3 ms·

I really don't understand the anxiety of artists towards AI - as if creatives haven't always borrowed and imitated. Every leading artist has had acolytes, and w

I really don't understand the anxiety of artists towards AI - as if creatives haven't always borrowed and imitated. Every leading artist has had acolytes, and while it's true no artist ever had an acolyte as prodigiously productive as AI will be, I don't see anything different between a young artist looking to Picasso for cues and Stable Diffusion or DALL-E doing the same. Styles and methods haven't ever been subject to copyright - and art would die the moment that changed. The only explanation I can find for this backlash is that artists are actually worried just like the rest of us that pretty soon AI will produce higher quality more inventive work faster and more imaginatively than they can - which is very natural, but not a reason to inhibit an AI's creative education.

beepbooptheory 3y ago
This has been litigated over and over again, and there have been plenty of good points made and concerns raised over it by those who it actually affects. It seems a little bit disingenuous (especially in this forum) to say that that conclusion is the "only explanation" you can come up with. And just to avoid prompting you too much: trust me, we all know or can guess why you think AI art is a good thing regardless of any concerns one might bring up.
jwells89 3y ago
Imitation isn’t the problem so much as it is that ML generated images are composed of a mush of the images it was trained on. A human artist can abstract the concepts underpinning a style and mimic it by drawing all-new lineart, coloration, shading, composition, etc, while the ML model has to lean on blending training imagery together. Furthermore there’s a sort of unavoidable “jitter” in human-produced art that varies between individuals that stems from vastly different ways of thinking, perception of the world, mental abstraction processes, life experiences, etc. This is why artists who start out imitating other artists almost always develop their imitations into a style all their own — the imitations were already appreciably different from the original due to the aforementioned biases and those distinctions only grow with time and experimentation. There would be greatly reduced moral controversy surrounding ML models if they lacked that mincemeat/pink slime aspect.
23B1 3y ago
[flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
  - 23B1 3y ago
    I disagree that my comments are un-substantive and flamebait, but I understand that my comments may run counter to the agenda of the site.
    - dang 3y ago
      The agenda is simply to have a discussion forum that doesn't suck, and in particular that doesn't regress to the internet mean.
      - 23B1 3y ago
        I genuinely love this site to be clear and appreciate all the work that you do around here - but the agenda of the site is to service Y Combinator Management, LLC.
        dang 3y ago
        Oh yes, but the question is how best to do that. The answer is that we can maximize HN's value for YC simply by making the site as good as possible, because that's what makes the community as happy as possible, and that's what has value. I've written about this many times in case you or anyone want to read more: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=yc%20business%20interests%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... Trying to make HN as good as possible has many aspects, but one of them is the attempt to keep discussions at least a little more substantive than the level they would normally degenerate to without effort, and that means avoiding flamewar comments, fulmination, etc., as described in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

beepbooptheory 3y ago

This has been litigated over and over again, and there have been plenty of good points made and concerns raised over it by those who it actually affects. It seems a little bit disingenuous (especially in this forum) to say that that conclusion is the "only explanation" you can come up with. And just to avoid prompting you too much: trust me, we all know or can guess why you think AI art is a good thing regardless of any concerns one might bring up.

jwells89 3y ago

Imitation isn’t the problem so much as it is that ML generated images are composed of a mush of the images it was trained on. A human artist can abstract the concepts underpinning a style and mimic it by drawing all-new lineart, coloration, shading, composition, etc, while the ML model has to lean on blending training imagery together. Furthermore there’s a sort of unavoidable “jitter” in human-produced art that varies between individuals that stems from vastly different ways of thinking, perception of the world, mental abstraction processes, life experiences, etc. This is why artists who start out imitating other artists almost always develop their imitations into a style all their own — the imitations were already appreciably different from the original due to the aforementioned biases and those distinctions only grow with time and experimentation. There would be greatly reduced moral controversy surrounding ML models if they lacked that mincemeat/pink slime aspect.

23B1 3y ago

[flagged]

dang 3y ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- 23B1 3y ago
  I disagree that my comments are un-substantive and flamebait, but I understand that my comments may run counter to the agenda of the site.
  - dang 3y ago
    The agenda is simply to have a discussion forum that doesn't suck, and in particular that doesn't regress to the internet mean.
    - 23B1 3y ago
      I genuinely love this site to be clear and appreciate all the work that you do around here - but the agenda of the site is to service Y Combinator Management, LLC.
      - dang 3y ago
        Oh yes, but the question is how best to do that. The answer is that we can maximize HN's value for YC simply by making the site as good as possible, because that's what makes the community as happy as possible, and that's what has value. I've written about this many times in case you or anyone want to read more: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=yc%20business%20interests%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... Trying to make HN as good as possible has many aspects, but one of them is the attempt to keep discussions at least a little more substantive than the level they would normally degenerate to without effort, and that means avoiding flamewar comments, fulmination, etc., as described in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.