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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31753 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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/r/art, having a normal one:

https://twitter.com/reddit_lies/status/1610669909842825222

If you'd prefer not to click, it's a screenshot of a mod communication in /r/art where a mod, believing that a particular user had uploaded AI art, has banned the user, and the user is appealing on the grounds that he did not use AI and in fact has a large DeviantArt portfolio in basically that style. The mod in question responded:

I don’t believe you. Even if you did “paint” it yourself, it’s so obviously an AI-prompted design that it doesn’t matter. If you really are a “serious” artist, then you need to find a different style, because A) no one is going to believe when you say it’s not AI, and B) the AI can do better in seconds what might take you hours. Sorry, it’s the way of the world.

This led to a predictable backlash resulting in /r/art temporarily going private, which appears to have lifted as of today.

I suppose I don't have too much useful commentary except to note that identifying what art is or is not ai-generated is probably an unsolvable challenge in the general case, and that forum bans for posting it are definitely going to get a lot of false-positives. You could probably do a 90% solution where you require that all art be accompanied by Photoshop .psd files; no current art generation system makes these (though I wouldn't put money on future systems not generating .psd files from text prompts). Though of course such a rule stops users from uploading anything that wasn't done in Photoshop.

I anticipate this problem will very rapidly worsen since Emad (the Stable Diffusion guy) posted https://twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1610811234676346880?cxt=HHwWgMC8sZKS4NosAAAA , which supposedly is a very-soon-to-be-released system that resolves most of the worst problems exhibited by image generation systems (such as malformed hands, an inability to grasp prepositions, and warped text.)

I feel like I can tell what's AI-generated at the moment, but I also would not want to be an arbiter doing the judging, since I know I'm inevitably going to get it wrong.

I suppose the AI art question might lead people away from the whole "lovingly-shaded fantasy art" supergenre, but as shown elsewhere, this stuff can emulate literal toddler baby crayon doodles. It really might not matter whether or not your focus is drawing shiny-skinned anime people or superflat skrunkly skeletons, people are just going to have to plan "exit" strategies soon.

Take a look at rule 11 of the art subreddit:

No "AI" art, ever, and absolutely nothing "NFT", or anything similar.

Did we stutter?

No, seriously. Don't post it. Don't even even think about posting it.

AI = Permanent Ban. NFT = Permanent Ban.

Does anyone want a peanut?

Why NFTs are just /r/awfuleverything

Caveat: If you yourself wrote the AI, and you can prove it, contact us and we can discuss.

Note to artists: be prepared to refute accusations your art is AI-generated. Don't make a fuss, just link to indisputable proof. Also, have an established portfolio somewhere online so people are less likely to suspect your "amazing" art is an AI-generated one-off.

Did we stutter? Have a peanut? How much more obnoxious can you get?

In their search to find out, they then directly contradict themselves. 'Oh if you wrote the AI we can discuss it' when they said 'no AI art ever' just a few lines ago! And of course you simply have to provide indisputable proof that you're not guilty of producing AI art. I'm confident even Stalinist show trials didn't demand participants provide 'indisputable proof' that they hadn't betrayed the motherland. What are you supposed to do, film yourself sketching? What happens in 5 years when you can have AI produce a short video of you sketching?

Obviously the artist just needs to use an AI to change his work to appear more human in origin.

Proof of concept already used for the most ancient of internet purposes.

Hm. But how do I know it's not a double-fakeout?

Though I suppose that proves the point just as well.

Very typical of the Reddit janny to immediately mute the guy so he can't respond to the snarky "beatdown." I am glad we are not associated with that website anymore.

Hey! We think over on rdrama that we're responsible for making this blow up (not the original post but fanning the flames afterwards). But yeah it's an absolute shitshow and exposing the dark underbelly of reddit moderators and laying it bare for the world to see is always fun.

Reddit yet again confirming how much it has gone downhill, how mods for large, popular subs still have too much power

You had stuff like this back in 2014 all the time. And there are probably examples much earlier than that. This isn't downhill. You're just on the wrong team.

I'm intrigued by this comment by @reddit_lies:

I staunchly believe AI art is a 'checkmate' to the Postmodernist prioritization of the viewer's subjective experience over artistic intent.

When artistic intent doesn't matter, neither does the artist.

I think this really is a major crux of the argument. I saw people complaining that knowing art was AI-generated took the fun out of speculating about artist intent, and I was mystified. I didn't realize people still cared about what human artist's intentions were when making things. I had basically accepted the lessons from The Elephant and the Brain, that even the actual artist of a piece isn't an authority of the intent that went into making a work - that it is just the "press secretary" in their brain fabulizing a plausible story of the intent behind something.

With this as a background, most of the fun of art to me has always seemed to be using your own brain's "press secretary" to make up your own plausible story about how a particular painting came to be, or what hidden meanings it might have.

It probably helps that I'm a huge fan of Borges, and his story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", which is about a man trying to write Don Quixote word-for-word the same, but different because of the different time period and life circumstances that he is writing it under.

AI art is definitely a postmodernists dream - it is the ultimate death of the author, since no author even exists anymore.

One reply to that countered that postmodernism implies the opposite, actually, but I have no idea. Your point is interesting, though.

Somewhat related but I was reading just yesterday about GPTZero which is an AI model designed to determine whether a body of text was generated by an AI. Apparently it used GPT-2 to train. Would be interesting to see if someone could develop something similar for identifying if an image was AI generated.

I was reading just yesterday about GPTZero which is an AI model designed to determine whether a body of text was generated by an AI. Apparently it used GPT-2 to train.

I now desperately want to see how GPTZero classifies typical corporate HR speak.

If you have a sample you want to test it has an online portal here.

Not only do I want this, but I want to see art competitions spring up around such a model where artists attempt to make art (while being observed to prevent cheating) which either maximizes or minimizes the AI's belief that their art is AI generated. Having artists study and attempt to replicate AI art styles in order to fool the detector would be cool and a funny reversal of the current paradigm, and having artists learn techniques which are uniquely human would be cool too (and may be a thing they attempt to do even without such competitions in order to minimize suspicions laid on their art).

All you need to do to win is to put a swastika in your art. No AI is allowed to create that.

One fix would be to use an unfiltered AI, or at least a discriminator that was trained on unfiltered AI.

More likely, the organizers would give the contest artists a list of rules, which would disqualify any art with "unacceptable" content which would be approximately the same as what the AI consider unacceptable. Though this may still lead to exploits like making something vaguely swastika shaped that humans won't find offensive but the AI will because it can't tell the difference.

That would be pretty neat, like a Turing test analog for art. I suspect any AI-art detector would, similar to adversarial attacks against AI classifiers, not be picking up anything that was visible to the human eye. It'd be some weird stuff like unnatural statistical patterns in the bits or something.

Probably. But you could mitigate some of that by having an adversarial learning environment where an AI trains against the classifier and learns not to do some of the more obvious tells. And even if the detector is really good and humans can't truly fool it with a >50% belief, they can still compete with each other: a 20% beats a 16% beats a 8%, even if none truly fool the AI. And maybe for minimizing you would do really smooth but curving lines that AIs have trouble with (In either case, you might need to have some score for artistic beauty from human judges in addition to classifier score to prevent trivial things like a blank canvas or a couple boring straight lines.)

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