#What is ART?

[therobotmonster]

Saw some of your posts about AI recently, but don't really know very much about you. I have two questions:

1. Are you an actual artist, or do you just do genAI?

2. If you are an actual artist, why do you use/support AI?

We're going to get into this in a minute, but yes, by what you'd likely use as a definition of 'actual artist', I am. I have a BFA in graphic design, a minor in art history, I've been working as a freelance artist either on the side or as my main hustle since 2001, and I've been making art since I was five. Multimedia, 3d modelling and sculpting, photography (in a darkroom type and digital), acrylic painting, illustration, writing, puppetsmithing, I'm a jack of many, many trades.

Because it's a potent force multiplier that lets me do things that I could not previous (as well as helping compensate for my increasingly arthritic joints) and because it's entirely keeping with the copyleft principles I've had since the 1990s. It's just plain interesting and fun. And I had my fill of moral panics in the 1980s.

This is gonna be a long one, enjoy a song while you read.

I've gone over all this many times before, (for full reading, here's the #AI Discourse tag on my AI blog) but the short version is that I agree with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's position on AI art.

To demonstrate, we've got some of my non-AI photobash work, and some of my AI-work of the same type. Both were made using many, many public domain images broken down to B&W lines, scaled, reinked, normalized and colored.

On the left, is a comic made with specific panels from comics that have had their copyrights expire (back when that could happen), on the right, a comic made with about 35 individual dall-E 3 gens. The techniques are the same, the only difference is the source of the pubic domain images.

No one debates whether what I've done on the left is art, yet somehow the one on the right is a problem for some people. Yet I have vastly more control over the latter than the former.

And it's hard to get more transformative than 'broke down into math and blended with literally millions of other math formulas in order to make a completely new image" Replace 'math' with 'memory' and you have how all human creativity works.

Moving to covers, one of my parody deepdream-adjusted comics, and a reinked-recolored AI one on the right. The one on the left no one had a single problem with, but Bruce Wayne and Jessica Fletcher are screencaps, the Specter is a sales photo of a statue with a copy of 1989 Ted Dansen's face, and I'm using direct DC trade dress. Crickets.

On the right, no actual images by humans are used (outside the barcode, comics code authority emblem, and the 30 cent mark.) Same techniques, same situation. Very different reaction.

I also was a young artist in the 90s when Disney and the RIAA bribed and lied their way into extending copyright to its current ridiculous 120 year term, and I recognize what's happening with the anti-AI movement.

The exact same fear-mongering was used to get small artists to rally their congressmen against their own self-interest, and that's what the Copyright alliance is doing now.

Copyright does not help the small artist. It's also a relatively new invention, one that would be baffling to humans through most of history. You can't own art. Not even the people who make it. You can own a canvass or a carved rock or a book, but you don't own the art itself because you can't own feelings or ideas.

Copyright is a limited patent on specific expressions intended (supposedly) to encourage production, a limitation on the business use of art. The arguments levied against AI would kill fanfic, fanart, pastiche, collage, and more.

This isn't a bug, it's a feature, because...

The anti-AI side isn't actually anti-AI, they're pro-regulatory-capture-of-AI-by-Megacorporations. The copyright anti-AI argument conveniently leaves it open for Disney, Warner Bros, Nintendo, Sony, the RIAA, all to make their own AI systems to lower their production costs, because they own more than enough material to make powerful datasets.

They get it, you don't, worst of all possible worlds.

Now, at the start I mentioned that we'd get into the "actual artist" situation. All those people making bog standard waifu-pics with AI? They're also making art. Kids using a spirograph make art. Duchamp's fountain is art. And people who make art are artists.

But more than that "if you're an actual artist why do you use AI?" is an interesting question, because if more people actually used the tech and saw how it works, you'd see a lot less people against it. Most of the anti-AI talking points are just factually incorrect or greatly misrepresent the situation, but nobody is gonna learn that if even using it is treated as a transgress worthy of 'fair game' treatment.

Funny how that works out.

To close out, enjoy one of my music videos, made from dozens of clips made using reference images made with dozens of heavily modified gens that I totally could have made the hard way, except for the lack of 5 million dollars and access to Geena Davis and Ron Ely circa 1982:

[deepdreamnights]

The Age Old Debate: Fire Good, or Fire Bad?

This was originally going to be part of this thread, but the points were distinct enough and my thoughts rambly enough that I split it into two posts.

From the recent PalWorld thread:

We gotta handle that last tag in two parts.

Part 1 "the devs admitted to using AI art to make the pals"

First off, that isn't true near as I can tell. I can't find anything of the PalWorld Devs admitting they used AI for PalWorld designs. Palworld had demo footage with Pals in it 2 years ago on June 6 with their announcement trailer, which means they would have had to have started dev much earlier than that.

This is what AI art from June of 2022 looked like:

On the left, Hieronymus Bosch's Pokemon, on the right, Charmander on Gumby.

I did a much deeper breakdown of the "used AI" accusation here. It does not hold water.

Now, I could change my mind on this point if there were linked evidence to the creators of Palworld saying this. But there isn't.

Because the accusation is repeated in a tag, there's no way to include supporting information, or even to easily directly ask the accuser for it. Many people are going to see it, internalize it, and then repeat it uncritically, and that's how rumors and witchhunts start.

Because I've seen a lot of accusations about PalWorld stealing fakemon, and I'm yet to see a smoking gun. There's barely smoke.

Gonna hit the second point in that tag, but while we're on the theme of spreading misinfo:

Part 2 of the Tag: Using AI to Brainstorm is "Bad"

This is also an assertion that would require support, and I believe it to be wholly incorrect.

Plagiarism happens at publication. Not at inception, not inspiration, not even at the production level. The only measure of whether something is or is not "stolen art" is whether what comes out at the end replicates, with insufficient transformation, an existing, fixed expression. Art theft is about what comes out, not about what goes in.

For more about how this works with AI art, I suggest checking out the Electronic Frontier Foundation's statement on the issue. They're the ones looking out for your online civil rights, and I agree with their position on this.

The argument that AI art is theft because it is trained on public-facing material on the internet just doesn't fly. Those are all fixed published works subject to inspiration, study, and transformative recreation under fair use. The utilization of mechanical apparatus does not change that principle.

And fair use that requires permission isn't fair use. That's a license.

Moreover, altering the process to put infringement at inspiration/input or allowing the copyrighting of styles would be the end of art as we know it.

There's no coincidence that the main legal push against AI art on copyright grounds is backed by Adobe and Disney. Adobe is already using AI art as a pretext to lobby congress to let them copyright styles, and Disney owns enough material on its own to produce a dataset that would let them do all the AI they'd ever need to, entirely with material they "own." And they're DOING THAT.

The genie is out of the bottle, they (Disney, Adobe, Warner Bros, Universal) have it, and it can't be taken away from them. They just don't want anyone else using AI to compete with them.

Palworld didn't use AI to conceive of its critters. If it had, they'd have probably been less derivative.

(three random AI fakemon I prompted up as examples of just that)

Both traditional and AI-assisted art can plagerize or be original, its entirely based upon how the techniques are used.

Moreover, you can infringe entirely accidentally without realizing, but you can also fail at copying enough that it becomes a new protected work.

We're well into moral panic territory with AI in general, and there's more than a touch of it around Palworld, largely because people aren't suspicious enough of information that confirms their worldview.

I used the quoted set of tags as the prompt for the top of the post, all the AI images in this post are unmodified and were not extensively guided, and thus do not meet the minimal expression threshold and should be considered in the public domain.

[trammellesstangent]

I was thinking recently about ai and my chosen medium, printmaking. I’m sure there were people who argued that the fact that an art piece could be replicable to be near identical somehow degraded it, made it so the piece you have wasn’t made for you. And it is true in a way; individual pieces in a limited edition will sell for more than an open one. And there are things that started as artworks that were replicated to the point that they lost all artistic value (think of money, for example- hand designed and printed by intaglio, but no one looks at it).

But then, printmaking allowed multitudes of new techniques to develop, art could be made and the creative process explored in a new way. It’s brought me personally a lot of joy. Not only that, but the invention of the printing press was instrumental in bringing around mass literacy. I’m sure there were many grumbling scribes who complained that they couldn’t keep up, that every document printed on a press lacked that personal touch of a handwritten page…

Another example, and another medium I like to dabble in, is digital art. I am a bit too young to remember any severe discourse in the art community about this, but I don’t doubt that there were people talking about how impersonal it was, plastic stylus on glass screen, made real by your office printer. As many copies could be made as you want, even easier than a relief print would allow, and you can even email the image to someone! And can it really be art if you don’t get your hands dirty?

But still, I enjoy my evenings spent with my tablet and my laptop, aimlessly drawing. I like to make tessellating patterns for scales and the like, that I can bend to any angle and have it look realistic. I like the stencil and mask layer, I like that I am more willing to experiment when no change is permanent thanks to my friend, ctrl+Z. Digital art did not ruin art. It’s given us something new.

Then, I look at the flyer I received for the printmakers’ association’ annual exhibition. It’s ai generated, and I feel a sudden anger at it. For something that celebrates human art and creativity, it feels like a betrayal. But what do I expect, really? It’d be insane for a volunteer to put hours into making a flyer for the event- no one looks at these that closely anyway. It fulfils its purpose, to convey information. The design doesn’t even look bad, I was actually unsure for a long time if it was really ai. So what is my gripe here? Am I against convenience? Not everything needs to be an art piece. They weren’t trying to pass it off as anything. So why was I uncomfortable about it?

And honestly, I myself do speak to Chat GPT with some regularity. So am I, by my own standards, a traitor to my fellow artists and writers? Is my behaviour hypocritical? And what will people in the future say of those who fought ai generated imagery, of those who welcomed it, of those who stood my idly and let whatever might happen, happen?

Ultimately, I simply stay quiet. I form and reform my opinions, watching the situation develop. I may occasionally give a thought, as I’m doing now, but I don’t feel strongly enough aligned with either perspective to really try to convince anyone. I barely know what I think about all this. I find I’m cautiously excited, if a fair amount nervous, for what this new wave of technology will bring. I won’t stop people from using it, I’ll even engage with it myself, but I won’t tell people they have to. And at the same time, I am sometimes conflicted whenever someone uses ai in non-artistic pursuits, or even downright angry when I see someone try to pass an ai generated image as their own work. All in all, I don’t know. I don’t think ai imagery is art in and of itself, but that’s not to say it couldn’t be a valid element or tool. Mainly, I just wonder what side of history my opinion is going to come out on.

-Me, on another platform, on art and AI generated imagery.

[rye-views]

What is Art? by Leo Tolstoy. 7.6/10

I wouldn't recommend this book to my friends. I would reread this book.

The essence of this book is me. Although, at times, it's like do we really need to think this hard about things, but why not when you're a philosopher back in the day. Sometimes, I don't agree with us having such strong points like when we're really pushing to get rid of false art. Or like how humanity should be reaching peak by being good.

To think of art as all the ways to communicate feelings from those who came before and now and after is amazing. I'm loving all the talks of accessibility needed in art. Yeah, you know we do say that ALL works by certain people are art. like mozart, beethoveen, etc, and for why? I just appreciate that someone spent so much of their life writing this book in the past while all I'm doing is just thinking about this stuff here and there. I liked when it talked about how during Aristotle's time, the schools of thought was separate for beauty and art, because that's how I feel it to be too. Beauty and art, both, are things I think about often.

Memorable Quotes: "but once I have nothing to do, I feel clearly that I cannot be alone." "beauty is nothing other than what is pleasing to us." "one could even see that he was indeed worn out; but who told him to suffer?" "One languishes from laziness, another because he is unloved."

[hurglewurm]

what i've been up to the past 20 minutes

[pears-palette]

An important PSA to remember!

[ID in Alt]

[guiiay]

jinx and isha visit a walmart

[swedenis-h]

Wife lovers till they die

[zelkams-art]

in all timelines in all possibilities only you can show me this

[itsscaredycat]

so ok yeah fine i watched gravity falls again and read the book of bill

[j-tee]

SHAPE HELL

Yup.

[blabberoo]

Idk what au im cooking.. but Im cooking..

[111papilio]

brazil miku

[noodles-and-tea]

Haha… yeah… that’d be crazy…

[sushiisiu]

this is what happened in think i dont know