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I think over the last few months we've established that AI issues are on topic for the culture war thread, at least when they intersect with explicitly cultural domains like art. So I hope it's ok that I write this here. Feel free to delete if not.
NovelAI's anime model was released today, and it's pretty god damned impressive. If you haven't seen what it can do yet, feel free to check out the /hdg/ threads on /h/ for some NSFW examples.
Not everyone is happy though; AI art has attracted the attention of at least one member of congress, among several other public and private entities:
I don't really bet on there being any serious legal liability for Stability.AI or anyone else, but, you never know.
I've tried several times to articulate here why I find AI art to be so upsetting. I get the feeling that many people here haven't been very receptive to my views. Partially that's my fault for being a bad rhetorician, but partially I think it's because I'm arguing from the standpoint of a certain set of terminal values which are not widely shared. I'd like to try laying out my case one more time, using some hopefully more down-to-earth considerations which will be easier to appreciate. If you already disagree with me, I certainly don't expect you to be moved by my views - I just hope that you'll find them to be coherent, that it seems like the sort of thing that a reasonable person could believe.
Essentially the crux of the matter is, to borrow a phrase from crypto, "proof of work". There are many activities and products that are valuable, partially or in whole, due to the amount of time and effort that goes into them. I don't think it's hard to generate examples. Consider weight lifting competitions - certainly there's nothing useful about repeatedly lifting a pile of metal bricks, nor does the activity itself have any real aesthetic or social value. The value that participants and spectators derive from the activity is purely a function of the amount of human effort and exertion that goes into the activity. Having a machine lift the weights instead would be quite beside the point, and it would impress no one.
For me personally, AI art has brought into sharp relief just how much I value the effort and exertion that goes into the production of art. Works of art are rather convenient (and beautiful) proof of work tokens. First someone had to learn how to draw, and then they had to take time out of their day and say, I'm going to draw this thing in particular, I'm going to dedicate my finite time and energy to this activity and this particular subject matter rather than anything else. I like that. I like when people dedicate themselves to something, even at significant personal cost. I like having my environment filled with little monuments to struggle and self-sacrifice, just like how people enjoy the fact that someone out there has climbed Mt. Everest, even though it serves no real purpose. Every work of art is like a miniature Mt. Everest.
Or at least it was. AI art changes the equation in a way that's impossible to ignore - it affects my perception of all works of art because now I am much less certain of the provenance of each work*. There is now a fast and convenient way of cheating the proof of work system. I look at a lot of anime art - a lot of it is admittedly very derivative and repetitive, and it tends to all blend together after a while. But in the pre-AI era, I could at least find value in each individual illustration in the fact that it represented the concrete results of someone's time and effort. There are of course edge cases - we have always had tracing, photobashing, and other ways of "cheating". But you could still assume that the average illustration you saw was the result of a concrete investment of time and effort. Now that is no longer the case. Any illustration I see could just as easily be one from the infinite sea of AI art - why should I spend any time looking at it, pondering it, wondering about the story behind it? I am now very uncertain as to whether it has any value at all.
It's a bit like discovering that every video game speedrun video you see has a 50% chance of being a deepfake. Would you be as likely to watch speedrunning videos? I wouldn't. They only have value if they're the result of an actual investment of time by a human player - otherwise, they're worthless. Or, to take another very timely example, the Carlsen-Niemann cheating scandal currently rocking the world of chess. Chess is an illustrative example to look at, because it's a domain where everyone is acutely aware of the dangers of a situation where you can't tell the difference between an unaided human and a human using AI assistance. Many people have remarked that chess is "dead" if they can't find a way to implement effective anti-cheating measures that will prevent people from consulting engines during a game. People want to see two humans play against each other, not two computers.
To be clear, I'm not saying that the effort that went into a work of art is the only thing that matters. I also place great value on the intrinsic and perceptual properties of a work of art. I see myself as having a holistic view where I value both the intrinsic properties of the work, and the extrinsic, context-dependent properties related to the work's provenance, production, intention, etc.
TL;DR - I used to be able to look at every work of art and go "damn someone made that, that's really cool", now I can't do that, which makes every interaction I have with art that much worse, and by extension it makes my life worse.
*(I'm speaking for convenience here as if AI had already supplanted human artists. As I write this post, it still has limitations, and there are still many illustrations that are unmistakably of human origin. But frankly, given how fast the new image models are advancing, I don't know how much longer that will be the case.)
EDIT: Unfortunately, this dropped the day after I wrote my post, so I didn't get a chance to comment on it originally. Based on continually accumulating evidence, I may have to retract my original prediction that opposition to AI art was going to be a more right-coded position. Perhaps there are not as many aesthetes in the dissident right as I thought.
But would you take the complaints of powerlifters demanding cranes not be used seriously? This is the crux of things, you want difficult art for love of the process itself, and if you want to join hobbyist communities to promote human created art for that sake more power to you. But to those of us who are not interested in this thing your complaints really do seem to boil down to making our lives worse so that people you feel kinship with can continue to monopolize a market. And it really does seem to be the market thing that is in contest.
Every piece of human art might be like Mt. Everest to you, and more power to you if you want to celebrate people who make that climb for no reason but leave the rest of us out of it.
edit: a question to cut out some speculation. If All ai art was reliably tagged in the metadata and software existed so that you could avoid accidentally seeing ai art and only frequent places where all tagged art was prohibited would that satisfy your complaint?
Cranes, like the cotton gin, manufacturing plants or programming language compilers, are engineering tools used to serve a purpose. That is, an actual purpose. Whereas things we consider art tend to be done because it is fun or for status.
The difference is, that the existence of a crane doesn't affect the status of powerlifters. You can still appreciate a power lifter because you know he's not a crane. To the extent that Stable Diffusion etc. mimic art, you can't really tell.
Now, there are a lot of good reasons to have AI-art generators. Like cranes, they can help us engineer and build things faster. People here have mentioned that AI art is probably already being used for generic business presentations for when a slide needs to be livened up and it doesn't need to be too precise or fancy for the audience to get the point.
Fine, artists no longer get their money ripping off people making powerpoints, but AI art still threatens the status market they're engaged in, which as far as I know, has no analogue.
I think power lifting is a fine analogue. You can't tell if a building used very strong men to get concrete pillars in place or a crane and yet powerlifting as a competition persists. AI art is threatening the market potential for artists, it's not removing the ability to produce art the hard way.
I own a chess board and play friends occasionally, the existence of an ai that can produce superior play than either of us does not spoil our fun.
The invention of the crane reduced the reach of the powerlifter status market, because when people look at buildings, they're assumed to all be made by cranes, but you can still watch real people lift weights and they're obviously not a crane.
AI Art will reduce the reach of artists and their monopoly on making pictures. Maybe in the future, people will assume most logos and the like are made by computers. That's all well and fine. But how can you prevent imposters from submitting AI art to museums and competitions? It would be as if a bodybuilder could hide a hydraulic arm under his clothes (or take steroids!) and compete without working.
Same way powerlifting tournaments prevent imposters: make them do the labor on-site.
I wonder if that would really suffice for them. After all, the guy may generate the image at home on his PC, then memorize it and paint it on site from memory. If this is still "A-ok", then this is a weird esthetic preference.
That just sounds like how a classical artist might have memorized the way nature looked in a particular spot, then went home and painted it. If someone has the skills to do all that, I think they deserve the credit for it.
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"This man didn't create art -- he held an image in his mind and put it on a canvas through the movements of his hand and arm!"
Bro, at that point he's not faking anything, he's just actually making art.
Is the art in the arm movements or the idea, the composition, the choice of colors etc? If I memorize how to paint a Mona Lisa replica, am I as impressive as Leonardo?
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