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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...

I honestly don't get a lot of concern over AI generated images, you'd think from the all the apocalyptic rhetoric that 90% of the average Mottizens income came from fulfilling online requests for furry porn. Somehow I don't think that's actually the case.

People are expecting/fearing the singularity, and everything that looks vaguely like a part of it is liable to be catastrophized. In fairness, it's a genuine win for the transhumanists- it wasn't so long ago when people could credibly claim that this would never happen, and it unquestionably will affect real lives.

Over at The Dispatch, I was mildly startled to see a caption under an image that went something like (generated by Midjourney).

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