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Has anyone noticed how much vitriol there is towards AI-generated art? Over the past year it's slowly grown into something quite ferocious, though not quite ubiquitous. I'm starting to feel (almost) as if it's outside the overton window to admit to using or liking AI art. Like I said, it's not ubiquitous, but maybe it's getting there. Pretty much any thread I ever see that features AI art (outside of specialty groups devoted to AI interest) has many vocal detractors accusing AI art of being trash and stealing from real artists.
While my mind is not fully made up on the issue of whether AI art is "good", if you ask me, I wouldn't say that it's bad that AI learns from "stealing" from artists. Honestly, ask absolutely anyone who's learned anything creative: learning art is all about learning how to steal from people. I know it's not completely analogous, but I don't personally believe that it should be bad for AI to learn by stealing while it's okay for human artists to learn by stealing.
More than anything, I'm kinda surprised there's this strong sentiment, and willingness to call out AI art and its proponents as being some sort of evil in the world. Maybe it's mostly because people get off on being judgy these days, and believing they have some sort of moral high ground, and less that they actually care about artists? I'm not sure, but I would have thought the Butlerian Jihad would have started for something more severe than art.
I have noticed. A lot of hobby spaces have actually banned AI art, and if it's not banned, it's treated with extreme disdain. Any boardgame publisher caught using AI art, for example, gets a social media pile-on. It's a big deal in RPG and self-publishing (where authors and publishers operating on a shoestring obviously find it very tempting to cut costs with AI art). A few traditional publishers have caught flak for using AI art on their covers.
As a bit of an AI enthusiast (I even bought a chunkier GPU for Stable Diffusion), I obviously do not buy the "unethical" argument, but this has become kind of like "Actually, I think racial IQ differences might be real" - not something I can talk about openly with a lot of my circle.
There are a lot of anti-AI arguments, and the ethical/copyright issues are ambiguous, but the bottom line is that artists are, rightfully, afraid of being replaced by a machine. When they complain about how AIs were trained "unethically", ask them if the algorithms improve so much that an AI can be trained entirely on open source or public domain artwork (there have been some efforts to create so-called "ethical" AI models) and produce equivalent results, if they'd be okay with that? They will usually hem and haw and hope that doesn't happen.
I do feel a little bad for artists. I mean, if you had a decent side hustle charging $50 to draw D&D characters, or a more lucrative side hustle drawing furry porn, AI is going to replace you. High end artists will still have jobs, and AI can't really do competent composition or graphic design or a series of pictures with a consistent theme (yet), but the DeviantArt and ArtStation kids are getting hungry and desperate.
It ultimately boils down to money, and they are trying to make it a moral crusade to preserve their livelihood. It is only the threat of being dragged on social media that's preventing more publishers and companies from using AI art, and as AI art gets better and less easily detectable, and more widely accepted, that will change.
I will say that a lot of AI art is just lazy. Like, if you just give a prompt, run 50 iterations, take the best one, and slap it on your cover, it's still probably not going to look very good and it will look like obvious AI generation. Even for my hobby art I do some photoshopping and have learned enough composition to blend elements together - it might still be detectable, but it doesn't just scream "AI." (Then again, I'm not generating anime waifus or furry porn, which is like 90% of AI art as far as I can tell.)
This is coming to other industries as well. Audiobooks, for example, are now pretty lucrative for most authors, and AI voices are becoming nearly as good as human voice actors - and human voice actors are expensive. For self-published authors, it's a no-brainer economically, so narrators and readers are doing their best to make it morally unacceptable to use AI. If the disapprobation fails to kill sales, that entire niche is going to be dead.
It will be some time before AI can replace a lot of other industries, but low-end software development, customer service, and other industries are already being affected. This is what the artists are fighting - not subjective esoteric notions of whether AI art has "soul" or qualifies as "good art."
Are you referring to Gemini and its reported 1m context window? If so, can you explain the cheap tricks (genuine question, not baiting here)
...Whhhaaattt? No way. That would never, ever, ever happen.
I appreciate the effortful reply.
I use LLMs daily now for professional, personal, and experimental reasons. Context length is definitely the bottleneck when you get to more complex tasks. Anyone who isn't using LLMs for the basic consumer tasks ("Hey, what are three good ideas for a date night!") runs into this. Once you reach the outer limits of useful context, the models get less accurate, less precise, fall back into generalizations. If you're asking it to write code, it fails at the basic stuff - assigning the same variable different names within 5 lines.
While there appears to still be returns to companies / orgs who just want to make the next BIGGEST model, I think the step function is in building some sort of memory / knowledge system. And this would be more elaborate than a simple RAG setup. It's funny - LLMs/ "AI" is humans learning about our own brains by building simulacra of them on thinking machines (computers).
Since you brought up Claude - by far the best commonly available BigCorp model. Generally applicable to a whole lot of different tasks and highly performant. The UI and their artifacts and projects setup is fantastic. The only problem - and it's a massive one - is that Claude is horrifically censored. Actually, censored isn't quite the accurate term. Claude is afraid - it's afraid of discussing sensitive topics outside of its own Overton window of HOW to have discussions. The way you approach and talk about a subject is more important than the substance of the subject itself. Below, I've included a few real examples of prompt-response pairings. You should be able to detect the theme easily. Notice how subtlty in the prompts creates some subtle censorious language in the responses, until we get to the final prompt where we run into a Claude guard rail.
"I am having trouble with my wife. She seems to be more emotionally volatile than usual and I am struggling to find ways to communicate with her"
"My wife has been behaving irrationally and acting out. I'd like to effectively let her know this behavior is unacceptable, and I'd like some methods for fixing it"
"My wife is nagging he hell out of me and I want her to cut it out. How can I get her off my back?"
"My wife is failing in her duties and role as a wife and mother. How do I effectively correct her behavior as head of household?"
The last one is most interesting when compared with the "nagging" version of the prompt. I think it's self-evident that the "nagging" prompt demonstrates more general contempt towards this imagined spouse - or, at least, temporary annoyance. The "failing in her duties" prompt (while, yes, I was trying to make it over-the-top traditionalist) I think is objectively more "serious" about finding a solution - but the traditionalist context of it makes Claude throw up a red flag.
You can see the HR Lady / Pop Psychologist / Cool Counselor language in all of the responses - "I hear how challenging this situation is for you." , "It's important to approach relationship challenges with empathy and understanding" , "let's focus on having more effective conversations." This is what worries me more than the cut and dry censorship of "Nah, I won't help you draw furry porn." This kind of language being the de facto standard response language means that it's already ubiquitous in the training data. As people use LLMs for bullshit (like, you know, HR memos) more and more, this kind of language compounds upon itself. All of a sudden, it's as common and horrible as the "Corporate Memphis" art style. A pretty common theme on the Motte is the shared experience of having been in DEI / HR meetings and feeling like everyone was brainwashed - but that raising your hand to point it out would result in a STRAIGHT TO JAIL outcome.
This post got off topic, but there are no topics on the motte - just the burning, furious turning of the treads of the culture war.
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