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In support of mistake theorists and against outgroup reification
There's even more drama in the AI art sphere than before. Actually multiple dramas, all around Stable Diffusion, as is customary now. Artists on Twitter are threatening class action, half-seriously rallying around Greg "by greg rutkowsky, trending on artstation, 8K" Rutkowsky, Palmers and others; Danbooru is being slowly purged of content on takedown requests, in the wake of NovelAI SD-based image generator release (drastically superior to earlier stuff, and allegedly tracing over whole pictures); StabilityAI Discord has banned Automatic111, a hero and pillar of the community, the developer of the leading UI, due to him
being an asocial Russian assholeimplementing means to handle the recently leaked (by a third party) NovelAI models and allegedly stealing like 20 lines from their proprietary code, apparently to placate NAI and send a message to future pirates and business partners about Emad's priorities; Voldy denies the theft and counter-accuses NAI of copying his prompt-weights code without license; Stability staff/mods, it is claimed, have taken over a community subreddit by guile, to no comment from higher-ups (update: Emad magnanimously agreed to concessions); Emad keeps postponing the release of an improved 1.5 citing great responsibility and «tweaks to handle extreme cases» which is taken to mean «castration on dataset level». It looks like another Open-for-profit company has been revealed as an embrace-extend-extinguish scheme, and we will have to learn, after all, to pool resources on our own. Or maybe it's all catastrophizing by excitable FOSS fanatics. The situation develops rapidly.…But I'd rather leave the drama discussion to @Porean, seeing as he's posted it first, and talk about something less spicy. After interactions with Hlynka here, I want to share an observation about conflict theoretic lens and unhelpful labeling of the outgroup – such as artists on 4chan /ic board calling AI users «pajeet».
This has to do with Emad's origins and the racism-tinged contempt for «soulless tech bro nerds» pervasive among the 4chan creative intelligentsia, of course (the Twitterati attack soulless tech bro nerds as such, without racial qualifiers). No equivalent prejudice against South Asians exists in Russia. So, there AI users and people arguing in favor of this tech are labeled «neuroschizo». I wonder about other sectors of the Internet.
Yes, singular «pajeet», singular «schizo». It's not just a meme. They (well, many of them) report it to mods as such, they whine about a sleep-deprived obsessive fanatic who keeps pestering them in their strongholds (a not-so-implausible scenario, but clearly wrong in this case). And I posit that this is Indicative Of A General Failure-Prone Tendency Of Conflict Theorists, who have a powerful presence here. I have ridiculed Scott's Conflict-Mistake framing myself. But the core objection – namely that the Conflict model is evidently true, as well as people's willingness to lie in service of their terminal goals – may be a cognitive poison pill.
Anonymous imageboards have been a mighty forge of internet culture. What is often underappreciated is how strong they are pound for pound, in terms of active user or post count – even the biggest 4chan boards are like a middling subreddit or Discord/Telegram chat. Why is that? Freedom of expression, lack of reputation and all that jazz, you know it. But I think that they're a bit similar to latent diffusion models: they are more efficient, due to compressing the trappings of a social network into a lower-dimensionality space. By stripping identification and the complexity it can carry, they allow – nay, force – individual voices to be associated instead with archetypes of groups, in every individual interaction. You cannot be a token, like on Facebook or what have you: everyone is a type, but which type, depends on the mood and the topic. This inflates the effective population size to parity with a big society where full connectedness is impossible and knowledge about others must spread by rumors and vague stereotypes. It makes boards a self-running, accelerated social experiment. (admittedly this theory needs more polish)
Anons know, of course, that they are few in number (although a Legion). And they can see that people are pretty stable in their quirks. And they are aware that people can lie when it serves them. So they overcorrect into reifying recognizable opinions as marks of an individual or at most a small coherent group. Someone sneering at «Chuds» comes, in /pol/ mythology, from some specific discord – and needs to be reminded that he «will never be a woman». On /ic/, someone explaining how latent diffusion works is… «cool story pajeet».
It's an experiment that represents, at small scale, the superstitious nature of network age paranoia. In larger communities, the same assumptions are applied on group level. Everyone who disagrees with me is a Russian bot! Except if I'm a Putin loyalist, then it's gotta be ЦІПСО, Ukrainian propaganda division (that's what I am these days, according to many of my compatriots). If you're an American Right-Winger, it's some sort of GloboHomo WEF talking head. If you're a good progressive, it's probably a Fascist representing a unified anti-Lib front.
This is psychologically comforting for a few simple reasons.
First, such a problem is very legible and simple. There's no structural reason for the thing that oppresses you to exist and be the way it is, no grandiose system of incentives, just malign will of a finite set of human actors, fallible flesh and blood with a self-serving narrative.
Second, it's surmountable. Calling the enemy out is half the battle; getting him banned is another one fourth, after that you just gather up the boys and attack his turf. The hostile group is not representing the majority of the population (usually is puny), is easily identifiable and kinda ridiculous. Maybe just one weirdo, a «pajeet» or «chud» at that.
Third, and most importantly, it excuses ignorance. You can plug bananas in your ears because conflict theory predicts that the enemy will lie, or try to deceive you while not technically lying, to demoralize you. And why would he keep investing effort into that, coming up with arguments tailor-made for you? Of course because his onslaught isn't really going according to plan, in part, precisely because people are not falling for it! That's what those artists think too. AI proponents are lying collectively to break their spirit; they just need to wait it out while the pajeet runs out of steam; they don't need to adapt.
They're wrong.
It's unhelpful to have a dead wrong model of the conflict they really are in. One big and obvious reason: because it precludes communication with people who are different but not the enemy and are trying to help – or at least negotiate. In trying to not be a 0HPLovecraft-style quokka, such a conflict theorist ends up being simply a myopic rat, destined for being made marginal and obsolete. The great discovery that counteragents might lie is a point of a wholly unreasonable pride of a certain brand of reactionaries. It's also a source of a delusion as damaging as the inability to conceive of bad faith.
Tl;DR: Conflict theories have a failure mode or reifying the opposition, that can lead to cognitive closure and lack of response to arguments. The very assumption of bad faith, without extra precaution, bootstraps the development of theories on how bad faith propaganda is being delivered to you, for what reason and by whom. From then on, truth is ever harder to find. People should remember that, when assuming they can see through the opponent and dismissing opponents out of hand.
I very likely wrote some of the posts on /ic/ you’re referring to.
My mental model of the developers/proponents of AI art (and AI in general) is that they believe that they’re genuinely making the world a better place, at least by the measure of their own terminal values. I just happen to sharply disagree with them.
Obviously, posts written on 4chan to blow off steam and commiserate with people in your own camp do not always reflect the nuance and complexity of one’s actual views.
EDIT: Well, since I just brought up the subject of having nuanced views, I should acknowledge that I don’t think the motives of AI developers are entirely pure-hearted in all cases. If you read the /sdg/ and /hdg/ threads, hardly a thread goes by without someone saying “fuck artists” or “it’s over for artcels”. There’s clearly some amount of resentment there for people who possessed a skill that they wanted, but were not able to obtain for whatever reason. As for a broader UN/WEF conspiracy to reduce the global population by replacing workers with automation - obviously I don’t have any concrete evidence of an intentional conspiracy, but I do fear that a future like that is possible, even if no one is consciously intending to bring it about.
Excellent!
Incidentally, I do not post there. 4chan is banned in Turkey, my VPN is banned on 4chan and bying a passcode or investing effort into cheaper workarounds feels not worth it. Still, I've written an angry response for a yet another maddeningly arrogant thread – struggling to fit it into 2000 characters – the other week, before finding out that no two-bit hack works. This is as good an opportunity to share it as will ever come.
Please don't take it too personally. Ahem:
...now, in a less 4channy mood, I need to admit that artists do have a point. Making them obsolete using their own work is a scummy move, regardless of artists' character flaws. And mundane considerations of fairness aside, we need a framework for the coming AI era where all jobs will yield to machine learning at some point. One option would be to institute a sort of collective entitlement, monetary and cultural, for members of guilds whose jobs have become automated, because the sweat of their brow, examples of their product, has enabled the creation of that automation to no lesser extent than the work of developers. A derivative «coom artist» can go pound sand on Twitter. Greg or Clive should have a stake in the pie of machine-produced visual content, and maybe some Prometheus Medal for their contribution.
But of course even their habits and egos are not worth hampering the greatest celebration in history.
@2rafa: no idea how the law will decide, it seems that purely by the letter of the law artists have no case, but the law may be changing soon. The logic above is why I tentatively approve of artists and other IP holders getting their wish come true and excising their stuff from training data. Spamming tags associated with generically high-quality pictures (which is all there is to «by greg rutkowski») is tasteless, and training models on Greg to learn his style along with his themes is silly and inefficient, but it's such an easy shortcut it may clog our creativity for an arbitrary span of time. With fat-soaked American IP like Mickey Mouse it's even worse, why keep clinging to it in the age of visual post-scarcity? It only ever got anywhere due to starting early. We need a clean break and an Aesthetic Space Browser, and the surest way to develop it is to begin with taking away the easy and cheap option. Now that the potential is known, the way there won't take as long.
Below is a translation from a Russian /ic/ equivalent, one of a series of texts that I consider to be some of the best writing on this subject available anywhere, from a man much smarter and a better writer than myself, and an obvious inspiration. (if anyone wants other texts, let me know).
Man, that's so
funnyfucked up.«Artist growth». «Income». What income now.
The basic model understands Euclidean 3D in classical perspective. Why this particular space? Because this abstract model is the most efficient way to explain the presented set of data. Why does it understand «objects» and the orthogonal group of transformations? Because it is the most convenient way to compress the data through a hierarchical decomposition of the visual field. Why does it understand lighting? Because, just as in the previous cases, the model was able to reverse-engineer the scene and decompose it into surfaces, light sources, and color space. Why does it understand «style»? Because «style» is a microscopic speck in terms of information volume, a cosmetic superstructure overlay for the underlying geometry, textures and lighting.
And yes, «composition» is also an element of style. So are different kinds of perspective. For a mangaka, «fish-eye» means years of wrestling with built-in visual cognitive biases, painstaking fiddling in awkward 2D, selecting, combining and projecting primitives, generating and tracking pencil trajectories, iterating a loop of deliberately memorized algorithms with elements of pseudorandom – assembling a cognitive chimera from the elements of thought amenable to control. For the model, it is only a vector weighing a few kilobytes that directs the hierarchical blending of the base elements.
Shift by vector plus cosmetic rendering. Click – an orange grows a coat of feathers. Click – feathers become made of glass. Click – fisheye. Click – reverse perspective. Click – Kuvshinov. Click-click – Vrubel. Gumroads have never taught anyone anything. Creative work is a pipeline. 99% in the technical tricks – and a bit of lucky pseudorandom.
And it's not even the beginning, it's just a precursor. Text, pictures, music, video, speech. Sculpture, architecture, engineering. What even is genuinely complicated in our culture? Mathematics? But proofs of theorems are isomorphic to programs – and coding, too, is kind of, well.
Only meat and quale will remain for the market. You can't carry quale to the market. Hence, only meat.
...I'm just complaining. We've all been blackpilled to the point of being stiff a long time ago.
That's not the essence of it. Creativity is now officially a closed topic. Well, you know, not very long ago, among the linguistically oriented highly intelligent public (philologists, writers, language philosophers, mathematicians...) it was fashionable to do topology, play word golf, admire Hofstadter, and subscribe to "Word ways" magazine. All we have left from those glorious times are scraps, fragments, and vestiges in the form of ubiquitous arroword and crossword puzzles.
The end of the glorious era came almost immediately by historical standards. And not because the fashion has changed and people got bored with something there. Just because there appeared a cheap microchip, capable of closing all open problems and finding all the interesting structures in about an hour – even without any algorithms, just by brute force.
The topic was closed. And no one even noticed how it happened. It went down quickly, almost immediately. Flip-flop, and that was it.
Poets have been constructing palindromes for centuries. A microchip came along and found them all. Aristocrats played word ladders for decades. A microchip came and built them all. The thicket of texts was once home to the most fascinating pokémons – but a microchip came and collected them all.
Dickgirls, dickgirls on dickgirls, vegetables... Does it hurt, doesn't it hurt, is that really what it's about now? [Skill] ceilings don't decide anything anymore. There are no ceilings. That's it. Flip-flop on the scale of an entire culture. I haven't made it. I was too late. And there was only a little bit left to go. Oh, man.
I understand what you're saying here, but I think it's an effect of the fact that the vast majority of people have nothing to say, rather than being some special vice that's unique to artists. The probability that a randomly selected person has something to say is tiny - the probability that they have something to say and they're a good artist is even smaller.
People who are really good at X tend to be, unsurprisingly, really interested in X, and not much else. Most programmers don't care about using their technical skills for social good; they'd rather contribute to an obscure open source OS or programming language or text editor, something that will only be appreciated by a small audience of their fellow programmers. Mathematicians gleefully extol the uselessness of the frightfully abstract theories they spend so much time on, actively avoiding thinking about the philosophical or practical implications of their work. The average musician doesn't give a shit about the elaborate philosophical underpinnings of Schoenberg's atonal system; they just want to jam. And, naturally, the average artist just wants to draw pretty pictures.
Historically, people with "something to say" have gravitated towards literature, philosophy, and other forms of non-fiction writing because, well, words are how you say things. Words tend, on average, to be better at it than pictures. In my view, the very idea of "saying things with pictures" didn't become fully developed until the invention of animation, video games, and (modern) comic books, all of which are very young media historically speaking. So criticizing artists for having "nothing to say" doesn't seem very fair, because that's never really been their job description, and if you do have something to say, the philosophy department is right down the hall.
Nonetheless, there are examples of people in the modern era who used their artistic ability to "say something". One of my personal heroes is Hideaki Anno, who was involved in the animation, writing, and directing for one of the greatest films (animated or otherwise) of all time, End of Evangelion. The post-war Japanese manga industry furnishes plenty of other examples of talented author-artists: Yoshihiro Togashi, Eiichiro Oda, Akira Toriyama, etc. They probably wouldn't fit your personal definition of "having something to say", but the millions of people who bought their books would presumably say otherwise.
Well that's obviously not true. If that was true, then companies wouldn't be spending millions of dollars to build machines to replicate their work. Who cares whether you think the value is "really" in the "technique" or the "creativity". Everyone plainly agrees that the work itself is highly valuable.
This doesn't sound very plausible.
Well there are a lot of people who think your "beauty and meaning machine" is blatantly evil and anything it produces is automatically disqualified from being meaningful and beautiful, so you may have to go back to the drawing board.
It seems to me that the Artistic class is an outlier both in per-capita vacuity, and in per-capita outspokenness. Speaking as an insider, the art world is highly politicized and supremely concerned with "message", with "starting conversations", with "ethical concerns" which mostly seem to play out as grifting by connected individuals. I've been in it for nearly two decades, and his description rings true.
This sentence is difficult to square with my personal experiences with "artists' statements", general artistic activism, and what I see in the art world around me. A supermajority of the fine-art world is shitty philosophy and warmed-over social theories perched atop a mountain of narcissism bordering on the solipsistic. To say that the pop-art world is better would be damning with faint praise; it is better, but still has serious issues. Watch an average Oscars speech, and then understand that the difference between one of those big-shots and a lot of the minnows is talent and scale of audience, not temperament or worldview. It's hard to avoid people who think they're Making A Difference, and inquire pointedly about your allegiances.
I strongly disliked those people back when I was a doctrinaire progressive in the Obama era, because I thought they were clowns and their art was bullshit. My feelings toward them have not improved now that they're front-line troops in the culture war. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that's the fault-line being gestured at in the passage you quoted: people boasting emptily of how they intend to change the world, now demanding the world not change when it inconveniences them.
"Their work" isn't what people want. It's the outputs that work generates, the results. And those outputs can be had without the moralizing and pretention and activism and drama.
It sounds pretty plausible to me, speaking as an artist. Non-artists just don't get how much of what we do is just trivially-simplistic mechanics. You need a lot of practice to actually learn how to do it, but what you're doing is often not terribly complex, it's just tedious and tiring and counter-intuitive. 3-point perspective is not some deep mystery. Neither is shading, highlights, brush-strokes and so on, any more than playing a guitar is some great mystery.
There's a lot of people who claim to think that. I am extremely skeptical that they'll actually pass the artistic Turing test, out in the real world. Absent a concrete objection to the material itself, it seems to me that this is just bigotry, pure and simple. What's the difference to people not liking Jazz because it's made by black people?
What are you talking about? Anime and manga is a multi-million dollar industry. Of course people want the work. Again, why the fervent desire to build machines to replicate it if people don’t want the work?
This doesn’t actually matter. Two objects can be physically identical and still have different relational properties. If you make an identical replica of a Van Gogh painting, one is still the original and one is still a fake.
Naturally, I also contend that “beauty” and “meaning” are at least partially relational properties.
It's just untrue. Overgeneralization of the concept 'original'. If you have two copies which are actually identical, neither is more original than the other.
The original must have the quality "created first." Doesn't that impose a limit on how perfectly identical any copy can be?
Let's say you have content-addressed Content-addressable file system. It supports mirroring of any piece file onto multiple devices. When user saved a new file, it is saved, identifiable only through its content hash, onto two or more devices.
If you unplug any of them and plug it to a different computer, both computers will have the file.
Which is the original file and which is a copy? Neither is original, it makes no sense to talk about 'original' in digital realm (usually).
And yes, files, digital data - abstract stuff. Maybe for 'real' objects it is different? Identity Isn't In Specific Atoms
But to what do you attach this metadata, if you are presented with two bit-by-bit (or atom-by-atom) identical objects? If it's a 'real world' painting on a canvas, and you make that copy, the only way to discriminate between them is some metadata - like position in space of its center of gravity or sth. That seems rather arbitrary.
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