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Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

303 points by hardmaru 4y ago

DefineOutside 4y ago
They should also ban creating digital art, as digital art takes less effort than paper.
- matkoniecz 4y ago
  And art using paper rather than doing proper stone carvings.
  - KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
    All those are segregated...
- shishy 4y ago
  I don't think that's really fair... I can see the argument for removing AI generated stuff in part because it doesn't require technical artistic skill (whereas digital art still does, in your ability to observe, draw with perspective, etc.)
  - polygamous_bat 4y ago
    But that can easily lead to a slippery slope since it requires more technical skill to make physical art than digital (for one, you can't "undo" anything in physical world.) Where do we draw the line? Secondly, it will just become more and more subtle as art softwares will subtly repackage such AI tools into their art software packaging. I am willing to bet anything Adobe is already employed an army already to figure out how to do so. How would you tackle that?
  - tiborsaas 4y ago
    So if I skillfully combine multiple AI generated images it's stops being art? What's the difference between someone only using that vs. someone taking parts form random images found in Google image search? The latter very common among digital artists.
- nottorp 4y ago
  > as digital art takes less effort than paper. Hmm I've seen someone draw/paint on both paper and an iPad. It didn't look to me that she was much faster on digital. But then it was original art not copies of something.
  - DefineOutside 4y ago
    probably should have said photographs, as photographs are more similar to AI art than computer generated art is
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      Photographs are a great analogy. If you work to learn about how to take a good photo, and learn all the techniques around framing a shot and how different shutter speeds affect things you can take beautiful pictures. However, if you tried to submit that picture to someone as a painting, they will cry foul. Also most people don't consider your candids on vacation to be in the same "category" as a carefully crafted (or not!!!) photograph of a landscape. In much the same way, sure you could dedicate your life to learning the craft of prompting an ML model to produce unique, novel, and interesting art, but these communities are saying "we want these to be considered a different class of art" and as mostly self organizing communities they are well within their rights to do so.
  - cthalupa 4y ago
    To be clear: I fully think that digital art is art. But it is a lot less effort in a lot of ways. If I'm painting in Photoshop or Krita, I have layers. I can adjust blending modes. I can move them up and down. I can easily ctrl+z a mistake. I can rotate my workspace quickly and easily in ways that would be difficult with physical media. I can easily find the color I want without having to purchase more paints and blend them, or colored pencils, or whatever. I can create brushes and variations on them to match my style. I can go on with dozens of other things. I happen to think all of that is a good thing, and don't know that comparing digital art to AI generated art is a good analogy, but digital art 100% makes many things you do in art easier.
- nurbl 4y ago
  If you are a "digital art" community, clearly you have already accepted some digital tools. I do think it makes logical sense to try and ban "AI" art if it is not what the community is interested in. It's likely not just about pretty images. They might value the mental process, the individual's style, progression, techniques, and yes, the effort. Someone coming in with generated images expecting to be treated the same is to me a bit like commissioning art from someone else, and then presenting that as your own. The images might be great, but it's not in the spirit of the community. There must be tons of "AI" focused communities for that. I suppose they will eventually fail at resisting this, but that's another matter.
gdubs 4y ago
I have a degree in Studio Arts in addition to being a software developer (and recently I've started making a lot of creative work with AI). Back when I was in school, there was already plenty of debate about 'what is "Art"'? It's always been hotly contested. Most of my teachers felt that 'technique' was not Art. Others were more purists – life painters, etc – and felt that, no, technique is art. Duchamp poked the art establishment in the eye with his 'readymades' (urinals on the gallery wall, etc.) Warhol with his 'factory' making silkscreens. The 'reverse Monet' (too lazy to link) that caused such an uproar when it was shared last week was ironic – apparently people aren't aware that the impressionists themselves were considered 'not artists' by a lot of people at the time. The camera and photography made many painters sit up and say, 'hey, it can't just be about "image" anymore' – enter abstract expressionism, fauvism, cubism, etc. Work that shifted the focus from the image represented in the painting ('a window into a world') onto the surface of the canvas itself: Rothko, Albers, etc. The thing is, people have wild misconceptions about what this technology does. Many clearly think it's a photocopier. As if StableDiffusion is hiding copies of all these works inside. When in fact what's been done is to take all of this online knowledge and create an incredible new tool with it. Like a music synthesizer times a million. It's understandable why this technology makes people uncomfortable. There are legit fears about displacement, economic uncertainty, etc. But we are fundamentally tool makers – it's arguably intrinsically part of what makes us human (borrowing from Carl Sagan's "Dragons of Eden"). If I were back in the art department last century, I'm pretty sure we'd be really excitedly discussing how these new tools will enable entirely new forms of expression. And sure, there'd be the old guard saying it was awful, and 'not Art'. This is a really interesting debate – I just wish it scratched deeper than the surface more often than it does, with a bit more historical context.
- zasdffaa 4y ago
  This is the kind of comment about art that is measured, constructive, non-absolutist, and too rare on HN in posts about art (and urban dictionary has an entry for 'reverse monet' cos I wondered, but I'd skip that one if I were you).
  - gdubs 4y ago
causi 4y ago
I don't understand the difference between telling photoshop to sharpen an image or remove red-eye and using AI to generate based on a prompt. Both of them are software modifying your canvas.
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RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
> Left unchecked, it’s not hard to imagine AI art crowding out illustrations that took days or weeks for someone to make. This reminds me of what someone from the 1800's would say: "If left unchecked, it is not hard to imagine photography crowding out paintings that took days or weeks for someone to make." Or several thousand years ago when the pottery wheel was invented. Or when humans learned to cast metals instead of having to chisel stone. Art is the expression of human creativity. Art transcends the medium. In addition, making art more accessible to more people is a good thing. There are probably a lot of people who did not consider themselves artists, but with creative use of prompts and img-to-img can actually create stunning works. That is a good thing, not a bad thing.
- diydsp 4y ago
  > "If left unchecked, it is not hard to imagine photography crowding out paintings that took days or weeks for someone to make." Today photography and illustration are segregated. Which is what these artist communities are establishing.
- SicSemperUranus 4y ago
  It depends what the point is. You wouldn't let a motorcycle participate in a horse race. I think there's a place for AI art and it's fine if "manual art" remains the same. The difference can be arbitrary at times, but art often is.
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  This reminds me of what someone from the 8 years from now will say if this is left unchecked I also will be out of a job like those useless artists all were.
  - Natsu 4y ago
    I don't think artists will be out of demand any more than fast food has made people stop eating out. I do think it will cannibalize the lower end of art such that it becomes like working at a fast food joint, though.
- 4y ago
Janicc 4y ago
It's going to be interesting to see how this is going to get enforced in the likely future in which AI art becomes in every way indistinguishable from human art.
- Jevon23 4y ago
  They can just focus on obvious cases: people that upload new images at an astounding rate, people who forget to remove the AI watermarks, and people who simply admit to using AI. No need to turn it into a witch hunt where you accuse everyone of using AI.
  - horsawlarway 4y ago
    It will 100% turn into a constant witch hunt - I can absolutely promise it. Want an easy reference? See First Person Shooter games. Turns out that once the computer can mostly do the job, you will see: 1. Constant use of the computer for that job 2. Constant accusations of using the computer in places that restrict it. See basically every online FPS community that exists. And that's with incredibly invasive software running on player machines explicitly to stop them from using the computer to play - and People both still do it (in HUGE numbers), and the communities constantly bitch about the "rampant cheating".
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    - scarmig 4y ago
      One way to take down someone you don't like will be to accuse them of using AI. It's an accusation that's impossible to defend against; you could require people to provide a video showing them creating the art, but that adds enough friction to be the death of a community and down the line will itself be something that could be generated.
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gonzo41 4y ago
Art takes effort. Training models and feeding them information takes effort. AI is not magic. Art is just getting another toolset.
- YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
  Building a motorbike from scratch by hand also takes effort, but we've universally agreed that that doesn't let you enter it into the Tour de France.
  - xani_ 4y ago
    Sure you can, you will just have to push it
- gspr 4y ago
  How much effort? Do you discount for example accidental works of art?
- biftek 4y ago
  Typing a prompt into DALLE does not take effort and it does not make you an artist. Don't kid yourself that the people generating art and submitting it to these sites are the same ones writing and training the AI.
  - filoleg 4y ago
    "Pressing a shutter button on your camera and tweaking a few parameters in settings does not take effort and it does not make one an artist." I think we have established by now that photography is art, so your argument doesn't feel like it would stand the test of time much. Just like the photography one didn't.
    - biftek 4y ago
      I think you're just proving my point actually, being able to take photos doesn't make everyone an artist or every photo art. To take truly great photos you still need to understand basics like composition and lighting (just like illustration and painting) which do take effort, and your still not guaranteed to get good photos. A camera, like AI, is simply a tool and it's no doubt already helping artists, but to think typing a prompt into a website somehow makes you an artist on its own is foolish.
latchkey 4y ago
Perfect. A huge niche opportunity to focus on an art community dedicated to AI generated images.
- KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
  There's one linked in the article, https://lexica.art/ https://lexica.art/
- throw_m239339 4y ago
  > A huge niche opportunity kind of an oxymoron. Why bother having an "art community" when one can just generate all the art at random themselves? That's the whole point of DALL-E and co, an endless stream of generated images... no need for a community for that.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    I think that is like saying digital cameras will never replace film. Art is art.
    - throw_m239339 4y ago
      Art is in the eye of the beholder. No need for a community to generate every possible art with a AI. Only some cloud storage.
  - Double_a_92 4y ago
    It still takes some skill, patience and luck to get a pleasing result. If you try out DALL-E literally 99% of the images you get from naïvely trying some promts will be complete shite.
    - throw_m239339 4y ago
      > It still takes some skill, patience and luck to get a pleasing result. No it doesn't take any form of skills to get 100 drawings from a simple prompt. This is the whole point of AI "art" generation.
Kiro 4y ago
Challenge accepted. How will they know?
- Jevon23 4y ago
  With the models that are available for public use today, there are still usually signs, particularly when it comes to drawings of humans.
  - Kiro 4y ago
    Sounds like a good opportunity for an "AI image detection"-as-a-Service.
    - TheMaskedCoder 4y ago
      Is it possible to automate detection of automation? If you can create an algorithm that detects the difference between AI art and human art, wouldn't that algorithm itself be able to create a new AI art algorithm that it itself could not detect?
      - alcover 4y ago
        Nice point. I think it's called 'adversarial training'. The Alphazero chess engine/model was grown this way it seems.
- coldcode 4y ago
  My normal artwork (digital) is 9000x9000 pixels up to about 14400x14400. Good luck getting any of them to make something bigger than 1024x1024. Sure, you can use Gigapixel to upres things, but in the end it's basically impossible to make a decent artwork using ML at the moment. I only use Dall-E for offbeat ideas for geometric abstractions, so far Stable Diffusion sucks for that purpose. Of course when you upload at no one wants you to do the full resolution image; at 1024x1024 you might be able to fool people with something ML made. I believe most of these models only use 1k images so they really can't make anything bigger yet. Maybe someday but not today.
ryeguy_24 4y ago
They should also ban people that have seen more art than others as they may be inadvertently creating derivative artwork from their more thoroughly trained real neural network in their brain. Purposely being facetious, but seriously, we will likely see more and more of these type of rules being applied to competitions or groups. It will be harder and harder to define the rules. At some point, it becomes moot. Did I draw it? Did my toddler? Was I on hallucinogens when I drew it? Did I use computer algorithms (filters) on any form of the digital art? If the intent is to preserve the "effort" that goes into art, fine, but that will be a really gray line. I guess it's all fine to have the rules, it's similar to the natural body building competition.
- jxy 4y ago
  How can they draw the line between AI and non-AI assisted art? What about a gaussian kernel filter? How about adding a saturation enhancer? How about putting a few of those together and let's play with the parameters a bit for fun?
- advisedwang 4y ago
  Newgrounds: "not have the Art Portal flooded with computer-generated art" DeviantArt: "complaining that their feeds are getting flooded" Artstation: "the front pages are flooded with unmodified AI generated slop" They're really worried about the volume that AI art scales. So they don't really have to chase down every image and decide if it's AI or not. They just need to stop users from throwing huge amounts of them, which is easy to detect.
  - nonbirithm 4y ago
    I contrast these reasons with the FurAffinity announcement from a week ago[0]: > AI art is a damn good learning tool, but it's taking everything it does from artists. It leeches on the time, effort, skill, energy an artist put into their work. > You can use tools like this to learn and try to come up with concepts to learn from. I have nothing wrong with that, but just adding it to an image gallery. The origin are questionable unlike, say, using a site specifically for royalty free images. > I stand with artists, not prompts. [0] https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/status/1566900442650628096 https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/status/1566900442650628096
imranq 4y ago
I agree that images only through AI should be removed from art sites. The issue with AI art is that the only human contribution in those pieces is the creation of the prompt and the curation of the final image. Without sensory and experiential inputs of its own, AI can only interpolate between real images and styles. So an AI generated image doesn't add much artistic value since its not expressing any new deep truth or factual understanding of the real world. Well isn't all art just a derivative of another piece? The issue with that statement is that art is fundamentally a communication from a human artist to a human viewer. At the level of AI prompt creation and curation, you act more like an art gallery owner rather than an artist, which doesn't communicate artistic values in the same way as does an original piece derived from the experiences, history, and skill of a human artist. Dall-E 2, Stable Diffusion, should be used for inspiration and helping with minor elements of a piece, but someone passing off an AI generated image as part of their portfolio is disingenuous at best
- Kiro 4y ago
  And how do you define artistic value? If you don't even know if an image is generated by an AI or not, what is lost?
  - zasdffaa 4y ago
    People who are precious about art will keep defining it away from anything that upsets them.
  - adrian_b 4y ago
    If you just want a beautiful or intriguing image to look at, an AI-generated image may happen to satisfy that need very well. The same need can be satisfied with a photo of some natural things, e.g. living beings or minerals or places. In both cases there is no human to whom one could attribute any artistic merit for the content of the images. Whether an image is beautiful or not is not necessarily correlated with the involvement of a human in its creation, but its origin should nevertheless always be made clear.
    - 4y ago
Nursie 4y ago
I make all sorts of interesting stuff with DALL-E I wouldn't have the temerity to claim it was art, or wholly my creation, though.
- wccrawford 4y ago
  A lot of people do, though. And even with more traditional art, a lot of people trace something and claim they made it themselves. However, I do think it's art. Coming up with an idea and then a prompt to express that idea, and then curating the results... That's artistry. It's not traditional, of course. And with img2img and in-painting, there's a lot more to creating a really good work than just a prompt and curation. I have no problem calling this art. I'm still struggling with the ethics, though. I'm not sure how I really feel about it yet.
hericium 4y ago
The problem I see here is that ML-generated art may be based on real art. While human painter may repeat style of fragments of work of other artist as homage, computer software does it more as plagiarism. This isn't much different than issues surrounding Microsoft GitHub Copilot.
- Kiro 4y ago
  And neither would constitute as plagiarism by the legal definition of it. Yes, it's a problem that they are trained on material without consent but what they produce is something totally new and not even close to plagiarism.
  - nottorp 4y ago
    > what they produce is something totally new It is? I may be cursed with a good memory but absolutely no "AI art" that my friends passed on to me looked original. In some cases it was painfully obvious what it's based on, in other cases it just felt like i've seen it before. Legal it may be (although there will be conflicts about machine generated derivative works) but it's also boring. People are just enthusiastic because it's "do it with a computer". If a young human artist came up with this stuff you'd tell them they're good technically but now they need to develop their own personality.
    - ShamelessC 4y ago
      It is more than capable of producing stuff that isn’t even in its dataset as the original DALLE paper shows. Inference takes 4 seconds on an A100, I’d say that makes it useful for a wide range of applications that weren’t even possible before. I do agree that the outputs will lack a sense of communication with the viewer that art has.
    - Ukv 4y ago
      > In some cases it was painfully obvious what it's based on Do you have an example of this? Ideally with a link (for DALL-E 2/Midjourney) or prompt and seed (for Stable Diffusion) to show that it was generated from an incidental prompt - as opposed to uploading the existing image and just using the AI for inpainting/fine-tuning.
ElCheapo 4y ago
It should simply be a new "hey guys, look at this cool prompt I came up with" category. Using AI for easy upvotes, unwarranted clout or spam should be banned.
matkoniecz 4y ago
> generator was uploading one image every 40 seconds before it was banned > not have the Art Portal flooded with computer-generated art That was the real problem.
- throw101010 4y ago
  Then why do they pretend to ban a specific art type? I could have generated variations of a human created digital piece in less time than these AI (currently) since the creation of this platform but they didn't seem to feel threatened by this up until now... so there is clearly an other problem.
  - matkoniecz 4y ago
    > I could have generated variations of a human created digital piece in less time than these AI Seems dubious that you could achieve over 2000 upload each day, without stopping.
    - batperson 4y ago
      I generated over 30k, maybe 40k images since stable diffusion 1.4 model went public 2 weeks ago. Most of it is just endless exploring and generating a lot of nonsense but I got some prompts that generate consistently good results. 2000 decent quality images per day would be quite easy, even with my humble rtx 2070s GPU.
      - matkoniecz 4y ago
        I was responding to claim that bot uploads of autogenerated work is not a problem, as humans can generate work at the same rate.
    - throw101010 4y ago
      The point I was making is that prior to AI generated pieces, a human could create one piece and then apply random filters to it and also upload thousands of small variations every day. People didn't do it because it is not very interesting. The broader point is that these AI pieces can be interesting, and such a ban is not just because of bandwidth/storage limitations.
firasd 4y ago
I think the communities involved here like digital artists, furries etc got a lot of attention hating on NFTs last year, so they are doubling down with the anti-art-generator movement. But I don't think this one will be so successful. Like sure, maybe art community sites could require you to tag prompt-generated art just as a way to label things, but in terms of widespread usage the cat is out of the bag. Whenever I get on Twitter and see someone incoherently angry about people using Stable Diffusion I'm reminded of that quote from an Android in Blade Runner 2049: “You tiny thing. In the face of the fabulous new, your only thought is to kill it? For fear of great change? You can’t hold the tide with a broom.”
- eat_veggies 4y ago
  Sure, AI generated art is probably out of the bag, but to lump it in with NFTs and such is an interesting rhetorical move, since the only thing that really links them is their new-ness. That Blade Runner quote can be used to shut down any critique of an emerging technology precisely because it fetishizes new-ness for its own sake, and assigns it an agency of its own, inevitable like the tide. It becomes a cause that generates effects in our lives, and the only question is how we react. This robs us of our own agency as social/political/historical actors who can kill/change/improve/use/abuse technologies and decide how to incorporate them in our lives. People invoked the same language about things like television, and I find Raymond Williams's critique helpful: > If the effect of the medium is the same, whoever controls or uses it, and whatever apparent content he may try to insert, then we can forget ordinary political and cultural argument and let the technology run itself. It is hardly surprising that this conclusion has been welcomed by the 'media-men' of the existing institutions. It gives the gloss of avant-garde theory to the crudest versions of their existing interests and practices, and assigns all their critics to pre-electronic irrelevance (1974, 128)
  - firasd 4y ago
    Well in this case the link between NFTs and AI art wasn't made by me, I'm just observing the overlap between the same online influencers/groups doing the same type of activism against two different phenomena. Sure I think there's always a conversation to be had about how to incorporate tech. Like Reddit banning celeb deepfakes is probably the choice I would have made as well if I set policy on the site. But what I'm noticing is over the top anger at usage per se. (Someone linked the 'reverse monet' tweet elsewhere in this discussion and the quote tweets there are unhinged.) That's what I'm saying can not be 'killed'--these breakthroughs in large language models
falcolas 4y ago
Individual art communities should be allowed to decide to only accept art created by a particular set of tools. Oil. Acrylic. Mixed Media. Watercolor. Chalk. Pencil. Digital. Photoshop. AI. And so forth. It's a matter of curation in my mind, not discrimination, and not really outrage worthy.
- AlecSchueler 4y ago
  I didn't take the idea that this was shared as an outrage piece as much as a point of interest; it's a key point along this journey and worth noting with or without judgement.
polygamous_bat 4y ago
This will become even more interesting as digital art softwares start including "AI brushes" and such that include subtle tweaks to the established process. AI generated art made in 40 seconds could be banned, but what would happen to the AI assisted works, churned out by an artist in 10 minutes instead of 10 hours?
scarmig 4y ago
Perhaps possible to enforce now, but they're fighting a losing battle. AI art will ultimately be indistinguishable from human art except by being consistently better; they're relying on the good faith of contributors. And anything that relies on the good faith of 100% of humans is something doomed to failure.
oulipo 4y ago
It's interesting to think about it, what differentiate art from a human or a machine. It can't be the content itself, because now machine output is close to a human output (modulo the small details). So what make those communities attracted to art made by humans, rather than art made by machines? It must be the "act of community" itself, which cannot be made by a machine (it is useless to be "in community" with a conscious-less machine). So this would mean that the "art content" for humans is not only the pictorial content of the image, but also the "transmission of a message", and in particular, the quality of the initiator and the receiver of the message. In this case, humans would (and apparently seem to) differentiate in quality art that has been created by a conscious being and for a conscious being, to art that has been created by a machine.
- 7952 4y ago
  People consume art for different reasons. It can be like a spiritual experience, or an investment, or something to brighten up your life. It can have a story attached to it or be inspirational. My guess is that different people will have different reactions to machine made art. And most of the art community will carry on perfectly happily as if nothing has changed.
- ilaksh 4y ago
  Has nothing to do with that. It's two things. Artists are threatened, and also right now a lot that is being submitted is low quality. So if you are an artist you don't like seeing a bunch of AI junk on your home page just because a lot is junk but also, because one can assume that it will continue to improve so that that most of it really is competing with artists. So that could put a lot of people out of work since it would make art-related business models much more competitive.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  > So this would mean that the "art content" for humans is not only the pictorial content of the image, but also the "transmission of a message", and in particular, the quality of the initiator and the receiver of the message Sounds like you've taken a semiotics class. If art is about transmission of a message, wouldn't the message be the prompt supplied to the AI by the human? In that case, perhaps the art is only as profound as the prompt?
helloworld11 4y ago
For artists who continue to paint, or use other physical means of expression through base materials and sell them as physical works, this entire AI art surge remains largely irrelevant in a practical sense. A buyer or patron who wants real, physical art will still need and want real, physical art, and I don't see an AI imitating much of that easily any time soon. The people or organizations to which AI-churned art appeals to most desire commercial visual churn. They are the same people who would in any case have least cared about art in its more creative, communicative forms. And there's nothing creative or imaginative about the results of machine-generated visuals. They're the very opposite in fact, visuals created literally mindlessly. If anything, I can see AI art giving a new breath of life and interest to real man-made art, much like industrial food production gave organic "local-grown" food producers a chance to brand themselves with a distinct, desirable identity.
- pavel_lishin 4y ago
  I don't know if I agree. One of the big sources of income for online artists is commissions of D&D characters and such; AI-generated art is now getting good enough that people can get a "good-enough" version of what they want for free, instead of paying an artist $50 or $100 for a piece of art. I've commissioned art for my D&D character before, and I'll almost certainly do so again - but if I'm playing a one-shot online and want a quick image to share with the group, AI-generated art is a fast and free way of getting that!
  - bheadmaster 4y ago
    People have been losing their jobs because of technology ever since the industrial revolution, each one of them enraged about it, and rightfully so. Society doesn't care about people who've put their whole lives into a skill that suddenly became worthless (or much less valuable then it was). The solution is not to ban technology (you can't really ban technology, as it's not under total government control) - the solution is to enable anyone to pursue new skills without fear of homelessness and starvation. I.e. Universal Basic Income.
    - 4y ago
jedberg 4y ago
It seems like the actual problem they're trying to solve is volume, so why not just rate limit submissions? They just need to look at their median submission rate prior to a few weeks ago and then make that the submission rate limit.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  The problem being solved by these decisions is that AI art is a visible threat to the livelihoods of the people the site is designed to support and uplift. Art sites have already had rate limits for years. These communities are explicitly saying "no" to this disruptive technology. If you want to go make a new gallery site for showing off your prompt engineering that's your own lookout, have fun trying to build a community and figure out how to keep the site funded. But you can't come spam our existing communities of people who've dedicated decades to their craft with the messy, incoherent results of the whole six months you've spent learning to be a "prompt engineer".
  - jedberg 4y ago
    > The problem being solved by these decisions is that AI art is a visible threat to the livelihoods of the people the site is designed to support and uplift. That's not a solvable problem. Art will be made by computers, it's inevitable. Eventually it will get good enough to be indistinguishable from human made art. It's already good enough that a human can use the AI to get 90% of the way there and then finish it themselves. > Art sites have already had rate limits for years. Clearly not good enough if every one of them is saying some variation on "our site is getting flooded with AI art" > These communities are explicitly saying "no" to this disruptive technology. If you want to go make a new gallery site for showing off your prompt engineering that's your own lookout, have fun trying to build a community and figure out how to keep the site funded. But you can't come spam our existing communities of people who've dedicated decades to their craft with the messy, incoherent results of the whole six months you've spent learning to be a "prompt engineer". I agree, people shouldn't be spamming crap directly from the AI. But good luck keeping out the people who tweak the AI generated art to make it look pretty good. A smart site would embrace this kind of art, perhaps make a new category for it. But trying to ban it from the community is a lost cause.
hackernewds 4y ago
"The candle makers protested the distribution of lightbulbs" "The horse stables protested the building of parking lots" "The taxi drivers protested the proliferation of Uber"
antonymy 4y ago
I'm waiting for the first case of a human artist being banned because their style was "too similar" to AI-generated art. I think that'll be the beginning of the end for the communities that do these kinds of bans.
pavel_lishin 4y ago
Aside from the debates about "artistic merit" and the ethics of using AI trained on existing artists' work, one of the key things is that this new technology allows anyone to flood a place with images. There are some scifi-themed subreddits that I visit that allow posting art, and at this point it feels like 50% of all submissions are Midjourney/Dall-E generated art. Fine, it looks ok, but there's such a low barrier to creating and posting these, it's beginning to drown out other valuable content. The article even speaks about this: > In July, one AI furry porn generator was uploading one image every 40 seconds
- Axauv 4y ago
  This could be solved on basically all arti communities by simply putting in a post limit per day. Say an artist can only upload 5 images per day or something, why would someone need to upload more than that?
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    > Say an artist can only upload 5 images per day or something, why would someone need to upload more than that? There's been more than a few days when I've uploaded more than 5 images a day to flickr/Instagram (according to my backup, I uploaded 27 images to Instagram on 2007-02-04 during a day-long walk.)
  - asddubs 4y ago
    because they're migrating there from another platform
  - pavel_lishin 4y ago
    But now everyone's an artist.
    - classified 4y ago
      So what? Are you the appointed gatekeeper on who's an artist? If you are then you won't be out of work any time soon.
greenhearth 4y ago
I've used AI to create stuff like music album covers and posters. It's cool and fun to mess around with, but I think it still takes a real person with an aesthetically trained eye to be fully effective. It does basically what I would do anyway, which would be to composite different images in Photoshop and then apply effects, etc. But you still need to edit for composition and text, and most of the time the images have to be fine tuned, or not at all what I wanted. I can easily see AI taking over most image compositing.
abeppu 4y ago
I think we should also be aware of the technological reasons for separating AI-produced and human-produced images: New effects/risks can occur when the ML system is naively trained against its own outputs. It's not hard to imagine multiple companies trying to periodically scrape and build new image datasets and retrain the newest models against the updated dataset. But if stablediffusion vN is mostly trained against stablediffusion v(N-1) images, then it's possible for the sequence to not actually improve even though more data and computation are being thrown at it.
Axauv 4y ago
When digital effects and CGI began to replace stop-motion monster effects in movies, the stop motion artists screamed that art made on a computer was not art, and that their industry would be lost. Nowadays we know better, not only is digital art accepted everywhere on earth, it's almost expected, and as for the stop-motion folks, they're still in business! Movies still come out every year, some of them with huge budgets (like Coraline) that use stop-motion because it has a certain look and feel that is all its own. AI art will only get better, but so will the ways we use it, and the people who are actually ARTISTS will be the furthest ahead, and leading the way.
- shagie 4y ago
  Jurassic Park was right at the tipping between stop motion and CGI. Corridor Crew with John Berton Jr. ( https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0078237/ https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0078237/ ) https://youtu.be/j8JgN_srwCc?t=921 https://youtu.be/j8JgN_srwCc?t=921 discuss the change and how Phil Tippett ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Tippett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Tippett ) who was the "master of dinosaur animation" changed the industry... And the first thing that they did was hire him as the animation director and other stop motion artists. This wasn't a "they were out a job" - it was a they changed how they did what they did.
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mabbo 4y ago
That should certainly help maintain a 'pure' source for further training examples.
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mring33621 4y ago
I think the AI generated art, even at this early stage, is pretty good and have no problem with people submitting it to contests and/or selling it. Also, as a sometime painter, I would view AI generated art as a great and fun source of inspiration. I'd pick some generated pieces that I like, combine parts from this and that and make it my own. This stuff may open more doors than it closes, IMHO.
dqpb 4y ago
> AI-generated art was not allowed because it “lacked artistic merit.” As a consumer, what I want is the art, not the merit. Over the last few weeks, I've been able to get images that I simply would have never gotten without Dall-e. Maybe it doesn't provide "merit", but it certainly provides a ton of value that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise.
leobg 4y ago
What are they using to tell AI generated art apart from human generated? AI? :P
parrellel 4y ago
How do you deal with the chatbot problem in visual media. It's still Eliza, but without the obviousness of text, how can you tell its just Eliza? I wonder if their will be a similar evolution in art circles as in chat. What questions and answers about the composition will out the AI generated pieces as mechanical in nature, or if our ability to parse images is different enough from our ability to comprehend speech and text, that it will legitimately be impossible to suss out. The big problem right now is just sheer volume. Just piles of auto-generated crap burying months of work. That definitely needs to stop, rate limiting or banning seems an appropriate way to deal with the misbehavior.
dmje 4y ago
I'm fascinated by this. So "AI" art isn't ok. But presumably Photoshop as a tool to create artworks is ok? What about some of the filters and plugins available? What about if you use AI as a tool to prepare art that you then make yourself? I was looking at SD and thinking this - I make linocuts and have been experimenting with using it to create layer ideas that I then cut by hand. Is this ok? What about using AI purely as a prompt? I tried just "linocut in 3 colours of a seascape" and got a whole nice bunch of starting ideas. Is this ok? Seems to be that there's a huge amount of nuance here that's pretty fascinating to watch / talk about.
2Slow 4y ago
Theres no skill in AI art involved and i think skill is part of art being art so.. Art is one of those raw human things
swayvil 4y ago
You can say that AI art is bad. But you can also say that normal people have bad taste. So the two meet in the middle and the normal art-consumer is satisfied with his junk. It's like fast food and normal people. Everybody knows it's crap but they eat the stuff by the megaton. The argument againt AI art is an argument against popular markets, basically.
drueter 4y ago
It's important to keep in mind that these art communities represent one very narrow kind of art, one that is more focused on illustration and graphical style, and most often not the kind of art that major art institutions work with. In the past 5 years, AI-generated art has been accepted and incorporated in the contemporary art world, with major works produced by luminaries such as Pierre Huyghe (of Ideal), Trevor Paglen (Bloom), and Hito Steyerl (Power Plants). For these artists, the graphical potency of the generated images is usually only one factor of the work, which also centers on how the artists use the technology, its origins, history, and broader uses, and what it might imply. For this kind of artwork, the kind made by artists who feel threatened by AI, I’ve been thinking for a while that a computer could likely do it better. Intricate detail, repetition, sampling and recombination of popular styles, optimization for aesthetic popularity and mass appeal — these practices are all squarely in the domain of automation, data science, and marketing. We might call it the Netflix-ification of illustration art, but it’s quite different, because the tools for making are available to many. As an arts educator and artist, I welcome these new tools, as they allow easy experimentation for newcomers, but also as they reveal that art based primarily in deployment of technical skill and eye-popping graphics is missing something vital.
asah 4y ago
Just wait until the NFT sells for more!
jmbull 4y ago
This topic always reminds me of a great poem[1] by Rudyard Kipling, The Conundrum in the Workshops. Enjoy! <snip> When the flush of a newborn sun fell first on Eden's green and gold, Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mold; And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves: "It's pretty, but is it Art?" </snip> [1] https://poets.org/poem/conundrum-workshops https://poets.org/poem/conundrum-workshops
jorl17 4y ago
I don't oppose AI-generated images in the slightest. I love them and I genuinely think they will be a very important part of our future. Effectively, it will take more effort to make a living as an artist, especially a mediocre one, because AI is now a decent mediocre artist. It's a stupendous artist for some prompts, too. However, I can understand that if I can just spit out image after image, there must be a way to "limit" my submission of these images. In that sense, I "get" banning AI-generated images, as a way to stop spam.
- bgro 4y ago
  I'm in some Discord chats for various things, and they often have a channel where people can post their artwork. Often, people spend weeks or months on a piece of fan art that's related to the Discord topic, or they draw a picture of the "leaders" for fun. Lately it's been just getting drowned out by people posting ridiculous AI art where they try to get absurd results. It was interesting and fun at first, but after seeing probably as low as 20 of these images I can tell they're all a similar sort of thing. I feel bad for people posting their art getting drowned out by this, and these aren't even remotely art related groups.
- odessacubbage 4y ago
  the vast majority of participants in any given field are, by definition, mediocre.
RoyBatty89 4y ago
Like this isn't gonna cause a backlash against the half assed "Artists" that modern art is. If AI can do everything better than humans, these luddites either can evolve or face the same fate the horses and loomers did when the industrial revolution came.
- GrazeMor 4y ago
  Wouldn't it have been good for the horses?
smrtinsert 4y ago
That's shortsighted. I'm sure they'll come around. There's already been some great demonstrations of artists using ai to enhance their visions instead of being just a simple output.
smm11 4y ago
I recall some time back the "photo of the year" with some esteemed organization looked like something you'd take at random. Just a few people doing various things. A snapshot, the sort you'd take back during the film era when you'd load film then click the shutter in case the first photo had a light leak. A throwaway photo. And it won.
andrewdubinsky 4y ago
This is exactly the sort of behavior the robots will point to when they rise up.
sn0w_monkie 4y ago
I'm not surprised more and more art communities are banning AI images, 99% of them are dull and ugly. Definitely not something I would print out and hang on my wall. I tried playing around with these models, but I was too bored to bother futzing around with prompts to try and make something I liked. But I have seen some cool things made using these models by creators who put more effort in than just writing a prompt to get back an image. I can definitely see how these tools can enhance human creativity but like most art the results are just bad. At least with some human art even if it's not aesthetically pleasing you can appreciate the thinking or time and effort put into producing a piece of work. When you go to an art museum you can learn about history, politics, culture etc even if you don't appreciate how something might look. Most AI art, however, is useless and ugly.
- cma 4y ago
  > I would print out and hang on my wall Printing things was at one point thought to devalue art and remove artist jobs.
enviclash 4y ago
Very interesting diffusion of a social norm, and probably easy to track?
t0bia_s 4y ago
I hope those "mouse wars" improve emptiness in digital art. Sure, AI can generate beautiful images. But art is beyond this. What the heck is furry art anyway?
_greim_ 4y ago
AI art is striking at first glance, but devoid of meaning once you really try to engage with it. It's the meaning people want, but an image's visual impact has been a reasonably cheap heuristic for finding it. The viability of this heuristic is now dead or rapidly dying, and AI generated art is degenerating into yet another form of spam. Relatedly, feeds full of visually-striking images, once impressive, are taking on a "spammy" tinge. New, harder-to-fake signals will be found, and social media will reorganize around whatever those end up being.
- betwixthewires 4y ago
  I'm personally very happy about it. To me, art is just pleasant, it's a matter of degree. Meaning is nice and all, but not necessary. And with this new way of generating art, people can have beautiful art, cheaply and as much as they want. No more cheap Target art everywhere. It's the replicator of art, nice, beautiful art is now post scarcity and I love it.
- Double_a_92 4y ago
  How does manual labour add meaning to a mentally creative process? It's not like the AI spits out random images, you have to very specifically tell it what you want in there. What's the difference between "telling" your hands vs. telling the AI?
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mikotodomo 4y ago
Sounds like they are just admitting AI generated art is legit.
mattkevan 4y ago
These tools are only weeks or months old. At the moment they’re a novelty. ‘A picture of a dog riding a skateboard by James Gurney | Trending on Artstation’ is clever and astonishing, yes, but we’ve nowhere near scraped the surface of what they can do or how they can be used as part of the creative process. It’s going to take time and a good few rounds of development and pushback, but eventually we’ll wonder how anyone did anything without it. Current trends in AI art are pretty boring, but once we properly get the hang of it it’s going to be fascinating. Reminds me a lot of the early days of Photoshop - adding a filter was cool and novel so most people added a filter and called it a day. But over time people have figured out how to do all kinds of creative things with it. As an artist, AI tools are like having a paintbrush that’s possessed by a drunk genie and that’s very exciting.
- mkaic 4y ago
  This 1000%. I'm currently working on my own slightly more complex/customizable interface for Stable Diffusion because I firmly believe that the value lies not in simple prepackaged text-to-image, but in the wealth of information, structure, and hierarchy that is compressed into its 4GB latent space. SD encodes only 4GB of information, but that information is so highly structured and compressed that it represents a sizable chunk of all images on the internet. The true value Stable Diffusion brings to the table is the sheer level of semantic meaning encoded into the vector spaces it samples from to generate images. The fact that it's open-source means anyone can write meta-algorithms to walk through and explore that latent space, too, and as Stability and other companies start releasing better and better models, the latent spaces of those models will become less and less entangled and more and more meaningful and—— We're on an exponential curve and it's so exciting.
- Bakary 4y ago
  Using any Photoshop tool still requires some work. AI is an order of magnitude more multifaceted and autonomous. What happens when we realize that AI art generators consistently and instantly bring forth better contributions than what we can make ourselves over a much larger period of time? The artist will look at their paintbrush and wonder what the point of holding it is when the drunk genie is doing much better on their own. There will still be artists, but there will be space only for the most exceptional of them. Art software is similar to cruise control. AI art will in a few years become the equivalent of a fully perfected autonomous car that is safer than a human driver in all but the most contrived scenarios.
synicalx 4y ago
How will they know what is and isn't AI-generated? And when they cause a false-positive how are the "real" artists able to verify that their art is legit?
vitiral 4y ago
> Lexica, a search engine that solely indexed images from Stable Diffusion’s beta tests in Discord, has over 10 million images in it. It would take a lifetime to explore everything in it, a corpus made by a relatively small group of beta testers in a few weeks. There are many interesting points, but this is a key one I think. The sheer volume is astounding, like the media flooding of the last decade taken up exponentially.
pipeline_peak 4y ago
They’ll ban it long enough until it’s no longer possible to tell its AI generated.
GrazeMor 4y ago
I think the divide is that artists have worked at developing a skill to express themselves (art) while AI artists think they have achieved the same thing by turning a prompt into an image. The former is an act of expression, the latter is choosing something you like out of a magazine. Very different and one is art and the other is not. If you really want to say AI is art, maybe, but the person prompting it is definitely not the artist...maybe the curator.
- cthalupa 4y ago
  A hyper opinionated curator that is commissioning work based on very specific criteria, maybe. I don't think that artist is the right word, but gallery owner or curator aren't quite right either. People are pumping out mountainloads of hot garbage with these things, but others are taking time to think about things like image composition, color and light rendering, etc. that are considered artistic skills. And that's not getting into the people that were already artists and have just added this to part of their workflow. I do think overall the needle is closer to the curator side of the spectrum, but it's not all the way there, and I don't think it's fair to say that there is no expression in the process, at least for some.
analog31 4y ago
I'm fascinated by the idea that AI-generated images will eventually be the primary data source for training the algorithms themselves. Kind of like a giant positive feedback loop. Eventually the "art" might not be about generating a single image from a prompt phrase, but influencing art through the generation of the most successful algorithms.
bergenty 4y ago
How can you even tell? Any human can just claim they made it.
_carbyau_ 4y ago
With a flood of AI generated art on the internet... what will the next generation of AI be trained on?

303 points by hardmaru 4y ago

DefineOutside 4y ago

They should also ban creating digital art, as digital art takes less effort than paper.

matkoniecz 4y ago
And art using paper rather than doing proper stone carvings.
- KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
  All those are segregated...
shishy 4y ago
I don't think that's really fair... I can see the argument for removing AI generated stuff in part because it doesn't require technical artistic skill (whereas digital art still does, in your ability to observe, draw with perspective, etc.)
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  But that can easily lead to a slippery slope since it requires more technical skill to make physical art than digital (for one, you can't "undo" anything in physical world.) Where do we draw the line? Secondly, it will just become more and more subtle as art softwares will subtly repackage such AI tools into their art software packaging. I am willing to bet anything Adobe is already employed an army already to figure out how to do so. How would you tackle that?
- tiborsaas 4y ago
  So if I skillfully combine multiple AI generated images it's stops being art? What's the difference between someone only using that vs. someone taking parts form random images found in Google image search? The latter very common among digital artists.
nottorp 4y ago
> as digital art takes less effort than paper. Hmm I've seen someone draw/paint on both paper and an iPad. It didn't look to me that she was much faster on digital. But then it was original art not copies of something.
- DefineOutside 4y ago
  probably should have said photographs, as photographs are more similar to AI art than computer generated art is
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    Photographs are a great analogy. If you work to learn about how to take a good photo, and learn all the techniques around framing a shot and how different shutter speeds affect things you can take beautiful pictures. However, if you tried to submit that picture to someone as a painting, they will cry foul. Also most people don't consider your candids on vacation to be in the same "category" as a carefully crafted (or not!!!) photograph of a landscape. In much the same way, sure you could dedicate your life to learning the craft of prompting an ML model to produce unique, novel, and interesting art, but these communities are saying "we want these to be considered a different class of art" and as mostly self organizing communities they are well within their rights to do so.
- cthalupa 4y ago
  To be clear: I fully think that digital art is art. But it is a lot less effort in a lot of ways. If I'm painting in Photoshop or Krita, I have layers. I can adjust blending modes. I can move them up and down. I can easily ctrl+z a mistake. I can rotate my workspace quickly and easily in ways that would be difficult with physical media. I can easily find the color I want without having to purchase more paints and blend them, or colored pencils, or whatever. I can create brushes and variations on them to match my style. I can go on with dozens of other things. I happen to think all of that is a good thing, and don't know that comparing digital art to AI generated art is a good analogy, but digital art 100% makes many things you do in art easier.
nurbl 4y ago
If you are a "digital art" community, clearly you have already accepted some digital tools. I do think it makes logical sense to try and ban "AI" art if it is not what the community is interested in. It's likely not just about pretty images. They might value the mental process, the individual's style, progression, techniques, and yes, the effort. Someone coming in with generated images expecting to be treated the same is to me a bit like commissioning art from someone else, and then presenting that as your own. The images might be great, but it's not in the spirit of the community. There must be tons of "AI" focused communities for that. I suppose they will eventually fail at resisting this, but that's another matter.

gdubs 4y ago

I have a degree in Studio Arts in addition to being a software developer (and recently I've started making a lot of creative work with AI). Back when I was in school, there was already plenty of debate about 'what is "Art"'? It's always been hotly contested. Most of my teachers felt that 'technique' was not Art. Others were more purists – life painters, etc – and felt that, no, technique is art. Duchamp poked the art establishment in the eye with his 'readymades' (urinals on the gallery wall, etc.) Warhol with his 'factory' making silkscreens. The 'reverse Monet' (too lazy to link) that caused such an uproar when it was shared last week was ironic – apparently people aren't aware that the impressionists themselves were considered 'not artists' by a lot of people at the time. The camera and photography made many painters sit up and say, 'hey, it can't just be about "image" anymore' – enter abstract expressionism, fauvism, cubism, etc. Work that shifted the focus from the image represented in the painting ('a window into a world') onto the surface of the canvas itself: Rothko, Albers, etc. The thing is, people have wild misconceptions about what this technology does. Many clearly think it's a photocopier. As if StableDiffusion is hiding copies of all these works inside. When in fact what's been done is to take all of this online knowledge and create an incredible new tool with it. Like a music synthesizer times a million. It's understandable why this technology makes people uncomfortable. There are legit fears about displacement, economic uncertainty, etc. But we are fundamentally tool makers – it's arguably intrinsically part of what makes us human (borrowing from Carl Sagan's "Dragons of Eden"). If I were back in the art department last century, I'm pretty sure we'd be really excitedly discussing how these new tools will enable entirely new forms of expression. And sure, there'd be the old guard saying it was awful, and 'not Art'. This is a really interesting debate – I just wish it scratched deeper than the surface more often than it does, with a bit more historical context.

zasdffaa 4y ago
This is the kind of comment about art that is measured, constructive, non-absolutist, and too rare on HN in posts about art (and urban dictionary has an entry for 'reverse monet' cos I wondered, but I'd skip that one if I were you).
- gdubs 4y ago

causi 4y ago

I don't understand the difference between telling photoshop to sharpen an image or remove red-eye and using AI to generate based on a prompt. Both of them are software modifying your canvas.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

> Left unchecked, it’s not hard to imagine AI art crowding out illustrations that took days or weeks for someone to make. This reminds me of what someone from the 1800's would say: "If left unchecked, it is not hard to imagine photography crowding out paintings that took days or weeks for someone to make." Or several thousand years ago when the pottery wheel was invented. Or when humans learned to cast metals instead of having to chisel stone. Art is the expression of human creativity. Art transcends the medium. In addition, making art more accessible to more people is a good thing. There are probably a lot of people who did not consider themselves artists, but with creative use of prompts and img-to-img can actually create stunning works. That is a good thing, not a bad thing.

diydsp 4y ago
> "If left unchecked, it is not hard to imagine photography crowding out paintings that took days or weeks for someone to make." Today photography and illustration are segregated. Which is what these artist communities are establishing.
SicSemperUranus 4y ago
It depends what the point is. You wouldn't let a motorcycle participate in a horse race. I think there's a place for AI art and it's fine if "manual art" remains the same. The difference can be arbitrary at times, but art often is.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
This reminds me of what someone from the 8 years from now will say if this is left unchecked I also will be out of a job like those useless artists all were.
- Natsu 4y ago
  I don't think artists will be out of demand any more than fast food has made people stop eating out. I do think it will cannibalize the lower end of art such that it becomes like working at a fast food joint, though.
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Janicc 4y ago

It's going to be interesting to see how this is going to get enforced in the likely future in which AI art becomes in every way indistinguishable from human art.

Jevon23 4y ago
They can just focus on obvious cases: people that upload new images at an astounding rate, people who forget to remove the AI watermarks, and people who simply admit to using AI. No need to turn it into a witch hunt where you accuse everyone of using AI.
- horsawlarway 4y ago
  It will 100% turn into a constant witch hunt - I can absolutely promise it. Want an easy reference? See First Person Shooter games. Turns out that once the computer can mostly do the job, you will see: 1. Constant use of the computer for that job 2. Constant accusations of using the computer in places that restrict it. See basically every online FPS community that exists. And that's with incredibly invasive software running on player machines explicitly to stop them from using the computer to play - and People both still do it (in HUGE numbers), and the communities constantly bitch about the "rampant cheating".
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  - scarmig 4y ago
    One way to take down someone you don't like will be to accuse them of using AI. It's an accusation that's impossible to defend against; you could require people to provide a video showing them creating the art, but that adds enough friction to be the death of a community and down the line will itself be something that could be generated.
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gonzo41 4y ago

Art takes effort. Training models and feeding them information takes effort. AI is not magic. Art is just getting another toolset.

YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
Building a motorbike from scratch by hand also takes effort, but we've universally agreed that that doesn't let you enter it into the Tour de France.
- xani_ 4y ago
  Sure you can, you will just have to push it
gspr 4y ago
How much effort? Do you discount for example accidental works of art?
biftek 4y ago
Typing a prompt into DALLE does not take effort and it does not make you an artist. Don't kid yourself that the people generating art and submitting it to these sites are the same ones writing and training the AI.
- filoleg 4y ago
  "Pressing a shutter button on your camera and tweaking a few parameters in settings does not take effort and it does not make one an artist." I think we have established by now that photography is art, so your argument doesn't feel like it would stand the test of time much. Just like the photography one didn't.
  - biftek 4y ago
    I think you're just proving my point actually, being able to take photos doesn't make everyone an artist or every photo art. To take truly great photos you still need to understand basics like composition and lighting (just like illustration and painting) which do take effort, and your still not guaranteed to get good photos. A camera, like AI, is simply a tool and it's no doubt already helping artists, but to think typing a prompt into a website somehow makes you an artist on its own is foolish.

latchkey 4y ago

Perfect. A huge niche opportunity to focus on an art community dedicated to AI generated images.

KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
There's one linked in the article, https://lexica.art/ https://lexica.art/
throw_m239339 4y ago
> A huge niche opportunity kind of an oxymoron. Why bother having an "art community" when one can just generate all the art at random themselves? That's the whole point of DALL-E and co, an endless stream of generated images... no need for a community for that.
- latchkey 4y ago
  I think that is like saying digital cameras will never replace film. Art is art.
  - throw_m239339 4y ago
    Art is in the eye of the beholder. No need for a community to generate every possible art with a AI. Only some cloud storage.
- Double_a_92 4y ago
  It still takes some skill, patience and luck to get a pleasing result. If you try out DALL-E literally 99% of the images you get from naïvely trying some promts will be complete shite.
  - throw_m239339 4y ago
    > It still takes some skill, patience and luck to get a pleasing result. No it doesn't take any form of skills to get 100 drawings from a simple prompt. This is the whole point of AI "art" generation.

Kiro 4y ago

Challenge accepted. How will they know?

Jevon23 4y ago
With the models that are available for public use today, there are still usually signs, particularly when it comes to drawings of humans.
- Kiro 4y ago
  Sounds like a good opportunity for an "AI image detection"-as-a-Service.
  - TheMaskedCoder 4y ago
    Is it possible to automate detection of automation? If you can create an algorithm that detects the difference between AI art and human art, wouldn't that algorithm itself be able to create a new AI art algorithm that it itself could not detect?
    - alcover 4y ago
      Nice point. I think it's called 'adversarial training'. The Alphazero chess engine/model was grown this way it seems.
coldcode 4y ago
My normal artwork (digital) is 9000x9000 pixels up to about 14400x14400. Good luck getting any of them to make something bigger than 1024x1024. Sure, you can use Gigapixel to upres things, but in the end it's basically impossible to make a decent artwork using ML at the moment. I only use Dall-E for offbeat ideas for geometric abstractions, so far Stable Diffusion sucks for that purpose. Of course when you upload at no one wants you to do the full resolution image; at 1024x1024 you might be able to fool people with something ML made. I believe most of these models only use 1k images so they really can't make anything bigger yet. Maybe someday but not today.

ryeguy_24 4y ago

They should also ban people that have seen more art than others as they may be inadvertently creating derivative artwork from their more thoroughly trained real neural network in their brain. Purposely being facetious, but seriously, we will likely see more and more of these type of rules being applied to competitions or groups. It will be harder and harder to define the rules. At some point, it becomes moot. Did I draw it? Did my toddler? Was I on hallucinogens when I drew it? Did I use computer algorithms (filters) on any form of the digital art? If the intent is to preserve the "effort" that goes into art, fine, but that will be a really gray line. I guess it's all fine to have the rules, it's similar to the natural body building competition.

jxy 4y ago
How can they draw the line between AI and non-AI assisted art? What about a gaussian kernel filter? How about adding a saturation enhancer? How about putting a few of those together and let's play with the parameters a bit for fun?
advisedwang 4y ago
Newgrounds: "not have the Art Portal flooded with computer-generated art" DeviantArt: "complaining that their feeds are getting flooded" Artstation: "the front pages are flooded with unmodified AI generated slop" They're really worried about the volume that AI art scales. So they don't really have to chase down every image and decide if it's AI or not. They just need to stop users from throwing huge amounts of them, which is easy to detect.
- nonbirithm 4y ago
  I contrast these reasons with the FurAffinity announcement from a week ago[0]: > AI art is a damn good learning tool, but it's taking everything it does from artists. It leeches on the time, effort, skill, energy an artist put into their work. > You can use tools like this to learn and try to come up with concepts to learn from. I have nothing wrong with that, but just adding it to an image gallery. The origin are questionable unlike, say, using a site specifically for royalty free images. > I stand with artists, not prompts. [0] https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/status/1566900442650628096 https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/status/1566900442650628096

imranq 4y ago

I agree that images only through AI should be removed from art sites. The issue with AI art is that the only human contribution in those pieces is the creation of the prompt and the curation of the final image. Without sensory and experiential inputs of its own, AI can only interpolate between real images and styles. So an AI generated image doesn't add much artistic value since its not expressing any new deep truth or factual understanding of the real world. Well isn't all art just a derivative of another piece? The issue with that statement is that art is fundamentally a communication from a human artist to a human viewer. At the level of AI prompt creation and curation, you act more like an art gallery owner rather than an artist, which doesn't communicate artistic values in the same way as does an original piece derived from the experiences, history, and skill of a human artist. Dall-E 2, Stable Diffusion, should be used for inspiration and helping with minor elements of a piece, but someone passing off an AI generated image as part of their portfolio is disingenuous at best

Kiro 4y ago
And how do you define artistic value? If you don't even know if an image is generated by an AI or not, what is lost?
- zasdffaa 4y ago
  People who are precious about art will keep defining it away from anything that upsets them.
- adrian_b 4y ago
  If you just want a beautiful or intriguing image to look at, an AI-generated image may happen to satisfy that need very well. The same need can be satisfied with a photo of some natural things, e.g. living beings or minerals or places. In both cases there is no human to whom one could attribute any artistic merit for the content of the images. Whether an image is beautiful or not is not necessarily correlated with the involvement of a human in its creation, but its origin should nevertheless always be made clear.
  - 4y ago

Nursie 4y ago

I make all sorts of interesting stuff with DALL-E I wouldn't have the temerity to claim it was art, or wholly my creation, though.

wccrawford 4y ago
A lot of people do, though. And even with more traditional art, a lot of people trace something and claim they made it themselves. However, I do think it's art. Coming up with an idea and then a prompt to express that idea, and then curating the results... That's artistry. It's not traditional, of course. And with img2img and in-painting, there's a lot more to creating a really good work than just a prompt and curation. I have no problem calling this art. I'm still struggling with the ethics, though. I'm not sure how I really feel about it yet.

hericium 4y ago

The problem I see here is that ML-generated art may be based on real art. While human painter may repeat style of fragments of work of other artist as homage, computer software does it more as plagiarism. This isn't much different than issues surrounding Microsoft GitHub Copilot.

Kiro 4y ago
And neither would constitute as plagiarism by the legal definition of it. Yes, it's a problem that they are trained on material without consent but what they produce is something totally new and not even close to plagiarism.
- nottorp 4y ago
  > what they produce is something totally new It is? I may be cursed with a good memory but absolutely no "AI art" that my friends passed on to me looked original. In some cases it was painfully obvious what it's based on, in other cases it just felt like i've seen it before. Legal it may be (although there will be conflicts about machine generated derivative works) but it's also boring. People are just enthusiastic because it's "do it with a computer". If a young human artist came up with this stuff you'd tell them they're good technically but now they need to develop their own personality.
  - ShamelessC 4y ago
    It is more than capable of producing stuff that isn’t even in its dataset as the original DALLE paper shows. Inference takes 4 seconds on an A100, I’d say that makes it useful for a wide range of applications that weren’t even possible before. I do agree that the outputs will lack a sense of communication with the viewer that art has.
  - Ukv 4y ago
    > In some cases it was painfully obvious what it's based on Do you have an example of this? Ideally with a link (for DALL-E 2/Midjourney) or prompt and seed (for Stable Diffusion) to show that it was generated from an incidental prompt - as opposed to uploading the existing image and just using the AI for inpainting/fine-tuning.

ElCheapo 4y ago

It should simply be a new "hey guys, look at this cool prompt I came up with" category. Using AI for easy upvotes, unwarranted clout or spam should be banned.

matkoniecz 4y ago

> generator was uploading one image every 40 seconds before it was banned > not have the Art Portal flooded with computer-generated art That was the real problem.

throw101010 4y ago
Then why do they pretend to ban a specific art type? I could have generated variations of a human created digital piece in less time than these AI (currently) since the creation of this platform but they didn't seem to feel threatened by this up until now... so there is clearly an other problem.
- matkoniecz 4y ago
  > I could have generated variations of a human created digital piece in less time than these AI Seems dubious that you could achieve over 2000 upload each day, without stopping.
  - batperson 4y ago
    I generated over 30k, maybe 40k images since stable diffusion 1.4 model went public 2 weeks ago. Most of it is just endless exploring and generating a lot of nonsense but I got some prompts that generate consistently good results. 2000 decent quality images per day would be quite easy, even with my humble rtx 2070s GPU.
    - matkoniecz 4y ago
      I was responding to claim that bot uploads of autogenerated work is not a problem, as humans can generate work at the same rate.
  - throw101010 4y ago
    The point I was making is that prior to AI generated pieces, a human could create one piece and then apply random filters to it and also upload thousands of small variations every day. People didn't do it because it is not very interesting. The broader point is that these AI pieces can be interesting, and such a ban is not just because of bandwidth/storage limitations.

firasd 4y ago

I think the communities involved here like digital artists, furries etc got a lot of attention hating on NFTs last year, so they are doubling down with the anti-art-generator movement. But I don't think this one will be so successful. Like sure, maybe art community sites could require you to tag prompt-generated art just as a way to label things, but in terms of widespread usage the cat is out of the bag. Whenever I get on Twitter and see someone incoherently angry about people using Stable Diffusion I'm reminded of that quote from an Android in Blade Runner 2049: “You tiny thing. In the face of the fabulous new, your only thought is to kill it? For fear of great change? You can’t hold the tide with a broom.”

eat_veggies 4y ago
Sure, AI generated art is probably out of the bag, but to lump it in with NFTs and such is an interesting rhetorical move, since the only thing that really links them is their new-ness. That Blade Runner quote can be used to shut down any critique of an emerging technology precisely because it fetishizes new-ness for its own sake, and assigns it an agency of its own, inevitable like the tide. It becomes a cause that generates effects in our lives, and the only question is how we react. This robs us of our own agency as social/political/historical actors who can kill/change/improve/use/abuse technologies and decide how to incorporate them in our lives. People invoked the same language about things like television, and I find Raymond Williams's critique helpful: > If the effect of the medium is the same, whoever controls or uses it, and whatever apparent content he may try to insert, then we can forget ordinary political and cultural argument and let the technology run itself. It is hardly surprising that this conclusion has been welcomed by the 'media-men' of the existing institutions. It gives the gloss of avant-garde theory to the crudest versions of their existing interests and practices, and assigns all their critics to pre-electronic irrelevance (1974, 128)
- firasd 4y ago
  Well in this case the link between NFTs and AI art wasn't made by me, I'm just observing the overlap between the same online influencers/groups doing the same type of activism against two different phenomena. Sure I think there's always a conversation to be had about how to incorporate tech. Like Reddit banning celeb deepfakes is probably the choice I would have made as well if I set policy on the site. But what I'm noticing is over the top anger at usage per se. (Someone linked the 'reverse monet' tweet elsewhere in this discussion and the quote tweets there are unhinged.) That's what I'm saying can not be 'killed'--these breakthroughs in large language models

falcolas 4y ago

Individual art communities should be allowed to decide to only accept art created by a particular set of tools. Oil. Acrylic. Mixed Media. Watercolor. Chalk. Pencil. Digital. Photoshop. AI. And so forth. It's a matter of curation in my mind, not discrimination, and not really outrage worthy.

AlecSchueler 4y ago
I didn't take the idea that this was shared as an outrage piece as much as a point of interest; it's a key point along this journey and worth noting with or without judgement.

polygamous_bat 4y ago

This will become even more interesting as digital art softwares start including "AI brushes" and such that include subtle tweaks to the established process. AI generated art made in 40 seconds could be banned, but what would happen to the AI assisted works, churned out by an artist in 10 minutes instead of 10 hours?

scarmig 4y ago

Perhaps possible to enforce now, but they're fighting a losing battle. AI art will ultimately be indistinguishable from human art except by being consistently better; they're relying on the good faith of contributors. And anything that relies on the good faith of 100% of humans is something doomed to failure.

oulipo 4y ago

It's interesting to think about it, what differentiate art from a human or a machine. It can't be the content itself, because now machine output is close to a human output (modulo the small details). So what make those communities attracted to art made by humans, rather than art made by machines? It must be the "act of community" itself, which cannot be made by a machine (it is useless to be "in community" with a conscious-less machine). So this would mean that the "art content" for humans is not only the pictorial content of the image, but also the "transmission of a message", and in particular, the quality of the initiator and the receiver of the message. In this case, humans would (and apparently seem to) differentiate in quality art that has been created by a conscious being and for a conscious being, to art that has been created by a machine.

7952 4y ago
People consume art for different reasons. It can be like a spiritual experience, or an investment, or something to brighten up your life. It can have a story attached to it or be inspirational. My guess is that different people will have different reactions to machine made art. And most of the art community will carry on perfectly happily as if nothing has changed.
ilaksh 4y ago
Has nothing to do with that. It's two things. Artists are threatened, and also right now a lot that is being submitted is low quality. So if you are an artist you don't like seeing a bunch of AI junk on your home page just because a lot is junk but also, because one can assume that it will continue to improve so that that most of it really is competing with artists. So that could put a lot of people out of work since it would make art-related business models much more competitive.
pcthrowaway 4y ago
> So this would mean that the "art content" for humans is not only the pictorial content of the image, but also the "transmission of a message", and in particular, the quality of the initiator and the receiver of the message Sounds like you've taken a semiotics class. If art is about transmission of a message, wouldn't the message be the prompt supplied to the AI by the human? In that case, perhaps the art is only as profound as the prompt?

helloworld11 4y ago

For artists who continue to paint, or use other physical means of expression through base materials and sell them as physical works, this entire AI art surge remains largely irrelevant in a practical sense. A buyer or patron who wants real, physical art will still need and want real, physical art, and I don't see an AI imitating much of that easily any time soon. The people or organizations to which AI-churned art appeals to most desire commercial visual churn. They are the same people who would in any case have least cared about art in its more creative, communicative forms. And there's nothing creative or imaginative about the results of machine-generated visuals. They're the very opposite in fact, visuals created literally mindlessly. If anything, I can see AI art giving a new breath of life and interest to real man-made art, much like industrial food production gave organic "local-grown" food producers a chance to brand themselves with a distinct, desirable identity.

pavel_lishin 4y ago
I don't know if I agree. One of the big sources of income for online artists is commissions of D&D characters and such; AI-generated art is now getting good enough that people can get a "good-enough" version of what they want for free, instead of paying an artist $50 or $100 for a piece of art. I've commissioned art for my D&D character before, and I'll almost certainly do so again - but if I'm playing a one-shot online and want a quick image to share with the group, AI-generated art is a fast and free way of getting that!
- bheadmaster 4y ago
  People have been losing their jobs because of technology ever since the industrial revolution, each one of them enraged about it, and rightfully so. Society doesn't care about people who've put their whole lives into a skill that suddenly became worthless (or much less valuable then it was). The solution is not to ban technology (you can't really ban technology, as it's not under total government control) - the solution is to enable anyone to pursue new skills without fear of homelessness and starvation. I.e. Universal Basic Income.
  - 4y ago

jedberg 4y ago

It seems like the actual problem they're trying to solve is volume, so why not just rate limit submissions? They just need to look at their median submission rate prior to a few weeks ago and then make that the submission rate limit.

egypturnash 4y ago
The problem being solved by these decisions is that AI art is a visible threat to the livelihoods of the people the site is designed to support and uplift. Art sites have already had rate limits for years. These communities are explicitly saying "no" to this disruptive technology. If you want to go make a new gallery site for showing off your prompt engineering that's your own lookout, have fun trying to build a community and figure out how to keep the site funded. But you can't come spam our existing communities of people who've dedicated decades to their craft with the messy, incoherent results of the whole six months you've spent learning to be a "prompt engineer".
- jedberg 4y ago
  > The problem being solved by these decisions is that AI art is a visible threat to the livelihoods of the people the site is designed to support and uplift. That's not a solvable problem. Art will be made by computers, it's inevitable. Eventually it will get good enough to be indistinguishable from human made art. It's already good enough that a human can use the AI to get 90% of the way there and then finish it themselves. > Art sites have already had rate limits for years. Clearly not good enough if every one of them is saying some variation on "our site is getting flooded with AI art" > These communities are explicitly saying "no" to this disruptive technology. If you want to go make a new gallery site for showing off your prompt engineering that's your own lookout, have fun trying to build a community and figure out how to keep the site funded. But you can't come spam our existing communities of people who've dedicated decades to their craft with the messy, incoherent results of the whole six months you've spent learning to be a "prompt engineer". I agree, people shouldn't be spamming crap directly from the AI. But good luck keeping out the people who tweak the AI generated art to make it look pretty good. A smart site would embrace this kind of art, perhaps make a new category for it. But trying to ban it from the community is a lost cause.

hackernewds 4y ago

"The candle makers protested the distribution of lightbulbs" "The horse stables protested the building of parking lots" "The taxi drivers protested the proliferation of Uber"

antonymy 4y ago

I'm waiting for the first case of a human artist being banned because their style was "too similar" to AI-generated art. I think that'll be the beginning of the end for the communities that do these kinds of bans.

pavel_lishin 4y ago

Aside from the debates about "artistic merit" and the ethics of using AI trained on existing artists' work, one of the key things is that this new technology allows anyone to flood a place with images. There are some scifi-themed subreddits that I visit that allow posting art, and at this point it feels like 50% of all submissions are Midjourney/Dall-E generated art. Fine, it looks ok, but there's such a low barrier to creating and posting these, it's beginning to drown out other valuable content. The article even speaks about this: > In July, one AI furry porn generator was uploading one image every 40 seconds

Axauv 4y ago
This could be solved on basically all arti communities by simply putting in a post limit per day. Say an artist can only upload 5 images per day or something, why would someone need to upload more than that?
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  > Say an artist can only upload 5 images per day or something, why would someone need to upload more than that? There's been more than a few days when I've uploaded more than 5 images a day to flickr/Instagram (according to my backup, I uploaded 27 images to Instagram on 2007-02-04 during a day-long walk.)
- asddubs 4y ago
  because they're migrating there from another platform
- pavel_lishin 4y ago
  But now everyone's an artist.
  - classified 4y ago
    So what? Are you the appointed gatekeeper on who's an artist? If you are then you won't be out of work any time soon.

greenhearth 4y ago

I've used AI to create stuff like music album covers and posters. It's cool and fun to mess around with, but I think it still takes a real person with an aesthetically trained eye to be fully effective. It does basically what I would do anyway, which would be to composite different images in Photoshop and then apply effects, etc. But you still need to edit for composition and text, and most of the time the images have to be fine tuned, or not at all what I wanted. I can easily see AI taking over most image compositing.

abeppu 4y ago

I think we should also be aware of the technological reasons for separating AI-produced and human-produced images: New effects/risks can occur when the ML system is naively trained against its own outputs. It's not hard to imagine multiple companies trying to periodically scrape and build new image datasets and retrain the newest models against the updated dataset. But if stablediffusion vN is mostly trained against stablediffusion v(N-1) images, then it's possible for the sequence to not actually improve even though more data and computation are being thrown at it.

Axauv 4y ago

When digital effects and CGI began to replace stop-motion monster effects in movies, the stop motion artists screamed that art made on a computer was not art, and that their industry would be lost. Nowadays we know better, not only is digital art accepted everywhere on earth, it's almost expected, and as for the stop-motion folks, they're still in business! Movies still come out every year, some of them with huge budgets (like Coraline) that use stop-motion because it has a certain look and feel that is all its own. AI art will only get better, but so will the ways we use it, and the people who are actually ARTISTS will be the furthest ahead, and leading the way.

shagie 4y ago
Jurassic Park was right at the tipping between stop motion and CGI. Corridor Crew with John Berton Jr. ( https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0078237/ https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0078237/ ) https://youtu.be/j8JgN_srwCc?t=921 https://youtu.be/j8JgN_srwCc?t=921 discuss the change and how Phil Tippett ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Tippett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Tippett ) who was the "master of dinosaur animation" changed the industry... And the first thing that they did was hire him as the animation director and other stop motion artists. This wasn't a "they were out a job" - it was a they changed how they did what they did.

deleted 4y ago

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mabbo 4y ago

That should certainly help maintain a 'pure' source for further training examples.

deleted 4y ago

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mring33621 4y ago

I think the AI generated art, even at this early stage, is pretty good and have no problem with people submitting it to contests and/or selling it. Also, as a sometime painter, I would view AI generated art as a great and fun source of inspiration. I'd pick some generated pieces that I like, combine parts from this and that and make it my own. This stuff may open more doors than it closes, IMHO.

dqpb 4y ago

> AI-generated art was not allowed because it “lacked artistic merit.” As a consumer, what I want is the art, not the merit. Over the last few weeks, I've been able to get images that I simply would have never gotten without Dall-e. Maybe it doesn't provide "merit", but it certainly provides a ton of value that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

leobg 4y ago

What are they using to tell AI generated art apart from human generated? AI? :P

parrellel 4y ago

How do you deal with the chatbot problem in visual media. It's still Eliza, but without the obviousness of text, how can you tell its just Eliza? I wonder if their will be a similar evolution in art circles as in chat. What questions and answers about the composition will out the AI generated pieces as mechanical in nature, or if our ability to parse images is different enough from our ability to comprehend speech and text, that it will legitimately be impossible to suss out. The big problem right now is just sheer volume. Just piles of auto-generated crap burying months of work. That definitely needs to stop, rate limiting or banning seems an appropriate way to deal with the misbehavior.

dmje 4y ago

I'm fascinated by this. So "AI" art isn't ok. But presumably Photoshop as a tool to create artworks is ok? What about some of the filters and plugins available? What about if you use AI as a tool to prepare art that you then make yourself? I was looking at SD and thinking this - I make linocuts and have been experimenting with using it to create layer ideas that I then cut by hand. Is this ok? What about using AI purely as a prompt? I tried just "linocut in 3 colours of a seascape" and got a whole nice bunch of starting ideas. Is this ok? Seems to be that there's a huge amount of nuance here that's pretty fascinating to watch / talk about.

2Slow 4y ago

Theres no skill in AI art involved and i think skill is part of art being art so.. Art is one of those raw human things

swayvil 4y ago

You can say that AI art is bad. But you can also say that normal people have bad taste. So the two meet in the middle and the normal art-consumer is satisfied with his junk. It's like fast food and normal people. Everybody knows it's crap but they eat the stuff by the megaton. The argument againt AI art is an argument against popular markets, basically.

drueter 4y ago

It's important to keep in mind that these art communities represent one very narrow kind of art, one that is more focused on illustration and graphical style, and most often not the kind of art that major art institutions work with. In the past 5 years, AI-generated art has been accepted and incorporated in the contemporary art world, with major works produced by luminaries such as Pierre Huyghe (of Ideal), Trevor Paglen (Bloom), and Hito Steyerl (Power Plants). For these artists, the graphical potency of the generated images is usually only one factor of the work, which also centers on how the artists use the technology, its origins, history, and broader uses, and what it might imply. For this kind of artwork, the kind made by artists who feel threatened by AI, I’ve been thinking for a while that a computer could likely do it better. Intricate detail, repetition, sampling and recombination of popular styles, optimization for aesthetic popularity and mass appeal — these practices are all squarely in the domain of automation, data science, and marketing. We might call it the Netflix-ification of illustration art, but it’s quite different, because the tools for making are available to many. As an arts educator and artist, I welcome these new tools, as they allow easy experimentation for newcomers, but also as they reveal that art based primarily in deployment of technical skill and eye-popping graphics is missing something vital.

asah 4y ago

Just wait until the NFT sells for more!

jmbull 4y ago

This topic always reminds me of a great poem[1] by Rudyard Kipling, The Conundrum in the Workshops. Enjoy! <snip> When the flush of a newborn sun fell first on Eden's green and gold, Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mold; And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves: "It's pretty, but is it Art?" </snip> [1] https://poets.org/poem/conundrum-workshops https://poets.org/poem/conundrum-workshops

jorl17 4y ago

I don't oppose AI-generated images in the slightest. I love them and I genuinely think they will be a very important part of our future. Effectively, it will take more effort to make a living as an artist, especially a mediocre one, because AI is now a decent mediocre artist. It's a stupendous artist for some prompts, too. However, I can understand that if I can just spit out image after image, there must be a way to "limit" my submission of these images. In that sense, I "get" banning AI-generated images, as a way to stop spam.

bgro 4y ago
I'm in some Discord chats for various things, and they often have a channel where people can post their artwork. Often, people spend weeks or months on a piece of fan art that's related to the Discord topic, or they draw a picture of the "leaders" for fun. Lately it's been just getting drowned out by people posting ridiculous AI art where they try to get absurd results. It was interesting and fun at first, but after seeing probably as low as 20 of these images I can tell they're all a similar sort of thing. I feel bad for people posting their art getting drowned out by this, and these aren't even remotely art related groups.
odessacubbage 4y ago
the vast majority of participants in any given field are, by definition, mediocre.

RoyBatty89 4y ago

Like this isn't gonna cause a backlash against the half assed "Artists" that modern art is. If AI can do everything better than humans, these luddites either can evolve or face the same fate the horses and loomers did when the industrial revolution came.

GrazeMor 4y ago
Wouldn't it have been good for the horses?

smrtinsert 4y ago

That's shortsighted. I'm sure they'll come around. There's already been some great demonstrations of artists using ai to enhance their visions instead of being just a simple output.

smm11 4y ago

I recall some time back the "photo of the year" with some esteemed organization looked like something you'd take at random. Just a few people doing various things. A snapshot, the sort you'd take back during the film era when you'd load film then click the shutter in case the first photo had a light leak. A throwaway photo. And it won.

andrewdubinsky 4y ago

This is exactly the sort of behavior the robots will point to when they rise up.

sn0w_monkie 4y ago

I'm not surprised more and more art communities are banning AI images, 99% of them are dull and ugly. Definitely not something I would print out and hang on my wall. I tried playing around with these models, but I was too bored to bother futzing around with prompts to try and make something I liked. But I have seen some cool things made using these models by creators who put more effort in than just writing a prompt to get back an image. I can definitely see how these tools can enhance human creativity but like most art the results are just bad. At least with some human art even if it's not aesthetically pleasing you can appreciate the thinking or time and effort put into producing a piece of work. When you go to an art museum you can learn about history, politics, culture etc even if you don't appreciate how something might look. Most AI art, however, is useless and ugly.

cma 4y ago
> I would print out and hang on my wall Printing things was at one point thought to devalue art and remove artist jobs.

enviclash 4y ago

Very interesting diffusion of a social norm, and probably easy to track?

t0bia_s 4y ago

I hope those "mouse wars" improve emptiness in digital art. Sure, AI can generate beautiful images. But art is beyond this. What the heck is furry art anyway?

_greim_ 4y ago

AI art is striking at first glance, but devoid of meaning once you really try to engage with it. It's the meaning people want, but an image's visual impact has been a reasonably cheap heuristic for finding it. The viability of this heuristic is now dead or rapidly dying, and AI generated art is degenerating into yet another form of spam. Relatedly, feeds full of visually-striking images, once impressive, are taking on a "spammy" tinge. New, harder-to-fake signals will be found, and social media will reorganize around whatever those end up being.

betwixthewires 4y ago
I'm personally very happy about it. To me, art is just pleasant, it's a matter of degree. Meaning is nice and all, but not necessary. And with this new way of generating art, people can have beautiful art, cheaply and as much as they want. No more cheap Target art everywhere. It's the replicator of art, nice, beautiful art is now post scarcity and I love it.
Double_a_92 4y ago
How does manual labour add meaning to a mentally creative process? It's not like the AI spits out random images, you have to very specifically tell it what you want in there. What's the difference between "telling" your hands vs. telling the AI?

deleted 4y ago

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mikotodomo 4y ago

Sounds like they are just admitting AI generated art is legit.

mattkevan 4y ago

These tools are only weeks or months old. At the moment they’re a novelty. ‘A picture of a dog riding a skateboard by James Gurney | Trending on Artstation’ is clever and astonishing, yes, but we’ve nowhere near scraped the surface of what they can do or how they can be used as part of the creative process. It’s going to take time and a good few rounds of development and pushback, but eventually we’ll wonder how anyone did anything without it. Current trends in AI art are pretty boring, but once we properly get the hang of it it’s going to be fascinating. Reminds me a lot of the early days of Photoshop - adding a filter was cool and novel so most people added a filter and called it a day. But over time people have figured out how to do all kinds of creative things with it. As an artist, AI tools are like having a paintbrush that’s possessed by a drunk genie and that’s very exciting.

mkaic 4y ago
This 1000%. I'm currently working on my own slightly more complex/customizable interface for Stable Diffusion because I firmly believe that the value lies not in simple prepackaged text-to-image, but in the wealth of information, structure, and hierarchy that is compressed into its 4GB latent space. SD encodes only 4GB of information, but that information is so highly structured and compressed that it represents a sizable chunk of all images on the internet. The true value Stable Diffusion brings to the table is the sheer level of semantic meaning encoded into the vector spaces it samples from to generate images. The fact that it's open-source means anyone can write meta-algorithms to walk through and explore that latent space, too, and as Stability and other companies start releasing better and better models, the latent spaces of those models will become less and less entangled and more and more meaningful and—— We're on an exponential curve and it's so exciting.
Bakary 4y ago
Using any Photoshop tool still requires some work. AI is an order of magnitude more multifaceted and autonomous. What happens when we realize that AI art generators consistently and instantly bring forth better contributions than what we can make ourselves over a much larger period of time? The artist will look at their paintbrush and wonder what the point of holding it is when the drunk genie is doing much better on their own. There will still be artists, but there will be space only for the most exceptional of them. Art software is similar to cruise control. AI art will in a few years become the equivalent of a fully perfected autonomous car that is safer than a human driver in all but the most contrived scenarios.

synicalx 4y ago

How will they know what is and isn't AI-generated? And when they cause a false-positive how are the "real" artists able to verify that their art is legit?

vitiral 4y ago

> Lexica, a search engine that solely indexed images from Stable Diffusion’s beta tests in Discord, has over 10 million images in it. It would take a lifetime to explore everything in it, a corpus made by a relatively small group of beta testers in a few weeks. There are many interesting points, but this is a key one I think. The sheer volume is astounding, like the media flooding of the last decade taken up exponentially.

pipeline_peak 4y ago

They’ll ban it long enough until it’s no longer possible to tell its AI generated.

GrazeMor 4y ago

I think the divide is that artists have worked at developing a skill to express themselves (art) while AI artists think they have achieved the same thing by turning a prompt into an image. The former is an act of expression, the latter is choosing something you like out of a magazine. Very different and one is art and the other is not. If you really want to say AI is art, maybe, but the person prompting it is definitely not the artist...maybe the curator.

cthalupa 4y ago
A hyper opinionated curator that is commissioning work based on very specific criteria, maybe. I don't think that artist is the right word, but gallery owner or curator aren't quite right either. People are pumping out mountainloads of hot garbage with these things, but others are taking time to think about things like image composition, color and light rendering, etc. that are considered artistic skills. And that's not getting into the people that were already artists and have just added this to part of their workflow. I do think overall the needle is closer to the curator side of the spectrum, but it's not all the way there, and I don't think it's fair to say that there is no expression in the process, at least for some.

analog31 4y ago

I'm fascinated by the idea that AI-generated images will eventually be the primary data source for training the algorithms themselves. Kind of like a giant positive feedback loop. Eventually the "art" might not be about generating a single image from a prompt phrase, but influencing art through the generation of the most successful algorithms.

bergenty 4y ago

How can you even tell? Any human can just claim they made it.

_carbyau_ 4y ago

With a flood of AI generated art on the internet... what will the next generation of AI be trained on?