I find that i can spot AI Images fairly easily these days, especially the sort of fantastical tableaus that get posted to the various AI communities around lemmy. I’m tired of seeing them; it all looks the same to me. Was wondering if im being too sensitive, or if other people are similarly bored of the constant unimaginative AI spam…
For the record, I block any explicit AI Art communities that pop up in the feed, but there are more every day…
Reading through the comments, I think OP’s question is skipping the root of the controversy here, which is whether or not that content even is art.
As a child of the 90s, a good example that comes to mind would be something like the Windows Media Visualizer - colorful and fun to look at, but it’s just an algorithm interpreting a sound.
If I sneezed into a microphone, ran that recording through Windows Media Player, then posted a screenshot of the swirly colors here exclaiming “Hey Lemmy - Do you like this art I made?” …would that even be an honest question? It’d probably just get downvoted cuz folks would take one look at it and conclude “You didn’t make that, and it’s not art.”
If I posted that same picture but instead with the title “Lol I sneezed into Windows Media Player, and the visualizer went nuts!” I’d probably get a more positive response - it’d still be a shitpost, but readers wouldn’t feel like they’re being lied to.
So… is an algorithm even capable of producing art?
And if no, is it the end product we have an issue with, or just the perception of being misled? …cuz even if something isn’t “art” doesn’t mean it can’t have beauty or some other feature worthy of our attention. Another poster mentioned sunsets - those aren’t art, but we still admire the hell out of them.
My take on all of the above:
- Don’t give a fuck if it’s technically art or not
- If it’s presented in a dishonest way, I don’t like the post, and will downvote regardless of the content.
- If the content looks cool, I can appreciate that in-and-of-itself; so, as long as the presentation isn’t misleading, I don’t mind it at all.
It doesn’t really bother me, but like you I am bored of it and I generally ignore it, or block communities if I’m seeing too much of it.
It is really cool that the models can generate fairly detailed images, but they’re all so similar and… boring. I once saw someone describe it like corporate art. It just tries to imitate something popular in a very mediocre way. You can keep re-training it, but it can still only imitate.
Still, if people are into it then that’s ok too. I have used it at work on occasion to create stupid little icons for internal tools I’ve built, so I guess there’s some little bit of utility.
My guess is that it’ll be used for a while for cheap and low effort branding, but soon companies will want to hire real artists again to differentiate themselves from the ML spam.
Still, if people are into it then that’s ok too. I have used it at work on occasion to create stupid little icons for internal tools I’ve built, so I guess there’s some little bit of utility.
IMO, thats sort of the main use I see for AI image generation (and a lot of other “art”-AIs). There are plenty of cases where a graphic is needed that doesn’t need to be original, nor have any meaningful thought put into it. This could be a small icon that would normally be a free peice of stock art or programmer art, or it could be adding a unimportant backdrop to some character art that would otherwise just be left blank. Not all graphics have to be “art” and things that are “art” don’t have to be 100% original and hand crafted.
It honestly depends on a community. On Ten Forward, where I’m a mod, we have banned AI posts because, at least this was my reasoning, they never do Star Trek right. I also mod on Lemmy Shitpost and, in general, I’m pretty lenient with them there as long as it isn’t so lazy that someone practically typed in ‘funny meme.’
That said, I’m also on another forum where an AI art thread that began with the first Dall-E has become mostly us finding ways to put Godzilla in ridiculous situations. Now that is a fun use of AI.
AI art is a turn off for me. Not just for how it looks, but how it disrespects the works of millions of artists and its users complete disregard to their welfare.
Just think of all those copyists the printing press put out of work. We should have abolished the printing press and gone back to hand copying.
It is unlawful to copy, reproduce, and or distribute copyrighted works using a printing press without the express permission of the author or creator.
Unless of course the author made it before an arbitrary date in time, or if they failed to follow every single rule required to copyright it, or if they were a citizen of a country that didn’t have a treaty in place, or if the owner is a corporation and it hasn’t been a billion years since the author died, or if the estate of the author was split between more than one person and a subset agrees but the others do not…
That’s the thing with this crap. It is all based on what the very wealthy wanted not based on what helped artists and not based on what made sense. So of course the Church of Scientology can keep religious texts away from the public, of course Disney will always own Mickey Mouse, of course some small poor culture doesn’t have a right to a single dime from the marketing of their heritage, off course the general public doesn’t have a right to their own culture, and of course it is perfectly fine to endlessly sell something you didn’t create because the publisher messed up a word in a legal blurb.
It’s a shit system and I won’t defend a shit system. I wonder why you do.
Because I empathize with people who’ve spent their life learning a trade, honing a skill that are facing poverty because people have found a turbo charged way to steal their work and not pay them.
Right very noble of you. I mean that in a non-snarky way.
So let me ask you: under the current system are artists doing well? I just checked the BLS and simple math shows that 0.04% of the US population writes for a living. The country producing the most magazines+news stories+TV+movies+blogs+etc. only pays 0.04% of its population a wage enough to do this full-time. To give you an idea of scale 0.45% of the US population works for Walmart. Go to a Walmart and if you see 11 employees standing there there is one writer.
This is the problem with nostalgia. It makes you pine for a world that never existed to begin with. There wasn’t some Golden Age where artists were free and paid well that we need to suppress tech to recover. Being a creative has always been a shit show. And yeah it sucks but it isn’t like it didn’t suck a year ago.
This is pivoting away from the issue: companies are training AI on professional artwork owned by professional artists without compensation, permission or attribution. The leaders of Open AI recently admitted that being unable to use copyrighted materials would mean they wouldn’t be able to offer a meaningful service.
They openly admit that they have to disregard the ownership of others property—that others spent their time to create and depend on for their livelihood—in order to make money themselves. That should be the end of it if we cared about the impact technology has on strangers we don’t know. Instead we selfishly say that’s progress.
ownership
If I copy your idea are you poorer in the same way as I take your tangible property?
To me, if they are contained to communities setup for AI generated images and there is some effort to mark or identify them as AI, I don’t mind them. Its when they get posted outside those spaces, especially posing as something someone made, that it gets very annoying.
I enjoy them. They’re usually quite creative, and I’m constantly amazed at what the technology can accomplish. I frequently forget that I can turn to DALL-E when I want pictures of specific things, and those posts remind me.
Can someone explain to me what the difference is between AI art and students imitating an artist? What happens when the AI actually gains the ability to experiment “outside the box” - what we call creativity?
Can someone explain to me what the difference is between AI art and students imitating an artist?
Students are people who cannot truly copy art even if they wanted to. Pius, everyone generally does art their own way because… that is the point of art.
Image generation models just copy patterns from existing images, there is no process of artistic creation, nothing to interpret, no process… AI generated images are just pretty noise.
What happens when the AI actually gains the ability to experiment “outside the box” - what we call creativity?
It cannot do that just by design. It’s not a thinking thing, calling these models AI is really a misnomer and more of a marketing thing than a description of what it really is.
always have bad lighting and smudge
Except when it doesn’t. Or is that how you decide what is AI art?
About as much as reading a book made on a printing press bothers me.
This comment is insane to me
I feel like there are too many ai art communities tbh, I constantly block them and there always seems to be more.
Separate AI art communities get created because the “traditional” art communities are largely banning them. What else do you expect AI art users to do?
Stop screwing over artists?
ai art users arent doing that
Of course they are
Even supporters of these businesses admit that their foundations are entirely dependent upon stolen art, work, labour, time, training, practice etc. Not only would they not function without it, they wouldn’t exist without it.
the art isn’t stolen
You know what, I should’ve checked your profile before responding to you and that’s on me
this sounds like you are poisoning the well
I’m fed up with it, as in: I can recognize AI generated images with ease, and they all look kinda same-y. I have nothing against people using ai or posting the content, but at the same time I think it’s simply bad art
I can recognize AI generated images with ease
Maybe some of it, but there’s plenty that looks just fine. That stuff slips under your radar, so you’re left with the impression that all AI art is recognizable. It’s a sampling bias.
where
If you think stuff slips below your radar, that just makes me question how good your radar is. The problems are obvious if you pay even a little attention, so… Maybe you don’t?
Agreed. AI art is just not appealing at all
I don’t consider it art. The only “creative” part is the prompt itself. Even then, it’s really just users trying to be as fanciful (or perverted) as possible. Once the prompt is ingested, the code takes its cues to remix the turgid crap that’s called the internet today.
Yes, once in a while it produces something “interesting” but this is an accident and not the desired outcome. Ask any artist about this - I’ve never met any that consider all their work as “good” (Ahem, Damien Hirst) and purposefully filter their own output. Ask AI to do that. It can’t. It will literally continue to shit things out until you ask it to stop. Again, like Damien Hirst…
The downside is it’s cheap and requires literally no skill. This means that soon, it will be pretty much everywhere, and thus we’ll continue the inexorable slide into abject mediocrity.
I’m not scared of the AI uprising. I’m scared it’s going to bore us all to death.
I think you’re being unfairly dismissive of the amount of work and creativity that goes into using an AI art generator well. Sure, you can just slam down a prompt and post whatever comes up. But if you really want to generate something specific it can be a ton of work. It can also involve plenty of fiddling with traditional art tools (funny that Photoshop and such are considered “traditional” now, once upon a time it was Photoshop’s turn on the “not real art!” Firing line). Some of the most egregious moral panics lately have come from work where 90% of the effort was traditional tooling, with just a dab of AI in the mix.
But it all gets lumped together under “LOL bad fingers!” And demonized.
Still orders of magnitude less effort than actually learning to draw for yourself and making something actually creative
But please do go on about how your pink slime regurgitated by an LLM trained on stolen artwork scraped from hundreds of thousands of actual artists requires so much effort and creativity
But please do go on about how your pink slime regurgitated by an LLM trained on stolen artwork scraped from hundreds of thousands of actual artists requires so much effort and creativity
Because clearly you’re so open to reason.
the artwork isn’t stolen.
Not in the slightest. What bothers me are the communities that ban it even when the art in question is exactly what that community is for. What bothers me even more are the communities that ban it secretly, so you never even know there’s an AI art ban unless you step on that landmine yourself.
I can’t stand anything AI generated, but people are free to post it wherever they want. I just block/filter it when I see it.
I’ll also add: it’s not art. No one punching a sentence into a text field is EVER going to be called an artist by me, nor will their heartless images ever be called art.
'its not art." But here it is making you talk about it and feel emotions.
It’s also initiated and selected by a human. Just because they aren’t placing every pixel or wiping a brush on a medium doesn’t mean it’s not expression.
It’s not art.
It is. You don’t need to deny reality, we can see it with our own eyes.
It’s still not art. Sorry, but not everyone thinks that you punching a sentence into a text field makes you an artist.
It’s very much art, and I’m here to tell you that just because you can punch a sentence into a Lemmy comment, you won’t convince everyone to deny reality with you.
And for some reason you’re arguing that prompt engineers are artists when they’re not engineers either. I’m not sure why you’d ever being this up but ok.
It’s not art. I don’t care what how you chose to present it. It’s not art. I hope you can be okay with this.
ROFL!
Funnily enough people said the same thing when photography was first invented (“No one pressing a button and getting a perfect representation of the real world will EVER be called an artist by me, nor will their heartless imitations be called art.”)
I considered it as a low effort spam and block any ai art community i can see.
