Not everything needs to be Art

Hey, as long as you don't try to

Sell it
Claim it's yours
Use it instead of hiring professionals if you're a business

not too fussed.

Also don't call yourself an engineer. You're a prompt monkey.
- So because I use chatgpt for help coding data analysis scripts, I am no longer a mechanical engineer?
I made my avatar with AI gen. Shit's perfect for things like that.
Still would pay a real person to make something closer to what I imagine though. I mean .. if I had money that is.
Use it instead of hiring professionals if you're a business
Why wouldn't you though?
- Because then artists aren't getting paid but you're still using their art. The AI isn't making art for you just because you typed a prompt in. It got everything it needs to do that from artists.
- Remember when corporations tried to claim that money you didn't spend on their product was theft ? This way of thinking has been recycled by the anti-AI bros.
  Turns out all the money you don't spend on struggling artists is not only theft, but also class warfare. You stinking bougie you.
- Because that's a harm to society and economy.
  It's gutting entire swaths of middle-class careers, and funneling that income into the pockets of the wealthy.
  If you're a single-person startup using your own money and you can't afford to hire someone else, sure. That's ok until you can afford to hire someone else.
  \ If you're just using it for your personal hobbies and for fun, that's probably ok
  \ But if you're contributing to unemployment and suppressed wages just to avoid payroll expenses, there is a guillotine with your name on it.
Why not sell it? Pet Rocks were sold.
Why not claim it's yours? You wrote the prompt. See Pet Rocks above.
Not use it and instead hire a professional? That argument died with photography. Don't take a photo, hire a painter!
So what if AI art is low quality. Not every product needs to be art.
- Why not sell it? Pet Rocks were sold.
  Why not claim it's yours? You wrote the prompt. See Pet Rocks above.
  Because, unlike pet rocks, AI generated art is often based on the work of real people without attribution or permission, let alone compensation.
  Not use it and instead hire a professional? That argument died with photography. Don't take a photo, hire a painter!
  So what if AI art is low quality. Not every product needs to be art.
  Do you know what solidarity is? Any clue at all?
  Seems like the concept is completely alien to you, so here you go:
- Why not sell it? Because chances are the things it was trained off of were stolen in the first place and you have no right to claim them
  Why not claim it's yours? Because it is not, it is using the work of others, primarily without permission, to generate derivative work.
  Not use it and hire a professional? If you use AI instead of an artist, you will never make anything new or compelling, AI cannot generate images without a stream of information to train off of. If we don't have artists and replace them with AI, like dumbass investors and CEOs want, they will reach a point where it is AI training off AI and the well will be poisoned. Ai should be used simply as a tool to help with the creation of art if anything, using it to generate "new" artwork is a fundamentally doomed concept.
- Why not sell it? Pet Rocks were sold.
  I didn't know that pet rocks were made by breaking stolen statues and gluing googly eyes on them.
- If your AI was trained entirely off work you had the rights to, sure. But it was not.

Nearly nobody is arguing against using AI for personal fun.

People are arguing against AI destroying entire career segments without providing benefit to society, especially to those displaced. People are arguing against how it so easily misleads people, especially when used as a learning aid. People are arguing against the enormous resource usage.

There's also the fact that it's an ecological disaster when it comes to both carbon emissions and using up potable water.
- That's why, its always good to run them locally(if you use them for fun)
My father in law told me how a guy at work created several pictures with AI for decorating the floor, bragging about saving costs since he didn't use licensed pictures. But the AI may have used licensed pictures to learn creating those images. Artists lose money due to this being done by companies, which could very well afford paying the artists. I guess a private person creating memes with AI is not threatening anyone to lose their job.
Is there any free AI for personal use?
- You can run Stable Diffusion locally on your PC.
- Yes, many. It depends on what you are looking for (image generation, text generation, text to speech, speech to text, etc) and what hardware you have.
- There is, and that's typically less bad, but it still has ethical issues with how it was trained.

I was gonna go ahead and argue about this, but sadly I have been depicted as a soyjak. My lawyers told me that there is literally nothing I can do about this now

And that's why you alway pack your Uno-Reverse-Card :P
- Don't worry, Mr. Mofu, I've got this argument covered for you. Ahem...
  *always

That's great! These things are super fun. Just don't call yourself an artist or try to copyright your generations. That's like pretending to be a musician because you're good at Guitar Hero.

In fairness, I had a college buddy who learned to play real drums by playing a lot of Rock Band. He was no Joey Jordison, but he wasn't half bad.
- Aw, that's cute, a drummer thinks he's a musician too? (I kid, that's a running joke in music circles, percussionists are definitely musicians, we'd be lost without them). That's awesome! I suppose expert drumming in Rock Band would be a lot like the real thing. A program like rock band would probably work as a great drum trainer on a real set.
- So did I, and I didn't even know I could play until years later when I sat in front of a friend's kit for a lesson with them. They basically talked me through the setup, gave me a song to play, and I just played the opening without much fuss. They told me I didn't need the lesson, I could already play and I just needed time on the kit, left the room and let me go ham.
Honestly who cares about being an artist? There's always going to be snobs trying to tear you down or devalue your efforts. No one questions whether video games are art or not now, but that took like twenty years since people began seriously pushing the subject. The same thing happened with synthesizers and samplers in the 1980s and as a result there are fewer working drummers today, but without these we would not have hip hop or house, and that would have been a huge cultural loss.
Generative art hasn't found its Marley Marl or Frankie Knuckles yet, but they're out there, and they're going to do stuff that will blow our minds. They didn't need to be artists to change the world.
- Chad take
- Image generators don't produce anything new, though. All they can do is iterate on previously sampled works which have been broken down into statistical arrays and then output based on the probability that best matches your prompt. They're a fancier Gaussian Blur tool that can collage. To compare to your examples, they're making songs that are nothing but samples from other music used without permission without a single original note in them, and companies are selling the tool for profit while the people using it are claiming that they wrote the music.
  Also, people absolutely do still argue that video games aren't art (and they're stupid for it), and it takes tons of artists to make games. The first thing they teach you about 3d modeling is how to pick up a pencil and do life drawing and color theory.
  The issue with generative AI isn't the tech. Like your examples, the tech is just a tool. The issues are the wage theft and copyright violations of using other people's work without permission and taking credit for their work as your own. You can't remix a song and then claim it as your own original work because you remixed 5 songs into 1. And neither should a company be allowed to sell the sampler filled with music used without permission and make billions in profit doing so.
Calling yourself a chef because you typed in what you wanted on a food delivery app.

If only there was a way to make funny pictures without AI...

The problem with Generative Neural Networks is not generally the people using them so much as the people who are creating them for profit using unethical methods.
As far as I'm concerned, if you're using AI it's no worse than grabbing a random image from the internet, which is a common and accepted practice for many situations that don't involve a profit motive.
- The "profit motive" is just the tip of the iceberg.
  I've seen people stopping looking for random images from the web to grab them, and instead going full AI. With reverse image searches, it even doubled as an advertisement, nowadays you're getting even less of that.
Nice Strawman you got there.

Another big argument is the large resource and environmental cost of AI. I'd rather laugh at a shitty photoshop or ms paint meme (like this one) than a funny image created in some water-hogging energy-guzzling server warehouse.

You're confusing LLMs with other AI models, as LLMs are magnitudes more energy demanding than other AI. It's easy to see why if you've ever looked at self hosting AI, you need a cluster of top line business GPUs to run modern LLMs while an image generator can be run on most consumer 3000, 4000 series Nvidia GPUs at home. Generating images is about as costly as playing a modern video game, and only when it's generating.

I've gotten arguments that it's theft, because technically the AI is utilizing other artist's work as resources for the images it produces. I've pointed out that that's more like copying another artist's style than theft, which real artists do all the time, but it's apparently different when a computer algorithm does it?

Look, I understand people's fears that AI image generation is going to put regular artists out of work, I just don't agree with them. Did photography put painters out of work? Did the printing press stop the use of writing utensils? Did cinema cause theatre to go extinct?

No. People need to calm down and stop freaking out about technology moving forward. You're not going to stop it; so you might as well learn to live with it. If history is a reliable teacher, it really won't be that bad.

Well said.
I'd like to add that the biggest problem, imo, is the closed source nature of the models. Corporations who used our collective knowledge, without permission, to create AI to sell back to us is unethical at best. All AI models should be open source for public access, sort of like libraries. Corpos are thrilled we're fighting about copyright pennies instead, I'm sure.
Except it isn't copying a style. It's taking the actual images and turning them into statistical arrays and then combining them into an algorithmic output based on your prompt. It's basically a pixel by pixel collage of thousands of pictures. Copying a style implies an understanding of the artistic intent behind that style. The why and how the artist does what they do. Image generators can do that exactly as well as the Gaussian Blur tool can.
The difference between the two is that you can understand why an artist made a line and copy that intent, but you'll never make exactly the same line. You're not copying and pasting that one line into your own work, while that's exactly what the generator is doing. It just doesn't look like it because it's buried under hundreds of other lines taken from hundreds of other images (sometimes - sometimes it just gives you straight-up Darth Vader in the image).
- It’s taking the actual images and turning them into statistical arrays and then combining them into an algorithmic output based on your prompt.
  So looking at images to make a generalised understanding of them, and then reproduce based upon additional information isn't exactly what our brain does to copy someones style?
  You are arguing against your own point here. You don't need to "understand the artistic intent" to copy. Most artists don't.
- and just about any artist can draw Darth Vader as well, almost all non "ethics" or intent based argument can be applied to artists or sufficiently convoluted machine models.

Since Gen art became a thing i've been using it episodically to create images of a civilization of space-faring boars, representing the future of my glorious South-Western France civilization. They raise ducks and grow wine in space, and the lore is getting a lot deeper than i first thought. It's so fucking fun man.

Okay now I'm hooked. What's the Story of the Boar-men
- It bothers me more than it should that his snout is sticking out through his helmet glass
- I ... I don't know man !
  I think some time around the year 10000 humanity solved most of their problem and the only remaining scarcity was "good living". Like, cultures that had a sophisticated way of enjoying life through good food, good drink and good companionship suddenly came at a high premium. The people from SW France became insanely wealthy very quick, and a sort of federation was struck between the Gascony people, the Basque and the Brittons. It was really the only possible counter-power to the more colonialist and military minded Italians.
  Boar religion could be described as Albigensian catharism, except in space. Their freedom-loving ways are despised by the Italian catholic church but the galaxy is so vast that religion wars never really break out, it's just local skirmishes.
  I haven't yet determined what animal the italians have morphed into, really glad to hear any suggestion.
  Oh and here's a picture of the Assembly of the Perfecti, held annually at Baiona Station :

Wee! Haha! Fun!!

sounds of a dozen methane gas generators humming away

This happens a lot in music. It's okay to listen to music that serves other purposes than art. Gatekeeping is ridiculous.

I'm a musician. I play more instruments than you can even name correctly. I can make a tritonus substitution without you even noticing. I don't give a shit if German Schlager Music is worse than country. If I want to watch Eurovision and enjoy myself and pay to vote for songs in foreign languages, I will do so.

You cannot stop me from enjoying stupid music.

Yup. There was a commercial I saw for like, Amazon or something that had the Canon in D mixed with some more modern vocals. While trying to find it (because I liked it) someone on Reddit was bitching about how Pachelbel never meant his work to be used that way or something and that if you like it you don’t know good music.
Bitch, I sing with a symphony orchestra regularly and have done so for 15 years. I’ve played instruments my whole life. Don’t gatekeep music.

We talk about freedom the same way we talk about art,” she said, to whoever was listening. “Like it is a statement of quality rather than a description. Art doesn’t mean good or bad. Art only means art. It can be terrible and still be art. Freedom can be good or bad too. There can be terrible freedom.

Joseph Fink, Alice Isn't Dead

But does Art don't need the intention to create it, or at least to declare it as Art? For example, the Meme I made, would it be considered Art even if it was not my intention to create art?
( Okay this is less about AI, more about philosophy at this point)
- I think art is as much in the eye of the viewer as it is the maker. You'll never convince me that Jackson Pollock was an artist, I simply don't see the art in his work, but you may have a life changing emotional experience viewing it. My opinion doesn't devalue your experience any more than your experience devalues mine.
- If there's one thing artists don't do, it's try and build a picket fence around Art to separate it from Not Art. Duchamp was 100 years ago i think the point that "Art can be anything and everything" has been abundantly made during the 20th century.
- Depends entirely on your definition of art.
  To me art is playing with your senses. A painting plays with your sight. Music plays with your hearing. Statues play with your touch. Dancing plays with your sense of balance and proprioception. ...
  So anything that does that, like a nice sunset, is art to me.
- Art doesn't need the intention to create art in order to be art. Everything is "Art." From the beauty of the Empire State Building to the most mundane office building, all buildings fall under the category of art known as architecture. The same way that McDonalds technically falls under the category of the culinary arts.
  Your argument that image generators are okay because you don't intend to make art is like arguing that you don't want to wear fashion and then you buy your clothes on Temu. From the most ridiculous runway outfit to that t-shirt you got at Walmart, all clothes are fashion, but that's not the issue. The issue would be that you bought fast fashion - an industry built entirely on horrible working conditions and poor wages that is an ecological nightmare. And this is the issue with these generators: they sell you a product made using stolen work (wage theft basically) that uses more electricity than every renewable energy resource on the planet.
  The issue isn't the tech. It's the companies making the tech and the ethics involved. Though there's an entire other discussion to be had about the people who call themselves artists because they generate images, but that's not relevant here.

The issue has never been the tech itself. Image generators are basically just a more complicated Gaussian Blur tool.

The issue is, and always has been, the ethics involved in the creation of the tools. The companies steal the work they use to train these models without paying the artists for their efforts (wage theft). They've outright said that they couldn't afford to make these tools if they had to pay copyright fees for the images that they scrape from the internet. They replace jobs with AI tools that aren't fit for the task because it's cheaper to fire people. They train these models on the works of those employees. When you pay for a subscription to these things, you're paying a corporation to do all the things we hate about late stage capitalism.

I think that, in many ways AI is just worsening the problems of excessive copyright terms. Copyright should last 20 years, maybe 40 if it can be proven that it is actively in use.
- Copyright is its own whole can of worms that could have entire essays just about how it and AI cause problems. But the issue at hand really comes down to one simple question:
  Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?
  "No!" Says society. "It's not worth anything."
  "No!" Says the prompter. "It belongs to the people."
  "No!" Says the corporation. "It belongs to me."
Agreed. The problem is that so many (including in this thread) argue that training AI models is no different than training humans—that a human brain inspired by what it sees is functionally the same thing.
My response to why there is still an ethical difference revolves around two arguments: scale, and profession.
Scale: AI models’ sheer image output makes them a threat to artists where other human artists are not. One artist clearly profiting off another’s style can still be inspiration, and even part of the former’s path toward their own style; however, the functional equivalent of ten thousand artists doing the same is something else entirely. The art is produced at a scale that could drown out the original artist’s work, without which such image generation wouldn’t be possible in the first place.
Profession. Those profiting from AI art, which relies on unpaid scraping of artists’s work for data sets, are not themselves artists. They are programmers, engineers, and the CEOs and stakeholders who can even afford the ridiculous capital necessary in the first place to utilize this technology at scale. The idea that this is just a “continuation of the chain of inspiration from which all artists benefit” is nonsense.
As the popular adage goes nowadays, “AI models allow wealth to access skill while forbidding skill to access wealth.”

Oooo an AI straw man

I agree.

I have all these images in my head and zero artistic skills to create them.

Thanks AI, if indeed that is your real name, for helping me with Visual aids for my teaching work!

I honestly think it's pretty weird that people don't like AI art memes.

That's its best case use, guys. Making a computer burn down an acre of Amazon to make a picture of Trump worshipping Putin's cock.

Yes, a real artist could waste their skill doing it, but why tho?

Using it for stupid shit is fine, especially if it fucks with the AI by making it turn out even more weird shit.

Hehe, dumb frog.

what's the point of a piece of (visual) media if the same thing can be expressed more concisely with words?

My eyes like it, it brings me dopamine
Because it makes it better.

So true bestie