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Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History
- yinser 2y agoEtsy is a hell hole and this is just the latest head of the hydra
- lopis 2y agoI don't think there's a single mark place nowadays that isn't a complete shit show and a travesty of what they set out to be.
- jameshart 2y agoThe inevitable lifecycle of any marketplace - Individual sellers in this sector struggle to get seen among all the big corporate offerings. Let's make a marketplace to help them find and connect with customers! - Wow! Now small businesses in this sector can make real money! <-- here is where the original business plan ends - So much money that new people are trying to get into the sector now... - That means there's money to be made selling the ability to enter the marketplace to those people - Big businesses are happy to franchise their offerings out to people who want some of that sweet marketplace money - Market economics of a never-ending supply of new rubes looking to get a piece of the action, and the dominance of the big suppliers, makes sure their resellers' margins are cut razor thin, and big business collects the bulk of the revenue - Marketplace ends up full of get-rich-quick-scam victims undercutting and driving out of business the very small sellers the marketplace was set up to benefit AI means you can skip the MLM scam component of the process and just destroy the marketplace with sock puppet bots.
- cleandreams 2y agoI use ebay a lot. I think it is fine. The difference between ebay and others are several: much better search. It's set up to allow customers to target what they want. Better filters. It includes the capability to have a complex user defined search that emails any new items that meet the criteria to the customer. Layers of search: one set of results can be searched to provide another set. It's amazing how other sites don't do this. The result is that ebay provides benefit to customers that in practice is not so easily gamed by big sellers. It gives you very, very, very niche results. E.g. arts and crafts pottery of a particular vintage and maker and color. I've found replacement parts for kitchen implements that haven't been manufactured in 20 years.
- serf 2y agoEtsy as a platform for buying and selling is fine, its discoverability and search that hinders the customer experience. I've bought lots of art commissions and actual hand-made knickknacks and toys from actual non-print-mill individuals. The experience has always been fine for me -- but I was aware of the artist and what I wanted going into it rather than searching for 'something cool' only to be inundated with mass-production "I LOVE MY DAD" mugs.
- Loughla 2y agoExactly. Etsy is still great if you explicitly know what you're looking for, in the case of bespoke jewelry or art, and/or if you explicitly know the artist. As a discovery tool, it's worse than anywhere else.
- surfingdino 2y agoI used to run a shop on Etsy. 20+ daily messages from scammers pretending to be buyers or Etsy support. Etsy ads bringing zero new customers, seller bans for no reason... it's a decent experience for buyer, but not fr he seller.
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- blacksqr 2y agoTelevision destroyed high culture a lifetime ago, and every generation that's come of age since has persuaded themselves that they can recognize the lines between high and low culture, only to be shocked and dismayed when the illusory lines are obliterated by the latest wave of invasive technology.
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- pjc50 2y agoThe line between authentic and inauthentic is very different from high and low culture. It's one thing to argue about whether you like William Morris, it's another to just forge works and use his name to market them.
- Theodores 2y agoIn all fairness you can have a lot of fun doing AI art in the style of William Morris. But can you sell it? Well, nobody has bought any of mine! It requires a special type of individual to fake the greats and a special type of customer to buy the forgeries. Creating a new 'art franchise' is an entirely different proposition, and I am sure that there will be plenty of new artists that are able to use their own name/brand/identity to succeed. It might also take time for people to get recognised.
- wrp 2y ago> everyone's art has gotten brighter, more colourful, more dramatic, more aesthetically pleasing, better composed, and more desireable. She seems to be ignoring at least the last 500 years of European art. Bright colors, drama, structured composition...it's all there to different degrees in different periods. I've looked into William Morris' art and design philosophy quite a lot and he definitely didn't use muted colors because shiny bright stuff wasn't available. Those recreations of the Impressionists also misrepresent their approach. The lack of detail was essential to the "impressions" they were trying to elicit.
- DrewADesign 2y agoEh. Most of those look like they were halfheartedly forged by Thomas Kinkade. I think it's a different level. There really is a whole gooey schlocky kind of sheen to so much of that stuff that really zeros out any intentionality of the original works. I think the most egregious examples are more operator error than anything else, but it is what it is.
- DeathArrow 2y agoQuite true. The style was deliberate and it wasn't due to lack of technology, skill and knowledge.
- DeathArrow 2y agoMost of these impersonations, visually brutal, too colorful, too noisy, reaching to the edge of grotesque, scream kitsch. I doubt the original authors would have liked something like that.
- gilleain 2y ago> didn't use muted colors because shiny bright stuff wasn't available I had (mistakenly it seems) thought the muted colors were partly due to those available for printing, but i suppose it makes sense that the Arts and Craft movement would not use bright colours? Anyway, zooming in on the detail of vegetal regions of such fakes is clear evidence. It's hard enough to reproduce the small gaps between curled leaves in these images anyway.
- hprotagonist 2y agoof all the people to rip off, huh? othing should be made by man's labour which is not worth making, or which must be made by labour degrading to the makers.
- jdietrich 2y agoThe real irony is the number of employees and customers that Morris killed. His wallpaper was hideously toxic. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/victorian-wallpaper-got-its-gaudy-colors-poison-180962709/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/victorian-wallpape...
- black_13 2y ago[dead]
- labster 2y agoLook at any photograph or work of art. If you could duplicate exactly the first tiny dot of color, and then the next and the next, you would end with a perfect copy of the whole, indistinguishable from the original in every way, including the so-called "moral value" of the art itself. Nothing can transcend its smallest elements. - CEO Nwabudike Morgan (Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, unlocking the Nanoreplicator tech)
- camillomiller 2y agoNice quote but it was clearly meant to demonstrate how out of touch a CEO unveiling such tech is from the actual nature of art and its value, which funnily enough is exactly what AI CEOs are doing right now. So much power and brain resources in the hands of the shallowest of individuals.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- bigbacaloa 2y ago[dead]
- globalise83 2y agoEventually we'll have to move to a model where the only way one will be able to have confidence that something is real is to go to a physical building where a temporary curated collection of such objects is displayed, having been gathered from around the world by well-connected elite of connoisseurs. Even then, some of the objects may be such well-executed forgeries that even the experts are fooled. We might call such a place a 'gallery', as it to some extent attempts to replicate in the real world the act of scrolling through a library of images on a website.
- jwmoz 2y agoEven then they could be replicas
- sandworm101 2y ago>> such well-executed forgeries that even the experts are fooled. More than a couple forgeries have been manufactured by the very experts tasked with detecting them. Other experts are incentivized not to detect forgery, or at least not speak to the scale of forgery as it may erode confidence in the legitimate market.
- DeathArrow 2y agoThe cat is out of the bag. We can't mandate AI generated images be watermarked. For now we have the information to distinguish between real and imitations. But what will happen in 200 years? Will people still know how the real Monet painted?
- pjc50 2y ago> We can't mandate AI generated images be watermarked. I'm not sure how well the information economy will work when everything is a forgery and every transaction a scam. It's bad for customers and bad for legitimate businesses.
- DeathArrow 2y agoThere are countless tutorials on how to get rich on Etsy using Stabble Diffusion. With so much AI offers, what the market is lacking is some AI buyers.
- numpad0 2y ago"But I can't tell apart from the real stuff!" - the Seller
- poulpy123 2y agoIt's the same that happened to google search: the cultural "market" is imploding into himself. It was somewhat manageable when creating crap necessited people, but now that AI can churn at speed never seen before, it's just a matter of time for creation to be devaluated. It's the first risk of AI before the other, and I'm wondering if it can be fixed and if it will be fixed.
- Dalewyn 2y ago>it's just a matter of time for creation to be devaluated I think it's just value being properly reassessed to be more accurate. Art has no intrinsic value, whatever value there might be are all external projections. If "AI" devalues art to what it should actually be, that is a good thing. Incidentally, art has seen a slow but constant decline in perceived value over time. "AI" is merely accelerating it.
- AlexandrB 2y agoNothing has intrinsic value. If society only values things that a computer can't do, we're all going to be plumbers and carpenters before too long.
- Dalewyn 2y agoWhen I say art has no intrinsic value, I mean that art doesn't feed, clothe, or house anyone. Nor does an artist contribute to society's productivity, objectively he's a dumb load. Note that this isn't to say art is unnecessary, a society without art is a damn boring one. But art is quite a ways down on the list of priorities. As an aside, tradesmen usually make good money while artists are stereotypically broke.
- yterdy 2y agoThis argument has been had a thousand times before, and it would be a waste of time to relitigate it. Suffice it to say that "intrinsic value" is subjective, artists absolutely contribute to the productivity of any society made up mostly of human beings (the subgroup of artisans being strictly necessary for tool-making, if nothing else), and even if they didn't, a "dumb load" is objectively more constructive than the net destructive activity of many whose primary activities have so-called "intrinsic value". But I'm not here to argue the points I've raised, only to state them, and that the debate you're trying to start is old and counterproductive and not something someone with any amount of introspective ability should want to continue further.
- doctorhandshake 2y agoWhen did ‘aesthetic’ become a descriptive adjective
- andybak 2y agoI once ranted about this and someone posted a historical usage from way back Doesn't mean I have to like it.
- doctorhandshake 2y agoSomehow it does make me feel better that it’s not a recent development.
- gwern 2y ago> I tried reverse image searching a few of the prints, only to find they were one-of-a-kind. I started googling “morris artwork” and found images that, while beautiful, seemed to lack the finesse and colour range of my new prints. Yeah, that seems to be one of the MJ telltales, and preference-tuned model telltale in general: they use too wide a color range and want to jam in every possible color. It's possible there's a lowest-common-denominator human-rating bias towards using a lot of colors. That seems to be a big problem with RLHF and instruction-tuning as practiced, which you will notice as you delve into outputs more. (I don't worry too much about the 'erosion of art history'. You know how many forgeries there are out there in art history? The only reason you don't think about this for, say, Rembrandt, is that the 95%+ of fakes or pious forgeries or restorations out there over the centuries have been winnowed out or destroyed or lost.)
- surfingdino 2y agoCases of compound forgery, compound fraud, and pastiche have been tried in courts before and will be tried again, because GenAI companies train models on works of others without proper licensing.
- pcrh 2y agoIronically, the complaint seems to be that the copies are not accurate enough, i.e. don't sufficiently resemble the styles of the original creators, and are too easily detected as forgeries.
- gilleain 2y agoNo the complaint is that these are fake 'new' works by artists. If someone wanted to sell an exact replica print of an existing work that is one thing.
- pcrh 2y agoYes, but they're evidently not in the same category as the originals, i.e. obvious fakes, and so are not "new", despite their claims to be so.
- gilleain 2y agoI'm confused. The sellers are not claiming these are new works, are they? The artists involved are dead, so that might be a little tricky. Instead these are AI works in the style of these artists, passed off as prints of original works, no?
- pcrh 2y agoIt's the passing-off that hasn't worked. The copiers/forgers decided to "improve" on the originals and in the process made their copies evidently fake. No doubt others will learn from this mistake and produce original-looking fakes; on the other hand some customers might actually prefer the "improved" fakes.