would have used human-generated art. Given that our financial situation as freelancers is often already unstable, even small projects lost to AI can make a negative difference. And obviously the better AI gets, the more often this will happen. (Also, one unexpected side effect is that it's somewhat common now to have people tell us to our faces that we're obsolete and our jobs will disappear in a couple of years. I've had this happen personally. Not that I believe it's entirely true, but the weird satisfaction people seem to take in it makes me wonder what artist has harmed them.)

[Jitter]

Sc0ut, I fully understand your concern. I’m exactly what you describe, someone with no ability to draw and no time to learn. What little I dabble at it is not anything any real artist would do, let alone get paid for, but your point about giving AI ”art” visibility is valid.

It’s very evident the AI doesn’t ”understand” what it is ”making” and many of the results are hilarious, but… for how long?

Also it’s a scary thought that AI will drive all artists to the ground. Obviously for the artists, but on the slightly longer run for the entirety of our culture. There are many variations an AI can produce if it has the entire internet as irs corpus. However, even a huge corpus is finite. If humans cease making original art, then the AIs just recycle the same ingredients over and over again. This soup is going to go rancid. Soon.

[Sc0ut]

Also it’s a scary thought that AI will drive all artists to the ground. Obviously for the artists, but on the slightly longer run for the entirety of our culture. There are many variations an AI can produce if it has the entire internet as irs corpus. However, even a huge corpus is finite. If humans cease making original art, then the AIs just recycle the same ingredients over and over again. This soup is going to go rancid. Soon.

True. Another risk (at least on the short term) is for it to contribute to our already existing tendency to consider only a very narrow collection of traits beautiful or worth representing. An artist can choose, if they want to, to show as much diversity as possible in their work - in body and face types, ethnicity, style choices, and so on, and to foster appreciation for them. AI won't, it will just blend the most popular handful of features it finds - that's why when you try to create a young man portrait you either get the strong jaw of a Western model/actor, or the delicate and very curated beauty of a Kpop idol, and very little in between.

Not gonna lie, this AI art thing is making me feel like a luddite, which is new and uncomfortable to me (I've always been excited about technology and I'm the first to tell people that the distinction between humanities and science is artificial). It's made me reconsider how I view my art and what I want to do with it (this process is still ongoing). Being more intentional is not bad, but I really do wonder for how long this will remain a valid career choice for those of us who are moderately good but not geniuses, and are also hampered with mental health issues that keep us from being too "competitive".

[JoB]

AI won't, it will just blend the most popular handful of features it finds - that's why when you try to create a young man portrait you either get the strong jaw of a Western model/actor, or the delicate and very curated beauty of a Kpop idol, and very little in between.

Unless, of course, the human prompting the image specifically requests other traits. I wonder whether we'll ever see AI refusing requests, like a human artist might ...

[Róisín]

Have you ever read the novel The Silver Eggheads’ by Fritz Lieber. Similar theme but with AIs writing. Subplots about writing, sexual oppression, robots discovering real creativity, and oldfashioned rollicking fun. Worth reading.

[JoB]

Have you ever read the novel The Silver Eggheads’ by Fritz Lieber. Similar theme but with AIs writing. Subplots about writing, sexual oppression, robots discovering real creativity, and oldfashioned rollicking fun. Worth reading.

... I wonder who exactly you're asking that? Gadzooks, I wasn't even born when that one was published ...

[review - comments]

... German title (translated back to English): "The Programmed Muses". I guess the translating business is more alike the plot than actual authoring today ...

[Róisín]

I actually meant that for you and Sc0ut, as part of the discussion about AI art endlessly recycling the live art of humans. Lieber’s book is about AI machines (wordmills producing wordwooze) doing the same sort of thing with books, while the human ‘writers’ are for putting on the cover of the books in interesting costumes and dramatic poses. Wordwooze seems to be something like endlessly recycled memes which press pleasure buttons in the human brain. Most of the genuine creative writing is being done by independent robots such as Zane, the major free robot character, and a few dangerous human lunatics who genuinely want to create great literature but aren’t sure how to do it. The major human  ‘writer’ is a dramatic fellow with a creative streak, whose cover character comes across as a sort of combination of Hemingway and the French Romantics. His actual job apart from looking dramatic on covers is to maintain the wordmill that produces the books with his picture on the cover. Then somebody defrosts the Eggheads, who are the frozen brains of a bunch of 20th century geniuses, who are housed in small independently mobile robot bodies, are bored to tears, and just want to come out and play and explore in the ‘brave new world’ of their future for which they were preserved. Hijinks ensue. The book is a period piece, but funny and kind of sweet.

And yeah, the book is old. Sometimes I forget how much older I am than most of our merry company - I was at university and reading SF back in the fifties.

[Sc0ut]

Unless, of course, the human prompting the image specifically requests other traits. I wonder whether we'll ever see AI refusing requests, like a human artist might ...

More or less. In this very thread people have complained it's hard to get a female character portrait without make-up, for instance.
I don't know whether art AI refuses any prompts but ChatGPT refuses to engage with prompts that contain swearwords, so far.

Have you ever read the novel The Silver Eggheads’ by Fritz Lieber. Similar theme but with AIs writing. Subplots about writing, sexual oppression, robots discovering real creativity, and oldfashioned rollicking fun. Worth reading.

I have not! I'll put it on my to read list, thank you.

[JoB]

I actually meant that for you and Sc0ut, as part of the discussion about AI art endlessly recycling the live art of humans.

Ah, I see. I was a bit confused because while the link I posted is about RL people feeding art AIs some ethically dubious tasks, which they happily fulfill, in The Silver Eggheads, robots supposedly did not only absorb the position of writers but also serve as government censors, so they're supposedly quite adequate for that job. If more philistine-slash-conflicted than historic human censors hopefully ever were.

(... at least that's what I deduce from the review, because, if it hasn't gotten clear yet, no, I have not read the actual book. Been quite a while since I have read anything beyond screens, my one newspaper, and my mail, I have to admit ...)

I don't know whether art AI refuses any prompts but ChatGPT refuses to engage with prompts that contain swearwords, so far.

A simple swear word filter? Seriously? It's been some 20 years since I worked as an external sysadmin at a bank and heard firsthand of the failures of the one their e-mail server used ... (as in, the day where the filter manufacturer thought it a good idea to match swearwords in compound words, too - who woulda thunk anyone'd send his bank a "doCUMent", eh? - or the poor customer whose e-mails were constantly blocked due to them containing his family name ...)

[Turnstylus]

I am dreading the same things that you are experiencing, @Sc0ut - robots replacing artists, and people thinking artists are obsolete!

As for using existing art as references for new art, though, I'm sorry, Sc0ut - artists have been doing that forever. Art students throughout history have been encouraged to outright copy the old masters for centuries, and the masters (living or not) didn't receive any residual income when their work inspired other work. Copyright law is a slightly complex can of worms that I won't open right now, but I will say there is nothing illegal (that I know of) about viewing art and using it as material for new art. There's even some latitude for appropriating pieces of an artwork - like sampling music - and making new art with a mixture of the pieces.

The big difference for me is that I don't feel any obligation to educate a machine to do art better. Maybe I'll feel differently later; if I start using AI for what I believe to be its strength - generating a lot of OK ideas quickly - maybe I'll want that idea generator to get smarter.

But right now, any artwork that I have posted online is designated "Don't look at me" as far as machine learning is concerned. Sites like ArtStation and others have lately built that function into their services - you can "opt out" of letting your art be scraped and used by AI.

I am also a "working artist" - a designer-turned-art-director at an advertising agency, and I offer this as words of comfort, hopefully: Artists have often had to "defend" and justify to the public why their art should be appreciated, so this latest challenge is not completely new. They must simply defend the need for human creativity on top of art started with AI.

Because right now that's the big difference, right? AI can re-interpret from source material, but can't create anything new. If machine learning had existed at the beginning of the 20th century, then robots could have made thousands of images like this:



But the robots would NEVER have come up with something like this:


It took people like Picasso and Braque to ask: "What if we jumped with both feet into abstraction?" and then had the gall to put their work into the world for consideration as art. Courage, contrariness, and the will to ask "what if?" are still human traits that robots don't have.

Hopefully some of these thoughts will help you, @Sc0ut , to answer those people who tell you a human artist isn't necessary anymore!

[Róisín]

JoB, those machine censors can be very silly. Even earlier in this forum, I remember talking to someone, I think it was Keep Looking, about a Western Australian wildflower called Ptilotus spathulatus, Mulla Mulla or Pussytails. The plant has fluffy flowers that look a bit like the tail of a very fluffy kitten. The name got automatically censored by the program looking out for bad words. Silly. I think Miss Blushes would have had more sense!

[JoB]

JoB, those machine censors can be very silly. Even earlier in this forum, I remember talking to someone, I think it was Keep Looking, about a Western Australian wildflower called Ptilotus spathulatus, Mulla Mulla or Pussytails. The plant has fluffy flowers that look a bit like the tail of a very fluffy kitten. The name got automatically censored by the program looking out for bad words. Silly. I think Miss Blushes would have had more sense!

Yeah, I remember the forum having an autocensor function (replacing, e.g., the F-bomb like here -> duck) and occasional discussions thereon. But then again, we don't go boasting that our forum qualifies as "an AI", with all the computing power and training that label suggests being at work, do we.

Plus, it seems that "Pussytails" is off the hook now ... as is the tailless version. (Or at least I hope it was not the "tail" part that had been put into the blacklist back then ... !)

[Keep Looking]

Yes, I remember talking about that plant! But the censoring isn't an AI, anyway, there's a place in the admin section of the site where you can put in specific words and what you want their alternatives to be. Obviously somebody had put in pussy at some point (due to its potential lewd meaning) but after our discussion about the plant I decided to see if I could edit it since it seemed a bit silly given it has another meaning that people might want to use.

[Lenny]

There was a period at the beginning of the forum where the swear list was... very overzealous. I think a generic list of words got imported? It was very difficult to write anything in romanji and a whole lot of words were filled with ****. Took a little to get that to a more normal level, haha.

With AI art I feel mostly anger towards the data collectors. There's a whole giant collection of opensource creative commons licensed art out there.......which they purposefully did not make use of. It's easier to just scrape everything than make sure you're only using art with consent. AI analysis is more intrusive than say, viewing pieces in an art gallery, and much more like doing infrared scans and x-rays of pieces and doing a ton of forensic analysis on it. Most of the art used was also not placed online with the understanding that this could one day be a possibility.

I've also seen absolutely tasteless use being made of the AI models out there, where people have taken the library of recently deceased artists and trained models on that for clout.

Maybe one day I'll be more okay with it, since there's definitely use out there for models like this that isn't unethical, and I'm actually really glad to see people here having fun with it! It's made me realise that there could be a version of this that would be a net positive. But for that to happen I'd need to see ethical data collection for training models that is transparent, and less direct parallels (or overlapping venn diagrams) with the NFT grifter community and the worst side of the tech crowd.

I am a little curious to see what's going to happen with needing to pay for image generation combined with some models being obviously trained on art with copyrighted characters. Selling fanart is technically illegal but not pursued in many places, and if a tech company is offering services for payment that results in, well, selling art of copyrighted characters that they have no right to, that might be picked up by companies who are fairly protective of that kind of thing. Who knows, maybe that's already "solved" by a swear filter too...

[lwise]

This is computer-generated but not AI-generated; it comes from E-onsoftware's Vue program.  I like it, and thought someone else might like it.

Spoiler: show