"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
Source (Bluesky)
Consumers don't decide the future. Labor does. And if labor doesn't organize then capitalist profits decide.
I hate this "change through consumption" crap. That is literally playing into the hands of capital.
Referring to the middle image in the comic.
i am in this community and an ai image community.
Okay so, ai has many issues, but there's a lot of redundancy here.
I agree with this comic whole-heartedly but I find it delightfully ironic that one of the complaints is AI generated images look “ugly and nonhuman” while the comic is stylistically in the same vein as garbage pail kids
I find it weird that people seem to argue almost exclusively over the economics of generative AI. I'd say around half of these panels are just variations of the same "it promotes economic trends which I find unacceptable" thesis.
My personal opinion on the matter, which is that any art is made meaningful by the person behind it, is basically only touched upon in the last two frames. I mean be honest, why on earth would we need some ugly piece of crap failing at imitating something aesthetically pleasing, when we could have unique styles shaped by personal experience and art that's actually thought over to look coherent in some way even if it may lack that detail that AI is obsessed with for some reason.
Hot mess of anti-"AI" slop...
First and foremost, "AI" doesn't exist.
Generative models are known as AI colloquially, if you're trying to communicate something to a wider audience, it's better to use a known term for the sake of communication.
Secondly people complaining about "IP" are missing the point. We shouldn't be fighting to maintain a capitalist system of oppression. We should be fighting for a world where artists don't need to sell themselves in order to survive.
You need to start somewhere, and smaller scale advocacy like this can be used to push for further change.
Yes, I don't like capitalism but we're living under it for the foreseeable future. Ceding any protections for smaller artists because capitalists also benefit from it sounds like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
You don't have to embrace all new technology, but you don't have to hate it either. The value of technology is determined by its use. The problem is that R&D is entirely driven by profits and the violent enforcement of privilege.
Can I hate some new technology? As a treat? 🥺
Generative models generally suck at what they do. They suck for the users, they suck for people who have to then read and see the shitty outputs, they suck for the environment, etc.
Worries about "skynet" are just phony hype that promotes the "AI" bubble.
It's pretty clear that that part is an exaggeration for comedic value. The impact on jobs is real, and again bad for everyone except capitalists.
The idea that "AI" art is somehow inherently worse than "human" art is extremely suspect
Generative models by definition cannot make art, as art is by definition made by humans.
You don't go look at a sunset and think about how great art is, or what the sunset might mean. In the same way, there is nothing behind a generated image.
Apart from this guy, nobody actually cares if people use "AI" art in the right context.
I care, it's fucking ugly, and it makes me think you're at the very least lazy and don't care about the thing you're putting out.
First and foremost, "AI" doesn't exist.
You watch too many movies.
Copyright can be a problem but they showed The Scream which isn't copyrighted.
The rest is wrong. I'm not paying an illustrator to make a meme. I used Gimp for my last shitpost. I didn't pay a professional oil painter.
The pollution claim is way off. You can run Stable Diffusion at home on your GPU for the same energy as playing a game.
No you do not have to embrace everything new. That's not a counterpoint.
Jobs. See Gimp comment above. Photography put millions of hard working portrait painters out of business. The world ended in 1865, you just didn't notice.
Using AI doesn't need to be done on corporate hosts. You can run AI on a home built server.
My hand made art looks ugly. My Photoshopping is garbage.
Using AI is lazy. As is Photoshop. As is photography. You want human touch, hire an actual artist. Don't digitize art because that uses electricity, is lazy, and puts artists out of work. Definitely don't use lithography or other photo mechanical copying methods like printing presses. Hand draw each and every comic you distribute.
The argument AI fanboys make that it's the same creative effort as directing or photography is absolutely insane and falls flat with even a tiny bit of critical thinking. Anyone can plug in a prompt. People study and work hard their entire lives to become good photographers and directors. Being able to take a decent picture is not the same AT ALL as a professional photographer, especially one of the successful ones, like all art. It takes incredible patience, timing, creativity, and technical knowledge. It's an accessible art form, like most forms of art, but doing it at the highest level takes a lot of skill. You need to select and know a great deal about your subject in order to capture it well, and timing is often incredibly important. There are people that spend their entire professional lives pursuing one shot, and when they finally get it, the photo is priceless and nearly impossible to replicate. The idea that an art form people get degrees and spend years pursuing is the same as typing a prompt is crazy. Just because anyone can pick up a camera (or a pen, or a paintbrush, etc) does not make the art form that simple.
Directing is an art form too, and there's a very good reason the art of great directors is immediately attributable to them on viewing, even with no context. Anyone making that argument has no idea what it means to direct. Just because some directors might be lazy or uncreative doesn't mean the artform doesn't exist. AI could never replace it.
Like I said I tried AI art once to see what it was about. I did not get anything good but I've seen AI art that looks good so I know it is possible with experience in prompting.
Getting the right prompts can be done by anyone in the same way anyone can take a photo. I expect people will spend time learning how to prompt in the same way people learn the knobs and lenses on their camera. Anyone can take a photo. It takes skill to take a good one. Anyone can generate an AI image but it takes skill (less skill but skill nonetheless) to create a good one.
The skill and knowledge to create an oil painting is several orders of magnitude greater than taking a photo. The only reason photography is defended is because everyone grew up with photography slop. Today phone cameras make it even more automated with their automated bokeh and red eye removal.
I cannot disagree more, as someone that paints with multiple mediums, including oil. It may be much more time consuming, but most of the art is in learning how the human eye views images, how to make the eye be drawn around the image in the order you want, and many other technical and artistic details. I can't even begin to discuss it here, it's a field of professional art like any other. Frequently, it intersects with sculpture and other physical and digital mediums. There are colleges of photography that offer the same level and quantity of schooling that other artistic studies do. The skill in art is not in the fine motor controls and techniques, though they are important to learn. Much harder is learning about forms, color, values, how to arrange artwork to be pleasing to the eye (or discordant, like a tritone), and all the other multitude of steps in arranging and capturing the message the artist is trying to convey.
You're just wrong and misinformed. I'm an artist, and every professional artist I know and went to school with shares my opinion. You have a very limited view of what photography can be, and it shows.
Edit: To be clear, professional photographers can spend huge amounts of time applying the knowledge they've learned through study and practice to arrange their subject, which is not simply "point and click." Look at the work of professional modern photographers. Photography is accessible like a set of cheap acrylics is accessible. High level art of all mediums takes far more study and skill to do well than AI art.
Everything you said about photography also applies to painting AND it requires the physical skill that you dismiss as trivial.
I'm not dismissing it, and that doesn't address the point at all compared to AI. It isn't that technique isn't important, it's just far less of what you learn as an artist compared to the theory. Photography has its own advanced techniques just like all artforms.
You did dismiss it by claiming it was a small part compared to what a photographer has to learn.
Ai doesn't do anything without prompting. You need all the same art knowledge to prompt an AI to create an image. In another reply here I compared it to a film director. Film directors don't say the lines, do the cinematography, create the sets, costumes, or anything else. They only prompt others do do what is in their mind until it satisfies their artistic viewpoint.
My experience with AI art is extremely limited. I got garbage out. I've seen good AI art so there is skill to prompting in the same way a photographer uses skill but has a machine that actually creates the art.
Repeating it does not make it so. There are no AI art colleges.
There were no photography art colleges 150 years ago either. Photography was widely derided by artists. Impressionism was created as a response to the increased use of photography. They wanted to show that art was a human interpretation, not a mechanical reproduction.
Edit: Looks like AI is being added to art classes in colleges. https://hyperallergic.com/944834/school-is-back-in-session-and-so-are-ai-art-classes/
So art school is already recognizing AI art as a medium.
Yeah I don't know if that source or that college make the point you think they do. AI art cannot exist without a constant feed of (non-consensual) human creativity. You can learn everything there is to know about AI "art" in a relatively short time span, because you have the plagiarism machine to do the composition for you. It isn't so for any other medium. This point isn't worth arguing, because it's so self-evident. The knowledge and skill of photography clearly set it apart as an art form, whereas AI does not. AI "art" requires the knowledge and skill of actual artforms to even exist.
Photography's genesis is fascinating and is taught about in art school. You conveniently left out the other side of that time, where the fledgling artform pushed back to prove its validity through multiple evolving forms and styles, which demonstrated that it is simply a new medium, not trying to replace or replicate any other style. That is explicitly what gen AI stands to do, and it even requires constant input of actual art to exist. Additionally , impressionism was far more a reaction to realism than it was to photography. Every new wave in art creates pushback from the other styles more popular at the time. Never before has every field of art so unanimously opposed what is clearly the cheapening and commoditizing of creativity through soulless reproduction. Gen AI can be fun to mess with, it can be interesting to explore the technology, but it is ultimately just a bubble being propped up by the exploitation of actual artists and consumers alike.
You clearly do not produce or understand the production of art, and why there is such a difference. Prompt engineering is not composition, and the only art that uses AI relies on human composition to give it any form of soul. This conversation isn't worth having, as you're still trying to argue that photography is analogous to AI art. Talk to artists.
It isn't self evident. Otherwise a movie director does not create art either because they only prompt.
Nor is AI art in college trivial because by you claimed the physical part of creating art isn't the important part. You need to know all the basics in exactly the same way a photographer needs to know the basics.
Prompt engineering is not composition,
It is by definition. If you were an art director and told an assistant to move an apple a little to the left before you pushed a button, that's no different than telling an AI to move an apple a little to the left before pressing a button.
As to AI only regurgitating preexisting art, I refer you to the Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism and Dada. There is no difference between telling someone to draw a beard and mustache on the Mona Lisa and telling an AI.
Kids are learning AI art in college. It's no different than when kids started learning photography in college and actual artists opposed it.
“If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon supplant or corrupt it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.”
Charles Baudelaire, 1859
Kids are learning AI art in college. It’s no different than when kids started learning photography in college and actual artists opposed it.
It's different because a camera didn't need to generate enough carbon to burn down an acre of rainforest to take a single picture, nor did it have to harvest the stolen artwork of millions of artists to generate a picture.
But, sure, "prompt engineering" is a creative process and can be artistic.
It's different because a camera didn't need to generate enough carbon to burn down an acre of rainforest to take a single picture
Absolutely false. You can run AI locally and measure the energy use yourself. It's the same as playing a 3d game.
Edit: It's literally the same energy use as playing MarioKart on a Switch for 20 minutes.
Carbon emissions don't just happen at point of use, they have to train these chatbots. That takes billions of kWhs of electricity, there's a reason they want to build nuclear reactors to power their data centers.
Then there's the immense water demands, which can cripple the actual human access to drinking water.
So, sure, the energy isn't used when you generate a picture. I misspoke. It was already used, but by creating demand it only incentivizes further training with even higher energy and water demands.
Also, I noticed you just glossed over the fact that they're trained on stolen art.
Gpt 4 had a training cost of $78 million. Gta5 cost $300 million. 4000 developers each with the latest GPU burning hundreds of watts per employee to create the assets. A rough estimate of 750watt pc, 4,000 developers, 8 hour a day, 300 days a year, 5 years = 36 giga watt-hours. That's the energy to power 3.6 million homes for a year and I'm not even including the HVAC costs of the office space.
For 1 game.
I'm not a big fan of AAA development, so thanks for another reason to hate that shit. Retvrn to ASCII
Using AI is lazy. [...] As is photography.
As somebody learning photography, take my goddamn hobby out of your mouth. I am so sick of you AI freaks pretending that chatgpt and photography are the same thing.
My hand made art looks ugly.
Practice, then. It's good for you. All that brain activity from actually doing something with your life might stop the dementia from getting you in your 50s.
take my goddamn hobby out of your mouth.
Have you painted landscapes and portraits? Take your goddamn machine generated hobby out of your mouth.
I've (attempted) painting (badly). I've done photography (successfully). I'm sick of photographers pretending it's the same thing as oil on canvas.
The gap of effort and time between photography and painting is greater than AI and photography. I select a lens and turn some knobs on my camera that I know from experience work based on the subject (lighting conditions, motion, distance, effects) and press a button. No amount of skill with oil on canvas can produce art as quickly as using a camera.
I tried AI art once to see what it was about and it took a lot of time with prompts to get anything useful out.
Have you painted landscapes and portraits?
Yes.
I tried AI art once to see what it was about and it took a lot of time with prompts to get anything useful out.
So does passing a kidney stone.
I don't care about effort, I want to know what you have to say. I want to see what you've learned. I want you to show me something about your life.
If this were math, I want you to show me your work.
In the things you've made, you are the only thing I give a shit about. You've made things with AI? Show me where you are in them, then. Are you even real? Do you exist? Should I care you were ever even here?
If you think photography doesn't achieve these things, boy, let me tell you about AI then.
To onlookers: if you're wondering why I'm not addressing the lazy and uninteresting hypocrisy arguments, it's because they don't mean anything.
Painters used to be mad at photographers? Okay. They get along now, why is that? Does anyone even care? Did they simply forget they were pissed at each other? Was Mercury in retrograde?
The only purpose of these arguments is to make you doubt yourself. They don't advocate for anything. They don't suggest a goal, or a resolution, or a compromise, they're just rhetorical chess moves---"neener neener" and tongue wagging.
I don't care about effort, I want to know what you have to say. I want to see what you've learned. I want you to show me something about your life.
Does that mean movie directors aren't artists? Because all they do is prompt people into doing what's in their mind until it's either close enough or the actor does something unexpected and they keep it because it was better than their idea.
the actor does something unexpected and they keep it
Credit for this would go to the actor, Morpho.
I am intentionally leaving you room to impress me, and you are still just calling out alleged hypocrisy.
It should go to the actor yet often it's the director who gets the Oscar without the actors also getting an Oscar despite improvisation on the set. Then there's the entire crew of set design, artists, cinematographers, costuming, and who also do work based on loose prompts from the director. Sometimes they will be acknowledged along with the director but often the director gets an award without everyone else on the set also getting acknowledged.
The supposed beef between painters and photographers is weird, painters were often interested in photography so that they could continue paint the scene when the scene did no longer exist, it also opened up new areas for painters to explore, like impressionnism because an exact copy is kind of boring! Tedious work was offloaded onto the machine.
People use AI to create art, but not in the way that they just do a prompt and "hop" here is art! No, it's just easier to ask the machine to generate scenery and stuff than walking around trying to find a suitable one (for example) to help out, to try to find that elusive thing you want to capture, and then you paint. For example.
Photography has also evolved into its own art form, maybe AI will too one ~~say~~ day, who knows?
People doesn't seem, as you suggest, to understand what art is or what it's all about. To be fair, it's a complex subject, but having a machine generating something is always going to be just a tool, like the painters brush is one.
maybe AI will too one say, who knows?
One can hope.
The key difference here between this and photography, though, is that photography only displaced painters. You can tell by looking whether something is a photograph or not. Usually.
AI is very good and will only get better. When the machine can replicate any style, any subject, 3,000 times a minute: what is left for people to even do? How will you ever know a person was there?
If these tools were built to be honest, such that you always knew when something was generated and when something wasn't, I wouldn't have nearly as much of a problem with it.
I'd argue that hyperrealism isn't art in itself, I mean you just cosplay as a printer. It's just technique.
An artist must know the tools of its trade, only then can he or she make art. If you only have one technique, then you can't express yourself, because expressing yourself is to chose between all that you know and can do and select the techniques that expresses the thing you want to express.
Art is about expressing yourself, expressing something, AI will never take that away. The masters artworks won't becone non-art just because a machine could paint similar paintings.
I also doesn't subscribe to the idea that art must be appreciated by someone, I think you can make art all by yourself (it is of course nice to be appreciated, but it's not an obligation, again IMO), so let that AI machine produce photographs and paintings all day long, it won't stop my struggles producing, maybe one day, a honorable painting.