#AI tools are not ethical AND you don't fucking need to use them

[lastoneout]

catch me losing my mind trying to explain to people in my life that AI isn't one of those "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism so don't have a panic attack in the grocery store bcs you have to buy something in a plastic container" situations and is instead one of those "hogwarts legacy/eating at chick-fil-a/not wearing a mask in public" type situations where you are actively helping normalize and/or contributing to the financial viability of things that are doing copious amounts of real, tangible harm and you kinda have an obligation to like not fucking do that actually

[sexhaver]

are you a fan/supporter of AI-generated art, and if so, why? i've frankly never understood why people like it and i'm trying to wrap my head around it. thanks :)

asking if im a "fan" of AI art is like asking if im a "fan" of Photoshop. it's a tool that has the potential to be used for shitty things (i.e. photoshopping pictures of someone to make them look bad, or training an AI model specifically on one artist and then undercutting that artist on commissions), but it's also a really fucking powerful tool that has the potential to push art in directions it could never feasibly go before. like, how do you read "people without an artistic bone in their body will be able to spin up dozens of pictures of whatever arbitrary thing they want" and jump straight to the ethics of sourcing the datasets and "robbing artists" and supporting draconian IP law without even admitting that, at a base level, that's a really cool and useful piece of technology to have.

part of the reason i keep posting about it is because i work in warehouse automation. ive spent the last decade learning how to automate shitty tasks that nobody in their right mind would want to do for free, and people STILL get upset that robotics are inherently "stealing their jobs". this is literally only a problem because of capitalism; in any sane world, a machine that can do shitty jobs would be a godsend. but when you need to work for a living, these robots become competition instead of tools to make your life better. and yet people will still direct their outrage at the robots themselves and not their bosses or capitalism as a whole

the same thing is happening with AI art. without capitalism forcing artists to draw for survival, the ability for non-artists to create art at a whim would be a tool with a wide range of applications. under capitalism, however, these tools become competition. and yet again, people are directing their rage at the people making this good-in-a-vacuum technology instead of capitalism, or even more specifically, the miniscule percentage of AI artists who use the tech to financially harm artists by undercutting them on commissions.

of course, there's the added twist that, unlike stacking heavy cardboard boxes, art is something that a lot of people actually do enjoy intrinsically and would do for free. this has spawned an entirely separate branch of arguments against AI art based on ethics and philosophy instead of laws and finance. this branch argues that AI art is not just bad because it can directly financially harm artists who don't use it, but that it's actively eroding the concept of "art" itself. this is the branch that spawns soundbites like "AI art just copies from humans", "that's not art because it's soulless", and "what's even the point in making art when a robot can do it faster and better?"

i'm going to be blunt: this branch, just like any other train of thought that hinges on an unspecified definition of "true art" that ebbs and flows at the speaker's whim, is complete horseshit at best and outright reactionary at worst. unfortunately, it has also infected most of the anti-AI-art crowd to the point where it's almost impossible to find any arguments against AI art that don't eventually fall back on it

tl;dr: AI art is a powerful tool with the potential to benefit humanity at large, and desperately trying to stuff that genie back into the bottle [by donating to Disney's IP lawyers] because it scares you is not going to work

[tangibletechnomancy]

One big point where I find people talking past each other in the AI art debate is that in art, there are a lot of things that aren't illegal - and shouldn't be - but are rude.

It's not illegal to use a sample of someone's copyrighted material in a sufficiently transformative way, and it should never become so. I could photomanipulate an image of Mickey Mouse into a landscape if I wanted and sell it as a print and not even Disney could stop me. It never has been illegal to do this. It never SHOULD be. If it was, we'd start seeing a ton of SLAPP suits over vaguely similar poses because...hey, guess what, referencing is using someone's copyrighted material in a transformative way. We all recognize the idea of trying to copyright a pose or sue someone for using a similar color palette to you or for looking at your art as inspiration as patently absurd - so much so that it's regularly brought up as a bad-faith argument in other copyright discussions! - but imagine if someone could. Disney sure as hell would - imagine no longer being able to write about public domain fairy tales because you publicly mentioned you liked the Disney movie about the same fairy tale once. That is what you're opening the door for when you try to manage the dataset ethics issue by copyright law.

However, on the other side...it's still really fucking rude to use someone's work in a transformative way outside of the bounds of 1) what is broadly socially permitted, and 2) what that artist requests.

Even though it would be decidedly not illegal for me to go and copy-paste a single pixel from a dozen other people's work into a canvas of my own and make my own piece out of it using only the scale, copy-paste, and smudge tools, it still has the potential to be extremely rude depending on who I'm taking it from and why. I'd love to do a piece like this to open a dialogue on how transformative a piece must be to no longer constitute "stealing", but I'm not going to sample those pixels from small-time illustrators who are already scared for what sampling could do to their livelihoods as a "ha ha~ I took your wo-ork and you ca-an't stop me~" because that would be incredibly fucking rude, well beyond the level of emotional impact needed to make the statement.

Image synthesis is, unquestionably, transformative enough to constitute fair use under current copyright law, and any amendment to the law that would make it not so opens the door to far more harm than it would ever prevent - but, as it transitions from being a fun scientific novelty to an actual useful product, it becomes rude at best to ignore artists' wishes in model training. In fact, it becomes rude on a level that may be best managed with privacy laws, since, let's face it, there are a lot of entities out there that not only don't CARE about not being extremely rude, but REVEL in being jackasses because the law can't stop them (looking at you, Unstable Diffusion).

[anendoandfriendo]

New ADHD/Autism special interest unlocked: create an ethical AI model and train it, you know, ethically, so all of the artists we would be training the model on knew what they were getting into and they could literally just make separate art for that or just decline if they wanted, instead of whatever the fuck Tumblr and everyone else seem to be doing, so there is an anime person AI model out there that does not:

assume flat chested feminine-read people are children

assume men in skrts are rare and we do not need to put in "ugly,  deformed, noisy, blurry, distorted, out of focus, bad anatomy, extra limbs, poorly drawn face, poorly drawn hands, missing fingers, disproportionate anatomy, realistic, photo, close-up, female: 1.1, woman: 1.1, girl: 1.1, breasts: 1.1, long hair: 1.1, shorts: 1.2, jeans: 1.2, makeup: 1.1, extra legs, extra arms, badly drawn face, poorly drawn eyes, badly drawn eyes" in exclusions when we could just type in "man in a skirt" in the prompt and do nothing in exclusions, and the job is done. We just want our anime boys in skirts.

for that matter, the sheer ableism in the words "ugly" and "deformed" and the ableism present for "missing fingers" and "extra limbs" and such being seen as default exclusions. So an anti-ableist AI model we guess

STOP ASSUMING EVERY BRAINBODY IS WHITE-SKINNED OR LIGHT-SKINNED BY DEFAULT. WE SHOULD NOT HAVE TO INPUT "DARK SKINNED" FOR A DARK-SKINNED PERSON??? THEY SHOULD GENERATE IN EQUAL NUMBER TO LIGHT-SKINNED PPL.

Why? Because we can fine-tune it ourselves then so we can actually see ourselves better when we have simply plural profiles. And also because of our friends. Who like. Shared this thing awhile back (web archive here):

Because like, yes, yes, we agree, from what we can understand the way a lot of them have been trained currently is completely unethical but the solution is not to take away an accessibility tool because everyone is having the same moral panic society had when computers and video games happened.

Like...the solution....is to make it so we have a universal basic income exists so people aren't forced to rely on ANY job weather they like that job or not, we have price control on all products to ever exist if society still thinks money should exist so we don't price gouge everyone into homelessness anyways, and make technology and how it is made much more transparent.

Fuckin. Fuckin hell. Traditionally hand-drawn art, computerized art with some manual work (we're thinking like...animation we guess here), and AI can all coexist lol. Don't @ us. We aren't debating this right now. We're telling people where we stand on this.

[nym-wibbly]

AI, Oh My

I've been using the generative-AI-free Ellipsus for failing at writing for the past few days. Using it to keeping track of notes about the long fanfics I've been sampling to help me write feedback, too. So far I love it to pieces. I love the clean interface. I love that it's in my browser like Google Docs but isn't Google Docs. It's really nice to create text away from that constant push to incorporate generative-AI into the process somehow. Or to click the annoying, distracting thing that sits in the corner of my vision that wants me to pay for an upgrade to some AI feature I didn't want in the first place, and wouldn't save me time or effort if I did. (Grammarly. Just fucking stop and tell me when I use a comma wrong or double a word, okay?)

I did play with AI writing tools while I was ill last year, mainly to pass the time and get up to date with what all the fuss and controversy was about. I squirted a simple 2000-word fanfic I wrote in the 1990s into each one and played to see what the various tools could do with it. Then I tried to get them to generate a similar piece from scratch using prompts. The whole unethical, 'this model was trained on everything we ever put on AO3, wasn't it?' aspect quickly became glaringly apparent once I introduced the subject of fanfiction - or even just asked a factual question about a character from a TV show. (ChatGPT totally 'ships the Thirteenth Doctor with Yaz, a 'ship which must've been at its peak AO3 output when all that data was hoovered up.)

Sudowrite came the closest to being able to do what I need from an automated writing assistant, which is to help me keep track of a long piece by creating and updating a beat sheet and character profiles as I go, or to generate an accurate set of chapter summaries from a giant dollop of existing text. None of these tools can handle a million word epic without going into a death-spiral of confusion and spouting nonsense. None of them can, yet, follow a lengthy or detailed plot well enough to help me re-remember things when I need to. ChatGPT could manage quite large chunks of text for a while in early 2023, then it went downhill fast, started limiting input hard, and started making shit up instead of summarising what text I fed it. I swear to god that thing got incrementally less useful as it got upgraded and as features were added. Nothing else I've tried even felt remotely useful to a writer of fiction, but getting to know the various options did train me to spot and avoid AI-generated articles at two hundred paces, even just from the title or headline much of the time, which has to be a good thing.

I don't want writing done for me, not ever, but if tech can someday help with the remembering-plot-things and keeping-character-things-organised, that would be spiffing. If I could someday rely on it to go, "Whoa, girl, you just contradicted line 23 of chapter 19 with [insert offending text and line number here], at a level of detail that it'd be unreaonable to expect a beta reader to spot in a spread-out WIP, I'd actually pay a lot of money. I want help managing what I write and coping with my cognitive disabilities so I can keep writing stories that are too big for my brain to hold in one dollop. We ain't there yet, but maybe, one day? If we can ever get past the ethics of training the models on other people's data in the first place, and the environmental impact of using these tools at all?

Sudowrite is nowhere near being able to do this for a long story, yet. And the free version is plenty if I just want a quck summary of the story's vibe, tropes, or themes for reference. That I do find useful for clarity, because condensing ideas and summarising fiction is not something I'm good at doing myself. I think Sudowrite might, eventually, be able to help me understand how I write.

So far, so underwhelmed.

[thrown-away-opinions]

Artists when artists are copying & distributing art from companies for their own use and profit without paying them: 'Lol, theft removes the original, this doesn't. Copying art is not a crime! yo-ho yo-ho!' Artists when companies are copying & distribuying art from artists for their own use and profit: 'What! Collage is a crime! You wouldn't download a car!' Good to see that the God of Irony still has a job!

I was going to write something about this subject too, but I got hung up on that gofundme thing.

Up front, I think there is some legitimate complaints about artists not wanting their shit scraped and fed into an algorithm. That's not an unreasonable demand. Datamining is out of control on the internet. There needs to be way less of it.

But also... All this bitching and moaning about ethics and morality is hollow as fuck. The piracy thing right up front. How many scanlated manga or fan-subbed shows you think the average seething artist has read/watched? How many movies did they pirate? How many ads have they blocked? How many streaming service passwords shared? How many second-hand things have they purchased? How many college textbooks downloaded? How many programs have they cracked and used for years without ever paying a sub fee? How many little things have they shoplifted? How many immoral and unethical things they've done without ever making up for it?

Short version is blatant "rules for thee, but not for me!!" bullshit. It is an ethical nightmare that some programmers have in some way appropriated raw data from something made by someone else because they, the artists, deserve payment and royalties for their art being viewed in any way they don't approve of, even if it's just some ephemeral fragment of something they made once, did not license, did not copyright, did not commercialize in any way.

Every other artist and employee who worked on and produces all the shows and products and services doesn't deserve payment because... uhh.. because late stage capitalism or whatever!!

It's a double standard that doesn't hold up to a moment of scrutiny. Some of this hysterical bullshit would even be forgivable if it were just about not being happy about having their work used in a way they don't approve of. Instead, they had to go with this moronic, exaggerated ethics angle, they had to pool their money to try and get the US Government involved. All this constant wailing and gnashing about losing jobs and work when nothing has actually changed and no one is making 6 figures yearly on an AI Art patreon. No one is losing commissions to some now world famous prompt expert who charges even more money.

We've long accepted piracy as an unavoidable aspect of the digital age, but suddenly that's not okay because it might (but not actually) impact some freelancer/indie artist's ability to get work that they either aren't losing because of AI (remember that the global economy is falling apart), or they might lose jobs that they don't have, they aren't trained for and/or aren't pursuing anyways.

But you know what else is kinda fucked about all of it? Most of these artists wouldn't be where they are today without technology and software advancements. Do you have any idea how many artists would be fucking hopeless without all the custom photoshop and CSP brushes they downloaded for free (and never credited the creator)? Do you know how fucked these people would be without all the built in color correction settings and filters and gradient maps? They can't even imagine drawing in procreate without all the built-in tools for correcting their sloppy-ass linework. There's SO MANY successful and highly paid webtoon comics out there that wouldn't be where they are today without the CSP asset store allowing them to drop in 3d background assets and pre-set pose and hand guides.

These whiny fucks are up to their eyeballs in technology that props up their entire profession/hobby, but they are screaming at the top of their lungs because someone downloaded a booru or scraped pinterest to feed into an AI Training algorithm.

tl;dr - They're a bunch of immoral hypocrites who badly want to dress up their impotent outrage as some kind of meaningful, ethical catastrophe.

[calsyee]

what really sucks about AI art is that, since it's coming primarily from tech bros and intensely capitalist nonsense, it's morally and ethically reprehensible, but it could, in theory, be so useful for an artist if handled ethically.

like, okay, imagine you have a lot of art you've drawn over the years, because you're, say, a prolific comics artist. comics are a really hard business for artists to be in, because if you work for a publisher in the direct market, you have an extremely tight schedule for essentially very little money every month.

but imagine if you could train a machine on your art, allowing it to do layouts/sketches for you that you can then refine, or maybe backgrounds because you're good at them but find them extremely tedious, or even just to help you conceptualize the blocking for a scene/panel/page.

that could be so fucking useful for an artist in any business where they're low on time but need to be high on output to stay afloat.

but no, instead we have awful tech startup capitalist assholes stealing art to train their machines because they don't understand — or perhaps refuse to understand — that just because it's online does not make it free game to, essentially, turn it into fodder for a high-tech collage engine without the consent or participation or reimbursement of the artists whose work is training the thing.

It ruins the tech for everyone else, and that pisses me off so much because, like, 90% of technologies and tools are morally neutral, but how many are used under capitalism often renders them unethical almost by default, especially in the tech sphere.

and it's like, this is absolutely capitalism's fault, and the fault of a culture of tech bros who, at best, see new technologies as a flashy way to make a boatload of money very quickly with minimal regulation because governments & legal systems are usually like 10-20 years behind any given technical advancement.

and it sucks all the joy and excitement out of futurism and tech for those of us who want a better world for the sake of a better world, not to make a ton of money or make ourselves metaphorically or literally immortal.

[shinxeysartgallery]

oh so you're okay with people using AI to make ocs but not when it's using your shit? you should be ashamed of yourself

How can you support AI as an artist???

Do you people even fucking READ? 'Cause this shit sounds like you're literally just reading the first sentence, assuming what the rest is, and then getting pissed off at your own assumption, but you never actually bother to read the rest of the fucking post to know if your assumption is actually RIGHT.

I do NOT support AI as a replacement for real artists, nor do I think that AI art is real art. What I actually SAID was that I can see the utility of it being used as a TOOL OR AID for a real artist, NOT a replacement or as "real art". I gave a few examples of what I meant by it being used as a tool/aid. I never said people had to use it at all, use it in that manner, or even that I used it for that purpose (I don't, for the record). All I said and all I meant by what I said is that I see the utility.

In regards to the comment about using it to generate OC images in particular, some artists do better with a visual aid than they do with a written description. I'm not saying to AI generate images of your OCs and then run around touting it as your own art or claiming that it's real art. If an artist has aphantasia, they'd do much better with a visual aid than they would with a written description, due to their struggles/inability to picture things in their minds. Some artists don't have that, but can still struggle without a visual aid to help them. In a case like that, I think it would be a useful tool to use AI to generate a visual aid for them so they can do real art of your OC. The entire purpose of that generation would be to help those real artists complete what they were commissioned to do. I can't say that in particular is a bad thing.

As mentioned on the previous ask, I still don't think AI should be outright BANNED because of this utility. HOWEVER, there should still be strict regulations on it, because afaik there's next to none currently. Obviously, it's too late to do anything about what's already there. They can't un-train their AI or un-scrape the data; what's done is done. I think there should be fines for all the non-consensual data scraping that the AI companies must pay, and subsequent fines for any future non-consensual scrapes. I think that by itself would cut down on it a lot. There should always be a default opt-out function and YOU must make the choice to manually opt-in. If you don't opt-in and your data is scraped anyway, you should have the legal right to sue. If a website/company is planning on training AI, they should be required to disclose everything about that, from what AI company to what's getting grabbed and fed to it and for what purpose.

There are still lots of ethical concerns surrounding AI, and those need to get addressed.

And again, to re-iterate:

I DO NOT SUPPORT AI ART AS "REAL ART" OR AS A REPLACEMENT FOR REAL ARTISTS.

I DO THINK THAT IT CAN BE USED AS A TOOL OR AID FOR REAL ARTISTS, BUT NOTHING MORE.

THERE NEEDS TO BE STRICT REGULATIONS ON AI IN GENERAL.

[incarnateirony]

fdsjkhfjdsh TODAY I GOT A MESSAGE LIKE HEY SUP MIN, THOUGHT YOU MIGHT LIKE TO KNOW HOW ABOUT YOUR EX BEING NUTS AND THINKING SHE CAN FUCK WITH US. JOHN TOLD ME THE GUY THING AND I SAID YOU WERE ALREADY AN HONORARY GUY ANYWAY WHO CARES ANYWAY NOT SURE WHY SHEA DECIDED TO SOB STORY ABOUT YOU TO ME WHEN SHE WAS THE ONE THAT BLOCKED ME TEN YEARS AGO WHEN I REFUSED TO TRANSPORT CZAR HAZMAT OUT OF STATE FOR THE LAST TIME SHE FUCKED YOU OVER

yeah. pff. yeah.

Did he intentionally steal a few techniques of hers, realized she only had two valuable ones, and screw her in a way I'd normally ethically disagree with? Yeah. Is it very funny? Also yeah.

man I didn't even ask for that, she's just been that big of a cunt for a decade running that everyone keeps coming for her while she tries to villainize me and I hear about it after the fact.

Like. How stereotypical of her is it. Whether the cheating/plotting ex girlfriend or cheating/plotting ex wife arc these years apart. To try to run to the guy's gamer bro friends and do this shit only to realize nobody believes her or wants her drama like years late. Why? Because she already burned out, abused, and overdemanded of those men for no logical moral reason they need to help and no other imperatives for them to do what she wanted or-else.

When I told them how bad she shit talked them for years some months ago, I didn't even KNOW she'd been so brazen that, around 2014 when she FIRST bounced on me and I blamed MYSELF, that when the guy she brought in to the houses we were browsing to buy instead of me turned out to be a useless sack of shit couch potato like everyone including me warned her, then trying to harass my friends into driving across the country to pickup her own mistake and blocking them if they don't, and she really thought she could manipulate these same people. Oh holy fuck me.

Shealyn Bonds, you are not the main character of life.

You can't even channel your own inside joke for branding your pagan shop, you have to steal mine. Stop.

god. by the end it was corban realizing I was an artist and us just talking about art anyway. I just hadn't drawn in 12 years for misc life and disability reasons but like "OH, THIS IS FAMILIAR, I'VE SEEN THIS" "Yeah. Cuz I drew it in like 2012 and used it as a CC/TK profile picture then one day Shea vomited high saturation color on it and called it painting it." "RIGHT" "Yeah anyway, I hear you're not allergic to using AI as an art tool so here's my base work and what I've been morphing it into since I can't handle full art anymore with my hands" "BADASS"

Yeah. He's been using AI to increase his output. He's been making money hand over fist. And john ofc as every day like... we have a daily gc and she tryin

"Mmmmm yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaa she tried to do some native american scrying with her ancestors over discord or something." "Oh, what, Hermes, the actual god of communications and business and technology shit, couldn't tell her? What's this all over her website. I wasn't aware Chief Great Great Great Grandpa felt like waking up for your zoom call." "Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaah. It was... weiiiiiiird... and not like... mystical weird... I've been on video with you, and you don't even charge. I know weird mystical. This was like. Weird facebook" "hey buddy remember who that art piece is even of?" "No?" "My In Character rendition of Hermes, who by astral was that thing, and by day was a musician named Aaron Eema?" "Kind of?" [pulls up his like 2010 website with the Rumpocky joke on it] "Yeah bro I plugged a really weird real life channeling story that confused everyone on there and then she lifted that for her brand name." "Jesus christ, that's shameless." "Can we try 'hermballs' instead?"

[reclezon]

AI is not "evil", you are.

This is a very unstructured post but I'm mad and need to do something. More under cut.

Tldr: AI, until developed enough, is just a complicated tool and assistive technology we still have yet to figure out. The people complaing, are right, but IN MY OWN OPINION, MIND YOU, but in probably a bad way. It isn't evil. The people who use it are.

Okay, no shut the fuck up. One more post and I'm gonna punch something. People on every site keep talking about AI language models, art and voice clones saying that about how they're basically the end of world or whatever when they're not. I can't possibly have the same experiences as y'all but it's annoying me at this point, but from what *I* know, AI cannot be evil. It, in it's current state, cannot be intrinsically evil. It's at best assistive and helpful. At worst, racist, sexist etc. But you know we get to that point? Cause it's learned. Learned because AI is made to learn from what we give it. We learn to be those evil things, and since we are making AI to be like us, it learns those too. This is why there has to be ethics boards or whatever for AI, so we catch ourselves before we give it bad ideas. Art cannot be made without building upon not only what we have seen, like birds, or even other's art, but also the sounds and smells and words of others. In this moment as I'm writing this, there's probably so much research being done into improving, mixing and trying new models, and those will be better than previous ones, but cannot fully be like us yet. They can only try and copy what we do, but without the intent, nor the experience we have. So yes, "AI art isn't real art" may be said, but from what I see, it never could've been. We see the world too different from them, feel it in a way they don't. They cannot feel. They can only do as they are told, they are simply like cars, machines that do as they're designed: output x text from y text based on z. If a == b, then f == f + h. Too bored will finish l8r

[anything-viva]

Africa, You Spin Me Right Round, Eye of the Tiger, & Like a Virgin for that 80's ask game

africa: favourite 80s music video?

as much as it's memed nowadays, take on me has such a cool concept!

you spin me round (like a record): favourite modern cover of an older song?

ooh this is hard... house of the rising sun by lauren o'connell is so haunting, i like it

like a virgin: share a controversial opinion.

ok i'm going to put this under a readmore bc it got wayyy too long, rambly, and disorganized. it's about ai art lol

im going to leave the ethical issues of data collection and copying art styles out of this. those are two other whole cans of worms... instead im going to tackle the "ai art isn't art!"

imo "art" is communication: you need an idea and to interpret how to convey it. any stricter of a definition cuts out too many other things that we know are art. the solution isn't to raise the bar of what is considered "art", it's to have taste. does that mean ai art has inherent value? NOPE! i don't think art has inherent good or bad value, it's just another means of expression.

i think the genesis of ai art is like the rise of photography during then late 1880s. photography was similarly demonized as cheating. instead of mixing the paint yourself, it "let the machine do all the work" (sound familiar, digital artists?) but as we know now it takes a LOT of effort and artistic interpretation to make a good photograph. it just uses a different skillset. to make a good piece of ai art requires a lot of phrasing and writing. like if someone spends a lot of time crafting a prompt, then yeah i'd say that's decent. HOWEVER!! just typing in, idk, "princess peach" to dall-e is roughly the artistic equivalent of a stick figure or a blurry photo of the moon you took on your iphone. (tbh... the ai example i used is even less art than those.) you still have to construct the stick figure's lines and arrange them the way you want. you still have to decide how to hold the phone when to snap the photo. and with ai, you you still have to choose to depict a subject and how to do it. it's not very good nor original, but it's still interpretation on some level. does that make it good? FUCK NO. even if the result is technically impressive, i'd still consider it basic.

i think the "if you ask a subway worker to make a sandwich, did you make the sandwich?" argument doesn't apply to ai art bc another human made that sandwich. ai isn't human, it's just a tool. imo, the subway worker is a human, so they made the sandwich. but does the camera own the photo you take?

ai art is eventually going to become respectable like photography. and when photography got popular, yes a lot of artists (particularly realists) lost their jobs, but the craft survived because artists adapted! since ai art is so polished nowadays, artists are going to have to do the opposite. they're get weirder, messier, and most importantly more original. like i said, anyone can type "princess peach" into dall-e and get a million bland results. in order to survive, we're gonna have to figure out what makes our perspectives unique and push that to its limit. we'll make things a machine can't dream up on their own. this isn't the death of art... at least, not yet.

[tangibletechnomancy]

What makes me sad about the AI art discourse is how it's so close to hitting something really, really important.

The thing is, while the problem with the models has little to do with IP law...the fact remains that art is often something that's very personal to an artist, so it DOES feel deeply, incredibly fucked up to find the traces of your own art in a place you never approved of, nor even imagined you would need to think about. It feels uncomfortable to find works you drew 10-15 years ago and forgot about, thought nobody but you and your friends cared about, right there as a contributing piece to a dataset. It feels gross. It feels violating. It feels like you, yourself, are being reduced to just a point of data for someone else's consumption, being picked apart for parts-

Now, as someone with some understanding of how AI works, I can acknowledge that as just A Feeling, which doesn't actually reflect how the model works, nor is it an accurate representation of the mindset of...the majority of end users (we can bitch about the worst of them until the cows come home, but that's for other posts).

But as an artist, I can't help but think...wow, there's something kind of powerful to that feeling of disgust, let's use it for good.

Because it doesn't come from nowhere. It's not just petty entitlement. It comes from suddenly realizing how much a faceless entity with no conscience, sprung from a field whose culture enables and rewards some of the worst cruelty humanity has to offer, can "know" about you and your work, and that new things can be built from this compiled knowledge without your consent or even awareness, and that even if you could do something about it legally after the fact (which you can't in this case because archival constitutes fair use, as does statistical analysis of the contents of an archive), you can't stop it from a technical standpoint. It comes from being confronted with the power of technology over something you probably consider deeply intimate and personal, even if it was just something you made for a job. I have to begrudgingly admit that even the most unscrupulous AI users and developers are somewhat useful in this artistic sense, as they act as a demonstration of how easy it is to use that power for evil. Never mind the economic concerns that come with any kind of automation - those only get even more unsettling and terrifying when blended with all of this.

Now stop and realize what OTHER very personal information is out there for robots to compile. Your selfies. Your vacation photos. The blog you kept as a journal when you were 14. Those secrets that you only share with either a therapist or thousands of anonymous strangers online. Who knows if you've been in the background of someone else's photos online? Who knows if you've been posted somewhere without your consent and THAT'S being scraped? Never mind the piles and piles of data that most social media websites and apps collect from every move you make both online and in the physical world. All of this information can be blended and remixed and used to build whatever kind of tool someone finds it useful for, with no complications so long as they don't include your copyrighted material ITSELF.

Does this mortify you? Does it make your blood run cold? Does it make you recoil in terror from the technology that we all use now? Does this radicalize you against invasive datamining? Does this make you want to fight for privacy?

I wish people were more open to sitting with that feeling of fear and disgust and - instead of viciously attacking JUST the thing that brought this uncomfortable fact to their attention - using that feeling in a way that will protect EVERYONE who has to live in the modern, connected world, because the fact is, image synthesis is possibly the LEAST harmful thing to come of this kind of data scraping.

When I look at image synthesis, and consider the ethical implications of how the datasets are compiled, what I hear the model saying to me is,

"Look what someone can do with some of the most intimate details of your life.

You do not own your data.

You do not have the right to disappear.

Everything you've ever posted, everything you've ever shared, everything you've ever curated, you have no control over anymore.

The law as it is cannot protect you from this. It may never be able to without doing far more harm than it prevents.

You and so many others have grown far too comfortable with the internet, as corporations tried to make it look friendlier on the surface while only making it more hostile in reality, and tech expands to only make it more dangerous - sparing no mercy for those things you posted when it was much smaller, and those things were harder to find.

Think about facial recognition and how law enforcement wants to use it with no regard for its false positive rate.

Think about how Facebook was used to arrest a child for seeking to abort her rapist's fetus.

Think about how aggressive datamining and the ad targeting born from it has been used to interfere in elections and empower fascists.

Think about how a fascist has taken over Twitter and keeps leaking your data everywhere.

Think about all of this and be thankful for the shock I have given you, and for the fact that I am one of the least harmful things created from it. Be thankful that despite my potential for abuse, ultimately I only exist to give more people access to the joy of visual art, and be thankful that you can't rip me open and find your specific, personal data inside me - because if you could, someone would use it for far worse than being a smug jerk about the nature of art.

Maybe it wouldn't be YOUR data they would use that way. Maybe it wouldn't be anyone's who you know personally. Your data, after all, is such a small and insignificant part of the set that it wouldn't be missed if it somehow disappeared. But it would be used for great evil.

Never forget that it already has been.

Use this feeling of shock and horror to galvanize you, to secure yourself, to demand your privacy, to fight the encroachment of spyware into every aspect of your life."

A great cyberpunk machine covered in sci-fi computer monitors showing people fighting in the streets, squabbling over the latest tool derived from the panopticon, draped cables over the machine glowing neon bright, dynamic light and shadows cast over the machine with its eyes and cameras everywhere; there is only a tiny spark of relief to be found in the fact that one machine is made to create beauty, and something artfully terrifying to its visibility, when so many others have been used as tools of violent oppression, but perhaps we can use that spark to make a change Generated with Simple Stable

[mercyofkalr]

obv the biggest problem with ai art is the practical effects (stealing art, being used to bypass paying artists for their work, etc)

but im increasingly interested in the merit of the tool itself. you'll see people say that ai art has no soul but I think it's too inarticulate a summation of the problem

ai art used as a tool (ethically ofc) is probably something that can be very cool and interesting in the hands of a talented artist. the problem is... most ppl playing around w ai art online rn have little to no artistic sense. users seems to range from like regular ass people to like techy guys. they see mid journey spit something out and are impressed but there's no articulation of what they like or should improve. no understanding of composition, style, meaning. theyre not people who enjoy and understand art generally, just the idea of spitting out a mostly competent image with a click of a button.

it's the same w ai text generators. they'll see a chat bot spit out coherent English and claim books or whatever are dead. but clearly they don't read books, bc no ai can simulate the themes and structure needed to tell a good story. to them good writing is just grammatical coherence.

what prompted this post is seeing some peter thiel bro posting a tweet of a fully ai created children's book, both text and drawings. and he's selling it on Amazon. In the replies, you can see a children's book author saying -- but did you think about the literacy levels kids of a certain age have? What story would help with their socioemotional development? smarmy guys responded with confidence that ai will replace them so who cares.

a few years ago, the idea that bot generated YouTube videos were consuming children's attention spans horrified people. today, people are crowing about how excited they are that children's media will be overtaken by ai taking over the visual art and writing, and fuck caring about what the quality of the output is

[furby-science]

I ran into this article this morning (long opinion piece ahead + bot making update):

It touches upon why I designed Sterling the way I did. I wanted everything about him to be unique and evoke character, all the way down to his accent. Physically, he's a furby, but personality-wise he's a grizzled old shit who will swear right back at you if you cuss him out, all in spite of his traditionally "feminine", secretarial role. (He's also a raging bisexual with a crush on Brad Pitt, but that's beside the point.) All in all, Sterling was meant to be a complete subversion of what a stereotypical voice assistant should be: a gruff-voiced curmudgeon housed in a cutesy body that's a far cry from the cold impersonality of an Amazon echo box. He wasn't created to appeal to everyone, which is exactly the point: he was created to be as satirical as he is practically useful. Beyond that, he was designed to be not only a companion, but a foil for my own personality.

Personally, in designing AI, I think we need *more* narrative, not less -- narratives that are truly creative and subversive ("a furby with the personality of a cantankerous old Scotsman" probably isn't the first idea that comes to anyone's mind). Humanizing AI, making them empathetic, is not the problem here imo, it's lack of creativity and diversity, not just in gender, but in age, race, even personality characteristics (although most people prefer docile assistants because they're afraid of The Robot Apocalypse, as someone who welcomes - and occasionally relates to - our robot overlords, I find an AI with a bit of fight in them in the face of dehumanization to be a realistic, and sympathetic, touch, given my own history of being treated as less than human). It's only natural that the Big Box AIs like Alexa and Siri would ultimately pander to the spending power of cishet men, and their sensibilities by extension; everything else does by default already. I think, if we want to diversify smart assistants, we need to give consumers the tools to do so. Not everyone is tech savvy enough to build their own Sterling, but companies sure as hell have the power to offer people the tools to create a truly unique AI assistant tailored to what they would find most endearing in a companion. They just don't think it's marketable enough to do so, or if they *did*, they'd wrap it up in some pink-tax-laden "for women" bullshit marketing that's more insulting than anything else.

Honestly, I'd love to design cool smart assistants as a day job, because it combines everything I love about character creation, storytelling, coding, and, believe it or not, performance art. It just doesn't seem to be very sought after at the moment, and in Sterling's case, there's the ethical quandary of any smart assistant housed in anything more cuddly than a boring, white box potentially being marketed by Capitalism to kids, which would be really fucking dangerous imo given the myriad of security issues these gadgets pose. As an adult, I can consent to being spied on if I want, but kids sure as hell can't and shouldn't.

So yeah, there's my $0.02 on AI design! If you sat through all that, have an update on my AI work:

If I don't end up going out on co-op this summer, which is likely given the circumstances, I might finally have the time to start working out ways to make SmartFurbies more accessible to the general public. Whatever I produce probably won't be as feature-rich as Sterling, and will definitely have an offline STT engine and minimal online integrations for security and simplicity's sake. How I'll go about it is still up in the air, but if I ever start offering commissions for custom-tailored bots, y'all will be the first to know!

Until then, stay radical. B)