# AI-generated art



## Foxridley (Aug 29, 2022)

Probably inevitable that a thread about AI-generated “art” would pop up on a forum for an art site.
The other night I saw someone was posting massive amounts of AI-generated pictures, and I’ve found a few galleries full of nothing but AI art.
While it can be fun to look at the surreal images DALL-E creates, the ability of computers to create these images is improving. Some stuff from Midjourney looks pretty close to the real deal: something you might actually see in an expensive commission.
So, this brings up a number of questions. Should there be restrictions on mass-posting AI-generated art, considering that it can be churned out much faster than human-made art? Someone can easily flood the site with dozens of these pictures in a short time. I don’t mean banning it, but spamming the site with large amounts of it could be problematic.
The other question is: To what degree might it replace human-made art and commissions? If folks can get a computer to mass produce pictures for cheap or free, no talent or effort required, many will see little reason to buy commissions, draw things themselves, or learn to draw. Especially considering a lot of people already seem to think artists should draw for free.


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## DrinkingVesper (Aug 29, 2022)

It probably wont. Human art has real value.


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## DrinkingVesper (Aug 29, 2022)

Don't be afraid AI is your friend.


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## quoting_mungo (Aug 29, 2022)

There’s good and bad ways to use these image generators. I don’t believe (in an ideological sense) they belong on a site like FA unless part of a transformative work (see below for an example), though it seems like the rule prohibiting submissions created with character creator/doll maker type tools is no longer in place, which would otherwise be what I’d lean on rules-wise. It’s definitely something FA will need to address within the next couple of years at the latest.

Broadly, I do believe there’s an ethical issue with training these tools on art made by still living artists, particularly when the tools understand and accept prompts like “in Artist McArtist style.” I haven’t seen _any_ such tools that allow artists to opt in rather than opt out (if they even have that). If you ask Dall-E to pretend to be Monet or Picasso that’s a very different thing from asking it to do work imitating an artist that’s currently alive and trying to make a living, possibly from their art.

For an example of good use, Ursula Vernon did a lovely comic where she incorporated the results from a generator with additional human editing. This is a cool, ethical way to use these tools.

__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1467984046059835399


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## TyraWadman (Aug 29, 2022)

Foxridley said:


> Probably inevitable that a thread about AI-generated “art” would pop up on a forum for an art site.
> The other night I saw someone was posting massive amounts of AI-generated pictures, and I’ve found a few galleries full of nothing but AI art.
> While it can be fun to look at the surreal images DALL-E creates, the ability of computers to create these images is improving. Some stuff from Midjourney looks pretty close to the real deal: something you might actually see in an expensive commission.
> So, this brings up a number of questions. Should there be restrictions on mass-posting AI-generated art, considering that it can be churned out much faster than human-made art? Someone can easily flood the site with dozens of these pictures in a short time. I don’t mean banning it, but spamming the site with large amounts of it could be problematic.
> The other question is: To what degree might it replace human-made art and commissions? If folks can get a computer to mass produce pictures for cheap or free, no talent or effort required, many will see little reason to buy commissions, draw things themselves, or learn to draw. Especially considering a lot of people already seem to think artists should draw for free.



Ai is a bit tricky- depending which ai software they use, it's against the rules to post it on FA because it creates images derived from other existing artwork.

All in all, I've seen the 'capabilities' of this software and it's a joke. Everything I have searched so far looks like art a beginner might make stepping into photoshop for the first time, or doesn't even look solid (blobs of color with no definition/don't complete the image). You have to remember they're only showing you what they want you to see... Not the garbage I'm getting XD


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## quoting_mungo (Aug 29, 2022)

TyraWadman said:


> Ai is a bit tricky- depending which ai software they use, it's against the rules to post it on FA because it creates images derived from other existing artwork.


The problem there, sadly, is that it’s not very enforceably against the rules. I hate to say this, but it’s been a problem with the “no third party reports” policy for a long time. It _should_ still matter that the rules say not to, but too much of the time that’s not how users actually think.

I would love to see blatant violations and lack of credit get addressed more firmly, and I think with tools like this becoming more available it’s going to be needed even more than it already is.


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## Foxridley (Aug 29, 2022)

quoting_mungo said:


> There’s good and bad ways to use these image generators. I don’t believe (in an ideological sense) they belong on a site like FA unless part of a transformative work (see below for an example), though it seems like the rule prohibiting submissions created with character creator/doll maker type tools is no longer in place, which would otherwise be what I’d lean on rules-wise. It’s definitely something FA will need to address within the next couple of years at the latest.
> 
> Broadly, I do believe there’s an ethical issue with training these tools on art made by still living artists, particularly when the tools understand and accept prompts like “in Artist McArtist style.” I haven’t seen _any_ such tools that allow artists to opt in rather than opt out (if they even have that). If you ask Dall-E to pretend to be Monet or Picasso that’s a very different thing from asking it to do work imitating an artist that’s currently alive and trying to make a living, possibly from their art.
> 
> ...





TyraWadman said:


> Ai is a bit tricky- depending which ai software they use, it's against the rules to post it on FA because it creates images derived from other existing artwork.
> 
> All in all, I've seen the 'capabilities' of this software and it's a joke. Everything I have searched so far looks like art a beginner might make stepping into photoshop for the first time, or doesn't even look solid (blobs of color with no definition/don't complete the image). You have to remember they're only showing you what they want you to see... Not the garbage I'm getting XD





quoting_mungo said:


> The problem there, sadly, is that it’s not very enforceably against the rules. I hate to say this, but it’s been a problem with the “no third party reports” policy for a long time. It _should_ still matter that the rules say not to, but too much of the time that’s not how users actually think.
> 
> I would love to see blatant violations and lack of credit get addressed more firmly, and I think with tools like this becoming more available it’s going to be needed even more than it already is.


As far as it being derived from existing art, it depends on how heavily referenced it is, since human artists also learn from watching others and use references. Heck, I use references since my proportions often end up out of wack.

As far as FA’s rules on third party reporting goes, you can still report stuff like screenshots of TV shows. Arguably, stuff simply pumped out by an AI lacks artistic merit. Altogether, any restrictions on AI art would involve changing FA’s policies.


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## TyraWadman (Aug 29, 2022)

Foxridley said:


> As far as it being derived from existing art, it depends on how heavily referenced it is, since human artists also learn from watching others and use references. Heck, I use references since my proportions often end up out of wack.



Referencing and literally copying and pasting are very different. XD



Foxridley said:


> As far as FA’s rules on third party reporting goes, you can still report stuff like screenshots of TV shows. Arguably, stuff simply pumped out by an AI lacks artistic merit. Altogether, any restrictions on AI art would involve changing FA’s policies.



There are AI's like artbreeder that explicitly state it creates/blends existing artworks. If you don't credit the original artists/don't have their permission, it's against the rules. 



> 2.5 Citing Sources​Content that was not made explicitly by you that is used as part of your submission (such as free-to-use lineart, backgrounds, or royalty-free content) must cite its original source and be used with permission from the copyright holder. All permissions and copyright holders must be cited in the content's description. If an artist or character owner wished to be kept anonymous they must be credited as anonymous.





> 2.6 Content Not Made By You / For You​Content that was neither made by nor for the uploader is not allowed, unless part of a derivative work (See Section 2.5 for more information) or a group that has permission from the copyright holder. All permissions and copyright holders must be cited in the content's description. A group is defined as a user account dedicated to showcasing content of a chosen theme with others who share similar interests for the purpose of building a community and giving artists exposure.


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## Foxridley (Aug 29, 2022)

TyraWadman said:


> Referencing and literally copying and pasting are very different. XD
> 
> 
> 
> There are AI's like artbreeder that explicitly state it creates/blends existing artworks. If you don't credit the original artists/don't have their permission, it's against the rules.


Yeah, that’s what I wasn’t sure about: where the “derived” part of AI art falls on a scale of “referencing” to “straight-up copying.”


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## Mambi (Aug 29, 2022)

Foxridley said:


> Probably inevitable that a thread about AI-generated “art” would pop up on a forum for an art site.
> The other night I saw someone was posting massive amounts of AI-generated pictures, and I’ve found a few galleries full of nothing but AI art.
> While it can be fun to look at the surreal images DALL-E creates, the ability of computers to create these images is improving. Some stuff from Midjourney looks pretty close to the real deal: something you might actually see in an expensive commission.
> So, this brings up a number of questions. Should there be restrictions on mass-posting AI-generated art, considering that it can be churned out much faster than human-made art? Someone can easily flood the site with dozens of these pictures in a short time. I don’t mean banning it, but spamming the site with large amounts of it could be problematic.
> The other question is: To what degree might it replace human-made art and commissions? If folks can get a computer to mass produce pictures for cheap or free, no talent or effort required, many will see little reason to buy commissions, draw things themselves, or learn to draw. Especially considering a lot of people already seem to think artists should draw for free.



A human can create. An AI can only *re*-create. We imagine, it recombines. We have no limits, while it has only the limits given to it by us.


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## LameFox (Aug 29, 2022)

I think going forward generated images probably should be in their own category or require mandatory tagging for filter purposes, or else the sheer volume could make looking for anything else a colossal pain in the ass.

Assuming art sites even want to host AI generated images. I guess it's worth considering that as the tools become more accessible, that volume they could potentially output may be a cost the hosts don't see any value in bearing.


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## Foxridley (Aug 29, 2022)

LameFox said:


> I think going forward generated images probably should be in their own category or require mandatory tagging for filter purposes, or else the sheer volume could make looking for anything else a colossal pain in the ass.
> 
> Assuming art sites even want to host AI generated images. I guess it's worth considering that as the tools become more accessible, that volume they could potentially output may be a cost the hosts don't see any value in bearing.


That's another issue, given how easy it is to mass produce, that we could see more AI-generated art than real art. If that were to happen, it could drive users away. That sort of thing might create an incentive for site operators to restrict it.


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## quoting_mungo (Aug 29, 2022)

Foxridley said:


> As far as it being derived from existing art, it depends on how heavily referenced it is, since human artists also learn from watching others and use references. Heck, I use references since my proportions often end up out of wack.


I feel like using generators like these without further (manual) editing is more akin to slapping a Photoshop filter onto something than using references or learning from other artists’ methods. I’m willing to treat training the raw software on exclusively your own work an acceptable special case, with the caveat that few if any artists have the raw numbers in their portfolio to make such use very feasible. At that point the method becomes “part of” the piece, though.



Foxridley said:


> As far as FA’s rules on third party reporting goes, you can still report stuff like screenshots of TV shows. Arguably, stuff simply pumped out by an AI lacks artistic merit. Altogether, any restrictions on AI art would involve changing FA’s policies.


Screenshots of TV shows can’t be third party reported if used in e.g. a background, mind (so if they’re derivative). Like, draw your character into a scene from a cartoon and now the copyright holder is the only one who gets to complain. The artistic merit rules are also extremely narrow in application.

I don’t often say anything this direct in criticism of FA’s rules and how they’re enforced, because I feel spelling out the rules’ shortcomings comes too close to giving people who want to push the line a playbook, but I think it’s important in this context. Even now I’m keeping some specific things back because I don’t want to be writing “how to get away with ignoring the rules 101.”

But yes, absolutely FA needs to add rules (or at least language) to address this, within the next couple years. Waiting for it to become a problem is asking for drama, IMO.



Foxridley said:


> That's another issue, given how easy it is to mass produce, that we could see more AI-generated art than real art. If that were to happen, it could drive users away. That sort of thing might create an incentive for site operators to restrict it.


Might or might not - ultimately it's a value judgment that site owners need to make. Like... sales reminders annoy the hell out of a lot of people and rules keep circling back to being pretty permissive where those go, on FA. I would love to see rules of art sites, in general, stipulate that differences between submissions need to have artistic merit (possibly with specific exceptions carved out for "here's a single version with/without speech bubbles" as speech bubbles can block out a lot of a piece). Like... if the changes made, in isolation, would violate the artistic merit rules, then they're not significant enough to qualify as a non-duplicate submission.

Because I'm hella salty about artists slapping a teensy tiny "reminder" text in one corner, too small to be visible in a front page thumbnail, and that being sufficient to call it a unique submission.


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## quoting_mungo (Aug 31, 2022)

Double posting because it’s been long enough since my last post that an edit risks missing some people who might be interested and I came across this tweet that seems highly relevant to the discussion:

__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1564651635602853889
There’s some context I’d like to have as to this person’s reasoning and reasons for submitting the piece. Is this similar to the thing some people did to embarrass peer reviewed journals (submit garbage papers and compile statistics for how they were received, basically, IIRC)? Is it one of those “what is art?” things like putting a toilet in an art gallery? Is it something like the dumbass classmate I had in sequential arts school who justified using a pirated version of Photoshop with the fact that her copy was in German and so a pain in the ass to use? (Curating AI-generated images to pick out the gems is something I can absolutely see being both tedious and time-consuming, but is that really an equivalent sort of effort as what an artist might put into a digital painting that could win the same award?)


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## Foxridley (Aug 31, 2022)

quoting_mungo said:


> Double posting because it’s been long enough since my last post that an edit risks missing some people who might be interested and I came across this tweet that seems highly relevant to the discussion:
> 
> __ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1564651635602853889
> There’s some context I’d like to have as to this person’s reasoning and reasons for submitting the piece. Is this similar to the thing some people did to embarrass peer reviewed journals (submit garbage papers and compile statistics for how they were received, basically, IIRC)? Is it one of those “what is art?” things like putting a toilet in an art gallery? Is it something like the dumbass classmate I had in sequential arts school who justified using a pirated version of Photoshop with the fact that her copy was in German and so a pain in the ass to use? (Curating AI-generated images to pick out the gems is something I can absolutely see being both tedious and time-consuming, but is that really an equivalent sort of effort as what an artist might put into a digital painting that could win the same award?)


On the last bit, I think combing through AI-generated images is more akin to fine-tuning a Google search. In both cases you’re giving a prompt to a machine. Picking the gems, so to speak, could just as well be done going through other people’s galleries. So it isn’t really comparable to a genuine creative process.


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## quoting_mungo (Aug 31, 2022)

Foxridley said:


> On the last bit, I think combing through AI-generated images is more akin to fine-tuning a Google search. In both cases you’re giving a prompt to a machine. Picking the gems, so to speak, could just as well be done going through other people’s galleries. So it isn’t really comparable to a genuine creative process.


Oh, absolutely, that’s closer to my thinking. I’m more wondering if the people who think that the person’s actions weren’t wrong are using a logic of “well it was hard work and therefore the results are my work.” And that reminded me of my long ago classmate who felt her pirated Photoshop was justified by the German UI being a pain in the ass.


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## Foxridley (Aug 31, 2022)

quoting_mungo said:


> Oh, absolutely, that’s closer to my thinking. I’m more wondering if the people who think that the person’s actions weren’t wrong are using a logic of “well it was hard work and therefore the results are my work.” And that reminded me of my long ago classmate who felt her pirated Photoshop was justified by the German UI being a pain in the ass.


Presenting AI art, like above, in that sense also seems to be an extension of “if it’s online, it’s free for me to take and use for my benefit.”
I’m kinda reminded of the kid who stole one of my YouTube videos with the excuse that my stuff had more views.


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## Ziggy Schlacht (Aug 31, 2022)

Mambi said:


> A human can create. An AI can only *re*-create. We imagine, it recombines. We have no limits, while it has only the limits given to it by us.


That's a philosophical argument at best. No art is created in a vacuum - you are a product of your influences, and are just combining those to create something "new." If you don't believe me - go draw a species _never_ seen before. Well, odds are you'll take say the muzzle of a wolf with cats ears and insect... crap, you're just combining elements. How is that different than feeding the AI a prompt and it combines things instead?


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## Fallowfox (Aug 31, 2022)

TyraWadman said:


> Ai is a bit tricky- depending which ai software they use, it's against the rules to post it on FA because it creates images derived from other existing artwork.
> 
> All in all, I've seen the 'capabilities' of this software and it's a joke. Everything I have searched so far looks like art a beginner might make stepping into photoshop for the first time, or doesn't even look solid (blobs of color with no definition/don't complete the image). You have to remember they're only showing you what they want you to see... Not the garbage I'm getting XD



It's worth considering that the art that human intelligences post is curated; they also only tend to share their best content. 
All art produced by human intelligences is effectively re-mixed input, mostly from existing photography and artworks, so it can become difficult to tell how the human approach to producing art is fundamentally any more creative than an artificial intelligence's. 

This is art produced by an artificial intelligence 'midjourney'. 






I think this field is going to progress rapidly and that we probably will not need human intelligences to produce art for business purposes, at least not directly. 
I think people will still make art, but for their own amusement, rather than because it will be a limited commodity.



Nexus Cabler said:


> I will say that I feel AI isn't capable of putting real artists out of business because it's so difficult for even an advanced program to create something that matches the specific image and idea a human being has in their mind.
> 
> Additionally, you will likely notice that even the most impressive computer-generated arts have recognizable flaws that make it stand out as something made by a program. I've seen that these generators struggle with anatomy like hands, feet, and faces.
> 
> I'm convinced that we will be able to distinguish something made by a person from something made by a computer.



It is possible to initiate artificial intelligences with existing images as input, in addition to natural language prompts. 
You can also re-cycle the output back into the intelligence multiple times.
So you can request an AI to produce several options, and then proceed with an iterative process to arrive at a well finished piece. 

I think a problem we're going to encounter is that the visions humans have for what they want may themselves become viewed as inadequate and vague instructions, and that interpreting what will appeal to humans may itself become automated.




quoting_mungo said:


> The problem there, sadly, is that it’s not very enforceably against the rules. I hate to say this, but it’s been a problem with the “no third party reports” policy for a long time. It _should_ still matter that the rules say not to, but too much of the time that’s not how users actually think.
> 
> I would love to see blatant violations and lack of credit get addressed more firmly, and I think with tools like this becoming more available it’s going to be needed even more than it already is.




Unless the output from an AI is automatically recorded or marked in some way, how are staff expected to distinguish what is produced by an artificial and a human intelligence anyway?


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## Mambi (Aug 31, 2022)

Ziggy Schlacht said:


> That's a philosophical argument at best. No art is created in a vacuum - you are a product of your influences, and are just combining those to create something "new." If you don't believe me - go draw a species _never_ seen before. Well, odds are you'll take say the muzzle of a wolf with cats ears and insect... crap, you're just combining elements. How is that different than feeding the AI a prompt and it combines things instead?



Hmmm, a very good good point, but there is one difference I suppose. I'm being guided by my *feelings* as I create something, while the computer is just pattern-matching to an algorithm. Whether it looks right, makes me feel happy, conveys a personality, whatever it is, I'm being guided by my emotional biases and preferences.

The computer would not, it would be just combining elements and asking "is this art now?" basically. Since a blank page or a Monet would make the computer "feel" the same, it would have to judge it's art creation process totally objectively and factually. There would be no soul to it because the creator had none. IT doesn't even appreciate it's art...it literally can't...so how am I supposed to?

I mean, can you imagine if someone tried to tell say Quentin Tarantino that the computer can make movie "art" as well as he could through an algorithm? After being done laughting at the person saying that foolishness, he'd smash it to pieces with a sledgehammer out of pure principle!


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## quoting_mungo (Aug 31, 2022)

Valid concern that was raised on this topic elsewhere: If this is treated as a legitimate and unproblematic way to create “real art,” it’s liable to further devalue artists’ work. 

Furry fandom already has a lot of artists undercharging; what happens if generated art adds further pressure to lower prices?



Fallowfox said:


> Unless the output from an AI is automatically recorded or marked in some way, how are staff expected to distinguish what is produced by an artificial and a human intelligence anyway?


While you have a point, I don’t believe that catching 100% of violations is always necessary for a policy to be good. Most people who build their gallery on generated art will sooner or later slip up, and can be dealt with when they do.


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## Firuthi Dragovic (Aug 31, 2022)

Foxridley said:


> The other question is: To what degree might it replace human-made art and commissions? If folks can get a computer to mass produce pictures for cheap or free, no talent or effort required, many will see little reason to buy commissions, draw things themselves, or learn to draw. Especially considering a lot of people already seem to think artists should draw for free.


You're more likely to see more complex commissions or more unusual species if the computer thing takes off.

The images needed to initiate an AI have to come from _some_where, after all.



Fallowfox said:


> I think this field is going to progress rapidly and that we probably will not need human intelligences to produce art for business purposes, at least not directly.
> I think people will still make art, but for their own amusement, rather than because it will be a limited commodity.


Ohohoho, you are underestimating human pickiness and possessiveness if you think this will replace art for business purposes, ever.


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## Fallowfox (Aug 31, 2022)

quoting_mungo said:


> Valid concern that was raised on this topic elsewhere: If this is treated as a legitimate and unproblematic way to create “real art,” it’s liable to further devalue artists’ work.
> 
> Furry fandom already has a lot of artists undercharging; what happens if generated art adds further pressure to lower prices?
> 
> ...



Is photography a legitimate way to produce portraits? Is photography an art form when contrasted with portraiture painting?
Did the advent and democratisation of photography undermine the career of portrait artists? _It probably did_. Does that mean the distribution of photographs should have been more tightly restricted?


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## RTDragon (Aug 31, 2022)

I've been seeing quite a few of them show up on FA which i'm surprised but i don't really like seeing it cause it makes it look like it's not genuine without the artist own work and style into it. Though seeing those AI generated furry artworks says quite a lot though.


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## Ziggy Schlacht (Aug 31, 2022)

Mambi said:


> Hmmm, a very good good point, but there is one difference I suppose. I'm being guided by my *feelings* as I create something, while the computer is just pattern-matching to an algorithm. Whether it looks right, makes me feel happy, conveys a personality, whatever it is, I'm being guided by my emotional biases and preferences.
> 
> The computer would not, it would be just combining elements and asking "is this art now?" basically. Since a blank page or a Monet would make the computer "feel" the same, it would have to judge it's art creation process totally objectively and factually. There would be no soul to it because the creator had none. IT doesn't even appreciate it's art...it literally can't...so how am I supposed to?
> 
> I mean, can you imagine if someone tried to tell say Quentin Tarantino that the computer can make movie "art" as well as he could through an algorithm? After being done laughting at the person saying that foolishness, he'd smash it to pieces with a sledgehammer out of pure principle!


Question, if I sent you art you liked and _didn't_ tell you it was AI created, you'd wonder who the artist was. If I then told you it was AI, would you cease to like it? Would you cease to feel anything? Would it cease to be art?

Granted, this debate is somewhat moot, because "what is art" and "what should be on FA" are two different questions. I don't like the idea of FA permitting AI generated art, because it's a lot easier to produce than well... anything done by a person. And in many cases, exceeds what a lot of people can do. So by making quality pictures easy to generate, you cheapen the skill of artists. But that doesn't mean it's not _art._


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## RTDragon (Aug 31, 2022)

Ziggy Schlacht said:


> Question, if I sent you art you liked and _didn't_ tell you it was AI created, you'd wonder who the artist was. If I then told you it was AI, would you cease to like it? Would you cease to feel anything? Would it cease to be art?
> 
> Granted, this debate is somewhat moot, because "what is art" and "what should be on FA" are two different questions. I don't like the idea of FA permitting AI generated art, because it's a lot easier to produce than well... anything done by a person. And in many cases, exceeds what a lot of people can do. So by making quality pictures easy to generate, you cheapen the skill of artists. But that doesn't mean it's not _art._



Fortunately i do know artfight doesn't allow AI generated images involving characters as it's an art trading game between two teams. Plus there are quite some tells when a drawing is made with AI generated images. Seeing something like this popping up with art trades would make things quite unfair as it makes hard work quite a moot point.


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## LameFox (Sep 1, 2022)

Ziggy Schlacht said:


> Question, if I sent you art you liked and _didn't_ tell you it was AI created, you'd wonder who the artist was. If I then told you it was AI, would you cease to like it? Would you cease to feel anything? Would it cease to be art?
> 
> Granted, this debate is somewhat moot, because "what is art" and "what should be on FA" are two different questions. I don't like the idea of FA permitting AI generated art, because it's a lot easier to produce than well... anything done by a person. And in many cases, exceeds what a lot of people can do. So by making quality pictures easy to generate, you cheapen the skill of artists. But that doesn't mean it's not _art._


I think I would actually like it less. It could still look nice, and there could still be some amount of meaning in it—maybe, if people get more inventive with it than they seem so far—owing to the user directing it, but there are also a lot of smaller choices that go into making art that would no longer be made consciously if an AI was just dredging them out of its dataset. Things that would previously have been part of the expression of a person would now just be coming from automated mimicry, often at the direction of people who don't even understand the processes being mimicked.

That might not make much difference to its value as a product (though being so easy to create surely will), but outside of industry there's a lot of personal expression in art too and I do think it waters that down. There'd no longer be any point looking for those things in it, only the macro elements would matter, essentially expressing stuff at the level of "I like spaceships". For instance, you'd not see something like how some people like to spend a lot of time drawing really intricate details, while others prefer to leave things pretty loosely suggested and move on. You might see that someone steering an AI _liked how one of those styles looks_ more than the other, but it's just an aesthetic at that point.


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## Foxridley (Sep 1, 2022)

LameFox said:


> I think I would actually like it less. It could still look nice, and there could still be some amount of meaning in it—maybe, if people get more inventive with it than they seem so far—owing to the user directing it, but there are also a lot of smaller choices that go into making art that would no longer be made consciously if an AI was just dredging them out of its dataset. Things that would previously have been part of the expression of a person would now just be coming from automated mimicry, often at the direction of people who don't even understand the processes being mimicked.
> 
> That might not make much difference to its value as a product (though being so easy to create surely will), but outside of industry there's a lot of personal expression in art too and I do think it waters that down. There'd no longer be any point looking for those things in it, only the macro elements would matter, essentially expressing stuff at the level of "I like spaceships". For instance, you'd not see something like how some people like to spend a lot of time drawing really intricate details, while others prefer to leave things pretty loosely suggested and move on. You might see that someone steering an AI _liked how one of those styles looks_ more than the other, but it's just an aesthetic at that point.


Though I can still see more value given to real, human-made art, in a similar sense that natural gems fetch a higher price than synthetic ones.


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## quoting_mungo (Sep 1, 2022)

Fallowfox said:


> Is photography a legitimate way to produce portraits? Is photography an art form when contrasted with portraiture painting?
> Did the advent and democratisation of photography undermine the career of portrait artists? _It probably did_. Does that mean the distribution of photographs should have been more tightly restricted?


I don't think this stands as a comparison; one of the primary ethical issues with generated art is that it's trained on human artists' work. (Another is the lack of honesty about various aspects among most people who take credit for their generated art because they plugged in the keyword/prompt image/foo.) If there had never been portrait artists, portrait photography could still look no different. (I say 'could' because obviously the aesthetic of how portraits are arranged/set up has no doubt been influenced by the history of portraiture.) If it is never trained on human artists' work, it's pretty much impossible for AI to produce results that look like human-made art. This goes doubly, as I believe I've said before in this thread, for generators trained on the work of living artists, which will (correctly) parse and follow instruction to imitate a named artist's style.

Like... I'm also of the opinion that FA should never have loosened up rules to allow collection photos. Photography can be art. That doesn't mean it's in the scope of an art gallery (IMO) to host photos of someone's collection of pikachu action figures (unless artfully arranged or there's some cool lighting shit going on or whatever - simply documenting your commercially produced collector’s  items is not art any more than a shopping list is literature or poetry).

Also worth considering is the involvement of cryptobros in this whole thing. People who already have proven themselves to have disappearingly little regard for artists' rights. Not people I trust to use or develop this technology in an ethical direction.

I also want to drop this here:

__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1565080555049594880(Worth noting is that Kiki has previously taught art at college level, and Windfalcon (who comments in the thread) is a current college Illustration instructor.)


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## ConorHyena (Sep 1, 2022)

quoting_mungo said:


> I don't think this stands as a comparison; one of the primary ethical issues with generated art is that it's trained on human artists' work. (Another is the lack of honesty about various aspects among most people who take credit for their generated art because they plugged in the keyword/prompt image/foo.)



I think this hinges much on the definition of fair use, intellectual property and derivative work, especially when it comes to 'styles' which are by no means exclusive to a single person (there are artists out there making money imitating other people's styles in a legitimate way)

As previously has been mentioned, people do art by essentially re-interpreting concepts that have been around for aeons. we find our style by looking at art we like and to a degree imitating that within our limited means. 

Computer art is essentially an extension of this (the people who wrote the program in this case would be the 'artist' not the program itself.)  Much like Warhol's work, or some things the italian futurismo came up with, this is something that hasn't been around before. 

However, that being said, I would be significantly less lenient about people taking credit for AI- generated stuff. If we assume this is art (and by all intents and purposes it is) then the creator of the program should be credited, because, by and large, it's his work.


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## Fallowfox (Sep 1, 2022)

@quoting_mungo I agree that dishonestly representing an AI's work as your own is a problem, although more from a sense of fairness than because of any immediate practical results. 

It is worth considering most acclaimed art features recycled motifs based on previous art; Salvador Dalí's's famous surrealist paintings often contain collaged elements taken from other artists' work. Roy Liechtenstein's most famous work is almost entirely based only upon enlarging existing work from other artists- who objected very strongly to his practice. 
Even going back to the renaissance, it was common place to directly copy entire figures from previous artists' work; (indeed this was viewed as legitimate and 'good' thing to do; as if it was a form of citation). In addition to that most famous artists had 'imitators' who tried to produce similar works to capitalise on their success. 
Sometimes painting credited to an artist were actually produced entirely by their assistants- a practice that continues today.

So these discussions are unfortunately not new problems. Personally I dislike artists like Roy Liechtenstein a lot, and would view somebody who was being honest about using an AI to make and share images of landscapes as less of a threat.


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## Mambi (Sep 1, 2022)

Ziggy Schlacht said:


> Question, if I sent you art you liked and _didn't_ tell you it was AI created, you'd wonder who the artist was. If I then told you it was AI, would you cease to like it? Would you cease to feel anything? Would it cease to be art?



I give you that, you're right. To me nothing would change, but in this case, "I" would be making it art by *my *appreciation of it as such. Just by coincidence what I see I like, but I've seen gemstones glued to things by children that give me joy as well. 

It's like when a monkey flings paint onto a canvas and someone sells it as an art piece. Someone who doesn't know the artist will start "interpreting the strokes" and colour choices and symbolic meaning behind it...happens all the time. But the animals didn't think so when they were mucking around. Same with the AI. It's not really talent as we know it, it's just random stuff that some people will like and some people will hate...errr...

_<smacks himself in the head>_ Which is art...by definition. _<blush> _ So crap, you're *right, *and I owe you a hug? _<the cat grins sheepishly and opens his arms wide> _


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## Green_Brick (Sep 1, 2022)

The moment AI is able to make pornographic material of everyone's favorite characters, Rule 34 is going to explode in size beyond comprehension. I doubt we would have enough hard drives to contain all the possibilities that some thirsties are going to generate.


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## LameFox (Sep 1, 2022)

Green_Brick said:


> The moment AI is able to make pornographic material of everyone's favorite characters, Rule 34 is going to explode in size beyond comprehension. I doubt we would have enough hard drives to contain all the possibilities that some thirsties are going to generate.


I think it already could if you didn't mind a bit of unintentional horror? Or at least I got the impression reading about stable diffusion that if you tweaked some of the code you could remove the bit they put in to stop it being NSFW.


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## Foxridley (Sep 2, 2022)

Green_Brick said:


> The moment AI is able to make pornographic material of everyone's favorite characters, Rule 34 is going to explode in size beyond comprehension. I doubt we would have enough hard drives to contain all the possibilities that some thirsties are going to generate.


Not a pleasant thought considering how much Rule 34 gets into Google images already, even for friggin’ kids’ shows.


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## Mambi (Sep 2, 2022)

Foxridley said:


> Not a pleasant thought considering how much Rule 34 gets into Google images already, even for friggin’ kids’ shows.



I've always believed that there is nothing, literally *nothing*, that 2 people can do to each other that doesn't turn on *someone* in the world...sadly.


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## Ziggy Schlacht (Sep 6, 2022)

Mambi said:


> _<smacks himself in the head>_ Which is art...by definition. _<blush> _ So crap, you're *right, *and I owe you a hug? _<the cat grins sheepishly and opens his arms wide> _


If it makes you feel better, this is one of the bigger issues with AI art - it absolutely can create compelling, evocative _art_. Art doesn't cease to be art because it was generated by code. Artists want to believe the generation method matters, as it's comforting - but that doesn't make it true. The reality is the model of "pay artist to do a custom drawing for you" is under a plausible threat. Just because (most) AI art is obvious now, give it a few years and it won't be.

Remember, in 2005 a pocket computer that could get your FAF on demand was scifi. The Iphone came out in 2007. I can now start my truck in California while on a beach in Italy. I can take a picture of my cat and it can tell me it's a cat and look up information for me. 

So long as there's a market, or a potential thereof, there will be development. AI art has a market.


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## Foxridley (Sep 7, 2022)

So, apparently some people are using the term “AI artist” for themselves, which I don’t quite get.
Now, there is “AI-assisted” art where the person makes their own changes to the image, but other than that it’s just giving instructions to another entity. In that sense, the AI-generated “art” you get is more like something you commissioned than something you made.


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## LameFox (Sep 8, 2022)

"AI artist" sounds like saying you're a bot.


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## Bababooey (Sep 8, 2022)

*Huzzah!*


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## ben909 (Sep 9, 2022)

this is very new, but i see their point


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## Foxridley (Sep 9, 2022)

ben909 said:


> this is very new, but i see their point


Dragoneer commented that the AI was sometimes even copying artist signatures.


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## LameFox (Sep 9, 2022)

I saw one on twitter where it had made a sky with enough of a watermark repeated through it that I could recognize it as 'shutterstock' despite a few garbled letters.


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## ben909 (Sep 9, 2022)

*wow reaction face*


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## quoting_mungo (Sep 9, 2022)

I wouldn't have a problem with image generators like this if they exclusively used public domain, other no-attribution-needed licenses, and/or strictly opt-in content to train their NNs on. But they don't. And, like, sure, e621 (for example) is a pretty great training data set because it's a large volume of art with pretty thorough tagging, but that doesn't make it an ethical data set to use. Hell, arguably boorus and image boards are pretty borderline or outright bad in the first place, ethically speaking.

Like, if your AI is a tool that you're training to see the capabilities of your algorithm, without the results ever leaving your research lab, grab the best data set you can find and use it, but as soon as you open it up to the public you have a responsibility to the rights holders of all those images you trained your tool on.


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## Fallowfox (Sep 9, 2022)

Am fine with FA not allowing art that isn't produced by humans.

I think there are some essentially philosophical claims about what artistic merit constitutes. x3
Is_ my_ art meritable?
Does a piece of art itself possess merit without knowledge of its creator?
Does a piece of art that is derivative, but made by a human, possess merit in a way that a piece of art made by an artificial intelligence capable of creativity does not?
Can a piece of artificial intelligence, directed by a human, produce art that expresses the spirit of the human in a meritable way?

Also I want my body part pics damn it. Where am I going to upload photographs of my eyebrows now? >:{


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## Green_Brick (Sep 9, 2022)

Loganth said:


> 1) They can't do OCs at all.  This is a problem of current AIs in general - they can't deal with anything that isn't in their training data.
> 2) They don't understand pose or action beyond the absolute basics.  The best prompts I've found so far specify a subject as succinctly as possible and are then followed by a set of style keywords.
> 3) They get confused if there's more than 1 character in a scene.  Characters tend to merge together and share traits no matter how you construct your prompt.
> 4) Everything they make is photobashed together from their training data.  Usually it looks nice, sometimes it's really obvious.  But they cannot make anything genuinely new.



This is why my post was framed as it was. We're not at the point where people can pair Sonic OCs with Ronald McDonald to make some really raunchy material. But when this technology gets there, we're going to have *lots of it. *People think R34 is bad right now? Wait until this tech supercedes what humans can do in a few days, within minutes! I sweat thinking about all the thirsty people who wants their dreams plastered all over the website in bulk quantities, of which we have not seen before... :sweat:

This will most likely result in the need for higher bandwidth and storage capabilities than most of these sites have currently. I will laugh so hard when R34 is unable to accept any more submissions, due to their drives being full. XD


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## Ziggy Schlacht (Sep 9, 2022)

Fallowfox said:


> Am fine with FA not allowing art that isn't produced by humans.
> 
> I think there are some essentially philosophical claims about what artistic merit constitutes. x3
> Is_ my_ art meritable?
> ...


Not sure that's the body part they mean...

The rest of your comments, well, I think it can. Remember, AI already won an art contest (that we know of in this thread.) That AI art _is banned from FA_ answers the rest of your question. If AI art didn't contain artistic merit, we'd never have to have specific rules against it. Remember, FA also bans low-artistic-merit stuff. That AI art warrants it's own rules is proof enough it has merit.


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## Filter (Sep 9, 2022)

Foxridley said:


> So, apparently some people are using the term “AI artist” for themselves, which I don’t quite get.



AI artist? Imagine one of these sitting across from you at a table in the Dealers Den:






It might not be all bad, however. If I could train an AI on my own art, it might help me illustrate or animate some of my story ideas. Something I don't currently have enough time for. I would do the writing and art direction, while the AI could handle some of the more labor-intensive parts. Then again, it might achieve sentience and run amok.


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## Foxridley (Sep 9, 2022)

Ziggy Schlacht said:


> Not sure that's the body part they mean...
> 
> The rest of your comments, well, I think it can. Remember, AI already won an art contest (that we know of in this thread.) That AI art _is banned from FA_ answers the rest of your question. If AI art didn't contain artistic merit, we'd never have to have specific rules against it. Remember, FA also bans low-artistic-merit stuff. That AI art warrants it's own rules is proof enough it has merit.


I’m not going to say that you can’t argue for AI art having artistic merit.
But I don’t think banning it is a sign of it having artistic merit any more than the other categories banned under section 2.8 of the AUP.


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## Bababooey (Sep 9, 2022)

Filter said:


> AI artist? Imagine one of these sitting across from you at a table in the Dealers Den:




I'd ask if they know what love is and if they'd be interested in maybe going somewhere after the convention is over. Heh...

Edit:


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## Filter (Sep 10, 2022)

Chomby said:


> I'd ask if they know what love is and if they'd be interested in maybe going somewhere after the convention is over. Heh...
> 
> Edit:


He's quite the lady-killer.


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## Fallowfox (Sep 10, 2022)

Ziggy Schlacht said:


> Not sure that's the body part they mean...
> 
> The rest of your comments, well, I think it can. Remember, AI already won an art contest (that we know of in this thread.) That AI art _is banned from FA_ answers the rest of your question. If AI art didn't contain artistic merit, we'd never have to have specific rules against it. Remember, FA also bans low-artistic-merit stuff. That AI art warrants it's own rules is proof enough it has merit.


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## Shiro_Iga (Sep 11, 2022)

I used midjourney for inspiration and searching for ideas. AI generate image based on the database; there is no genuine creativity expressed. It's a tool that lowers the entry bar of creating art and floods the community with art-mimicking things.

Back in the time, photography is cheating on creating art and people fear of it. AI generated image looks like the new impact in creative communities, and because it's hard to tell its art, photo or rendering, mentioning AI art is a good ethical practice.


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## Filter (Sep 11, 2022)

Fallowfox said:


>


Hopefully, the AI will be more like Data and less like Skynet.


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## ben909 (Sep 11, 2022)

its a bit off topic, but was a character like data, or the "robot" characters that are in movies really AI's, or character designed of a human base and then altered to take traits that people view as "ai like"  they are more anthro computers then true ai's


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## Pomorek (Sep 12, 2022)

This is a very complex, broad topic, so apologies if my super long train of thought gets a bit derailed somewhere...

First off, I wonder who are the people behind this and what is their motivation. They don’t seem to realize the damage they can cause. Or they don’t care. In any case, what they did is a giant middle finger towards intellectual property, and absence of any consideration towards the online art as a social phenomenon. It’s only just that the art galleries should respond in kind, by disallowing such produce.

And there’s the technical aspect too, such images can be churned out by the hundred which threatens to clog the gallery servers pretty quickly. There should be dedicated AI gallery service, one that doesn’t store the images themselves but only starting prompts and seeds, and generates pictures on demand. 

Also interesting what will happen if these folks step on the toes of some big copyright holder. Or did they summarily avoided this, by blacklisting things that can be deemed copyrights breach on corporate level, and instead focused on harvesting the works of individual artists who can’t defend themselves?


But simultaineously I wonder if we aren’t getting ahead of ourselves. Emergence of AI capable of winning an art contest is causing understandable fears among artists. But we still don’t know at what level will this technology stabilize. Can it progress much beyond the current level where the details are messed up in vast majority of images, which then seems to be inherent weakness of the algorithms they’re using? And even if we eventually get a god-tier art machine, I wonder if its services will be free or cheap enough to eliminate human artists? I’d think it’s the cheap commissions area that is most endangered anyway. That, and what can be called art for commercial purposes: stock images, advertisements, enterprise illustrations and such.

With the necessary disclaimer that I’m not engaged into the commercial side of art myself: I’m thinking in the terms how the customers probably act. Those wanting something cheap can be expected to not care much what they exactly get, as long as it is along their general guidelines. They will happily migrate to AI. But those willing to pay more can be expected to know exactly what they want, something which the AI doesn’t deliver and will probably not deliver soon. Also these higher-paid artists are typically renown for something specific that the customer will want, some personal touch. So even if significant portion of run-of-the-mill art is automatized, I claim that there will still be space for higher level artists.

All this without even touching upon art as a hobby, which probably will continue much as it did.

We also need to be aware of our own perspective. Most people here have something to do with art, in one way or another, either as creators or enthusiasts. For us, such AI easily appears as a threat. But I think that for an average Joe who has nothing to do with art, it must be much more fascinating that suddenly a computer can be commanded to make pictures on a given topic in a given style. But then, such people don’t make much of a commission customer base anyway.

I also wonder if the furry art isn’t actually more resilient to such automatization. While sure, e621 with its thorough tagging looks like technically perfect material for AI training – what kind of equipment does this actually need? Doesn’t seem to be a thing you can do on a laptop in any case. So my question is, would anyone realistically have resources to pull off AI automatization of this material, on a scale _and quality_ that would endanger the commission market? Its NSFW nature likely makes it uninteresting to any bigger commercial agents. So we’re left mostly with individual people and how much capacity could they devote here. Sure, we have thisfursonadoesntexist.com which I was using a lot for shit & giggles, but this project is limited in scope and full of hilarious errors.

Another factor is that furry commissioners often have very specific design of their character(s) and of what they want to have in the picture. AI is currently not capable of satisfying that, and the question remains, how close will it be able to get to it, and at what price?


On the other end of possibilities again, in case we do get god-tier AI that blows the online art community out of the water, another question arises. With much fewer people willing to invest their time in art, and those remaining being just hobbyist, the AI can be expected to stagnate! And possibly even get worse with time. No new pictures to take things from, or mostly bad quality ones. So if you want something truly new, you might still have to hire somebody. Unless we get a truly sentient, creative AI - but that's still _somebody_ in my book.


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## Deleted member 160111 (Sep 12, 2022)

@Pomorek ,
I am delighted with your words.
Obviously, some people are just not picky about the generated image. If someone like very fat dogs, they just generate as much as possible, and they will be willing to pay $15-50 to generate even more. It is this fur that can completely abandon the real art.
Furs with a small budget will also gladly refuse the services of an artist.
The bottom line is that the greatest damage (not counting copyrights and clogging of the gallery) will be inflicted on novice artists who have no audience and low prices.


Pomorek said:


> On the other end of possibilities again, in case we do get god-tier AI that blows the online art community out of the water, another question arises. With much fewer people willing to invest their time in art, and those remaining being just hobbyist, the AI can be expected to stagnate! And possibly even get worse with time. No new pictures to take things from, or mostly bad quality ones. So if you want something truly new, you might still have to hire somebody.


You blew my mind with it.(O_O)


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## quoting_mungo (Sep 12, 2022)

Pomorek said:


> First off, I wonder who are the people behind this and what is their motivation. They don’t seem to realize the damage they can cause. Or they don’t care. In any case, what they did is a giant middle finger towards intellectual property, and absence of any consideration towards the online art as a social phenomenon. It’s only just that the art galleries should respond in kind, by disallowing such produce.


This depends a lot on which exact generator you’re using - some were developed in academic/research settings and have only released a downscaled version for public use. If you’re developing and using a tool like this as a step in AI research, I don’t feel there’s a major ethical problem even if the training data is used without permission. _As long as access remains strictly limited to academic use_.

Which, obviously, isn’t the case here.



Pomorek said:


> I also wonder if the furry art isn’t actually more resilient to such automatization. While sure, e621 with its thorough tagging looks like technically perfect material for AI training – what kind of equipment does this actually need? Doesn’t seem to be a thing you can do on a laptop in any case. So my question is, would anyone realistically have resources to pull off AI automatization of this material, on a scale _and quality_ that would endanger the commission market? Its NSFW nature likely makes it uninteresting to any bigger commercial agents. So we’re left mostly with individual people and how much capacity could they devote here. Sure, we have thisfursonadoesntexist.com which I was using a lot for shit & giggles, but this project is limited in scope and full of hilarious errors.


Training a high quality image generator is (from what my much more tech-savvy boyfriend has told me) ridiculously expensive - for better and worse. On one hand, it means some random person can’t feasibly train their own version (which could potentially target specific artists in an even more unethical way than is already done when artists’ work is used as training data without their consent). On the other, it increases the incentive for big players who _can_ afford to train one to charge for its use. And on an ethical scale I think most of us can agree that training an image generator on unconsenting artists’ work and then earning money off of the results is even less defensible than just releasing the tool for general use for free.

I don’t think it’s wise to limit our concern to whether these tools can produce passable furry art specifically is wise. If they were to inundate the general art market to where art/illustration is severely devalued that is likely to have knock-on effects on pricing and perceived value of _all_ art.

Plus we already have a problem with a subset of artists using Google Images as a free source of textures or backgrounds, often without even giving proper credit to the rights owner. Landscapes are among the subjects that image generators are currently best at, from what I understand. Uncredited generated backgrounds are something we’re liable to see cropping up in furry art much sooner than full generated work, and it’s no less intellectually dishonest or unethical.

EDIT: I realized I should also add that the arguably biggest ethical issue most of these tools available today share doesn’t even have anything to do with them “replacing” artists. It’s the unauthorized use of images that the keeper of the program does not hold rights to. For images in the public domain or released under a Creative Commons license that doesn’t require attribution (and does allow derivative work and, where applicable, commercial use), fair enough. But I’ve seen no tool making such claims about their training data, much less seen any such claims verified.

That’s the first discussion that needs to be had. People already have a woefully poor understanding of copyright, usage rights, and licenses for creative work. Making the (wider, not isolated to FAF) discussion primarily about the potential for these tools usurping artists risks further normalizing/painting as acceptable the violation of artists’ rights that is occurring.

We don’t need another round of “if you didn’t want people to steal your work you should’ve never posted it on the Internet.”


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## Foxridley (Sep 12, 2022)

Pomorek said:


> This is a very complex, broad topic, so apologies if my super long train of thought gets a bit derailed somewhere...
> 
> First off, I wonder who are the people behind this and what is their motivation. They don’t seem to realize the damage they can cause. Or they don’t care. In any case, what they did is a giant middle finger towards intellectual property, and absence of any consideration towards the online art as a social phenomenon. It’s only just that the art galleries should respond in kind, by disallowing such produce.
> 
> ...


AI stuff in general is advancing pretty fast though, so it may not be very long before it vastly improves.

As to sampling other AI art, it will probably be a while before AI-generated images take up a large enough fraction of internet images for such self-sampling to have a big effect. FA alone is approaching 50 million total submissions. Even then, an AI could be made to avoid other AI art, such as by going for older images over new ones.

I don’t like the idea of AI replacing cheap artists though. I wouldn’t want to look for art in a place where my only options are an expensive human artist or a soulless machine.


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## dragon-in-sight (Sep 17, 2022)

Art is not just about creating pictures. It's a medium to express the abstract and irrational aspects of life and emotion. There for AI-Generated art is just an another contribution to art but won't replace it.


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## Foxridley (Sep 17, 2022)

Loganth said:


> I think it's an unenforceable overreaction.
> 
> Are you going to take down something like https://www.furaffinity.net/view/49024283/ because it was party made with Midjourney?
> 
> At the end of the day these programs are just tools, like Photoshop and Blender.  There's still a community of people out there who believe digital art of any sort isn't art because it wasn't made with traditional media.


Art made _partly_ with AI is a different matter IMO. Like, in the link you gave, the background is AI-generated, but the artist drew the dragons.

If someone is simply posting the AI output, without additions of their own, then I don’t think it’s comparable to using photoshop and the like. They’re giving a prompt to another entity that creates the image for them. In that sense, the person’s role in the creative process is closer to that of the commissioner than that of the artist.


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## Inafox (Sep 19, 2022)

AI art is an oxymoron. Art is defined as human activity that nurtures skill. Not all arts produce assets or are creative at all.
If someone is a martial artist, e.g. does kung fu or tai chi, the art is in an inner experience more than just outside skill.
Likewise the liberal arts and meditative arts are all defined by human effort and devotion.

In Latin "art/ars" means "to be", e.g. "human livelihood". So what exactly is "human livelihood" in AI?
In old English if someone asks you what your art is, you'd state what your livelihood is. Likewise if someone said "how art thou" they mean what your livelihood is like today. Any art is a potentially life-long skilful practice that becomes a part of your life.

Art referring to assets or creativity is actually very new-age, and wishy-washy, capitalistic and anti-art.
The point we start to rewrite language doesn't mean we rewrite the concept, yet by using the corruption of the definition people try to distort the concept.
This isn't good at all. People could start defining logic by the illogical, art by the inhuman and science by the pseudoscience.
Words like art, science and logic shouldn't be overwritten just for consumerists to walk over the intellect and the diversities of cultures.

By calling AI art you're not just destructing the visual and creative arts, you're also saying that the non-creative arts are not arts.
Art is not equal to assets or creation, and just because AI can generate things does not mean that it is engaging in the arts. Artistry is fleeting and experiential, it's a joy and hobby and occupation in understanding, transforming and inventing that which allows us to intrapersonally and interpersonally communicate in an enjoyable way.
Nature has produced beautiful aesthetics and transformation for billions of years and is not art, it's aesthetical, we shouldn't confuse art and aesthetics.

Likewise if you rephrase art, science and logic to refer to everything, language loses its meaning. Why even use words if everything is the same?
Words or no words used, AI generation is separate from that which is what art original meant and still is.

Similarly, when it comes to art"work", what is the "work" here? Work is when a living being experienced craft to produce something, it's through that labour that art gained its value under capital systems. How can an AI user call their AI generations "visual" art"work" if they engaged in no "visual work" to create the visual elements of the image? And surely those who prompt or loosely sketch with no need for artistic experience especially are "commissioners" of the AI instead of artists themselves? If prompting is art, then is telling an artist to do something somehow making you the visual artist and not the artist you ordered? Certainly the "visual" work that occurs in an image generator is from three sources, a) the visual imagery fed into the machine that derives from actual artefacts from uncredited sources, b) the mild work effort of the scientists who contributed (often uncredited also) towards the AI model, and c) the (likely non-green) energy employees who work for the power-plants.

So from what I can see, AI generation is neither art for the AI model nor substantial work for the user. If the work was not stolen, the user wouldn't bother to use the model to begin with. Without the model there is no AI generation. Therefore the AI model is essentially powerless when empty of the hard work fed into it.
As such, it is "making money" from these models that is unethical, while calling it art is just outright illogical and language corruption. AI is dangerous because consumeristic capitalism made it dangerous. AI is like Pandora's box, a jinni in a bottle and a post-human ideology. Post-humanism is human eradicating, wherein humans serve no experience, it's not evolutionary and rather very extremely cannibalistic in the sense that the ideology is built on wrath and rage towards the imbalances in society rather than being a positive evolution that nurtures humanity.

When you start to realise it is an ideology, you start to realise that convoluted human-hating concepts like AI art is a form of post-human and transhuman terrorism. It's a jealous attack of the beinghood of humanity itself, a desire for skills and money without merit or effort. Yet it comes at the expense of individuality, the human mind and replaces our visual dreams with an exterior that's far more tempting than our own abilities. It makes you infinitely inadequate, infinitely pointless. Yet it's entirely human choice to get rid of this superior ideological alien that's trying to invade our planet and destroy us mentally from the inside out. Many sci-fi writers thought that AI would come as extra-terrestrial or future-bound invaders, but really AI will come for your mind and what it means to be human first. And it's everyone's fault for allowing capitalism to extort people and feed consumerism. Because AI is entirely the product of consumerism and techno-fascist supremacy dreams like "the supreme immortal transhuman race" myth. It's just a proof that capitalism and consumerism has made people care little for those who provide to them and care little for the human experience and the inner worlds that are the arts.

Humans have practiced the arts since the cave and tribes times. The notion of AI replacing the very basis of what makes humans humans would be not human benefit but the benefit of a replacement to humans. Yet AI can't replace the arts, what it can replace is the consumerism of artefacts. It just means future generations would have their brain rotted into being inferior to the machines that govern and do all. What would humans find pleasure in then? Because for sure an AI will do better than you at everything and its consumers won't care for your efforts. AI like climate change is made out of consumeristic horror and negligence.
When you start to realise that consumerism and capitalism is a cancer on this earth, you start to realise who the true enemies of humankind are. Fight back or be replaced.


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## Fallowfox (Sep 21, 2022)

Inafox said:


> AI art is an oxymoron. Art is defined as human activity that nurtures skill. Not all arts produce assets or are creative at all.
> If someone is a martial artist, e.g. does kung fu or tai chi, the art is in an inner experience more than just outside skill.
> Likewise the liberal arts and meditative arts are all defined by human effort and devotion.
> 
> ...



You could say that we need a word for creative art because words for 'pliable skill' didn't do the job properly.
Language changing to encompass new needs doesn't necessarily mean that treasured concepts will be corrupted; indeed practically all natural language emerges in this way.
Our word for 'science', as you point out, is derived from 'scientia', which simply means 'knowledge' in Latin. This is a distinct concept from the way we use 'science' in English. The word 'ars' in Latin for 'work' comes from a proto-indo-european root that also gives us our word 'army', and the body part 'arm'.
In German it also gives rise to their word for 'poverty'. ('Arm')


I think it is also a bit strong to describe art generated by neural networks as 'anti-human terrorism'. Neural networks are just a human invention that imitates the way neurons interact. They are not inherently good, evil, capitalism, techno-fascist etc.

I would advocate a 'Turing test' for identifying art. Can human observers _tell_ that a piece of art _wasn't _made by a feeling person?


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## Foxridley (Sep 21, 2022)

Fallowfox said:


> I would advocate a 'Turing test' for identifying art. Can human observers _tell_ that a piece of art _wasn't _made by a feeling person?


Well, there was the case of Pierre Brassau, the French artist later revealed to be a chimp.

There are definitely some tells for AI art, like figures being melded together, or MidJourney producing a lot of symmetrical, face-on portraits.


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## Frank Gulotta (Sep 22, 2022)

I'm divided when it comes to banning Ai generated art, on one hand (the uploader's hand) it's fraudulent. On the other hand (the beholder's hand) isn't beauty in the eye of the beholder? so if I find something inspiring does it really "lack artistic merit" any more than the shitloads of low effort stuff that may be handmade but also doesn't appeal to me in the slightest?
Your brain is like a computer too. It's not just confused or mistaken if looking at stuff produced by a machine fires up signals in it.




I'm almost sure this was made by an AI. I don't think anybody could tell unless they look at the person's gallery and notice what you could call gallery patterns. I think it looks interesting. Why make war to it? Perhaps it "means nothing" for the "creator", but what if it means something to the beholder?
Not to mention, having deep meaning isn't a rock solid standard. I don't think a handdrawn dick means more than a AI made one. Does it?


Inafox said:


> Likewise if you rephrase art, science and logic to refer to everything, language loses its meaning. Why even use words if everything is the same?
> Words or no words used, AI generation is separate from that which is what art original meant and still is.


That is such a rabbit hole


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## SirRob (Sep 30, 2022)

This is NSFW, but this is pretty important to bring up— https://mobile.twitter.com/teodosio_iart

All the pictures here are AI generated. It’s really terrifying to me that this is evolving so rapidly.


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## TrishaCat (Sep 30, 2022)

SirRob said:


> This is NSFW, but this is pretty important to bring up— https://mobile.twitter.com/teodosio_iart
> 
> All the pictures here are AI generated. It’s really terrifying to me that this is evolving so rapidly.


@.@
these are...good...


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## SirRob (Sep 30, 2022)

TrishaCat said:


> @.@
> these are...good...


And it’s going to get better. It’s going to replace the current standard of art production. That is, the new standard will be inputting prompts and editing them for a finished product. FA is eventually going to have to accept AI art submissions again if it wants to support artists as a whole.


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## Lexiand (Sep 30, 2022)

AI generated art is such a double edged sword. I can see how it could help artists. But I can also see it get really abused by scammers.


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## Judge Spear (Sep 30, 2022)

As someone that's done commissions for furries very frequently, I feel like the one thing furries value over any other community is their grassroots heritage. Furries are like the only people on Earth that legitimately respect their artists because they quite literally *built *the fandom.

So I'm genuinely not even worried about AI art as far as the furry community is concerned.
Also, the bottom line is that furries want their OC's. Good luck punching those extreme specifics into GLaDOS and having her spit out exactly what you want with the accuracy of a human's intention and not shitting itself. Not any time soon. I see the same "styles", generic designs, and stock poses come from these machines.

If that's the extent of their range. I'm not impressed.


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## Foxridley (Sep 30, 2022)

SirRob said:


> And it’s going to get better. It’s going to replace the current standard of art production. That is, the new standard will be inputting prompts and editing them for a finished product. FA is eventually going to have to accept AI art submissions again if it wants to support artists as a whole.


Accepting AI generated art wouldn’t really be supporting artists since inputting a prompt into a generator doesn’t make you an artist. I’ve said before, if someone is giving a prompt to another entity, their role is closer to that of a commissioner than that of an artist.

Though there is artistic merit on the person’s part if they make their own artistic edits or additions. I guess I’m saying that so-called AI-assisted art would be allowable, but not so much posting raw AI output.

I know you’re talking about images to which the human has made an actual contribution (which might be better described as mixed AI/human generated art), but I think it’s an important distinction if we’re talking about whether AI art should be allowed.


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## SirRob (Sep 30, 2022)

I really don't want to argue with Judge Spear... but of course, there's a clear counterpoint to "furries want their OC's": one can simply edit an AI-generated picture to match a commissioner's character. That is a realistic application of the software and it's already being done by artists.


__
		https://www.reddit.com/r/aiArt/comments/xgnefq

Currently there's certainly a homogenous style but as the programming continues to evolve, so will its scope of what it's able to produce. And you can already emulate different styles, people just like the "popular" style because it's popular.



Foxridley said:


> Accepting AI generated art wouldn’t really be supporting artists since inputting a prompt into a generator doesn’t make you an artist. I’ve said before, if someone is giving a prompt to another entity, their role is closer to that of a commissioner than that of an artist.
> 
> Though there is artistic merit on the person’s part if they make their own artistic edits or additions. I guess I’m saying that so-called AI-assisted art would be allowable, but not so much posting raw AI output.
> 
> I know you’re talking about images to which the human has made an actual contribution (which might be better described as mixed AI/human generated art), but I think it’s an important distinction if we’re talking about whether AI art should be allowed.


What an artist is depends on who you ask. Like, my parents wouldn't really consider me an artist because I draw on the computer. It's subjective.


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## TrishaCat (Sep 30, 2022)

Are the people using this ai calling themselves artists? I saw comments in that post saying "at this point you're not an AI artist but a multimedia artist" which leads me to believe people think just putting text into a robot is being an artist. Which seems...insulting to people that actually create art themselves.

I know what an artist is may depend on who you ask, but it just doesn't seem like it takes much personal effort or creative input to make ai-generated art in my opinion. Like sure it can look good, but you're not really being an artist imo if the ai is doing all the work for you. The intensive editing is one thing, I can respect that. But direct from the ai creations? That doesn't make someone an artist in my eyes.


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## Foxridley (Sep 30, 2022)

One thing I can see happening is an increased demand for artists to stream in order to demonstrate that their art is human-made.


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## Judge Spear (Oct 1, 2022)

Foxridley said:


> One thing I can see happening is an increased demand for artists to stream in order to demonstrate that their art is human-made.


Maybe but I dont see that happening too often in the future really. You can just as easily ask for them to provide a canvas file that shows each layer you've used to make the image.

And if we're talking about commissioners demanding this, artists are supposed to be showing each step of the process from sketch to completion. It would be exceedingly difficult to try and weasel some AI dreck to your clients.

And as of now, theres so many tell tale signs of AI. Despite the "leaps" made in the tech, the best of these machines have consistently had the same exact shortcomings with the exact same frequency since day one. 
I think we're deeply underestimating the sheer amount of very human deliberation that goes into the design process no machine is going to account for.


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## Rayd (Oct 1, 2022)

i think AI generated art is a technological marvel and really cool. i don't think anybody creating art using AI actually believes they're a real artist so i don't think there's a problem. if an AI manages to beat real artists in an art competition, i think that just goes to show how far the technology has actually come.

and if it becomes even better over the coming decades, that's great, too. but i don't think it'll ever replace what someone can do by hand. so i don't understand why the art community has been so up in arms about it.


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## Judge Spear (Oct 1, 2022)

Rayd said:


> i think AI generated art is a technological marvel and really cool. i don't think anybody creating art using AI actually believes they're a real artist so i don't think there's a problem. if an AI manages to beat real artists in an art competition, i think that just goes to show how far the technology has actually come.
> 
> and if it becomes even better over the coming decades, that's great, too. but i don't think it'll ever replace what someone can do by hand. so i don't understand why the art community has been so up in arms about it.











						'A.I. Should Exclude Living Artists From Its Database,' Says One Painter Whose Works Were Used to Fuel Image Generators | Artnet News
					

The digital artist Greg Rutkowski has seen his style of painting copied by A.I. image generators, which use databases of millions of images.




					news.artnet.com
				




I think the doom and gloom is a bit excessive, but it definitely poses some cause for concern.

_"MIT’s Technology Review reports that Rutkowski’s name ranks among the most used prompts on Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, two popular open-access A.I. image generators, where users have input Rutkowski’s name *93,000* times. That is far more than users’ requests for images similar to the style of Michelangelo or Picasso, whose names have been employed as prompts no more than 2,000 times each." 

"At first, Rutkowski considered his newfound popularity on the A.I. platforms an avenue to new audiences. But when ran a web search of his own name for other reasons, works in his style he’d had no hand in making turned up."_

This is why corporations are defensive of their own intellectual property and nip illegitimate uses of their work in the bud very early. This is a problem for branding specifically when your name is searched and an alarming amount of results lead to things that other people made using your content but not back to you. And it's especially an issue when you're a not a corporation but a single creator.


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## TyraWadman (Oct 1, 2022)

AI will never be able to create the things I have going on in my brain and I can't imagine I'm the only one that feels this way.
It's going to be a nuisance for sure, but there's no way for it to kill the entire commission community.


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## Gushousekai195 (Oct 1, 2022)

I was going to use AI to generate complex backgrounds for my art and have the character(s) interact with it (and I usually prompt it to create stuff made by no particular artist or photographer), but now FA has banned it. It upsets me to see people saying that AI art is just a collage of bits and pieces of stolen artwork by real artists.

I don’t see anything in it that screams “collage.”


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## Foxridley (Oct 1, 2022)

Judge Spear said:


> Maybe but I dont see that happening too often in the future really. You can just as easily ask for them to provide a canvas file that shows each layer you've used to make the image.
> 
> And if we're talking about commissioners demanding this, artists are supposed to be showing each step of the process from sketch to completion. It would be exceedingly difficult to try and weasel some AI dreck to your clients.
> 
> ...


Yeah. I forgot about WIPs. Outside of streams, a lot of artists either don’t offer them or only provide them upon request.

For some reason I was thinking about speed runs, which are recorded to prove no hacks or disallowed strats were used.


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## Judge Spear (Oct 1, 2022)

Foxridley said:


> Yeah. I forgot about WIPs. Outside of streams, a lot of artists either don’t offer them or only provide them upon request.
> 
> For some reason I was thinking about speed runs, which are recorded to prove no hacks or disallowed strats were used.


Lmao
Yeah speedrunners better be streaming with as much proof as possible. 
But honestly, not giving WIP's (at least 2) is very bad practice. I've recently learned this is not standard myself which shocked me because I figured that was just...an innate thing to do. Like that makes zero sense to not give updates.


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## Foxridley (Oct 1, 2022)

Judge Spear said:


> Lmao
> Yeah speedrunners better be streaming with as much proof as possible.
> But honestly, not giving WIP's (at least 2) is very bad practice. I've recently learned this is not standard myself which shocked me because I figured that was just...an innate thing to do. Like that makes zero sense to not give updates.


Interesting. I think only one or two artists have given me more than one WIP.


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## Minerva_Minx (Oct 1, 2022)

TrishaCat said:


> Are the people using this ai calling themselves artists? I saw comments in that post saying "at this point you're not an AI artist but a multimedia artist" which leads me to believe people think just putting text into a robot is being an artist. Which seems...insulting to people that actually create art themselves.
> 
> I know what an artist is may depend on who you ask, but it just doesn't seem like it takes much personal effort or creative input to make ai-generated art in my opinion. Like sure it can look good, but you're not really being an artist imo if the ai is doing all the work for you. The intensive editing is one thing, I can respect that. But direct from the ai creations? That doesn't make someone an artist in my eyes.


No, it doesn't make an artist.  I have tried them, even posted works on dA and a couple here.  it's interesting, but not ultimately unique.  It fills the niche void of you want FaceApp, Adobe, word, powerpoint, amd a powershell script to c4eate a picture based off random math.
Probably for the best it is banned or curbed with a lot of disclaimers.
Some word choices on midjourney and dall-e will expose a hidden watermark.


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## Frank Gulotta (Oct 1, 2022)

That's pretty much what I meant
AI art is fascinating in its own right and has its place around


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## Minerva_Minx (Oct 1, 2022)

It's just as fascinating when we agree...


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## Judge Spear (Oct 1, 2022)

Foxridley said:


> Interesting. I think only one or two artists have given me more than one WIP.


Thats fucking WILD. What the Hell?


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## Foxridley (Oct 1, 2022)

Judge Spear said:


> Thats fucking WILD. What the Hell?


And here I was worried about being too demanding if I asked for a WIP.


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## Minerva_Minx (Oct 1, 2022)

Judge Spear said:


> Thats fucking WILD. What the Hell?


The higher commission and detailed premium artists - oh god yes I would like two or more WIPs in most cases.

Here is where I piss off friends who are artists. (I love you guys, please don't hurt me!)
My reasoning is this: there is a different between speedpainting and interactive details. 
Speedpainting has no focus on detail, is all about mass production, and spends the least time on the most things possible.  This is the equivalent, to me, of going to Goodwill to pick out furniture, but only spending $50 and whatever I can scrounge from a couch cushion and taking whatever I get and being happy.  if you are the viewer, it seems generic and reproducible:

https://www.deviantart.com/minervaminx/art/Me-the-Succubus-873820375

Detail requires purpose and coordination.  everything that can be tuned is, anything else is left alone.  Walls are neutral colors, so furniture is still neutral but slightly lighter or darker, so pillows and paintings on the walls contrast so the colors all "pop".    this is what grabs you attention and makes you look at the intricacies.  These artists usually, but not always, charge $200+.

https://www.deviantart.com/minervaminx/art/Me-Spellsword-854257005

Then you have AI and...

https://www.deviantart.com/minervaminx/art/Craiyon-Raging-Frustration-928360597

and that is a horror show of just WTF meets FML using photos and commissions.  Does it make me an artist?  No, it males me a sad, depressed woman with too much time on her hands succeeding at being more miserly than Scrooge McDuck.


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## Judge Spear (Oct 7, 2022)

One of the common things I hear people saying as a use of AI is to treat it as reference or inspiration. While on paper that sounds good, here's the problem with this notion as AI currently stands and will almost certainly stand for years...

Novice artists *mainly *would be the ones to find this method of reference enticing. But it's a bit of a trap. You don't exactly know what to look for at the beginning stages of learning how to structure a drawing. This comes with mileage, critique, and fervent practice to be able to pick out flaws and know what to avoid. The really glaring errors might jump out at someone still learning, but even those, in any work, regularly do not get noticed by beginners. So for sure, they'll be picking up the more numerous, nuanced flaws they simply aren't trained enough yet to spot. Not to imply this will ruin them forever, but their per piece results will be worse than if they studied a master or some photos.

An adept on the other hand simply has no need.
Someone who's been drawing (and taking it _seriously_) for 5+ years will have books, photos, and hundreds upon hundreds of valuable artist references to pull from. This is on top of their own muscle memory for how things work built over years of studying.
You have to spend some time experimenting with a bunch of parameters to plug into a machine. And what you get in return, _at best_, will only ever be stock compositions of generic "designs" with dead faces in very basic often cropped poses. None of which are conducive to advanced growth. And for it all to also come with numerous errors on top of that? It's completely worthless.

For both the adept and the novice, even from the angle of just "simple inspiration" as opposed to a learning tool, there's no point. With no exaggeration, there are several hundred *quintillions *of photos on just the Internet alone. There are are almost 5 *billion *photos uploaded to the Internet *daily*. Petabytes of high quality photos from the last 5 years alone and a literal MILLENIA of master art of every genre and style conceivable. All at your disposal to find inspiration from and study.

So experienced artists can make no use of this and novice artists should avoid it.


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## Foxridley (Oct 8, 2022)

Judge Spear said:


> One of the common things I hear people saying as a use of AI is to treat it as reference or inspiration. While on paper that sounds good, here's the problem with this notion as AI currently stands and will almost certainly stand for years...
> 
> Novice artists *mainly *would be the ones to find this method of reference enticing. But it's a bit of a trap. You don't exactly know what to look for at the beginning stages of learning how to structure a drawing. This comes with mileage, critique, and fervent practice to be able to pick out flaws and know what to avoid. The really glaring errors might jump out at someone still learning, but even those, in any work, regularly do not get noticed by beginners. So for sure, they'll be picking up the more numerous, nuanced flaws they simply aren't trained enough yet to spot. Not to imply this will ruin them forever, but their per piece results will be worse than if they studied a master or some photos.
> 
> ...


I’ve watched streamers to get an idea, of the drawing process. Not something you can get from AI.
I’ve noticed a lot of midjourney images are portraits with a character completely face on, which is not an angle commonly shown in human made art. The symmetry is a little unnerving when you see a lot of those images together.


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## Zara the Hork-Bajir (Oct 14, 2022)

Having looked through some of the AI generated art and the responses reminds me of the time that Autotune just started getting used in basically all popular songs. Everyone was sure it now took zero skill, song artistry was dead forever. I think over time people will come to accept it more and more as just the way things are, right now people are just playing in the sandbox seeing what they can get away with, where it works and where it doesn't. 

What bothers me is how all AI generated art has now been labeled as "lacking artistic merit", simply because a brand new tool was used to make it. Do all autotune songs have no value? While nobody like to admit it some of those songs were more catchy than a plague. Having a seperate tag or category for AI generated/assisted art is a good idea, not sure why a complete ban is necessary.


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## Green_Brick (Oct 14, 2022)

Hear hear, people said the same thing and felt the same about Photoshop when it first came out. It's not going to replace things entirely, rather it will just open up a whole new paradigm. Just because Photoshop exist doesn't mean that traditional art is any less valuable.


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## TyraWadman (Oct 14, 2022)

Zara the Hork-Bajir said:


> What bothers me is how all AI generated art has now been labeled as "lacking artistic merit", simply because a brand new tool was used to make it.




While the sensitivity of the wording is debatable, it's different to voluntarily alter your own voice, vs posting an image that plagiarizes existing photos and artwork (to the point where it can sometimes include the artists signature).

I find there are enough image dump websites where things like memes and ai art can thrive. Haven't seen any news about banning AI works on Deviantart. I see nothing wrong with websites wanting to separate themselves/offer different things.


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## Foxridley (Oct 14, 2022)

Zara the Hork-Bajir said:


> Having looked through some of the AI generated art and the responses reminds me of the time that Autotune just started getting used in basically all popular songs. Everyone was sure it now took zero skill, song artistry was dead forever. I think over time people will come to accept it more and more as just the way things are, right now people are just playing in the sandbox seeing what they can get away with, where it works and where it doesn't.
> 
> What bothers me is how all AI generated art has now been labeled as "lacking artistic merit", simply because a brand new tool was used to make it. Do all autotune songs have no value? While nobody like to admit it some of those songs were more catchy than a plague. Having a seperate tag or category for AI generated/assisted art is a good idea, not sure why a complete ban is necessary.


I guess,
But I think there’s a substantial difference between AI-generated art and AI-assisted art.
The latter is closer to your autotune analogy.
But would people think the same for a song written and sung by a computer?


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## quoting_mungo (Oct 14, 2022)

Zara the Hork-Bajir said:


> Having looked through some of the AI generated art and the responses reminds me of the time that Autotune just started getting used in basically all popular songs. Everyone was sure it now took zero skill, song artistry was dead forever. I think over time people will come to accept it more and more as just the way things are, right now people are just playing in the sandbox seeing what they can get away with, where it works and where it doesn't.
> 
> What bothers me is how all AI generated art has now been labeled as "lacking artistic merit", simply because a brand new tool was used to make it. Do all autotune songs have no value? While nobody like to admit it some of those songs were more catchy than a plague. Having a seperate tag or category for AI generated/assisted art is a good idea, not sure why a complete ban is necessary.


These tools aren’t like autotune, though. Autotune is like a Photoshop filter. You go out and snap a photo and slap a filter on it people might call you lazy, but the work (the photo and by extension the modified one) is still yours.

When they make synthetic voices for people who need to use text-to-speech in their regular life (think Stephen Hawking), the people whose voices are sampled are aware and have consented to that use. No one has a problem with that.

If you were to go out and grab the audio of a large body of TikTok clips, YouTube videos, and podcasts, and use those to teach a computer speech, that might be acceptable as a research project, either in Linguistics and related fields or in AI/computer parsing research. But if you go on to then release your computer voice maker for anyone to use? You’ve crossed a line. You used the work of others, which they own the rights to, without their consent. It doesn’t matter if the computer doesn’t use any one person’s voice straight. Yes, it’s a problem if this hypothetical computer voice maker undercuts and replaces voice actors, but it’s much more of a problem how it’s using the labor of people _without permission or acknowledgment_.


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## Faustus (Oct 14, 2022)

One thought I've been having recently is this. AI isn't programmed. It's trained. You show it stuff, indicate a portion of the image and say, for example, 'this is a boat' or 'this is a fish' or 'this is a surrealist commentary on contemporary values in Sweden using the medium of pig faeces', and the AI learns.

Human artists learn in a very similar way.

So, while I can understand arguments against AI art because (for example) it makes it more difficult for human artists to find work, I don't entirely agree with arguments that say it's copyright theft to use images to train a model. Every artist uses reference images at some point. It only becomes a problem if they are recognisable in the artist's own work.

Besides, if you make that specific argument, you also have to ban all those human artists who draw 'fan art'.


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## quoting_mungo (Oct 14, 2022)

Faustus said:


> One thought I've been having recently is this. AI isn't programmed. It's trained. You show it stuff, indicate a portion of the image and say, for example, 'this is a boat' or 'this is a fish' or 'this is a surrealist commentary on contemporary values in Sweden using the medium of pig faeces', and the AI learns.
> 
> Human artists learn in a very similar way.
> 
> ...


But you can ask those humans about their influences and they’ll tell you. They will (generally) correctly attribute fanart and homages. (And will get in hot water if they try to make money off of anything owned by The Mouse. ) They have learned not only from pictures, but from watching the world. And human memory isn’t static. We interpret, fill in blanks, and so on. Drawing a giraffe from memory a couple days after you sat at the zoo doing gesture drawing by the giraffe enclosure is going to yield a different result than doing so months or years down the line. 

Trained computer applications that generate images directly derive their value from the work they were trained on. We don’t allow people to use art they don’t own the rights to (and that aren’t in public domain) in order to create a product in any other sphere. When it’s done, there is justified backlash.

The conversation would be very different if publicly released generators only used public domain work to train their models. Hell, it would be different if there weren’t already people monetizing (ie charging to use) their particular generators. But using work you don’t own the rights to in order to generate value and quite possibly undercut those same rights holders is unethical. Allowing prompters to request art in the style of artists whose work has not yet passed into public domain is unethical.

Hell, there’s training data used for some of these generators that wasn’t supposed to be public at all in the first place. And there’s not really any way to “untrain” specific things from the algorithm. 








						Artist finds private medical record photos in popular AI training data set
					

LAION scraped medical photos for AI research use. Who's responsible for taking them down?




					arstechnica.com


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## TrishaCat (Oct 14, 2022)

Loganth said:


> I did this in about 2 hours in NovelAI and Photoshop.
> 
> This particular genie is out the bottle.  I would advice against a blanket ban, just create a new category for it.
> 
> ...





			https://forums.furaffinity.net/threads/how-to-properly-handle-adult-content.1655576/
		



> Hiding NSFW content within spoiler: *BAD* (Anyone can click it)


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## Firuthi Dragovic (Oct 14, 2022)

Loganth said:


> I did this in about 2 hours in NovelAI and Photoshop.
> 
> This particular genie is out the bottle.  I would advice against a blanket ban, just create a new category for it.
> 
> _((image removed from post))_


You probably could have picked different subject matter for a forum post... but let me give this a try.

So... what was with the knee, shoulder, and lower jaw of that dragon?  Were those markings the AI's idea, or yours?


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## Faustus (Oct 15, 2022)

quoting_mungo said:


> But you can ask those humans about their influences and they’ll tell you. They will (generally) correctly attribute fanart and homages. (And will get in hot water if they try to make money off of anything owned by The Mouse. )


I covered that already where I said it is a problem if the art is recognisable as being based on something else, and fan art is still technically copyright theft under the auspices of demarkation, it's just not worth Disney's time to prosecute so many small-time artists. They'd lose money. Where an AI is responsible for fan art and homages, it is the person who requested the image who is responsible for noting influences. In fact, some AI art programs give you the option to include the original prompt (and hence its influences) in the finished image.



quoting_mungo said:


> Trained computer applications that generate images directly derive their value from the work they were trained on. We don’t allow people to use art they don’t own the rights to (and that aren’t in public domain) in order to create a product in any other sphere. When it’s done, there is justified backlash.


Sure we do. Otherwise, there wouldn't be so many superheroes in spandex. It's not illegal for an artist to look at a picture, then draw something similar but legally distinct.



quoting_mungo said:


> The conversation would be very different if publicly released generators only used public domain work to train their models.


I'll bet human artists use copyrighted works for reference all the time, and even more often, subconsciously without realising it.



quoting_mungo said:


> Allowing prompters to request art in the style of artists whose work has not yet passed into public domain is unethical.


Real artists copy other artists' style all the time too. It's not illegal so long as they're not trying to pass it off as someone else's work.



quoting_mungo said:


> Hell, there’s training data used for some of these generators that wasn’t supposed to be public at all in the first place. And there’s not really any way to “untrain” specific things from the algorithm.


I'm not going to defend any single specific case of people using things they shouldn't, but the vast majority of images obtained for training AI comes from the public Internet where human artists can assimilate and reference it too.


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## quoting_mungo (Oct 15, 2022)

Faustus said:


> I'm not going to defend any single specific case of people using things they shouldn't, but the vast majority of images obtained for training AI comes from the public Internet where human artists can assimilate and reference it too.



That sounds worryingly like the ages-old “if you didn’t want people stealing it, you shouldn’t have posted it online.” At best you’re making a case for huge, obtrusive watermarks to make a comeback. Humans do not learn the way computers do, or vice versa.

You can ask a computer to draw adsfgvfkjh and it will come up with something. Ask an artist to draw that and at best they’ll give you some fancy lettering. A computer has no concept of what it’s drawing, it’s just got rules that it associates with letters. Friend who actually knows this stuff on a technical level just now fed “qqq” into a generator and it spat out images that a human might describe as “Middle Eastern city.” I can’t entirely follow the fancy text speech he used to describe why this is, but I can understand that much.

Deep neural networks make rules that they then follow when they spit something out. They have no concept of “vase” corresponding to an object, or any semantic knowledge about that object (things like “a vase is a container with a hole pointed vaguely upwards that you put flowers in”), just that those letters in that sequence are associated with edges following a particular set of rules. There are no gaps in these systems’ “knowledge” - if you never train one on a single image of an elephant, and you ask it to draw one, it will confidently spit _something_ out and far as it is concerned has fulfilled your request. You ask a hypothetical artist who has never been exposed to images or descriptions of elephants (and never seen one in other contexts) to draw one, and they’ll ask you wtf is an elephant. Because the artist understands that an elephant is an object, and trying to extrapolate what it looks like from the spelling of the word is silly and pointless.


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## Judge Spear (Oct 15, 2022)

Faustus said:


> Real artists copy other artists' style all the time too. It's not illegal so long as they're not trying to pass it off as someone else's work.


A lot of you are looking at all of this from extremely linear angles and are not considering very important extrinsics like brand recognition and traffic.

Real artists cannot rapidly output copied or grifted content to the point that, in the modern age, fucks the original source artist's metrics. AI art can and it already floods searches with itself because what I do in a day, a machine will do 30 times in 6 hours.
Companies for instance don't strike down fan works for existing. it's going to be fan work that is directly misleading an audience in a manner that is too big to ignore and can erode brand recognition which is a net loss. Not because it's theft/copyright infringement on it's face.

AI art that directly utilizes an artist in it's prompt is a non insignificant concern as a single creator or small group. Your work can be over shadowed or contended with bastardized versions of your content. That directly cuts into your traffic which is destructive the more independent you are.

EDIT: (Fixed some sentence structure/typos)


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## Attaman (Oct 15, 2022)

Something to keep in mind with AI art is that it can and has been directly used - openly, with candid admittance - as a means to avoid paying artist _as well_ as a way to actively target and hurt artists' income.

This is not the realm of theoretical future problems that hypothetical bad actors might engage in. We have people training art-creation AI's _right now_ with the explicit intent of targeting, copying, and supplanting artists who have been vocally critical of AI art just to go "We can teach an AI to replace you". We have people using art-creation AI's as a means to get "Trending on Art Station" (as the meme goes) works that normally would cost several hundred each to commission (let alone any professional license to actually, y'know, make commercial use of the art) to avoid having to pay / credit artists _with them explicitly saying_ it's to avoid having to pay / credit artists.

Even if one wishes to argue "This is fine", it sets some _pretty chilling precedents_ both in creative fields and with regards to work (professional, hobby, et al) as a whole. And while I may be lingering on the former more than the latter (professional artists of various mediums do not have it particularly easy these days with the war on voice actors, absurd productivity and 'quality' expectations for web series', the rampant abuse of virtual effects artists, etcetera), the latter is also very much worth keeping in mind seeing as how there's _already_ well documented anxiety as to what 'work' might look like 30 years from now and it doesn't need help with people actively arguing "If your entire career field can be replaced by a 3"x3"x0.1" piece of silicone and a stable internet connection that sounds like a you problem". See how fucking fast that answer spins on its head when somebody goes after STEM (and I'll be blunt: It's significantly easier for this sort of tech to be used to go after STEM fields than creative arts). "You can't just replace Civil Engineers with an AI program!" "Haha STEM loan defaulting go brrrr."


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## quoting_mungo (Oct 15, 2022)

Attaman said:


> Something to keep in mind with AI art is that it can and has been directly used - openly, with candid admittance - as a means to avoid paying artist _as well_ as a way to actively target and hurt artists' income.


Quite. Part (though not all) of my ethical concerns with training these algorithms on the art of living artists without their consent ties into this. It’s not even paying someone to build their own replacement - it’s using the fruits of their labor, for free and without even asking (and often against their protestations), to create and improve a means of undermining their livelihood. And that’s, like… if you (gen) don’t see the ethical issue there, you’re very much damaged by late-stage capitalism.

(And no, not charging for the use of your ethically questionable tech toy doesn’t mean you’re not deriving value from the training data. Not charging for playing with the tech toy on request doesn’t mean you’re not deriving value. And that’s without considering the fact that there _are_ people who charge for access to their toys.

I don’t have issue with people building and using these things _for science_. AI and NNs and machine learning are cool research fields. It’s the public access that creates most of the issues.)


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## Judge Spear (Oct 15, 2022)

Attaman said:


> Something to keep in mind with AI art is that it can and has been directly used - openly, with candid admittance - as a means to avoid paying artist _as well_ as a way to actively target and hurt artists' income.
> 
> This is not the realm of theoretical future problems that hypothetical bad actors might engage in. We have people training art-creation AI's _right now_ with the explicit intent of targeting, copying, and supplanting artists who have been vocally critical of AI art just to go "We can teach an AI to replace you". We have people using art-creation AI's as a means to get "Trending on Art Station" (as the meme goes) works that normally would cost several hundred each to commission (let alone any professional license to actually, y'know, make commercial use of the art) to avoid having to pay / credit artists _with them explicitly saying_ it's to avoid having to pay / credit artists.
> 
> Even if one wishes to argue "This is fine", it sets some _pretty chilling precedents_ both in creative fields and with regards to work (professional, hobby, et al) as a whole. And while I may be lingering on the former more than the latter (professional artists of various mediums do not have it particularly easy these days with the war on voice actors, absurd productivity and 'quality' expectations for web series', the rampant abuse of virtual effects artists, etcetera), the latter is also very much worth keeping in mind seeing as how there's _already_ well documented anxiety as to what 'work' might look like 30 years from now and it doesn't need help with people actively arguing "If your entire career field can be replaced by a 3"x3"x0.1" piece of silicone and a stable internet connection that sounds like a you problem". See how fucking fast that answer spins on its head when somebody goes after STEM (and I'll be blunt: It's significantly easier for this sort of tech to be used to go after STEM fields than creative arts). "You can't just replace Civil Engineers with an AI program!" "Haha STEM loan defaulting go brrrr."


This is one issue I take with a lot of people in favor of AI.
I don't know what world people think we're living in because when I wake up every morning, it absolutely is not this.







People can cook up all of these romantic idealizations of these fabled AI art uses. But you'd be naïve to think it won't be used far more by lazy grifters to the detriment of art communities. Assuming it gets that far.

Now, I personally don't see big *damage *in the future to the extent you do. It could come to pass and I might be wrong.
But to ignore the reality that an alarming amount of people ARE putting in express effort to be outwardly malicious, industry eroding hacks, is to be living a high fantasy. And by "high" I mean some new strain of weed. 
We just finished dealing with NFT Bros. burning holes in our atmosphere to make some quick millions. What makes anyone think AI Art will not be used _en masse _by the same ilk of gremlins?


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## Faustus (Oct 16, 2022)

Judge Spear said:


> A lot of you are looking at all of this from extremely linear angles and are not considering very important extrinsics like brand recognition and traffic.


To be fair, I DID make a sidelong reference in my original post to OTHER reasons that AI might be bad for the art industry. I would only debate the 'copyright theft' angle.


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## quoting_mungo (Oct 16, 2022)

Faustus said:


> To be fair, I DID make a sidelong reference in my original post to OTHER reasons that AI might be bad for the art industry. I would only debate the 'copyright theft' angle.


You seem to be mixing up legality and ethics to some degree, though. It’s not only about copyright theft copyright infringement _per se_. It’s about the ethics of taking an artist’s body of work and using it to train a neural network without consent. That those artists should have input as the rights holders is an important concern not primarily because of the legality, but because them retaining their rights rather than releasing the work into public domain means they cannot be assumed to be okay with whatever novel use people come up with.

Right now there hasn’t, far as I’m aware, been any legal challenge that can serve as precedent for whether feeding the work into a neural network is _legal_. Nor am I aware of any proposed legislation around it. I _am_ aware that corporations have lobbied for “orphaned works” excemptions in copyright law, and _those_ are/would be a very direct _legal_ threat to/undermining of  artist rights. I believe the concept of orphaned work (as these corporations would like to define it) could be used as leverage against artists in future legal challenges against generated art. So yes, there’s legal concerns, but those mainly exist as a future concern.

Fact stands that computers do not, and _can not_ (at least with current technology), learn art the way humans do. Not least because computers don’t _understand_ any of what they learn. Comparing machine learning to human learning, and indiscriminately feeding images into a training data set to humans using references, comes off as either disingenuous or short on understanding.

If there’s no human verification that images are posted legitimately (by the rights holder or with the rights holder’s permission) _at the absolute minimum_, you cannot escape situations like in the Ars Technica article I linked arising. They will continue coming up, and unlike DMCA takedowns for the source images (which could at least remove them from being used in future data sets/future uses of URI-based data sets) there is _no_ way to “untrain” the neural network on a specific image. It’s like the “once it’s on the Internet it’s out there forever” thing turned up to 11. Until legally challenged (and I’m not a lawyer, so I have no idea of how likely such a challenge is to stick) that’s a solely ethical issue, but one that to me has a pretty obvious answer.

I get that you feel strongly about this because you do play with these tech toys, and you do take requests from people to play with them on their behalf. But that’s the thing. You’re getting value (in views/likes/followers) out of something that builds entirely on the work of others. I’m not saying this as a character judgment on you. I’m saying this because I can’t think of a way, other than being concrete, to communicate that these artists’ work is a prerequisite of your tech toy existing. Of the images you generate existing.

My art might not have been quite the same without my being exposed to Lena Furberg, to _Bamse_, to any number of artists. But the hypothetical non-existence of their work would not automatically preclude me creating art. Practically all children draw, and some of their earliest works almost universally will depict things and people they see in real life. Themselves. Their families. Pets and cars and trees and flowers. While symbols will play into it (the sun isn’t literally a yellow circle with straight spokes sticking out), those symbols are not the part of art that anyone objects to being included in training data.

Without the images being fed into them as training data, these tech toys would at best create absolute nonsense. Flat colors, pixel soup, errors, I don’t know. They directly derive their value from other people’s work. At that point, the least one can do is make sure one gains informed consent.

Because otherwise, you do risk heading into a future where more and more content is heavily watermarked and/or hidden behind a paywall. And I know _that’s_ something consumers of furry art kvetch about to no end.


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## Faustus (Oct 16, 2022)

Point of order, I never claimed to be making a legal statement.


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## quoting_mungo (Oct 16, 2022)

Faustus said:


> Point of order, I never claimed to be making a legal statement.


Not as such, but you've used phrases like "it's not illegal" in e.g. this post. To me, at least, that suggests that legality plays into your argument.


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## Faustus (Oct 17, 2022)

quoting_mungo said:


> Not as such, but you've used phrases like "it's not illegal" in e.g. this post. To me, at least, that suggests that legality plays into your argument.


Oh that was just intended to point out the parallel between a human artist and a computer one, and also the difference between drawing something using information learned from other pictures, and actually attempting to copy elements of those pictures.


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## SirRob (Oct 20, 2022)

Pixiv has a policy on AI-generated work now. They're allowing it although it has to be tagged as such.








						pixiv's policy on AI-generated work
					

Greetings from pixiv.  We have recently witnessed a surge of inquiries regarding artworks in which a…




					www.pixiv.net
				




"At pixiv, we believe that the use of AI technology in the creative process will become even more widespread in the future, and we have no plans to ban AI-generated artwork completely.

We believe that AI technology, like other technologies that have been developed up until today, such as art supplies and resources, drawing software and digital tools, and 3D technology, can be a valuable ally to creators. Ultimately, we are looking for ways in which the creative community and technology can coexist successfully.

On the other hand, the rapid development of this technology has brought about various concerns and different perspectives about the use of AI, and we realize the regulations and ethics discourse haven't kept up with the pace of this transition. We are currently researching various topics related to AI technology and discussing each matter.
We are committed to long-term efforts to address the concerns of creators, general sentiment, and legal limits so that everybody can enjoy the world of creation with peace of mind."


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## Sheol_Azure (Nov 29, 2022)

Personally I view it as a tool. People who want to commission can make better representations of the character they had in mind. Artists can play with it creatively when experimenting with their artwork. We can argue back and forth but AI art is here to stay.
The only solution I can think of would be giving monetary compensation to the creator of the image used when generating the art when you generate it.


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## Deleted member 160111 (Nov 29, 2022)

Sheol_Azure said:


> The only solution I can think of would be giving monetary compensation to the creator of the image used when generating the art when you generate it.*


Sounds good, but you have to be Elon Musk to afford it.


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## Sheol_Azure (Nov 29, 2022)

No you can generate thousands of images for less than a dollar.
What I'm getting at is that the company generating the images could potentially share royalties accordingly.


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## Pomorek (Nov 29, 2022)

Sheol_Azure said:


> No you can generate thousands of images for less than a dollar.
> What I'm getting at is that the company generating the images could potentially share royalties accordingly.


I don't think the datasets they use contain information on whose artwork they were leeching.


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## Deleted member 162282 (Nov 29, 2022)

My issue with AI isn't what it does, it's how it does it. In order to train AI you need hundreds or thousands of samples, where this becomes an issue for me is, did the artists give you the rights to use their art to train your AI? If not, I wonder if there might be some legal repercussion for the companies in the future.

Perhaps artist should now add a non compete clause or condition to their art, or something along that measure? I don't know what I'm rambling about, but taking someone else's work, and in the case of AI, literally kit-bashing new work out of it without license seems legally grey to me.

Also, before anyone brings up kit-bashing as a legitimate thing, such as how the ship models on Star Wars were built, the key difference is that those companies paid for those kits, they didn't just take them.


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## ConorHyena (Nov 29, 2022)

quoting_mungo said:


> and I’m not a lawyer, so I have no idea of how likely such a challenge is to stick


very unlikely. Multiple different avenues of reasoning have been made but under general european copyright/IP law interpreations the way AI works falls under derivative work (-> collages are a similar example here) Making something like a 'style' an IP to potentially cause consequences for generators has a long list of potential reprecussions, and more often than not what we percieve a lack of regulation is actually there for a very good reason. 

That being said - ethics wise I do to a degre agree with you. It's just extremely difficult to argue ethics in an absolutist way because they are very liable to change and they differ greatly in different backgrounds and over time (for instance the ethics of 'copying a master' nowadays and during the baroque era were significantly different)
Ethical arguments also to a degree are divorced from a legal standpoint - because the law shoudl establish a very basic baseline of what is OK and what isn't - and society will have to define what it feels is acceptable.
For instance at least part of the demographic I've talked to that has been very upset about AI has been either drawing fanart (It's just fanart, duh!) and has been downloading stuff on the internet (It's all just big cooperations anyway, right?) which under the very restrictive AI-art-is-theft doctrine is essentially on the same level but for some reason it is okay. (Which I'm not judging on btw. This is not supposed to be a callout post or such. There's just a significant fickleness in the average citizen's perception of 'what is right and proper that is inherently problematic)

Same goes with paywalls. I feel it perfectly reasonable to put one's higher-quality pieces behind a patreon or something, as an artist, even in the furryverse. People will get upset over this (and deem it unethical) because ethics more often than not are providing a justification for 'but I want this and I don't wanna pay for it'

full disclosure: I'm an artist and I have not ever worked with AI before.


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## Yastreb (Nov 29, 2022)

Daurvn said:


> My issue with AI isn't what it does, it's how it does it. In order to train AI you need hundreds or thousands of samples, where this becomes an issue for me is, did the artists give you the rights to use their art to train your AI? If not, I wonder if there might be some legal repercussion for the companies in the future


In order to train a human brain to creat art you need to see thousands of other art pieces. Where this becomes an issue is, did the artists give you the right to use their art to train your brain?


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## Deleted member 162282 (Nov 29, 2022)

Yastreb said:


> In order to train a human brain to creat art you need to see thousands of other art pieces. Where this becomes an issue is, did the artists give you the right to use their art to train your brain?


Or you could just go outside, sketch nature, find inspiration in the real world, work hard and refine your style, or take a class, paying a tutor to assist your development. Plenty of ways that people can better themselves without the potential theft of thousands of other peoples works, particularly when we're talking about for profit purposes.

Additionally, there is a difference from being inspired from someone's work, and outright taking it for a kit-bash, at the end of the day a human can find inspiration from anywhere, real-life or not and people are not restricted to reference images from other artists, where AI (at this time) is. So you have a technology that is 100% dependant on IP theft in order to kit-bash something together based on a few prompts, that's why at this time, I'm against AI art generators that do not license or require permission from the artists that they are trained on.


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## quoting_mungo (Nov 29, 2022)

ConorHyena said:


> For instance at least part of the demographic I've talked to that has been very upset about AI has been either drawing fanart (It's just fanart, duh!) and has been downloading stuff on the internet (It's all just big cooperations anyway, right?) which under the very restrictive AI-art-is-theft doctrine is essentially on the same level but for some reason it is okay.


I don’t believe that the ethical concerns surrounding fanart and image generators are more than superficially similar, tbh. But then I guess I don’t exactly see “AI art” as art theft _per se_. And vital parts of the ethical issues I see with it have no counterpart in fanart:
- Lack of source material verification (images for training datasets are scraped uncritically, without ensuring that they were posted with the rights holder’s and (in the case of photography) subject’s blessing)
- Lack of attributability (fanart can clearly point back to its source material)
- Competition with the original (with very rare exception, fanart exists alongside rather than in competition with its source material)
But then “art theft” also gets used overbroadly by some groups, as well. 

(For the record, my personal position on piracy is “don’t, but if the rights holder will not make it available to a market at a reasonable market price, they have no real room to complain.” Like, multiple shows were recently retired in order to do accounting dark magic by declaring them a loss. In doing so, the company binds themselves to generate no future revenue from the property, and to pull it from distribution. At that point, what damages do they get to claim? (Rhetorical question.) “Reasonable market price” basically meaning “if a movie is only sold in an extravagant collector’s edition for $$$, and is not available in forms and at price points comparable to similar products, that’s only ‘available’ on paper.”)


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## Mambi (Nov 29, 2022)

Daurvn said:


> Or you could just go outside, sketch nature, find inspiration in the real world, work hard and refine your style, or take a class, paying a tutor to assist your development. Plenty of ways that people can better themselves without the potential theft of thousands of other peoples works, particularly when we're talking about for profit purposes.
> 
> Additionally, there is a difference from being inspired from someone's work, and outright taking it for a kit-bash, at the end of the day a human can find inspiration from anywhere, real-life or not and people are not restricted to reference images from other artists, where AI (at this time) is. So you have a technology that is 100% dependant on IP theft in order to kit-bash something together based on a few prompts, that's why at this time, I'm against AI art generators that do not license or require permission from the artists that they are trained on.



AI can only imitate art. Ask the AI what it *feels* about the art. Ask it what emotions it's trying to convey. 

The nothingness you'll get in reply is exactly why AI art is a failure before it begins.


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## Fallowfox (Nov 29, 2022)

Mambi said:


> AI can only imitate art. Ask the AI what it *feels* about the art. Ask it what emotions it's trying to convey.
> 
> The nothingness you'll get in reply is exactly why AI art is a failure before it begins.



Beep boop. :{

So counter to this. What if a human feels something when they view art generated by an AI?


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## Mambi (Nov 29, 2022)

Fallowfox said:


> Beep boop. :{
> 
> So counter to this. What if a human feels something when they view art generated by an AI?



Easily countered: The AI is replicating art from *components *made by humans that were *originally* *designed* to evoke emotion. So it gets carried over accidentally.

If an AI draws a baby being snuggled by a kitten, *WE* feel the sense of "awwwww!", but the AI just sees two random objects together and places them as instructed.
The AI is _not _trying to create the emotion no matter what it uses as a palette, while the components were made by humans who _were_ so we start feeling things.

A human will see an animal or a face in the clouds as well, but the clouds aren't _trying _to draw anything. That's how I see AI art...coincidental evocations only.


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## Foxridley (Nov 29, 2022)

Mambi said:


> Easily countered: The AI is replicating art from *components *made by humans that were *originally* *designed* to evoke emotion. So it gets carried over accidentally.
> 
> If an AI draws a baby being snuggled by a kitten, *WE* feel the sense of "awwwww!", but the AI just sees two random objects together and places them as instructed.
> The AI is _not _trying to create the emotion no matter what it uses as a palette, while the components were made by humans who _were_ so we start feeling things.
> ...


Just to fully flesh out the idea: How might this compare, then, to an artist drawing a kink they aren't into for a commissioner?
That is, it is a turn-on for the commissioner, but does nothing for the artist.


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## Mambi (Nov 29, 2022)

Foxridley said:


> Just to fully flesh out the idea: How might this compare, then, to an artist drawing a kink they aren't into for a commissioner?
> That is, it is a turn-on for the commissioner, but does nothing for the artist.



Oh that's easy: The artist can *empathize* with the purchaser, and can ask specific question to put themselves in the mindset of the person. At least the artist is still trying to evoke an emotion even if they don't feel it personally, the only real difference is they do not share that emotion but rather are asking the purchaser to help them through that part of the process through feedback. Like an actor, after understanding the desire of the "producer", they are temporarily putting themselves into that mindset to create what is asked of them.

For example, a straight artist can draw a gay scene because they can picture what a gay person would like. If they can't, they can ask gay people or look at gay art for references and patterns. But unlike the AI, the artist is trying to see what the original artist was feeling while they made it. The AI on the other hand is just grabbing random stuff it was told is related to the topic and saying "Here you go, as asked." The AI is not trying to feel the emotions at all, so when it tries to replicate the emotion requested, it simply can't understand what it's being asked to do. It's just grabbing random stuff and trying to throw it together and get lucky emotion-wise.


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## Fallowfox (Nov 30, 2022)

Would art drawn by a vulcan who doesn't feel emotion count?


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## Deleted member 160111 (Nov 30, 2022)

Fallowfox said:


> Would art drawn by a vulcan who doesn't feel emotion count?


This is illogical.


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## Yakamaru (Nov 30, 2022)

Fallowfox said:


> Would art drawn by a vulcan who doesn't feel emotion count?


"I've made art that depicts how I feel"
"...But the canvas is empty"
"Exactly"


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## quoting_mungo (Nov 30, 2022)

Fallowfox said:


> Would art drawn by a vulcan who doesn't feel emotion count?


Do Vulcans truly not feel emotion, though, or are they simply detached from it? (I get the impression that it leans towards the latter, but I’m not _that_ deep into Star Trek.)

I don’t believe that the only thing an artist can leave of themselves on the canvas is emotion. Maybe Vulcans paint logic and greater good?


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## ConorHyena (Dec 20, 2022)

Fallowfox said:


> Would art drawn by a vulcan who doesn't feel emotion count?


only if done during pon farr


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