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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 feeli

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 :)
  - jamincan 4y ago
    I think it's more than just about competition. If the whole point of a subreddit is to critique each other's work and discuss process etc., someone coming in with AI-generated art isn't going to further those goals, and the risk is that the subreddit gets overrun by the AI art and no longer be focused on its original subject matter.
  - drdaeman 4y ago
    > Imagine a formula 1 driver installing an AI :) As an unpopular opinion: I don't watch races, but maybe I would watch that. I mean, Roborace is pretty cool (but it's mostly about the tech rather than racing, and IIRC it's all strictly driverless), I wonder how a man-machine pair would do. Similarly, I find most sports boring and hardly worth watching (unless in a good company, but then it's not really about the sports), but if some day there would be Olympic Games NG+ without any doping or gear restrictions, I'd most likely check those out with great interest. I do realize there would be tons of drawbacks and nuances involved (and more than a lot of people screaming hate how this is wrong to them), but that'd be a) interesting on a personal level - watching some folks who trained for their whole life isn't really resonating with me - I'm happy for them being beyond good but I can't say I really care; and b) would produce enormous effects on society, in terms of medical and technological advances, just like the space races of the past (and hopefully the future) - I'd surely cheer for that. Then, I'm a proponent of machine assistance in computer games, too. In my opinion, human bodies and minds are inherent sources of unfair advantage and machine assistance - if equally available to everyone - is the greatest equalizer. Though, of course, I acknowledge that a lot of games are designed solely or mostly around imperfections of human performance (mechanical or perception).
- papichulo4 4y ago
  Have you tried AI-generated art yet? It's more like protein powder, not steroids.
  - onion2k 4y ago
    I've used Dall-e, midjourney, and stable diffusion, and given my total inability to draw anything properly its like competing in a 100m sprint in a drag racer.
Sharlin 4y ago
Well, the temporary ban at SO is entirely justified. They already saw the influx of massive amounts of new answers, generated by ChatGPT, that are essentially spam and make everybody worse off. Even if 90% of the answers are perfectly correct, that leaves the 10% that are wrong, sometimes in subtle ways. And because the submitter of those answers is only parroting what ChatGPT wrote, they probably won't be available for further discourse, or to amend the answer they submitted. The biggest problem with ChatGPT is that when it's wrong, it's confidently wrong and cannot quantify its uncertainty in any way (maybe it's too human-like in that respect...) Furthermore, the whole idea of a reputation economy collapses if reputation becomes "too cheap to meter".
- ilyt 4y ago
  > Even if 90% of the answers are perfectly correct, that leaves the 10% that are wrong, sometimes in subtle ways. I wish 90% of real people answers were correct...
unshavedyak 4y ago
Well in this case, it's the artists who care. Ie the person at risk being "replaced". Yes, ML is not there yet to actually replace artists, but we all see the writing on the wall. I'm a software dev attempting to learn art. I recently joined Mastodon related to this purpose and it's quite the hot topic there. Many, many artists pissed about how their work is being used to train corporate profits as well as potentially undermining their living/passion/etc. I've actually seen some cool art in protest of "AI"... usually involving malformed hands which the artist community have gravitated towards being the representation of current AI capabilities. I think it matters how it is created, personally. Not because the author of an individual piece of art is important to me, but rather because once AI moves into a problem space and can effectively and accurately "solve" that problem space the displacement of humans will be surreal. How it affects people is the important thing to me. I'll be interested to see how we manage to recognize this reality as AI improves.
Sebb767 4y ago
> An answer on SO is either helpful or not. Who cares how it was written? "Who cares if the diagnosis is done by a medical expert or someone pulling out random drugs they tried before? As long as I feel better immediately after taking them, who cares how they were prescribed?" The case on SO is clearly different, as ChatGPT might answer incorrectly or answer with something containing subtle bugs. There's also a good chance that you won't be immediately able to spot those bugs, as, if you were sufficiently knowledgeable in the topic yourself, you would have most likely not asked that question. The case for art is a bit different, as there is no technically correct way to do it, but there is still a value to the way it is created. Would you think the first picture drawn by your child is worth the same as any other bad painting? Would you agree that a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa has equal value to the actual object? If no, it should be pretty easy to see why a painting generated by an AI is different from one created by a human.
- danenania 4y ago
  "ChatGPT might answer incorrectly or answer with something containing subtle bugs. There's also a good chance that you won't be immediately able to spot those bugs, as, if you were sufficiently knowledgeable in the topic yourself, you would have most likely not asked that question." Playing devil's advocate here, but this also clearly applies to human answers.
  - Sebb767 4y ago
    SOs answer quality was never perfect, but there are still a few differences: - Humans actually try to answer the question at hand, whereas ChatGPT is only auto-completing text. This might lead to similar results in a lot of cases, but the goal of ChatGPT is not to produce correct SO answers. - Related, humans will (usually) back off or correct answers if errors are pointed out to them. ChatGPT (at the moment) doesn't. - Humans will (usually) not attempt to answer questions they don't feel like they are qualified to answer. ChatGPT will. I'm not saying that SO is/was perfect as-is, but ChatGPT is - in my opinion - overall not likely to improve SOs quality as of now. Since it is currently banned on SO, it seems like this is not only my opinion.
  - 4y ago
polio 4y ago
It matters to me because, to me, art is a reflection of emotional processes specific to human beings. There is meaning conveyed by the difficulty of technique, refined over hundreds of hours at great opportunity cost. It says to me that the human being has sacrificed a lot to produce this piece, and so I should give it my attention. For human-made work, complexity is something like proof of work which is itself proof of conviction. None of this applies to generated work. While I am impressed at the analogous sacrifices of the human inventors of AI, the work produced by the AI itself has not yet surpassed the level of significance of a party trick, even though I would be impressed if a human had produced the work .
sfpotter 4y ago
Seriously? Shouldn’t the SO example be very obvious? If you submit an answer yourself and it’s wrong, if someone begins the process of critiquing it or editing it, they can engage in a dialogue with you in order to make this happen. You can explain how you came up with your answer, and they can help you debug your thinking. Seeing this process unfold over a couple comments is often one of the most enlightening things on SO. How is this supposed to happen if you submit a ChatGPT answer which you have just accepted on blind faith and maybe don’t even understand?
Beltalowda 4y ago
> It's the same with banning ChatGPT from StackOverflow: Who cares and who notices? People were posting low-quality rambling bullshit, sometimes completely off-base, without even bothering with the most basic of smell-tests. People occasionally post low-quality rambling bullshit too, or things that are off-base, but with ChatGPT you can post 100 answers in an hour. It's a matter of scale. The ban wasn't pre-emptive, it was reactive in response to a real observed problem with people lazily Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V spamming poor quality nonsense from ChatGPT. While technically not allowed, you can still use ChatGPT on Stack Overflow: just make sure it's correct, copy-edit things a bit to remove some of the waffling and repetition that ChatGPT tends to generate, and no one will even notice. I'm less involved in the art community, but I would imagine that most communities are at least in part about people who create things for the joy of creating things, and then share that in the community for the joy of sharing. I don't have anything against AI art, but if lots of people start lazily spamming that kind of stuff then you've kind of lost your community. It's not so much about what is or isn't art, it's about having a community. That said, this mod is clearly being an ass about it.
unethical_ban 4y ago
We should at least have transparency in the origin of the work. I care about the human experience, not the AI experience.

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 :)
- jamincan 4y ago
  I think it's more than just about competition. If the whole point of a subreddit is to critique each other's work and discuss process etc., someone coming in with AI-generated art isn't going to further those goals, and the risk is that the subreddit gets overrun by the AI art and no longer be focused on its original subject matter.
- drdaeman 4y ago
  > Imagine a formula 1 driver installing an AI :) As an unpopular opinion: I don't watch races, but maybe I would watch that. I mean, Roborace is pretty cool (but it's mostly about the tech rather than racing, and IIRC it's all strictly driverless), I wonder how a man-machine pair would do. Similarly, I find most sports boring and hardly worth watching (unless in a good company, but then it's not really about the sports), but if some day there would be Olympic Games NG+ without any doping or gear restrictions, I'd most likely check those out with great interest. I do realize there would be tons of drawbacks and nuances involved (and more than a lot of people screaming hate how this is wrong to them), but that'd be a) interesting on a personal level - watching some folks who trained for their whole life isn't really resonating with me - I'm happy for them being beyond good but I can't say I really care; and b) would produce enormous effects on society, in terms of medical and technological advances, just like the space races of the past (and hopefully the future) - I'd surely cheer for that. Then, I'm a proponent of machine assistance in computer games, too. In my opinion, human bodies and minds are inherent sources of unfair advantage and machine assistance - if equally available to everyone - is the greatest equalizer. Though, of course, I acknowledge that a lot of games are designed solely or mostly around imperfections of human performance (mechanical or perception).
papichulo4 4y ago
Have you tried AI-generated art yet? It's more like protein powder, not steroids.
- onion2k 4y ago
  I've used Dall-e, midjourney, and stable diffusion, and given my total inability to draw anything properly its like competing in a 100m sprint in a drag racer.

Sharlin 4y ago

Well, the temporary ban at SO is entirely justified. They already saw the influx of massive amounts of new answers, generated by ChatGPT, that are essentially spam and make everybody worse off. Even if 90% of the answers are perfectly correct, that leaves the 10% that are wrong, sometimes in subtle ways. And because the submitter of those answers is only parroting what ChatGPT wrote, they probably won't be available for further discourse, or to amend the answer they submitted. The biggest problem with ChatGPT is that when it's wrong, it's confidently wrong and cannot quantify its uncertainty in any way (maybe it's too human-like in that respect...) Furthermore, the whole idea of a reputation economy collapses if reputation becomes "too cheap to meter".

ilyt 4y ago
> Even if 90% of the answers are perfectly correct, that leaves the 10% that are wrong, sometimes in subtle ways. I wish 90% of real people answers were correct...

unshavedyak 4y ago

Well in this case, it's the artists who care. Ie the person at risk being "replaced". Yes, ML is not there yet to actually replace artists, but we all see the writing on the wall. I'm a software dev attempting to learn art. I recently joined Mastodon related to this purpose and it's quite the hot topic there. Many, many artists pissed about how their work is being used to train corporate profits as well as potentially undermining their living/passion/etc. I've actually seen some cool art in protest of "AI"... usually involving malformed hands which the artist community have gravitated towards being the representation of current AI capabilities. I think it matters how it is created, personally. Not because the author of an individual piece of art is important to me, but rather because once AI moves into a problem space and can effectively and accurately "solve" that problem space the displacement of humans will be surreal. How it affects people is the important thing to me. I'll be interested to see how we manage to recognize this reality as AI improves.

Sebb767 4y ago

> An answer on SO is either helpful or not. Who cares how it was written? "Who cares if the diagnosis is done by a medical expert or someone pulling out random drugs they tried before? As long as I feel better immediately after taking them, who cares how they were prescribed?" The case on SO is clearly different, as ChatGPT might answer incorrectly or answer with something containing subtle bugs. There's also a good chance that you won't be immediately able to spot those bugs, as, if you were sufficiently knowledgeable in the topic yourself, you would have most likely not asked that question. The case for art is a bit different, as there is no technically correct way to do it, but there is still a value to the way it is created. Would you think the first picture drawn by your child is worth the same as any other bad painting? Would you agree that a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa has equal value to the actual object? If no, it should be pretty easy to see why a painting generated by an AI is different from one created by a human.

danenania 4y ago
"ChatGPT might answer incorrectly or answer with something containing subtle bugs. There's also a good chance that you won't be immediately able to spot those bugs, as, if you were sufficiently knowledgeable in the topic yourself, you would have most likely not asked that question." Playing devil's advocate here, but this also clearly applies to human answers.
- Sebb767 4y ago
  SOs answer quality was never perfect, but there are still a few differences: - Humans actually try to answer the question at hand, whereas ChatGPT is only auto-completing text. This might lead to similar results in a lot of cases, but the goal of ChatGPT is not to produce correct SO answers. - Related, humans will (usually) back off or correct answers if errors are pointed out to them. ChatGPT (at the moment) doesn't. - Humans will (usually) not attempt to answer questions they don't feel like they are qualified to answer. ChatGPT will. I'm not saying that SO is/was perfect as-is, but ChatGPT is - in my opinion - overall not likely to improve SOs quality as of now. Since it is currently banned on SO, it seems like this is not only my opinion.
- 4y ago

polio 4y ago

It matters to me because, to me, art is a reflection of emotional processes specific to human beings. There is meaning conveyed by the difficulty of technique, refined over hundreds of hours at great opportunity cost. It says to me that the human being has sacrificed a lot to produce this piece, and so I should give it my attention. For human-made work, complexity is something like proof of work which is itself proof of conviction. None of this applies to generated work. While I am impressed at the analogous sacrifices of the human inventors of AI, the work produced by the AI itself has not yet surpassed the level of significance of a party trick, even though I would be impressed if a human had produced the work .

sfpotter 4y ago

Seriously? Shouldn’t the SO example be very obvious? If you submit an answer yourself and it’s wrong, if someone begins the process of critiquing it or editing it, they can engage in a dialogue with you in order to make this happen. You can explain how you came up with your answer, and they can help you debug your thinking. Seeing this process unfold over a couple comments is often one of the most enlightening things on SO. How is this supposed to happen if you submit a ChatGPT answer which you have just accepted on blind faith and maybe don’t even understand?

Beltalowda 4y ago

> It's the same with banning ChatGPT from StackOverflow: Who cares and who notices? People were posting low-quality rambling bullshit, sometimes completely off-base, without even bothering with the most basic of smell-tests. People occasionally post low-quality rambling bullshit too, or things that are off-base, but with ChatGPT you can post 100 answers in an hour. It's a matter of scale. The ban wasn't pre-emptive, it was reactive in response to a real observed problem with people lazily Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V spamming poor quality nonsense from ChatGPT. While technically not allowed, you can still use ChatGPT on Stack Overflow: just make sure it's correct, copy-edit things a bit to remove some of the waffling and repetition that ChatGPT tends to generate, and no one will even notice. I'm less involved in the art community, but I would imagine that most communities are at least in part about people who create things for the joy of creating things, and then share that in the community for the joy of sharing. I don't have anything against AI art, but if lots of people start lazily spamming that kind of stuff then you've kind of lost your community. It's not so much about what is or isn't art, it's about having a community. That said, this mod is clearly being an ass about it.

unethical_ban 4y ago

We should at least have transparency in the origin of the work. I care about the human experience, not the AI experience.