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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.
I think there definitely is going to be an attempt to make AI-users low-status, but it might not stick. Someone is probably going to get really popular using AI art without telling anyone.
there are already people that are micro famous for doing video tweaked by that old google deepdream image manipulation AI thingy from like 2016. I imagine some insanely talented artists will use this new stuff to make stunningly beautiful works before too long.
The thing is, AI still has a long way to go to replace someone like Android jones , but not very far to replace 80% of all fan art and furry commisions.
I look at jones' work and i don't even see how AI would help it be any more ridiculous, but maybe he does. Maybe he can make 20 of these a year instead of 10. Maybe the 10 he makes are 10 times larger next year. Idunno, im excited for the possibilities and think the effort to assign low status to AI generated art is sour grapes.
I'm not sure it's quite that high or that close. StableDiffusion is very good at making portraits or fullbodies of a single character with few accoutrements, for some species, but it struggles a lot with complex prompts or contextual clues and some other species, and while there's some ways that this will improve with additional training and data, there's others where it may reflect a technical limit in its underlying approach.
That doesn't mean it won't happen eventually. It doesn't even mean StableDiffusion can't be disruptive as-is -- I expect we'll find more and more Photoshop/SAI/so on plugins that use it as a texture- or brush-like tool to add detail and form to individual components of an image. It does some things even great artists struggle with: interpolating a character from different perspectives or in different media using textual_inversion is really magic!
It's not that it can't make a character sheet. It's not even that it might not have the token width to input a prompt for a character sheet. It's that it's not clear the current approach can allow it to have the necessary contextual framework necessary.
Of course, that might just mean one decade rather than a year.
thanks for the links, very intersting read. My counter would be that while it may be impossible to get all of the context necessary to create consistently accurate character style sheets from current AI, you don't need it to be consistent or accurate because you can brute force until you get an acceptable output. This might be cost/time prohibitive to the point that its a bad idea but how many thousands of attempts before a reasonable one pops out?
FWIW 80% was a tongue in cheek jab at the notoriously always high quality furry art community on places like deviantart, i even gave them an extra 10% (from my standard 90% of everything sucks because im so enlightened and nihilistic) because the community is legit known for pouring stupid amounts of money into legitimately well made (even if of questionable content) art.
personal sidenote, i finally upgraded my ancient computer in part because i really wanna play with stablediffusion, i hope AI art remains controversial long enough for me to get in on the grift in some way.
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