AI vs. ART

I'm philosophical about it. You can't stop a nerd on the trail of a new idea! But ... they should pay their dues "were unhappy to learn that pictures of their work were used without someone informing them, asking for consent, or paying for their use."

Sadly, can't see a way to make that happen.

Note: I have nerd genes :) 😀
 
Jo, if all you were doing was playing with ideas, creating, experimenting, it's a boon to you. But it's a threat to the original artists. 200 years from now that won't matter. While those artists and their families are trying to live on what they produce today, it's a serious problem.

The example used here is Erin Hanson, whose artworks keep grabbing me on Pinterest. I can tell her style (and her usual subjects) instantly. She not only works hard to produce constantly, she also has (or partners with?) a few live galleries to make her living. They literally stole from her directly in my view without her permission and the AI works are too close to hers to be anything but confusing to the market in copyright terms.

Yes, the government can do more about this via copyright laws, but the burden is on the artist/owner of the copyright to take it to court.

You know parody most of the time when you see it. You know derivative works when you see them pretty much always. But this is sooooo close to home that it's not just uncanny, it's unconscionable to distribute (much more so to sell) them.

When David Hockney started doing his work on an iPad, that was just experimentation or legitimate original use of a new medium. AI copies are not, even if initiated by a flesh and blood human.
 
"Yes, the government can do more about this via copyright laws, but the burden is on the artist/owner of the copyright to take it to court."

Very few artists will have the resources or inclination to go to court, unfortunately, knowing they will probably lose. Proving a violation of a copyright would be a tough sell without strong visual evidence. Making something "in the style of" should not be a crime. Modern globalist government will not come to our aid.

As I read it, AI technocrats are gathering millions of graphic artifacts to feed the art machine, something we've all been doing for years with our eyes and brain. All art is derivative, so they say, and what goes in comes out. We do that here everyday, though we may not want to recognize it.

Visual artists might gather under something like a Screen Actors Guild to lobby their cause and call out violations. I think musicians have something like that. But they have the strength of being gathered in places like Hollywood or Nashville where they can collectively influence producers of pop entertainment. Organizing reclusive painters scattered around the globe might be harder - or not given the nature of the internet.

I don't like AI when it's used like this by corporations because it kills jobs and steals income and makes individual creativity a moot point. Artists on this forum experimenting with AI are not in that category, of course, and may they be happy in their work.

I'm glad for now, at my age, that I can do whatever I want on paper or canvas without being accused of blasphemy, dragged into the public square and beheaded. (That happened to one of my ancestors during the English Civil War (1642-1651) but he was on the wrong side at the wrong time. ) :)
 
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Agreed, Druid.

However, don't think that the exploitation (not the experimentation) is going to be from individual artists. It will come from the art market machine corporations - the big auction houses and those that market images cheaply online or through advertising. The little guys just trying out new stuff here are not the issue for me, any more than the Asian tradition of copying great art as homage to the originals.
 
Jo, if all you were doing was playing with ideas, creating, experimenting, it's a boon to you. But it's a threat to the original artists. 200 years from now that won't matter. While those artists and their families are trying to live on what they produce today, it's a serious problem.

The example used here is Erin Hanson, whose artworks keep grabbing me on Pinterest. I can tell her style (and her usual subjects) instantly. She not only works hard to produce constantly, she also has (or partners with?) a few live galleries to make her living. They literally stole from her directly in my view without her permission and the AI works are too close to hers to be anything but confusing to the market in copyright terms.

Yes, the government can do more about this via copyright laws, but the burden is on the artist/owner of the copyright to take it to court.

You know parody most of the time when you see it. You know derivative works when you see them pretty much always. But this is sooooo close to home that it's not just uncanny, it's unconscionable to distribute (much more so to sell) them.

When David Hockney started doing his work on an iPad, that was just experimentation or legitimate original use of a new medium. AI copies are not, even if initiated by a flesh and blood human.

There is, alas, no way to copyright a style of painting, and there is nothing much anyone can do about any new technology other than trying to insulate himself. As it stands, Erin Hanson is, at least for the moment, thoroughly AI-proof, for the simple reason that she sells originals, painted in physical media. That is not something AI can do at all. The technology might wreak havoc in the print market, but then again, maybe not as much as we fear.

For one thing, the technology isn't mature, as amazing as the images sometimes look at first glance. I saw this one "inspired by Hopper" posted on Twitter:

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Quite impressive, but look carefully. Even impressionistically painted figures should make some sense, and many of these do not. Look particularly at the one on the far right. What exactly is going on there? Not to mention the text on the image: "CAFE CAFE"? "NEW YOOK"? And I see this all the time in AI art; there is almost always something weird or "off". It remains to be seen whether they'll be able to fix this.

Now if you want prints for your home or office, and AI ones are much cheaper than ones made after the work of humans, then perhaps it will be worth it for some. But I think many people might prefer human art on principle; having your home or office full of AI prints might come to be seen as a sign of lack of sophistication.

Well, maybe, maybe not. No one can predict the future, or what a generation of people who grow up with AI will prefer. At least for the moment, while I'm pretty impressed with the technology, and I have seen some genuinely beautiful and striking imagery made with it, I keep on asking myself: what is it actually good for? Thus far it is not of much use to illustrate books, for example, it is of no use for people who want original paintings on their walls, it has limited use as posters and such things as album covers.

I think at least some low end illustration jobs are going to go away, and one will have to see what effect this has on the market. I don't think it is likely that human art will go away, any more than AI made human chess players go away. But it is possible that it will make human professional art, i.e. the possibility of making a living through art, go away. Well, for the vast bulk of human history there was no such thing as a professional artist, so perhaps we should be philosophical about it. But as I note above, I don't think the danger is immediate or catastrophic.

Also, at least some forms of human art is very AI-proof indeed. One I already mentioned: physical paintings. Another that occurred to me: comic books and graphic novels. Go page through, say, one of the later Tintin books, and ask yourself what the chances are that any conceivable AI will be able to come up with such a thing.

Lastly, just as a point of interest, something I saw someone note on Twitter. We all predicted AI completely wrongly. In the arts, we always thought that should AI ever be able to produce art, it will tend to be coldly accurate but soulless art. The exact opposite happened: AI images are often strikingly beautiful, but upon closer examination full of amusing errors, accuracy-wise.

Similarly, we thought AI would make "low end" human jobs go away. The exact opposite happened: we are going to have AI lawyers and psychologists long before we have AI janitors. This fits in with something else I saw someone mention. AI can nowadays also write texts, to some extent. One guy tried this: for a speech, he made some bullet points and asked an AI writer to expand these into a long text. The AI had no problem doing this, and came up with a quite impressive text that needed virtually no correction.

But then the guy did the opposite: he gave the AI a long text and asked it to summarize it into bullet points. The AI failed to do this, completely and utterly. This follows because AIs don't actually understand anything. But it does show how we humans are very easily impressed by color and noise. The stuff politicians have been saying for years in their speeches is pretty much the same kind of stuff the AI above came up with when it expanded the bullet points. Utter drivel, and we mindlessly cheer it on.

It may be that we need to rethink our aesthetics, rather than rant at AI for being able to so easily emulate it. :)

And yes, after a long absence from CS, I am back for a while. :)
 
Brian, AI CAN do physical artworks. Hook it up easily to a 3D printer or any flat printer or a CNC machine and everything you think it cannot produce it can do more easily than a human can. Whether we would like or want it is the only question.

Note how advanced CGI and deepfakes have become. AI is only I when it can learn and seek to learn, which it now can do. So why do you think this level of development is where its evolution ends? If anything you should expect a rapid growth curve, not a steeply declining one.

And making it even harder for human artists in any art/design field to make a living is a resounding negative in my book!
 
Brian, AI CAN do physical artworks. Hook it up easily to a 3D printer or any flat printer or a CNC machine and everything you think it cannot produce it can do more easily than a human can. Whether we would like or want it is the only question.

I doubt whether any current 3D printer will be able to emulate the subtlety of human-made brushstrokes - you'd need a robot hand holding a brush. Probably doable in the longer run, but it remains a question how many people will want such pictures. It will be the new equivalent of old master knock-offs from Chinese painting factories - some people do like them, but I don't think they have killed the market for originals.

Owning an original painting is and always has been a way of showing off wealth, for a great many buyers. Flooding the market with cheap knock-offs might actually increase the value of genuine, human-made originals, though I foresee a whole new industry of authentication services. :)

Of course, in principle it is possible to create completely autonomous painting robots: they go out into the world, decide which scenes to use as reference, judiciously decide which parts of the reference to leave out, whether to add things into the scene etc., and they do so tastefully and intelligently, and then paint the scene with a robot hand with the same fine motor skills as those of a human artist holding the brush.

But here's something to keep in mind: such machines will be essentially as intelligent as any human. Not only artists are going to be out of a job. AI computer engineers will also be, as will everyone else.

Where such machines will leave society is a question one can endlessly debate or speculate about, but rest assured not only artists are going to feel the pinch. At least we'll all be in it together, including the idiots who made the machines in the first place. :)

Note how advanced CGI and deepfakes have become. AI is only I when it can learn and seek to learn, which it now can do. So why do you think this level of development is where its evolution ends? If anything you should expect a rapid growth curve, not a steeply declining one.

Yes, indeed: the technology will improve. Whether it will infinitely improve remains to be seen. It's not magic, and while I have only a rather vague understanding of how these things work, it seems to me that current models of AI have inherent limitations. They don't actually emulate the way in which human brains work.

It is nevertheless true that a lot of stuff that we traditionally considered "deeply and uniquely human" and "spiritual" and "self-expressive" etc. turned out to be superficial fluff. One can legitimately ask how valuable it really was in the first place, if a machine can so easily make it. Rather weirdly, people who frame pictures turned out more AI-proof than people who paint them!

And making it even harder for human artists in any art/design field to make a living is a resounding negative in my book!

Indeed, but there's not much we can do about it. We're then in the same position as horse experts and carriage builders were at the end of the 19th century. We won't be the first or the last group of artisans screwed out of a living by new technology.

But don't do what all those nerds tell you, namely "learn to code." No. The vast bulk of coders are also going to be out of jobs. Learn handyman skills. Those turned out to be more AI-proof than virtually anything else.
 
Yeah. This no different then any other profession thats been taken over by machines. Its been going on for awhile now and everyone thinks their profession is safe until it isn't.
 
Its been going on for awhile now and everyone thinks their profession is safe until it isn't.
Yup. I've twice had workplace skills suddenly rendered useless by machines. If there's a way for corporations and employers to replace humans with automation, they'll jump on it and never look back or think through whatever consequences might ensue. The bottom line is the bottom line.
 
Yeah. This no different then any other profession thats been taken over by machines. Its been going on for awhile now and everyone thinks their profession is safe until it isn't.

It's impossible to predict the future. AI is different from previous technologies: an AI that can replace any human artist is likely an AI that can also replace a computer scientist - as it is, a great deal of software development is also automated, and the very last advice anyone should take is the flippant "learn to code" sometimes thrown around by nerds. We'll see whether the computer nerds will end up shooting themselves in the foot. :)

One can envision a weird dystopia in which humans have returned to an agrarian existence, living in the shadows of an AI "society" in which AIs buy and sell stuff they don't need, police streets devoid of humans, mine raw materials they don't have a use for, make art and music no one appreciates, etc. - basically mindlessly running all the trappings of human civilization, except humans are no longer a part of it, because they're all "unemployable." Fertile grounds there for science fiction writers.

Now, I'm a big fan of the writings of Nassim Taleb (the man has an annoying habit of pretty much ALWAYS making correct predictions, while loudly protesting that he cannot predict anything). He notes that the 20th century was the graveyard of socioeconomic utopianism - one fantastic political project after the other, that would turn earth into paradise, failed spectacularly. He predicts that the 21st century will be the graveyard of techno-utopianism. All these tech nerds waiting breathlessly for the "singularity", or for machines finally freeing us all from "backbreaking labor," are in for a rude shock.

Well, we'll see if he's right this time. :)
 
One can envision a weird dystopia in which humans have returned to an agrarian existence...
Big Agri-Chem already has massive tractors guided by GPS, so even the option of an agrarian existence may be taken from us.
 
Big Agri-Chem already has massive tractors guided by GPS, so even the option of an agrarian existence may be taken from us.

I was thinking agrarian as in medieval. Of course, the AIs will then still mindlessly be producing food, bought by food companies run by AIs, and then disposed in landfills by still other AIs, because no one bought it.
 
I was thinking agrarian as in medieval. Of course, the AIs will then still mindlessly be producing food, bought by food companies run by AIs, and then disposed in landfills by still other AIs, because no one bought it.
Humans are amazingly adaptable when they want to be (as in get off the sofa). I can see AI trucks full of food getting hijacked on the road to the dump :)
 
Jo, if all you were doing was playing with ideas, creating, experimenting, it's a boon to you. But it's a threat to the original artists. 200 years from now that won't matter. While those artists and their families are trying to live on what they produce today, it's a serious problem.

The example used here is Erin Hanson, whose artworks keep grabbing me on Pinterest. I can tell her style (and her usual subjects) instantly. She not only works hard to produce constantly, she also has (or partners with?) a few live galleries to make her living. They literally stole from her directly in my view without her permission and the AI works are too close to hers to be anything but confusing to the market in copyright terms.

Yes, the government can do more about this via copyright laws, but the burden is on the artist/owner of the copyright to take it to court.

You know parody most of the time when you see it. You know derivative works when you see them pretty much always. But this is sooooo close to home that it's not just uncanny, it's unconscionable to distribute (much more so to sell) them.

When David Hockney started doing his work on an iPad, that was just experimentation or legitimate original use of a new medium. AI copies are not, even if initiated by a flesh and blood human.
I hear you, but it's not just art. e.g. Microsoft Copilot
 
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