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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.
I can't imagine caring about the work that goes into art. Art is a product; the process is not something to exalt, it's something to lament, because the process has only ever been an imperfect means of translating the perfection of thought into the rough matter of reality with crude tools. A statue is beautiful because it is beautiful; it is no less beautiful if God willed it into being with the merest flick of his finger, and no more beautiful if the most devoted artisan spent his entire life on it.
Work for work's own sake is an abhorrent waste of time and energy. I rejoice at the prospect of AI obsoleting the artist -- and any lover of the arts should. A doctor should think a world that has no need of him is amazing; a soldier should long for a world that doesn't need soldiers; and wouldn't it be grand if we had no need of farmers, for all were fed?
The ultimate triumph of a field is self-destruction.
I agree. A parallel can be drawn between the invention of AI generated art and that of of optimizing compilers. They effectively replaced hand generated assembly code and I don't want to go back to a world where every programmer has to write their own assembly. It's much more productive to use higher level languages and reason about data structures and control flow, not registers and jumps. And just like AI art generators can make better art than the average person, a compiler can generate better code than even a competent programmer used to high level languages.
This doesn't make an understanding of assembly and the intricacies of the various families of processors any less useful in the narrower domain of compiler design. So maybe a keen understanding of art will be no less useful in a world filled with AI generated art, where the true connoisseur will appreciate the hand crafted art, while the masses will happily stare at machine created images.
Another comparison is procedural generated. I'm perpetually disappointed by it in games like Dwarf Fortress or the randomly generated side quests that games like Borderlands use - not because a human didn't put effort into each individual character name and backstory or quest goal, but because they're bland and boring for the most part, and it soon becomes obvious that even though there is infinite variety on the surface level, it all operates under a rigid structure.
Rather ironic given your flair!
I like the technology, but I worry that this metaphor may not continue. In a world where computers just Did Everything for you in the programming and compsci spheres except the extraordinarily difficult exceptions, would many people be able to develop the interest or fundamental skills that eventually lead to a successful compiler design understanding? Or would their first genuine CompSci problem going to throw dependency hell at students that don't know what a file is, and they just turn around and say fuck it?
Sometimes it's chicken-sexing, sometimes it's a problem of available resource scaling (how do you train in your basement to run multi-million-user scale cloud?), sometimes it's a matter of developing the temperament to not throw computer monitors out windows. The First Step is a Doozy, and a lot of these skills are hard to learn and harder to understand what you have to learn.
It's plausible this won't happen. Past changes to CompSci haven't eliminated on-boarding opportunities, even if they've mangled many of them; artists have adapted structures to discourage bulk-scale tracing and seldom (have the specific tech skills to) take available 'traditional' automation tools to their maxima. Music is different than it was a hundred years ago, but it's not lacking steps for the garage band. Even if it does happen, there will always be the auties and the paranoid and the slightly nuts who hypnotize themselves into doing in the old-fashioned way.
And yet, there are skillsets that are lost, at least to country-scales. If you wanted to rebuild Saturn rockets pre-SpaceX, you'd have to start by rebuilding the entire aerospace industry (and might still today). There's a lot of woodworking techniques that have turned into gimmicks, shown only by weirdos on YouTube because you'd have to scour auction sites to even find the tools in the right quality to have a chance to learn the trick, because a trim router can do the easier variants and no one finds the hard ones worthwhile. There are classes of power transformer that can’t be made in IGBT or MOSFET forms due to physical constraints, and when the last guy who knows how to make the vacuum tube version retires, I doubt we build up a whole infrastructure to support a replacement.
And there's only so much confidence that induction can give you, in a case where the Type II errors are invisible.
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