AI-generated art

[Faustus]

But you can ask those humans about their influences and they’ll tell you. They will (generally) correctly attribute fanart and homages. (And will get in hot water if they try to make money off of anything owned by The Mouse. )

I covered that already where I said it is a problem if the art is recognisable as being based on something else, and fan art is still technically copyright theft under the auspices of demarkation, it's just not worth Disney's time to prosecute so many small-time artists. They'd lose money. Where an AI is responsible for fan art and homages, it is the person who requested the image who is responsible for noting influences. In fact, some AI art programs give you the option to include the original prompt (and hence its influences) in the finished image.

Trained computer applications that generate images directly derive their value from the work they were trained on. We don’t allow people to use art they don’t own the rights to (and that aren’t in public domain) in order to create a product in any other sphere. When it’s done, there is justified backlash.

Sure we do. Otherwise, there wouldn't be so many superheroes in spandex. It's not illegal for an artist to look at a picture, then draw something similar but legally distinct.

The conversation would be very different if publicly released generators only used public domain work to train their models.

I'll bet human artists use copyrighted works for reference all the time, and even more often, subconsciously without realising it.

Allowing prompters to request art in the style of artists whose work has not yet passed into public domain is unethical.

Real artists copy other artists' style all the time too. It's not illegal so long as they're not trying to pass it off as someone else's work.

Hell, there’s training data used for some of these generators that wasn’t supposed to be public at all in the first place. And there’s not really any way to “untrain” specific things from the algorithm.

I'm not going to defend any single specific case of people using things they shouldn't, but the vast majority of images obtained for training AI comes from the public Internet where human artists can assimilate and reference it too.

 

[quoting_mungo]

I'm not going to defend any single specific case of people using things they shouldn't, but the vast majority of images obtained for training AI comes from the public Internet where human artists can assimilate and reference it too.

That sounds worryingly like the ages-old “if you didn’t want people stealing it, you shouldn’t have posted it online.” At best you’re making a case for huge, obtrusive watermarks to make a comeback. Humans do not learn the way computers do, or vice versa.

You can ask a computer to draw adsfgvfkjh and it will come up with something. Ask an artist to draw that and at best they’ll give you some fancy lettering. A computer has no concept of what it’s drawing, it’s just got rules that it associates with letters. Friend who actually knows this stuff on a technical level just now fed “qqq” into a generator and it spat out images that a human might describe as “Middle Eastern city.” I can’t entirely follow the fancy text speech he used to describe why this is, but I can understand that much.

Deep neural networks make rules that they then follow when they spit something out. They have no concept of “vase” corresponding to an object, or any semantic knowledge about that object (things like “a vase is a container with a hole pointed vaguely upwards that you put flowers in”), just that those letters in that sequence are associated with edges following a particular set of rules. There are no gaps in these systems’ “knowledge” - if you never train one on a single image of an elephant, and you ask it to draw one, it will confidently spit something out and far as it is concerned has fulfilled your request. You ask a hypothetical artist who has never been exposed to images or descriptions of elephants (and never seen one in other contexts) to draw one, and they’ll ask you wtf is an elephant. Because the artist understands that an elephant is an object, and trying to extrapolate what it looks like from the spelling of the word is silly and pointless.

 

[Judge Spear]

Real artists copy other artists' style all the time too. It's not illegal so long as they're not trying to pass it off as someone else's work.

A lot of you are looking at all of this from extremely linear angles and are not considering very important extrinsics like brand recognition and traffic.

Real artists cannot rapidly output copied or grifted content to the point that, in the modern age, fucks the original source artist's metrics. AI art can and it already floods searches with itself because what I do in a day, a machine will do 30 times in 6 hours.
Companies for instance don't strike down fan works for existing. it's going to be fan work that is directly misleading an audience in a manner that is too big to ignore and can erode brand recognition which is a net loss. Not because it's theft/copyright infringement on it's face.

AI art that directly utilizes an artist in it's prompt is a non insignificant concern as a single creator or small group. Your work can be over shadowed or contended with bastardized versions of your content. That directly cuts into your traffic which is destructive the more independent you are.

EDIT: (Fixed some sentence structure/typos)

 

[Attaman]

Something to keep in mind with AI art is that it can and has been directly used - openly, with candid admittance - as a means to avoid paying artist as well as a way to actively target and hurt artists' income.

This is not the realm of theoretical future problems that hypothetical bad actors might engage in. We have people training art-creation AI's right now with the explicit intent of targeting, copying, and supplanting artists who have been vocally critical of AI art just to go "We can teach an AI to replace you". We have people using art-creation AI's as a means to get "Trending on Art Station" (as the meme goes) works that normally would cost several hundred each to commission (let alone any professional license to actually, y'know, make commercial use of the art) to avoid having to pay / credit artists with them explicitly saying it's to avoid having to pay / credit artists.

Even if one wishes to argue "This is fine", it sets some pretty chilling precedents both in creative fields and with regards to work (professional, hobby, et al) as a whole. And while I may be lingering on the former more than the latter (professional artists of various mediums do not have it particularly easy these days with the war on voice actors, absurd productivity and 'quality' expectations for web series', the rampant abuse of virtual effects artists, etcetera), the latter is also very much worth keeping in mind seeing as how there's already well documented anxiety as to what 'work' might look like 30 years from now and it doesn't need help with people actively arguing "If your entire career field can be replaced by a 3"x3"x0.1" piece of silicone and a stable internet connection that sounds like a you problem". See how fucking fast that answer spins on its head when somebody goes after STEM (and I'll be blunt: It's significantly easier for this sort of tech to be used to go after STEM fields than creative arts). "You can't just replace Civil Engineers with an AI program!" "Haha STEM loan defaulting go brrrr."

 

[quoting_mungo]

Something to keep in mind with AI art is that it can and has been directly used - openly, with candid admittance - as a means to avoid paying artist as well as a way to actively target and hurt artists' income.

Quite. Part (though not all) of my ethical concerns with training these algorithms on the art of living artists without their consent ties into this. It’s not even paying someone to build their own replacement - it’s using the fruits of their labor, for free and without even asking (and often against their protestations), to create and improve a means of undermining their livelihood. And that’s, like… if you (gen) don’t see the ethical issue there, you’re very much damaged by late-stage capitalism.

(And no, not charging for the use of your ethically questionable tech toy doesn’t mean you’re not deriving value from the training data. Not charging for playing with the tech toy on request doesn’t mean you’re not deriving value. And that’s without considering the fact that there are people who charge for access to their toys.

I don’t have issue with people building and using these things for science. AI and NNs and machine learning are cool research fields. It’s the public access that creates most of the issues.)

 

[Judge Spear]

Something to keep in mind with AI art is that it can and has been directly used - openly, with candid admittance - as a means to avoid paying artist as well as a way to actively target and hurt artists' income.

This is not the realm of theoretical future problems that hypothetical bad actors might engage in. We have people training art-creation AI's right now with the explicit intent of targeting, copying, and supplanting artists who have been vocally critical of AI art just to go "We can teach an AI to replace you". We have people using art-creation AI's as a means to get "Trending on Art Station" (as the meme goes) works that normally would cost several hundred each to commission (let alone any professional license to actually, y'know, make commercial use of the art) to avoid having to pay / credit artists with them explicitly saying it's to avoid having to pay / credit artists.

Even if one wishes to argue "This is fine", it sets some pretty chilling precedents both in creative fields and with regards to work (professional, hobby, et al) as a whole. And while I may be lingering on the former more than the latter (professional artists of various mediums do not have it particularly easy these days with the war on voice actors, absurd productivity and 'quality' expectations for web series', the rampant abuse of virtual effects artists, etcetera), the latter is also very much worth keeping in mind seeing as how there's already well documented anxiety as to what 'work' might look like 30 years from now and it doesn't need help with people actively arguing "If your entire career field can be replaced by a 3"x3"x0.1" piece of silicone and a stable internet connection that sounds like a you problem". See how fucking fast that answer spins on its head when somebody goes after STEM (and I'll be blunt: It's significantly easier for this sort of tech to be used to go after STEM fields than creative arts). "You can't just replace Civil Engineers with an AI program!" "Haha STEM loan defaulting go brrrr."

This is one issue I take with a lot of people in favor of AI.
I don't know what world people think we're living in because when I wake up every morning, it absolutely is not this.

People can cook up all of these romantic idealizations of these fabled AI art uses. But you'd be naïve to think it won't be used far more by lazy grifters to the detriment of art communities. Assuming it gets that far.

Now, I personally don't see big damage in the future to the extent you do. It could come to pass and I might be wrong.
But to ignore the reality that an alarming amount of people ARE putting in express effort to be outwardly malicious, industry eroding hacks, is to be living a high fantasy. And by "high" I mean some new strain of weed.
We just finished dealing with NFT Bros. burning holes in our atmosphere to make some quick millions. What makes anyone think AI Art will not be used en masse by the same ilk of gremlins?

 

[Faustus]

A lot of you are looking at all of this from extremely linear angles and are not considering very important extrinsics like brand recognition and traffic.

To be fair, I DID make a sidelong reference in my original post to OTHER reasons that AI might be bad for the art industry. I would only debate the 'copyright theft' angle.

 

[quoting_mungo]

To be fair, I DID make a sidelong reference in my original post to OTHER reasons that AI might be bad for the art industry. I would only debate the 'copyright theft' angle.

You seem to be mixing up legality and ethics to some degree, though. It’s not only about copyright theft copyright infringement per se. It’s about the ethics of taking an artist’s body of work and using it to train a neural network without consent. That those artists should have input as the rights holders is an important concern not primarily because of the legality, but because them retaining their rights rather than releasing the work into public domain means they cannot be assumed to be okay with whatever novel use people come up with.

Right now there hasn’t, far as I’m aware, been any legal challenge that can serve as precedent for whether feeding the work into a neural network is legal. Nor am I aware of any proposed legislation around it. I am aware that corporations have lobbied for “orphaned works” excemptions in copyright law, and those are/would be a very direct legal threat to/undermining of artist rights. I believe the concept of orphaned work (as these corporations would like to define it) could be used as leverage against artists in future legal challenges against generated art. So yes, there’s legal concerns, but those mainly exist as a future concern.

Fact stands that computers do not, and can not (at least with current technology), learn art the way humans do. Not least because computers don’t understand any of what they learn. Comparing machine learning to human learning, and indiscriminately feeding images into a training data set to humans using references, comes off as either disingenuous or short on understanding.

If there’s no human verification that images are posted legitimately (by the rights holder or with the rights holder’s permission) at the absolute minimum, you cannot escape situations like in the Ars Technica article I linked arising. They will continue coming up, and unlike DMCA takedowns for the source images (which could at least remove them from being used in future data sets/future uses of URI-based data sets) there is no way to “untrain” the neural network on a specific image. It’s like the “once it’s on the Internet it’s out there forever” thing turned up to 11. Until legally challenged (and I’m not a lawyer, so I have no idea of how likely such a challenge is to stick) that’s a solely ethical issue, but one that to me has a pretty obvious answer.

I get that you feel strongly about this because you do play with these tech toys, and you do take requests from people to play with them on their behalf. But that’s the thing. You’re getting value (in views/likes/followers) out of something that builds entirely on the work of others. I’m not saying this as a character judgment on you. I’m saying this because I can’t think of a way, other than being concrete, to communicate that these artists’ work is a prerequisite of your tech toy existing. Of the images you generate existing.

My art might not have been quite the same without my being exposed to Lena Furberg, to Bamse, to any number of artists. But the hypothetical non-existence of their work would not automatically preclude me creating art. Practically all children draw, and some of their earliest works almost universally will depict things and people they see in real life. Themselves. Their families. Pets and cars and trees and flowers. While symbols will play into it (the sun isn’t literally a yellow circle with straight spokes sticking out), those symbols are not the part of art that anyone objects to being included in training data.

Without the images being fed into them as training data, these tech toys would at best create absolute nonsense. Flat colors, pixel soup, errors, I don’t know. They directly derive their value from other people’s work. At that point, the least one can do is make sure one gains informed consent.

Because otherwise, you do risk heading into a future where more and more content is heavily watermarked and/or hidden behind a paywall. And I know that’s something consumers of furry art kvetch about to no end.

 

[Faustus]

Point of order, I never claimed to be making a legal statement.

 

[quoting_mungo]

Point of order, I never claimed to be making a legal statement.

Not as such, but you've used phrases like "it's not illegal" in e.g. this post. To me, at least, that suggests that legality plays into your argument.

 

[Faustus]

Not as such, but you've used phrases like "it's not illegal" in e.g. this post. To me, at least, that suggests that legality plays into your argument.

Oh that was just intended to point out the parallel between a human artist and a computer one, and also the difference between drawing something using information learned from other pictures, and actually attempting to copy elements of those pictures.

 

[SirRob]

Pixiv has a policy on AI-generated work now. They're allowing it although it has to be tagged as such.

pixiv's policy on AI-generated work

Greetings from pixiv. We have recently witnessed a surge of inquiries regarding artworks in which a…

www.pixiv.net

"At pixiv, we believe that the use of AI technology in the creative process will become even more widespread in the future, and we have no plans to ban AI-generated artwork completely.

We believe that AI technology, like other technologies that have been developed up until today, such as art supplies and resources, drawing software and digital tools, and 3D technology, can be a valuable ally to creators. Ultimately, we are looking for ways in which the creative community and technology can coexist successfully.

On the other hand, the rapid development of this technology has brought about various concerns and different perspectives about the use of AI, and we realize the regulations and ethics discourse haven't kept up with the pace of this transition. We are currently researching various topics related to AI technology and discussing each matter.
We are committed to long-term efforts to address the concerns of creators, general sentiment, and legal limits so that everybody can enjoy the world of creation with peace of mind."

 

[Sheol_Azure]

Personally I view it as a tool. People who want to commission can make better representations of the character they had in mind. Artists can play with it creatively when experimenting with their artwork. We can argue back and forth but AI art is here to stay.
The only solution I can think of would be giving monetary compensation to the creator of the image used when generating the art when you generate it.

 

[Deleted member 160111]

The only solution I can think of would be giving monetary compensation to the creator of the image used when generating the art when you generate it.*

Sounds good, but you have to be Elon Musk to afford it.

 

[Sheol_Azure]

No you can generate thousands of images for less than a dollar.
What I'm getting at is that the company generating the images could potentially share royalties accordingly.

 

[Pomorek]

No you can generate thousands of images for less than a dollar.
What I'm getting at is that the company generating the images could potentially share royalties accordingly.

I don't think the datasets they use contain information on whose artwork they were leeching.

 

[Deleted member 162282]

My issue with AI isn't what it does, it's how it does it. In order to train AI you need hundreds or thousands of samples, where this becomes an issue for me is, did the artists give you the rights to use their art to train your AI? If not, I wonder if there might be some legal repercussion for the companies in the future.

Perhaps artist should now add a non compete clause or condition to their art, or something along that measure? I don't know what I'm rambling about, but taking someone else's work, and in the case of AI, literally kit-bashing new work out of it without license seems legally grey to me.

Also, before anyone brings up kit-bashing as a legitimate thing, such as how the ship models on Star Wars were built, the key difference is that those companies paid for those kits, they didn't just take them.

 

[ConorHyena]

and I’m not a lawyer, so I have no idea of how likely such a challenge is to stick

very unlikely. Multiple different avenues of reasoning have been made but under general european copyright/IP law interpreations the way AI works falls under derivative work (-> collages are a similar example here) Making something like a 'style' an IP to potentially cause consequences for generators has a long list of potential reprecussions, and more often than not what we percieve a lack of regulation is actually there for a very good reason.

That being said - ethics wise I do to a degre agree with you. It's just extremely difficult to argue ethics in an absolutist way because they are very liable to change and they differ greatly in different backgrounds and over time (for instance the ethics of 'copying a master' nowadays and during the baroque era were significantly different)
Ethical arguments also to a degree are divorced from a legal standpoint - because the law shoudl establish a very basic baseline of what is OK and what isn't - and society will have to define what it feels is acceptable.
For instance at least part of the demographic I've talked to that has been very upset about AI has been either drawing fanart (It's just fanart, duh!) and has been downloading stuff on the internet (It's all just big cooperations anyway, right?) which under the very restrictive AI-art-is-theft doctrine is essentially on the same level but for some reason it is okay. (Which I'm not judging on btw. This is not supposed to be a callout post or such. There's just a significant fickleness in the average citizen's perception of 'what is right and proper that is inherently problematic)

Same goes with paywalls. I feel it perfectly reasonable to put one's higher-quality pieces behind a patreon or something, as an artist, even in the furryverse. People will get upset over this (and deem it unethical) because ethics more often than not are providing a justification for 'but I want this and I don't wanna pay for it'

full disclosure: I'm an artist and I have not ever worked with AI before.

 

[Yastreb]

My issue with AI isn't what it does, it's how it does it. In order to train AI you need hundreds or thousands of samples, where this becomes an issue for me is, did the artists give you the rights to use their art to train your AI? If not, I wonder if there might be some legal repercussion for the companies in the future

In order to train a human brain to creat art you need to see thousands of other art pieces. Where this becomes an issue is, did the artists give you the right to use their art to train your brain?

 

[Deleted member 162282]

In order to train a human brain to creat art you need to see thousands of other art pieces. Where this becomes an issue is, did the artists give you the right to use their art to train your brain?

Or you could just go outside, sketch nature, find inspiration in the real world, work hard and refine your style, or take a class, paying a tutor to assist your development. Plenty of ways that people can better themselves without the potential theft of thousands of other peoples works, particularly when we're talking about for profit purposes.

Additionally, there is a difference from being inspired from someone's work, and outright taking it for a kit-bash, at the end of the day a human can find inspiration from anywhere, real-life or not and people are not restricted to reference images from other artists, where AI (at this time) is. So you have a technology that is 100% dependant on IP theft in order to kit-bash something together based on a few prompts, that's why at this time, I'm against AI art generators that do not license or require permission from the artists that they are trained on.

 

[quoting_mungo]

For instance at least part of the demographic I've talked to that has been very upset about AI has been either drawing fanart (It's just fanart, duh!) and has been downloading stuff on the internet (It's all just big cooperations anyway, right?) which under the very restrictive AI-art-is-theft doctrine is essentially on the same level but for some reason it is okay.

I don’t believe that the ethical concerns surrounding fanart and image generators are more than superficially similar, tbh. But then I guess I don’t exactly see “AI art” as art theft per se. And vital parts of the ethical issues I see with it have no counterpart in fanart:
- Lack of source material verification (images for training datasets are scraped uncritically, without ensuring that they were posted with the rights holder’s and (in the case of photography) subject’s blessing)
- Lack of attributability (fanart can clearly point back to its source material)
- Competition with the original (with very rare exception, fanart exists alongside rather than in competition with its source material)
But then “art theft” also gets used overbroadly by some groups, as well.

(For the record, my personal position on piracy is “don’t, but if the rights holder will not make it available to a market at a reasonable market price, they have no real room to complain.” Like, multiple shows were recently retired in order to do accounting dark magic by declaring them a loss. In doing so, the company binds themselves to generate no future revenue from the property, and to pull it from distribution. At that point, what damages do they get to claim? (Rhetorical question.) “Reasonable market price” basically meaning “if a movie is only sold in an extravagant collector’s edition for $$$, and is not available in forms and at price points comparable to similar products, that’s only ‘available’ on paper.”)

 

[Mambi]

Or you could just go outside, sketch nature, find inspiration in the real world, work hard and refine your style, or take a class, paying a tutor to assist your development. Plenty of ways that people can better themselves without the potential theft of thousands of other peoples works, particularly when we're talking about for profit purposes.

Additionally, there is a difference from being inspired from someone's work, and outright taking it for a kit-bash, at the end of the day a human can find inspiration from anywhere, real-life or not and people are not restricted to reference images from other artists, where AI (at this time) is. So you have a technology that is 100% dependant on IP theft in order to kit-bash something together based on a few prompts, that's why at this time, I'm against AI art generators that do not license or require permission from the artists that they are trained on.

AI can only imitate art. Ask the AI what it feels about the art. Ask it what emotions it's trying to convey.

The nothingness you'll get in reply is exactly why AI art is a failure before it begins.

 

[Fallowfox]

AI can only imitate art. Ask the AI what it feels about the art. Ask it what emotions it's trying to convey.

The nothingness you'll get in reply is exactly why AI art is a failure before it begins.

Beep boop. :{

So counter to this. What if a human feels something when they view art generated by an AI?

 

[Mambi]

Beep boop. :{

So counter to this. What if a human feels something when they view art generated by an AI?

Easily countered: The AI is replicating art from components made by humans that were originally designed to evoke emotion. So it gets carried over accidentally.

If an AI draws a baby being snuggled by a kitten, WE feel the sense of "awwwww!", but the AI just sees two random objects together and places them as instructed.
The AI is not trying to create the emotion no matter what it uses as a palette, while the components were made by humans who were so we start feeling things.

A human will see an animal or a face in the clouds as well, but the clouds aren't trying to draw anything. That's how I see AI art...coincidental evocations only.

 

[Foxridley]

Easily countered: The AI is replicating art from components made by humans that were originally designed to evoke emotion. So it gets carried over accidentally.

If an AI draws a baby being snuggled by a kitten, WE feel the sense of "awwwww!", but the AI just sees two random objects together and places them as instructed.
The AI is not trying to create the emotion no matter what it uses as a palette, while the components were made by humans who were so we start feeling things.

A human will see an animal or a face in the clouds as well, but the clouds aren't trying to draw anything. That's how I see AI art...coincidental evocations only.

Just to fully flesh out the idea: How might this compare, then, to an artist drawing a kink they aren't into for a commissioner?
That is, it is a turn-on for the commissioner, but does nothing for the artist.