AI Art

[m7600]

I'm still going to insist that AI should be fully implemented in manufacture, farming and transportation. Any worker displaced by such technology should be fully compensated, for life. Even though many will balk and cry "utopia!" at this, the fact is that my suggestion isn't really a big brain move. It's more like putting two and two together. If some peeps can't see that, then that's on them.

 

[O_Bruce]

Reality shows that AI is being implemented in creative spaces in unethical way, instead of in manufacturing, farming, and transportation. Neither it is implemented in literally any job no wants to do or has any inspiration towards. Reality is as it best when not ignored.

 

[m7600]

Reality is as it best when not ignored.

You do realize that you sound increadibly condescending when you say shit like this, right? Everything else you said in your comment was fine and respectful. Why did you feel the need to add such a stupid sentence at the end?

 

[O_Bruce]

Because I think you are out of touch with it sometimes. I think it takes some level of "out of touch" to believe that a fully automatized area of industry ( let's say, manufacturing or farming) won't come out with its problems or even that it still absolutely won't be free, cheap or not requiring any human input (in instance when something in a hug chain of automation goes wrong). The other out-of-touch thing is a belief that tech companies would care about freeing people from doing work no one wants to do. Other reason I'll keep to myself, because I don't believe we'll ever come to understanding with that thing.

 

[m7600]

Because I think you are out of touch with it sometimes.

Ok. If that's what you think, then let me tell you something about myself. I have a Doctorate in Philosophy. I work at two universities, one of them is public and the other one is private. I teach courses for graduate students, and it just so happens that in both universities, I'm in the Psychology department. You are, or were, a student of psychology. Well, I'm one of the teachers. Despite the fact that I have a Doctorate, I make just enough money to support my family. I don't complain that much though, it was worse when I worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant, or when I worked at a call center. I have two children. One of them was born with a heart problem. He needed heart surgery the very day that he was born. I had to sign a waiver that said that I wouldn't sue the hospital if he died during the surgery. For the first few years of his life, he had to eat through a tube. Not only did I support my family economically during that time, I also supported them emotionally. My significant other was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. We made it through, thankfully. Am I sufficiently in touch with reality, according to your criteria? Or does the fact that I like to entertaing scenarios involving AI and automation somehow invalidate every other aspect of my life? But hey, feel free to dodge my questions and to reply with a laughing reaction instead, I'm sure you have much more life experience and formal studies than me, right?

 

[O_Bruce]

Before I answer your questions, I just want to say that I'm genuinely sorry to hear about some of your circumstances, particularly familial ones. I can emphasize to them, and to some in a more personal way. I'm not willing to share details of my personal life, more so with strangers, so I won't elaborate on that.

Now answer your questions:
In terms of you being in touch with reality, I admit was wrong. I can see why you might want to entertain certain scenarios regarding the use of AI technology. But given what reality of the matter is, those scenarios come off as mocking of my situation, and of the situation of people like me. That is and will rub me the wrong way and I can't help it.

I do owe you an apology, overall. I'm sorry.

As for formal studies, I'll at least open to you with one thing: life taught me formal studies mean little to nothing in terms of, let's call it, "wisdom".

 

[Antimatter]

Really sorry to hear that, @m7600, and wish all the best to you and your family.

Props to @O_Bruce for the apology. I witnessed the whole argument from the outside and heard both sides, it's comforting to see the peaceful resolution.

 

[shmity72]

Things that AI will not be able to do for 10's of years: subjective reasoning, It can instantly recite a rose by any other name but for decades will not be able to 'exactly' by virtue of 1s and o's smell one. not until ...dare I say...full on awareness, rather than this/that. awareness.

Maybe we can lend it a Werneck's synapse then AI may have a memorable volitionary word.

 

[alice_ashpool]

Surely you are both saying the same thing, and does not seem controversial: in the abstract, automation is a great thing as it frees people from having to carry out certain jobs, but in the concrete it is bad since in the world we live in the labour savings will not accrue to the workers, they will accrue to the owner of the machines, and will result in 1) a reduction in wages for those working in jobs which are in the process of being automated (as machines reduce the socially accepted labour time for these jobs), and 2) mass unemployment.

Today's society puts little to no value on art except a a commodity.

 

[Black Elk]

Its honestly just so refreshing to see some boards where disagreements can be aired and resolved with some empathy and without too much bitterness or too many resentments, or ya know, peeps instantly decamping. I feel like as a rule I tend to try a little harder and in good spritis when the spot isn't quite so large and there's time to get to know the tavern locals. I wish other places were more like this one. I tend to like the everything here somehow lol. It encourages the spirit for me

Also, and this is completely left field, but just cause I only discovered it tonight, and it's been playing in the background while I was reading all the replies hehe.

I just had no idea that this even existed...

I mean legit, I've always loved her voice for so long, but I didn't have any clue she could do stuff like that!

The whole Album was fucking fantastic! What would Dolly do?

I don't know, but somehow I doubt the AI could ever quite pull that off. The word play! So great!

How is she so amazing!?

Get's me every time! Also this one was a ton of fun I thought

It's Viconia!!!

 

[OrlonKronsteen]

It's Viconia!!!

A country song about the Underdark needs to be a thing.

 

[shmity72]

Surely you are both saying the same thing, and does not seem controversial: in the abstract, automation is a great thing as it frees people from having to carry out certain jobs, but in the concrete it is bad since in the world we live in the labour savings will not accrue to the workers, they will accrue to the owner of the machines, and will result in 1) a reduction in wages for those working in jobs which are in the process of being automated (as machines reduce the socially accepted labour time for these jobs), and 2) mass unemployment.

Today's society puts little to no value on art except a a commodity.

Don't get me wrong I love the marvel movies! but umm they really are not cinema. They are 90 percent CGI/AI with a creative director formulaic plot and some good one liners.

I was going to show a clip of the differences from: cinematic art vs. the lowest common denominator 'art appreciated' box office movie. Even when legacy studios said: 'American Graffiti'? what's a graffiti and why would it make money for the studio?, or when 'bands' of musicians came together to discover and write/play music, rather than lowest common denominator 'art appreciated' drum beat to a great vocal as popular music, (consumer art: One may try to please all of the people '98' percent of the time. A tragedy, art that informs us of our dark emotions that we may have perspective upon those with levity, will never overwhelmingly be 'a hit'. And therefor the 6 TOTAL media outlets will not make it)

It has been throughout time that as new inventions of technology come into play the world gets a whip on the hinny (displaced workers) and the carriage of society gallops forward.

I realize that I type abstractly and less than particularly coherently. Apologies.

I think we all get the point that the current conglomerate gunny sack of 'Today's society puts little to no value on art except a a commodity.', Hurts human flourishing rather than helps. AI does not give subject perspective on this picture:

~ Agree with Black Elk as well, this is a cozy forum with a humanity that is advanced to apologize and forgive.

 

[m7600]

I accept your apology, @O_Bruce, though instead of apologizing I would prefer that in the future you made less assumptions about me and about other people. After all, as you said it yourself, I'm a stranger to you, so why would you presume to know anything about me? By your logic, I would be entitled to assume that you think (or thought) that I'm a pink-haired, politically correct social media enthusiast or something like that. If that's the case, then you couldn't be more mistaken. Not that there's anything wrong with having pink hair, or being politically correct, or using social media. It just so happens that I don't fit that profile. But I don't know if you actually thought that, and if you didn't, then that just proves my point: the assumptions that we make about other people might be wrong. So, thanks for apologizing, but in the future please try to assume less things about other people.

 

[O_Bruce]

I agree with you there, I definitely shouldn't be so quick to assume things about people.
I'm displeased at myself with how jaded and bitter I have become in the last 2-3 years, I need to work on myself more.

 

[shmity72]

I agree with you there, I definitely shouldn't be so quick to assume things about people.
I'm displeased at myself with how jaded and bitter I have become in the last 2-3 years, I need to work on myself more.

You are amongst fellow gamers and friendly acquaintances...be kind to yourself.

 

[Nimran]

Considering manufacturing is already mostly automated, with minimal human input, and therefore, minimal room for human error, the idea of it going fully automated isn’t so far fetched.

 

[Black Elk]

Another dimension to our ongoing conundrum, courtesy of a random article at the Gamer...

https://www.thegamer.com/couldnt-make-book-covers-the-expanse-2024-ai/

It's about the book Cover Illustrations for "The Expanse" series and uses this image for the article inset...

The suggestion is that, even though the images were created by a human being, if the covers of those books were to be released today, that they would just be instantly rejected as looking "too close to AI."

To me the covers of those books had what I guess we'd describe as the concept art vibe, keeping it loose and leaving it up to the imagination. Just suggested forms mostly. I think an early precursor might be someone like Berkey, where the spaceships and nebulas are more suggested. I'm sure the internet is already flooded with knock-offs there. The concept artists were the first to raise the alarms on this front, and now we're seeing the results start to filter out. The current conversation is moving into stuff like deepfaked pornography again, with the superbowl drama, but basically we're already losing whole branches on the visual style tree, because as soon as something becomes ubiquitous in whatever the AI is spitting out, it becomes immediately passé.

Just one example I've heard mentioned by a friend would be Beksinski lighting. You know that orange light that he used to set that whole otherworldly mood in his paintings. The mood is shattered the second unscrupulous people start plugging that name into their AI prompts to chase after a recognizable style. Internet articles are shamelessly are using AI images for click-bait visuals in article headers. It's already everywhere. I can just scroll through google "discovery" and see half a dozen as go down the page, like every other day. I think if nothing is done to hold anyone to account, soon there just won't be a New Yorker illustrated cover anymore, and the Sunday cartoons may go the way of the dinosaur as artists struggle to bend their work into styles that cannot be quickly scooped and rehashed by the machine.

Just really sticks in the craw. On the one hand, I love my DLSS upscaling that allows me to play BG3 on ultra settings in QHD, but I just have a categorically different attitude towards it in the creative sphere and the arts. This is going to be nightmare for tort law probably, as artists are basically powerless going up against this giant corpos. Like unless they can win the moral argument now, that plagiarism and theft is fucked up, that this is what it is and shouldn't be tolerated, by the time that happens it's almost already too late. The last time something like this happened was the advent of photography in commercial advertisement supplanting the commercial illustration.

The result in terms of a response there, was basically 20th century modernism, with painters trying to do things (anything really) that a camera couldn't achieve, to try and carve out a space for themselves. These results there were decidedly mixed for me, but I think something similar will happen here, as illustrators become more and more desperate to find some way not to get ripped off and have their style copied ad nauseum. It's hard enough when actual people are cribbing styles in the rat race, and ripping each other off like that, but when it's a soulless algorithm replicating their stuff that's even worse, since you can't shame an AI into better practices.

It's not alive and in the world the way a human artist is. It doesn't suffer the same consequences to it's career that say someone copying panels from another artist's comic book pages would, or that someone trying to forge Vermeers would. You can't break the machine really, you only go after the peeps trying to extract money from it and then hope the average viewer will also react against such practices.

Really strange times we're in. I think the backlash against what's been happening recently is going cast a really long shadow and a dark pall over the arts, for like years and years to come in the aftermath.

 

[O_Bruce]

There is a problem with actual artists being accused of using AI when they do not, I have seen that before. It is really unfortunate. Some things appear quite often in AI generated images (like, specific contrast and "shinnines", lack of story being told, lack of intentionality in details, like how hair/folds works, details on machinery etc.) and some of these things - mainly the specific contrast - can be sometimes observed in actual artist.

As for the moral argument, it is a tricky thing, because the AI side doesn't consider morality. You see, people, when creating diffusion models and more importantly behind the database absolutely could work on public domain artwork and photography. Or at the very least, could ask artists/photographers for permission to use their work and offer compensation. But they didn't. They simply don't hold visual artists in high regard, they simply don't think people could do anything about it. Contrast it with a database for AI-generated music, which uses public domain or samples with artists' permission. We see a double standard here.

One thing to add to the moral side of things: in the earlier mentioned database, there is a variety of things. Artworks. Professional photography. Amateur photography found on social media. For example, photography of young women. Sometimes children. And what else? Porn. Oh, there's no reality in which that could go wrong, right? Right? Point is, there's no curating what is added to the database, it is an uncontrollable mess at this point. And this is also a huge problem.

Having the above in mind, the way to combat this would be through legal means. AI side works on a moral and legal grey area since the law hasn't caught up yet. But it might in the future, who knows. For now, the only precedent I am aware of is that AI-generated images cannot be copyrighted - as in, the person using AI to generate them don't own them. They can only own what they do themselves. That's a start, but there's a long way to go.

As an amateur artist, I can confirm that with the flood of AI-generated goo, I managed to see artists wondering about and implementing ways to make their artwork be different to what typical AI-generated images are. Sometimes to emphasize qualities AI-generated images lack, sometimes to add additional texture to make their artwork look less like rendered on computer, and more similar to traditional artwork. In general, emphasizing humanity.

 

[Black Elk]

Just a couple random articles hitting on the same day, as like a time capsule for the current moment...

Google’s Genie game maker is what happens when AI watches 30K hrs of video games

Researchers herald new system as key step to an "infinite generator" of training data.

arstechnica.com

I don't know how you get 200,000 hrs of platformers down to 30k to run a model like that, except to guess that they probably jacked like every single thing on youtube or reposted from twitch streams to do it. Seems pretty dicey.

Then this one... with public trust in AI at a new all time low

https://www.axios.com/2024/03/05/ai-trust-problem-edelman

Then there was this... lol

‘The worst AI-generated artwork we’ve seen’: Queensland Symphony Orchestra’s Facebook ad fail | Culture | The Guardian

A ‘poorly considered’ use of AI has resulted in a perplexing number of fingers – and a large amount of mockery

amp.theguardian.com

Which explains the why! hehe

Probably this will require something like a watermark even for text I guess? Like for any text generated by an AI, that text is branded. They need to come up with that Nightshade Poison Ivy thing that MIT did for visual arts, but somehow make it for simple text? Seems like a seriously tall order there, for whoever's cooking up those potions. The sort of thing that can follow after content and be quickly discovered, with the equivalent of a spellchecker for typographical errors. But why would they ever build that into these things, when we already see how they roll? Either that or maybe just the end of the anonymous internet altogether?

I mean as people will begin to just ignore each other, the same way they ignore pop up adds. Which is already the case in many quarters. This seems wickedly by design somehow. Like it's hard for me to imagine anyone in charge being quite that oblivious about it all, so instead it just comes off like a totally transparent grift. Honestly how long do they think they can ride this 3 cup shell scam? Cause usually people wise up pretty quickly right, like when every other cup is just a bot and they don't even bother with slight of hand on it? It's just so absurd. But not in the good way like Doctor Octagon, cause I still like that album even if it's total trip and a little hard parse.

I'm curious what other people are doing with this stuff, or like how we're meant to defend ourselves against this sort of onslaught, like as just average denizens of the tavern? For my part I find that I'm now increasingly reluctant to use any service that makes explicit or heavy use of AI or bots. Like if it's bot in the chatroom, that to me would indicate that all text within that chat is being fed into an AI, so that that the bots can more accurately mimic bantering humans, making simple communication impossible.

 

[Black Elk]

The following I think qualifies as an off topic rant on the above, just to let off some steam in the cypher hehe.

So at some point this conversation will be so old hat and so ubiquitous that it ceases to be all that interesting anymore, but for now at least, I still think it's funny as all hell that Wikipedia, (the most comprehensive encyclopedia in the history of the world), is currently in the process of downgrading the reliability of sources that have knowingly published AI generated content alongside the regular stuff.

From the leap year article...

AI-generated articles prompt Wikipedia to downgrade CNET’s reliability rating

Futurism report highlights the reputational cost of publishing AI-generated content.

arstechnica.com

This is particularly amusing, since for years and years Wikipedia was scrutinized and denigrated esp. in media with claims questioning it's reliability, at least in the popular parlance, I mean right. Now it's Wikipedia going to bat for us on the credible information front haha. Currently CNET is all embroiled for their decision to give a byline to a computer and then pushing out plagiarized garbage with reckless abandon starting some time in 2020. Perhaps it was meant to be humorous, or just fad chasing, but now that game of chicken came home to roost. They went from a Green 'mostly reliable' designation, to a Red 'mostly unreliable' designation inside of 3 years. Their reputation as a credible secondary source is effectively destroyed. Not that CNET was ever all that great to begin with, but the AI branding doesn't just wash off from the later mea culpa. Their brand is already tarnished.

It's the same as an AI title sequence in a TV show ruining the whole show before you even watch the first 10 minutes of it. Or some jank AI image ruining everything else hanging in an art gallery, simply by being there. This whackness just permeates via osmosis or something. The backlash seems to be very very swift, to the point where I would be scarred shitless if I was a chief editor of anything, that somehow something like this makes it's way to the front page, or I don't know say a cartoon on the cover of TIME, that just ends the whole thing in farce?

As little things like this continue to happen - as AIs muddle and pancake everything down into the mire, and we become more saturated - I bet the reaction will become even more knee-jerk in response. This is possibly a new dividing line or wedge that's going to fuck up the discourse on basically all fronts at once. I don't mean terminator drones coming for the actors, or Lensa on her midjourney, but just the overall numbing whackness like a law of thermodynamics or something, the entropic effect of general AIs just floating around being lame - day to day. I mean do you all get that too?

I legit think the single worst thing a game developer or publisher could be doing right now is trying to save a buck in this way. It will mark the final product as trash, like the opposite cool, and peeps will be far less likely to pay for things that they know were made so cheaply and at such a hidden cost (i.e. trying to ditch all the creative humans involved.) The red line is super clear right now, like if they want to see where it leads just follow the trajectory straight off the graph paper down to the floor. My neuro-divergent quadrangle on this stuff is kinda laying it out for me over here, L7 to the point where the cards are pretty hard to misread at this point.

Then all these peeps getting laid off and sent packing during in the great bloodletting that has befallen workers in the games industry right now, it's all predicated on this idea that the broader public will acquiesce to AI generated content replacing them. Anecdotally, I see the exact opposite going down. In my brief time kicking around on planet earth, I don't think I've seen anything quite this extreme for a response, how quickly AI art gets spit out like a bitter taste in the mouth. The negative reaction towards a novel technology and the speed of its adoption, it just seems to be of a different order here. Like sure, people might have bemoaned cars or smart phones or socials or TV when they arrived, but learning to fucking hate AI takes a lot less time hehe. I've noticed that I no longer trust or have much confidence even when it comes to little things like random posts on general discussion boards. Especially if they are provocatively framed at the outset. There's no way to captcha on this one to tell whether it's a legit human or a bot anymore, or at least not for online communities at scale. Twitter is dead in the water already, youtube and meta, likely the same. The major publishers and studios seem to think they're pulling a fast one like 28 days later, but instead it's already spotlights way off in the distance. Zombie content is on the rapid rise, but also everyone can see em coming. Like good grief, what is this nonsense anyway? Affective polarization is off the charts everywhere already, and then the AI zombies arrive right on time, just cause of course they would lol. Bah. I will keep trying so hard to make sure that people know I'm human, or very cynical dog, and not just a fucking robot, even if it's hella long winded a bit more us/them in the framing than I'd usually countenance, but here why not I guess lol