It's terrifying how fast people discredited the entire world of ART the moment they could. I'm literally seeing people saying that art is overrated and your wasting your time now.

It’s very hard being alive right now, to me. I find myself wishing I was my parents, growing up in the 80’s and having a great, stable career. I’m currently in my freshman year of high school, so there’s time to work around this situation and adapt, but I fear being replaced yet again. I’m scared shitless. All I’ve ever wanted is a stable life. What the hell.

The sheer amount of money and time these businesses will invest in Machine Learning to avoid paying artists a fair rate is almost impressive if it wasn't so abhorrent.

People just don’t take artists seriously. Look at how people are treated in the animation industry

As with most things the major problem is not that these things exist, but that the average consumer or audience is completely apathetic. They want to consume content and they want to be entertained; they really for the most part don't care what created it. This isn't helped by the fact that beloved creators on a regular basis are being revealed to be horrible people, as fans want to know "everything" about creators. The idea that the thing you like was created by something that isn't going to disappoint you down the line is probably a plus in many people's eyes, even while they rail against it.

Turning every facet of human existence into a subscription service is the end goal. It's not even actually about denying artists the ability to make their own art, it's about making it so no one will be able to make art their job. Artists should just get back to working assembly and typing code for the Company, and then pay the Company to use their machine to make things.

This is a horrible situation. Instead of paying artists for their work, they decide to create a software (which costs a lot) to replace artists. I bet it's the same people who say "art isn't a real job". We have to stand up, no matter what

Thank you for this conversation, I recently saw a graphic saying that creative jobs (graphic design, concept art, illustrators, comic artists, music, etc) would be the latest jobs to be automated or replaceable. I am mad, not only because they used deceased and living artists to profit and just actively avoid to pay artists but also they are automating jobs without any safe net for people (you know, you get out of bussiness and now what? How are you even going to survive?). Many artists unfortunately keep saying "Well, AI art is just another tool", even comparing it with Photoshop, but the thing is, in Photoshop you still have to do stuff as if it was a paper, nothing is given, is still a white canvas to create something and pour you knowledge on. AI art just gives you everything smashed already and well yeah you can tweak it, but it's already made. It is a tool, a tool to keep the working class (not only artists) poor and underpayed, and yes, you should be mad too.

It'll never stop. They want to replace filmmakers, writers, influencers, and they will absolutely replace even traditional artists eventually.

The fact that they threw Kim Jung Gi's art into an AI before he was even buried is disgusting.

Novel AI is really good at making anime AI art but at the cost of artists that never consented to their project. There were even cases where the AI just straight up stole someone's entire composition in one of their art, just with a different anime girl's head. It's extremely dystopian

The rapid advancement of AI and lack of protections surrounding it are so troubling. We don't even have serious protections when it comes to our personal data, so the absence of protection and regulation when it comes to content that has been traditionally protected under copyright and trademark? Yeah, we're not in a great place. I think the fear of AI art devaluing actual skilled artists is extremely real. As you laid out, companies and grifters are more than willing to use it in these unethical ways. A glance at Clients From Hell, even assuming that only a small percentage of stories are real, there's still far too many about people who don't value artistic skills. Even in translation, the rates in some language pairs have plummeted because of grifters offering rock bottom rates and delivering insane turnarounds with Google Translate. There's also the AI projects that are basically deepfakes for your voice. They can completely mask your voice based on a sample set. They're closed source as far as I can tell because they recognize how troubling it is, but how long until that technology becomes more widely available? How much voice data do different companies have on us because they have our videos, our voicemails, etc.? How much data could a bad actor feed into a sample set from podcasts, broadcasts, videos, movies, or anything else? Like the visual deepfake, it has troubling implications for disinformation and for working people. After all, we own the likeness to your interpretation of the character and now have a large enough sample set to AI-assist someone in your place. And yet we just keep going, not acknowledging the problem in any serious way and letting company leaders make decisions for themselves. Cool, totally trust the guys who are in no way actually affected by the negative consequences of these technologies in the immediate future. Totally trust them not to prioritize their own profits over the security, whether that's personal security or working security, of others or the ethical and moral, not to mention legal, implications that they can skirt around while the only organizations that can potentially do something about it on a large scale sit around with their thumbs up their behinds. Anyway, great video. You expressed, with a lot of interesting sources that I paused and looked up while watching, a lot of what I've been feeling about AI technology from your perspective as an artist and I appreciate that.

Claiming that you’re an ai artist when you’re not even using your own art is like ordering from McDonald’s and calling yourself a chef. These techbro’s and artist haters are scamming others with stolen works, and it’s a shame that things will have to get more strict to protect artist since they lack creativity and effort

AI art is starting to get scary. All these prompts, learning, and pickings have made them understand what a good shape, anatomy, and composition are. one thing they still couldn't do is picking subtle shapes like 45 degrees isometric or perspective of an object from diagonal angle. But for now, they are good enough for generating images of your made up anime girls and will make it better than average anime style artists.

The issue is that we artists are the ones bringing messages through art, and our art is a window to different ages, cultures, ways of thinking. If social network, search engines, they will control our voice, the relevance of topics, it will fill out the networks in a way our voices will become not relevant or even heard. Thats is the goal, to control narratives and messages, and we are losing this battle.

I think that artists are going to have to work together in class action lawsuits to stop some of these AI companies from moving forward with these tools. I think very few artists have voluntarily given permission for their art to be used in the "training data sets" for these AI. Just because an image is posted on the internet does not make it freely usable for commercial purposes like that. I really think that legal action is going to have to be taken. I don't necessarily mind the tools being used to generate ideas by real artists - but whatever is created directly with these tools SHOULD NOT be copyrighted in any way or used in commercial work.

Yeah I've been thinking about this as an artist and I didn't want to come off as overly worried but honestly... It's not hard to see the way artists would get replaced.

There is something messed up about this, Dance Diffusion, a music version of Stable Diffusion made by the same company, says they will not train their AI on copyrighted music. They extend this ethical courtesy to musicians but not to us because they are not legally afraid of artists. We should be furious about this. My opinion is that, it is far too early to know what is going to happen. AI art as it is right now cannot be copyrighted. Even if it says you can do so, there are messages within the T.O.S of these major AI art generators mentioning a complete waiver of liability for potential copyright issues. I'm pretty sure no company will touch AI Art as it is right now. Commercial Rights can only be given to something that has been created by a human. There is, of course a chance that copyright law could not end up in the favor of artists, instead in favor of AI Art Generators and granting them commercial use rights. There are so many legal issues surrounding AI Art, the biggest being having the AI study copyrighted art without the consent of the artists and allowing the use of artists name I their generators. I try to stay realistic but also slightly optimistic. Again, its far too early to know what is going to happen. I am terrified of AI Art as an artist myself, especially with seeing how incredible AI Art has become. But I dunno, we will have to wait and see :)

Thank you for this video. As someone who isn't an artist clicking on this video, I've gone from mild concern to pure terror and I'm only 8 minutes in.

I tried to use my own artwork to train the AI and the AI said "No need, I've been using your images"

The thing that annoys me about AI projects like this (i.e. one that attempt to minic or replace creatives and skilled professionals) is that you never hear about Silicone Valley companies trying to make products to replace roles/professions like B2B sales and business consultancy/strategy etc. When you think about it, surely it would be much easier to creative AI that could negotiate sales/procurement contracts or analyse a company's performance to suggest a new strategy or something. All of these roles deal with very set parameters and figures; a company will have have a certain budget to spend on procurement, set targets they wish to met etc. Wouldn't it be much cheaper to train AI to fulfil those tasks rather than trying to teach it the complexities of things like language or art? In short, they're willing to spend hundreds of millions trying to replace skilled (and, I would argue, useful) workers but not the professions traditionally taken up by business graduates. Whenever they try to justify these sorts of AI with vaguely utopian ideas like "progress" you have to wonder why they're trying to put artists, writers and programmers out of business and not annoying B2B sales people and Mckinsey & Company...

cat, this video means so much to me because youve highlighted all my fears as an artist and i just want to say how happy i am you are raising awareness to this!!!!!!

Ok I built a simple bot (also an AI) that detects whether an image is from an AI or not, and I did this because I thought that separating the hand-drawn images from the AI images could be a starting point. Do you guys have any ideas on what I should do next? Which functionalities would be necessary? Or any ideas on where I could get the necessary funds to sustain this bot? I used my personal server to train it but definitely would need larger servers soon if we really want to take this seriously

Yeah, this is rage inducing. I saw Simon Stålenhag lamenting this on twitter in response to some bro joking about putting him out of a job. Absolute rage. Thanks again for the thorough rundown Cat.

This is really important and well-stated! It's fun to play with new toys, but it's crucial to remember that venture capitalists are not playing around. And as for being able to "create" instantaneously using these tools-- it's infinitely more satisfying to love something without having to possess it. And it's infinitely more valuable to take the time and energy to create, if that is one's motivation. Thank you, Cat, for making this video 💜

I’m an artist myself, not someone who makes a living off of it and just for fun, and still fundamental see how wrong this is

People are awful, People are drones People are selfish.

Agree. People really undervalue artists, and seem to be alright just shitting on them if it suits their needs.

so what im getting is we waited until i was actually in a position to search for a viable art career and now that i can finally search for a job i enjoy and can consistently perform, now all of a sudden theres people programming ai to do it instead of me being able to afford a house k word

Ai-scumbags abusing this system and stealing from other artist is the real example of "Big power falling in the wrong hands" Worst part is that they get so incredibly cocky getting away with it.

I think this kind of technology (so as GTP-3) are examples of Silicon Valleys attempts to fully automate the creation of content. Content is the blood that keep this type of platforms (KZfaq, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter) alive. So long as this AI-generated content can be differentiate from human-created content creators have a chance within this enviroment. PS: I'm really interested to know your vision about NFTs now that, apparently, the boom has slowly faded. I feel like between April and August I was bombarded with content about NFTs that now have apparently vanished 🤔

we need to stop thinking that art is a product because is more than that, is our voice and the footprint of our views over the time. Art is a window to the past, to the present and the future.

Been a professional freelance artist for a little over thirty years now (yes, I’m an old-timer). My initial response to AI generated art was kind of soul-shattering. A machine can do in minutes what would take me several weeks or months! And it looks good! Definitely felt pangs of existential angst, like the party was over, that I was now obsolete, and that a lifetime of honing a craft was all for naught. Not gonna lie, it depressed the hell out of me. Then it dawned on me that the amount of energy I was wasting worrying about this was actually getting in the way of me being creative. Yes, the tech is new and scary. So was photography when it first came out. If you’re truly and artist or a creative person, then you’ll have no choice to DO WHAT YOU DO, regardless. Keep creating. Try to remember that all the drama, all the existential angst you may be feeling, is secondary to doing the actual WORK. Keep going!

For years I've despised copyright laws. They don't reflect the attitude if making/preserving something and the effort of making something.

AI "art" is just stealing using 4D chess move

i dont think AI will be replacing art anytime soon because the whole point of art is the creative idea and meaning of the human behind it

This is only the beginning of AI taking jobs, I generally didn't think artist would be the first to go. It's a shame

I think human made art won't ever disapear because we simply like what we do. We simply like holding that pencil and playing around. But I believe that it is highly probable that artists won't be employed as they are today, if at all. AI will surpass in anyway what we are able to do in a very short amount of time, better and cheaper. The thing with AI too is that it feeds itself and trains itself based on what people like or not. And all of that faster than any human could ever do. While we take hours to make one art, AI does thousands in a matter of seconds. Also, "AI artists" that believe they deserve to be called artists should as well consider the fact that AI will inevitably come to a point where they won't need them to create "art". In doing AI art, they too feed the machine until it won't need the human factor anymore (because that's the goal). So as it has been well explained in this video, the goal of these image generating AIs, is businesses who create a service for other businesses (mostly) far cheaper and far "better" than what human could offer today. One could argue that any machines that came along the way of history, destroyed and created jobs. But AI is probably going to massively and completely change our world on every aspect of it, in a scale never seen before in human history. PS: Using references is not equal (at all) to completely taking it and processing it by a machine. This is the narrative that these megacorps want you to repeat blindlessly. Although I can understand that it can be confusing for those who don't draw.

AI art reminds me of Bryce back in the day. A bunch of cliches blenderize into a semi coherent image. They look ok at first glance but the lack of intention bleeds though the longer you look at them.

I worked for weeks on a commission to do a hot sauce bottle label and in the end they went with some images some guy generated on "nightcafe ? I had to look it up. Learning more i found this video. In the end... they still paid me but can't help but feel insulted they chose an AI generated image vs the one i actually sketched and painted. AI artists beat me out of the next paying gigs bc their ETA to produce is same day. Makes me want to puke.

AI art is really just a replacement for artists and we are the tool. not the AI. And the implication of art, something we like doing, is being automated is sickening! So many fields would benefit from being automated so ppl don't have to do aweful work anymore. but no! They just gotta ruin culture and human creativity and self expression instead. these people wanna ruin everything for profit. be it the environment, entertainment, food, housing and pretty much anything else. ai art is a dystopian nightmare. nothing you enjoy to cope with your life now will be an escape anymore. cause you won't even find human connection in art anymore or entertainment. we are ruining our very species by turning passions into automated corporate generators wich also mind you are above the law as well it seems. you don't get to plagarize. you don't get to steal. you don't get to monetize work including copyrighted content. those AI's can do all these things and make people rich from piggy backing off our work and labour without our consent or our agreement. If you are an artist and you don't strongly oppose this, you are the enemy here. because this isn't art. this is theft and abuse of human creativity on a mass scale and if you support this in any way including doing nothing, you're furthering the replacement of artists with soulless machines who'll only serve the rich and create corporate propaganda on a mass scale as the only source of entertainment. The music industry has been also way more self respecting regarding this. also because they have their own corporate interests and good lawyers are involved. No AI has gotten permission to use any copyrighted music in their datasets because the industry has warned these AI goons. Unlike artists, music ppl actually seem to respect themselves and their creative work while we artist lie dormant pathetically surrendering to the thing that is actively going to kill us. Be self respecting and oppose this madness because you have to if you don't wanna doom yourself. Do not be a pushover! Your art is YOURS and so any dataset using it without your consent is a nasty thief stealing from you in broad daylight. If that doesn't enrage you, you've lost yourself completely.

Musical artists are dealing with the same issues

Loved this. It put into words what i have been feeling these past few months

What?! Kim Jung Gi died? :(

I've given these ai generators a try myself, and one of the things I found was if you add in an artist's name you would tend to get more vibrant results as opposed to just simply typing in objects or verbs. Hence, these systems are dependent on the intuition of artists to create inspiring imagery. One can't imagine the many years these artists have had to spend honing their craft. I know some personally who've gotten screwed over as the industry is privy to that. What more now with these systems that sift their works unsolicited so that the end user can call themselves an "artist"

It's so sad that we barely have the time to wonder at a new technology's capabilities before realizing it's being used for nefarious purposes...

If people used AI image generation as intended, to generate copyright free images because AI made products are not copyrighteable, half of these problems wouldn't even exist

In my opinion it is a bit simular to chess, where AI has studied billions of games, calculated openings to death and can no longer be defeated by humans. Which is also why a lot of the "magic" in the game is more or less gone. AI is just way too strong in any field its employed more or less

Do you think that missleading hashtags could work as a way to confuse AI? I started doing it. we cant do anything to change the current database, but Babylion may fall twice if we make our own language thanks for your work #bananas

I was waiting for you to talk about this one after NFT and here it come! Thanks for being so honest when a lot of people pretend to be blind.

Excellent video. I really wish there was something that could be done about the unauthorized use of images by these companies. Not just the artwork but all kinds of personal images that no one gave permission to be used. Sure, some was probably uploaded to sites that had fine print that no one had the time to read, that said, "we can do whatever TF we want to with the images you post", but it is my understanding that there are a ton that were not acquired in even that legal but sketchy way. But I fully expect that the billionaires behind all this will use their billions to retroactively make it 100% legit in the eyes of the law. My fantasy is that class action lawsuits will cripple these thieves, but I am not holding my breath.

I think the salient message here is: why are tech investors pouring billions of dollars into this and what is their end game? It's all too easy to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it's not paranoia or fantasy if it really is happening, now is it?

At least NFTs stayed in the cryptocurrency scam, this AI stuff does not.

Thanks for making this video! We need more people to talk up about the implications of AI

honestly if big corporations replace artists with Ai then we no longer have to feel obligated to support them, because the ai is the only one doing the creative work

ah yes can't wait to lose my job to a robot..

No human can be an AI artist

I have nothing to do with "AI art". I will have nothing to do with "AI art". It is horrid, and is a triumph of money over life.

Wouldn't it not be copyright because the output image is a composition of billions of images?

Do you think photographers aren't artists because it takes no effort to click a button? I'm a professional artist and I think Ai artists are valid. But i also know it's going to disrupt the lives of many artists, but it isn't the machine fault, making art more accessible is a net positive. It's because of the economic system around it. People will always do art because it's our nature, it's profit and exploitation that chains us.

" It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear."

This is getting crazy. Adam Duff just put out a video on this, I will watch after yours. What do we have to do? Watermark everywhere on our art? You do the most amazing research btw. Your art is incredible, can't believe you found it on that site:(

Totally agree, but at this point, what job isn't at risk of being replaced by AI? We probably need to rethink the concept of property and ownership entirely now, or we're all going to starve. And if we're all broke, the economy collapses too. Wonder if the billionaires are worried about that.

If you've ever trained a model for AI generative art you will note that if you take a picture of an object or person next to a houseplant for every image used to train the AI. Guess what, the AI will associate that house plant with the prompt and it will show up in many of the images it generates. Likewise, the garbled "signatures" are an artifact that the AI was trained on THOUSANDS of paintings that have signatures and therefore will assume that it's just part of the image. It's not proof that there is theft, it is proof that it was trained on paintings with signatures... it is NOT cloning any one IP; it is a generative approximation of many, many images and attempting to make a coherent image. There is a difference. It proves nothing/u that there is gabled text on images.

Thanks for shedding a light on the weird dystopian future we're molding into

Thank you so much - this video makes me feel like I’m not going crazy. A number of takes I’ve seen lately attempt to erase valid concerns (as you’ve beautifully outlined) all seem to ignore the fact that artists are reasonably worried about our work being stolen and exploited, without consent, and pulling the rug from under us.

The real problem is that artists are treated like garbage. If creatives were valued in society we wouldn’t have everyone running around pulling their hair out because they won’t be able to feed their families should their corporate-valuated contribution to society be replaced by poor quality AI approximations. The problem is we have allowed ourselves to compete for scraps in a pitiless corporate sociopath generation engine that doesn’t value human beings with true creativity and artistry. And there is zero safety net or compassion for anyone who isn’t a total cog. That’s the real problem. Have been training AI on my own hand-painted abstract art from the last 10 years, and this process is simply amAzing and i’m so happy. It’s helping me push further into my own ideas. This isn’t just capitalist horror for me. Real artists are going to make mind-blowing work by letting AI spark their own process, essentially removing the anxiety of the blank canvas. I’m kind of lucky in that I don’t share my work online and have never had any interest in corporate valuations of my work, and/or fame. So others aren’t out there stealing my work. I’ve always used my creative skills to survive, but i have never felt comfortable with the disgusting fame machine in the art “industry.” And it is an industry, you’re supposed to make one thing over and over like a factory, for rich people to buy as a commodity. But where’s the disgust against this system? Nowhere because even artists claiming to be anticapitalist are trying to become famous and are lining up to have their work valuated by a sick system. For me, i simply have never chosen to participate. As a result, i’m living my life and enjoying quietly making beautiful fresh new work with a truly remarkable technology that i am still not attempting to use to gain fame. Hang in there everyone.

waiting for the day disney/nintendo will sue their ass for using their intelectual property

"anymore?" this was always an offensive, dystopian perversion! I'm glad ppl are catching up i guess? 😭 this is a huge deal, we should all be up in arms sueing the hell out of these ppl for using our art. hell, all visual artists working in hollywood should quit all at once! I had the most depressing time on twitter trying to explain how monstrous this shit is to ppl who simply do not remotely understand or had ever even considered the value of art and art-making (ie most ppl, bc we're all gd brainwashed and alienated by capitalism). gd ppl literally argued that there is NO difference between a human being making a piece of art vs AI. when AI literally wouldnt exist if it couldnt feed on artwork made BY PPL! SO GD STUPID OMG

I want to watch this but I’m very afraid of seeing the Dall-E mini images come up. They make me physically itch to a very serious extent

THIS has been my greatest concern when it comes to AI art generation, ever since it initially popped off. It has exponentially becoming so good that it is plausible and even is actively being used to replace _actual_ artists who do the hard work by greedy capitalists. Why would a company spend thousands of dollars paying their artists a living wage when AI art generation has become a viable, cheap alternative? Why hire a prolific artist when companies can just use AI to extrapolate their work to the company's own liking? It seems like the system that we currently live in is actively working against us to satisfy the wealthy few at the top. Let's just hope we abolished Capitalism before this nightmare occurs especially since class consciousness is growing due to the problems our real world face recently.

Can't have AI without "Artificial".

11:08 I took a bite and signed up for midjourney's unlimited plan for a month and I spent... nearly all my freetime on discord pumping prompts into this thing. Funny thing is I have this same sense of ownership, even knowing I just typed in a few words and clicked left or right a bundle of times. I'm a real artist myself and there is some really weird internal disagreement on whether the stuff I made with midjourney ... i actually "made". Midjourney lets you evolve a prompt over time and one prompt I evolved for almost a week, creating quite a few really interesting images. Of those, one or two images I feel really proud of. But again... I don't think I should. It feels weird because I could have just as easily drawn in myself, but instead I chose to evolve an AI via a few hundred iterations to get to the end result. I feel like I had a hand in it's creation, but I'm not really an artist for it, maybe a skilled pilot? ... It's complicated. The experience was fun for a month, but that was enough for me. I have since picked up my water colors and have operated as if this month didn't happen, but deep down I feel like I tip-toed for a moment into a dark future, then stepped back into the now. Not a pleasant feeling.

This is just depressing - cars all look the same, music all sounds the same - and art? Why did I even go to art school? Nothing creative has a soul anymore! Soon AI will own our emotions too!

This has been highlighted a lot by the writers and actors strikes going on right now, the more disturbing things they are protesting being companies wanting to be able to use past scripts to train AI and wanting to be able to take the likeness of BG actors and use them forever in unlimited productions. It's even harder for a lot of visual artists to protect themselves because it's not like graphic designers and freelancers have strong unions.

How would you address those who say the AI training on others' work is fundamentally the same as human artists studying others' work? It's clear this is going to put a huge amount of strain on artists, who will now need to pay for and learn entirely new sets of tools to remain competitive in commercial markets and whose masterful work will be buried beneath cheap knock-offs in the fine arts space, and I'm worried there doesn't seem to be a solid argument for legal recourse. I've been a musician a long time, not professionally, though I've known a lot of professionals in the community, and I wonder how long it will be before AI comes for my own form of expression and its depth and meaning is stripped away too.

Your marathon analogy was on point.

One of the AI weakness is it can't make art if there is no data to be fed. So, all the artist have to unite to prohibited all of their works to be fed. And need a regulation, if AI company/use wants to get more "data", it have to get permission from the artist.

Thank you for making this video, much more people need to be talking about this

one of the defenses i hear a lot from professional artist, it that this is going to happen, it's best to adapt and use it... i have tried to think of how this could be used by a real artist in any way that will help them sell their "real" art. honestly, this is a replacement. triple-A titles will flock to this. at some point hasbro/mgt will only feature a piece or 2 for "nostalgic" reasons. this will not go good for commercial artist... on the brightside, I do see performative art becoming more prominent... live streaming art (which is already pretty huge on twitch) will blow up even more... well that's my clairvoyant thought of the day :)

i definitely think the bit about the boston dynamics dog is a great portent for the future of AI art

The biggest problem here is that the AI Art solidifies how terrifying Artificial Intelligence and AI is. It's long been well known that AI would replace easily repetitive jobs. Things that require data analysis to reach conclusions or complete repetitive simple tasks, and that's a threat in itself. The thought though was that the arts would be safe, that art was something too complex for AI to overtake and that the world of art would still have a faint glimmer of light as automation edges everything out. Instead this proves that not even the field of art and creativity is sacred. There is really nothing out of reach for what corporations could use AI to replace people with. (Oh but trades and physical labor are still safe!... Uhhh.... Sorry to tell you....)

the general public successfully killed of NFTs as a way for digital creators to finally make money without a client, so i’m sure if people don’t want AI art either, they can kill that off too…

I was a bit confused about the art from places like dA being taken from because that art is protected under copyright laws. So, I am watching to see if artists come together to sue as a collective (which may or may not work against such large companies) for using their art without consent. Also, at least artists can display their talent by actually physically going through the process of creating art vs those who are just selecting images to feed into the AI. What does that count for in this environment? Not sure.

I've been a fan of computer generated art for a while but also came along to agree with you. PS - I love your top!

As both an artist and a programmer, i think the solution in regards to art commissions is pretty straightforward: we're going to have to get really good at spotting AI art. In terms of professional art (because as far as hobbyists go, both traditional artists and AI art users aren't really gonna be making much money off of this shit), there's going to need to be a bigger emphasis on policing creators that may be suspected of making AI art and passing it off as actual art for profit (because y'know: you don't want people getting scammed into giving their money to people who are just putting prompts into a machine and churning out a picture in seconds). This is obviously easier to show proof for if you're a digital artist since you could just take screenshots of the piece's Krita file or whatever program you used to draw it in (or just provide a copy of the file in general for inspection). This would mean though that as a digital artist, you're going to want to get in the habit more of merging layers less often for authenticity. Either that, or making a video time lapse of the piece would be a good habit to get into doing. As for physical art, the best you could do is just document the production of the piece with pictures from a camera or something showing the WIP piece on a canvas or whatever. I need to reiterate though that I think this should only be enforced if someone is suspected of using AI art. I don't exactly like the idea of people harassing artists online out of the blue. I personally think art commissions are going to be the least impacted by this sort of thing in the long term since its the easiest to self-police. I'm more so concerned about concept artists and other industry positions, yet at the same time, i think this technology is great for people who need to make album cover art or book cover art on a budget. Like, i'm all for empowering those kinds of artists in that regard.

Thank you SO MUCH for covering this very important issue!

Can we slow it down by reducing what we share online?

If a mathematician were to study a large amount of images and through their studies come up with an equation to create art, would this be copyright infringement? If they were to use a computer to speed up this process, would it be copyright infringement? This is what AI art generation is, at it's core - a massive equation with billions of coefficients. You can download all 4 gigabytes of coefficients for free (at least for stable diffusion). Those 4 gigabytes do not contain any copyrighted imagery within them, just a whole lot of numbers that map out the relationship between colors, shapes, and words. There are no inherent ethics to these equations, they are just information. There are numbers within the equation that relate the words "Apple" with the concept of "the color red" and "round" and "plant" and "fruit", and different numbers that associated "plant" with certain shapes and textures. There are also numbers that relate the words "Greg Rutkowski" with the idea of dragons, fantasy, dark palettes, and certain brush styles (among countless other things). Nowhere in those numbers does it have a copy of Greg Rutkowski's art, it's just a whole lot of numbers representing connections between concepts ranging from extremely specific to very abstract. How the technology gets used does, of course, have ethical implications. A corporation using the equation so that they don't have to pay artists is directly making it harder for artists to afford to live. It's important to note that the issue here are the implications, not the equation itself. The solutions to the issue is not banning use of the equation, this would be basically impossible, like trying to ban the use of F=ma or e=mc^2. Paying artists royalties for the use of the equation would also be basically impossible. If a user passes in a prompt that the equation interprets to mean "dragons", "fantasy", "dark color palettes", and certain brush styles that happen to be the same that Greg Rutkowski uses, does he get a commission? What about the millions of other artists that also use this style, or pieces of this style - their art also contributes to the construction of the equation. Plus given that the use of the equation is inherently free (it's just math, after all) where would this money even come from? No, the solution for the downstream effects of AI art generation need to tackle the effects, not the use of the equations themselves. There is no other way to do it, as all it takes is 4 gigabytes of information to create AI art - it's effectively an info hazard. The data exists, and millions of people already have the data, so stopping its propagation at this point is quite literally impossible. Even if you could, the method to re-make the equation from scratch is publicly known at this point - there's a bunch of freely available research papers on it.

I want to say sorry to whoever tries to code using gpt. I uploaded my code and every commit is marked as different variants of crimes.

You do not have an innate right to an idea note I am not saying that taking someone’s idea without crediting them is not morally wrong however, copyright should be abolished

The AI models do NOT make a collage of existing images. Instead, they learn the essence (for the lack of a better word) of images - the thing that is common between all pictures of a cat, or all images by Van Gogh. Much in the same way a child learns to associate words with things (or an art student learns different styles, in fact). The generated images are unique, they do not contain any elements copied from images they are trained on.

Here’s what I think about AI art in the future, and how I think it’ll fail. So, let’s say the backers for this are right, let’s say AI art does indeed take over, how will it keep up this traction it’s been gaining? If it’s free, and anyone can use it, it just becomes overdone, it’s just art but free and faster, not even better in any way because the AI only learns from pre-existing artists, AI art will lose all its awe and interest, it’ll become the GMO’s of the art world, meanwhile artists will become the non-GMO eco friendly healthy alternative. If they bump the prices of AI art way up, again, artists will become the more authentic, safer option. But if they manage to get through all that and more, and AI art still remains on top somehow, at the end of the day, to all the artists, this is super important, all that talk about replacing all artists is a lie, at worst, they replace art as a business, but as long as you have a pen (or any supplementary drawing utensils as pencils, tablets, paintbrushes, etc.) and paper (or any supplementary canvases as painting canvases, digital displays, glass frames etc.) and creative freedom, you are an artist (or any other supplementary creative outlets as dance, music, game design, etc.)

"When everyone is super.. No one will be." Syndrome

On a second note: one of the differences between getting art from an AI and getting art from a human artist: human artists are not slaves. They have the rights to choose, who, and what they want to make and paint there were a couple of chicks that Leonardo da Vinci did not want to paint, but they wanted him to paint them. I have a friend who wants promised to paint me a portrait. We did an entire photo session ages ago, but she has never produced the items I desired the painting from that photo session with AI. You are not at the mercy of the individual artist, and you can utilize the digital slave essentially to make what you want to specifications. From an architecture perspective, there was a parallel here on the human human level. I just finished taking writing. I’m sorry an essay on Tom Wolfe‘s book “From Bauhaus to Our House” that discussed modernism in architecture, and how modern style architects broke away from becoming just “builders” to becoming autonomous architects in the sense that they did not design to the customer specs they told the customer this is how it’s done, and they seize control of the creative process, throwing away centuries of craftsmanship of the more ornate artists even to the point of making structurally unsound designs were flat roofs, were prone to leaking and not taking into account the comfort of their customers, so there is this multiple levels of balancing between the desires of the customers and the desires of the creator and I feel like this AI issue is also touching on some of those points. There’s always this tension between getting paid for your creative process if you make art for yourself and you were lucky you can make a good living out of it because you make what people want and desire, and then there are many artists who are having to make art to spec to help interior designers or whatever and there’s always this kind of snobbery between being able to create your own art for art sake, and people buy it versus providing a service to a customer who has specific needs and catering to their specifications.

the one upside I see is that in 10 years we're going to have a huge number of businesses whose logo was obviously designed by AI and the amateur eye dismissing its slight surrealism will let an absurd corporate aesthetic grow

after watching steven zapatas well crafted video with arguments against AIs, i started spreading the word and its truly shocking, exhausting and taxing to talk to people, they truly dont care about how its created and how they abuse non-profit laws to steal over 5 billion pictures. I am truly disappointed by some websites too, for example pixiv, is now flooded with ai art and fanboxes selling those.

"maybe your barista is the only one who can make you mocca espresso latté just the way you want it. But most people won't care and just want a decent cup of coffee".

Rich folks have billions to pour into tech they see important - for them. Replacing human as creator of images is one small area; how about text to speech (voice talents, learning material, announcements etc), text generation, writing summaries, writing code (copilot), self driving vehicles, general purpose AIs... and whatever else is in the works. These all together will change our society, no matter how and if for better, the ones who will suffer the consequences (as always) are the most of us poor little people, as world isn't run by good will and charitable people. Unfortunately.

I still can't believe that this AI shit is really happening. It's like a nightmare.