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Artist today use the exact same method of learning from other peoples artwork to generate new artwork and styles. These models are learning just like any artist

by thewanderer1983 4y ago

Artist today use the exact same method of learning from other peoples artwork to generate new artwork and styles. These models are learning just like any artist learns and then producing new content.

trention 4y ago
Even if that's true (which it isn't), it doesn't matter. It's absolutely logically consistent to allow humans to do it while forbidding AI to do it.
- astrange 4y ago
  The problem is forbidding it won’t do much. - It appears people can train AIs from scratch or at least fine-tune them at home. - Even if your art isn’t in “the training set”, that does not prevent the AI from learning its style. (Someone can decode it to CLIP embeddings. It could have a really good text model trained on vivid art museum descriptions of your art.) - The ability of an image model to generate your art means it could also be trained in reverse to recognize it, producing a caption model, which would give vision to the blind. And surely you’d feel bad about that.
  - trention 4y ago
    If you forbid it, the investment in developing those models disappears. They will be stuck at ~what we have now at best. You can also require cloud providers to enforce a ban on training (and deploying) such models, it's doable. Good luck training it in your basement, it will probably take you a decade. If this is banned, it will become a lot like piracy - yes, it's available, no, most people (at least in the West) don't do it, practically no businesses do it.
    - astrange 4y ago
      Training these models is much much cheaper than you think it is, and there’s good data for it already. Either use a CC0 set like Wikimedia/Flickr and throw in some dead artists like Brueghel, or train on data from a country we don’t respect the IP of. Lots of Taobao product photos out there. It’s enough.
      - trention 4y ago
        You are getting ridiculous now. Training this on "Taobao product photos" will lead to a useless model that is unable to produce practically all of the "cool" demos posted here in the last week.
        angusturner 4y ago
        A few months ago this task was virtually impossible. Then it was possible, but extremely expensive and pay-walled behind the "Open"AI' website. As of about a week ago this tech runs on consumer GPUs. The weights have been downloaded 100s of thousands of times, and fine-tuning / modifying is possible. Training from scratch is about $500k still, but it will only get cheaper and easier.
        trention 4y ago
        This doesn't contradict anything I have written. The average technical user will be unable to train this exact model (not to mention the supposed future more powerful ones) in their basement in this decade.
        angusturner 4y ago
        That just feels like such a pessimistic forecast to me. Of course, the current trajectory of improvements in model efficiency and better commercial GPUs / ML-accelerators may hit a wall. But I would not be surprised if this was trainable on a commercial GPU at home within that time. But I think another important trend that we are seeing is that you don't need to train these models from scratch. Open-source "foundation models" means that you can usually get away with the much easier task of fine-tuning, as to not throw away / re-learn everything that these large models have already fit. Edit: I initially said 2-5 years, but on more reflection this does seem optimistic (for training from scratch).
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - greysphere 4y ago
      If things go that way, the 'legit' models will continue dev, just using licensed content (along with public domain works). It will be more expensive for the end user, but that cost will shrink over time for general work. Tools that mimic working artist though might not be available (or will expensive). This all seems pretty ideal, so the pessimist in me guesses it's fairly unlikely.
      - trention 4y ago
        I am not sure it will be possible to get enough training data that way. I don't know enough about diffusion models but if LLMs (of current size) have to use only public domain, they will be undertrained and we will see significant degradation in performance. Not to mention that Codex will be effectively dead.
- t-3 4y ago
  > It's absolutely logically consistent to allow humans to do it while forbidding AI to do it. Why would you, though? If art is for the sake of art, then all art is valuable regardless of origin. If art is for the sake of providing human employment, AI being better in no way stops performative make-work from existing. If art is for the sake of copyright trolls to troll harder, then fuck art, feed it to the AI!
  - trention 4y ago
    Art is for the sake of humans producing said art. I don't give a flying f*ck about "art" (it's not art) generated by a neural net using statistical patterns.
    - solumunus 4y ago
      This is such a strange position to hold. At some point in the future may be confronted with an image that is emotionally stimulating, and you will have no idea whether a human or AI created it. Are you suddenly going to dismiss and discard it just because you subsequently learn it was AI generated? You must see how silly that is. Your "logic" for making AI art illegal is basically "don't like it". Your personal and subjective opinion is that it's not art by definition.. This is like refusing to eat artificially grown meat because you have some strange idea about what food "should" be. Even if the meat was made MORE delicious you would still claim it wasn't food and turn it away. There's no logical consistency to your position, it's purely reactionary.
      - trention 4y ago
        My position is perfectly logically consistent. Art is distilled human experience and human emotions emerging in a particular context after a chain of events. None of this is true of AI "art". What is not logically consistent is to claim that a black box utilizing statistical relationships between pixels in a giant dataset is an "artist" and that its products create "value". The compiler is not a programmer, AI can never be an artist.
        4y ago
- numpad0 4y ago
  Human artists can copy an art using transparent tracing paper on a lightbox just like that, and that will be plagiarism. No reasons AI output shouldn’t be.
noisymemories 4y ago
This is patently, obviously _wrong_ for anyone who has tried learning any artistic skill in their life. Sorry to be this straightforward, but it gets on my nerves every time I read it. If you tried learning, let's say, the chiaroscuro technique from Caravaggio you'd be analyzing the way the painter simulated volumetric space by using white and dark tones in place of natural lighting and shadows. You wouldn't even think of splitting the whole painting into puzzle size pieces while checking how many how those look similar when put close one another. Given somewhat decent painting skills, you'd be able to steadily apply this technique for the rest of your life just by looking at a very small sample of Caravaggio's corpus. On the other hand if you tried removing even just a single work from the original Stable Diffusion data set you used to generate your painting, it would be absolutely impossible to recreate a similar enough picture even by starting from the same prompt and seed values. Given how smart some of the people working on this are, I'm starting to believe they're intentionally playing dumb to make sure nobody is going ask them to prove this during a copyright infringement case.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- thewanderer1983 4y ago
  >This is patently, obviously _wrong_ for anyone who has tried learning any artistic skill in their life. Sorry to be this straightforward, but it gets on my nerves every time I read it. Both my parents (though retired now) were commercial artists. I was trying to be an artist at one point in my life before moving in Engineering and Science. All my parents friends are artists so I grew up around artists. Ask any artist here who is using illustrator, Photoshop, Krita etc. How often do they google image search for textures, or reference images that gets incorporated into their artwork? The final artwork is their own but it may incorporate many elements from others artwork. >If you tried learning, let's say, the chiaroscuro technique from Caravaggio.. You wouldn't even think of splitting the whole painting into puzzle size pieces while checking how many how those look similar when put close one another. Ever seen hyperealistic pointillism? Who are you to be the arbitrator of how an artists creates their work? Have you ever gone to a modern art gallery and seen all the different methods people use to create artwork? Art is boundless and unique to each who creates it. If a Artist uses a tool to create art, everyone agrees that is art. It could be a paint brush, clay, software on a computer etc etc. If an artist uses AI as a tool to create art then suddenly it's not art.

Artist today use the exact same method of learning from other peoples artwork to generate new artwork and styles. These models are learning just like any artist learns and then producing new content.

trention 4y ago

Even if that's true (which it isn't), it doesn't matter. It's absolutely logically consistent to allow humans to do it while forbidding AI to do it.

astrange 4y ago
The problem is forbidding it won’t do much. - It appears people can train AIs from scratch or at least fine-tune them at home. - Even if your art isn’t in “the training set”, that does not prevent the AI from learning its style. (Someone can decode it to CLIP embeddings. It could have a really good text model trained on vivid art museum descriptions of your art.) - The ability of an image model to generate your art means it could also be trained in reverse to recognize it, producing a caption model, which would give vision to the blind. And surely you’d feel bad about that.
- trention 4y ago
  If you forbid it, the investment in developing those models disappears. They will be stuck at ~what we have now at best. You can also require cloud providers to enforce a ban on training (and deploying) such models, it's doable. Good luck training it in your basement, it will probably take you a decade. If this is banned, it will become a lot like piracy - yes, it's available, no, most people (at least in the West) don't do it, practically no businesses do it.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Training these models is much much cheaper than you think it is, and there’s good data for it already. Either use a CC0 set like Wikimedia/Flickr and throw in some dead artists like Brueghel, or train on data from a country we don’t respect the IP of. Lots of Taobao product photos out there. It’s enough.
    - trention 4y ago
      You are getting ridiculous now. Training this on "Taobao product photos" will lead to a useless model that is unable to produce practically all of the "cool" demos posted here in the last week.
      - angusturner 4y ago
        A few months ago this task was virtually impossible. Then it was possible, but extremely expensive and pay-walled behind the "Open"AI' website. As of about a week ago this tech runs on consumer GPUs. The weights have been downloaded 100s of thousands of times, and fine-tuning / modifying is possible. Training from scratch is about $500k still, but it will only get cheaper and easier.
        trention 4y ago
        This doesn't contradict anything I have written. The average technical user will be unable to train this exact model (not to mention the supposed future more powerful ones) in their basement in this decade.
        angusturner 4y ago
        That just feels like such a pessimistic forecast to me. Of course, the current trajectory of improvements in model efficiency and better commercial GPUs / ML-accelerators may hit a wall. But I would not be surprised if this was trainable on a commercial GPU at home within that time. But I think another important trend that we are seeing is that you don't need to train these models from scratch. Open-source "foundation models" means that you can usually get away with the much easier task of fine-tuning, as to not throw away / re-learn everything that these large models have already fit. Edit: I initially said 2-5 years, but on more reflection this does seem optimistic (for training from scratch).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - greysphere 4y ago
    If things go that way, the 'legit' models will continue dev, just using licensed content (along with public domain works). It will be more expensive for the end user, but that cost will shrink over time for general work. Tools that mimic working artist though might not be available (or will expensive). This all seems pretty ideal, so the pessimist in me guesses it's fairly unlikely.
    - trention 4y ago
      I am not sure it will be possible to get enough training data that way. I don't know enough about diffusion models but if LLMs (of current size) have to use only public domain, they will be undertrained and we will see significant degradation in performance. Not to mention that Codex will be effectively dead.
t-3 4y ago
> It's absolutely logically consistent to allow humans to do it while forbidding AI to do it. Why would you, though? If art is for the sake of art, then all art is valuable regardless of origin. If art is for the sake of providing human employment, AI being better in no way stops performative make-work from existing. If art is for the sake of copyright trolls to troll harder, then fuck art, feed it to the AI!
- trention 4y ago
  Art is for the sake of humans producing said art. I don't give a flying f*ck about "art" (it's not art) generated by a neural net using statistical patterns.
  - solumunus 4y ago
    This is such a strange position to hold. At some point in the future may be confronted with an image that is emotionally stimulating, and you will have no idea whether a human or AI created it. Are you suddenly going to dismiss and discard it just because you subsequently learn it was AI generated? You must see how silly that is. Your "logic" for making AI art illegal is basically "don't like it". Your personal and subjective opinion is that it's not art by definition.. This is like refusing to eat artificially grown meat because you have some strange idea about what food "should" be. Even if the meat was made MORE delicious you would still claim it wasn't food and turn it away. There's no logical consistency to your position, it's purely reactionary.
    - trention 4y ago
      My position is perfectly logically consistent. Art is distilled human experience and human emotions emerging in a particular context after a chain of events. None of this is true of AI "art". What is not logically consistent is to claim that a black box utilizing statistical relationships between pixels in a giant dataset is an "artist" and that its products create "value". The compiler is not a programmer, AI can never be an artist.
      - 4y ago
numpad0 4y ago
Human artists can copy an art using transparent tracing paper on a lightbox just like that, and that will be plagiarism. No reasons AI output shouldn’t be.

noisymemories 4y ago

This is patently, obviously _wrong_ for anyone who has tried learning any artistic skill in their life. Sorry to be this straightforward, but it gets on my nerves every time I read it. If you tried learning, let's say, the chiaroscuro technique from Caravaggio you'd be analyzing the way the painter simulated volumetric space by using white and dark tones in place of natural lighting and shadows. You wouldn't even think of splitting the whole painting into puzzle size pieces while checking how many how those look similar when put close one another. Given somewhat decent painting skills, you'd be able to steadily apply this technique for the rest of your life just by looking at a very small sample of Caravaggio's corpus. On the other hand if you tried removing even just a single work from the original Stable Diffusion data set you used to generate your painting, it would be absolutely impossible to recreate a similar enough picture even by starting from the same prompt and seed values. Given how smart some of the people working on this are, I'm starting to believe they're intentionally playing dumb to make sure nobody is going ask them to prove this during a copyright infringement case.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
thewanderer1983 4y ago
>This is patently, obviously _wrong_ for anyone who has tried learning any artistic skill in their life. Sorry to be this straightforward, but it gets on my nerves every time I read it. Both my parents (though retired now) were commercial artists. I was trying to be an artist at one point in my life before moving in Engineering and Science. All my parents friends are artists so I grew up around artists. Ask any artist here who is using illustrator, Photoshop, Krita etc. How often do they google image search for textures, or reference images that gets incorporated into their artwork? The final artwork is their own but it may incorporate many elements from others artwork. >If you tried learning, let's say, the chiaroscuro technique from Caravaggio.. You wouldn't even think of splitting the whole painting into puzzle size pieces while checking how many how those look similar when put close one another. Ever seen hyperealistic pointillism? Who are you to be the arbitrator of how an artists creates their work? Have you ever gone to a modern art gallery and seen all the different methods people use to create artwork? Art is boundless and unique to each who creates it. If a Artist uses a tool to create art, everyone agrees that is art. It could be a paint brush, clay, software on a computer etc etc. If an artist uses AI as a tool to create art then suddenly it's not art.