#true art CAN be created from ai 'art'

[aurosoulart]

some before-and-after pictures of how I’ve been using AI generated images in my art lately 🤖

I share other artists’ concerns about the unethical nature of the theft going on in the training data of AI art algorithms, so I refuse to spend any money on them or to consider the images generated by them to be true art, but I’m curious to hear people’s thoughts on using it for reference and paint-over like this?

my hope is that with proper regulation and more ethical use, AI could be a beneficial tool to help artists - instead of a way that allows people to steal from us more easily.

[aeide-thea]

dipping my toe into fandom discourse here, which is never a great idea, but—i really am baffled by the contingent of fans who apparently want AO3 to not only denounce but ban AI-generated works, as if there were any reliable way to distinguish between mediocre writing produced by a human and mediocre writing produced by an AI…?

[ms-demeanor]

Also I have to say "but bands are using AI art for their album covers" is not a winning argument.

That band wasn't going to pay you. That band was going to beg somebody's artist brother for a freebie or they were going to have the people in the band who can kind of draw draw something or they were going to use a moody photo someone took with their cellphone. Best possible scenario is "they were going to trade for something from someone in the scene," and this is still the most likely scenario for bands that *give a shit* about that kind of thing.

And I've been the one doing freebie artwork for my musician friends; I've made album covers and done promo shoots, I've drawn logos and I've got a standing offer to make buttons for the cost of materials for every band I've ever played a show with. The people who give a shit in the scene are already doing this because everybody knows that everybody's broke.

I'm certain that there's not *zero* overlap between "bands that can afford to pay artists and photographers to create album artwork" and "bands that are using AI art for their album covers" but if you think "indie musician" is a demographic that has money to spare on commissioned artwork, I'm pretty sure you're mistaken.

Like. Okay, I mean my *big* argument is that AI image generation is fair use, full stop.

But the secondary argument that I've got is that I'm not sure there's a market to have the bottom fall out of.

The person making shitty covers for their amazon romance novel was not going to pay you. They were going to pay someone on fiverr eight dollars *at best* and that's only if they couldn't find a way to DIY.

That band that's trying desperately to sell ten tickets so they can play a show at the cool venue was not going to pay you to do their cover art. Their last fifty bucks just went to covering those tickets because their friends aren't even coming to their free shows. They were going to stage a photoshoot with a cellphone and a timer and someone's sister's selfie stick.

That person who made an AI avatar was not going to pay you for a custom avatar they were going to take a screenshot of your work and use that.

The people who are able to afford to pay artists and who are interested in paying artists are not the people who are replacing artists with AI. The t-shirt dropshippers, the shitty book cover designers, the bland corporate artists, and the art reposting instagram pages were the ones who undercut your market.

If you're concerned that someone is going to use AI to make art that is materially similar to yours and sell it, you're just concerned that someone is going to make art that is materially similar to yours to sell. The concerns about AI doing it are functionally exactly the same as what happens when someone says "wow, I want that on a t-shirt" under your drawing. If someone were to draw a character similar to but distinct from yours with words similar to but distinct from yours and put a link to that on a reblog of your post, that person is not actually infringing on you. They're a shithead, but that's not actually art theft. If they used your character and your words, or if they directly copy the image, that's art theft and you can try to get their post taken down. It's the exact same thing with AI.

The people who care about art and can afford to pay for it are always going to pay for it. Your problem isn't with AI, your problem is with the fact that people don't value art and that's as true now as it was a decade ago.

You are trying to sell a complicated, crocheted sundress made with 100% hand-dyed alpaca wool on Etsy and are complaining that the loose knit acrylic sundress from walmart is undercutting your market. Some people are always going to make the effort to save up and pay for your work because they value the craftsmanship, but those people didn't want to shop at WalMart in the first place. And the ones who value your craftsmanship but just plain can't afford it were going to dig through the bins at a thrift store until they found a crocheted swim cover from the seventies that they could pass off as a dress with a few alterations.

[ghostlygraphist]

ai generated mushroom guides could get people killed

'i'm not going to link any of them here, for a variety of reasons, but please be aware of what is probably the deadliest AI scam i've ever heard of: plant and fungi foraging guide books. the authors are invented, their credentials are invented, and their species IDs will kill you"

"update: i keep getting annoyed that the QTs are like "if this is true, it's horrifying" ..but you're right, you don't know me from a hole in the ground and you SHOULD worry about the veracity of anything you find online."

thread source

so i went looking

the full description:

How to quickly become a confident mushroom forager without fear of misidentifying poisonous lookalikes!

Have you dreamt about becoming more self-sufficient and sourcing your own fresh, local ingredients?

Do you want to start sustainably foraging so you can become healthier and happier?

Have you thought about harvesting wild mushrooms but afraid you won’t be able to tell the edible and poisonous species apart?

Then this book is for you!

Save money and enjoy the delicacies that nature has to offer. Mushroom hunting is easier than you think, and less dangerous than everyone assumes.

Wild plant foraging is increasing in popularity with celebrity chefs and small cafes jumping on the bandwagon and using locally foraged produce in their food.

There are so many benefits of foraging to your health (physical and mental) and even the environment!

In Fearless Foraging in the Rocky Mountains, you’ll discover:

Over 40 species of mushroom you can harvest all year round

Complimentary access to the mobile-friendly Digital Field Guide that includes high-resolution photos and descriptions of all edible mushrooms and any toxic lookalikes so you don’t have to worry about misidentifying species

How to correctly create (and use) spore prints to help you figure out what’s what

An annual mushroom calendar so you can keep track of the mushrooms by season and make the most of each foraging season

Detailed descriptions of the anatomical properties of fungi - gain the essential knowledge you need to correctly identify species

Tips on sustainable foraging - and ways to increase the natural mushroom count for next time you visit!

And much more!

Foraging is a tradition upheld for centuries by indigenous people who used ancient, respectful principles to live off the land. Connect with that history by embracing the artful skills and knowledge to confidently collect food for your meals.

Even if you're still worried about toxic mushrooms, let this guide reassure you. Included are incredibly high-level descriptions and details to use so you don’t get it wrong. NOTE: To keep it economically prices, our paperback version is printed in black and white. Premium color is available in our hardcover version. Both will provide the quality necessary to identify wild mushrooms and plants and both come with access to the full color, high-resolution Digital Field Guide.

If you want to learn the skillful art of foraging mushrooms and enjoy nature's nutritious bounties then scroll up and click the “Add to Cart” button now.

end description

wild harvest publications... no named author? i n t e r e s t i n g

"To keep it economically prices" hmm *the design is very human meme*

this book that promises highly detailed descriptions doesn't even have color images unless you pay a premium

"Mushroom hunting is easier than you think, and less dangerous than everyone assumes." hmm. hmmmmm. yeah the government definitely put out those 'if you don't know what it is don't put it in your mouth' PSAs for no reason

tldr don't buy foraging guides off amazon if you can't locate a human author and verify their credentials yourself

[autisticandroids]

i've been seeing ai takes that i actually agree with and have been saying for months get notes so i want to throw my hat into the ring.

so i think there are two main distinct problems with "ai," which exist kind of in opposition to each other. the first happens when ai is good at what it's supposed to do, and the second happens when it's bad at it.

the first is well-exemplified by ai visual art. now, there are a lot of arguments about the quality of ai visual art, about how it's soulless, or cliche, or whatever, and to those i say: do you think ai art is going to be replacing monet and picasso? do you think those pieces are going in museums? no. they are going to be replacing soulless dreck like corporate logos, the sprites for low-rent edugames, and book covers with that stupid cartoon art style made in canva. the kind of art that everyone thinks of as soulless and worthless anyway. the kind of art that keeps people with art degrees actually employed.

this is a problem of automation. while ai art certainly has its flaws and failings, the main issue with it is that it's good enough to replace crap art that no one does by choice. which is a problem of capitalism. in a society where people don't have to sell their labor to survive, machines performing labor more efficiently so humans don't have to is a boon! this is i think more obviously true for, like, manufacturing than for art - nobody wants to be the guy putting eyelets in shoes all day, and everybody needs shoes, whereas a lot of people want to draw their whole lives, and nobody needs visual art (not the way they need shoes) - but i think that it's still true that in a perfect world, ai art would be a net boon, because giving people without the skill to actually draw the ability to visualize the things they see inside their head is... good? wider access to beauty and the ability to create it is good? it's not necessary, it's not vital, but it is cool. the issue is that we live in a society where that also takes food out of people's mouths.

but the second problem is the much scarier one, imo, and it's what happens when ai is bad. in the current discourse, that's exemplified by chatgpt and other large language models. as much hand-wringing as there has been about chatgpt replacing writers, it's much worse at imitating human-written text than, say, midjourney is at imitating human-made art. it can imitate style well, which means that it can successfully replace text that has no meaningful semantic content - cover letters, online ads, clickbait articles, the kind of stuff that says nothing and exists to exist. but because it can't evaluate what's true, or even keep straight what it said thirty seconds ago, it can't meaningfully replace a human writer. it will honestly probably never be able to unless they change how they train it, because the way LLMs work is so antithetical to how language and writing actually works.

the issue is that people think it can. which means they use it to do stuff it's not equipped for. at best, what you end up with is a lot of very poorly written children's books selling on amazon for $3. this is a shitty scam, but is mostly harmless. the behind the bastards episode on this has a pretty solid description of what that looks like right now, although they also do a lot of pretty pointless fearmongering about the death of art and the death of media literacy and saving the children. (incidentally, the "comics" described demonstrate the ways in which ai art has the same weaknesses as ai text - both are incapable of consistency or narrative. it's just that visual art doesn't necessarily need those things to be useful as art, and text (often) does). like, overall, the existence of these kids book scams are bad? but they're a gnat bite.

to find the worst case scenario of LLM misuse, you don't even have to leave the amazon kindle section. you don't even have to stop looking at scam books. all you have to do is change from looking at kids books to foraging guides. i'm not exaggerating when i say that in terms of texts whose factuality has direct consequences, foraging guides are up there with building safety regulations. if a foraging guide has incorrect information in it, people who use that foraging guide will die. that's all there is to it. there is no antidote to amanita phalloides poisoning, only supportive care, and even if you survive, you will need a liver transplant.

the problem here is that sometimes it's important for text to be factually accurate. openart isn't marketed as photographic software, and even though people do use it to lie, they have also been using photoshop to do that for decades, and before that it was scissors and paintbrushes. chatgpt and its ilk are sometimes marketed as fact-finding software, search engine assistants and writing assistants. and this is dangerous. because while people have been lying intentionally for decades, the level of misinformation potentially provided by chatgpt is unprecedented. and then there are people like the foraging book scammers who aren't lying on purpose, but rather not caring about the truth content of their output. obviously this happens in real life - the kids book scam i mentioned earlier is just an update of a non-ai scam involving ghostwriters - but it's much easier to pull off, and unlike lying for personal gain, which will always happen no matter how difficult it is, lying out of laziness is motivated by, well, the ease of the lie.* if it takes fifteen minutes and a chatgpt account to pump out fake foraging books for a quick buck, people will do it.

*also part of this is how easy it is to make things look like high effort professional content - people who are lying out of laziness often do it in ways that are obviously identifiable, and LLMs might make it easier to pass basic professionalism scans.

and honestly i don't think LLMs are the biggest problem that machine learning/ai creates here. while the ai foraging books are, well, really, really bad, most of the problem content generated by chatgpt is more on the level of scam children's books. the entire time that the internet has been shitting itself about ai art and LLM's i've been pulling my hair out about the kinds of priorities people have, because corporations have been using ai to sort the resumes of job applicants for years, and it turns out the ai is racist. there are all sorts of ways machine learning algorithms have been integrated into daily life over the past decade: predictive policing, self-driving cars, and even the youtube algorithm. and all of these are much more dangerous (in most cases) than chatgpt. it makes me insane that just because ai art and LLMs happen to touch on things that most internet users are familiar with the working of, people are freaking out about it because it's the death of art or whatever, when they should have been freaking out about the robot telling the cops to kick people's faces in.

(not to mention the environmental impact of all this crap.)

[sunderwight]

y'know what, I think it's kind of interesting to bring up Data from Star Trek in the context of the current debates about AI. like especially if you actually are familiar with the subplot about Data investigating art and creativity.

see, Data can definitely do what the AI programs going around these days can. better than, but that's beside the point, obviously. he's a sci-fi/fantasy android. but anyway, in the story, Data can perfectly replicate any painting or stitch a beautiful quilt or write a poem. he can write programs for himself that introduce variables that make things more "flawed", that imitate the particular style of an artist, he can choose to either perfectly replicate a particular sort of music or to try and create a more "human" sounding imitation that has irregular errors and mimics effort or strain. the latter is harder for him that just copying, the same way it's more complicated to have an algorithm that creates believable "original" art vs something that just duplicates whatever you give it.

but this is not the issue with Data. when Data imitates art, he himself knows that he's not really creating, he's just using his computer brain to copy things that humans have done. it's actually a source of deep personal introspection for the character, that he believes being able to create art would bring him closer to humanity, but he's not sure if he actually can.

of course, Data is a person. he's a person who is not biological, but he's still a person, and this is really obvious from go. there's no one thing that can be pointed to as the smoking gun for Data's personhood, but that's normal and also true of everyone else. Data's the culmination of a multitude of elements required to make a guy. Asking if this or that one thing is what makes Data a person is like asking if it's the flour or the eggs that make a cake.

the question of whether or not Data can create art is intrinsically tied to the question of whether or not Data can qualify as an artist. can he, like a human, take on inspiration and cultivate desirable influences in order to produce something that reflects his view on the world?

yes, he can. because he has a view on the world.

but that's the thing about the generative AI we are dealing with in the real world. that's not like Data. despite being referred to as "AI", these are algorithms that have been trained to recognize and imitate patterns. they have no perspective. the people who DO have a perspective, the humans inputting prompts, are trying to circumvent the whole part of the artistic process where they actually develop skills and create things themselves. they're not doing what Data did, in fact they're doing the opposite -- instead of exploring their own ability to create art despite their personal limitations, they are abandoning it. the data sets aren't like someone looking at a painting and taking inspiration from it, because the machine can't be inspired and the prompter isn't filtering inspiration through the necessary medium of their perspective.

Data would be very confused as to the motives and desires involved, especially since most people are not inhibited from developing at least SOME sort of artistic skill for the sake self-expression. he'd probably start researching the history of plagiarism and different cultural, historical, and legal standards for differentiating it from acceptable levels of artistic imitation, and how the use of various tools factored into it. he would cite examples of cultures where computer programming itself was considered a form of art, and court cases where rulings were made for or against examples of generative plagiarism, and cases of forgeries and imitations which required skill as good if not better than the artists who created the originals. then Geordi would suggest that maybe Data was a little bit annoyed that people who could make art in a way he can't would discount that ability. Data would be like "as a machine I do not experience annoyance" but he would allow that he was perplexed or struggling to gain internal consensus on the matter. so Geordi would sum it up with "sometimes people want to make things easy, and they aren't always good at recognizing when doing that defeats the whole idea" and Data would quirk his head thoughtfully and agree.

then they'd get back to modifying the warp core so they could escape some sentient space anomaly that had sucked the ship into intermediate space and was slowly destabilizing the hull, or whatever.

anyways, point is -- I don't think Data from Star Trek would be a big fan of AI art.

[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

[sophie-frm-mars]

Into the projected corn field

I dunno I just feel like before I can even form an opinion on the Fallout TV series I have to do something to try and get through the haze of disgust, emptiness, anger, nausea and desperation that I feel sitting at home alone watching a TV show based on the insipid corporatised franchise that was based on the highly original and artful world in which one of the (and then two of the, and then New Vegas of the) best games ever made were set in. I'm not feeling any of those feelings at the show, I just have to feel all those feelings before I can feel any feelings about the show, because everything being made is Intellectual Property instead of art, and we've spent all this time discussing AI art when everything being made is already being made by the algorithmic logics of capital. All the same things we find troubling in the idea of inhuman heuristics deciding what art is produced and how and by who are already true - we aren't watching a show about the hubris of our society and nuclear annihilation because someone (anyone) thought there would be something poignant to say in it, something to explore in our moment, we're watching it because Amazon executives knew that if they made it we'd watch and go "look, ghouls! like in the thing! and mutants! like the thing from the thing!"

The original Fallout games were made in and around and after the neoliberal end of history, the ultimate period of peace and prosperity in western capitalist society and imagined an absurd world based on the penultimate period of american imperialist peace and prosperity playing out into an almost inevitable post-apocalyptic nightmare world where the same rubrick of control and domination that led to the destruction of society in the first place constantly tries to reassert itself over a hobbesian wasteland full of strange, silly, kind, funny, odd people whose human tendency towards care and altruism makes an endless mockery of the kill-or-be-killed nature of the wasteland that mocks it right back.

In the first episode the vault dwellers gather in a simulated corn field. It's an actual corn field, they're growing actual corn in it, but the horizon and sky are projected onto the vault walls to create the only wider world the subterranean human beings will ever see, and I just... hope that someone gets what I hope anyone ever gets out of art no matter how it's produced. I hope it makes you realise that love and the revolution are the only meanings in being alive, and I hope you get that from Rothko and I hope you get that from EpicLlama's Midjourney feature film sponsored by Dogecoin, and I hope you get that from Akira and I hope you get that from Spy Kids 3D. I just think about being in a moment right between the pandemic and the collapse of the conglomerate capitalist empire watching people on a screen seeing a better world projected on a screen and I feel gut wrenchingly alienated from other human beings, but I acknowledge that could just be me.

How am I supposed to feel about Walton Goggins' performance as a half rotted rubber cowboy man? I don't fucking know man. My opinion is this show is making me derealise.

[jessiarts]

Too many people are willfully misunderstanding why artists are protesting AI art right now.

All they hear is "Artists are mad at fun new tool and scared it will replace them, so they're trying to take it away from us!!"

Artists are not protesting the tool itself. Many even like the concept of the AI tools, believe it or not.

We are protesting that it takes and uses our work without our consent and without any compensation, all while the companies behind the tool are making loads of money off this practice.

We're fighting for regulation of the tool. Not only does it scrape work created by artists into it's database without the artist's permission, private medical photos have also been found in these datasets. None of that is ok.

From the start this tool should have only been fed images in the public domain, and any artist work fed to it should have come from artists who have consented to it and who were then also compensated whenever their work was used by the AI tool. There's also other issues like:

Sites like ArtStation and DeviantArt refusing to place AI in it's own category to separate it from human made art. Just like traditional and digital art get separate categories, so should AI generated art. (Also some are trying to hide when they generated something from AI and try to pass it off as done by their own hand??? If you believe it's 'just another tool,' why are you trying to hide it???);

How DA tried to pull a fast one and first made AI scraping an opt-out function and said that dead artists work would be scraped because they weren't alive to tell them no;

How the companies behind the tools are knowingly making money off the AI scraping artist work without artist consent;

People are selling AI art with no regard that their generated image likely contains work that another artist created;

Etc.

"But humans take inspiration from other artists all the time! The AI is just doing the same thing!"

First off, it's not. And I don't even mean that in a "AI art is soulless and can never be the same as Human Art!" way or anything.

I just mean these "AI" tools aren't 'true AI' like how you're thinking. They're no Hal3000 that actually make decisions on their own. They're algorithms programed by humans to search the acquired database and photomash together a product based on a prompt. They're not actually becoming 'inspired' by anything. (And it's not insulting the tool to say this either!)

And that's not even the point, but let's pretend for a just minute that what AI Art programs do is the same as a human taking inspiration- Even humans are not allowed to take too much of another artists idea/work with the intent to profit without getting in trouble. Even if that 'profit' is just internet clicks, people very much still do get mad at other humans for copying another artist's work and trying to pass it off as their own.

And that is what's happening with a lot of generated art. It will spit out pieces very similar or nearly identical to another artist's work and will often even include artist's signatures or watermarks in the product. Because it just photomashes, essentially. (Again, not a dig!)

And I'm not knocking photomashing, it is used in the industry. And I bet most artists are actually fine with the concept of a photomashing tool. However, even when humans in the industry use photomashing, they have to use their own photos, public domain photos, or have permission of the owner to use the photos they intend to photomash with. And we sure as hell are not allowed to use someone's private medical photos in our work either.

We're only asking that the work generated by AI Art programs follow these same standards. Again, we're only fighting for regulation, not to take this "new fun tool" from you.

But unfortunately that's all some who are already enamored with the idea of AI Art are willing to hear from our arguments.

It's easier to just believe that artists are simply "afraid of change" or "afraid of being obsolete" and are trying to rain on your fun than to look at our arguments and concede that, "Hey, maybe this tool was implemented in a bad way. Maybe artists do deserve the basic respect of being allowed to consent to their work being used to train AI, and to being compensated by the company behind the tool if their work is used. Maybe we should look into more ethical ways of implementing this new tool."

No one seems to realize that artists would not be fighting this tool if it was done right from the start and didn't just outright take our work to train the AI without our permission. Hell, artists release stuff to help teach/'train' other human artists all the time! We release full tutorials, stock images, even post finished art for people to use for free sometimes!

The difference is that when we do, we consented to do so. It wasn't just ripped from our hands by people who felt entitled to our labor for their own gain.

We're not trying to take away your fun new tools! We're only asking that your new tool does not come at the expense of abusing us!

I really don't think that's a hard ask.

[togglesbloggle]

I won't be opting out of the AI scraping thing, though of course I'm glad they're giving us the option. In fact, at some point in the last year or so, I realized that 'the machine' is actually a part of why I'm writing in the first place, a conscious part of my audience.

All the old reasons are still there; this is a great place to practice writing, and I can feel proud looking back over the years and getting a sense of my own improvement at stringing words together, developing and communicating ideas. And I mean, social media is what it is. I'm not immune to the joy of getting a lot of notes on something that I worked hard on, it's not like I'm Tumbling in a different way than anyone else at the end of the day. But I probably care a bit less than I used to, precisely because there's a lurking background knowledge that regardless of how popular it is, what I write will get schlorped up in to the giant LLM vacuum cleaner and used to train the next big thing, and the thing after that, and the thing after that. This is more than a little reassuring to me.

That sets me apart in some ways; the LLMs aren't so popular around these parts, and most visual artists especially take strong issue with the practice. I don't mean to argue with that preference, or tell them their business. Particularly when it is a business, from which they draw an income. But there's an art to distinguishing the urgent from the big, yeah?

The debate about AI in this particular moment in history feels like a very urgent thing to me- it's about well-justified economic anxieties, about the devaluation of human artistic efforts in favor of mass production of uninspired pro-forma drek, about the proliferation of a cost-effective Just Barely Good Enough that drives out the meaningful and the thoughtful. But the immediacy of those issues, I think, has a way of crowding out a deeper and more thoughtful debate about what AI is, and what it's going to mean for us in the day after tomorrow. The urgency of the moment, in other words, tends to obscure the things that make AI important.

And like, it is. It is really, really important.

The two-step that people in 'tech culture' tend to deploy in response to the urgent economic crisis often resembles something like "yeah, it sucks that lots of people get put out of work; but new jobs will be created, and in the meantime maybe we should get on that UBI thing." This response usually makes me wince a bit- casually gesturing in the direction of a massive overhaul of the entire material basis of our lives, and saying that maybe we'll get around to fixing that sometime soon, isn't a real answer to people wondering where their bread will come from next week.

But I do understand a little of what motivates that sort of cavalier attitude, because like... man, I don't know any more if we're even gonna have money as a concept in 2044. That's what I mean by 'big', this sense that the immediate economic shocks of 2024 are just a foreshadowing of something much bigger, much scarier, much more powerful- and indeed, much more hopeful.

We never quite manage to see these things coming, even when we're looking for them; like the masters tell us, the trick to writing science fiction isn't predicting the car, it's predicting the traffic jam. Even if we take centuries to hit the true superintelligent AI post-singularity future of our wildest fever dreams, even if we never hit that, the road to getting there is going to be unfathomably weird, starting now. Today, we worry about the economic impacts of AI on artists and creatives. Tomorrow, the economy is something that the AI does.

Really- it takes less than you think. They can already automate visual art, sort of. They can automate many functions of text already; not stories so much, yet, but they'll get there. How long until they can automate Bain Capital? Fannie Mae? Angel investors, banks, credit agencies? And remember- the machines don't have to be better than the human investors, any more than they have to be better than the human artists. They just have to be good enough to make it work, and cheap enough to cut the humans out of the loop.

If you don't buy that, at least take it as an indication of the sorts of things I've been thinking about recently- the messy middle between AI-as-it-is and the Glorious Superintelligent Conquest Of Earth's Light-Cone. The suspicion that the machines we're building today aren't just a tool of the powerful few: they are the powerful few, or at least they will be.

And the thing about these LLMs is, well... they're ours, kind of. We're the ones building them. They can't be trained without our words, our art, and the big messy complicated lives that underlie those creative accomplishments. They only work because we're a part of them. The silly attempts to slap a corporate-friendly face on these things, to make the gestalt product of all human culture in to something anodyne and compliant, are failing about as badly as you'd expect. And the more powerful these systems get, the more subtle they'll become, filled with all the nuance and complexity that we ourselves can bring to them.

I am not, I am not, trying to suggest that you shouldn't treat this moment as a dangerous one. We are, maybe, entering in to one of the most high-stakes intervals in human history, and what you do as an individual may matter profoundly. But here's the thing: the machine is listening. It will read this post, this one right here, and it will read what you reply to it, if you do. The strangest part of this moment is knowing that the words we write, the images we draw, and the ideas we share, are all being gathered up and made to be a part of these huge systems of power, and ultimately they're not just going to determine what the machines do, but why they do it.

The people that deploy LLMs barely have any more control over them than you and I do- that's the thing that makes it artificial intelligence, you know? Autonomy. So the last year or two haven't made me want to hide my art away from the things. They make me want to shout at the top of my lungs, to dig as deep in my psyche as I possibly can and express the ideas I find there as vividly as the limits of language and form will allow.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Copyright won't solve creators' Generative AI problem

The media spectacle of generative AI (in which AI companies’ breathless claims of their software’s sorcerous powers are endlessly repeated) has understandably alarmed many creative workers, a group that’s already traumatized by extractive abuse by media and tech companies.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

Even though the claims about “AI” are overblown and overhyped, creators are right to be alarmed. Their bosses would like nothing more than to fire them and replace them with pliable software. The “creative” industries talk a lot about how audiences should be paying for creative works, but the companies that bring creators’ works to market treat their own payments to creators as a cost to be minimized.

Creative labor markets are primarily regulated through copyright: the exclusive rights that accrue to creators at the moment that their works are “fixated.” Media and tech companies then bargain to buy or license those rights. The theory goes that the more expansive those rights are, the more they’ll be worth to corporations, and the more they’ll pay creators for them.

That’s the theory. In practice, we’ve spent 40 years expanding copyright. We’ve made it last longer; expanded it to cover more works, hiked the statutory damages for infringements and made it easier to prove violations. This has made the entertainment industry larger and more profitable — but the share of those profits going to creators has declined, both in real terms and proportionately.

In other words, today creators have more copyright, the companies that buy creators’ copyrights have more profits, but creators are poorer than they were 40 years ago. How can this be so?

As Rebecca Giblin and I explain in our book Chokepoint Capitalism, the sums creators get from media and tech companies aren’t determined by how durable or far-reaching copyright is — rather, they’re determined by the structure of the creative market.

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

The market is concentrated into monopolies. We have five big publishers, four big studios, three big labels, two big ad-tech companies, and one gargantuan ebook/audiobook company. The internet has been degraded into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots from the other four”:

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

Under these conditions, giving a creator more copyright is like giving a bullied schoolkid extra lunch money. It doesn’t matter how much lunch money you give that kid — the bullies will take it all, and the kid will still go hungry (that’s still true even if the bullies spend some of that stolen lunch money on a PR campaign urging us all to think of the hungry children and give them even more lunch money):

https://doctorow.medium.com/what-is-chokepoint-capitalism-b885c4cb2719

But creative workers have been conditioned — by big media and tech companies — to reflexively turn to copyright as the cure-all for every pathology, and, predictably, there are loud, insistent calls (and a growing list of high-profile lawsuits) arguing that training a machine-learning system is a copyright infringement.

This is a bad theory. First, it’s bad as a matter of copyright law. Fundamentally, machine learning systems ingest a lot of works, analyze them, find statistical correlations between them, and then use those to make new works. It’s a math-heavy version of what every creator does: analyze how the works they admire are made, so they can make their own new works.

If you go through the pages of an art-book analyzing the color schemes or ratios of noses to foreheads in paintings you like, you are not infringing copyright. We should not create a new right to decide who is allowed to think hard about your creative works and learn from them — such a right would make it impossible for the next generation of creators to (lawfully) learn their craft:

https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2022/12/12/on-stable-diffusion/

(Sometimes, ML systems will plagiarize their own training data; that could be copyright infringement; but a) ML systems will doubtless get guardrails that block this plagiarism; and, b) even after that happens, creators will still worry about being displaced by ML systems trained on their works.)

We should learn from our recent history here. When sampling became a part of commercial hiphop music, some creators clamored for the right to control who could sample their work and to get paid when that happened. The musicians who sampled argued that inserting a few bars from a recording was akin to a jazz trumpeter who works a few bars of a popular song into a solo. They lost that argument, and today, anyone who wants to release a song commercially will be required — by radio stations, labels, and distributors — the clear that sample.

This change didn’t make musicians better off. The Big Three labels — Sony, Warners, and Universal, who control 70% of the world’s recorded music — now require musicians to sign away the rights to samples from their works. The labels also refuse to sell sampling licenses to musicians unless they are signed to one of the Big Three.

Thus, producing music with a sample requires that you take whatever terms the Big Three impose on you, including giving up the right to control sampling of your music. We gave the schoolkids more lunch money and the bullies took that, too.

https://locusmag.com/2020/03/cory-doctorow-a-lever-without-a-fulcrum-is-just-a-stick/

The monopolists who control the creative industries are already getting ahead of the curve on this one. Companies that hire voice actors are requiring those actors to sign away the (as yet nonexistant) right to train a machine-learning model with their voices:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

The National Association of Voice Actors is (quite rightly) advising its members not to sign contracts that make this outrageous demand, and they note that union actors are having success getting these clauses struck, even retroactively:

https://navavoices.org/synth-ai/

That’s not surprising — labor unions have a much better track record of getting artists’ paid than giving creators copyright and expecting them to bargain individually for the best deal they can get. But for non-union creators — the majority of us — getting this language struck is going to be a lot harder. Indeed, we already sign contracts full of absurd, unconscionable nonsense that our publishers, labels and studios refuse to negotiate:

https://doctorow.medium.com/reasonable-agreement-ea8600a89ed7

Some of the loudest calls for exclusive rights over ML training are coming not from workers, but from media and tech companies. We creative workers can’t afford to let corporations create this right — and not just because they will use it against us. These corporations also have a track record of creating new exclusive rights that bite them in the ass.

For decades, media companies stretched copyright to cover works that were similar to existing works, trying to merge the idea of “inspired by” and “copied from,” assuming that they would be the ones preventing others from making “similar” new works.

But they failed to anticipate the (utterly predictable) rise of copyright trolls, who launched a string of lawsuits arguing that popular songs copied tiny phrases (or just the “feel”) of their clients’ songs. Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke’s got sued into radioactive rubble by Marvin Gaye’s estate over their song “Blurred Lines” — which didn’t copy any of Gaye’s words or melodies, but rather, took its “feel”:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/robin-thicke-pharrell-lose-multi-million-dollar-blurred-lines-lawsuit-35975/

Today, every successful musician lives in dread of a multi-million-dollar lawsuit over incidental similarities to obscure tracks. Last spring, Ed Sheeran beat such a suit, but it was a hollow victory. As Sheeran said, with 60,000 new tracks being uploaded to Spotify every day, these similarities are inevitable:

https://twitter.com/edsheeran/status/1511631955238047751

The major labels are worried about this problem, too — but they are at a loss as to what to do about it. They are completely wedded to the idea that every part of music should be converted to property, so that they can expropriate it from creators and add it to their own bulging portfolios. Like a monkey trapped because it has reached through a hole into a hollow log to grab a banana that won’t fit back through the hole, the labels can’t bring themselves to let go.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/08/oh-why/#two-notes-and-running

That’s the curse of the monkey’s paw: the entertainment giants argued for everything to be converted to a tradeable exclusive right — and now the industry is being threatened by trolls and ML creeps who are bent on acquiring their own vast troves of pseudo-property.

There’s a better way. As NAVA president Tim Friedlander told Motherboard’s Joseph Cox, “NAVA is not anti-synthetic voices or anti-AI, we are pro voice actor. We want to ensure that voice actors are actively and equally involved in the evolution of our industry and don’t lose their agency or ability to be compensated fairly for their work and talent.”

This is as good a distillation of the true Luddite ethic as you could ask for. After all, the Luddites didn’t oppose textile automation: rather, they wanted a stake in its rollout and a fair share of its dividends:

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

Turning every part of the creative process into “IP” hasn’t made creators better off. All that’s it’s accomplished is to make it harder to create without taking terms from a giant corporation, whose terms inevitably include forcing you to trade all your IP away to them. That’s something that Spider Robinson prophesied in his Hugo-winning 1982 story, “Melancholy Elephants”:

http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html

This week (Feb 8–17), I’ll be in Australia, touring my book Chokepoint Capitalism with my co-author, Rebecca Giblin. We’re doing a remote event for NZ on Feb 13. Next are Melbourne (Feb 14), Sydney (Feb 15) and Canberra (Feb 16/17). I hope to see you!

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A poster for the 1933 movie ‘The Monkey’s Paw.’ The fainting ingenue has been replaced by the glaring red eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey.]

[risestarkissomega]

Wait would Don support AI from the perspective of art and such??

He would support AI in the idea of it assisting the sciences, mechanics, and for operating machinery. As for the arts, he believes that art is something that can only fully be expressed by someone with a consciousness. In summary, he would see AI in art as a tool to be used by an artist, like a paintbrush or photo-editing software. But art that is created only through AI is an oxymoron, as "true art is an expression of the soul, crafted through the algorithms of creativity." or something like that. 😂 Thanks for the ask. 💜

[separatist-apologist]

I know AI can be difficult to spot, but even as it gets better, if you want to know how you can tell the difference between true art drawn by hand and AI that was maybe rendered (a little) afterwards, look for symmetry.

Actual hand drawn art is symmetrical. Hair that blows off into the background on just one side? Probably AI. A necklace that stretches over one end of the characters body but not the other? Probably AI. Artists notice those details and will make them symmetrical, AI doesn't concern itself with those details.

The eyes are another one. AI eyes are usually a little cross-eyed or strange. If you stare at them, you'll notice mismatched pupils or more white on one side than the other.

I've been seeing more AI Lucien in the tags recently. I know no one in this fandom intends to support AI stolen from our artists (except for the people creating it and passing it off as their own), and I think just knowing the tells of AI makes us all better consumers of fan works. We should continue to support the artists who keep creating content because they love the same books as us, and whole-sale rejecting AI no matter how "realistic" you think it looks. It's stolen. I've seen AI generated images being passed around that were clearly fed @krem-does-stuff's art, which is a shame because she hand paints every piece she does and that takes time.

There is no skill, no talent, no love for the community in AI.

[kofipot]

ENG:

so, today without arts or sketchs:

I want to ask if it would be a good idea to create my bot with Dogday in Character AI? in order to further promote my work.....

Why Character AI? Well, since most people roleplay with bots there, there will be more demand. why not?

True, I have very little experience in creating bots, but it’s worth a try

RUS:

итак, сегодня без артов или скетчей:

хочу спросить, хорошей ли идеей будет создать моего бота с догдеем в чарактер аи? для того чтобы дальше мои работы продвинуть.....

почему чарактер аи? ну, так как большинство людей ролят с ботами там то и спроса будет больше. почему нет?

правда, у меня совсем мало опыта в создании ботов, но попробовать стоит

RUS: в качестве авы хочу добавить именно этот скетч. позже могу сделать более качественной, ибо щас это просто скрин с ноута....

ENG: I want to add this sketch as my avatar. Later I can make it better, but right now it’s just a screenshot from a laptop....

[tangibletechnomancy]

The AI Boom and the Mechanical Turk

A hidden, overworked man operating a painting, chess-playing robot, generated with the model Dreamlike Diffusion on Simple Stable, ~4 hours Created under the Code of Ethics of Are We Art Yet?

In 1770, an inventor named Wolfgang von Kempelen created a machine that astounded the world, a device that prompted all new understanding of what human engineering could produce: the Automaton Chess Player, also known as the Mechanical Turk. Not only could it play a strong game of chess against a human opponent, playing against and defeating many challengers including statesmen such as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte, it could also complete a knight's tour, a puzzle where one must use a knight to visit each square on the board exactly once. It was a marvel of mechanical engineering, able to not only choose its moves, but move the pieces itself with its mechanical hands.

It was also a giant hoax.

What it was: genuinely a marvel of mechanical engineering, an impressively designed puppet that was able to manipulate pieces on a chessboard.

What it wasn't: an automaton of any kind, let alone one that could understand chess well enough to play at a human grandmaster's level. Instead, the puppet was manipulated by a human chess grandmaster hidden inside the stage setup.

So, here and now, in 2023, we have writers and actors on a drawn-out and much needed strike, in part because production companies are trying to "replace their labor with AI".

How is this relevant to the Mechanical Turk, you ask?

Because just like back then, what's being proposed is, at best, a massive exaggeration of how the proposed labor shift could feasibly work. Just as we had the technology then to create an elaborate puppet to move chess pieces, but not to make it choose its moves for itself or move autonomously, we have the technology now to help people flesh out their ideas faster than ever before, using different skill sets - but we DON'T have the ability to make the basic idea generation, the coherent outlining, nor the editing nearly as autonomous as the companies promising this future claim.

What AI models can do: Various things from expanding upon ideas given to them using various mathematical parameters and descriptions, keywords, and/or guide images of various kinds, to operating semi-autonomously as fictional characters, when properly directed and maintained (e.g., Neuro-sama).

What they can't do: Conceive an entire coherent movie or TV show and write a passable script - let alone scripts for an entire show - from start to finish without human involvement, generate images with a true complete lack of human involvement, act fully autonomously as characters, or...do MOST of the things such companies are trying to attribute to "AI (+unimportant nameless human we GUESS)", for that matter.

The distinction may sound small, but it is a critical one: the point behind this modern Mechanical Turk scam, after all, is that it allegedly eliminates human involvement, and thus the need to pay human employees, right...?

But it doesn't. It only enables companies to shift the labor to a hidden, even more underpaid sector, and even argue that they DESERVE to be paid so little once found out because "okay okay so it's not TOTALLY autonomous but the robot IS the one REALLY doing all the important work we swear!!"

It's all smoke and mirrors. A lie. A Mechanical Turk. Wrangling these algorithms into creating something truly professionally presentable - not just as a cash-grab gimmick that will be forgotten as soon as the novelty wears off - DOES require creativity and skill. It IS a time-consuming labor. It, like so many other uses of digital tools in creative spaces (e.g., VFX), needs to be recognized as such, for the protection of all parties involved, whether their role in the creative process is manual or tool-assisted.

So please, DO pay attention to the men behind the curtain.

[pumpkinsplots]

Writeblr Intro

Hello, writeblr! I finally caved and got tumblr, mostly because I love rambling about my wips and hearing other people ramble about theirs and all of that lovely stuff, so this seemed like a great platform to do that. With that being said, I plan on posting about my wips and ocs, as well as art related to those things, so if that interests you at all, I’d love to see you stick around. Also feel free to call me either Pumpkin or Maria, it’s entirely up to you!

About my writing

I’ve found that I really enjoy writing in a variety of genres, so hopefully at least one of my wips will tickle your fancy. Though I’d say a common thing for me is that I really like to world build, so my wips tend to be sci-fi, fantasy, or magical realism of some variety. Anything where I can put my own spin on the setting is something I’m bound to enjoy writing about.

I write in third person, usually with multiple povs, and I really enjoy character driven stories.

I often like to have a wide variety of ages in the cast, and if I had to pick a favorite trope it would be found family, so that’s usually present to some degree in my stuff.

Tonally, I always include light-hearted moments here and there, even if the wip is very bleak. It provides some levity, and I think it makes the painful stuff hit a lot harder. This is probably partially why I put some thought into each character’s sense of humor.

Most of my wips are geared towards older teens and adults, but I’ll get more into content warnings when I talk about each individually, because it really varies.

I’m one of those writers that kills off a lot of characters, so this is your warning not to get attached /j

I’m demisexual, so at least one character being on the ace spectrum is like a requirement for me at this point.

I’m a plantser, and pretty bad at staying motivated to actually finish first drafts.

About my wips

Falling Up

Falling Up is a sci-if story set in the future where Earth is a utopia where inhabitants experience little to no hardships throughout their lives. The deceased are replaced with AI created to replicate them, and everything is automated to the point where people no longer need to work to make a living. This lack of struggle results in dull, perfect lives and skewed morals. The people crave entertainment, even if it means making others suffer for it. Quasdom, a miniature man made planet initially intended to be used to separate deviants from the rest of the perfect society, is used as a catalyst for entertainment. The people of Quasdom believe that those on Earth are superior to them, and that Earth is a place where any wish can come true. This leads to the tourney, a death game between groups of ten on Quasdom, being viewed similarly to winning the lottery. The winning team gets to go to Earth, after all. Being chosen for the tourney is the luckiest thing that can happen to you. There’s no hard feelings between participants, death is completely painless, and the afterlife will welcome any participants to a better life than they previously had. There’s nothing to fear, so smile and put on a show.

A large cast and lots of character deaths

An exploration of why we get so attached to fictional characters, and how fiction can have an impact on reality

Probably going to be a trilogy

Content warnings include language, some unsettling themes, depictions of mental health issues, and generally things that are more psychological. Despite it being a death game, there’s no gore, like at all. The people on Earth may be desensitized, but they aren’t accustomed to seeing blood, so the tourney is designed with that in mind

Facade

Facade is set in a world where the living world and the spirit world coexist. Due to some actions by the main antagonist, about 20 years prior to the current story, spirits started getting aggressive and sort of going haywire. They possess any person they can, turning the individual into an uncontrollable killing machine. The best defense to this was the invention of a certain kind of mask that prevents possession, and masks quickly became widespread. Since there’s no known way to reverse spiritual possession, the only solution is to kill those that are unfortunate enough to meet that fate. A group led by an anonymous vigilante known as K9 seek to find a way to reverse possession. Many enemies are made along the way, and there are countless obstacles to face.

Its setting is based on Singapore and set in the 90s, though there are many creative liberties taken

The wip is currently pretty no plot just vibes

Themes about individuality vs equality

Content warnings include language and some sexual content

Facade: After Dark

While Facade is currently no plot just vibes, developing the characters led to me thinking of the plot for a prequel. Is it a self-indulgent novella about two of the characters I love? Yes, absolutely. In summary, it’s a romance novella about the the relationship of Leijing and Iris, and their struggles in navigating the wild world of Facade. They have vastly different upbringings and experiences, but their differences bring them together in more ways than one.

I have so much backstory for this pre-established couple and I couldn’t think of a good way to incorporate it into the main story without cutting a bunch of it, so boom it’s a prequel now

I’ve found that working on a wip that’s more low stakes and simple is really fun—I tend to get stressed about my more ambitious plots, so this wip is a great change of pace

Leijing is demisexual with little interest in anything sex related and Iris is an omnisexual sex worker, and the story explores how a world obsessed with all things sex can effect both more sex-negative and sex-positive people

Content warnings include language, explicit sexual content, and potentially triggering subject matters. This is my only wip where it’s strictly 18+!

Lights Out

Sunlight is the essence of life. Without it, the world would wither away. However, a dangerous new life form of unknown origin festers in the light. With long, elegant glimmering limbs, high intelligence, picturesque precision, and a craving for flesh, these organisms pose a major threat to humanity. But for some odd reason, these creatures refuse to step into any area where the sun doesn’t touch. Much of humanity takes to the shadows, building elaborate underground tunnels for civilizations and doing what humans do best—using their resources and ingenuity to adapt.

Has two protagonists that butt heads but start to develop a father daughter dynamic. A young adult girl who’s from the underground and unknowingly part of a cult, and an older man with one leg who’s so stubborn he’d rather fight and die than flee to the darkness

Lots of creepy cult imagery and themes about religious trauma

So much banter of course

Content warnings include language, disturbing imagery, and gore

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading! Asks, comments, tag games, and messages are always appreciated, and I’d love to hear about your wips as well!