(I am part of a group that builds UI on top of open models, but we stopped working on our Krita version for that reason.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I dunno if it would help, but people do seem(?) to be improving their ChatGPT responses by telling it to answer as if it is an expert on a topic.
I'm one of those. I've been programming for a while now and there's no way i'm gonna trust a neural network with my code. Debugging is painful enough without having to deal with subtle bugs hallucinated by ML.
Some machines are really useful to reduce human suffering and augment our collective capabilities. Some machines are just useless, polluting gadgets. I think ML sits in the middleground: if your job is pissing meaningless code all day that's very repetitive it can probably do it for you... but if you have to actually do R&D to develop new tools i don't think ML will be any use.
So yes AI can reduce work, but arguably work that was never required nor beneficial to humanity to begin with. I would be way more interested in society reflecting on "bullshit jobs" and how to actually share the workload so that we can have 1-day work-weeks planet-wide, just as the scientists from the 19th/20th century envisioned. Instead of continuing to destroy the planet so we can run bullshitting neural nets in the cloud that produce arguably little value.
But sure, ML is fun. Let's just pretend we don't see the whole world burning outside the window.
Hm, just a suggestion, I would be careful with such statements, if you don't want to insult peoples work you know nothing about.
Because LLMs enable a very broad spectrum of work. I don't use them in my current workflow(nor am I that easily insulted), but the times I did use them, they were useful. My problem with them was mainly ChatGPT4 was out of date, but it did produce very useful results for me for WebGPU and Pixijs, which I had not used before and the solutions it gave me, I could not find on the internet. So for my novel work, they don't help me in general, but they do help me if I need a new custom part, without having to reinvent the wheel.
And then of course there are people who greatly benefit from them, who did not study CS, like a friend who is ecologist and all he wants are some custom python scripts, to modify his GIS tool. I think he is doing useful work and with LLMs he is indeed spending less time on his (freelance) work and has more time for his children. Isn't that, what you are also hoping for?
Answering my own question somewhat, I think that LLMs are becoming a kind UI layer over many applications/tools for many users. Which is interesting. And in some ways they show signs of fulfilling the promise of AI.
Agree that I have never seen a GIS tool where I thought the GUI was top notch.
You could not possibly have made it sound more attractive and compelling.
Also, there's nothing really stopping you from giving up all your worldly goods and doing this now.
Moving code around a loop, extracting a series of variables etc.
Like a sibling comment I also find it useful to complete the end of the line.
As for writing code, it mostly produces very convincing looking code at a glance, but full of shit on a second look.
But as a smart completion and local refactoring tool, I really find it useful.
It’s like having an over-eager coworker to pair-program with - and can kinda boss around as you please, it never tiring or needing a break. Not senior-level (outside of knowing “deep” small pieces and snippets), but not fresh out of school either.
And it is great for fleshing out comments (if you’re into that, as I am), picking up your style and notation as you go.
While impressive, the two issues I have with codepilot and other AI tools are:
1. The code is usually the same code I'd get a few web searches away, except then it would have the appropriate copyright. As a FOSS developer (in my free time), I do not want to risk using code I don't have a license for, and thus dirtying up my entire project and putting it in danger of being taken down.
2. I really don't need it. At very few points in a project do I both think "I want to continue this" and also "I want my code written for me". I like autocomplete, I use autocomplete, and I like Visual Studio's suggestions, too. It's only wrong 50% of the time, around about. I have no interest in a tool that writes my code for me, because I have learned everything I know from solving problems myself.
Edit: Clauses in the AI's ToS like "all code generated is yours" or something is akin to a sign on a bar saying "if you hit someone in here it's not assault" -- it doesn't change the facts whatsoever, and the fact is that it's still a crime to hit somebody, even if the bar's ToS say otherwise.
My impression is that people normally don't use Copilot as a substitute for finding solutions (ChatGPT is much better for that), but as a way to help with otherwise tedious tasks that are really specific to your codebase. Check out 6:05 and 6:25 in this Andreas Kling video for a good example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mxubNQC5O8
Regarding your second point Copilot helps me when I least expects it. I think the video illustrates what I mean with that as well.
Oof. So not only was it a poor replacement for a macro, it didn't even generate the correct code!
- Not enough to switch (yet, at least)
- I would have to carefully review the generated code, which is not as fun writing
The license issue is something I expect will be solved in the next few years (a dropdown menu to choose from, maybe).
I'm not sure it will, as everyone who uses it don't appear to really care about other people's licences anyway. It's just a method of BSD washing GPL code.
I had my share of auto generation with enterprise Java stacks, and tried as hard as I could to move to stacks where what we write is concise and relevant (rails is the closest I came to this, not perfect but clearly going in the right direction).
I think AI has its place, but I also hope to be lucky enough to not have to use it.
Illustrators might have similar issues, where some of them need to produce boilerplate drawings a lot, but I think they'd also prefer working on project that aren't that.
If it is possible to guess what we’re going to write, then we aren’t transmitting much information to the computer.
Copilot seems to be very popular though.
Yes.
I'm a Vim user with 100 WPM typing speed, and I can say with confidence that Copilot isn't that useful to me. Typing boilerplate is not an issue - understanding what I wrote is most of the work. And having an AI spew code that I have to read is more work for me than just writing it myself.
In Go, it's great for dealing with a lot of the repetitive code one finds themselves writing.
When writing Android apps, it's useful for API discovery!
Not doing so would be like going to the gym and not posting your muscle flexing photos on social media. It's just taking away the joy.
What does this comment add to the conversation?
I don't mean to dismiss your data point, just to put things in context. Since Copilot is generally recognized as a useful tool, there will of course be Vim users with great typing speed who still find it useful regardless.
Now, when it comes to Go, I find that there isn't much repetitive code to write (especially since generics landed in Go 1.18). Some people say that error handling is repetitive, but I find that those people just bubble up errors without adding appropriate context, which makes them less useful. But I haven't personally found a scenario in which I explicitly thought "damn, I know exactly what I need to write, but it's so long - I wish someone would write it for me".
I made my comment because I hope others who are fast typists, and familiar with their tools, do give Copilot a try. I expected to hate it, didn't try it for a long time, and was quite surprised when I did.
> But I haven't personally found a scenario in which I explicitly thought "damn, I know exactly what I need to write, but it's so long - I wish someone would write it for me".
Test case setup comes to mind. Another place it's useful is for writing long function-interface signatures. Or adding a bunch of similar "case" statements to a switch.
Generics still have a ton of limitations.
Disclaimer: My cat is named Emacs, so if you say anything bad about Emacs, I will take it personally, because he is such a fine cat, named after such a fine text editor.
Not only does it feel like something that might be dangerous to become reliant on (what happens when it’s not working or I don’t have access to it), I have no idea what material it was trained on which makes it ethically gray. I might be more receptive to a local LLM where I can personally vet what it was trained on (primarily, I’m concerned with if the material was obtained fully consensually or not).
My attitude towards image generators is similar. Adobe’s is totally out of the question for example, because though they claim it’s 100% ethically trained because all material came from their stock image service, I know that’s bullshit because I’ve seen stolen art put up for sale there more times than I can count (and worse, they’re unresponsive when theft is reported).
In both cases you're also risking being accused of plagiarism, when the model literally remembers, or reconstructs, a piece it has seen, and finds it perfectly matching your request.
I think "AI" tools in Krita may have their place: object detection and selection / tracing, upsampling, seamless resizing, cutting and pasting, texture generation, light adjustment, stuff like that. An integrated analog of DALL-E or Midjourney would likely be a poor for.
For example, this recent GitHub presentation about productivity improvements: 35% acceptance rate, 50% more pull requests, etc. I believe these numbers, and even if you don't, they will be a reality soon.
The main difference is that in development, more of the tedium gets removed-- e.g. interacting with some API or UI boilerplate-- and more of the more satisfying work-- how the program, generally, is going to solve a problem-- remains. In art, the more satisfying part-- conceptualization and forming those ideas into images-- is entirely removed but the tedium remains.
Commissioning a piece of art from an artist entails describing what you want, maybe supplying some inspo images, and then going through a few rounds of drafts or waypoint updates to course-correct before arriving at a final image. Sound familiar? Generative AI art isn't making art: it is commissioning art from a computer program that makes it from an amalgam of other people's art. It reduces the role of the "artist" to making up for the machine artist's shortcomings.
When you're making art, making the details are ingrained in that process-- a requisite step to forming your ideas into images. Details are critical in high-level commercial art, and despite the insistence of many developers who know far less than they realize, current generative AI isn't even close to sufficient.
Economic realities aside, when you're merely editing someone else's images, you've basically transitioned from "writer" to "spell checker" and I don't understand how so many refuse to see how a professional artist would be distraught about that.
Hi! This is me! I'm good enough that I can draw and paint whatever I want manually. I (generally) don't want it in my (main) workflow and I don't want telemetry training models against my work (without knowledge & consent). However, I don't have any qualms against other people using it and I think it's exciting technology.
Of those that don't ever intend to rely on something like copilot - is the majority because "I can code better without it in the current capabilities" or a principled matter about the technology wronging them in some way?
But the line between "random generator" and "artistic finer control" isn't that sharp and clear. How do digital artists draw leaves and bushes in background? If not photobashing, most experienced people will use some kind of brushes[0] with some radnomness built into them, like random rotation or spray.
Randomness is even more prevelant in traditional media.
And I'm 100% sure AI will evolve to cover as much as both ends.
[0]: Not necessarily a leaf brush. A common misconception held by digital painting newbies are you need X brush to paint X efficiently. Experienced aritsts don't want X -- they want some controllable randomness.
AI tools will be much more artist-oriented than they currently are. You will be able to control parameters like denoise strength with your stylus pressure. LoRAs and prompt templates will be listed in a gallery like PS's neural filters. You will be able to preview colored thumbnails that generated by control net as you sketch in near real-time.
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).
Do your thing.
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.
((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))
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.)
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.
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.
It took some time for photography as well...
edit: typo
(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.)
UNLIKE other tools, AI makes creative decisions. No other tool has done this, and moreover, its primary purpose is to take away the reliance on artists. The ultimate aim of BIG TECH is to take away this reliance so that they can be the ultimate source of cheap art, just like cheap slave labour is the ultimate source of cheap and unsustainable clothing for most people.
Therefore, AI will NEVER be a tool to create art like other tools. It is is a tool that will outcompete humans on a massive scale so that even if "normal human art" exists, it will never gain much traction or commercial viability.
To be honest, AI is absolutely sickening and companies like Microsoft and OpenAI make me sick.
Most of this generative AI is NOT about using AI for boring tasks, and have you ever even tried to draw clouds? Not easy. Everyone draws clouds differently, which you would know if you ever tried to draw anything.
Moreover, AI as a societal phenomenon goes way beyond AI drawing clouds.
I know exactly how hard it is to draw anything because I tried a bunch of times, and failed. I for one am happy that I can now express my creative ideas, which I couldn't do before due to missing talent / practice.
The problem here is we need to look beyond our own self interest to how this will impact other people.
We don’t make a career out of art. This technology is just a novelty to us and but many others rely on it for themselves and their family and had no way of foreseeing the technology coming. They need it more than we do.
This is a uniquely AI related issue, as artists of all mediums can relate with each other about their struggles learning and improving their skills and ability to express themselves.
Tbh this sounds like gatekeeping to me.
Perlin noise on a plane, can be either in line with the camera or off at an angle. Nice effect. Very easy. I don't even count myself as a proper artist.
Clouds can obviously be hard when you have a specific cloud formation in mind — but "just" a random cloud, to the standards of most who will observe it, is much easier.
And of course, there are plenty of free photographs of clouds, and Photoshop has had plenty of filters — even from the days before people had broadband, let alone what people now call AI — to turn those photographs into different styles.
This looks like trash and doesn't look like clouds. Even if you're doing procedural clouds, everyone does them differently. And a lot better than just slapping Perlin noise on a plane. Photoshop filters cannot change the bones of a cloud, and when people are illustrating clouds they're taking entirely different approaches. They're not just "this cloud, but flat" or "this cloud, but with a fuzzy diffused look." All you're doing is showcasing your own lack of knowledge on the subject while filling the arrogant techbro stereotype perfectly.
It's tempting to just say that creative work that can be automated this quickly should be automated so that artists can focus on more creative challenges, but this is not how it plays out in practice. Rather, this only allows companies to cut down costs. It is already extremely difficult to find work which will pay a livable wage as a creative. AI has already caused layoffs and negative wage pressure on remaining employees. The only thing that AI has done (at least among my circle of friends) is reduce corporate costs and increase antidepressant prescriptions.
If you're interested, feel free to reach out to me because I am starting an anti-AI coalition.
(1) AI has already been used for IDENTIY THEFT in many places. Check this out: https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-scam-voice-clone-fake-kid...
AI here to clone a voice was used to make a mother think her daughter had been kidnapped
(2) People getting fired from their jobs such as illustrators because AI can now do things. Also, people NOT getting hired when they could.
(3) I am a professional writer, and I know of some websites who are using generative AI for articles and hiring less (or even firing writers)
(4) AI removes what remaining reliance we have on each other and makes it less likely for people to talk to each other when needing some basic information. The societal effects of destroying communities where people need each other are pretty clear.
(2) AI is unique in the sense that it has a much wider range and acts much faster. Therefore, it is much more dangerous, similar to how both salt and sodium cyanide are dangerous but the latter is much worse. You need to think in terms of the magnitude of the effect, not just its qualitative nature.
"Here, rural areas and undeveloped nations. Take this crippled, distorted window into the greater internet. It happens to be much better at viewing content than creating it and will surveil you more closely than ever you watch it. The preinstalled software is forbidden to remove. Don't view it more than ten minutes a day or the content recommended by social media algorithms may cause malaise. Like and subscribe for more content."
This is especially important when you consider how unethical the Prime Directive itself is as a principle, and how often Star Trek portrays violating it as the morally superior choice.
The position you're advancing here seems to infantilize people in rural areas and undeveloped nations, and aims to deny them the agency to make their own choices about how to fit modern technology into their lives and communities. It sounds like a modern variation on "noble savage" and "white man's burden" notions -- not exactly a good look.
I believe it seems that way to you.
Many people (in particular unemancipated minors) might likewise consider it infantilizing to place a minimum age requirement on drivers' licenses, firearms, alcohol, etc. yet the consensus is that doing so is for the greater good.
It seems unremarkable that we tend to treat actual children like children, but it's far less mundane to propose treating mature adults like children on the presupposition that due to their cultural or ethnic origins, they must exist in an immutable childlike state. The latter is an extremely dangerous notion, and we ought to be wary of anyone who advances it.
> yet the consensus is that doing so is for the greater good.
I'm not sure that any 'greater good' calculus is part of any consensus whatsoever.
What humans use it for is another discussion.
One example: - You can use nuclear fission to provide light and warmth to millions or blow up millions.
Is nuclear fission good or bad?
I would argue it depends what humans make of it.
Same with what you call "AI".
I wish you luck with your coalition, but once a technology is "out there", you cant take it back. I don't think there is an example in history where that happened, would be curious if you know one.
You mean your friends that work to produce generically pleasant looking props in order to maximize player retention and profits?
It seems like artists complaining about AI don't actually work like artists but more like office drones
I think AI use in art tools is inevitable, but replacing artists at any level is not a good thing.
Everything in the computing space has been shifting labor from one skillset to another skillset and maximizing the output per hour worked so that fewer workers are needed for the same output (but also more tasks are worth doing, because the costs are lower for any given benefit.) Why is displacing people manually building the visual component of video games any worse than, say, displacing typists, secretaries, people delivering interoffice mail -- all of whom also had salaries, dependents, and livelihoods -- while increasing the value of work in the field automating all those things?
Of course there will be people just clicking "generate" on a website. But isn't that the difference between consumer and artist? Everyone can press the shutter button on a digital camera to take a snapshot. But the artist knows how to use light, angle and technology to create a photograph with the looks and composition that they intend. (If you compare snapshots from amateur photographers and from professionals, the differences are astounding. And it's not just about the cost of the equipment.)
Certainly, there will be jobs – especially the rather repetitive jobs – that will be replaced by the use of AI, just like stock photos replaced jobs of certain photographers, or just like industrialization and automation replaced the jobs of a lot of craftsmen and artisans. But craftsmen and artisans are still around, and they are paid a lot more than they used to be paid, as long as they provide added value on top of the generic products available on the market!
There's a lot of "but wait, there's more" in what's happening around AI.
Perhaps with commercial art, pragmatic bread and butter art being automated and pooped out by noncomprehending, non-communicating consumers the job of real Art that communicates the frontiers of human experience using rich metaphor and on the edge of language and reason can work without having to also deliver hallmark nonsense.
Yeah, the economics to allow this are all fucked. But if you're an artist communicating your human experience, that does not matter, it's a part of your work.
I firmly disagree. I have a very strong imagination, but I never had time (and still don't have the time between full-time work and needing to learn German) to develop the skills to turn what I can imagine into artefacts that others can enjoy by my own hand. AI gives me the means to turn some of what I imagine into things I can share — not everything! (SD is so terrible at dragons, even the basic body plan is all over the place) — but it can help with many things.
> its primary purpose is to take away the reliance on artists. The ultimate aim of BIG TECH is to take away this reliance so that they can be the ultimate source of cheap art, just like cheap slave labour is the ultimate source of cheap and unsustainable clothing for most people.
IMO the purpose is fully automated luxury communism.
Stable Diffusion is free, so "Big Tech" (which would here have to include a small German academic spin-off) can't reap huge rewards from this, just like there's no huge business case for yet more video call services or social networks — too much competition for the money.
Finally, just yesterday I was watching a year-old video from a german robot supplier that's undercutting "cheap slave labour" for clothing.
Big Tech will benefit immensely from AI. Even if Stable Diffusion is free, it will spurn the development of new computers and new technology to run models like Stable Diffusion, so even not immediate things benefit big tech.
Fully automated luxury communism is a rather bleak future, and it will take us away from being stewards of the environment, and instead consume as many resources as possible.
Finally, even if you are doing something relatively harmless with Stable Diffisuion, many other people will use AI for malicious purposes.
Not so. Sense of purpose is important.
Your sense of purpose conflicts with the opportunity of everyone else to express themselves as they wish.
How familiar are you with utilitarian ethics, and the "mere addition paradox" criticism of it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox
> Good thing you have a full-time job....
For now. The LLMs will come/are coming for mine, just as diffusion models and GANs eat at the jobs of graphical artists.
> Fully automated luxury communism is a rather bleak future, and it will take us away from being stewards of the environment, and instead consume as many resources as possible.
It's (currently) pure Utopianism, taking on whatever hopes the proponents want it to have no matter how unrealistic. I therefore think you're arguing on the basis of which team it's associated with, without understanding the details of what it is you hate.
> Finally, even if you are doing something relatively harmless with Stable Diffisuion, many other people will use AI for malicious purposes.
Oh absolutely. Whole can of worms there.
Can say the same about basically every tech way back to the wheel, fire, and pointy stick, though unlike most using this analogy I am well aware of the problem of induction (in particular the turkey and the farmer), and don't claim that it will all work out just because it has so far.
AI in general could make us immortal, with lives of leisure and free from all suffering… or it could turn us all into paperclips to maximise shareholder value.
I do not believe people should be able to express themselves as they wish unconditionally. They should not be able to express themselves to the point of destroying the environment, they should not be able to express themselves by creating nuclear weapons or something EXTREMELY dangerous (AI), they should not be able to express themselves by disrupting society.
AI is just as disrupting as creating biological or chemical weapons, and perhaps even worse.
And it would horrible if AI could make us immortal. We should die...
Perhaps? You had death by paperclip optimiser right there in my comment :P
> And it would horrible if AI could make us immortal. We should die...
Samuel Johnson tires of London, visits an undisclosed location somewhere near Zürich.
It's actually "fully automated luxury gay space communism", all words are important there. Also, in the Culture series, arguably the seminal series about the "fully automated etc.", there's a whole scene about AI producing art (i.e. nobody cares or think it's interesting)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Automated_Luxury_Commu...
> there's a whole scene about AI producing art (i.e. nobody cares or think it's interesting)
As I recall, this was a conversation between an organic person and a Mind, a specific category of AI that's quite capable of running several billion uploaded human consciousnesses simultaneously in real time, and it was the Mind who was saying that yes, they could make far better music, but they didn't want to.
And yet artists have always used tools and adapted themselves to the qualities of those tools. Paints, paintbrushes, canvases, chemicals, instruments of all kinds inform the end result just as much as the artist's initial intention.
Jackson Pollock's most famous works were produced by splattering paints on a canvas. Sure, he selected the paints, the canvas, and the trajectory and velocity of the splatters, but his works are as much the expression of stochastic fluid dynamics as they are of his vision.
Nothing is stopping people who see handcrafting every intricate detail of their work as an expression of their innermost sense of self from continuing to do so just as they always have.
If that's what they're getting out it, why should it bother them that people who do just want to obtain the end product for their own purposes are getting it from someplace else?
Even taking your arguments at face value, it doesn't really make sense: Let's agree and say that AI can never make "real art." How does AI art existing prevent human-made art with the intent of self expression from existing? You say it will make human art less commercially viable, but that's hardly related to the expression behind the art. Human art has just as much expression whether or not it is a commercial success. Is your argument about financial viability or expression? Would you agree that having deep human expression enhances the value of a piece of art? Are you aware that artists who focus wholly on expression were already stereotypically "starving," even before AI art was a thing?
No, it doesn’t.
That's just an anthropomorphization of “produces deterministic results of its inputs that are practically intractable to compute by other means”. But Stable Diffusion doesn’t “make creative decisions” any more than POV-Ray or (pre-Generative fill) Photoshop.
There. My argument works without modification but with this more precise definition.
>UNLIKE other tools, AI makes creative decisions. No other tool has done this
If you use any other tool or technology (for example certain oil paint, canvases, sculpting material, motif, etc.) that also implies a creative decision.
>its primary purpose is to take away the reliance on artists
That is not true. It might be the purpose that some people ascribe to it, but it is a technology & a tool.
Humans decide what its purpose is, its purpose is not inherent to the technology itself.
You can use Imagen to create very personal and individual self-expression. With open source models that you can tweak and train yourself there are many possibilities to get an individual result. I guess you only looked at things like Dall-E and came to the conclusion that this would replace artists.
The same thing people said about photography aka "This is just a technology to replace portrait painters/landscape painters etc."
If you learn more about how Imagen works you will understand that there are many possibilities to make it your own and create meaningful self-expression.
>even if "normal human art" exists, it will never gain much traction or commercial viability.
There is 0 indication of that. Why do you think that?
FWIW the current art "market" is what makes me sick, so I am happy for any tech or idea that demolishes it and makes room for something new and creative.
But for one-click self-expression, AI tools will certainly come in handy.
Humans are surprisingly adept at coming up with new kinds of work.
IMO the bigger "risk" is that we will extinct ourselves in the next few hundred years, but that is a different discussion.
But I've spent well over a decade learning to write. I don't have any skill in drawing, and I don't earn any money from my writing. (...and last time I tried to hire an artist, they bit my head off when I offered an example of what I was after.)
So I'll use AI art, because it's that or no art.
How do you figure that?
I refuse to use it from a moral standpoint but I also don't use any digital tools at all in the creation of my work. Even if I worked digitally I don't create art to produce pretty pictures as fast as possible. Typing in a prompt and fiddling with some things back and forth is just that.
AND I've been pushing what can be done with Stable Diffusion, and it's absolutely a tool to create art. The idea that "Typing in a prompt and fiddling with some things back and forth" is all there is to AI art is so fucking absurd. This is the "meme" I'm talking about. There SO much more to AI art from an artistic control perspective than the prompt, and not only that, there's so much we haven't even fucking invented yet which is clear from the rate of progress in the field. These reductive "it's not real art" are even worse than the "theft" moralizing. It's akin to saying photography isn't art because you just click a button.
> I don't create art to produce pretty pictures as fast as possible.
I create art because I like to make art, sometimes that means laboring over the placement of every line. Sometimes I need three hundred frames and there's only me and my GPU against the world. AI opens up possibilities that were completely unreachable before, just like everything else I'm able to do artistically with my computer.
We're all different and again, it's great if you like making art with AI. The world needs differences, otherwise it would be quite boring.
Photography isn't gonna be painting or drawing either, it's still art that affords the artist an enormous amount of control. This is the "meme" I'm talking about. The way you talk about AI art is what's making me go AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
> typing some text and pressing 'generate', iterating, or doing layering and photobashing
It's such a self report, you have no idea what is going on, you are quick to discount it without any understanding. We are still in the infancy of the space and people are fixated with these idiotic reductive arguments. Prompt -> image is the tiniest fraction of what's possible with this technology. I wish I was better at communicating how fucking epic the set of possibilities that this opens up is, I'm sure we will see it eventually. It frustrates me to no end that people are so blind to it.
You're someone looking at Amiga DPaint in 1986 and claiming to understand the limitations and confines of digital art. It's absurd.
technobabble just doesn't change some fundamentals.
If your basis for your art is about the hot new tool, or a tool in the future then it's just novelty. Generative AI is incredible from a technological perspective, as was Photoshop before it, but neither of them are ushering in some profound new wave of art.
> fucking epic the set of possibilities that this opens up is
Most great art and great design is built on constraints. My suggestion in using these magical tools is to reduce your possibilities to find something that speaks true to yourself.
> didn't usher in a profound new wave of art
How can you claim that with a straight face?
The meaning of art, the art of intelligence, is being recreated after it was gruesomely vivisected by postmodernism... We better not let the narrative come with a price tag.
Reality makes them angry.
Techbros see the tool and talk on and on about how it'll optimize workflows and how it's just another tool, cloning artstyles and patting each other on the back for automating another task, while completely ignoring the concern from artists about having basic ethical concerns trampled over in the name of disruption and progress.
It is in some cases. Obviously not all of them, but there is definitely bandwagoning going on. Go on any social platform where this is up for debate and ask why they have this position, and you will be mocked or ignored while they fail to formulate any actual reasoning for their belief.
Yeah it must be a meme.
And there certainly doesn't exist any where the entirety of the world population can be given access to these things.
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.
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…)
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.
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.
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.
Ok, so what does the next level of "difficult" look like?
You can look at say, 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.
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.
I recon a sufficiently advanced AI could learn enough to do that from only that training data and some appropriate prompting.
You're under selling the difficulty of using a toilet bowl to make a convincing statement.
I'm 50-50 split on thinking I regard that kind of art as a vehicle for tax evasion, vs. thinking the "difficulty" is the money wasted on it (which is still Veblen "look at me I'm rich I can waste money on something pointless").
This is so far from the norm and feels like a television lens version of artists and art galleries. Yes, Duchamp used a toilet bowl in 1917 as art which was over 100 year ago. This is known because no one had done it before and presented an everyday object as art. This is 106 years old but still referred to so you can guess it was a big deal.
My suggestion is to visit a modern art museum in a larger city and you'll see this kind of "easy bullshit art as a statement" doesn't really exist.
https://www.tate.org.uk https://www.hauserwirth.com https://www.moma.org https://www.davidzwirner.com https://gagosian.com
My example was more about how the appearance of effort is not necessary for the viewer. Many people can look at abstract paintings and say "this is bullshit, my kid could do that!", and yet many people can also look at it and recognize beauty, and it's not because the latter group sees the piece as more effort, they're just able to parse the language of the piece better (imo).
We also have them for social/historical reasons. A museum usually isn't built around "best stuff humanity has to offer", but has some sort of more complicated angle.
Eg, a reason why you may have a fruit bowl hanging on the wall is that this particular artist has been influential, and they just happened to paint a fruit bowl. Maybe thousands of artists of the era painted fruit bowls, and maybe a dozen of those are technically more impressive, but this is the guy that got talked about a lot, or started a movement, or such, so it's this guy's bowl we're going to go with.
Museums can have many themes. They may showcase a particular artist, a particular movement, a particular theme, a particular period in time. You can build a museum of nothing but paintings of cats if you wanted to.
Nowadays art is whatever one wants it to be (or not to be). It's just a word people use to enhance the social perception of whatever manmade creation they like.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anger about using AI is less justifiied.
Yes. It's quite difficult to do so, however. The people capable usually have better things to do with their skills.
AI is none of that.
How do we know? We can do art Turing Test - have 3 real artists and an text/image generation AI train on somebody's art. Have it generate the images and answer questions about the art.
If you can't tell which one of them is AI - would you conceed they are "all of that"?
> mad about models being trained on their work without informed prior consent
This is the "your mind has been poisoned by a corporate view of intellectual property" take. The idea that copyright should extend this far is horrifying, it is another step toward stifling and controlling creative expression. The problem is capital being rewarded way more by IP law than labor, something that isn't going to be fixed by giving people more and broader ways to own things.|
You'll be surprised how recent the idea of owning ideas is.
I guess I should worry a bit that important software without worthwhile alternatives might start to do this, but I don't think the blender foundation will as long as Ton is alive, and I bet the same for Krita. Procreate I'm a little less confident about, but only a little, as they know who their main userbase* is and they know how those people feel about AI.
*Arguably there are more people with Procreate that barely know how to draw than people who do. BUT part of Procreate's appeal is that it's software that 'the pros' prefer to use. If the talented artists start publicly dumping on Procreate, the people who can't draw will slowly but surely follow those artists to whatever their preferred software becomes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because it's possible and someone wants to. Same reason why we have multiple Linux distros, multiple databases, multiple browsers, multiple text editors.
Are you surprised that open source software in general is duplicated? Or is this specific just to image editing software. If yes, what makes image editing software special so that having a second option is surprising?
Yes, open source promotes collaboration. It also promotes forking and starting new projects.
There are actually more than two.
I'm actually more confused by the converse: why do people keep using and recommending Gimp when Krita has existed for decades and is so much easier to use?
Krita is actually quite old. The reason you haven't heard of it is probably that it's more focused on digital painting than on general image manipulation.
The fact that you think there's only one open source image editor out there is fascinating.
Krita on the other hand is designed for drawing and painting.