#dont nobody be stealing it or selling it to AI | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ot3 · 1 year

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omg thank you for being the first normal person I've seen so far about AI who's also an artist T-T like obviously all the stealing is horrible and it's good it's talked about but almost everyone really is acting like the idea of computers being capable of creating images killed their firstborn child

(also I don't mean it as one of the weird AI art bros but as an artist myself I'm just glad that there are other artist with open mind to the concept)

no right like its insane to me to see how many other people who seem reasonable and level headed are falling for the kneejerk response to say ai Isn't Art Can't Be Art ! It's throwing out the baby with the bathwater to an almost incomprehensible degree.

Unfortunately the fact of the matter is that we live in an era where essentially all new technology's first and prime purpose will be for ghoulish, capitalistic, anti-human ends. But to reject any other uses for the technology doesn't do anything other than make you look like an anti-tech weirdo. This is genuinely insanely impressive and revolutionary tech! There are a TON of legitimate artistic uses for AI image generation.

It also seems weird that everyone is delving into this false binary of 'dont use AI, learn to draw' as if there is any conceivable reason for these things to be mutually exclusive? Like, before all of the AI discourse really popped off i was doing some experimenting with using AI in my process.

the texturing used in this drawing was made by VQGAN + Clip (different type of image generation than the stable diffusion model that is producing most of the AI art that's up for debate right now) running through google colab. I made a bunch of these weird, ethereal images that would have been almost impossible for me to produce under my own power - it would have taken a titanic amount of time, effort, and design to produce any of these through illustrative or photo editing techniques.

here's a sampling of some of the textures i made. Now I think it would be a real struggle to try and claim that these images made are plagiarisms. However, I stopped messing with the google colab generation for one key reason: i didnt know enough about the image databases being used to train these models. That's the real stumbling block

the internet is CHOCK FULL of images that are free to use commercially and repurposes, there's stuff like wikimedia commons, the smithsonian open access, unsplash and pexels which have free stock photos, etc. I honestly think a nonzero amount of artists would consent to having some of their work used in image generation databases if they were promised noncommercial use of the resulting images, also. But the problem is the people training these AI don't give a shit about any of that. It's just the complete entitlement to other people's work and neglect for creative boundaries that makes AI generation bad.

The fact that people are attempting to replicate the art of living, working artists, or people like kentaro miura who by all accounts were so dedicated to the craft that they worked themselves to death sickens me. And the fact that the companies responsible for this are using that as an active selling point for their product is even worse. It's a pretty miserable time to be an artist, and this is just the icing on the cake.

But I don't want silicon valley greed and bizarre, impotent jealousy from redditors who want custom waifu jpgs to mean that nobody who could really benefit from AI image generation gets to use it.

like, my dad for example. he's been a creative person his whole life but it never really went anywhere. He drew a lot as a kid and then went and got a degree in filmmaking. My parents were living in LA when I was born, with my dad managing a filming/sound studio and the two of them trying to break into writing screenplays. This did not happen because they had three kids, and for the past decade and then some my dad had been doing database programming on contract for the CDC. Now, in his mid 50s, he's finally got a permanent and secure position and, rather than spending all his free time raising children or getting PMP certified to try and angle for a string of promotions, he can start having hobbies again. there's a comic he's been wanting to draw for as long as I can remember.

only, one big problem - in 2021 he had surgery on his cataracts and never healed properly. He's got severely impaired vision and looking at stuff too hard for to long causes him a ton of eye strain and pain. He has to look at a lot of screens for his job so by the time he's off work for the day he's pretty much too fatigued to do all the intense visual stuff it'd take to make a comic.

I wanted to tell him AI image generation could help him make the kind of stuff he always dreamed about making as a kid but instead I had to tell him that as it stands, the predatory nature of AI modeling means it's insanely hard to use it without ripping off vulnerable creatives. Instead we chatted a bit about combining 3d assets, digitally edited photos, or photobashing/digital kitbashing methods to try and make a pipeline he could do without drawing, but the time commitment to learn these methods is probably just not feasible unless his eyes make a pretty unprecedented recovery in future years.

Like, that's the worst thing about all of this. The idea that AI makes the production of certain kinds of art more accessible to people with disabilities isn't just a 'gotcha' being used by the pro-AI people, it's also true. I would love for my dad to be able to make his comic. I myself also have a huge string of health issues and sometimes the main thing stopping me from drawing is that it hurts to do so. Anything in my process that could reduce the strain drawing puts on my body is an accessibility concern in some ways. Eventually degrading so much that I can't draw at all is one of my biggest fears.

But that doesn't counter all of the negatives! It just doesnt! Which fucking sucks man it just sucks so fucking bad that we have this cool incredible thing and we can't use it without being complicit in some stuff i am fully ideologically against! As things stand I really cant imagine that 'ethical' AI image generation will ever exist, so unfortunately it will have to be in the hands of the people using it to decide for themselves if they are using it in a way that is predatory or harmful, or as a legitimate tool to make meaningful works of art.

#sorry to go on this whole rant ive just been percolating on these thoughts for awhile.#long post #ai #i know this comes off as preachy im just passionate about this subject

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