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Merged Artificial Intelligence

arthwollipot said:
To be fair, most AI generated images have a style to them that is pretty distinctive. And it's not just the wrong number of fingers - AI has been getting better and better at that sort of thing on an almost daily basis. But AI has a... smoothness... that human-made art does not have. I don't know how to describe it but I can see it.
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I call it the melding issue. The currently available full image generative AIs produce their images as a single whole image. In other words when I prompt one to "create an image of a rabbit in a basket on top of a table" they aren't thinking of it as an image of a rabbit that is in an image of a basket that is on top of an image of a table. If I am creating such an image I am thinking of the elements separately, so even though one of the rabbit's leg is hidden in the basket I may have sketched it to get the proportions and perspective correct for the elements of the rabbit you can see, I've then drawn the basket on top of that sketch. Now when I've completed the drawing there may (depending on the style I've chosen) be no hard outine visible where the rabbit and the basket "meet" in the image, so zooming in you would see a fuzzy boundary that isn't rabbit nor basket which is what you'd also see in an AI generated image but something is different. Something about the image being created as one "thing" persists in most of the AI images I've studied. (There are of course other pointers and the like.)
 
A lot of the arguments against AI that I've been getting (and there has been a pretty spirited discussion on my facebook post) are arguments against humans stealing other peoples' art and manipulating it using AI tools. Like this if you can see it. Someone took an artist's photo and used AI to change it so that it was different (the prompt basically said "eyes open but otherwise make it as similar as possible"). That is extremely unethical in my opinion. They are making a statement that the original piece of art wasn't good enough and they think they can make it better.

That's not the same thing as using generative AI to create a new image from a training database.

The discussion on my facebook has certainly given me some things to think hard about, but I am still of the opinion that the ship is out of the bottle and the genie has sailed. AI isn't going anywhere and we should do more to support human artists. By far the place where I see the most AI images are in the ads that appear at the bottom of this page. Advertising images that once would have been provided by human artists who have now been replaced by a cheap tool.
 
arthwollipot said:
A lot of the arguments against AI that I've been getting (and there has been a pretty spirited discussion on my facebook post) are arguments against humans stealing other peoples' art and manipulating it using AI tools. Like this if you can see it. Someone took an artist's photo and used AI to change it so that it was different (the prompt basically said "eyes open but otherwise make it as similar as possible"). That is extremely unethical in my opinion. They are making a statement that the original piece of art wasn't good enough and they think they can make it better.

That's not the same thing as using generative AI to create a new image from a training database.
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Isn't it, though? You ask a human to create a pastiche of certain artists or styles, you get an original work. Derivative, sure. Artistically bankrupt, maybe. A significant new entry in the medium? Sometimes.

But a bot has no artistic identity. It's just a rote tool. "Mindlessly mix and match elements from the works of artists who never consented to having their art used for profit this way" isn't the same thing.

Parody and satire and fair use all assume a human artist adding a unique and personal touch to the borrowed material.

If you want to set up a mindless conveyor belt of patchwork art, and you want to use my art for some of the patches, you damn well better pay me top dollar for my contribution to your project.

Put that in your generative AI and give it a vigorous spin.
 
arthwollipot said:
A lot of the arguments against AI that I've been getting (and there has been a pretty spirited discussion on my facebook post) are arguments against humans stealing other peoples' art and manipulating it using AI tools. Like this if you can see it. Someone took an artist's photo and used AI to change it so that it was different (the prompt basically said "eyes open but otherwise make it as similar as possible"). That is extremely unethical in my opinion. They are making a statement that the original piece of art wasn't good enough and they think they can make it better.

That's not the same thing as using generative AI to create a new image from a training database.

The discussion on my facebook has certainly given me some things to think hard about, but I am still of the opinion that the ship is out of the bottle and the genie has sailed. AI isn't going anywhere and we should do more to support human artists. By far the place where I see the most AI images are in the ads that appear at the bottom of this page. Advertising images that once would have been provided by human artists who have now been replaced by a cheap tool.
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Can you explain why it isn't stealing, without using esoteric terms like "training database" that don't actually explain anything, or dubious comparisons with how humans do it? I've seen rough explanations of how an AI does it. Humans don't do it like that. We don't play an adversial game with real and fake data, we don't draw a dog by employing game theory to whether a string of data looks like a dog or doesn't.
 
Olmstead said:
Can you explain why it isn't stealing, without using esoteric terms like "training database" that don't actually explain anything, or dubious comparisons with how humans do it? I've seen rough explanations of how an AI does it. Humans don't do it like that. We don't play an adversial game with real and fake data, we don't draw a dog by employing game theory to whether a string of data looks like a dog or doesn't.
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Okay, when I go to an AI (like Dall-E) and type "Create an image of Loki as a ballerina", what the AI doesn't do is a real-time search for images that match those parameters and copy them.

AIs are "trained". You create an AI application and then you have to feed it lots and lots of data so that it can do what you want it to (this is the "training database"). Then when you ask it to do that thing, it draws on the connections it has made in that data to produce the thing that you want.

In the case of generative AI, the information that was fed into the database to train it was commonly acquired without the permission or knowledge of the artists who produced it in the first place. This is why it is commonly said that AI "steals" art from artists, though I think that phrasing can be misleading.

This is a <10 minute video by CGPGrey that explains the process in detail if you'd like to know more:

 
arthwollipot said:
Okay, when I go to an AI (like Dall-E) and type "Create an image of Loki as a ballerina", what the AI doesn't do is a real-time search for images that match those parameters and copy them.

AIs are "trained". You create an AI application and then you have to feed it lots and lots of data so that it can do what you want it to (this is the "training database"). Then when you ask it to do that thing, it draws on the connections it has made in that data to produce the thing that you want.

In the case of generative AI, the information that was fed into the database to train it was commonly acquired without the permission or knowledge of the artists who produced it in the first place. This is why it is commonly said that AI "steals" art from artists, though I think that phrasing can be misleading.

This is a <10 minute video by CGPGrey that explains the process in detail if you'd like to know more:

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See, to me that doesn't explain why it isn't stealing. It very much sounds like a term I've heard, which is "copyright laundering". They are putting steps between the stealing and the final product to make it seem like they aren't stealing.
 
Olmstead said:
See, to me that doesn't explain why it isn't stealing. It very much sounds like a term I've heard, which is "copyright laundering". They are putting steps between the stealing and the final product to make it seem like they aren't stealing.
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To the extent that anything is "stolen" it is in the training process, not the actual use of the AI.
 
Olmstead said:
But surely the training process is part of the actual use of the AI? This seems like an artifical separation.
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No - the training process is part of the creation of the AI. You can't use an AI until it is trained. Did you check the video I posted? It really does explain it very well.
 
Olmstead said:
But surely the training process is part of the actual use of the AI? This seems like an artifical separation.
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The AI isn’t stealing anymore than humans do when they draw on their knowledge of artwork they have encountered over the years. Only the early human artists in the Stone Age had to create from scratch. Everybody else have been trained by seeing the works of other artists.

As Artwollipot says, AI steals work, not works.
 
steenkh said:
The AI isn’t stealing anymore than humans do when they draw on their knowledge of artwork they have encountered over the years. Only the early human artists in the Stone Age had to create from scratch. Everybody else have been trained by seeing the works of other artists.

As Artwollipot says, AI steals work, not works.
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I disagree with Arth on this.
theprestige said:
You ask a human to create a pastiche of certain artists or styles, you get an original work. Derivative, sure. Artistically bankrupt, maybe. A significant new entry in the medium? Sometimes.

But a bot has no artistic identity. It's just a rote tool. "Mindlessly mix and match elements from the works of artists who never consented to having their art used for profit this way" isn't the same thing.

Parody and satire and fair use all assume a human artist adding a unique and personal touch to the borrowed material.

If you want to set up a mindless conveyor belt of patchwork art, and you want to use my art for some of the patches, you damn well better pay me top dollar for my contribution to your project.

Put that in your generative AI and give it a vigorous spin.
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Not part of the current discussion… I’ve had videos appear in my YouTube feed of people being “thrown off” of Stephen Colbert’s show. I keep thinking I’d have heard of at least some of them if they really happened. I also think they look a little odd. Does anyone else suspect AI, or have I just been missing things? By the way, I haven’t clicked on more than one or two.
 
We can get the Genie back in the bottle by instituting costs on AI models being used.
It would make sense anyway to force companies to make their training data sets available to inspection, and blocking the program from doing certain things is now routine.

The main reason why no one will do it is because Chinese companies won't get their access and use of their domestic data restricted, which would give their models an advantage.
 
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