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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 too am a programmer, and am horrified by Copilot and friends. I write code to solve problems and release it under copyleft so that people can modify it for their own ends and share alike. I don't release it for it to be bundled up into some training set for a system that will accelerate the generation of non-free software.

Whatever an artist's goal in developing a skill, I think it's fair for him to be utterly crushed at the thought of his artistic career and personal style being reduced to an "by artist X" prompt to an image generator.

Sure if they were honest and just said "im not pleased about losijg my job" everyone would be sympathetic to them.

Instead they piss and shit all over about how their jobs are divine edicts from god and simulacras are demonic.

But part of it really is that making art is a very human thing to do, from the earliest records we have of humans, and mechanising it away with AI feels like chopping out part of the human experience. It isn't like "a better way to make cheesecake", where the AI is churning out industrial-recipe amounts in an industrial process. It's reducing creativity and imagination to a set of standard tropes for lowest common denominator appeal, like the production line of Marvel movies which, I think, people are beginning to get tired of because it's all too much and too the same: just slot in a new comic book character and sprinkle in explosions and fight scenes. A formula that gets over-used no longer works, because it's tedious. You've seen the same thing sixteen times before, why go see this particular one?

A lot of the complaining is taking themselves too seriously, but it's not merely about losing a job. It makes people feel replaceable, and in something that was considered to be uniquely human. Maybe a robot could replace you as a worker on an automobile assembly line, but as an artist? How would you feel to be totally replaced as a programmer, and whatever you might produce would be regarded as amateur hobbyist stuff, "that's nice dear", but everyone knows real coding is done by AI. Your occupation would be gone, and if this is something you do because you love this stuff, and not just as "well I gotta do something to make a living", wouldn't you feel lost and valueless?

It isn't like "a better way to make cheesecake", where the AI is churning out industrial-recipe amounts in an industrial process. It's reducing creativity and imagination to a set of standard tropes for lowest common denominator appeal, like the production line of Marvel movies which, I think, people are beginning to get tired of because it's all too much and too the same

(Emphasis added). I'm not sure where the bolded part came from. What reason is there to believe that AIs would reduce creativity or imagination to a set of standard tropes for lowest common denominator appeal? Nothing about the actual process of the creation of art by AI would imply that. If we look at usage of AI in other fields like, say, go or chess, AI has been known to display creativity far beyond what the best humans have been known to come up with.