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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38198 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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A few followups to last week's post on the shifting political alignment of artists:

HN: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

The AI Unbundling

Vox: What AI Art means for human artists

FurAffinity was, predictably, not the only site to ban AI content. Digital artists online are in crisis mode, and you can hardly blame them -- their primary income source is about to disappear. A few names for anyone here still paying for commissions: PornPen, Waifu Diffusion, Unstable Diffusion.

But what I really want to focus on is the Vox video. I watched it (and it's accompanying layman explanation of diffusion models) with the expectation it'd be some polemic against the dangers of amoral tech nerds bringing grevious harm to marginalised communities. Instead, what I got was this:

There's hundreds of millions of years of evolution that go into making the human body move through three-dimensional space gracefully and respond to rapidly changing situations. Language -- not hundreds of millions of years of evolution behind that, actually. It's pretty recent. And the same thing is true for creating images. So our idea that like, creative symbolic work will be really hard to automate and that physical labor will be really easy to automate, is based on social distinctions that we draw between different kinds of people. Not based on a really good understanding of actually what's hard.

So, although artists are organising a reactionary/protectionist front against AI art, the media seems to be siding with the techbros for the moment. And I kind of hate this. I'm mostly an AI maximalist, and I'm fully expecting whoever sides with Team AI to gain power in the coming years. To that end, I was hoping the media would make a mistake...

Concerns over AI art continue to be vastly overblown. Such art is only really threatening things where the graphic design budget is next to $0, e.g. stuff like placeholder art or stock images. AI art continues to be terrible at generating pornographic images where a lot of freelance artists' requests come from. It also has trouble maintaining a coherent style across multiple images, so needing a set of themed images becomes problematic. Some of these issues might be solved in the near term... or they might not be. Remember that people were extremely gung ho about the future of stuff like motion controls and VR in gaming, and they thought that just a little bit more time and investment would fix the major issues. These predictions have not panned out, however, and both technologies remain a gimmick. You should likewise be skeptical of claims that artists are going to be out of work en-masse any time soon.

AI art continues to be terrible at generating pornographic images where a lot of freelance artists' requests come from.

My dude, I listed three services that provide what I believe to be good quality AI pornography. I have personally been making use of these services and I suspect I will not be using my old collection anymore, going forwards.

It also has trouble maintaining a coherent style across multiple images,

This is just a prompt engineering problem, or more specifically cranking up the scale factor for whichever art style you're aping && avoiding samplers that end with _A.

Remember that people were extremely gung ho about the future of stuff like motion controls and VR in gaming

And I can assure you I was not one of these people. Neither was I a web3 advocate, or self-driving car optimist, or any other spell of "cool tech demo cons people into believing the impossible".

For Stable Diffusion, there is no demo. The product is already here. You can already get your art featured / sold by putting it up on the sites that permit it. I know with 100% certainty that I am never going to pay an old-school artist* for a piece of digital art again, because any ideas I had were created by me with a few prompt rolls an hour ago.

*I might pay for a promptmancer if I get lazy. But that will be magnitudes cheaper, and most likely done by people who used to not be artists.

My dude, I listed three services that provide what I believe to be good quality AI pornography. I have personally been making use of these services and I suspect I will not be using my old collection anymore, going forwards.

I checked out Pornpen's feed, and the faces are still offputtingly deformed in about half of the images.

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