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this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2024
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chapotraphouse
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It's an extremely powerful piece of productive capital that runs locally inside a fairly cheap piece of capital that most people can acquire. We can say "so powerful a device should never have been created!" but it was and it now exists as a piece of productive capital no less disruptive than countless other machines.
We aren't going to be rid of it now that it exists, so the only move that remains is to take hold of it, learn to use it, and exploit it - any artist picking it up immediately has an advantage over every gormless techbro dipshit that's just churning out nonsense without looking at it. Like every bit of aesthetic taste and ability to draw and edit image massively improves what one can do with a machine that cleans up sketchy linework and handles shading in seconds, while the vast majority of people using it are just hitting "generate" as a treat button and barking and clapping at the gibberish it spews out.
Like if you look at what techbros are doing, they love the dogshit pixar-style "I made a machine to generate shitty 3d blob art because I can't even be bothered to use generic assets in blender and do the most basic and braindead work ever" shit, or the "photorealism, but with oily brushstrokes and nightmare fuel JPEG error looking shit" style, which look awful and are almost impossible to fix up, but the AI is actually fairly competent at traditional art styles which are also trivial to clean up and edit since they're (comparatively) low-detail and abstract.
Seriously, if one looks at the people interacting with AI art right now most are just babbling at magic prompt machines someone else runs, then of the people involved enough to run it locally most are using simple prompt UIs, while the most complex thing anyone uses is comfyui, a braindead basic flowchart interface that's absurdly simple and easy to use, and most of the community cries about how it's too complicated and hard to use. Techbros are all talentless dipshits and anyone with a brain and art skills could take their toys and eat their lunch.
That is true, and ideally this would be a tool for artists (I would love to save time on backgrounds and things for example, using AI to fill in the parts of work I find tedious and time consuming and just fix it up as needed) but unfortunately it also doesn't generate wholly new art, it creates a collage of existing work, but doesn't attribute any of the art of the other artists used to make it. So even if it were a tool used by artists, it would be effectively stealing art from other artists in the process.
And the problem ultimately is any art space that allows AI art to be used is flooded with it. Look at the front page of deviantart for an example. Used to be an actually interesting art website with unique and interesting stuff, now it is just the same generic hundreds of pieces of AI art because it takes 0 effort to actually make. The market gets flooded and actual artists can't be seen by potential supporters because those supporters would have to wade through a mountain of shit to find their work. So it actively becomes detrimental to artists in any space it is allowed, which is why the only people who can get any sort of use out of it have nothing but contempt for art and artists.
dear fucking god please stop upholding capitalist ideas about IP rights.
Hot take: Artists should be able to not have their life's work automatically fed into the plagiarism machine without their compensation or consent. Like I'm not going to pretend that Mickey Mouse being copyrighted for a century is a normal thing, but people having their labor exploited for the profit of the wealthy is kinda the thing we're supposed to be against, no?
does art belong to everyone or not?
i think you shouldn't get to opt out of the remix machine but the corporations shouldn't ~~be able to exploit it for profit~~ exist. Having your work not become part of the commons is the same shit as a century of copyright. Anything we do about these generative models that allows corpos to continue to use them is a bandaid at best.
Well I disagree. You should have a fundamental right to opt out of these things. Even in a perfect world where everything is just and every artist can support themselves, I see no reason it shouldn't require the creator's consent. Surely, with no financial pressures to corrupt things, many creatives would willingly contribute to these models, and we wouldn't need to resort to this ugly, non-consensual scraping.
so i should be able to prevent my shit from entering the public domain? how is that different than the mouse?
I just think, fundamentally, there should be some level of control the artist has over these things. You asked me earlier if art should "belong to everyone", and I guess I don't think it should, at least not fully or without restriction. I'm not against stuff like fanart and fanfiction and things like that, not in the slightest, but the idea of having my work taken in that way, mechanistically, even in a non-artistic context, like the conversation we're having right now, feels so thoroughly violating that I just can't support it. It feels like in the minds of a lot of people, the only option an artist should have to avoid these things, to avoid being scraped, is to seclude themselves, or at least their work, and to completely shut people off from experiencing it. I don't want that, but I don't want to be scraped either. Is it so strange? Am I really the weird one for wanting a middle ground, where the humans are allowed to see me and the AI isn't?
i think that feeling is probably rooted in capitalism and precarity? whatever fan works you're imagining and fan works "with an advanced computer" are the same.
i do think we should have some protection against e.g. political candidates we don't endorse using our art, or corporations profiting from our work, but something automatic like how covers work in music seems pretty sane.
rare copyright law w.
if somebody wants to make art and not actually share it for metaphysical reasons i really don't respect that and don't think shit like city or asinine stunts should be validated, but that's a huge tangent.
Again, I'm not against any kind of voluntary arragement, but the first part of this comment, the first two sentences, just don't feel right to me. I'm writing an effortpost as we speak, maybe I'll put that up later. Still gotta organize my thoughts on that.