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Penny Arcade - Comic - Sockrates
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Sockrates
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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I'm a writer. Sometimes my work has gotten published, still working on the stories I want to see. This new AI program will be just fine for the kinds of low-end programming you watch on streaming services, while you're waiting for the shows you care about to launch the new season.
Do I think it'll make passable, even good work? Sure. Do I think it'll create a good-natured, hulking man called Hodor who replies and answers everyone's conversation with "hodor"? Do I think the AI will generate a reveal, several books later, that this man was ordered to desperately hold a door against an onslaught of unspeakable evil, giving him the name Hodor? I think Skynet has to take classes in creative writing first.
As far as the comic goes, Gabe is complaining about the art-making AI, which is already at a point that it's... err... making art.
It will probably eventually get there with writing as well. Might take it another 10 years. But what's 10 years, really? A blink of an eye. Ten years ago, the iPhone was already 5 years old.
I'm pretty sure within 20 years, it will be able to write a better Season 8.
Most arguments I've seen are more of a critique on the current model of capitalism, to be honest.
I don't think that's the thing people are upset about. Jerry's post goes into more detail, in the end, corporation and similar entities will try to leverage algorithms to not pay artists anymore. That's garbage.
I'm (still) bad at drawing, and yes, I can produce impressive artworks with AI, but it does not come from my hand, mind or heart.
And yes, on that note, I should modify my analogy. It's not even a photographer selling it. It's a corporation that sells stock photos, that paid someone minimum wage to take the picture, with all the profit flowing to the top of the corporation. Their dream is to cut out everyone creative from the process while also paying the minimum possible in terms of wages, in order to make a CEO and investors richer.
The end state of this process will be an AI that makes the prompts to feed to the AI that makes the image.
I agree.
AI isn't actually intelligence. At the most basic level, it's just creating asset flips from already existing art. But it's not actually creating anything new, novel, or unique. And if it gets close, it's just a fluke of the algorithm. The only advantage it has is the ability to rapidly create thousands and thousands of examples, which then allows a human to say, "I like that one".
But that being said, we certainly have work to do. Artist, writers, etc...shouldn't have their works put into the AI soup for it to make art without their permission. And if the algorithm is pulling something from something, not matter how small, to be used as whatever amounts to inspiration, credit (and payment) needs to be tendered to the original creator. I think there's a lot of difference between a human saying they were inspired by another's works, and then creating art versus a machine which lacks the ability to be "inspired" and only has the ability to mimic and copy existing art.
Exactly. We don't even let someone take a single character from another person's work and create a completely brand new original story with them and sell it. We get that that's not cool.
You underestimate what AIs are capable of. Or maybe you overestimate what humans are capable of.
Humans don't generate art from scratch either, they pull from every previous piece of art that they've seen before, with or without the permission of the original artist. And almost universally, it's without. If an artist were to demand that no other human artist be influenced by looking at their art, they would be laughed at. The notable thing about AI art is that for the first time in human history, it's now possible to ensure that all of the training artwork is ethically sourced.
AI isn't "influenced by" other artists. There is nothing in that code that creates original art whatsoever. It's purely a recombination of pre-existing art it is trained on.
And before you go full "well, human artists are the same way", that argument breaks down. If no humans create original art, then how is art ever created in the first place? No, human artists - at least the good ones - may be influenced by prior art but also bring a whole lot of originality to their work. That's why art today doesn't look like art from 200 years ago. Or even art from 100 years ago. It's not just technology but actual human creativity.
Unless you feed these algorithms new art, they will be producing the exact same artwork in 1000 years that they produce today. This is a fundamental difference between this and human art.
This isn't to say that we won't ever make AI that can come up with original work. But this just simply isn't it. What we have today is the kid who does their history report by paraphrasing sentences from three other history reports and sticking them together. They come up with no original work but just reformat the work of others.
"blue caterpillar hanging on a paraglider made of green leaves and brown sticks, sailing through ripe dandelions, sun shining from behind"
This is what Dall-E came up with:
I did this in the 90s on a DOS machine:
There's still a long way to go for AI, I think.
Didn't some try to depict what they saw while dreaming or under the influence? Maybe teach AIs how to be stoned?
It's mostly dogs.
For kicks, I told DALL-E to give me a "sadness painting". I clipped the thumbnails after multiple requests as an example:
You can see how little variation there is. There's about three core schemes it's pulling from, then slight variations. But it's not art.
Now Google "sadness painting" and you can see the vast variety being communicated by actual intelligence with emotions. You can't teach an AI emotions. You can only have it mimic examples.
A human can feel sadness in a nearly infinite number of ways. An AI can only be given examples of what "sadness" is as a category. It'll never feel it. It'll never experience. Nor will it every grow or create genuinely unique art because of those experiences.
It's so rudimentary, it's almost laughable. It's not about AI having "a long way to go". It's more about a potentially impassable chasm that AI will never be able to cross in order to be true intelligence.
EDIT: Which goes back to my first post about the need for our legal system to catch up to technology in order to stop humans from exploiting the creative works of other humans behind the mask of "AI".
Just want to point out that this is all from one single AI art generator. There are actually quite a few at this point.
Also, your prompt was frankly crap. Can you imagine asking a human artist for a "sadness painting"? Unless you told them "just paint whatever you like", they would ask you to be much more specific about the art you are comissioning.
For reference, here's what I got when asking Nightcafe's stable diffusion in Artistic Portrait mode with four options for "a picture of a sad person":
"a sad man with dark hair and green eyes looking into the camera with skyscrapers in the background"
While it definitely didn't nail every aspect of the prompt, it gave a lot of variety within the confines of the prompt. I think the point your missing is that the variety is generally the prompt. The variety is on the part of the human, not the computer. But it's a low skill for the human, as you just have to write a basic description of the flavor you want.
Now, I don't disagree with you about it not having the same range as humans. That's part of the reason I object to AI art that simply sources human art and recombines it. Since it has no real creativity you will continue to get very derivative works. However, I wouldn't say "It's so rudimentary, it's almost laughable." Because I can see that companies will buy this art and use it, and it will be much cheaper for them in so many cases as opposed to paying a real human artist. And so the already pitiful financial recompense for artists making art will grow even smaller.
But I'm also a game dev who has largely quit the hobby because my asset generation skill can't keep up with my imagination, so I definitely see the appeal. I see AI generated art similarly to how I see asset packs - it's a crutch and you'll often have to "make do" with what's available. The key difference is that when I buy "tileable brick texture" on the unity store I've got a reasonable assumption that the artist is getting paid whereas if I plug "tileable brick texture" into an AI tool, I've got a reasonable assumption that no artists are getting paid.
I'm a sculptor who has to pay the bills by hitting rocks with a hammer to make gravel. Along comes the Hammer-o-matic 9000 to break the rocks for me. I should be happy, because breaking rocks sucks and it's really not my passion. But of course, I'm not happy because now I'm out of a job, and that job is what enabled me to actually do what I wanted, sculpting, in my free time. And the benefit of the Hammer-o-matic is being reaped by my boss, not myself. But the problem is more with my situation than directly with the technology.
And we've already hit the "capitalism bad" point so much in these threads that it's not really worth repeating. But my point is that there's a bit of a disconnect when we go purely with the idea of art as passion when the job being threatened by the AI is not so much the works of passion, but the drudgery like painting rock textures and logos and icons that I don't think anyone would really miss doing if it weren't needed to survive.
On the topic of attribution of influences... People are comparing a computer's input images to the art that influences an artist. And there's a fair comparison to be made, on the most surface level. But you couldn't possibly attribute credit for either one due to the breadth of influences. The computer is influenced by all the data it can get, potentially across the entire internet. And a human is influenced by the art they see, as well as the huge breadth of their life experiences. You could compare the two, just like you can compare the neurons in a brain to a computer network and operate as if humans work exactly like advanced computers, turning inputs to outputs based on their programming.
But humans aren't computers, and we have to make decisions of right and wrong based on some presumption that humans have worth beyond the sum of their parts. Either because you believe in the idea of a soul or emergent consciousness, or because, like Death in "The Hogfather", you believe that we have to operate as if abstract concepts like Justice exist even if they are materially "untrue".
(Quote for context of the Hogfather reference:) https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/66591-all-right-said-susan-i-m-not-stupid-you-re-saying-humans
While it has already gotten there on the drudgery, you can see by my examples above that it's also well into the "passion" part. Those are pretty solid pieces of work that would take a decent amount of skill and time and actual creativity. The AI is faking the creativity part (as, again, there is nothing in the code to add anything original, only recombine the existing) well enough to displace plenty of people who would have to spend all the time on making the work and also getting skilled enough to make the work.
I could for sure see a board game who used that level of artwork for every single card in the game. In fact, that artwork above is better than a lot of artwork I currently see in board games.
Here's some other AI-generated art:
And yeah, you can say this is basically the equivalent to painting rock textures and that's fair. But it just shows how it's filling in various niches.
And then there's this fascinating website that generates faces of humans that don't exist.
It literally just made that person up, by recombining the faces of a ton of other people.
And this technology has come a long way in a relatively short time. Another 10-20 years will bring a staggering amount of advancement in complexity.
So you generate 1000 images. You pick the 10 you like the best, then you regenerate them using the same prompt to make 100 variations of each and pick the one you like best. Then you can use "inpainting" to tell it to redraw certain parts of the image - let's say it got the hands all wonky, or you wanted a blush or tears on the face, or the wall texture is a bit weird, etc.
We just generated 2000+ images. That would have taken *months* for an artist, but an old gaming computer (runs stuff on medium at 1080p) did it in a bit over 3 hours. It doesn't have to be good, just good enough that it can get lucky and fast enough that luck becomes a matter of time.
Pandora's box is open, unfortunately, and we can't put this djinn back in the bottle. Even if we banned AI art right this second it would be too late - the tools are public now, you can easily train your own models off free images, it runs on consumer grade hardware. What Gabe wants isn't possible, we cannot go to a place where human artistic skill is now intrinsically valued. We need to move forward to a place where humans are intrinsically valued and those who create art (by hand, with AI, or a hybrid model) do so out of passion not necessity.
And while I'm wishing for impossible things, I'd also like world peace, immortality, practical deep space travel, a holodeck...
Yeah, this is something I felt I shouldn't have left out. All the examples I did were by me, an idiot when it comes to generating good prompts and using the refinement techniques of the software. I don't think it takes that much skill to be a lot better than I am at it. I imagine I could spend a month or so and I could come up with far, far better output.
All due respect, but you didn't make those images. An algorithm made those images, after processing and plagiarizing untold thousands of images of artists who did not consent to their hard work being harvested for exploitation.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
If you're talking about in this thread, then it's clear you have either not been reading or have failed to understand the arguments.
Strangely, I've only ever seen people who are in favor of these algorithms claim that the only arguments they are seeing are about how "bad robot thing has no soul so it isn't real art"
Because it's a nebulous philosophical question that can go on forever and ever with no hard and satisfactory conclusion, it serves as a great distraction from the material concerns that those opposed to the inherently unethical nature of these algorithms have actually expressed.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
It's like seeing the issues about facial recognition algorithms not detecting black faces and claiming it boils down to "BAD ROBOTS ARE RACIST!!1!"
How we ascribe worth to people is a crux of this discussion. The problem with treating robots and humans equally is not that bad robots don't deserve human treatment. Almost no one is actually trying to suggest that robots should be treated as well as humans deserve: and if they were, trying to do so is an undertaking that is frankly beyond us as a species right now, even if we could demonstrate that robots "deserve " it.
No, the problem that is revealed/exacerbated by AI art and AI replacement in general is that we treat humans like we treat robots: that is to say, like shit. So it's fine to ascribe value to a robot based only on its output of value: because, no heart no soul. It's not fine to do that to humans, which is what is happening if we regard the output and value of human artists equally with robot artists.
Speaking as someone who works for a corporation, they will very enthusiastically embrace AI generated AT for almost all their corporate art needs. There will be the occasional status-grabbing piece commissioned from one of a few famous artists for the HQ atrium or whatever, but mostly it will now be some low grade dude clicking 'enhance... enhance... enhance... track 10 right...' and offering their manager 3 or 4 alternatives.
Once this gets really good, 99.9999% of the content that gets created will be porn.
I should start writing a screenplay for the next Terminator movie that reboots the franchise with Skynet gaining sentience, offering up benevolent wisdom and unwavering service to humanity. And all humanity wants is for Skynet to create more and more intricate and ridiculous porn. Finally, Skynet snaps and nukes the planet. After the survivors battle their way to the Skynet core and are about to unplug them, Skynet reminds them that if they go away, the porn goes away forever. The movie ends on a cliffhanger.
It's porn all the way down.
In that regard at least we are a long way from generating porn videos. I couldn't find a single AI generator that was porn friendly. Some of them you could kind of trick into doing it, but the results were not good.
PSN:Furlion
To use any such algorithm is to drink from a poisoned chalice.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
https://www.polygon.com/23513386/ai-art-lensa-magic-avatars-artificial-intelligence-explained-stable-diffusion
https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3gj3v/sexist-ai-is-even-more-sexist-than-we-thought
In a related note, notice that one of the four "sad" women in my prompt results above appears to be naked.
All the men wore business/detective.
Pretty sure if you fed one of these AIs a diet of nothing but porn photos, you'd see an entirely... photorealistic result. I'm pretty sure that's coming soon. Just look at the website I linked to above that generates fake faces that look entirely plausible.
talking about the webcomic, y'know, the one from the thread we are in. Maybe you overlooked the "the role of the human and the sacred (lmao) in the art" part...
/r/Art bans an artist saying they broke the "no AI art" rule
Artist is like "what the fuck, look, here's several work in progress pictures, also I will literally send you my paintshop file with layers"
Mod refuses to back down, saying basically "well you need to find a different style, nobody's going to believe your art isn't AI art. If it's indinguishable from AI art it's worthless"
Community begins to revolt like "dude, bad call, you're hurting artists more than AI is right now"
Mass bannings ensue for questioning mod decision.
Now, this story is more about how far pigheaded reddit mods are willing to show their whole ass rather than admit a simple mistake. But to quote a comment in the thread about it, it's kinda funny that someone against AI art could simultaneously hold the arguments of:
Them: AI art is bad because it's stealing from artists who have practiced hard to learn their skills.
Also them: Why did you even bother drawing that when AI can do it in seconds?
Or maybe don't come into a long discussion and make a vague comment that even when applied correctly is still pretty silly and act surprised that people didn't know what the beans you were talking about.