It's not just silly, its outright incorrect. No artist starts from an image of random noise and then arrives at an art piece. Even artists who make art work from spilled ink show control and could most likely tell you the expected outcome of the image before the final image is even formed. If using AI gives you no real control over the final piece, is it really your artwork? Is it not the same as just comissioning someone else for art? No one would try to pass on a comissioned piece of artwork as their own.
I don't see what the point of this argument is. The methodology in generating the image from noise is irrelevant. And anyone who generates an image from one of the bots and calls it their "art," or themselves an "artist," are full of shit. Now if an actual artist incorporates some AI processes into their overall workflow? Well, now it's debatable. Some may call them a hack. Some may think AI is just another tool in the process.
Just because something is available online doesn't mean you can just download it and pass it off as your own work. In the past, if you traced other artists work and passed it off as your own, that is copyright infringement. Artists have no say in whether their work ends up in these training sets. In the past even if you were tracing work, you could only create a few pieces, no such limitation exists now.
You can freely look at an image online. If you post your drawing on deviantart, anyone can view it, study it, or even download it and set it as their wallpaper or something. What they can't do is try and sell that piece of art or distribute it.
No one is passing off the art as "their own." They are used in training sets. Boo hoo, your art is publicly available for anyone to view, and a bot learned some data based on it.
Also not true. The relationship is stored as weights in large multidimensional arrays known as tensors. If one style/image has been overtrained, the ai will recreate the original art piece. This is also why they need to steal thousands of artists work. The structure of their work is stored within these tensors. Images which have duplicates/similar images present in the training set will give rise to similar weights. These absolutely do duplicate themselves in generated data. Some popular examples are: Moonlanding, any celebrity portrait, logos etc. This also means that the AI never comes up with anything creative. It can only make work similar to the images present in its training data.
Tensors are just describing the way the data is stored. I never said data isn't stored. Obviously, if the bot wants to retain training information, data needs to be stored. I'm saying the data isn't anything from the source image. The data that is retained is gonna be some parameters the bot generates to associate the image to the keyword in various stages of noise. The image itself is not stored anywhere in the bot. This means that it literally cannot reproduce the original. With redundant training images and very commonplace concepts like the ones you listed, it can produce something that is quite close to the original, but it's not actually the same art, now is it?
Besides, drawing something, whether it's the same picture/scene or something in the same style, is perfectly legal. What you can't do is pass it off as the original or the work of the orginal artist. And obiviously, trademark and copyright laws still apply to whatever you draw someone's IP by hand or AI.
No AI artist is using stable diffusion to come up with the next Berserk.
Actually, Mori and the team behind Berserk's continuation after Miura's death considered using AI to replicate his style. You don't need the AI to "come up" with the next berserk. What they would do is train it on Miura's art, and then use image-to-image to turn the panel they draw into Miura's style. But they opted against this, which is probably the right move. Running it through an AI filter, regardless of how well it replicates the style, loses the sentimentality of honoring his work. His close friend Mori (who is the only one Miura told the entire story outline to) continuing the serires would be honoring him.
The point is, they absolutely could have used AI to continue Berserk.
If it's that easy, put your money where your mouth is and learn art. Also, you literally can't do what AI is doing. The best analogy is using bots to buy up tickets. Anyone could do what the bot is doing, however a bot can buy with volume and speed which a human can't match. This makes the experience worse for sellers, since they now have to deal with scalpers and consumers since they have to either support scalpers or get priced out of going to events.
What a silly argument. Did I say it would be easy or even feasible for me, personally? Did I say I want to be an artist? What I said was that I can do what the AI is doing at a much more human scale. I can look up an artist on deviant art and spend years studying and perfecting his style and techniques. That's not illegal in any way. Now, what I do with this skill obtained
may become illegal. Like for example, if I make an amazing replica of the artist's style and try to pass it off as his autentic art or something. Same goes for AI. Training isn't pushing ethical boundaries any more than a human training on their favorite artist's works would be. But what people do with the generated content from the AI can obviously become an illegal act.
The scalping bot analogy has some holes. First of all, the technology itself is just a tool. The same tech can be used to do good. It's the scalpers using it to screw other buyers that is the issue. Secondly, using a insta-buy script for personal use isn't illegal. Scalping to resell en masse has become illegal since 2016 or something. So obviously, doing something illegal is bad.
Ultimately I don't really care if people use AI art, I just can't stand AI 'artists' acting like they are revolutionising art, when all they've really done is google search for an image, and then picked the image best suited for them. Entering in prompts in to a machine where you have no control over the final product is not art.
The average AI 'artists' are to art what script kiddies are to programming. How many people who play around with Stable Diffusion and the bots actually consider themselves artists? Only the deluded kids would do that, similar to how idiotic script kiddies might think they are hackers while most sensible people just understand they are running a program, which they probably don't even understand, to do its function.
On a more philosophical train of thought, I just don't think "muh artists" sentiment deserves any consideration. It's the same fucking thing over and over in history. Technological progress can make certain jobs obsolete or transform the field in some way. It's just the way it is. People in unfortunate sectors get the short end of the stick, but society moves on incorporating the new tech.
The horse and buggy driver was fucked when cars took over. Taxis got fucked when Uber dominated. Telephone operators got fucked when they were no longer needed. The list goes on and on.
On the other hand, things like the Camera was met with staunch pushback from artists, but look how it turned out. They coexist peacefully.
But make no mistake, AIs will be the next
internet in terms of societal impact. If anything, creative fields like art probably has the most capacity to not go obsolete in the coming decades. What neural networks do is analyze and make associations and find patterns in huge amounts of data, as well as having the generative AI side of things which uses those training sets to produce output.
Think about less creative fields like finance and medicine. We are in the infancy of the tech. As it matures and gets incorporated into basically every sector, many people will lose their jobs as the demand for a human component decreases drastically across the board. And so what? Are we gonna cry about every one of these people? No, you just accept that progress is happening and people gotta get new skillsets. Perhaps in the far future, the efficiency of such systems enables a sci-fi society with universal income and people pursuing whatever leisure they want.
