34 ms·

Artist banned, told to “find a different style”- AI-made art

164 points by kamban 4y ago

benjaminbachman 4y ago
The only real news here is that Reddit mods are power mad tyrants, which is nothing new at all. AI generated art has just given them newer, funnier ways to be in the wrong.
- richbell 4y ago
  "Power" moderators, that is people who moderate a large number of subreddits, are untenable. It is not possible to effectively or fairly moderate dozens of communities, even if you were to spend all your waking moments doing so. This is, in part, why it's so common for popular submissions to be locked or deleted because "y'all can't behave". The people that do so are largely doing it for their own self-gain (e.g., self-promotion) or because it makes them feel important. I had a very low stress job for a few years and ended up as a moderator for over a dozen large subreddits, including a few defaults. Socializing with Reddit's prominent moderators was enlightening.
  - Y_Y 4y ago
    Please tell us more about what you learned from socialising with these "power mods", I think it would be enlightening to us too.
  - Mezzie 4y ago
    I wonder if/how a hard limit on number of communities moderated would work? Make it so one person could only mod 2-3 subreddits. Unfortunately, this would require some work from Reddit the company to keep those same powermods from just making new accounts so probably won't happen.
    - hbn 4y ago
      They already have rules about making secondary accounts to evade bans, upvote yourself, etc. If anything it'd probably be easier to enforce a "no moderating a bunch of subreddits across multiple accounts" rule since it's mainly bigger subreddits that matter, and "mod teams of big subreddits" is a smaller group of people to monitor. And if there was really some big conspiracy to skirt around this system they'd have to organize on a platform outside of reddit, ensure everyone is always accessing through VPNs so reddit doesn't notice multiple accounts modding from the same IP, and hope no one ever defects and exposes the underground moderation ring.
      - Mezzie 4y ago
        It'd be logistically easier, I just doubt Reddit is going to put forth the money and staff time required to enforce it. Current enforcement is based on reporting, I believe, and don't reports go to mods first. And they definitely will organize off site. Discord is huge for this. I also bet they would use VPNs since a lot of them have the barest hint of tech knowledge and a burning ideological conviction they're doing something important. > hope no one ever defects and exposes the underground moderation ring. Man, whoever had the balls or ovaries to do that would be immediately smeared and mobbed.
      - greggarious 4y ago
        >They already have rules about making secondary accounts to evade bans, upvote yourself, etc. If that rule was enforced, huge swathes of the so called power mods (and admins) would be removed. That's probably why, much like Twitter, they declined to hire me on to work on anti-abuse technology. The so called humans in the loop are evil and replaceable.
    - awillen 4y ago
      Reddit just doesn't have any incentive to do this - you're talking about people who are doing free labor for them. Maybe it's got problems, but if you get rid of the power mods (and don't change the structure to add any incentives like pay), you probably just end up with a bunch of unmoderated communities that then die off.
  - vikingerik 4y ago
    Why do Reddit moderators do their work? They are paid in power. They get to decide what viewpoints are seen or not by others. That is a very compelling wage. And of course they all think they're doing a service by advancing their ideology because of course their ideology is the right one.
    - jknoepfler 4y ago
      That's an extremely reductive claim. Can you really not think of more mundane reasons someone might find themselves moderating reddit? It's hard to imagine "ideology" being relevant to the vast majority of reddit... Do you really think the moderators of ELI5 or PeopleFuckingDying or some obscure porn reddit or whatever are primarily concerned with "ideology"? I used to help moderate a poker forum. I was a professional poker player, and an extremely active user of the forums. I don't recall pushing an ideology beyond "keep discussions constructive and topical." The person you just replied to was a mod. Are you implying that their work was somehow about pushing an ideology?
      - aliqot 4y ago
        > It's hard to imagine "ideology" being relevant to the vast majority of reddit... This is egregiously incorrect.
        jknoepfler 4y ago
        In what sense? Would tipping that scale entail that "all reddit moderators are only and exclusively motivated by ideology?"
      - bitwize 4y ago
        It's common knowledge now that abstaining from politics is taking the side of the oppressor. This has the effect of giving many subreddits and other topical communities a political orientation even if politics is nominally offtopic. To give an example, it is increasingly hard to find an online knitting community that tolerates conservative viewpoints; most have followed the lead of Ravelry.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    > This is, in part, why it's so common for popular submissions to be locked or deleted because "y'all can't behave". But they have no problem digging into downvoted comments and deleting them, even if the system already did the job for them (put the downvoted stuff at bottom and hidden).
    - 13of40 4y ago
      Maybe this is already well-known, but I saw another behavior recently on some subrreddits where a lot of new posts are seemingly getting a single downvote to a score of zero. I suspected there was some troll doing it, so I went down the line and gave about 20 or 30 of them a single up vote back to one, refreshed the page, and most of them had immediately gone back to zero. I think the mods must have a button for squashing a post without actually deleting it, and on some subs they use it for a huge number of the posts.
      - traverseda 4y ago
        /r/3Dprinting has no such button for what it's worth. If there is they haven't given it to me.
        richbell 4y ago
        They've added custom CSS to hide it, it isn't actually removed. You can easily bypass this by disabling custom CSS or using a mobile app.
        Seattle3503 4y ago
        13of40 was talking about a single button that mass downvotes multiple comments. None of the default (nor popular) clients support this functionality, but you could script your own version using the reddit API.
        richbell 4y ago
        Oh, I guess I misinterpreted that because it's a bizarre speculation. Shwartzworld is correct, the votes are fuzzed and deliberately fluctuate so that it's difficult for bots to tell whether they've been detected.
  - counttheforks 4y ago
    Reddit allowing moderators to lock threads was a mistake. It just enables lazy mods to be even lazier.
    - watwut 4y ago
      The laziest thing to do is to not do anything and let someone else moderate. While the disagreements over moderation are normal, complains about volunteers being "lazy" for not doing impossible are absurd.
      - counttheforks 4y ago
        Hardly. Volunteer positions come with responsibilities. No one is forcing them to waste their time on moderating an internet forum, but they chose to do it for whatever reason and then chose to be lazy and actively harmful.
        watwut 4y ago
        The complaint here is about moderation tactic that is not actively harmful or abusive to people and ease their own load when threads become too much. Complaining about that is absurd.
        counttheforks 4y ago
        No. The purpose of a subreddit is to let users engage. Excessive locking decreases user engagement and is harmful, not to mention that it punishes users (who are no longer able to continue a already started conversation in the comments) for violations of others.
  - greggarious 4y ago
    >"Power" moderators, that is people who moderate a large number of subreddits, are untenable. At least you know it's just one person, spread across multiple contexts. I had a string of unusual behaviors when I ran /u/dontbenebby, culminating in being involuntarily being made the moderator of several Snapchat related subreddits around the time that Reddit let you view analytics and things I was posting were getting six or seven figure views as I dodged literal assassination attempts every time I tried to take a peaceful walk in the woods. For context, I was (in)famous for not logging IPs, or even numbers of pageviews as far back as when I dropped that Facebook zero day on my blog and virtually planted myself in the middle of the protests against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and then went on to lecture class full of CMU students they should use strong anonymity tools and careful opsec if organizing protests in oppressive regimes like Tehran or Times Square as I threw up an image of a dead protester on the screen. I meant what I said then, and I mean it now. And maybe I spoke offline with whoever made me the moderator of a subreddit I never visited, for an application I have never used? In that case, let's share it with the whole class the three core points my art was intended to drive home: 1.) They are going to nuke Penn Quarter, not Pittsburgh. 2.) It is not my problem if you drop dead of a heart attack because you fucked around and found out. 3.) I am an alumni -- that means I can do whatever I want. Anyways, I'm off to read a book and "do email". Cheers!! - Greg.
- jdc0589 4y ago
  proof: I was a mod of a small hobby subreddit for a while, and I'm an idiot.
  - seanw444 4y ago
    Small hobby subreddits are the best subreddits, and among the only ones I visit. I don't usually have problems with those mods. Anything front-page, or remotely popular to a wide audience, are where the worst mods (and posts / commenters) are.
- hbn 4y ago
  The amount of great discussions I've seen shut down because a moderator removed the post on some stupid minor infraction is infuriating.
- generalizations 4y ago
  I wonder if the simple solution is to prevent mod accounts from interacting on the subreddits they moderate.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    I'm almost in favor, but I would worry that for really small communities that deprives the sub of its biggest contributor
    - Mezzie 4y ago
      Maybe implement it once the community reaches a certain size/certain volume of posts?
  - Sebb767 4y ago
    This would probably make the situation worse. You'd remove the incentive for people who moderate for the good of their own community, leaving only those who do so for the power they get (which are probably worse mods, though I don't have a citation for that).
  - squarefoot 4y ago
    Not sure if that would not create more problems, but there should be some accountability when they behave like a-holes. The mod in question could have asked for proof (draw live on webcam? - not an expert, just wondering) or peer analysis instead of just silencing the artist. Then another user contacted the mod to complain, and got this reply: https://nitter.bird.froth.zone/MeaririForever/status/1607826931516596227#m https://nitter.bird.froth.zone/MeaririForever/status/1607826... That mod has become toxic and imho should either apologize or be removed asap.
  - kibwen 4y ago
    That's the opposite of what you want. Good mods are those that are invested in the community and are well-known and respected participants.
- Sebb767 4y ago
  HN is really lucky to have dang. Although he is a payed mod, so it's not 100% comparable.
- spacemadness 4y ago
  Reddit mods are ineffective or harmful a lot of the time, but so is Reddit itself in how it incentivizes thankless moderation and oversized and noisy communities for the purpose of ads and their upcoming IPO. Most non-niche subreddits could be replaced by ChatGPT at this point.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    Many just look like RSS feed of news outlets, except moderated by morons. And obligatory wide reaching TOS where the discussion about say how fighting games could be more accessible to new players gets removed under "no content for fun or entertainment allowed" TOS point...
  - ok123456 4y ago
    > Most non-niche subreddits could be replaced by ChatGPT at this point. According to the "dead internet theory" they already are. I'm inclined to believe that a lot of the political discourse on there is bot driven.
    - rightbyte 4y ago
      It feels like it. It is so single minded compared to any real group of people I know.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  For real. From the headline I thought this was going to be a "ban" from an art department or marketplace or something of actual value, which would actually be news. Being banned from a subreddit for an arbitrary/idiotic reason is just reddit as usual.
- tibanne 4y ago
  Came here to say this.
- jtbayly 4y ago
  But in this case, the mods can't win. If they let AI art take over, HN will be condemning them for putting artists out of business. If they refuse to allow AI art, HN condemns them anyway.
  - cat_plus_plus 4y ago
    On the contrary, AI will put a lot more artists in business by drastically expanding the range of artistic works than can be created and kinds of people who can create great works. Hanging a rectangle still painting on the wall is of limited appeal in the age of smartphones and VR. Imagining being able to paint walls and ceiling of entire house with aesthetically appealing, one of a kind art, for the same effort as currently required for a small still painting. A lot more people will be interested in paying for that and they will be willing to pay a lot more.
- ilyt 4y ago
  That's not news and applies to pretty much any moderators, especially the non-paid kind.
- seattle_spring 4y ago
  Fun fact: there's a popular car sub that will ban you for mentioning dealer markups in a disparaging way. That's right: if you say that Joe's Toyota tried to upcharge you $15k for a Camry, you'll be banned for life!
  - ilyt 4y ago
    If it is the one I think they have both automatically blocking comments containing "stealership" too.
  - weregiraffe 4y ago
    >you'll be banned for life! Or for the 30 seconds it will take you to make a new account.
  - millzlane 4y ago
    is it /r/cars?
- jasonkolb 4y ago
  Reddit is a worse echo chamber than Twitter ever was. I gave up on it when I got banned from certain subreddits for posting quotes from congressional testimony. If you post anything that deviates in the slightest from the moderator's viewpoint, you get banned. The end result is an echo chamber that's getting tighter and smaller, excluding any diversity of opinion. It's no way to run a business.
  - thechao 4y ago
    Reddit's business is to house all of the echo-chambers, though, isn't it? That seems like a great business to be in, during this Heyday of Echo Chamber Construction™.
    - BitwiseFool 4y ago
      >"all of the echo-chambers" All of the like-minded echo-chambers. They seem to have no appetite for certain heresies and have walked back Aaron Swartz' original emphasis on free speech as a virtue.
      - richbell 4y ago
        > All of the like-minded echo-chambers. They seem to have no appetite for certain heresies and have walked back Aaron Swartz' original emphasis on free speech as a virtue. Reddit is ultimately amoral, despite the sensibilities of its moderators, imo. They want to sell ads and IPO, thus they've been increasingly purging communities, posts, and individuals that are either not advertiser-friendly or create trouble. Even as a casual user of the site, I have noticed a sharp increase in the number of submissions and comments that get Removed by Reddit (i.e., administrators) for no reason. I think they just went completely 'mask-off' after the debacle with Aimee Challenor.
  - kypro 4y ago
    It's not just the mods, the users on Reddit are equally awful and contribute more to the echo chamber imo. The UK politics subreddit used to be one of my favourite subreddits back in the early 2010s. Back then it was quite a small community and while we had differences of opinions I think it's fair to say we enjoyed each other's company. But around the time of the Brexit vote, then Trump shortly after that, the subreddit started getting flooded with reactionary, low-effort comments and anyone who tried to provide a nuanced opinion or alternative view point was typically downvoted and insulted. I along with a few other long-time commenters were mostly in favour of Brexit at the time so we would constantly be downvoted and insulted whenever we wrote anything in favour of Brexit. And the worst was when a post made it to /r/all because then you'd an even larger flood of low-effort commenters just downvoting and insulting everyone with a different opinion. And this wasn't even just minor insults, this was people telling me to kill myself and that I'm a horrible person literally everyday. I'm not sure how much this was a political subreddit thing vs Reddit generally, but it was honestly ridiculous the stuff people would say to me there. Needless to say, I obviously left the community shortly after 2016, but I've seen similar things play across the site since. There seems to be no room for a difference of opinion there anymore. The mods if anything are just an amalgamation of the average Redditor.
- robotnikman 4y ago
  Reddit mods fully convinced me that most of what we read on the internet is written by insane people. And I include most Reddit mods in that. See previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827
- shoulderfake 4y ago
  [dead]
- smsm42 4y ago
  It is still surprising - at least for me, I've been using Reddit for years but mostly niche subs, nothing popular - how such a petty power warps people's minds. I dread to think what a real power does then.
tazjin 4y ago
Reddit's weird setup where essentially random people who were first "own" entire categories (= subreddits) of discussion is totally absurd.
- root_axis 4y ago
  It's not absurd, it's reddit's killer feature and the primary reason that reddit is as big as it is.
  - EGreg 4y ago
    Sorry, I am not familiar with reddit’s model. What is “ownership” in this case? Total private tyranny, with delegation of authority? Does it transition to collectively and more democratically managing the channel, as stackexchsnge does?
    - cyborgx7 4y ago
      There is no collective or democratic management, unless the tyrannical overlords choose to allow it. "Total private tyranny, with delegation of authority" is correct. What it leaves out is that anybody else can make a competing subreddit, dedicated to the same issue, where they have control. The only thing getting there first does is prime realestate in the namespace and network effects of having an existing community.
      - EGreg 4y ago
        Ah, so like Valve Software then. On a related note, the only reason the United States' citizens directly vote for the President is at the pleasure of the State Legislatures. The Constitution allows them to choose the manner in which electors are elected, and they in theory could elect them directly (by specifying this before election day), usurping the power from the public. https://www.justsecurity.org/73274/no-state-legislatures-cannot-overrule-the-popular-vote/ https://www.justsecurity.org/73274/no-state-legislatures-can...
        4y ago
geraldwhen 4y ago
The hilarious irony is that the AI is quite possibly copying the authors older work if it was published on an image sharing site like Reddit or deviant art. Lawsuits need to destroy these models stolen from the public.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  While we're at it we should publicly flog anyone who's ever done any art in the style of anyone else before them, because they also stole ideas from the public.
  - Auracle 4y ago
    I guess we’re back to crude cave paintings. Tear down all the statues and burn the museums.
    - AlexandrB 4y ago
      > Tear down all the statues and burn the museums. No need. Soon there will be so much AI generated "art" that human-made art will largely be pushed out of popular consciousness.
      - danogentili 4y ago
        Looking at recent online discussion, this is an easy conclusion to come to, but it's really just a huge bubble. People won't stop creating just because there's a cheaper alternative. The analogy with manual labor automation simply doesn't hold, first because people actually like creating stuff, but perhaps most importantly because there is no supply problem to solve. Taking the analogy with automation in the car industry, automation drastically lowered prices, making each individual copy of a product accessible to anyone. It costs virtually 0$ to copy a movie, a picture, a song and display it on every device on the planet. The cost of creating a audiovisual product is amortized across all users, dividing the costs by the number of users instead of multiplying it. Sure, one day we may have models capable of generating full 3d animated movies from just a prompt, paying for just the electricity used to run the GPUs, but how much cheaper can you get compared to 9$/month to compete with a traditional streaming subscription with human-made content? Assuming the world even comes to the point where AI streaming services contain virtually infinite amounts of meaningless autogenerated content, and assuming people actually like that content (which may be the case for the chunk of people already watching statistics-driven garbage on Netflix), nothing will stop creatives fired from previously-human studios from creating their own studios, producing hand-crafted, human works at the same price as always (9$/month). An analogy can be made with handcrafted cars like Lamborghinis may cost millions, with the difference that with audiovisual content, a work can be shared by (and the price amortized by) billions.
afavour 4y ago
Safari telling me the SSL cert for this site is not trusted. Perhaps only appropriate for "the tech deviant dot com".
- bragr 4y ago
  Seems like a normal let's encrypt cert to me.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Seems like parent is having their TLS certificate to thetechdeviant.com intercepted and the browser is having none of that.
jcq3 4y ago
I agree with the moderator, AI will push artists to their limits and force them to become creative which is the most important skill of an artist. Technicality isn't enough nowadays, doesn't matter if you can paint like Raphael, you need to be creative like Picasso or Dali.
- capableweb 4y ago
  > Technicality isn't enough nowadays When was it ever like that for artists? Most complex music to perform doesn't mean it's the "best", neither is it like that for art. As an example from visual art, abstract art is sometimes very simple, yet have a profound impact on people, and it was never about being "technical", "complex" or "hard to reproduce".
  - potatototoo99 4y ago
    Technicality was everything in painting before the advent of the photograph.
    - loriverkutya 4y ago
      The impressionists wholeheartedly disagree with your comment.
      - Turing_Machine 4y ago
        The Impressionists came after photography, and in fact Impressionism was something of a reaction to its development. "Since we have the camera to do realistic images now, we should concentrate on other things.", more or less.
  - aenvoker 4y ago
    AI has reached a point where aesthetics and technique are no longer hurdles. You can literally prompt gibberish and get back a highly aesthetic image that is completely boring and irrelevant. So, the challenge is still to dig deep and make something interesting and relevant. The hurdles are removed. The gates are wide open. You can make anything. So… what will you actually make?
teekert 4y ago
What does it even matter how art is created? It's the same with banning ChatGPT from StackOverflow: Who cares and who notices? Art is either evoking some feeling or not and it's different for everybody. An answer on SO is either helpful or not. Who cares how it was written? ChatGPT can easily say something more helpful than me, stable diffusion can easily make something I'd rather have on my wall than Da Vinci's Mona Lisa (or anything more along my preferences). Why do we care so much? What's "real art" anyway? I always like a colleague's mousepad, it said: "Is this art or can we throw this out?" Always makes me smile.
- jaywalk 4y ago
  It shouldn't matter how it's created. But some artists are pissed off that AI can generate art that people like, so they want to ban it. I don't think the average person cares at all.
  - lleb97a 4y ago
    Some artist are pissed off that the AI can only generate art because it stole the reference pictures they spent countless hours creating.
- onion2k 4y ago
  If the goal of a community is to share work, critique each others efforts, and enjoy a hobby together, then someone coming along and pretending that they're doing it while they're not is obviously going to annoy people who are genuine. I see AI-generated art as being similar to taking performance enhancing drugs in sport or using something that's against the rules in motorsports. Outsiders don't really care because they just see someone performing at the same level of the others by using clever tech, but if you're part of the group then you will care much more.
  - teekert 4y ago
    Ok, yeah, I can imagine if it's about competition, which it is when humans want to create the most beautiful thing purely with their bodies, that it's "unfair". There are (written and unwritten) rules in any competition after all. Imagine a formula 1 driver installing an AI :)
happyopossum 4y ago
Err, banned from a subreddit by a mod who didn’t believe him. Pretty sure that happens to about 10% of Reddit users every year.
zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
Reminds me of the type of stuff r/Seattle mod u/careless would do https://www.seattleweekly.com/news/seattles-reddit-community-is-big-active-and-at-war-with-itself/ https://www.seattleweekly.com/news/seattles-reddit-community...
tedunangst 4y ago
Too much effort for the article to mention r/art was the subreddit in question?
danuker 4y ago
https://archive.ph/hK78G https://archive.ph/hK78G
MrPatan 4y ago
AI is replacing artists like CAD replaced arhcitects
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Or like InDesign replaced people who set type with hot lead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_metal_typesetting#/media/File:Linotype_operators_of_the_Chicago_Defender.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_metal_typesetting#/media/F...
darepublic 4y ago
I think this may be overreach by the moderator but I basically agree with their points. This looks just like a midjourney output. It is a hodge podge of different cultural influences -- asian character, with green eyes, with grecoroman garb, and eye of sauron orbs floating around her. It would have once been technically impressive, and now is just a kind of culture diarrhea.
- jollyllama 4y ago
  You've got a point, but I feel like I've seen more egregious examples of what you're describing. The Sauron eyes are unnecessary, but without that, it could be an interesting "Muse in the Warzone" piece. The character doesn't really look Asian to me though, or drawn in an anime style, but the expression could stand to be more subtle. We're all critics.
- kzrdude 4y ago
  So what. I guess the artist in question hasn't even been playing with AI art or even seen that much, so they don't have that context. And why do we need to look at AI art to know what is right for ourselves to paint?
- vitno 4y ago
  I have a passing familiarity with the webfiction "Beneath dragon eye moons", that this artwork was designed for. All of the things you are complaining about makes sense in the context of that writing.
Overtonwindow 4y ago
That's just Reddit.. I don't think we should take any Reddit community. Seriously because it is run by Reddit mods who have proven countless times to be absolutely terrible at their job.
- Turing_Machine 4y ago
  The problem with Reddit, SO, and pretty much any system with moderators is that a heavy-handed moderator can claim that he's "doing something", while a lenient moderator who only deletes genuinely egregious content looks like he's "not doing anything". The same is true of other institutions, such as congresses and parliaments. Note that politicians run on the basis of what new laws they've gotten passed far more often than what laws they've blocked. There's something to be said for the idea of a branch of government whose function is limited to repealing laws.
tjpnz 4y ago
This is /r/art by the way and based on the blurb and about section it seems less about art and more about fulfilling the deranged power fantasies of its moderators. What an unfriendly place. Nice to hear the artist has gotten a more positive response in /r/drawing.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  I'm not too surprised, /r/art has been famous for completely arbitrary rules for years by now.
- oigursh 4y ago
  /r/art mods are swivel-eyed loons
lifefeed 4y ago
Those hands have the right number of fingers. So either 1) It's not AI-generated art, or 2) It is AI-generated art and the artist is a master at prompting. Either way they should be celebrated.
- buffington 4y ago
  I've been keeping up with Stable Diffusion and all the tools around that for months now and it wasn't until a few weeks ago that I learned that you can just tell it to draw things accurately if you want to avoid weirdness. For example, if I include "anatomically correct fingers" it significantly decreases the number of images with wildly creative ideas for how human fingers should be drawn. Negative prompting works too. "deformed fingers" or "inaccurately drawn anatomy" can go a long way.
- lgreiv 4y ago
  This person knows what they are talking about. Although I have been pretty successful in obtaining realistic hands by prompting photographs and including make of a camera, lens and film [1][2]. Somehow this seems to narrow down the model to mostly produce realistic output. Still, some variants will occasionally feature Chernobyl-levels of fingers. [1] https://cdn.midjourney.com/6f52a6e9-b3f2-4830-81b1-84c8f8ca40a7/grid_0.png https://cdn.midjourney.com/6f52a6e9-b3f2-4830-81b1-84c8f8ca4... [2] https://cdn.midjourney.com/361e143f-5121-4bff-ada9-069c2e400e40/grid_0.png https://cdn.midjourney.com/361e143f-5121-4bff-ada9-069c2e400...
c3534l 4y ago
It does look like AI generated art, tbh.
- layer8 4y ago
  Only at first glance. It doesn’t have any dodgy area or incongruence like you pretty much always find in AI pictures.
  - brador 4y ago
    The new hotness is letting the AI do the first pass then the artist cleans it up before posting.
bufferoverflow 4y ago
And that's the argument I've been making. Once you can't tell the difference between AI-made art and human-made art, the demand for human-made art will dramatically decrease, especially in the commercial areas. If it takes a human a month to paint something beautiful, and 1 minute for AI, it's really hard to compete with AI. The best we have is Midjourney V4, and it's getting quite close.
- splatzone 4y ago
  This is why I believe we’ll soon see a huge increase in the popularity of ‘physical’ art. Theatre, sculpture, dance… in a world overflowing with computer made images and sounds, things which can only be human-made will be all the more special.
  - bufferoverflow 4y ago
    You're assuming robots won't be able to sculpt, dance or theater.
  - cma 4y ago
    There are AI approaches that generate images one brush stroke at a time. I can imagine that going from that to a robot arm laying them down on physical medium if it isn't already a widespread thing. Disney uses a robot Spiderman stunt double to be able to launch it into the air and do aerial acrobatics, edging into the dance example.
  - kazinator 4y ago
    We've had painting robots for quite a long time now.
rvz 4y ago
All digital artists need to do to prove that their art is not AI-generated is to record their screen and show a start to finish recording of themselves painting the digital image from scratch as proof. This is not new and it is similar to speed painting, and all these prompters using Stable Diffusion cannot do such a thing. Problem solved and job done.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  The artist in question offered to show the raw Photoshop files and the progression of work done on the piece to prove it was not AI generated, but the mod did not take him up on that offer, and simply banned him.
- yegle 4y ago
  Wait until AI can generate such a video in 1min?
xwdv 4y ago
I’m glad. If your “art” can be mistaken for AI art, it’s likely just content, not art. The example picture is meaningless, just technical work. Makes no sense upon scrutiny. True art is something that can’t be replicated by AI. You will have no doubt once you see it. It still exists even with the proliferation of AI art. It’s like the difference between a random picture and a meme. The meme looks like a picture, but it captures an emotion or essential human truth that you connect with upon looking at it, where as a picture is just a random picture that could look like a meme but has no real meaning to it. You will know what I’m talking about.
- buffington 4y ago
  > True art is something that can’t be replicated by AI. You will have no doubt once you see it. Ignoring your assertion about what art is, I have to ask: what happens when you can't tell the difference?
  - xwdv 4y ago
    Then our search for human connection through art only deepens.
- MrNeon 4y ago
  I looked at the image and it feels like art in the terms that you put it. What now. Is my inner experience of art not valid? How do we reconcile this?
kazinator 4y ago
I'm not saying I agree with the actions of the mods, but there is a grain of truth in the "way of the world" remark. Human artists who are just highly skilled executors of bad taste are going to be decimated by AI.
- Adraghast 4y ago
  Which is why, despite my distaste for DALL-E and its ilk, I’m not at all moved by the anguish over it rendering artists obsolete. Stuff like this never had any artistic value in the first place, so it makes perfect sense to me that a bot would create it rather than a person.
cat_plus_plus 4y ago
Even if true, AI is just another tool and combined work of artists and AI can produce greater art than the artist alone. For example, natural world has a lot of repeated elements and hand painting each one detracts from time that could be spent on more expressive aspects of the work. Airplanes let us fly further and faster than birds, should that be avoided / considered not to be real flight just because we are getting technological assistance?
- Adraghast 4y ago
  Fundamental misunderstanding of what art is.
- deely3 4y ago
  > AI can produce greater art than the artist alone.. Citation needed. > natural world has a lot of repeated elements and hand painting each one detracts from time that could be spent on more expressive aspects of the work. Can't agree. Using these repeated elements artist can add additional level of impression for a viewer. While AI probably will use random distribution in this situation.
  - Guillaume86 4y ago
    No citation needed since he clearly said: > combined work of artists and AI can produce greater art than the artist alone
flumpcakes 4y ago
Speaking on the topic of Reddit and mods and it's power structure: In the UK Reddit has pushed a new subreddit called "HeyUK". It has turned up in the subscription feeds for some (all?) UK users automatically without the user asking for it or adding it. If you remove it from your list of subreddits the posts will still show up in your feed as "sponsored". As far as I can see this new subreddit is seeded with just cross posts from other UK subreddits and is created/pushed by Reddit itself. The big issue I have is that this is just another subreddit with 15-odd random people who are the mods. These people have the unilateral power to shape discourse and be the arbiter of what is "UK" and what isn't. Reddit is getting a bit too big, this feels very strange. On the swing-back we then have Reddit not banning the "jailbait" subreddit until it made major US news. I have no idea what's going on with social media anymore, I'm just left with the overwhelming feeling that the people with the voice and the power are not the best of us.
- purpleblue 4y ago
  The beauty of reddit is that you can create your own subreddit with your own mods and have the discourse that you want. You're not held to just sticking with the subreddits that are given to you.
  - ok123456 4y ago
    It can be 'sponsored' as the parent noted. (By whom? Why?)
    - flumpcakes 4y ago
      Not only sponsored - but also automatically added to your list of subscribed sub-reddits! I only saw the "sponsored" posts when I went out of my way to unsub from this new subreddit I was unceremoniously subscribed too.
  - blendergeek 4y ago
    What the parent is pointing out is that Reddit choosing subreddits for people to subscribe. Sure, I can "create the subreddit with [my] own mods and have the discourse that [I] want". But nobody will see it because everybody is automatically added to the subreddits that Reddit chooses.
lofaszvanitt 4y ago
Reddit = brainwash center
- deely3 4y ago
  Thats truly interesting thing to learn on such site as HN.
  - lofaszvanitt 4y ago
    There is something inherently wrong there. The up/downvotes do not make sense, there is a seriously lopsided (non human?) feedback that goes against common sense. And certain very popular reddits are just puzzling. There are things you wouldn't do in real life if you would know a bit more about the context... and yet people get feedback at those reddits that what they are doing is good, every critical thought is downvoted in an instant and the list goes on. It's like an experiment on groups of people where their feedback is totally distorted. I can compare it to a relationship where a parent praises their child when they do something wrong, instead of scolding them and explaining what is right. So in the end the child is doing totally batshit crazy things and thinks that is normal. Or imagine that you get in a bubble where your sense of excess heat is distorted and you can touch a red hot iron without any severe pain, yet your hands are slowly crumbling away like a charcoal. The patterns there are very very strange.
pcrh 4y ago
On the topic of AI vs "real" art, I visited /r/artcommissions. I was surprised at how little people are asking, many in the range of $5-$50 for original work.
- layer8 4y ago
  Supply and demand.
  - pcrh 4y ago
    Quite. Then I realized that most art has always been cheap (c.f. "starving artist"), so maybe AI doesn't make _that_ much difference in the end?
    - layer8 4y ago
      It’ll probably allow more people to be starving artists.
      - pcrh 4y ago
        The difference has maybe always been in the interaction between the artist and the market. Even very competent and painstaking replicas of "great works" that are indistinguishable to most command a small fraction of the price of the original.
possiblydrunk 4y ago
Wow, that's like banning a photorealist because their work looks too much like a photograph.
zzz345345 4y ago
[flagged]
jack_the_dev 4y ago
Surprised no one is talking about how this is terrible art and derivative of GoT and LoTR.
- tester457 4y ago
  Because the art is actually good and better than most hobbyists in terms of technical skill in digital art.
cobertos 4y ago
If AI content is already this indistinguishable from normal content, how much normal content is "real content" anymore? We have no metric or insight into this. The percentage will keep increasing as it's cheap and very economically beneficial for companies to use.
nilslindemann 4y ago
Notice how this is an unmanaged misuse of power. The artist has no legal tools to defend against the actions of this moderator. An internet court is needed for these cases, like courts in the real world, and supported by them. And an internet police, which makes sure the court rulings are obeyed. Also supported by real world police, if necessary.
RutgerHauer 4y ago
They aren’t wrong. It looks like AI art because it’s meaningless, derivative bullshit.

164 points by kamban 4y ago

The only real news here is that Reddit mods are power mad tyrants, which is nothing new at all. AI generated art has just given them newer, funnier ways to be in the wrong.

richbell 4y ago
"Power" moderators, that is people who moderate a large number of subreddits, are untenable. It is not possible to effectively or fairly moderate dozens of communities, even if you were to spend all your waking moments doing so. This is, in part, why it's so common for popular submissions to be locked or deleted because "y'all can't behave". The people that do so are largely doing it for their own self-gain (e.g., self-promotion) or because it makes them feel important. I had a very low stress job for a few years and ended up as a moderator for over a dozen large subreddits, including a few defaults. Socializing with Reddit's prominent moderators was enlightening.
- Y_Y 4y ago
  Please tell us more about what you learned from socialising with these "power mods", I think it would be enlightening to us too.
- Mezzie 4y ago
  I wonder if/how a hard limit on number of communities moderated would work? Make it so one person could only mod 2-3 subreddits. Unfortunately, this would require some work from Reddit the company to keep those same powermods from just making new accounts so probably won't happen.
  - hbn 4y ago
    They already have rules about making secondary accounts to evade bans, upvote yourself, etc. If anything it'd probably be easier to enforce a "no moderating a bunch of subreddits across multiple accounts" rule since it's mainly bigger subreddits that matter, and "mod teams of big subreddits" is a smaller group of people to monitor. And if there was really some big conspiracy to skirt around this system they'd have to organize on a platform outside of reddit, ensure everyone is always accessing through VPNs so reddit doesn't notice multiple accounts modding from the same IP, and hope no one ever defects and exposes the underground moderation ring.
    - Mezzie 4y ago
      It'd be logistically easier, I just doubt Reddit is going to put forth the money and staff time required to enforce it. Current enforcement is based on reporting, I believe, and don't reports go to mods first. And they definitely will organize off site. Discord is huge for this. I also bet they would use VPNs since a lot of them have the barest hint of tech knowledge and a burning ideological conviction they're doing something important. > hope no one ever defects and exposes the underground moderation ring. Man, whoever had the balls or ovaries to do that would be immediately smeared and mobbed.
    - greggarious 4y ago
      >They already have rules about making secondary accounts to evade bans, upvote yourself, etc. If that rule was enforced, huge swathes of the so called power mods (and admins) would be removed. That's probably why, much like Twitter, they declined to hire me on to work on anti-abuse technology. The so called humans in the loop are evil and replaceable.
  - awillen 4y ago
    Reddit just doesn't have any incentive to do this - you're talking about people who are doing free labor for them. Maybe it's got problems, but if you get rid of the power mods (and don't change the structure to add any incentives like pay), you probably just end up with a bunch of unmoderated communities that then die off.
- vikingerik 4y ago
  Why do Reddit moderators do their work? They are paid in power. They get to decide what viewpoints are seen or not by others. That is a very compelling wage. And of course they all think they're doing a service by advancing their ideology because of course their ideology is the right one.
  - jknoepfler 4y ago
    That's an extremely reductive claim. Can you really not think of more mundane reasons someone might find themselves moderating reddit? It's hard to imagine "ideology" being relevant to the vast majority of reddit... Do you really think the moderators of ELI5 or PeopleFuckingDying or some obscure porn reddit or whatever are primarily concerned with "ideology"? I used to help moderate a poker forum. I was a professional poker player, and an extremely active user of the forums. I don't recall pushing an ideology beyond "keep discussions constructive and topical." The person you just replied to was a mod. Are you implying that their work was somehow about pushing an ideology?
    - aliqot 4y ago
      > It's hard to imagine "ideology" being relevant to the vast majority of reddit... This is egregiously incorrect.
      - jknoepfler 4y ago
        In what sense? Would tipping that scale entail that "all reddit moderators are only and exclusively motivated by ideology?"
    - bitwize 4y ago
      It's common knowledge now that abstaining from politics is taking the side of the oppressor. This has the effect of giving many subreddits and other topical communities a political orientation even if politics is nominally offtopic. To give an example, it is increasingly hard to find an online knitting community that tolerates conservative viewpoints; most have followed the lead of Ravelry.
- ilyt 4y ago
  > This is, in part, why it's so common for popular submissions to be locked or deleted because "y'all can't behave". But they have no problem digging into downvoted comments and deleting them, even if the system already did the job for them (put the downvoted stuff at bottom and hidden).
  - 13of40 4y ago
    Maybe this is already well-known, but I saw another behavior recently on some subrreddits where a lot of new posts are seemingly getting a single downvote to a score of zero. I suspected there was some troll doing it, so I went down the line and gave about 20 or 30 of them a single up vote back to one, refreshed the page, and most of them had immediately gone back to zero. I think the mods must have a button for squashing a post without actually deleting it, and on some subs they use it for a huge number of the posts.
    - traverseda 4y ago
      /r/3Dprinting has no such button for what it's worth. If there is they haven't given it to me.
      - richbell 4y ago
        They've added custom CSS to hide it, it isn't actually removed. You can easily bypass this by disabling custom CSS or using a mobile app.
        Seattle3503 4y ago
        13of40 was talking about a single button that mass downvotes multiple comments. None of the default (nor popular) clients support this functionality, but you could script your own version using the reddit API.
        richbell 4y ago
        Oh, I guess I misinterpreted that because it's a bizarre speculation. Shwartzworld is correct, the votes are fuzzed and deliberately fluctuate so that it's difficult for bots to tell whether they've been detected.
- counttheforks 4y ago
  Reddit allowing moderators to lock threads was a mistake. It just enables lazy mods to be even lazier.
  - watwut 4y ago
    The laziest thing to do is to not do anything and let someone else moderate. While the disagreements over moderation are normal, complains about volunteers being "lazy" for not doing impossible are absurd.
    - counttheforks 4y ago
      Hardly. Volunteer positions come with responsibilities. No one is forcing them to waste their time on moderating an internet forum, but they chose to do it for whatever reason and then chose to be lazy and actively harmful.
      - watwut 4y ago
        The complaint here is about moderation tactic that is not actively harmful or abusive to people and ease their own load when threads become too much. Complaining about that is absurd.
        counttheforks 4y ago
        No. The purpose of a subreddit is to let users engage. Excessive locking decreases user engagement and is harmful, not to mention that it punishes users (who are no longer able to continue a already started conversation in the comments) for violations of others.
- greggarious 4y ago
  >"Power" moderators, that is people who moderate a large number of subreddits, are untenable. At least you know it's just one person, spread across multiple contexts. I had a string of unusual behaviors when I ran /u/dontbenebby, culminating in being involuntarily being made the moderator of several Snapchat related subreddits around the time that Reddit let you view analytics and things I was posting were getting six or seven figure views as I dodged literal assassination attempts every time I tried to take a peaceful walk in the woods. For context, I was (in)famous for not logging IPs, or even numbers of pageviews as far back as when I dropped that Facebook zero day on my blog and virtually planted myself in the middle of the protests against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and then went on to lecture class full of CMU students they should use strong anonymity tools and careful opsec if organizing protests in oppressive regimes like Tehran or Times Square as I threw up an image of a dead protester on the screen. I meant what I said then, and I mean it now. And maybe I spoke offline with whoever made me the moderator of a subreddit I never visited, for an application I have never used? In that case, let's share it with the whole class the three core points my art was intended to drive home: 1.) They are going to nuke Penn Quarter, not Pittsburgh. 2.) It is not my problem if you drop dead of a heart attack because you fucked around and found out. 3.) I am an alumni -- that means I can do whatever I want. Anyways, I'm off to read a book and "do email". Cheers!! - Greg.
jdc0589 4y ago
proof: I was a mod of a small hobby subreddit for a while, and I'm an idiot.
- seanw444 4y ago
  Small hobby subreddits are the best subreddits, and among the only ones I visit. I don't usually have problems with those mods. Anything front-page, or remotely popular to a wide audience, are where the worst mods (and posts / commenters) are.
hbn 4y ago
The amount of great discussions I've seen shut down because a moderator removed the post on some stupid minor infraction is infuriating.
generalizations 4y ago
I wonder if the simple solution is to prevent mod accounts from interacting on the subreddits they moderate.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  I'm almost in favor, but I would worry that for really small communities that deprives the sub of its biggest contributor
  - Mezzie 4y ago
    Maybe implement it once the community reaches a certain size/certain volume of posts?
- Sebb767 4y ago
  This would probably make the situation worse. You'd remove the incentive for people who moderate for the good of their own community, leaving only those who do so for the power they get (which are probably worse mods, though I don't have a citation for that).
- squarefoot 4y ago
  Not sure if that would not create more problems, but there should be some accountability when they behave like a-holes. The mod in question could have asked for proof (draw live on webcam? - not an expert, just wondering) or peer analysis instead of just silencing the artist. Then another user contacted the mod to complain, and got this reply: https://nitter.bird.froth.zone/MeaririForever/status/1607826931516596227#m https://nitter.bird.froth.zone/MeaririForever/status/1607826... That mod has become toxic and imho should either apologize or be removed asap.
- kibwen 4y ago
  That's the opposite of what you want. Good mods are those that are invested in the community and are well-known and respected participants.
Sebb767 4y ago
HN is really lucky to have dang. Although he is a payed mod, so it's not 100% comparable.
spacemadness 4y ago
Reddit mods are ineffective or harmful a lot of the time, but so is Reddit itself in how it incentivizes thankless moderation and oversized and noisy communities for the purpose of ads and their upcoming IPO. Most non-niche subreddits could be replaced by ChatGPT at this point.
- ilyt 4y ago
  Many just look like RSS feed of news outlets, except moderated by morons. And obligatory wide reaching TOS where the discussion about say how fighting games could be more accessible to new players gets removed under "no content for fun or entertainment allowed" TOS point...
- ok123456 4y ago
  > Most non-niche subreddits could be replaced by ChatGPT at this point. According to the "dead internet theory" they already are. I'm inclined to believe that a lot of the political discourse on there is bot driven.
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    It feels like it. It is so single minded compared to any real group of people I know.
crazygringo 4y ago
For real. From the headline I thought this was going to be a "ban" from an art department or marketplace or something of actual value, which would actually be news. Being banned from a subreddit for an arbitrary/idiotic reason is just reddit as usual.
tibanne 4y ago
Came here to say this.
jtbayly 4y ago
But in this case, the mods can't win. If they let AI art take over, HN will be condemning them for putting artists out of business. If they refuse to allow AI art, HN condemns them anyway.
- cat_plus_plus 4y ago
  On the contrary, AI will put a lot more artists in business by drastically expanding the range of artistic works than can be created and kinds of people who can create great works. Hanging a rectangle still painting on the wall is of limited appeal in the age of smartphones and VR. Imagining being able to paint walls and ceiling of entire house with aesthetically appealing, one of a kind art, for the same effort as currently required for a small still painting. A lot more people will be interested in paying for that and they will be willing to pay a lot more.
ilyt 4y ago
That's not news and applies to pretty much any moderators, especially the non-paid kind.
seattle_spring 4y ago
Fun fact: there's a popular car sub that will ban you for mentioning dealer markups in a disparaging way. That's right: if you say that Joe's Toyota tried to upcharge you $15k for a Camry, you'll be banned for life!
- ilyt 4y ago
  If it is the one I think they have both automatically blocking comments containing "stealership" too.
- weregiraffe 4y ago
  >you'll be banned for life! Or for the 30 seconds it will take you to make a new account.
- millzlane 4y ago
  is it /r/cars?
jasonkolb 4y ago
Reddit is a worse echo chamber than Twitter ever was. I gave up on it when I got banned from certain subreddits for posting quotes from congressional testimony. If you post anything that deviates in the slightest from the moderator's viewpoint, you get banned. The end result is an echo chamber that's getting tighter and smaller, excluding any diversity of opinion. It's no way to run a business.
- thechao 4y ago
  Reddit's business is to house all of the echo-chambers, though, isn't it? That seems like a great business to be in, during this Heyday of Echo Chamber Construction™.
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
    >"all of the echo-chambers" All of the like-minded echo-chambers. They seem to have no appetite for certain heresies and have walked back Aaron Swartz' original emphasis on free speech as a virtue.
    - richbell 4y ago
      > All of the like-minded echo-chambers. They seem to have no appetite for certain heresies and have walked back Aaron Swartz' original emphasis on free speech as a virtue. Reddit is ultimately amoral, despite the sensibilities of its moderators, imo. They want to sell ads and IPO, thus they've been increasingly purging communities, posts, and individuals that are either not advertiser-friendly or create trouble. Even as a casual user of the site, I have noticed a sharp increase in the number of submissions and comments that get Removed by Reddit (i.e., administrators) for no reason. I think they just went completely 'mask-off' after the debacle with Aimee Challenor.
- kypro 4y ago
  It's not just the mods, the users on Reddit are equally awful and contribute more to the echo chamber imo. The UK politics subreddit used to be one of my favourite subreddits back in the early 2010s. Back then it was quite a small community and while we had differences of opinions I think it's fair to say we enjoyed each other's company. But around the time of the Brexit vote, then Trump shortly after that, the subreddit started getting flooded with reactionary, low-effort comments and anyone who tried to provide a nuanced opinion or alternative view point was typically downvoted and insulted. I along with a few other long-time commenters were mostly in favour of Brexit at the time so we would constantly be downvoted and insulted whenever we wrote anything in favour of Brexit. And the worst was when a post made it to /r/all because then you'd an even larger flood of low-effort commenters just downvoting and insulting everyone with a different opinion. And this wasn't even just minor insults, this was people telling me to kill myself and that I'm a horrible person literally everyday. I'm not sure how much this was a political subreddit thing vs Reddit generally, but it was honestly ridiculous the stuff people would say to me there. Needless to say, I obviously left the community shortly after 2016, but I've seen similar things play across the site since. There seems to be no room for a difference of opinion there anymore. The mods if anything are just an amalgamation of the average Redditor.
robotnikman 4y ago
Reddit mods fully convinced me that most of what we read on the internet is written by insane people. And I include most Reddit mods in that. See previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827
shoulderfake 4y ago
[dead]
smsm42 4y ago
It is still surprising - at least for me, I've been using Reddit for years but mostly niche subs, nothing popular - how such a petty power warps people's minds. I dread to think what a real power does then.

tazjin 4y ago

Reddit's weird setup where essentially random people who were first "own" entire categories (= subreddits) of discussion is totally absurd.

root_axis 4y ago
It's not absurd, it's reddit's killer feature and the primary reason that reddit is as big as it is.
- EGreg 4y ago
  Sorry, I am not familiar with reddit’s model. What is “ownership” in this case? Total private tyranny, with delegation of authority? Does it transition to collectively and more democratically managing the channel, as stackexchsnge does?
  - cyborgx7 4y ago
    There is no collective or democratic management, unless the tyrannical overlords choose to allow it. "Total private tyranny, with delegation of authority" is correct. What it leaves out is that anybody else can make a competing subreddit, dedicated to the same issue, where they have control. The only thing getting there first does is prime realestate in the namespace and network effects of having an existing community.
    - EGreg 4y ago
      Ah, so like Valve Software then. On a related note, the only reason the United States' citizens directly vote for the President is at the pleasure of the State Legislatures. The Constitution allows them to choose the manner in which electors are elected, and they in theory could elect them directly (by specifying this before election day), usurping the power from the public. https://www.justsecurity.org/73274/no-state-legislatures-cannot-overrule-the-popular-vote/ https://www.justsecurity.org/73274/no-state-legislatures-can...
      - 4y ago

geraldwhen 4y ago

The hilarious irony is that the AI is quite possibly copying the authors older work if it was published on an image sharing site like Reddit or deviant art. Lawsuits need to destroy these models stolen from the public.

CuriouslyC 4y ago
While we're at it we should publicly flog anyone who's ever done any art in the style of anyone else before them, because they also stole ideas from the public.
- Auracle 4y ago
  I guess we’re back to crude cave paintings. Tear down all the statues and burn the museums.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    > Tear down all the statues and burn the museums. No need. Soon there will be so much AI generated "art" that human-made art will largely be pushed out of popular consciousness.
    - danogentili 4y ago
      Looking at recent online discussion, this is an easy conclusion to come to, but it's really just a huge bubble. People won't stop creating just because there's a cheaper alternative. The analogy with manual labor automation simply doesn't hold, first because people actually like creating stuff, but perhaps most importantly because there is no supply problem to solve. Taking the analogy with automation in the car industry, automation drastically lowered prices, making each individual copy of a product accessible to anyone. It costs virtually 0$ to copy a movie, a picture, a song and display it on every device on the planet. The cost of creating a audiovisual product is amortized across all users, dividing the costs by the number of users instead of multiplying it. Sure, one day we may have models capable of generating full 3d animated movies from just a prompt, paying for just the electricity used to run the GPUs, but how much cheaper can you get compared to 9$/month to compete with a traditional streaming subscription with human-made content? Assuming the world even comes to the point where AI streaming services contain virtually infinite amounts of meaningless autogenerated content, and assuming people actually like that content (which may be the case for the chunk of people already watching statistics-driven garbage on Netflix), nothing will stop creatives fired from previously-human studios from creating their own studios, producing hand-crafted, human works at the same price as always (9$/month). An analogy can be made with handcrafted cars like Lamborghinis may cost millions, with the difference that with audiovisual content, a work can be shared by (and the price amortized by) billions.

afavour 4y ago

Safari telling me the SSL cert for this site is not trusted. Perhaps only appropriate for "the tech deviant dot com".

bragr 4y ago
Seems like a normal let's encrypt cert to me.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Seems like parent is having their TLS certificate to thetechdeviant.com intercepted and the browser is having none of that.

jcq3 4y ago

I agree with the moderator, AI will push artists to their limits and force them to become creative which is the most important skill of an artist. Technicality isn't enough nowadays, doesn't matter if you can paint like Raphael, you need to be creative like Picasso or Dali.

capableweb 4y ago
> Technicality isn't enough nowadays When was it ever like that for artists? Most complex music to perform doesn't mean it's the "best", neither is it like that for art. As an example from visual art, abstract art is sometimes very simple, yet have a profound impact on people, and it was never about being "technical", "complex" or "hard to reproduce".
- potatototoo99 4y ago
  Technicality was everything in painting before the advent of the photograph.
  - loriverkutya 4y ago
    The impressionists wholeheartedly disagree with your comment.
    - Turing_Machine 4y ago
      The Impressionists came after photography, and in fact Impressionism was something of a reaction to its development. "Since we have the camera to do realistic images now, we should concentrate on other things.", more or less.
- aenvoker 4y ago
  AI has reached a point where aesthetics and technique are no longer hurdles. You can literally prompt gibberish and get back a highly aesthetic image that is completely boring and irrelevant. So, the challenge is still to dig deep and make something interesting and relevant. The hurdles are removed. The gates are wide open. You can make anything. So… what will you actually make?

teekert 4y ago

What does it even matter how art is created? It's the same with banning ChatGPT from StackOverflow: Who cares and who notices? Art is either evoking some feeling or not and it's different for everybody. An answer on SO is either helpful or not. Who cares how it was written? ChatGPT can easily say something more helpful than me, stable diffusion can easily make something I'd rather have on my wall than Da Vinci's Mona Lisa (or anything more along my preferences). Why do we care so much? What's "real art" anyway? I always like a colleague's mousepad, it said: "Is this art or can we throw this out?" Always makes me smile.

jaywalk 4y ago
It shouldn't matter how it's created. But some artists are pissed off that AI can generate art that people like, so they want to ban it. I don't think the average person cares at all.
- lleb97a 4y ago
  Some artist are pissed off that the AI can only generate art because it stole the reference pictures they spent countless hours creating.
onion2k 4y ago
If the goal of a community is to share work, critique each others efforts, and enjoy a hobby together, then someone coming along and pretending that they're doing it while they're not is obviously going to annoy people who are genuine. I see AI-generated art as being similar to taking performance enhancing drugs in sport or using something that's against the rules in motorsports. Outsiders don't really care because they just see someone performing at the same level of the others by using clever tech, but if you're part of the group then you will care much more.
- teekert 4y ago
  Ok, yeah, I can imagine if it's about competition, which it is when humans want to create the most beautiful thing purely with their bodies, that it's "unfair". There are (written and unwritten) rules in any competition after all. Imagine a formula 1 driver installing an AI :)

happyopossum 4y ago

Err, banned from a subreddit by a mod who didn’t believe him. Pretty sure that happens to about 10% of Reddit users every year.

zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago

Reminds me of the type of stuff r/Seattle mod u/careless would do https://www.seattleweekly.com/news/seattles-reddit-community-is-big-active-and-at-war-with-itself/ https://www.seattleweekly.com/news/seattles-reddit-community...

tedunangst 4y ago

Too much effort for the article to mention r/art was the subreddit in question?

danuker 4y ago

https://archive.ph/hK78G https://archive.ph/hK78G

MrPatan 4y ago

AI is replacing artists like CAD replaced arhcitects

pessimizer 4y ago
Or like InDesign replaced people who set type with hot lead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_metal_typesetting#/media/File:Linotype_operators_of_the_Chicago_Defender.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_metal_typesetting#/media/F...

darepublic 4y ago

I think this may be overreach by the moderator but I basically agree with their points. This looks just like a midjourney output. It is a hodge podge of different cultural influences -- asian character, with green eyes, with grecoroman garb, and eye of sauron orbs floating around her. It would have once been technically impressive, and now is just a kind of culture diarrhea.

jollyllama 4y ago
You've got a point, but I feel like I've seen more egregious examples of what you're describing. The Sauron eyes are unnecessary, but without that, it could be an interesting "Muse in the Warzone" piece. The character doesn't really look Asian to me though, or drawn in an anime style, but the expression could stand to be more subtle. We're all critics.
kzrdude 4y ago
So what. I guess the artist in question hasn't even been playing with AI art or even seen that much, so they don't have that context. And why do we need to look at AI art to know what is right for ourselves to paint?
vitno 4y ago
I have a passing familiarity with the webfiction "Beneath dragon eye moons", that this artwork was designed for. All of the things you are complaining about makes sense in the context of that writing.

Overtonwindow 4y ago

That's just Reddit.. I don't think we should take any Reddit community. Seriously because it is run by Reddit mods who have proven countless times to be absolutely terrible at their job.

Turing_Machine 4y ago
The problem with Reddit, SO, and pretty much any system with moderators is that a heavy-handed moderator can claim that he's "doing something", while a lenient moderator who only deletes genuinely egregious content looks like he's "not doing anything". The same is true of other institutions, such as congresses and parliaments. Note that politicians run on the basis of what new laws they've gotten passed far more often than what laws they've blocked. There's something to be said for the idea of a branch of government whose function is limited to repealing laws.

tjpnz 4y ago

This is /r/art by the way and based on the blurb and about section it seems less about art and more about fulfilling the deranged power fantasies of its moderators. What an unfriendly place. Nice to hear the artist has gotten a more positive response in /r/drawing.

kitsunesoba 4y ago
I'm not too surprised, /r/art has been famous for completely arbitrary rules for years by now.
oigursh 4y ago
/r/art mods are swivel-eyed loons

lifefeed 4y ago

Those hands have the right number of fingers. So either 1) It's not AI-generated art, or 2) It is AI-generated art and the artist is a master at prompting. Either way they should be celebrated.

buffington 4y ago
I've been keeping up with Stable Diffusion and all the tools around that for months now and it wasn't until a few weeks ago that I learned that you can just tell it to draw things accurately if you want to avoid weirdness. For example, if I include "anatomically correct fingers" it significantly decreases the number of images with wildly creative ideas for how human fingers should be drawn. Negative prompting works too. "deformed fingers" or "inaccurately drawn anatomy" can go a long way.
lgreiv 4y ago
This person knows what they are talking about. Although I have been pretty successful in obtaining realistic hands by prompting photographs and including make of a camera, lens and film [1][2]. Somehow this seems to narrow down the model to mostly produce realistic output. Still, some variants will occasionally feature Chernobyl-levels of fingers. [1] https://cdn.midjourney.com/6f52a6e9-b3f2-4830-81b1-84c8f8ca40a7/grid_0.png https://cdn.midjourney.com/6f52a6e9-b3f2-4830-81b1-84c8f8ca4... [2] https://cdn.midjourney.com/361e143f-5121-4bff-ada9-069c2e400e40/grid_0.png https://cdn.midjourney.com/361e143f-5121-4bff-ada9-069c2e400...

c3534l 4y ago

It does look like AI generated art, tbh.

layer8 4y ago
Only at first glance. It doesn’t have any dodgy area or incongruence like you pretty much always find in AI pictures.
- brador 4y ago
  The new hotness is letting the AI do the first pass then the artist cleans it up before posting.

bufferoverflow 4y ago

And that's the argument I've been making. Once you can't tell the difference between AI-made art and human-made art, the demand for human-made art will dramatically decrease, especially in the commercial areas. If it takes a human a month to paint something beautiful, and 1 minute for AI, it's really hard to compete with AI. The best we have is Midjourney V4, and it's getting quite close.

splatzone 4y ago
This is why I believe we’ll soon see a huge increase in the popularity of ‘physical’ art. Theatre, sculpture, dance… in a world overflowing with computer made images and sounds, things which can only be human-made will be all the more special.
- bufferoverflow 4y ago
  You're assuming robots won't be able to sculpt, dance or theater.
- cma 4y ago
  There are AI approaches that generate images one brush stroke at a time. I can imagine that going from that to a robot arm laying them down on physical medium if it isn't already a widespread thing. Disney uses a robot Spiderman stunt double to be able to launch it into the air and do aerial acrobatics, edging into the dance example.
- kazinator 4y ago
  We've had painting robots for quite a long time now.

rvz 4y ago

All digital artists need to do to prove that their art is not AI-generated is to record their screen and show a start to finish recording of themselves painting the digital image from scratch as proof. This is not new and it is similar to speed painting, and all these prompters using Stable Diffusion cannot do such a thing. Problem solved and job done.

ryandrake 4y ago
The artist in question offered to show the raw Photoshop files and the progression of work done on the piece to prove it was not AI generated, but the mod did not take him up on that offer, and simply banned him.
yegle 4y ago
Wait until AI can generate such a video in 1min?

xwdv 4y ago

I’m glad. If your “art” can be mistaken for AI art, it’s likely just content, not art. The example picture is meaningless, just technical work. Makes no sense upon scrutiny. True art is something that can’t be replicated by AI. You will have no doubt once you see it. It still exists even with the proliferation of AI art. It’s like the difference between a random picture and a meme. The meme looks like a picture, but it captures an emotion or essential human truth that you connect with upon looking at it, where as a picture is just a random picture that could look like a meme but has no real meaning to it. You will know what I’m talking about.

buffington 4y ago
> True art is something that can’t be replicated by AI. You will have no doubt once you see it. Ignoring your assertion about what art is, I have to ask: what happens when you can't tell the difference?
- xwdv 4y ago
  Then our search for human connection through art only deepens.
MrNeon 4y ago
I looked at the image and it feels like art in the terms that you put it. What now. Is my inner experience of art not valid? How do we reconcile this?

kazinator 4y ago

I'm not saying I agree with the actions of the mods, but there is a grain of truth in the "way of the world" remark. Human artists who are just highly skilled executors of bad taste are going to be decimated by AI.

Adraghast 4y ago
Which is why, despite my distaste for DALL-E and its ilk, I’m not at all moved by the anguish over it rendering artists obsolete. Stuff like this never had any artistic value in the first place, so it makes perfect sense to me that a bot would create it rather than a person.

cat_plus_plus 4y ago

Even if true, AI is just another tool and combined work of artists and AI can produce greater art than the artist alone. For example, natural world has a lot of repeated elements and hand painting each one detracts from time that could be spent on more expressive aspects of the work. Airplanes let us fly further and faster than birds, should that be avoided / considered not to be real flight just because we are getting technological assistance?

Adraghast 4y ago
Fundamental misunderstanding of what art is.
deely3 4y ago
> AI can produce greater art than the artist alone.. Citation needed. > natural world has a lot of repeated elements and hand painting each one detracts from time that could be spent on more expressive aspects of the work. Can't agree. Using these repeated elements artist can add additional level of impression for a viewer. While AI probably will use random distribution in this situation.
- Guillaume86 4y ago
  No citation needed since he clearly said: > combined work of artists and AI can produce greater art than the artist alone

flumpcakes 4y ago

Speaking on the topic of Reddit and mods and it's power structure: In the UK Reddit has pushed a new subreddit called "HeyUK". It has turned up in the subscription feeds for some (all?) UK users automatically without the user asking for it or adding it. If you remove it from your list of subreddits the posts will still show up in your feed as "sponsored". As far as I can see this new subreddit is seeded with just cross posts from other UK subreddits and is created/pushed by Reddit itself. The big issue I have is that this is just another subreddit with 15-odd random people who are the mods. These people have the unilateral power to shape discourse and be the arbiter of what is "UK" and what isn't. Reddit is getting a bit too big, this feels very strange. On the swing-back we then have Reddit not banning the "jailbait" subreddit until it made major US news. I have no idea what's going on with social media anymore, I'm just left with the overwhelming feeling that the people with the voice and the power are not the best of us.

purpleblue 4y ago
The beauty of reddit is that you can create your own subreddit with your own mods and have the discourse that you want. You're not held to just sticking with the subreddits that are given to you.
- ok123456 4y ago
  It can be 'sponsored' as the parent noted. (By whom? Why?)
  - flumpcakes 4y ago
    Not only sponsored - but also automatically added to your list of subscribed sub-reddits! I only saw the "sponsored" posts when I went out of my way to unsub from this new subreddit I was unceremoniously subscribed too.
- blendergeek 4y ago
  What the parent is pointing out is that Reddit choosing subreddits for people to subscribe. Sure, I can "create the subreddit with [my] own mods and have the discourse that [I] want". But nobody will see it because everybody is automatically added to the subreddits that Reddit chooses.

lofaszvanitt 4y ago

Reddit = brainwash center

deely3 4y ago
Thats truly interesting thing to learn on such site as HN.
- lofaszvanitt 4y ago
  There is something inherently wrong there. The up/downvotes do not make sense, there is a seriously lopsided (non human?) feedback that goes against common sense. And certain very popular reddits are just puzzling. There are things you wouldn't do in real life if you would know a bit more about the context... and yet people get feedback at those reddits that what they are doing is good, every critical thought is downvoted in an instant and the list goes on. It's like an experiment on groups of people where their feedback is totally distorted. I can compare it to a relationship where a parent praises their child when they do something wrong, instead of scolding them and explaining what is right. So in the end the child is doing totally batshit crazy things and thinks that is normal. Or imagine that you get in a bubble where your sense of excess heat is distorted and you can touch a red hot iron without any severe pain, yet your hands are slowly crumbling away like a charcoal. The patterns there are very very strange.

pcrh 4y ago

On the topic of AI vs "real" art, I visited /r/artcommissions. I was surprised at how little people are asking, many in the range of $5-$50 for original work.

layer8 4y ago
Supply and demand.
- pcrh 4y ago
  Quite. Then I realized that most art has always been cheap (c.f. "starving artist"), so maybe AI doesn't make _that_ much difference in the end?
  - layer8 4y ago
    It’ll probably allow more people to be starving artists.
    - pcrh 4y ago
      The difference has maybe always been in the interaction between the artist and the market. Even very competent and painstaking replicas of "great works" that are indistinguishable to most command a small fraction of the price of the original.

possiblydrunk 4y ago

Wow, that's like banning a photorealist because their work looks too much like a photograph.

zzz345345 4y ago

[flagged]

jack_the_dev 4y ago

Surprised no one is talking about how this is terrible art and derivative of GoT and LoTR.

tester457 4y ago
Because the art is actually good and better than most hobbyists in terms of technical skill in digital art.

cobertos 4y ago

If AI content is already this indistinguishable from normal content, how much normal content is "real content" anymore? We have no metric or insight into this. The percentage will keep increasing as it's cheap and very economically beneficial for companies to use.

nilslindemann 4y ago

Notice how this is an unmanaged misuse of power. The artist has no legal tools to defend against the actions of this moderator. An internet court is needed for these cases, like courts in the real world, and supported by them. And an internet police, which makes sure the court rulings are obeyed. Also supported by real world police, if necessary.

RutgerHauer 4y ago

They aren’t wrong. It looks like AI art because it’s meaningless, derivative bullshit.