In my opinion, AI just feels like the logical next step for capitalist exploitation and destruction of culture. Generative AI is (in most cases) just a fancy way for cooperations to steal art on a scale, that hasn’t been possible before. And then they use AI to fill the internet with slop and misinformation and actual artists are getting fired from their jobs, because the company replaces them with an AI, that was trained on their original art. Because of these reasons and some others, it just feels wrong to me, to be using AI in such a manner, when this community should be about inclusion and kindness. Wouldn’t it be much cooler, if we commissioned an actual artist for the banner or find a nice existing artwork (where the licence fits, of course)? I would love to hear your thoughts!
Real artists may be influenced, but they still put something of themselves into what they make. AI only borrows from others, it creates nothing.
I realise no-one is paying someone to make a banner for this forum, it would need to be someone choosing to do it because they want there to be a banner. But the real artists whose work was used by the AI to make the banner had no choice in the matter, let alone any chance of recompense.
This isn’t an argument, it’s pseudophilosophical nonsense.
In order to make such a statement you must:
So, what model did the OP use?
I mean, unless you’re just ignorantly suggesting that all diffusion models are trained on unlicensed work. Something that is demonstratively untrue: https://helpx.adobe.com/firefly/get-set-up/learn-the-basics/adobe-firefly-faq.html
Your arguments havent been true since the earliest days of diffusion models. AI training techniques are at the point where anybody with a few thousand images, a graphics card and a free weekend can train a high quality diffusion model.
It’s simply ignorance to suggest that any generated image is using other artist’s work.
Nope, you can’t train a good diffusion model from scratch with just a few thousand images, that is just delusion (I am open for examples though). Adobe Firefly is a black box, so we can’t verify their claims, obviously they wouldn’t admit, if they broke copyright to train their models. We do however have strong evidence, that google, openai and stability AI used tons of images, which they had no licence to use. Also, I still doubt that all of the people, who sold on Adobe Stock either knew, what their photos are gonna be used for or explicitly wanted that or just had to accept it to be able to sell their work.
Great counterargument to my first argument by the way 👏
So, what model did the OOP use?
Adobe has a massive company with a huge amount to lose if they’re lying to their customers. They have much more credibility than a random anti-AI troll account. Of course you’d want to dismiss them, it’s pretty devastating to your arguments if there are models which are built using artwork freely given by artists.
Firefly was found to use suspect training data too though… It’s the best of them in that it’s actually making an effort to ethically source the training data, but also almost no one uses it because programs from professional adobe suite are expensive as hell.
https://martech.org/legal-risks-loom-for-firefly-users-after-adobes-ai-image-tool-training-exposed/
So what’s the solution for this board, they should just put up a black image? Should they start a crowdfunding to pay an artist?
It’s a really bothers an artist enough they could make a banner for the board and ask them to swap out the AI. But, they’ll have to make something that more people like than the AI.
No, it does not have to be better than the AI image to be preferable.
Speak for yourself.
Okay, we have your vote down now think about the other people that are also here. It needs to be preferable to the majority not just you.
Considering AI is really unlikeable, I don’t think that’ll be too hard.
Proof is when it happens.
The banner could be anything or nothing at all, and as long as it isn’t AI generated, I would like it better
I, on the other hand, would not.
Perhaps we should ask ChatGPT what to do about this?
or perhaps you could stop perseverating
Not sure where I’m doing that - have been having some pretty interesting conversations with others tbh. My point is that you wouldn’t outsource that decision to ChatGPT, so why is the creation of a banner image outsourced to one of these inherently dehumanizing systems?
https://dialecticaldispatches.substack.com/p/a-marxist-perspective-on-ai
Will read your link, but when I saw the phrase “democratising creativity” I rolled my eyes hard and then grabbed this for you from my bookmarks. But I’ll read the rest anyway
https://aeon.co/essays/can-computers-think-no-they-cant-actually-do-anything
Edit: yeah so that piece starts out by saying how art is about the development of what I’m taking to be a sort of ‘curatorial’ ability, but ends up arguing that as long as the slop machines are nominally controlled by workers, that it’s fine actually. I couldn’t disagree more.
Elsewhere in a discussion with another user here, I attempted to bring up Ursula Franklin’s distinction between holistic and prescriptive technologies. AI is, to me, exemplary of a prescriptive process, in that its entire function is to destroy opportunities for decision-making by the user. The piece you linked admits this is the goal:
I reject this as being worthwhile. The output of those human pursuits can be mimicked by this technology, but, because (as the link I posted makes clear) these systems do not think or understand, they cannot be said to perform those tasks any more than a camera can be said to be painting a picture.
And despite this piece arguing that the people using these processes are merely incorporating a ‘tool’ into their work, and that AI will open up avenues for incredible new modes of creativity, I struggle to think of an example where the message some GenAI output conveyed was anything other than “I do not really give a shit about the quality of the output”.
These days our online environment suffers constantly from this stream of “good enough, I guess, who cares” stuff that insults the viewer by presuming they just want to see some sort of image at the top of a page, and don’t care about anything beyond this crass consumptive requirement.
The banner image in question is a great example of this. The overall aesthetic is stereotypical of GenAI images, which supports the notion that control of the process was more or less ceded to the system (or, alternately, that these systems provide few opportunities for directing the process). There are bizarre glitches that the person writing the prompt couldn’t be bothered to fix, the composition is directionless, the question-marks have a jarring crispness that clashes with the rest of the image, the tablets? signs? are made from some unknown material, perhaps the same indistinct stuff as the ground these critters are standing on.
It’s all actively hostile to a sense of community, as it pretends that communication is something that can just as well be accomplished by a statistical process, because who cares about trying to create something from the heart?
These systems are an insult to human intelligence while also undermining it by automating our decision-making processes. I wrote an essay about this if you’re interested, which I’ll link here and sign off, because I don’t want to be accused again of repeating myself unnecessarily: https://thedabbler.patatas.ca/pages/ai-is-dehumanization-technology.html