This is completely and utterly your own opinion, not a fact. I know several people who can’t draw for shit, due to various reasons, but now AI allows them to create images they enjoy. One of them has aphantasia (They literally cannot imagine images).

Never claimed it wasn’t an opinion. And I fully acknowledge that tools can make creating art easier. Hell, I even support the use of machine learning tools when making art. When used as tools and not as a means of creating art wholesale they can enable creativity. But, I’m sorry, writing a text prompt for an AI to produce an image is not making art (for the person writing the prompt). It’s writing a prompt. In the same way that a project manager writing a brief for a contract artist to fullfil is also not creating the art. The AI is producing the art (and by extension the artists who created the works the AI was trained off of). Your friend with aphantasia is not.

This is basically trying to argue there’s only 1 correct way to make “art”, which is complete and utter bullshit. Imagine trying to say that a sculpture isn’t art because it was 3D printed instead of chiseled. It makes 0 sense for the method of making the art to impact whether or not it is art. “Expression” can take many forms. Why is this form invalid?

Again, I never said any form of art was invalid. Not even AI art. Nor do I think AI art isn’t art. AI art is perfectly capable of creating something worthwhile by means of its content. It’s basing it’s output on worthwhile works of art created by people after all. I’m merely arguing AI art is unethical. If you made a mural out of the blood of children you murdered it’d still be art. But it sure as shit wouldn’t be ethical.

You could say that about literally all art

Except I couldn’t. Because a person being influenced by an artwork and then either intentionally or subconsciously reinterpreting that artwork into a new work of art is a fundamentally different thing from a power hungry machine learning algorithm digesting the near entirety of modern humanity’s art output to churn out an image manufactured to best satisfy some random person’s text prompt.

They’re just not the same thing at all.

The whole purpose of art is to be an outlet for expressing ourselves as human beings. It exists out of this need for expression; part of what makes a work worth appreciating is the human person(s) behind that said work and the effort and skill they put into making it.

…and this is the crux of it - it’s not anything related to the actual content of the image, it’s simple protectionism for a class of worker. Basically creatives are seeing the possibility of some of their jobs being automated away and are freaking out because losing jobs to automation is something that’s only supposed to effect manufacturing workers.

Yes it has nothing to do with the content of the image. I never claimed otherwise. In fact AI art sometimes being indistinguishable from human made art is part of the problem. But we’re not just talking about automating someone’s job. We’re talking about automating someone’s passion. Automating someone’s dream career. In an ideal world we’d automate all the shitty jobs and pay everyone to play guitar, paint a portrait, write a book, or direct a film. Art being made by AI won’t just take away jobs for creatives, it’ll sap away the drive we have as humans to create. And when we create less our existence will be filled with even more bleakness than it already is.

Again, the argument is it’s nothing to do with the actual result, but with it being done by an actual human as opposed to a mere machine. A pixel for pixel identical image create by a human would be “art” by virtue of it being a human that put each pixel there?

I’m not certain I understand what you’re asking. But If the human is the one making the decision on where to put the pixel then yeah that would be fine. But at no point am I arguing about whether or not AI art is “art”. That would just be a dumb semantic argument that’d go nowhere. I’m merely discussing why I believe AI art to be unethical. And the taking away work from creatives point is only one facet as to why I do.

I see this argument a lot as a defense for AI art and I see a couple major flaws in this line of thinking.

First, it’s treating the AI art as somehow the same as a dirivitive (or parody) work made by an actual person. These two things are not the same and should not be argued like they are.

AI art isn’t just dirivitive. It’s a Frankenstein’s Monster of a bunch of different pieces of art stitched together in a procedural way that doesn’t credit and in fact obfuscates the original works. This is problematic at best and flat out dishonest thievery at worst. Whereas a work made by a person that is dirivitive or parody has actual work and thought put into it by an actual person. And would typically at least credit the original works being riffed on. This involves actual creative thought and human touch. Even if it is dirivitive it’s unique in some way simply by virtue of being made by a person.

AI art cannot and will not ever be unique, at least not when used to just create a work wholesale. Because it’s not being creative. It’s calculating and nothing more. (at least if we’re talking about current tachnology. A possible future General AI could flout this argument. But that would get into an AI personhood conversation not really relevant to our current machine learning tech).

Secondly, no one is worried that some hypothetical shitty AI video is going to somehow usurp the work that it’s stealing from. What people are worried about is that AI art is going to be used in place of hiring actual artists for bigger projects. And the fact that this AI art exists solely because it’s scraped the internet of art from those same artists now losing their livelihoods makes the tech incredibly fucked up.

Now don’t get me wrong though. I do believe machine learning has its place in society. And we’ve already been using it for a long time to help with large tasks that would be incredibly difficult if not impossible for people to do on their own in a bunch of different industries. Things like medicine research in the pharmaceutical sector and fraud monitoring in the banking sector come to mind.

Also, there is an argument to be had that machine learning algorithms could be used as tools in creating art. I don’t really have a problem with those use cases. Things that come to mind are a bunch of different tools that exist in music production right now that in my opinion help in allowing artists to fulfill their vision. Watch some There I Ruined It videos on YouTube to see what I mean. Yeah that guy is using AI to make himself sound like other musicians. But that guy also had to be a really solid singer and impressionist in the first place for those songs to be any good at all.

He was inoculated before the wave of cancelations hit. Like chicken pox.

Why the hell is everyone turning on him because of a poor fucking debate performance? The man is old and stutters. So what? He’s just one fucking guy. If you vote for him you’re voting for his entire administration and his policies. Not just him. He could be a vegetable in the oval office and I wouldn’t care as long as the rest of his administration remained democratic and progressive. (well at least as progressive as anyone could hope for at this point)

Trying to sabotage his campaign because he’s old just makes it more likely for Trump to win.

What a weird looking between two ferns episode.

🎵One of these things is not like the others 🎵

Alright, time to go shoot the pilot.

On an unrelated note I recently just came into some massive stock of ornamental desk noodles if anyone is interested.

Is that not the purpose of a beta? That doesn’t seem like a good sign.

This better not make people dismiss my depression because I run cold…

And the Sony account requirement will be reimplemented in 3… 2… 1…

Holy shit. Completely forgot about rollcage. Wild to me that anyone remembers that game enough to make a spiritual successor.

I recently started a Durge run and accidentally chopped Gale’s hand off and killed him by clicking the wrong dialog option when I first ran into him. Was honestly happy to not have to feed him magical items all the damn time.

Dammit. I should not have clicked that spoiler tag…

Does miyamoto do business stuff? Always thought he was the creative guy.

If I was the squatter: Fucking rad new pet! I’m now the coolest squatter in the world!

Oh. This looks great. Thank you for sharing.

AI as in machine learning? No I dont think that’s bad. It’s a very useful technology that we’ve already been using for decades in a bunch of different fields. But I’m assuming you’re referring to LLMs which are what’s being integrated into Firefox.

I would argue that LLMs ARE bad. For multiple reasons. At least the big ones run by these giant tech companies.

If you’re locally running one with training data provided by you then I don’t see an issue with that really. (except maybe energy consumption issues. Though I don’t imagine a personal use LLM run locally would draw anywhere near the energy that something like Chat Gpt is drawing.)

I’m very much on the side that believes that what these LLM models do essentially boils down to theft/plagiarism though. So if you disagree with that you may disagree that LLMs are bad.

I did. I’m not needing to switch. At least not right now. (hence the ‘may’ in my original comment) But given the Laura Chambers interim CEO thing and now this LLM integration. Mozilla seems to be making moves that I don’t agree with. But as long as they stay true to their key tennents I won’t need to switch. Which would be good. Because I really don’t want to. But I’ve seen a enough good companies become bad companies that I’m weary for the future of the app. So being aware of what alternatives may be out there would be helpful.