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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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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:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA) urged the National Security Advisor (NSA) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to address the release of unsafe AI models that do not moderate content made on their platforms, specifically the Stable Diffusion model released by Stability AI on August 22, 2022. Stable Diffusion allows users to generate unfiltered imagery of a violent or sexual nature, depicting real people. It has already been used to create photos of violently beaten Asian women and pornography depicting real people.

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 really don't find your post convincing in the least. And the constant whiny bitching and crying by artists about AI art has made me suspicious of the motivations of these so called "artists", who claim to do it so much so for their love of the art. @EfficientSyllabus, said it a lot better than me. You are not lamenting the loss of an artform, you are lamenting the loss of status.

Here are a few scattered as to why I am so deeply unsympathetic to those who endlessly moan about AI art.

  • I'm a programmer. I believe I love the art of programming. I also know some people who genuinely love the art of programming. When I saw what OpenAI Codex (AI that can generate code) was capable of doing, My jaw was on the floor. A program that could write more programs?? It was science fiction in-front of my own eyes. Every other programmer I know who loves the game itself had the exact same reaction; amazement.

    So what if a machine can write code? Code is good! The world needs more code! Code makes machines more efficient, it does boring jobs that people would have to do, code optimizes processes that literally puts food into most peoples mouths.

    In the same vein? Is art not a good thing? Is the world not a richer place because there will be more art? Isn't it great that an independent blogger who couldn't afford commissions will now get to have art that makes his blogging richer? Is it not great that a mom and pop shop can now produce artwork that will make their corner store more lively? Won't the world get a little bit more aesthetically pleasing?

    Why are the majority programmers so enthusiastic about machines that can code but not artists?

    Maybe because the greatest trick the devil pulled was that "artists" are in it for the love of the art and us uncool dirty nerds are in it for the money and status?

  • There is an art to almost every process right?

    Farming can also be an art right? Getting the soiled tilled just right, making sure the seeds are placed just the appropriate distance apart, etc.

    However, if someone lamented the loss of farming as an artform because combine harvesters were invented... My and hopefully any rational persons response would be;

    " You motherfucker. Do you not realize that millions of hungry mouths will be fed because of this thing? Is your artsy fartsy shit more important that people not being hungry?"

  • The world is a place where things need to get done.

    I love the art of programming and spend countless hours cleaning up my programs, but ultimately it's of no value if no one can use my programs. Chefs can put their heart and soul into their food, but it would be of no value if no one ate it.

    The value is in the PRODUCT, not the PROCESS.

    If my favorite bakery found a way to mass produce their cheesecakes but the pastry chef was not required anymore and it would be all done by machines, then good. More people can enjoy great food for cheap. And to be honest my tongue doesn't care, if it did, its priorities are not in order.

    Boohoo for the pastry chef, if they love making cakes so much they can make the cake and throw it in the trash. In my world cakes are for eating. Is it not wisdom that you cook for your friends and family for them, not for you? The sanctity is in the fact that their stomachs are full not that your knife skills are perfected?

    Same for the artists, they can draw their art and throw it in the trash, its the process that matters right?

As someone who believes that more things are good. Products are good. Anyone lamenting about a process that brings more good things into the world is my enemy. You are actively lamenting that the world is becoming a richer place, in both the very economic and metaphorical sense of the word 'richer'. The pie is getting bigger, you are just lamenting you won't be having a relatively larger share of it.

I think there is a certain line of thinking that can plausibly be raised as a defense:

  • The process of freely creating art is valuable as a form of human expression, either per se or because it enriches the human experience in some way. (This position is apparently one which you do not hold, but let's assume for the moment that a large portion of the population does sincerely hold it.)

  • So far, the process of creating art has been subsidized by its products which can be sold: corporate art, commissions, etc. However, in the future, these products are poised to be far more efficiently generated by AI.

  • Without revenue from these products, many of today's artists will be forced to move into other fields, and perhaps curtail their personal output due to no longer having enough time, supplies, or practice. This is bad, since it decreases the quality and quantity of valuable art creation.

  • Similarly, once the creation of art becomes no longer profitable, the second-order effects start to occur: the entire industry of art education gradually falls apart, and many people become unable to learn the skills to express themselves through art in the way they would prefer.

That is, the process of art-as-human-expression will be impacted negatively by the AI-driven devaluing of art-as-a-commercial-product.

I recall a discussion on LW or SSC (that I am now unable to find), about how many try to find economic justifications for avoiding animal stress, looking for evidence that less-stressed cows (for instance) produce better meat, since that kind of justification is the only form our society will accept: if no such justification can be found, then animal welfare will inevitably get tossed out the window. I interpret @Primaprimaprima's perspective in a similar light; if there is no more value in humans creating art as a product, then there will be nothing left to prop up the tradition of art as an expression, and the world will be worse off for it.

(Whether this assumption of art-as-expression depending on the existence of art-as-a-product holds up in reality is a different question. But it certainly seems like a plausible enough risk to worry about, assuming one values art-as-expression.)

If art as expression is valuable enough then people will spend money to do it for its own sake. If it is not then they were being subsidized the whole time and it was less valuable than we previously thought. I think art will survive but most artists will need to get dayjobs, just like all the people who used to subsidize their art who didn't personally get to experience the expression element. Because that's really the hidden cost that isn't being brought up, the tiny tax on everyone else in society so that artists could be for lack of a better word "unproductive"(undoubtedly they were productive in a pre-ai-art world but they are no longer productive in a post-ai-art world)

Indeed. I suppose that the next step of the defense would be that society persistently undervalues art-as-expression: if the general public were aware of its full value, they would pay for art-as-expression, but structural factors and lack of quantifiable benefits makes awareness implausible in the near future. (Compare this to the animal-welfare activist who fights against factory farmers' greed and consumers' apathy: they believe that if the public were aware of the full value of animal welfare, then animal-protection laws would be passed in a heartbeat.)

In this scenario, the best outcome, short of formal subsidies for artists, would perhaps be a large-scale donation model, much like for many orchestras and museums today. But this is still much less accessible to artists than the pre-AI status quo, where art-as-expression maintains a safe existence as a byproduct of art-as-a-product. So it would still make sense for those who value art-as-expression to lament this change beyond the effects on their own lifestyles, given that this particular Pandora's Box isn't getting closed any time soon.