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To which tribe shall the gift of AI fall?
In a not particularly surprising move, FurAffinity has banned AI content from their website. Ostensible justification is the presence of copied artist signatures in AI artpieces, indicating a lack of authenticity. Ilforte has skinned the «soul-of-the-artist» argument enough and I do not wish to dwell on it.
What's more important, in my view, is what this rejection means for the political future of AI. Previous discussions on TheMotte have demonstrated the polarizing effects of AI generated content — some are deathly afraid of it, others are practically AI-supremacists. Extrapolating outwards from this admittedly-selective community, I expect the use of AI-tools to become a hotly debated culture war topic within the next 5 years.
If you agree on this much, then I have one question: which party ends up as the Party of AI?
My kneejerk answer to this was, "The Left, of course." Left-wingers dominate the technological sector. AI development is getting pushed forward by a mix of grey/blue tribers, and the null hypothesis is that things keep going this way. But the artists and the musicians and the writers and so on are all vaguely left-aligned as well, and they are currently the main reactionary force against AI.
Copied signatures are part of it (indeed, it's pretty trivial to end up getting stock watermarks out of StableDiffusion), but StableDiffusion at least does pretty clearly recognize individual artists and studios, and not just mainstream ones. It's not just that "studio ghibli" or "greg rutkowski" or "artgerm" drastically improves a lot of prompts: "hibbary" are definitely recognized keywords.
On the flip side, I'm not sure that this ban will actually block even moderately well-curated StableDiffusion txt2img results, never mind img2img or textual_inversion (or both) approaches with original bases, or where it's part of a toolchain rather than the sole step. Compare how the rules against tracing are almost entirely enforced against pretty obvious copycats, while drawovers are totally accepted.
On the other hand, I don't know that it's great to motivate people to strip any AI-specific hidden watermarks out (even if I hope no one's using FA or e621 for a general-purpose art AI). Which will be the immediate result even if none of the enforcement uses them.
On the gripping hand, I can understand if the genuine motivation were more immediate. It's pretty trivial to pump out sixty or a hundred varied images an hour, even with a multi-step AI toolchain and human curation. And there's only so much of that you can get before that's gonna have downsides, in ways that FurAffinity's (awful and dated) backend really isn't built to handle.
And while there's arguments that AI-generated art will make on-boarding into the sorts of collaboratively-purposed art that builds communities easier, FA's "Our goal is to support artists and their content" points to a more immediate concern. I don't think StableDiffusion's there even for the simplest cases (eg, single-character sfws, character sheets) yet, but it's believable that it could be close enough to impact the marginal cases in months rather than years. Whether AI-generated art has 'authenticity' or 'reflects the soul of the artist' may end up coming to entirely different results than questions about whether a community filled with AI-generated art becomes onanistic.
(If you'll excuse the puns.)
From a quick glance, Weasyl and e621 haven't taken the same approach (yet), and their underlying approaches are different enough that they may end up resolving the problem in ways other than direct bans on the media. Outside of the furry fandom, DeviantART hasn't blocked it, and enough artists have moved to Twitter that I don't think it'll be an issue.
Probably people outside of the United States (and probably outside of "The West", tbh).
Red Tribers don't care about 'artist rights' that much mostly because Red Triber exposure to Artist-as-a-title rather than artist-as-a-career is antagonistic at best, but there's no shortage of available outputs from AI that will trigger Red Tribe discomforts and no shortage of places where Red Triber frameworks for innovative ownership will be in conflict. Say what you will for the merits of doujinshi culture, but at least it's an ethos: the United States has 'solved' its copyright paradox largely by sticking its hands over its ears and its inventor's paradox by regulating away large parts of it.
I don't think AI-generated art is going to get hit as hard, but I think the general treatment of it's going to end up dropping it into a similar place, where it's theoretically available but practically fringe-even-among-the-fringe.
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