11 ms·

Somewhat tangential, but the Krita community and core team have been pretty explicitly anti-AI. https://krita-artists.org/t/change-in-policy-for-topics-related-

• thot_experiment 3y ago
  The AI hate is suuuch a meme in the art community, it's very frustrating/alienating. (Though understandably, neoliberal capitalism is also extremely frustrating, so I see why artists mad, I just wish they'd be mad at the root cause.) ((the root cause is that an economic system fundamentally based on scarcity == value doesn't make sense when applied to things that are essentially infinite, and kludgeing in artificial scarcity to make things work is not a good take))
  • whywhywhywhy 3y ago
    It’s more just ridiculous because the same community is completely fine with photobashing and “paint overs” (aka tracing) and “fan art” (aka profiting from IP you don’t own).
    • raincole 3y ago
      Photobashing was hated to death when it was new. Now it's the norm (for environmental concept art at least). AI will go through the same process.
      • neoromantique 3y ago
        AI is the norm for concept art already, it's too useful for it not to be.
    • flxy 3y ago
      I don't know what sort of artists you know, but of all the artists I know, nobody is "completely fine" with tracing. It is okay but still frowned upon when people do it for "practice" without publishing the result, but anything that even looks remotely like it is traced gets called out and further investigated incredibly quickly. And as for fan art, a lot of companies explicitly allow art based on their IP, as long as it's used/published by the artists themselves and the commercial rights to the work aren't sold to some other company. In Japan, there is a whole industry based around derivative works, Doujin - self-published works, that works off of what is essentially a code of honor. Companies don't go against the artists, as long as said artists adhere to certain guidelines on what they're allowed to depict (eg. no NSFW content.) Many franchises have become a lot more popular due to fan art/derivative works alone (ie. Touhou Project, Fate Series.)
      • jwells89 3y ago
        Tracing is particularly unacceptable in professional settings. There’s been several cases, some even somewhat high profile, where manga and comic artists have found themselves in hot water as a result of engaging in the practice.
        • charcircuit 3y ago
          >Tracing is particularly unacceptable in professional settings. Tracing is a fundamental skill in a professional settings for consistency, speed, and quality reasons. In torepaku it is the paku (pakuri) part that is not acceptable.
  • wokwokwok 3y ago
    > it's very frustrating/alienating Mm. I’ve spoken to a number of artists who have expressed similar feelings of despair, frustration and anger. There are many upset people over this technology, and calling it a meme diminishes them to meaningless copycat haters. I don’t think that’s true; and doing it, really reallllly makes them angry. Consider: this attitude it part of the reason why that attitude exists. :| If the stable diffusion folk hadn’t gone crazy cloning every art style they could and laughing about it, we could all have had a very different AI art future. …but apparently we can’t have nice things because (some) people suck.
    • Lacerda69 3y ago
      IMO all of this will blow over in a few years and most artists will accept that "AI" is just another tool that one can use to create art. It took some time for photography as well... edit: typo
      • dbrgn 3y ago
        That's an interesting point. Retouching a photo after taking it used to be "manipulating reality", frowned upon by "real" photographers. Nowadays, postprocessing digital negatives and adding your own style to it is part of a normal photographer's workflow. (However, I think the negative feelings don't come from a discussion of "real vs fake" or "classical vs new", but mostly from the point of view that using artwork as training data is stealing. I don't agree with that view, but I think it's at the core of the argument.)
        • jdiff 3y ago
          People have been doing post processing of photographs as long as photographs have existed.
          • dbrgn 3y ago
            Yes, but - at least in landscape photography - there was a divide between people using retouching to "fix" things (i.e. removing spots, making the colors more realistic, etc) and the people altering the style of the photo (e.g. by boosting or even shifting certain colors to achieve a certain look). The latter was viewed as fake by some people I knew. Today this is just part of your photography style.
  • kranke155 3y ago
    Yet this terrible economic system you describe determines whether these people can afford food, rent and their children's education. Yeah it must be a meme.
    • dahhowl 3y ago
      Surely, there exists no other economic system where a percentage of the world's population is allowed access to food, rent and education for their children. And there certainly doesn't exist any where the entirety of the world population can be given access to these things.
      • kranke155 3y ago
        You're talking about hypotheticals, I'm talking about reality. Saying "these silly people are obsessed with their economic system, which is pointless!" makes no sense if those same people live or die by that system.
    • misnome 3y ago
      They aren’t CS graduates so they can’t really be human or have thought processes. Literally stealing their work to pad a VC linesheet must honestly be the most altruistic of options.
      • ben_w 3y ago
        Your snark would be slightly harder hitting if not for the fact that freshly minted CS grads demonstrate approximately the same skill as LLMs when it comes to turning feature requests into code. The "G" in "AGI" is "general", as in "can do all things" — Ask not for whose job Bell Labs tolls, it tolls for them all. (And now I'm reminded of someone, ages ago now, who was boasting about how good he was at matching all the `new`s and `delete`s in his C++ code, or possibly even `malloc`s and `free`s, being completely oblivious to the existence of STL smart pointers…)
  • hafriedlander 3y ago
    I have tried to explain "you're not mad at generative AI, you're mad at late stage capitalism" before. Most people aren't really willing to smash the state though (I understand, that's where all my stuff is) so look for less drastic ways to protect themselves.
  • bsenftner 3y ago
    I've had the situation where long term friends contact me with a child/teen either entering or graduating art/animation/film school and want me to give advice to their kid. My background is 3D graphics, animation, film VFX, video games, and AI - from the software developer and digital artist sides. Every one of those conversations has been their kid telling me they will never touch AI, AI is evil, AI is the death of art and artists, and they refuse to see it any other way. One is graduating this year, wants to be a concept designer for high concept film and games: a role that is leaning heavy into generative art simply for the variations it generates. They refuse to discuss how their intended industry already uses and is adopting AI generative art en mass. Times when I wish I had the eloquent voice of another.
  • ben_w 3y ago
    Mm. Possibly, but not necessarily. I have a suspicion that art is to humans as fancy tails are to peacocks: the difficulty is the point. I believe this is why we have art galleries proudly displaying oil paintings of fruit bowls, but don't do this for random food snapshots. It's also why photographs as a category were initially dismissed (in an era that had come to praise extreme realism in paintings), but when photographers went on long trips to visit unusual places, people, and events, those photographs suddenly did count as art. Bit of overlap between arts and knowledge shown by the wiktionary entry for the Latin "ars", so this can be extended to the way Socrates didn't like writing, and the desire for hand-made foods and durable goods over mass produced foods and products. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
    • amelius 3y ago
      > the difficulty is the point Ok, so what does the next level of "difficult" look like?
      • dale_glass 3y ago
        It's an interesting question, because AI breaks the intuitiveness of this dramatically. You can look at say, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wedding_at_Cana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wedding_at_Cana and quickly get that yup, this took a whole lot of time and effort. But AI has nothing like that. Some things that look like an awful lot of work it spits out with ease, some things that sound simple can take a whole lot of fiddling. Like the other day I was playing with DALLE3, and for whatever reason it didn't want to place things on a table.
        • Dioxide2119 3y ago
          In the same way that using a limited medium like some oil paints, paintbrushes, and canvas to create images = the art of painting, there will become the art of hacking / abusing / advanced prompt engineering / pushing AI to do things that are close to or at its limits of capabilities. A: Oh so your LLM generated an image of a spaceship cockpit, so what? B: So what? This LLM was trained on nothing but tax records from 1929! A: :o amazing! So AI artists do not necessarily equal 'creatives who render images using AI tooling', they may instead be 'creatives who tease out novel outputs from AIs' or something like that. Then again, this is suspiciously close to a 'what is art' conversation, so i'll stop here.
  • gumballindie 3y ago
    Is it though? Veryone I know in the art community is quite pissed at copyright violations.
  • bayindirh 3y ago
    I don't agree. I take photographs as a hobby, and share them, just for showing them off. They're generally licensed with CC-NC-BY plus no derivatives (akin to GPL), but I don't want my images to be taken to a training set to feed a generative model without my consent, because you're violating the license terms I put on it. Same is valid for my code. I stopped using GitHub, because it devours any and all open repositories regardless of its license and without asking for consent. This is not about scarcity, but respect and ethics mostly. At least, from my perspective.
    • cwillu 3y ago
      For what it's worth, CC-NC is not akin to the GPL, at all. The GPL says “you can sell this if you want, but whoever you sell it to can still do whatever they want with it, subject to the same terms.” CC-NC says “you can't do whatever you want with this” Which isn't to say that you're wrong to use whatever license you like, just that it's very much not similar in spirit to the GPL. Protecting the right of others to make derivatives of the thing being licensed is, in fact, the entire point of the license.
      • bayindirh 3y ago
        By akin, I didn't mean it's functionally equivalent. GPLv3 is one of the strongest copyleft licenses for software out there, forcing re-sharing of changes while preventing any source closing. CC-BY-NC is the strictest CC license which allows sharing, with credit, with no commercial use and no derivatives. Hence I tried to aim for "I'm selecting the one of the most strict license for sharing my photos, as I do the same for my software, yet AI systems disregard my license every occasion and just rip what I put out without my consent or consideration of the license I use for these, hence I refuse to use, or support AI models which are fed like this". Hope this helps.
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
        • cwillu 3y ago
          You can apply CC-BY-NC to software, people have done it. And it's recognized as _not_ being an open license, it's at best an “open-access” or “source-visible” license, because of the usage restrictions. The entire point of an open-source license is that you're _preventing_ people from restricting modification and derivative use. The whole point of the AGPL was to prevent a hack that companies found to abuse the software's license and prevent derivative use of their changes. I'm not saying you're morally in the wrong for choosing a license that doesn't permit commercial use, but I _am_ saying that it's contrary to the spirit of the license you're claiming it's akin to. Hope this helps.
  • loki-ai 3y ago
    It is not just in the art community: check the currently top post and see how many devs are saying they would never use AI on their work. They hate and are alienated as much as any artist.
  • boppo1 3y ago
    Artist here. It's totally reasonable for artists to be mad about models being trained on their work without informed prior consent. Anger about using AI is less justifiied.
    • ajuc 3y ago
      Would you object to somebody looking at your images and imitating the style? How is AI different?
      • boppo1 3y ago
        >Would you object to somebody looking at your images and imitating the style? Yes. It's quite difficult to do so, however. The people capable usually have better things to do with their skills.
        • whelp_24 3y ago
          The claim that people don't copy art styles or even that it's rare is ridiculous. Opwm tumblr and you will immediately be presented with a counterexample.
          • boppo1 3y ago
            I mean if you're talking about throwaway 4chan/twitter-anime, that's a different tier of art. I'm talking artists more like Jeremy Lipking or Jose Lopez Vegara.
      • dotnet00 3y ago
        Have you ever actually looked into people who do that? They put in a lot of effort into understanding the original creator, their intent, process, materials etc. The copies are still very much art as they are expressions of the imitator's feelings towards the work. Performing studies of popular art by trying to replicate it is a powerful tool for learning precisely because it allows you, as an artist, to understand how the original artist thought, helping you learn to think like an artist and leading you to develop your own ideas and means of expression. AI is none of that.
  • __loam 3y ago
    It's super rich to call artists being mad at a labor alienation machine, alienating for being mad at it.
  • Gormo 3y ago
    Agreed that trying to create artificial scarcity is not good (and isn't really compatible with any ethical system, least of all "neoliberal capitalism"), but it should be pointed out that natural scarcity is an a priori fact of nature that economics itself is our method of dealing with, and is not a normative contrivance of any "economic system". I'm not entirely sure how any of this relates to artists agitating against AI, unless they are themselves seeking to create artificial scarcity to prop up the market value of their services, now that the supply of art ability is no longer as constrained as it previously was.
  • pxoe 3y ago
    you're a meme. do you "see" why artists are mad? it's quite simple. artists offer to make their art for a price, as a 'service'. then, something comes in, that pirated their previous works, and offers to make imagery in that art style for free (or at a low low price), undercutting and displacing that artist. really it's a 'yet another spin on piracy'. cause that's just the 'services' part, besides the 'selling works/artwork' which has long been rife with piracy, but the 'pirating what's been offered as a service' thing is new. piracy expanding into 'services' field as well. services (particularly those that rely on someone specifically taking their time to do something, and not just 'press button, service gets performed unattended') are scarce. there's only so many hours and so much time in one's life.
  • opyate 3y ago
    I don't get AI hate. It's nothing other than "technology hate". As a web developer who started out in 2001/2002, I watched as custom web design jobs dried up, and more and more people (and ahem artists) started using online tools to create a templatised website on the cheap. Did I throw a tantrum? Nope! I learned to do backend dev so I could make my own automation tools. Seriously, just embrace these new superpowers already.
    • deely3 3y ago
      I get AI hate. How many AI models out there created with clear consent from authors of source materials? Zero?
      • tavavex 3y ago
        Who decided that they should have the power to rule over this? Not only does it appear to be legal, but deciding that dataset compilation is inherently immoral and consent-violating would represent a draconian expansion of IP law that almost no individual should agree to. If I perform statistical research and count the most common English words based on many books, should I be liable to go and ask every author if they're okay with me analyzing their works? If I see a thousand character designs and then pick up some cues and ideas to create my own, should I pay a licensing fee?
        • deely3 3y ago
          You stretching my words in so many directions... Relax, its just a comment, no need to feel vindicated.
    • voitvoder 3y ago
      They are only superpowers until you have made enough AI art to see how pathetically limited and un-creative midjourney is. This is all a lot of nothing. A year ago at this time I thought we had reached the art singularity. Now after thousands of images, seeing any AI art makes me want to puke. It is just the same shit over and over and over because it is so limited in what it can actually make. In the long run all AI art will do is make people appreciate human art more. Any human artist against AI art is an idiot. It is not like web design or anything else. AI Art is a giant decentralized PR and unintentional advertising campaign that will show how awesome human artists are and how overhyped AI is. In a few years people will view AI art as useless, shit, scriblings of non-artists. Why? Because that is exactly what it is.
• raincole 3y ago
  I think at one point Krita will fork to two apps because of this exact reason. AI-based tools are clearly the next step of painting apps (to me at least, but I can't be the only one who believes in this). I think in 3~5 years an painting app without AI generation feature is just like a painting app without pen pressure today. It's still usable, you can make great art with it if you have the skill, but it will be so out of fashion to a point it starts becoming cool again.
  • makeitdouble 3y ago
    Is it that different from how we view Github copilot ? As far as I know there's a sizeable number of devs who don't intend to ever rely on copilot, and I would expect the a similar trend in the drawing community with amateurs and pros not specially anti-AI, but not wanting to have a random generator meddle with their art.
    • hutzlibu 3y ago
      "As far as I know there's a sizeable number of devs who don't intend to ever rely on copilot" Is that really a thing? I mean, I also don't want to rely on Microsoft and therefore also not on Copilot, but not using AI tools in general out of principle is probably a very rare minority. I simply would prefer my own local LLM. But in the thread linked above I read "AI never had and never will have it’s place in art." And this stance would be very weird for me for devs.
      • dartos 3y ago
        Well think of how AI was trained. GitHub trained copilot on _mostly_ open source data with permissive licenses. Giving away code and their rights for free is commonplace. Also it’s not like you can use “by Ryan Dhal” to make the output from copilot better. But these art AI were trained on. CC, CC-BY, and closed license pieces of art. And you can use “by Greg Rotowski” to get art in that artist’s specific style. I don’t think comparing the use of AI or the general attitude towards AI between artists and devs makes sense. Very apples and oranges.
• shultays 3y ago
  Huh, I wasn't aware Krita was a thing. As a software engineer that rarely needs image editing Gimp was my go to software. Why there is a second open source image editing software now?
  • elaus 3y ago
    I think it's totally fine and normal for multiple OSS tools existing in the same space. Krita is almost 20 years old and is more focused on painting than on image editing – but personally, I use it for both, liking the UI much more than that of GIMP.
    • Matumio 3y ago
      Back in those days, GIMP was just barely usable for painting, and Krita was mainly good for crashing. Both have come a long way since then. GIMP is still mainly an "image manipulation" program. It got better at painting, too, but you probably want to give Krita a try for that.
  • wastewastewaste 3y ago
    It's much closer to how photoshop generally works, with an extra focus on drawing. Gimp is not a good replacement for photoshop for artists. It's quite popular for this.
  • diputsmonro 3y ago
    As a software engineer and artist, Krita feels more focused on drawing/painting with a pen, while GIMP has always felt to me as more focused on photography/editing. Obviously they both manipulate images so there's lots of overlap in features, but the idea of painting or drawing in GIMP seems really alien to me. I'm sure the interface and pen support was even worse when the Krita project was started.
  • raincole 3y ago
    Krita aims for SAI/CSP, GIMP aims (well... sorta) for PS.
  • duckmysick 3y ago
• lbeltrame 3y ago
  Which is kind of funny in a way. I am no artist but I'm using Krita with a smallish Wacom tablet to manually refine illustrations generated by Stable Diffusion. But again, some of the Krita team have had strong ideological positions on many themes. Luckily you can keep using the software whether you agree or not (and you can contribute, too).
• GabeIsko 3y ago
  I am a firm believer that the creator should choose the way their work is licensed, but man - it is weird seeing an open source project have such a commitment to Intellectual Property. It seems like it is mostly developed by volunteers. So the expectation is that artists take these devs hard work and use it to create proprietary paintings. I'm on board for this on the basis that the creator should ultimately get to choose how their work is released. Open Source has to be a choice. But dang, I would hope that one of the outcomes of a project like this would be more public domain digital art.
• ouraf 3y ago
  A tool is a tool. If the krita team is anti AI, they can choose to just ignore a plug-in or extension made by an independent team. Do your thing.
• Topgamer7 3y ago
  Sounds like burying your head in the ground and pretending it's not happening.