I first dabbled with AI image generation back in 2022 and sprinkled a few such images throughout my worldbuilding project. It was easy to look past all of the flaws with the idea that it was nothing more than a novelty. And I never cared nearly enough about my worldbuilding to pay anyone for artwork of it.
Now that I look back at it, those images are obvious slop, which I’ve grown to dislike as much as the next person. But recent comments I’ve seen here and on other sites have made me wonder if my brain has rotted in the same manner that makes some boomers fall for AI slop. There will be videos where the use of AI is not very noticeable to me, but not with deceptive intent. Maybe an illustration to get the point across or a subtle two-second animation. Commenters will very passionately point it out. To be honest, I don’t see the creator either paying for the equivalent human work or drawing anything better themselves.
Does it really just look that bad? Is it an issue with what AI and the companies that sponsor it stand for? Theft of real artists’ work? Does it change at all if the images were generated locally with the creator’s own hardware and resources? What about upscaling images, like I do with old wallpapers so that they look better on new monitors?
I assume what I’ve just said will attract downvotes, but that was my thought process and I do want to understand where other people draw the line and for what reasons. Should we limit it to quick-and-dirty illustrations, pure novelty, upscaling existing images, a model that only incorporates work if the artist consents, or something else?
I see no issue with locally run models like Z-Image Turbo. They take very little resources to run, so there’s no real issue with energy use here. They produce good results when prompted properly.
The whole theft of artist work applies to commercial models where companies are profiting of other people’s work. However, I simply don’t see the argument when it comes to open models that anybody can use freely, and especially in cases where you’re not producing images for profit.
There are different reasons against AI, it depends which ones you consider more important.
A) taking jobs away from artists - you can argue that if you would never have hired an artist for this anyway (throw away character portrait for a D&D game) then it’s justifiable.
B) That AI was trained on stolen content. - depends on your definition of stolen, this is the area that makes me think twice.
C) Environmental reasons - I try to generate stuff locally if I use it, but you still have the impact from the model being trained originally.
When the model isn’t built on stolen licensed works and built/run in a way that isn’t in conflict with the community where the data center resides seems like some basic requirements to meet.
Honestly my main issue is that this gives more power to the corporations who can steal any content and then sell it as a subscription.
Even local generative AI is ethically sus, but as an occasional pirate I don’t have any moral high ground. I don’t really mind as long as its user in a way that doesn’t harm the jobs of the artists (which it often does).
Quality wise, realistic images are often sloppy but I too am starting to fail to notice sometimes, which doesn’t feel good if it’s something that can misinform me. Recently I played for some hours with an anime based model, and I have no chance telling what is real there. But it still really drew home the fact that it lacks some of the artistic expression. No matter how much you write in the prompt you can’t control all the details with intent like the artist does, and you’re at the mercy of the model on anything that you leave to interpretation. And if the model doesn’t have enough data on what you want it will just break down. So it only works as long as you have a relatively vague idea and don’t care about the specifics. Which is why I also think it can’t replace anyone as long as the audience cares about intent being there and being consistent (which again often they don’t care).
Anyway, I consider these models to basically be creating interpolations of existing art now.
No.
Even if you manage to find a niche valid reason, even if you train on exclusively your own content, even if you run it on your own hardware powered by your own solar panels, it’s still normalising the technology for everybody else who won’t use it like that.
Basically NEVER
The worst problem, to me, is that it pollutes our “environment” that is, our cultural environment, our pool of input about the world, with potential corruption, inaccuracies, at worst the intensification of falsities, stereotypes, and mediocre conceptions. Even if you don’t detect them in an AI image, they may be there. A real world image contains details that humans have not already preconceived, and diluting that with the bullshit of what humanity thinks is reality but which may or may not be, will have a greater long run cost than we can imagine.
with potential corruption, inaccuracies, at worst the intensification of falsities, stereotypes, and mediocre conceptions
you’re saying this in a world where 99% of people wig out if they don’t see white Jesus (or their culture’s equivalent lie)
I’d rather see MS paint illustrations than GenAI images.
Apple has “GenMoji” and I find that a good use for it. It’s using emojis that they designed for the model, generating other emojis that you can only use on their devices (or sending an image). I use it to make new funny reaction emojis for me and my friends. I cannot use any art for other types of reactions the same way that emojis work (like reacting with an emoji for an image).
Hypothetically, any time you’d not be able to have a person do it.
Thing is, all the current models out there are built on stolen talent. So you have to decide if that matters to you.
Me? I don’t hate generative software per se. I think it does fine for the exact cases you mention.
Learn using image generation properly rather than accepting slop and use it when you need it’s. Just like with LLMs generating text.
These tools are going to stay and they can be useful. Refusing to use them when they are useful for a good cause is not going to help anybody.
Also, problematic aspects of these tools are always related to capitalism. Artists whose work was used against their interests suffer because of conditions of our current socio-economic system. In a system that doesn’t make relationship with art alienated, it wouldn’t exist.
Like others will say there is no ethical use of it, except maybe locally on your own hardware for personal curiousity. It’s an environmental catastrophy, if it’s used more it will increase the value for companies like OpenAI whos owners want to be the feudal chiefs of a new techno-fascist society, and the more encouraged and developed it becomes, the more useful it is for surveillance companies and totalitarian states.
I’m sure there are uses I don’t notice, but it does look very bad, and if I notice a company using it it makes me feel a sort of repulsion towards that company.
AI images have this uncanny valley effect to them. They are unsettingly off, because they are not human. I think they are fine for idea generation, but you will lose credibility if you use them elsewhere.
It doesn’t necessarily look bad, but it has a certain look. Once you start to recognize AI’s tells you can’t unsee it.
I don’t think individual use matters that much. It’s slop, but if it doesn’t matter then slop is fine. It’s when institutions and companies and governments are using generated images instead of hiring an artist that it becomes a problem; an artist didn’t get paid for what is essentially stolen work and now that slop will be crammed down our throats.
never. ai “art” is theft.
Let’s not just exchange blunt claims, but reason a little.
Copyright critics have long made the somewhat compelling argument that copying isn’t stealing because the original digital item does not become scarcer in the process. So how can AI taking artists’ work be considered theft if it, too, just uses copies of the original work and maybe transforms them into a new work (which would, under U.S. law, fall under “fair use”)?
We might argue that, well, fair use does not apply because most AI companies try to monetise the models derived from other people’s work.
Which leads me to the question: would you find visual genAI more acceptable if it weren’t commercial?
As bad as copyright laws are, they are made even worse when they are applied to everyday people via life-altering fines, and often ignored completely when applied to giant corporations.
I get and share the criticism of double standards in the application of the law and the other ugly sides of corporate AI. The question I’m asking here is: if unshackled from its corporate contexts (i.e. proprietary models run for-profit in centralised data centres): is genAI still objectionable? Is the tech unethical as a wholez or is it only problematic because for now, it is mostly a tool of the oligarchs?
Because AI companies are making a huge profit (and wrecking the environment) on stolen art.
There’s a huge difference between someone that torrent 1T of books over his/her life and a company that torrent every books in history to make a machine that will try to destroy art as we know it for the profit of the 1% few.
Alright, I get that. It’s pretty much what I wrote up there in the second half of my posting.
I’d still be curious as to your answer to my question there:
Which leads me to the question: would you find visual genAI more acceptable if it weren’t commercial?
Personally probably still see it as slop, because I think that genAI are just a by product of the inherent spyware they are
Which leads me to the question: would you find visual genAI more acceptable if it weren’t commercial?
For sure. I couldn’t tell you where inspired, but new, work ends and theft begins, or how model training would be funded without commercial incentive. But I would be more comfortable knowing that companies have not ripped potential profits straight from every artist the model had been trained on.
And I like this kind of discussion. What’s bothered me before have been the jabs at the mere presence of AI without deeper discussion as to what qualifies as theft. I haven’t found myself buying art even before such AI models. I wouldn’t buy or sell images that I know are AI generated. And I pay the electric bill for locally-generated ones as if I were doing any other novelty activity like gaming on my PC. I’m curious, what would you think of local models that can be acquired for free?
I’m probably the most anti-AI person I know, but I agree discourse around how “AI is theft” is a bit shallow.
Copyright is often erroneously conflated with plagiarism. While the two do sometimes coincide, they’re very different concerns.
I, myself, believe copyright is so broken we’d be better off throwing it away. (The only thing I believe I’d miss about copyright if I woke up tomorrow and it didn’t exist would be copyleft.) But I do deeply believe in a right to attribution. I don’t think AI is theft. I think it’s plagiarism.
And I believe that listing the names of all those whose works were included in training data for a model would still be a great disservice to the artists buried tens of millions of names deep right after some dumbass “NFT artist”. Meanwhile, asking an LLM or image generating model which training data was involved in generating one particular piece of output it produced is futile the same way as asking a stage strongman which rep at the gym allowed them to lift that car.
And if someone objected that giving what I would consider “sufficient credit” to artists/authors/whoever would make AI models completely infeasible, then my response would be “that’s exactly my point.” If it can’t exist without taking advantage of huge numbers of people without their consent, then it shouldn’t exist at all.
Finally, one more point I want to make is that if AI didn’t make billionaires a huge amount of money, the legal system would have put a stop to the mass scraping of training data and made a very visible example of whoever undertook to do mass scraping in the first long ago. (Never forget what they did to Aaron Swartz for scraping on a vastly smaller scale than OpenAI or Twitter or whoever did to make their LLM models.) As terrible as it is having to deal with the shitty IP laws we have, the greater injustice is that the laws (IP and otherwise) only apply when billionaires want them to.
