Comment by jezzamon
6 months ago
Makes sense to me, the whole structure of the artist booth is about connecting with the person that made the art. Why would you want to see a booth showing artworks that weren't even created by the person in front of you but by an AI?
If anything, an AI artwork booth should be manned by the engineers that built and trained the image model and well as scraped the training data. Then they can meet all the people they non-consensually took artwork from :P
I don't think the question is really about whether AI art is real art. (But it could be about that, as I'm not familiar with commercial cons in the US.)
Some years ago, around the time I became aware that AI art is a thing, the artist scene around Finnish cons had already decided to ban it. And the reason was obvious, as the same people are also very eager to police others who might be selling pirated products.
They don't care legal constructs such as intellectual property. They don't really care about economic constructs such as copyright. What they care about are authors' moral rights. If the model was trained without obtaining a permission from the authors of every work in the training data, they think using the model to create art is immoral.
> What they care about are authors' moral rights. If the model was trained without obtaining permission from the authors of every work in the training data, they think using the model to create art is immoral.
Art is not created in isolation. It is a result of the artist's exposure (aka training), both intentional and incidental. If an artist wants an AI model to get permission before training on their work, then the artist should get permission from all the artists they were exposed to that shaped their artistic expression.
It's training and copying all the way down.
> Art is not created in isolation. It is a result of the artist's exposure (aka training), both intentional and incidental.
"aka training" is doing A LOT of work here
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The problem is that if this argument is allowed to stand, art, as a human endeavor will shrink 99% or maybe even 100%.
Oh and this happens in a very underhanded way. Courts, governments and companies (including OpenAI and others) demand copyright is respected by humans. They impose great penalties when humans cheat, and then this happens:
https://torrentfreak.com/nvidia-contacted-annas-archive-to-s...
https://torrentfreak.com/authors-accuse-openai-of-using-pira...
https://torrentfreak.com/meta-torrented-over-81-tb-of-data-t...
If these companies were forced to abide by the rules courts impose on humans, they would have to buy billions worth of books. But of course, "that's not how copyright works". Of course, these companies ARE using copyright to avoid reciprocating:
https://openai.com/policies/row-terms-of-use/
So this is yet another "rules for thee, not for me" situation involving companies worth billions of dollars. A situation that's really hurting people's livelihoods ...
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People would say: I love when a person does that, it's cool to see someone's inspirations and participate in the process and journey of them developing their artistic talent. And I don't really care to be involved in an AI doing that
>If the model was trained without obtaining a permission from the authors of every work in the training data, they think using the model to create art is immoral.
Honestly, they aren't even that logical. Most of the anti-ai rhetoric is anti any usage, even that which is fully licensed.
To clarify, I'm not saying AI created stuff can't be art, I'm saying that someone that enters a text prompt is not the creator of the AI's output
Technically, it's a legal grey area, and currently any image by AI can be considered public domain.
This is a good change in society towards protectionist IP, which was long due for fixing, but was never done.
AI generative art doesn't exist by definition. You cannot generate art. Actually we have a term for this - kitsch.
I think that you can probably do some interesting things. Sol Lewitt made art that was just instructions to be interpreted by another human. But the medium needs to be the instructions rather than the isolated output of the machine.
>Why would you want to see a booth showing artworks that weren't even created by the person in front of you but by an AI?
I'd suggest people learn about Andy Warhol's factory where they mass produced "art." Art is obsessed with "thing-ness," that is, being able to hold and own the artistic object. It's why people without record players buy vinyl that they listen to on spotify. And the way I see it, the main problem with AI art is that (1) it's all digital, and (2) there hasn't been an artist willing to develop a model themselves in order to create unique pieces that exist in the real world.
Don't get me wrong, I think the visual arts are going through a shift that will rival the advent of the photograph, but we are at the birth of this new period. I think it's fair to say that we are in the "this is bad" period before new art movements using the technology start to emerge (e.g. photography), as well as art movements that move away from the medium (e.g. modern art). Art has always been in conflict between being about the idea and being about the skill to bring that idea to life.
https://guyhepner.com/news/318-andy-warhol-inside-the-factor...
https://www.thecollector.com/how-photography-transformed-art...
I'd suggest people learn about Andy Warhol's factory where they mass produced "art."
Ditto for Picasso, and many artists even going back to the Renaissance when great painters and sculptors sometimes had apprentices finish or duplicate paintings/sculptures for them.
But this isn't that. AI is something else entirely.
I don't recommend using the Warhol argument. It's become a trope used by AI-über-alles people who have little knowledge of and often zero experience in the arts.
My entire point is that art is an inherent contradiction. Art can be anything. Fucking Duchamp’s readymades should make any concern about AI worthless. He was literally putting someone’s trash in a gallery and it was art.
The reason why artists are mad about AI is the same reason artists were mad about the photograph… they were selling a product like craftsmen, but calling themselves artists. Yes, there is a crisis for getting paid to be someone else’s creative, but there is no crisis in creativity. In fact, there has never been more freedom than now.
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> This technique allowed him to mass-produce images, echoing the consumer culture he sought to critique and celebrate.
Critique, yes. Celebrate, wat?
I tend to categorize Warhol as an artist that if you hate their work you should love it because the point is to coerce you to hating it to lead you to the realization that the arc of factory mass production bends toward lowering quality.
I highly doubt Warhol used his chosen soup brand because he felt it was the pinnacle of soup and represented how even mass produced quantities can have excellence in quality.
More likely he was saying this piece is to art as this brand's product is to soup.
I'm old enough to remember when such arguments were had about 'real art' coming from pens, pencils and brushes, not programs. Took a good long time for 'digital art' became a category.
I don't think it did take that long actually? And I don't think it's even a good comparison. AI art vs human art isn't the same jump as physical media to digital.
Honestly I'm okay with "AI art" becoming a category. The issue is when it's presented as handmade, causing confusion.
Digital artwork being presenting at an oil painting conference would cause similar confusion and outrage for the same reasons.
I disagree. AI art is oxymoron. You cannot generate art by definition.
When? Museums were interested in and adopted digital media basically as soon as it existed.
There was also a brief moment where digital art wasn't cheating as long as you didn't use layers and the clipboard.
This too will pass. Soon everything is going to be rendered at 60hz in real time, and demands that everything needs to be rendered by hand will be as absurd as claiming every frame of a 3D game needs to be hand rendered in Photoshop.
I remember this as well, but I also remember those who thought that merely expressed their disapproval.
This time around the response as been aggressively adversarial. Not only do they disapprove of the new thing but anyone who express a contrary opinion is considered a target.
“The whole structure of the artist booth is about connecting with the person that made the art.”
I can vouch for myself and others - that we are there to just buy cool shit and not ‘connect’ with the artist.
“Why would you want to see a booth showing artworks that weren't even created by the person in front of you but by an AI?”
Um, because they are cool?
Yeah. The problem is that AI images are widely considered uncool, like hyper uncool. That's it.
you're speak for yourself. There have been wildly cool AI generated art
You could save yourself some time and jingle keys in front of your face.
"I can vouch for myself and others - that we are there to just buy cool shit and not ‘connect’ with the artist."
Who is "we"? Art, to me, is about pouring your heart and soul into something in a way that AI can trivially emulate, which makes it dangerous when placed next to art that actually has a lived experience attached to it.
I can slap a prompt into AI and get some graphic design slop that to the untrained eye looks "close enough" to the vendor next to them that actually made the art themselves. This is dangerous and spits in the face of people who pour themselves into their work.
At best, put the AI art generators into their own little special corner. But don't put one-shotted AI art next to actual crafted human created art right next to one another and say that they're equal. The brush strokes are imaginary. That's a grift.