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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.
My observations from lurking around Art Twitter indicate that most artists, who are often but not always left-aligned, hate hate hate AI art. This may feel like I'm stating the obvious, since it's going to unfortunately invalidate many of their jobs overnight, but it shouldn't be understated.
There are a few strains of this. Some are denying the power of these new programs. Some in the replies indicate this guy is cherrypicking bad results, but even if StableDiffusion can't copy him 100% yet, the time until it's reproducing his art perfectly in seconds is here in less than five years, conservatively. This one is more in the acceptance stage of grief. This is from an art YouTuber that I quite enjoy and to summarize the tweet he essentially says it's here, it's good, it's probably over soon unless you're established.
From my limited perspective, AI Art is/is going to be maligned in online spaces and among journalists in the same way as Crypto and NFTs are. Big companies will adopt it, but they will be dragged for it by the online commentary class. I've seen the term "AI Art Bro" thrown around the same why as NFT Bro, which makes me a bit sad. The tech will be supremely disruptive in a way Crypto and especially NFTs can only gesture at being, but there are a lot of upsides to it, and I get the feeling that many people are dismissing it without giving the implications much thought because of the class of people they perceive as being most excited about it.
Personally, I think it sucks for the artists who get displaced, and they will be displaced, but it's good overall for everyone else who isn't an artist. Others have discussed how many doors it opens to have cheap, instant, bespoke art that you can dictate into a text document… Still, there's something deeply psychologically troubling about some code making something you base your identity on obsolete, so I do genuinely feel for them.
I think voice acting is one that's going to be hit soon as well. I look forward to this for similar reasons - how many games and productions are bottlenecked in quality/money by the high cost of voice acting? The outpouring of art we'll see from people who didn't have the resources beforehand is something that excites me.
To answer your prompt on tribe distinctions, this one might fall more on the growth/retreat split that was brought up by Ilforte. Retreat mindset focuses on artists losing their jobs and deepfakes allowing for misinformation. Growth mindset focuses on democratizing access to art and all the new doors opened by AI content.
This is definitely happening. AAA publishers are investing a lot of money into AI solutions for speech synthesis. They're especially interested in technology that allows for a single voice actor to voice many characters. Games with more than 50% AI generated lines will be on the (metaphorical) shelves in two years. I can't say more than that.
That makes sense to me. Last year I saw a Skyrim modding tool that let modders synthesize new voice lines from an AI that listened to and mimicked the lines of the in-game voice actors. It was rough but surprisingly solid, especially if you put in the time to chop up the lines by hand to make them flow better. I figured that if modders could do it (for free) then the actual industry must have something like that cooking.
Yeah the only thing holding the industry back is exorbitant licensing fees from cloud based voice synthesis services. These companies are making a killing off selling tokens while they still can before there's a open source solution.
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Sad in what sense?
I see the people behind the development of this tech as essentially launching a malicious DDoS attack on human culture. Don’t be surprised when you get pushback.
Do you have a rulebook for what types of art and what methods of making it I may permissibly employ?
To speak more plainly, I am an artist, and I want to use these tools to make art for my own amusement and enrichment. What "pushback" to these desires do you consider valid?
I'm not interested in approaching the question from the perspective of, "what is permissible for an individual artist to do?". I'm interested in approaching the question from the perspective of, "what impact will this technology have on culture and the nature of art?".
Consider the impact that AI is already having on the genre fiction market. It's easy to imagine that writers will soon feel compelled to collaborate with AI, even if they don't want to, in order to match the output rate of authors who do use AI. I think that's a rather deplorable state of affairs. But that problem doesn't come into view when we only consider individual actors in isolation; it only becomes apparent when we zoom out and look at culture as a whole.
I recommend reading Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction if you haven't. Not because I necessarily endorse his conclusions, but because his thought process is illustrative of how technology can impact the meaning and nature of art, independent of any one person's thoughts or actions.
What impact is it having, to date? I've seen stylistic filters and a few other things; what I haven't seen is people claiming they're a problem, rather than a solution. I have a friend who wants to be a writer, who's been using some of the automation tools to polish his work. I don't see how harm is done.
I don't grok how this is a problem caused by AI. writing, like most forms of art, is an endless task. You can always spend more time on a piece, improve it a little more, tweak, add, cut, polish... That's why deadlines are such a ubiquitous part of all creative industries. Artists need them.
Artists who don't want to collaborate with AI don't have to. This will doubtless mean they are less productive, so they have to make a choice on ends and means. I don't see how this choice is different from pretty much any other choice in the artistic world, all the way down to whether one takes weird furry fetish commissions. Is the artist's goal to make money or to express themselves? Both options are still available. To the extent that AI output is distinguishable from pure human effort, I think it will retain value. To the extent that it is not distinguishable, I question whether it is valuable. Is the Muse less divine for being instantiated in silicon? And it is the Muse, the infinite recombination of human experience, washed clean of one's own ego and presented to the intellect for assessment.
No time to read now, but I'll try to hit it tomorrow, thanks for the recommendation.
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This feels like it is applicable to any tool and any skill. Programmers have to keep up with tools is a well-known trope if only because the tools change so rapidly.
In your original post, you described this tool as coming from malice, can you elaborate more on that?
Not the OP, but apparently Emad Mostaque was fairly excited about the disruptive potential of Stable Diffusion. Whether that's malice or Emad simply taking a colder-blooded accelerationist stance is probably up for debate.
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It's not like these algorithms are generating inhuman images for their own inhuman purposes and flooding the Internet with them. Every image produced by one of these algorithms is something a human requested, and, if they bother to share it, presumably finds valuable in some way. That's still firmly within "human culture."
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I view it as more akin to the printing press, game development engines, digital art tools like photoshop — something that will increase creative output, not decrease it.
For the first time, new technology is not only making it easier to transfer art from head to the medium, but to decide what is being put to the medium.
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Except we've been down this road before. While the future you describe is theoretically possible, it's simply not what we're going to get. Before AI, Computers also democratized art production. CGI that would blow the minds of every single person on Earth back when I was a kid, is reproducible by mildly talented teenagers, for basically no cost other than their time. Same for editing, SFX, or practically any aspect of media production.
On top of that, the Internet later democratized distribution. No more begging publishers to kindly take a look at what you created. If people like what you made, they will get it from you directly, and tell all their friends about it.
And what is the end result off all this "democratization"? A golden age of creativity? People taking risks to create new art no one has ever seen before? Or millions of people making the exact same video, talking about the exact same thing, hoping to appease the recommendation algorithm, and endless livestreams of people playing video games, and gossiping about the news, and things other people have done?
There's more to the retreat mindset than that, though you're right most people will focus on attacks on their livelihood and identity. My fear is the effect AI will have on humanity as a whole. My fear is we will turn us into mindless consumers, incapable of creating anything beautiful anymore, or even understanding the world around us.
I mean, all of these sure look like a golden age of creativity to me. If not golden, then at least bronze. The quality and quantity of creativity displayed in these videos and livestreams can be impressive from my experience. This comment seems akin to saying "What's so special about this Van Gogh fella? He's just drawing a night sky like people have been doing forever."
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I think that the internet really has democratised media. Consider the kind of niche subjects you can find youtube videos, podcasts or blogs about. These are things that simply could not exist pre-internet. Today, you can listed to a podcast about pens (Pen Addict - Relay FM) that has been running for over ten years and has over 500 episodes. Pre-internet, there's no way that something like this could exist on radio or television.
By definition, the most popular stuff on the internet will appeal to the most people and so will be similar to what we had before. The difference is that now we have the niche, obscure stuff as well.
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Yeah, but I was thinking just today how CGI, or the overuse of CGI, has just contributed to sameyness; current popular movie culture is just dominated by superhero movies that all blend aesthetically and thematically into each other, into the same weightless and meaningless soup. This is not just because of the overuse of CGI, but CGI is a part of it; it tends to allow for striving for lowest common denominator, easy ways to convey the impression of something that is wanted to be conveyed without the effort of the traditional film craft, perhaps acceptable by itself but, as a part of a larger culture, creating an effect that everything's just... this.
The AI art risk is that it just increases the sameyness of everything exponentially, eventually making all art, even things that are supposed to be in different styles, the same generic "AI style" that's easy and cheap to churn out by boatloads but which, instead of expanding culture, just freezes it to endless iterations of average values of what's been before. OTOH, it may also be unavoidable, barring Butlerian Jihad.
This could be summarized as "superhero movies are low status. It's okay to be snobbish about low status people."
There have been plenty of superhero movies that crashed and burned because not enough effort was put into craft, including the majority of DC superhero movies that aren't about Batman. You can't just put in CGI and expect to make a ton of money from people who'll buy anything, because that just isn't true. People won't buy anything, and CGI doesn't substitute for craft.
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Yes! This is exactly how I think it will go down. I also don't see a way out of it for society as a whole. Personally I'm toying with the idea of going pre-Internet-Amish, but I'd be down for the Butlerian Jihad as well.
Do the Amish use the internet now?
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Why, both, of course.
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You're underselling the effect of these things because they're normal now, but we used to live in a world where on-demand entertainment meant picking one of 3 channels on TV whose content was made by very similar people. Hell, there was a world where to even own a copy of a book was a huge status symbol, because we didn't have a way of quickly copying them. The democratization brought by computers, the Internet, new tools, etc. has created a golden age of creativity.
In previous eras, if you wanted to be an artist, you needed a wealthy person to sponsor you. Now, open a Twitter or ArtStation account and get to work. If you are a writer with ideas too weird for publishers, you can get a following on Twitter and outsell most published authors. Musician? No need to sign a deal with a label anymore, just make good music and network. Interested in video? There's YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, etc. Take your pick of media — books, games, short videos, fanfiction — it has either been improved by or invented as a result of new technologies. If your media is too samey, then that might be due to a lack of looking on your part.
Why is this? From my point of view new tech that democratizes creation is the best solution to those that would like to gatekeep and limit the range of acceptable thought. If people seem dumber now because of things like Twitter, I'd counter that the average person isn't much of a thinker anyway and you're just able to see them more clearly now.
You go on to describe what I already described in my comment. Yes, computers have made it easier than ever before to create art, and the Internet made it easier to publish it... but I just don't see the explosion of creativity. In fact creative people seem to be barely hanging on, against all odds. Everything is set up encourage commentary and criticism, rather than actual creative expression, and on top of that, to do it off the cuff, rather than plan you want to say.
This isn't necessarily the fault of the Internet. Like I said, I do think the creative utopia is theoretically possible, but to get there, we need a lot more than tools to make stuff as cheaply and easily as possible.
Because the less you practice something the worse you become at it, and AI generated art doesn't give you a lot to practice.
First of all, I'm not on Twitter, so I don't think it's that. I'm not even sure if people are dumber now (though I am open to the possibility), I just think the kind of people that would use to play music at your local pub, paint, or join a theatre group, increasingly just don't bother anymore, and that AI will only make it worse.
They seem to be flourishing. It feels like every day I can find something new and amazing that I'd never heard about before. The problem is that there is too much good stuff out there right now, because as an individual you have limited free time and lots of responsibilities and goals.
I can see that. I still think art as a hobby will be widespread despite it not being economically viable. Art as a means to an end is where things get exciting. To give an example from my own life, I moved for work and started an online tabletop campaign with some friends of mine. This is normally something I'd do in person, but the situation is what it is. Moving online has its drawbacks but also gives me a lot of opportunities to increase the production value of my games with pictures and maps while we play. I'm not great at drawing and it isn't feasible to make that much art myself, but being able to generate it instead of hoping I can google an approximation of what I want to show? That's really exciting.
An overabundance of entertainment does make it easier to just consoom, but better tools and more time due to cheap/free labor from automation similarly frees up creatives to create. We'll have to see how it balances out. We used to have to have 9 farmers to support 1 non farmer. Better technology has turned that number on its head, and I would bet on it continuing to do so.
In the off chance you haven't come across them...
Kill Six Billion Demons
Unsounded
Black and Blue
Thanks! I've heard the names of some before but often a mention on the motte is a good push to actually give something a read.
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I don't know if I'd call 2013 "almost every day", and I only skimmed, so I don't know if it's amazing, but setting issues like this aside, the problem is most definitely not that there's too much stuff. I can accept the idea of Big Tech, and Big Media conspiring to hide all the good stuff from us, and flooding us with mediocre crap, but not that I never saw this comic because there's so much good stuff out there.
I sure hope so, but I'm worried. Few forces are as powerful as human laziness, and even personally, I can feel myself giving into it quite often.
To be fair, I also know where you're coming from. I have my own art project, where I used AI generated voices to make a... I suppose "short horror story" would be the best description. Yeah, was loads of fun! But so was early Youtube, and now it's corporate schlock. I'm worried same thing will happen with AI.
Yeah, but that was about materially supporting people. For the most part, you don't run into weird Pareto-distribution winner-takes-it-all social dynamics, when switching from farming to non-farming labour.
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