Pinterest

[stlukesguild]

For quite some time I have used Pinterest as a means of collection images… mostly paintings… but also illustration, sculpture, prints, photography, comic books, etc… as a source of inspiration for my work. Because I haven’t had any work space for almost a year now I haven’t looked at Pinterest much at all recently. It had actually been so long that when I went to look at the site yesterday I had to login again which meant digging up the password. When I did get on the site I was less than thrilled to find almost 90% of the images in my feed were AI crap This seems to be true across social media. Luckily I have well over 100,000 images saved to my devices vis the cloud so I can always look there for inspiration. Anyone have some other sources of “real art” that they feed their creativity with?

 

[brianvds]

The Pinterest is unbelievably annoying - I also used it extensively for everything from inspiration to simply practice. The good news is that one can fig into one's Pinterest settings and specify no AI-generated images, and doing that works to at least some extent. The bad news is I cannot remember how to do it! One has to go into the settings and turn off AI somewhere.

Just went to check my Pinterest, searched for "people" (a subject where LOTS of AI content exists) and saw almost no AI-generated images in the search result. There are still some, and one must not click on those, because then in the next page lots of your "similar images" will also be AI-generated.

As for sources of real art, at least for contemporary art I now and then enjoy mindlessly scrolling through my Instagram feed. Also, I sometimes check through the online catalogues of auction houses - presumably their stuff isn't AI-generated.

 

[txomsy]

Museums. Many are now available for online visiting.

I have used extensively sources of freely available online images like Pixabay, MorgueFile, etc. but haven't checked lately and they may be flooded by AI now, don't know. But these were often wanting. Flickr was a great resource, but same, haven't logged in for more than a decade, so don't know now, it may even not exist any more, like Panoramio did.

Lately, I take my own pictures from museums, Nature, etc.

I was once an active publisher of my works, a eager applier of "Shamizdat", but now I am growing more and more wary of publishing anything "worthy" out there. Now publishing any work is feeding large shameless, greedy corporations' AI engines, and worse, making it available for any kind of gruesome abuse (like the ones Grok allows). And hearing the owners of these corporations proudly boast the abusive capabilities of their engines and even promote them, doesn't help.

Think of it, for a platform to publish your images you must grant them the right to use those images, and currently there is no agreement that allows you to specify "I grant permission for publishing in the web page I uploaded it, but not use in AI training or any other use". Even if it were, once out, anyone can "access" them; by publishing you are granting people with access to the platform permission to "access" it. And no way you can avoid -as stlukesguild- the download and use (e.g. as inspiration or for any other -dubious included- goal) of them.

I mean, I would expect, as people learns, that less and less original work will be publicly available (to avoid abuse) and more crap will substitute it.

 

[brianvds]

Museums. Many are now available for online visiting.

I have used extensively sources of freely available online images like Pixabay, MorgueFile, etc. but haven't checked lately and they may be flooded by AI now, don't know. But these were often wanting. Flickr was a great resource, but same, haven't logged in for more than a decade, so don't know now, it may even not exist any more, like Panoramio did.

Lately, I take my own pictures from museums, Nature, etc.

I was once an active publisher of my works, a eager applier of "Shamizdat", but now I am growing more and more wary of publishing anything "worthy" out there. Now publishing any work is feeding large shameless, greedy corporations' AI engines, and worse, making it available for any kind of gruesome abuse (like the ones Grok allows). And hearing the owners of these corporations proudly boast the abusive capabilities of their engines and even promote them, doesn't help.

Think of it, for a platform to publish your images you must grant them the right to use those images, and currently there is no agreement that allows you to specify "I grant permission for publishing in the web page I uploaded it, but not use in AI training or any other use". Even if it were, once out, anyone can "access" them; by publishing you are granting people with access to the platform permission to "access" it. And no way you can avoid -as stlukesguild- the download and use (e.g. as inspiration or for any other -dubious included- goal) of them.

I mean, I would expect, as people learns, that less and less original work will be publicly available (to avoid abuse) and more crap will substitute it.

Problem is, in such a scenario, instead of the AIs training on my amateurish daubing, they instead train on Rembrandt, thus getting better than they would have ben!

EDIT: Hmm, now I see all manner of really weird typos on my previous post. I'm sure I didn't type it like that! We have an AI vandal on the board!

EDIT:

 

[txomsy]

You have a really good point, and that's a pet peeve of mine: most of the work in the Internet is of questionable quality, when not intentionally disinforming, and that is what AIs are trained from.

OTOH, to build up one's own library of reference works for inspiration, badly or quickly drawn sketches may be as useful -or more- as detailed reproductions or pictures.

Personally, I think that I tend to mostly (not exclusively) look to masterpieces to learn tricks of the trade, pictures for detail, and sketches for inspiration. Not always, of course. AI produce is of little help currently. Maybe when real artists start using it to generate really original work, it will also become a source of inspiration. YMMV.