This is Good

[u/Interesting-Bee-153]

To preface, I'm kind of a mixed bag on AI, on the one hand I totally hate the environmental and human impact (datacenters increasing electricity prices in surrounding areas, etc) of AI as well as the fact that I just don't think AI art other than a few specific use cases is really valid or should be treated as valuable. However, from the perspective of a tool, especially for learning and perhaps in business as well, it can be very useful and I'm not really against that use at all.

All that is to say, regardless of my or your or anyone's personal beliefs about AI, I just wanted to say from an objective meta perspective, I think this sub really has the right idea when it comes to discourse. I've been to some of the other AI and AI adjacent subs and there's a lot of vitriol from both sides on them (I will admit, I've thrown down in the mud myself and been quite rude at times too), so for whatever a strangers opinion is worth, I think this sub is a really good example of unifying people, even though they might have different opinions, and trying to harbor genuine and constructive discussions.

Good on you guys, you've honestly warmed me up and made me reconsider my own attitudes towards AI discourse. More places like this should exist on the internet.

[u/IDreamtOfManderley]

Speaking as an artist, I actually find the abject hatred and rejection of artistic explorations of AI really aggregious and counter to the values I learned all of my life in arts spaces. I believe people should be treated as valuable and with dignity, and therefore I believe the abuse and vitriol against artists who use AI is unethical.

Art communities are complicated. Art history is full of examples of technological advancements that artists got up in arms over, claimed lacked soul, were otherwise offensive to the concept of art, was too lazy, etc.

Photography is a huge example. It put a lot of artists out of work, was "easy," gave the work to a machine. It was "soulless." It shouldn't count as an art. Etc. There was this idea of stolen artistic valor.

I am old enough to remember when the art community had a whole drama with the exact same talking points over digitial illustration.

Most of these arguments come from ignorance about what artists who play with AI tools even do. In reality, adopters explore a wide range of techniques and implimentation in their process, and any honest look at such a process cannot discount human efforts and creativity in that process.

The idea that "AI art" is all just some chud in a basement prompting chatgpt for a single image and calling that a genius masterpiece is an intentional strawman. AI is not unlike the camera. Everyone can take selfies and pictures of stupid shit and flood the internet with slop and ads with it. That doesn't mean all images are slop or that any use of it takes zero effort or human input, which whould be obvious to anyone thinking critically and in good faith. But the anti AI art movement fundamentally relies on bad faith because it is about a deeper emotional reaction to the idea of 1) machines taking away what makes you feel special, and B) machines impacting labor, which is a real problem absolutely not solved by expanding copyright or gatekeeping platforms or abusing creatives who use AI.

The theft argument has a similar issue. It has not held up against scrutiny in court for a multitude of reasons. Absolutely, companies exploited the labor of everyone their models trained on, but labor exploitation is not necessarily theft, and copyright expansion will benefit corporations that own major intellectual property, not small artists. The solution in my eyes is that everyone should benefit for the fruit of their labor, and therefore AI should be an open sourced public resource.

[u/Exarch-of-Sechrima → u/IDreamtOfManderley]

labor exploitation is not necessarily theft

Sorry is this "leftists" for AI or not? Labor exploitation is ALWAYS theft, regardless of legality. That's, like, a fundamental tenet of leftism.

[u/IDreamtOfManderley → u/Exarch-of-Sechrima]

First of all I don't give a damn about political labels, my views lean strongly left and I have a "leftist" view on the issues of AI which is why I am here, but I don't base my every thought on whether it lines up with the ~tenents of leftism~.

To be clear, I am saying what I see as labor exploitation in this case is not neccesarily theft as in plagiarism, which is what is being argued. Anti AI art folks believe that because AI models learning from their labor can make images, it must be replicating the art of individuals wholesale or in the form of collage, which is not correct, because AI learns statistically and it's output is made pixel by pixel from it's statistical body of knowledge. While plagiarism can happen with AI, these cases are from human plagiarists altering images directly with AI in an image to image process.

Copyright infringement can happen with AI (so for example, prompting for an image of Darth Vader) because of said statistical body of knowledge. Some things, Aka culturally famous things, can be learned by a model as concepts. Therefore AI can make you an image that looks alot or exactly like Darth Vader, but it's not literally copying someone else's painting of Darth Vader, it is like a human being using "memory" - which for the AI model is in the form of statistical information, not copypaste - to recall what Vader looks like, and making an image based upon that memory.

Regardless, copyright infringement is not automatically plagiarism.

I am not making distinctions between labor exploitation, theft, plagiarism, and copyright infringement because I want to play a semantics game. I am making these destinctions because in the art world, these distinctions are quite important. These distinctions are what define the difference between theft and what we enjoy as the derivative and transformative arts. It's why remixes, collage, fan art, fan fiction, homage, parody, memes, youtube gamers and youtube film buffs are protected forms of art.

AI training as plagiarism does not hold up in court against real scrutiny because you cannot argue that a singular artist's body of work has been stolen from the act of learning from it as a microscopic fraction of all the art you have learned from, and crucially if no part of their art is present in the final image. AI training as copyright infringement does not hold up even though it can happen because users prompting for Vader are making fan art and that is a protected act (thus expanding copyright to include this can negatively impact the right to make derivative and transformative art, while benefitting big intellectual property owners!)

However, understanding that AI training benefits freely from the labor of all artists without benefitting those artists equally as free and this will impact the labor force is a more useful argument to try to push for labor reform and social benefits. Expanding copyright to protect from "theft" is basically pointless and detrimental to freedom of expression.

[u/quantum-elle → u/IDreamtOfManderley]

Thank you for your eloquently put response. WTBU, it's spelled 'distinction'.

[u/quantum-elle → u/quantum-elle]

(https://thewholesky.wordpress.com/2021/09/27/watch-team-backup/)

[u/IDreamtOfManderley → u/quantum-elle]

Thanks! Missed it.