OpenAI’s new AI image generator is potent and bound to provoke
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It means that while the technology has shortcomings today, it will improve as people develop and use it—simple old feedback loop. I am a bear of very little brain and even I got it.
It offers no value judgment on how people use it—for good or ill purpose—which seems to be your real complaint. Lots of good hurting people right now desperate to latch Blame onto every tangible thing just so they can frag them. Tossing That Asshole like a sticky grenade, work on your aiming.
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The paying up part’s easy. The difficult side is disbursing that cash to all of the people who deserve it—just ask any coked-up record label exec!
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100%
It is the same process, it’s just completely automated. No more slumping around art school libraries. Every book has already been read, every photo dissected, dropped into the pot for remixing.
Yep. English law is well behind on automation.
Yeah, the protection clause is boned. It was already boned: before GenAI came along, the biggest content generation machine in the world was Chinese manufacturing, which doesn’t do English civil law either.
8Bn people buying and/or selling, all wanting to survive. That’s a lot of bodies. Even among highest artisans, competition must be getting Darwinian.
So every time someone kicks off about this latest disgraceful shortage of Queensberry Rules, I remember another take. That’s good art.
Have any artists considered this: feed your own AI slop machine?
Like parents manufacturing children, sitting on your iPhone all day Instagramming while your kids are raised by iPad, yields exactly the outputs you deserve. (Shady Pines? Luxury!)
At least with your own AI, you’ve got your standards and a tiny iota of control (even if only of yourself). Better than Tamagotchi—and look how popular those were, for a while.
…
BTW, here’s what I would do if I was Canva:
I’d offer every maker an option to raise their own GenAI, training it on their own artwork as they build it manually, so it learns to mimic what they do.
Every artist gets to choose how much they wish to automate their own artwork production. Assign only the most menial scutwork to the machine and continue crafting most of each piece personally? Or go full Renaissance, with a studio of untiring juniors doing big chunks of the work?
That’s more control over one’s own destiny than bemoaning the cruel future, wishing for the Good Old Days of the past. Your old achievements will continue to exist as part of your light cone, but the universe itself is stuck stubbornly in Forward and futile is to pretend anything else.
This isn’t just idle speculation on my part. This is drawing on years of my own experience as artist turned automator.
I’ve built [non-AI] automation that learned from observing the artist work and populating a database with metrics extracted from each artwork, so that it could, with increasing competence, assemble semi- (and increasingly fully-) personalized artworks itself. So I know (N=1) the general principle works. As a piece of technology it was not complex. Intermediate JavaScript and mature problem-solving skills combined with a human with deep understanding of artists and their artworking—what they do, why they do it the way that they do, and what are their daily bugbears are—because s/he is an artist herself.
…
To every artist fearful today of not earning their crust tomorrow: Teach yourself how to automate your artworking already!
At minimum, you’ll better keep pace with all the lazy people who only push buttons, and with all of your artistic skills and business nous still intact: producing consistently high-quality works, cheaper, faster. Your works.
My work (which I’m now working to scale up) has, over the years, turned a handful of working graphic artists into artist-automators, without me even trying. Those artists could visualize what tech I’d made could do for them, embraced it as busy working artists, and taught themselves to use it. My best artistic work.
Best. /out
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plagiarism is not a new concept
nor has it or replication, by mechanical or just exploitable minimal wage art students means, never been considered and debated seriously in art history/theory
these are not new concepts in the art :fine art world recently introduced by AI
- this goes back to before the printing press
the shallowness of forgery and
corporate art (as well as the gallery investment financial model) can easily be seen in the disastrous late career of Damien Hirst
art is not valued in isolation
the Value in art is artisan … call it providence if you must .. the hand or at minimum signature of the creator is that which makes it unique is what gives it value
even lithographs are numbered and individually distinct
why is this piece distinctive and unique is of importance but secondary in value compared with being clearly derived from an individual artisan
so yeah - AI allows ‘art’ to be mass produced without the stylistic signature of an artisan
which make it valueless
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Which is why fair use allows for the reprinting of portions of copyrighted material for the purposes of critique. It expressly does not allow the reprinting of entire works. What AI training is doing is closer to the latter than the former, because the AI has ingested the entire work and is capable of producing infinite derivatives based on the whole work on demand.
From the Wikipedia article on copyright under the "Background" section describing the original motivations behind the creation of copyright laws: "[Before copyright laws] Popular new works were immediately re-set and re-published by competitors, so printers needed a constant stream of new material." People who produced original works didn't like getting ripped off that way, so they wanted copyright to protect their right to profit from their work.
This is pretty well-known stuff, so I'm not sure why you're insisting it isn't the case.
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I really don’t give a shit is the answer.
Playing this game is stupid. You can argue for anything if you just say “but so and so is doing it”.
Consumer piracy 100% violates it. That’s the law.
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I think you should stop trying to tell people things about generative AI. This one sentence was a fairly hilarious example of why your increasingly shrill screeds were a waste of everybody's time.
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It violates the law, but not the axiom I described above. Copyright was created to protect an author's right to be the only person who can profit by their work. It was not created to exact a toll every time someone consumes that work, otherwise there wouldn't be libraries or fair use provisions, etc.
That's why copyright law has gone off the rails both with consumer piracy and with this AI training situation.
Even so, the law itself recognizes the distinction to some degree. There are two categories of infringement: commercial infringement and noncommercial infringement. So, for example, if I pirate your music for my own consumption, that's a noncommercial infringement and is considered a much less severe offense by the law. But if I then sell CDs with your music on it for a profit, the law considers that a much more severe offense.
What vexes me most regarding AI is that distinction seems to have gone completely out the window. AI is not just an infringement, but it's the more severe commercial variant of infringement. Yet the courts are pretending they never established this precedent at all.
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This is not accurate though.
You might wish it were so in your ideal world, or framework, which is totally fine. Happy to talk about what we would prefer to see. I’m not a fan of lots of things about copyright!
But yes, that toll is built in to the system, both legally and conceptually.
Your examples, libraries and fair use, are the exceptions that prove the rule.
On the legal side this is of course trivial to give a zillion examples. But let’s chat purpose.
It’s dual pronged. You are covering the protection part. But profit is very much the other. Because that’s the incentive.
It’s not just “we will protect your work”, the idea is that by being able to exact that toll you have a reason to share your work. It’s not altruism, it’s a two way street.
If you remove that other part society loses. These things the AIs all rip off don’t exist without it.
Studio Ghibli requires making money from their effort to exist. The system provides that. If everyone says “I’ll wait until I can pirate it, for my own non-commercial personal use” it all breaks.
Then there is no Ghibli style, and OpenAI, which cannot create shit, only imitate, has one less thing to steal.
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Where I think we agree is:
1. There is a distinction in copyright law between commercial and noncommercial infringement.
2. All legal precedent so far points towards commercial infringement being a more severe violation than noncommercial infringement.
3. What the AI companies are doing should be properly interpreted as some form of copyright infringement.
4. It makes more sense to label their infringement commercial infringement than noncommercial infringement given their profit motive.
5. Given that, it's bizarre that the courts are not taking action to enforce their own precedent against this clearly for-profit infringement the AI companies are engaged in.
Where I think you are disagreeing with me is my assertion that noncommercial infringement (consumer piracy) doesn't violate the spirit of the original intent of copyright law, which is an interesting debate to have, but tangential to the discussion about AI training. I only brought it up because there are a lot of people who would like to see the legalization of noncommercial infringement, but instead what we're seeing is the legalization of commercial infringement, except only when it's committed by an AI company, and that seems like a very bizarre contrast.
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Do you really think at AI image generation is just writing a prompt? Do you know anything about this technology at all, other than the fact that you don't like it?
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Please cite the law so I know what it is you’re referring to, because your posts seem to be predicated on something that is not actually law or how copyright works.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding.
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Please, explain to everyone how the image of Studio Ghibli imitation style 9/11 towers was created.
Since you’re an expert this should be very simple for you to walk us all through.
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No, just like you can't look at someone else's photoshop and explain exactly what they did. That makes no sense.
A person can type some words into a prompt and get a picture. A person can also make a couple marks on a piece of paper and get a picture. My point is that this does not mean making a couple marks on paper is all that drawing is. You can take a quick snapshot on your phone, but that is not all that photography is.
AI artists are just "prompt engineers" in the same way computer graphic artists are just "point-and-clickers." Just wiggling a mouse around; how can that be "art," right?
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This is of course utter nonsense.
Typing “in the style of Studio Ghibli”, which is all they did, doesn’t make you some kind of creative genius.
The truth is you don’t want to be honest about it because it doesn’t fit the narrative you’re pushing.
Don’t get all snide with people about how you know how it works and they don’t and then suddenly pretend you don’t in fact know how it works.
If you would like to try and educate people about what’s possible, make your case for a process, feel free. It might be interesting.
But insulting our intelligence about how all this Ghibli dreck that’s been posted in this thread and all over the internet was actually made just hurts your case.
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Yes, that's exactly what it is. Sorry you're so offended by your favorite slop generator being described accurately.
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I'm sorry, honestly, I'm not trying to insult anyone's intelligence. I'm also not trying to argue that people aren't making dreck by typing prompts in some web form and clicking a button.
I'm trying to explain that generative art can be, and often is, so much more than that, and so it's unfair to label the entire artform as garbage because some people use it to lazily create garbage. Every kind of art contains a fair share of lazy garbage, but there are beautiful creations also.
If you'd like an example of what I'm talking about in terms of process, there are at least four main things I start with when beginning to generate an image: Model, Sampler, Steps, and CFG. There are thousands of Models to choose from, all trained and merged willy-nilly. There are a handful of Samplers to choose from, which is the part that uses the Model's weights to generate pixels. Steps are how many iterations it will run, and more is not necessarily better, as it can get off track somewhere and ruin the image. CFG is more or less how "imaginative" it is, for lack of a better word; a low setting will try to portray the prompt as literally as possible, while higher settings will go farther afield (and eventually turn into psychedelic slop).
There are many, many other settings and tools involved on top of those four primary choices and the prompt. There are also many ways of integrating traditional art forms into the pipeline--you can draw your own images and incorporate or alter them, for example. I strongly suggest that anyone with an interest in this subject, pro or con, experiment with it on a more nuts and bolts level to learn more about how it really works.
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yes. vaguely telling someone/thing what to do is the true artistry
Management Wins !
unfamiliar with this AI stuff but does it follow the same principles of Advertising and Film Production ?
where you make your prompts vague contradictory and confusing enough so you can claim whatever the positive results you get were exactly what you requested?
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I can provide specific examples of different prompts and settings on my local setup if anyone is interested. Give me a prompt and optionally a negative prompt and/or original image and I'll demonstrate how these factors affect image output.
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The thing is more often than not that’s exactly what it is.
I mean, just to ground where this conversation is, every single example in the article was just that.
All of these Ghibli ripoffs flooding the internet are. I don’t have any stats of course. But I’d guess 99% of all of it is “just a prompt”.
It’s what we’re talking about.
I’m actually happy to hear about process and what people find it interesting.
My issue is that you kinda just walked in giving people attitude. “You don’t even know how this works” stuff.
That’s not going to win anyone over. In no small part because it’s not true.
If you wanted to you could be friendly and simply share examples you found interesting instead.
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That's valid, sorry for my attitude before. That was unhelpful of me and I apologize.
It pains me to see a lot of potential in this medium getting buried under schlock, and people everywhere saying "I guess it's all bullshit then." I hesitate to start tossing out examples of stuff I think is "good," since there will always be disagreement about that. What I can do is hopefully demonstrate and explain some of the process in order to show that writing a prompt is only the first step, and despite the fact that indeed, a bunch of people never progress beyond that single first step, there is a world of depth to explore beyond that.
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The disconnect for me is between: "in the Ghibli style" flood that persists for a few weeks or months before internet culture moves on to the next shiny thing, and any real impact on the creation of Ghibli animated films.
If you had to put your cards on the table and make a prediction, what impact do you think a flood of Ghibli twitter images will actually have?
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It’s already ruined things for every artist who drew their own homages or even just “anime” art that’s at all in that vein.
It’s fucking sad to see people share their drawings and get dunked on for posting AI slop when they didn’t.
All for what? Some company could burn electricity? We complain about companies enshittifying things, but we do it ourselves too.
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The law regards copyright infringement as a civil offense, unless it it is particularly egregious. It becomes a criminal offense when it is done "for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain" (among other things) https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/506
That's what I'm getting at when I say there is a distinction in existing law between noncommercial infringement vs. commercial infringement. The courts have had a long history of imposing harsher punishments on people who try to make a profit off of someone else's copyrighted work. So it's astonishing to me that these AI companies are all getting a pass from the courts' own precedents.
My guess is what will happen is the courts will twist themselves into pretzels to declare AI training some bizarre new kind of fair use so they don't have to label the AI companies the mass commercial copyright infringers that they plainly are.
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