Your thoughts on A.I. art creation

[Kastchey]

Media as in digital files of whatever type (music, graphics, etc.) that may be used as part of a larger project.

[cat]

I totally get the point about copyright difficulties, usage of other people's intellectual property to train AIs etc.
But complaining about AI taking other people's jobs sounds a bit like an angry mob with shovels trying to destroy an excavator.

[AndreasBlack]

I totally get the point about copyright difficulties, usage of other people's intellectual property to train AIs etc.
But complaining about AI taking other people's jobs sounds a bit like an angry mob with shovels trying to destroy an excavator.

AI save lives in Denmark. They've started using it to alert caretakers about patients. Don't have the article at hand tho, google if you want "source".

[LimpingFish]

But complaining about AI taking other people's jobs sounds a bit like an angry mob with shovels trying to destroy an excavator.

Well, that analogy might work if we consider AI to be an improvement over, or evolution of human creativity, which it isn't, though it is cheaper and faster. And to corporations that's really all that matters.

AI save lives in Denmark....google if you want "source".

Quite.

But this is a case were I can see AI being actually useful, healthcare usually being a woefully understaffed field. But this is different than bringing in an AI to write your articles because you you don't want to pay a writer.

AI replacing human (creative) jobs is inevitable, though humanity will be the poorer for it. AI can't create. It can't critique. It can generate ersatz "new" media based on learning models and algorithms, but, despite what tech-bros would have us believe, this is not "just like" how a human creates, and the more they pedal that lie, the more I despise them for it.

And to those "AI art is gonna happen! Just accept it, or get left behind!"-spouting fatheads, I submit to the court a hearty "Fuck you!"

[AndreasBlack]

I submit to the court a hearty "Fuck you!"

 
It's funny cause i asked about the "media", and you replied exactly what i had thought you would! "But this is different than bringing in an AI to write your articles because you you don't want to pay a writer.". I hope you are not a writer for B.S Tabloids. If so the following sentences should be ignored

To me that's one place where the "real humans" are so bad at their craft, i wouldn't mind replacing the Swedish staff at B.S tabloids like Aftonbladet, Expressen. It's already happening cause on most articles it says "partially created with AI" and i'm fine with that. Their shitty quality is still the same along with their common lies about society. However real authors,composers, etc that's different. They are the good people in my book (Yes, i call myself good).

Now we are talking "real art".  
Just writing B.S all day long about what happened to Angelina Jolie in a wheelchair (seen on Facebook recent days, probably AI but anyway). Is not a serious job, an AI can do that shit since it's just clickbait B.S. Controversal standpoint? Perhaps. Unbiased news on the TV is a different media where i want real human! . Not that any news is unbiased these days tho Just read the news and let the audience make up their own minds! But no...  

[Danvzare]

But this is a case were I can see AI being actually useful, healthcare usually being a woefully understaffed field. But this is different than bringing in an AI to write your articles because you you don't want to pay a writer.

AI replacing human (creative) jobs is inevitable, though humanity will be the poorer for it. AI can't create. It can't critique. It can generate ersatz "new" media based on learning models and algorithms, but, despite what tech-bros would have us believe, this is not "just like" how a human creates, and the more they pedal that lie, the more I despise them for it.

I just want to start by saying, I completely agree.

But I also want to say that... well. Have you seen what most so-called "writers" are writing nowadays?
It's usually nothing but drivel made to appease an unseen algorithm. All of the good stuff is buried, because the good writers refuse to appeal to the algorithm (I should know, because all of the good stuff I ever find is incredibly unpopular). And I'm not just talking about Youtube videos and News articles. I'm including games, TV shows, movies, comics, all media.

What I'm trying to say is, the people that look like they're about to be replaced by AI, kind of brought it on themselves. They lived by the algorithm and now they'll die by the algorithm. It's hard to feel empathy for sellouts being sold out. 

But that's just one tiny part of a much MUCH larger picture. Which is why at the start I said I completely agree with you. Overall, it does seem as though as you said "humanity will be the poorer for it". I just wanted to point out how I felt about that one small part.

[Ali]

If algorithms and media gatekeepers are promoting bad writing, that is hardly the fault of writers. If bosses are sacking writers, to replace them with AI-generated pablum, that's also not the writers' fault. I can't understand the resentment people feel towards writers and artists who are likely to be sacked so that a computer can produce a significantly cheaper and immeasurably worse product.

[Snarky]

To me it seems that a lot of the negative sides of AI being discussed are really general problems of capitalism, rather than something specific to the technology.

[Babar]

I kind of echo Cat's feelings on the matter here.

In terms of AI being trained on copyrighted material, it does seem immoral, and hopefully there can be laws put in place that prohibit that (and I think there are now, sort of? i.e. some country implemented that you can't copyright anything made using AI).

But in terms of creatives complaining that AI will eliminate them, I really don't see that happening at all. have you seen those AI created pieces of art/writing? They're very obvious and not really useful as is. The most they can be used for is a jumping off point or base to make something. If companies are rushing to fire their creatives and replace them with AI, they're going to be in for a pretty bad fall when the quality of whatever they are making will suffer immensely.

What I do see happening is the roles and work those creatives do being modified a bit to "prompters" and then using the created thing as a concept or jumping off point. Which is going to be pretty suck in the short term (in terms of derivative art), but hopefully AI will improve at some point and that will be less of a problem.

[KyriakosCH]

An AI article still needs human supervision, so one has to suppose people will be paid to do that. And with articles that need to be insightful, you also require the proofreader to know the subject to a considerable degree.
In the future, we will probably have the tech to create videos/art/music directly from images/sound composition in our mind, so art is set to change massively regardless.

[LimpingFish]

Have you seen those AI created pieces of art/writing? They're very obvious and not really useful as is. The most they can be used for is a jumping off point or base to make something. If companies are rushing to fire their creatives and replace them with AI, they're going to be in for a pretty bad fall when the quality of whatever they are making will suffer immensely.

They obviously don't care about quality, as we've already seen with those companies who tried to pass off AI content on the quiet. We have to remember that no creative or person knowledgeable of the limitations of AI are in any position to stop the blanket use of AI, since it's the executives who only care about the bottom line calling the shots.

People talk about the coming of AI content, but it's already here; abused into shape and cobbled together though it may be. Amazon is chock full of AI books and artwork on it's Kindle Unlimited service, not a particularly good service in the first place (so much so that I cancelled my own subscription), but practically unusable now due to search results coughing up SEO'd AI garbage, and burying books written by actual humans. A similar situation is brewing on Spotify, and I presume on other music streaming services.

What I do see happening is the roles and work those creatives do being modified a bit to "prompters" and then using the created thing as a concept or jumping off point. Which is going to be pretty suck in the short term (in terms of derivative art), but hopefully AI will improve at some point and that will be less of a problem.

Now, I'm going to rant a little here, and it's not directed at you, Babar, but you raise I point that I hear a lot.

Where did this idea come from that, all of a sudden, artists/musicians/writers/etc need some sort of crutch or short-cut to be creative? We have hundreds of years of creativity that worked just fine without AI. Artists learned their art through practice, study, and discipline. Yes, the influence of existing art and the world around us will shape and inspire an artist, as it always has, but that art will be embraced on a critical, human level, not ingested as an algorithm. AI apologists like to talk about "opening up art to the masses", as though lack of actual talent was just a single pebble to be avoided on the road to creating (commercial of otherwise) art. It's a lie. It's not gatekeeping that stops you from being an artist...it's the fact that you're not a fucking artist! That doesn't mean that you can't eventually become one, if you have a small grain of talent that can be honed and polished through hard work. But there's no magic bullet.

AI is a way for talentless people to appear otherwise, and unscrupulous people to make easy money. Read the opening to that article I linked above. The man featured is not a writer, and has no discernible talent in that arena. AI enabled him to overcome this, by generating a hollow, ersatz product which he used to fulfill his "dream" of becoming a "published" author. Will AI write his next book too? It would be tragic, if it wasn't so damaging to actual artists.

An AI article still needs human supervision, so one has to suppose people will be paid to do that. And with articles that need to be insightful, you also require the proofreader to know the subject to a considerable degree.

One supposes nothing of the sort. The ultimate end goal of these companies is a workforce of precisely one; the guy who sits at the computer and presses "GO". No offense to anyone, but arguing otherwise is wishful naivety.

To me it seems that a lot of the negative sides of AI being discussed are really general problems of capitalism, rather than something specific to the technology.

Indeed, but there's blood in the water, and too many eyes focused purely on profit. I feel it's now too late to talk about AI (especially in how it relates to artists) without acknowledging the influence of capitalism.

[KyriakosCH]

If you use the current AI models for articles (I have had a few written by Chatgpt, not to publish of course), you will know they are prone to very serious errors, so require proofreading by default. Unless your company doesn't care about being ridiculed and will risk it so as to not pay even a basic proofreader (who costs less than an article-writer anyway).
Price may increase due to the proofreader needing to be at least familiar with what they are reading, to notice (at least the worst of the) mistakes.

[Babar]

Where did this idea come from that, all of a sudden, artists/musicians/writers/etc need some sort of crutch or short-cut to be creative? We have hundreds of years of creativity that worked just fine without AI. Artists learned their art through practice, study, and discipline. Yes, the influence of existing art and the world around us will shape and inspire an artist, as it always has, but that art will be embraced on a critical, human level, not ingested as an algorithm. AI apologists like to talk about "opening up art to the masses", as though lack of actual talent was just a single pebble to be avoided on the road to creating (commercial of otherwise) art. It's a lie. It's not gatekeeping that stops you from being an artist...it's the fact that you're not a fucking artist! That doesn't mean that you can't eventually become one, if you have a small grain of talent that can be honed and polished through hard work. But there's no magic bullet.

AI is a way for talentless people to appear otherwise, and unscrupulous people to make easy money. Read the opening to that article I linked above. The man featured is not a writer, and has no discernible talent in that arena. AI enabled him to overcome this, by generating a hollow, ersatz product which he used to fulfill his "dream" of becoming a "published" author. Will AI write his next book too? It would be tragic, if it wasn't so damaging to actual artists.

Artists and creatives don't "need" a shortcut, but if a company needs some piece of media, and one person can provide a good quality product without AI in a week, and another person can provide an acceptable level of quality in 3 days that used AI as a base, the company would probably go for the AI one. And sure, yeah, "Capitalism sucks" and all of that. But AI is just a tool, it's not a boogeyman that's going to destroy creatives. Even using the example of the article you linked, purely AI-created works are pretty much error-riddled trash. Nobody is going to be replaced by someone purely using AI and nothing else.

[Snarky]

Couldn't a lot of what you say about generative AIs also be said about cameras, @LimpingFish? Before photography, it took a lot of training, skill and time to create a painting, whether a person's portrait or a landscape painting. Photography allows "anyone" to create similar images without artistic training, and much faster, just by buying a device and learning a few technical procedures. It's a shortcut to avoid the hard work otherwise required.

Among other things, this led to a large number of amateurs taking a massive number of shitty pictures, and painters losing a major part of their business as fewer people were interested in commissioning portraits, and magazines, advertising posters etc. largely switched from paintings to photos for their illustrations. And it has led to many serious painters incorporating photography into their process.

One thing I think both you and @Babar underestimate is how much of art only serves in a supporting role, as a necessary but not central element of some other work, rather than as an end in itself. For images, we can take book covers as one example: A book needs one, but the cover is not the work being sold. I think lots of authors and publishers would be fine using an AI-generated image for that. Or let's say a T-shirt with Mickey Mouse (or Peppa Pig or whoever is popular with kids these days) standing in front of a local landmark, sold as a souvenir. It doesn't need to be some interesting or "good" work of art, it just needs to feature the right elements and the right look. I'm sure if they can whip up those images automatically, nobody is going to complain that the result is formulaic and insipid: that's rather the point.

The same thing with backdrops or even background characters for TV animation: the goal in many scenes is to provide decent-looking but not attention-grabbing scenery for what happens in the foreground. It's not striving to be the pinnacle of art.

For writing, I don't think we're going to see fully AI-generated movie or TV scripts any time soon (perhaps they might try to use AI to do first-pass adaptations, turning books into movie scripts, but I doubt it will be very successful), but I'm sure we'll get games where generic NPC dialog is AI-generated, or a bunch of the incidental writing (like item descriptions), or where AI is used to create "more natural" variations of scripted repeating scenes. (So that e.g. each time you enter a shop, the shopkeeper's greeting could dynamically reflect events in the game, without having to manually write thousands of variants.)

The problem, of course, is that work like this (and many other examples that could be added) is often a way for artists/writers to make ends meet, or a stepping-stone into the industry. So yes, I think a lot of artistic work can be successfully replaced by AI without necessarily leading to a greatly inferior end-product, and I think it will cost jobs.

[Crimson Wizard]

Looking at this from another angle, I think there's an irony in how a good number of human writers and artists will soon be indistinguishable from AI.

Wonder which of the things that you read, watched or listened to in the past would appear AI-generated today?

I guess that over time it will require an effort to prove that you did "it" yourself too.

[LimpingFish]

Artists and creatives don't "need" a shortcut-

Bad ones do...

-but if a company needs some piece of media, and one person can provide a good quality product without AI in a week, and another person can provide an acceptable level of quality in 3 days that used AI as a base, the company would probably go for the AI one. -purely AI-created works are pretty much error-riddled trash.

But you can't argue both points; either AI art is good enough to provide a useful product (proto-art that a human can then expand upon, or use in creating a finished piece of art), or AI art is garbage that nobody in their right mind would try to pass off as acceptable. If the AI is making bad art, why would an artist want to use that as a base to work from? On the other hand, if AI will eventually become "better", why limit it, why not let it take over content generation completely?

There's no doubt, that in some form, AI could be used effectively as another tool in making artwork (much like Photoshop), whether with advanced compositing, background removal, etc*. What I object to is the concept of "creative" AI; generating content alone, not with creativity or insight, but by algorithmic necromancy. Quality is irrelevant.

Nobody is going to be replaced by someone purely using AI and nothing else.

As I said in my earlier post, that indeed is the end result sought by those at the top of the food chain. Sensible people like you and me might see it as folly, but that's where we're heading.

One thing I think both you and @Babar underestimate is how much of art only serves in a supporting role, as a necessary but not central element of some other work, rather than as an end in itself. For images, we can take book covers as one example: A book needs one, but the cover is not the work being sold. I think lots of authors and publishers would be fine using an AI-generated image for that. Or let's say a T-shirt with Mickey Mouse (or Peppa Pig or whoever is popular with kids these days) standing in front of a local landmark, sold as a souvenir. It doesn't need to be some interesting or "good" work of art, it just needs to feature the right elements and the right look. I'm sure if they can whip up those images automatically, nobody is going to complain that the result is formulaic and insipid: that's rather the point.

Over one hundred years of fabulous book covers (or record covers, movie posters...even toy boxes!) show that you don't have to reduce commercial promotional art to the status of the purely functional. Oh, you can, and yes, I'm certain that publishers/manufacturers would indeed be welcoming of purely AI-generated content in this sense. But as a consumer, what would be the benefit? And while such products don't need to be "interesting" or "good", they also don't need to be free of such qualities. And why deny the guy who designs your milk carton a job, simply because nobody cares what a milk carton looks like as long as it has milk in it?

Maybe the milk would be cheaper...?

The same thing with backdrops or even background characters for TV animation: the goal in many scenes is to provide decent-looking but not attention-grabbing scenery for what happens in the foreground. It's not striving to be the pinnacle of art.

But don't you see that as a diminishing of the art, regardless of it's status? Maurice Noble created some astonishing backgrounds for old Warner Bros. cartoons (backgrounds that sometimes whizzed by in the blink of an eye during a Road Runner short), and I'm sure, as he cashed his weekly check, he didn't consider his work would end up as museum pieces. Or what about the beautifully designed backgrounds in Samurai Jack? People care. Granted, not everybody cares, but still. To argue for lesser art, simply because of it's nature, confuses me.

I guess that over time it will require an effort to prove that you did "it" yourself too.

It would be a sad day to find yourself arguing that your art is indeed yours, because of the normalization of AI art, and the expectation that everybody must be using it.

Just to clarify, bad art, or art created as product, is still art. AI-generated art is non-art, or the inverse of art. In a consumer/capitalist society, non-art may indeed be acceptable to the majority, even as a replacement of art, good, bad or indifferent.

But fuck that society.

*: But, since we do indeed live in a consumer/capitalist society, to those saying we could just use AI in this way, or just a smidge of AI in this area, I have little option but to view all those suggestions as covert back-doors to the afore mentioned end goal; total adoption, by those in power, of AI as a replacement for human creativity.

Also this.

[KyriakosCH]

If the worry is about quality of art, I am pretty sure that future "AI" art programs will easily match the style of any human. Because they aren't limited by art skills, it's all math, so they will do it better in the same way that a pocket calculator will calculate better than the fastest human.
All that said, we should remember that the human will be needed still, even if only to serve as the evaluator of worth of the computer-produced art. The program itself cannot do it, because it's not actually sentient.

So the talented artist will still be around, just in the role of the eye - which imo is better, since the mechanics of producing art are tedious regardless of how good one is at it.

[Crimson Wizard]

So the talented artist will still be around, just in the role of the eye - which imo is better, since the mechanics of producing art are tedious regardless of how good one is at it.

From my impression, the people do art for following reasons:
- Recreation and pleasure;
- Devising new ways of portraying reality;
- Money, fame,
- Utilitarian purposes.

Use of AI covers the two last purposes, while majorly defeating the first, and probably unapplicable for the second, at least not at the moment.

All that said, we should remember that the human will be needed still, even if only to serve as the evaluator of worth of the computer-produced art. The program itself cannot do it, because it's not actually sentient.

To tell the truth, I actually doubt that it's impossible to teach machine to evaluate art. I thought about this many years ago, long before the AI became a widespread topic, and in my opinion the problem here is mostly to find out how humans evaluate art, and then describe that mathematically. That is, if we want to make machine follow our own perception of "art".

[KyriakosCH]

^Regarding AI establishing what works for humans as good art, I have to suppose this would quickly approach one of the many (already) known limitations of any level of a formal logic system. Of course the program can produce stuff and 'by accident' achieve very high quality, but I doubt it will be able itself to reproduce that (more likely that it will mathematically model the success as tied to parameters of the image it wasn't tied to for the human), and even if it does, it won't go above that level, while a human can (due to serendipity if not conscious calculation and extrapolation).

As for my remark about tedious mechanics, I already mentioned that future programs may well allow us to create digital images out of what we see in our imagination. Which in my view is certainly a bonus, since we imagined that in the first place, and being able or not to produce it mechanically yourself is surely secondary.

[Crimson Wizard]

^Regarding AI establishing what works for humans as good art, I have to suppose this would quickly approach one of the many (already) known limitations of any level of a formal logic system. Of course the program can produce stuff and 'by accident' achieve very high quality, but I doubt it will be able itself to reproduce that (more likely that it will mathematically model the success as tied to parameters of the image it wasn't tied to for the human), and even if it does, it won't go above that level, while a human can (due to serendipity if not conscious calculation and extrapolation).

What I mean, the question is whether the human thought and perception may be described mathematically. So far most of the processes in human body were, at least this is my impression based on what I've read or heard. There's already some understanding of how human brain works. I cannot predict the future, but I think there's a realistic chance that, given time and effort, humans will be able to define how their own mind works, including intuition, perception of beauty, and so forth.

Of course the above assumes that the nature of our thought is deterministic. If there's, say, a spiritual essence which cannot be described by a formal logic, then we have a different situation...