The Computer Is Hungry

[rynling]

Please Do Not Feed the AI
https://drillbaby.tumblr.com/post/702810499314810880/have-i-been-trained

Unfriendly fucking reminder that AI is a copyright violating machine, that the original AI projects were funded by Elon Fucking Musk because he does not see value in the work of artists, and that AIs have problems with constantly putting signatures and watermarks back into art

I will continue to use NightCafe to generate personal reference images of fantasy architecture because it's fun and I have no ethics, but this is true. In landscape images especially, the AI will every so often put a "fake" watermark onto a generated image. More often than not, this watermark clearly comes from Alamy or Getty Images, and fuck both of those companies. Sometimes the watermark is a bit more of an artistic signature, though, and that's when things start to get dicey.

Obviously this is not ideal, but I wish I understood more about how it works and where the stolen art is coming from. Would there be a way to create AI-generated "art" ethically?

I'm putting "art" in scare quotes because it is so, so, so obviously generated by AI. It works (sort of) if the prompt is "giant gothic castle labyrinth," but not so much if the prompt is "a flower" or "a human hand." Some of the fingers I've seen this AI generate are going to haunt me forever, no joke.

Comments

[lassarina]

Someone else linked this Ursula Vernon tweet and I agree: https://twitter.com/UrsulaV/status/1599786277863587843?s=20&t=lKUekXAXhVSfG5TyzU0Khw (If you don't want to click through, the text:

As I’ve said before, one of the reasons that I do keep poking AI art, despite very real and valid legal concerns, is that A) the tech genie never goes back in the bottle and B) when those laws DO get written, I want artists to be in the room, not just tech bros.

)

I think the ethical nature would depend entirely on the training dataset? And the usage. As I said to someone else who was like "well I know people who save art off tumblr to print for single postcards and sometimes lose the credit" there is a material difference between that (which is still harmful, but on a massively different scale) and "corporation fires all its graphic designers to profit off stolen artwork."

[rynling]

Thank you for the link to that tweet. "The tech genie never goes back in the bottle" is something I think about a lot, and it's absolutely applicable to this situation.

I'm also approaching the issue from the admittedly morally dubious position of being a writer, specifically a writer annoyed by the current social media culture of valuing the work of artists while (all but a handful of) writers are largely ignored, so it's hard for me to discount a residual feeling of bitterness. Like, it's difficult for me to summon the appropriate outrage for "you only got paid once for your work" when I never got paid at all.

"Divide and conquer" is how they get you, of course, which is why I think the appropriate manner of supporting writers and artists alike is to burn down Twitter. 🔥

[lassarina]

It's ok! the AI is coming for us writers, too! [bitter]

I'm with you on burning down Twitter. I'll get the kerosene.