I think if we fall into the philosophical “What is art?” rabbithole, the discussion won’t progress to anywhere. Same thing if we start talking metaphysics of an piece having “soul”.
The ethics of those tools are a better framework of discussion in my opinion
On ethics: AI training using copywrited artist’s materials is no different than human artists training using copywrited materials or even collage artists actually using others’ material. It’s fair use and no copywrite infringement is occurring.
This comment just shows further that you don’t understand my point at all. Art is expression and expression in any detail. i had before already this great example of the character with overly long rusting leg prosthesis to showcase what makes something art. But you missed that seemingly completely.
like I could make a character with unnaturally long rosting leg prothesis and I could use it as a metaphor for how this character lost its humanity trough a past traumatic experience and now struggles to interagate with his surounding anymore, but of course that would make no sense in reality, why would you make leg prothesis which would be too long and therefore make you struggle to actually move in your used circles/movements?
That is what makes it art, design decisions of those “mistakes” and everything else are connected to feelings and visualisations of concepts. We sacrifice realistic thinking to get into a further expression strenght and forming own aesthetic and styles but everything with a very concrete intent.
Art is expression into the finest delicate details, or sometimes extra rough and raw.
Meanwhile you just say if they are pink they could as well have three arms instead so it makes no problem.
There is nothing behind it message wise and it is also not like an aesthetic preference thing it is just an unfortunate malformation of the image you ignore to get fixed. That is not art. You can’t add small details with deep meaning or sharpen the specific aesthetic your art seek, you just give a text order trough a program.
We don’t care about realism but we want things to make sense, and those damn hands make no sense, even when those grotesque anatomy can be excused the third underarm has no place and reason
Imagine studying art and creative development for years and setting up a structure and style of your own or based/inspired by some artistic movement and then you can no longer find a place in the profession where there is already AI dont cost a lot…
How frustrating and demotivating is that situation 
I will let a question to youself think about: What is the value of art, regardless of whether it is realistic or abstract, made by a human being?
(I’m not talking about monetary value)
This is going to be a long one, so strap in.
I sincerely believe AI is here to stay and that it has come too soon. It was unleashed upon the world where the only consideration was being first and making all the money, and no one stopped to think that perhaps it’s not a good idea to unleash something so powerful without fully analyzing the detrimental effects. Maybe one company will play by a code of ethics and have their AI unable to do certain things, but there’s no guarantee every individual will think the same. I can almost guarantee you that they won’t.
That’s why I feel that complaining about AI has big James Chapman Energy.
It’s a new arms race on every front. Strap in.
I also think we (as a society) are in the infancy of using AI, and still exploring potential applications to see where it fits. The current applications are driven by hype beast tech bros who have not a creative bone in their body but seek to apply the newest iteration of late-stage capitalism to every aspect of the creative arts. AI will never be a sufficient replacement for a human artist because a human can be creative and an AI cannot. Right now, an AI is just a giant remix machine. I’ve been extensively using Copilot since Microsoft forced it upon every Windows 11 user, and it’s barely passable as a reverse search engine. It’s even worse at tackling music theory questions, often getting basic concepts completely wrong and trying to bullshit it’s way through the prompt. Even image generators are not creative; they’ve been trained on a set of data and can only generate new images based on those parameters. It cannot create a new style or do anything new. And as we can see from the Dir en grey “The Devil in Me” PV, AI isn’t going to replace VFX artists anytime soon.
As long as AI hallucinates to the degree that it does, y’all are good. I can only hope that we get to a place where AI finds its place in more subtle ways, and that AI tools augment the artist’s capabilities instead of replacing the artist outright.
But this leads me to my next point:
OpenAI is employing a very deceptive argument. They scraped a bunch of data from the internet for use in its training model without consideration for whether this art was copyrighted or not, and without compensating anyone. OpenAI also stated in that submission that, without access to copyrighted works, its tools would cease to function. They cannot simultaneously claim that the data has no value (so they can scrape data with impunity) and that the data does have value (because they need it to function). There are way too many precedents to go into to establish that data has value, and that copyright can extend to data. If I were an artist impacted by these tools, I’d definitely demand my payment for my non-consensual contributions to these training models, because if humans never created the data there would be nothing to train AI on!
However, I can’t claim if it’s fair use or not because the law has not caught up to AI. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again and I’ll even quote it so it stands out:
Technology is taking a wrecking ball to the axioms of society faster than we can put it back together
Is AI transformative because it’s creating new information or insights from the data? Or does it infringe upon the rights of copyright holders because AI systems can reproduce copyrighted works as a part of their output? Fair use is too complicated to call at the moment. It’s definitely not an absolute.
If you really care about this issue, you have to just wait for someone to push the envelope too far, too fast. Like I said earlier, the law lags behind, but it has an astounding ability to catch up when it affects the Right People. If you need an example, look no further than Taylor Swift deepfakes. Deepfakes have been around for a while - reddit closed the r/deepfake subreddit six years ago - and celebs have been dealing with Photoshop jobs since even before that. But the combination of convincing Taylor Swift deepfakes circulating on Twitter like wildfire changed the tone of the conversation from silence to “this needs to be regulated”. There are other examples like this yet to come.
My main concerns are the increasing number of scams involving deepfakes and the proliferation of both AI content and AI-regurgitated content that is flooding the internet and taking us many steps closer to a Dead Internet. I’m no longer on Facebook, but I’ve heard it’s getting quite bad.
If you can no longer trust what you observe on the internet, does it begin to lose its usefulness?
Having completed some solid exposition, I will wrap up by saying the AI use in the Dir en grey PV is objectively shit. I don’t like it, it looks weird, and trying to come up with an explanation to cover for it doesn’t fly for me. It’s about as bad as the various explanations for why the film version of Ghost in the Shell has a white woman playing an Asian woman, and even when I completely acquiesce to the argument and buy into the whole “race is fluid” construct in this hypothetical future, there is no denying that it is so awkwardly forced into the narrative that it distracts from the philosophical nature of the source material.
I feel the same way about this PV. Just because you can explain why it looks bad doesn’t make it look less bad, and there’s no denying a team of VFX artists would have done a much more convincing job and maybe have been on time too!
precisely
I wanna say we should be really grateful dall-e etc have not been launched during covid lockdown - this would legit have destroyed a lot of artist lives with that sort of timing - but for now, I mostly want to see where it all goes.
To shift the conversation towards J-rock and Visual Kei, has anyone else checked out Udio yet? (other than some folks on Discord where the topic has been floating around)
Something I threw together in like 5 sec. with a few simple prompts:
Still nonsensical, but faaar more convincing than anything you could cook up a year-or-two ago. You can also input your own lyrics, which is a huge gamechanger.
This and Suno are the two dominant AI music generators currently out.
**Here’s one using the lyrics for The Devil in Me:
Explanations of the kind you desire exist in this case and have been explained ad nauseam but it also doesn’t matter because art doesn’t require any form of logic or rationalization behind it. No great wall of text affects that.
I’ve never used AI.
I’m not OpenAI and my argument doesn’t come from them or anything they’ve said. Value wasn’t a part of my argument.
There’s nothing to say AI won’t one day surpass human intellect in every way. If we’re smart enough to make it it will happen. Unless you mean this remix machine specifically. In which case true.
The future of the internet is 50 cent armies that cost a lot less than 50 cents arguing with each other and driving out the voices of the native inhabitants - the porn bots. Such is the nature of ecological succession. Video will also become an unreliable source of information - more so than it already is - and people will be even more justified in believing whatever they want to about the world.
Just your reminder that we’re sprinting real close to it.
Another update. Artists are coming for Google’s AI. Copying text in case link dies later.
April 29 (Reuters) - Google has been hit with a new copyright lawsuit in California federal court by a group of visual artists who claimed the Alphabet (GOOGL.O) unit used their work without permission to train Imagen, its artificial-intelligence powered image generator.
Photographer Jingna Zhang and cartoonists Sarah Andersen, Hope Larson and Jessica Fink said in the proposed class action filed Friday that Google is liable for misusing “billions” of copyrighted images, including theirs, to teach Imagen how to respond to human text prompts.
The case is one of many potential landmark lawsuits brought by copyright owners against tech companies including Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta over the data used to train their generative AI systems.
“Our AI models are trained primarily on publicly available information on the internet,” Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said on Monday. “American law has long supported using public information in new and beneficial ways, and we will refute these claims in court.”
The artists’ attorneys Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick said in a statement that the case was “another instance of a multi-trillion-dollar tech company choosing to train a commercial AI product on the copyrighted works of others without consent, credit, or compensation.”
Zhang and Andersen are also involved in a similar ongoing lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney and others over the companies’ alleged misuse of their work to train AI image generators. The lawsuit filed on Friday said that Google used one of the same datasets to train Imagen that Stability and Midjourney used to train their systems.
The artists asked the court for an unspecified amount of monetary damages and for an order forcing Google to destroy its copies of their work.
The case is Zhang v. Google LLC, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 5:24-cv-02531.
For the artists: Joseph Saveri of Joseph Saveri Law Firm; Laura Matson of Lockridge Grindal Nauen; and Matthew Butterick
For Google: not yet available
Just wanna say that I called it:
According to this article, Imagen (terrible name to Google btw, you try it) was released in December 2023. So in true Google fashion, late to the party. That means it’s only been out four to five months. That’s a pretty fast lawsuit considering how slow the law can move.
We’ll have to stay tuned for this, but for all my artists out there go get that bag!
I like that they don’t even bother invoking the fair use bullshit this time; it feels like they’re going to blame the artists for not reading into creative commons and not predicting AI scraping when uploading stuff on the web, or something. or someone just gets a bit cash dropped off by their house in a nice discreet box, and it doesn’t move from there at all, lol.
I think there would be a very modest compensation in the Zhang vs google case, but I want to see where all of this is going… obv best of luck to her, the amount of unhinged nolifer bullshit she’s a target of at the moment is unreal, including people going on twitter to hurl hate on her directly.
I just found out that one of the midjourney founders actually did participate in graphics software in some way - ten years ago, corel painter had a brief, never publicly released version compatible with Leap Motion (if anyone still remembers what that is)
blurry video of a process, you basically used your hands suspended in front of a webcam to paint in the air, LeapMotion supplied the realtime mo-cap camera technology.
it is a very small world and I’ll never be not amazed at how low the code ppl can go considering painter had since switched development for china (which benefitted it immensely), corel were never an investment powerhouse - they’re a skimpy “microsoft office at home” thing largely supplying their retail sales with russian government contracts at that time, and painter was at its lowest point in 2013.
midjourney was allegedly profitable already back in 2022. we all thought painter died altogether last year, when the annual release iteration didn’t come out, but there never was a confirmation of any sorts (they changed ownership again, and were going for a restructuring process, or something; the parent company is now a girlboss IT hub, and I very distinctly remember the rapid degradation several painter versions went through when corel appointed a staff she/her as a program manager, upping her from some rando position before that… two promtly fired product managers later, most of ottawa team were let go, and the core coding team was put together in Beijing.)
later in the day, I would stumble upon this:
I’ve also been thinking about the disruption business model embraced by tech companies and startups. Maybe I’m over my skis in this point, but it seems to me that the cycle generally goes: 1. create a tech substitute for an existing industry. 2. Back this with venture capital funding so deep that massive losses can be sustained for years and years. 3. Aggressively compete against an existing industry which can not afford to operate at a loss for extended periods of time. 4. the existing industry is undercut until it falters or outright fails. 5. The disruptor(s), now having captured the market for the given industry, raise prices and reduce services to achieve profitability. I think about this every time I sit through a commercial on the Amazon Prime account that I’m already paying to use. Apply this strategy to A.I. and creative professions. These programs are designed to undercut working artists with fast, cheap, and “good enough” until work is devalued to the point that artists are forced out because they can’t make a living. After that, with untold amounts of money lost by the tech companies giving away this service to drive actual artists out of business, the companies that own these programs will have effectively bought the industry. From there, they are then in a position to charge whatever they want for their shitty product because it has become the most viable option, with all of the money now going to them. It doesn’t have to go this way, but this is the logical path to profitability.
AI is doing what humans can already do legally - just bypassing some of the human involvement. Of course someone would be mad (no one likes their style being ripped - but it’s legal) or think they could get money out of it.
Well, not in Japan. They recently updated their law to also include AI that uses an artist’s distinctive style. I would link the article but it was in german.
Ngl this thread is interesting in light of all the Tupac AI verse set off
it is funny how Pro AI people like you always act like they know shit about artistically process while you always were too lazy to learn anything about anything
We must beg the website’s owner to restrict access from japan because if vk artists find it over for the world.
But jokes aside, the site makes bangers.
I hate how I just know how my favourite music genre definitely would have a third of bands who would be willing to throw out all composership just for a ““tactical effective budget saving””
It’s legal for humans to do it without AI which is what I was referring to.
If AI is both as terrible as you say and you feel threatened by it then the art you make must not be very good at all. If AI is bad then it will never catch on.
I love Visual Kei but there are a lot of bands you need to confess don’t care much about the music they play.
There are a certain amount of groups getting their music from ghost song writers so why should those bands not do the logical next step of automating the composing and song lyrics process completely?
Ghost Songwriter bands become an algorithm’s pet, those silly little guys group who want to get girls will not bother even starting to compose things themselves anymore, because “why should I when that one discord bot can do it for me instead for free”
Those groups in the past who just did their thing to get attention from women and gradually trained those skill sets themselves to grow into serious musicians, they won’t evolve any longer.
The problem is not that I am scared of the quality of the bot, the problem is that we get a complete decline in quality for every kind of entertainment and humanity will lose touch completely with their creative mind because people think they found an infinite money hack.
