fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6264 ]

[ SECRET POST #6264 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6264 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[Fandom: Tiān Guān Cì Fú/Heaven Official's Blessing
Ship: Beefleaf (Shi Qingxuan and He Xuan)]

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[Music, Drake/Kendrick Lamar beef, What's the Beef? Youtube channel]

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[X-Files s04e10, "Paper Hearts" ]

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 07 secrets from Secret Submission Post #895.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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For fuck's sake, if you actually care about artists and their livelihoods and have ever actually spent two seconds of your day listening to them then you'd know exactly why AI art is in fact not the same as using digital paint programs. Capitalism. The answer is capitalism. AI is demolishing entire fields of work here in 2024, both in the realm of art and outside of it.

SA
Specialized skills and trades are folding to AI and capitalism, that is.

Peoples' hatred of AI extends way over and above its effect on job markets or things of that nature.

And rightly so. There's a level of existential dread to AI - the fact that human creativity is at risk of being replaced by machine creativity is something that should worry everyone, artists and non-artists alike.

Nah, that's nonsense. People make art because they like making art. The existence of a new tool isn't gonna change that.

Tell that to the opening credits of Secret Invasion.

It already is. No matter if the audience thinks what AI have is ugly, companies will do anything to not have to pay artists.

Human creativity is unlikely to be replaced by these tools, however, because they're incapable of creating anything that isn't iterated from other creations; they can't truly innovate or produce anything "new." Humans will still need to be involved both to direct them and to give them new works to build off of.

Wouldn't it be a better use of time if humans stopped playing around with AI and just... Actually created things on their own as we have done for thousands of years?

Well, I don't know -- whether something is a "better use of time" is largely subjective (we're fandom people, right? How many people think we should be doing something else with our time?), and there is a strong creative element to developing something like AI. I can imagine that people will also develop really creative ways of using it, methods that we personally haven't thought of and so can't predict.

I'm not overjoyed at the idea of art making machines, and I'm a shit visual artist who envies people who make drawing, painting, sculpture, etc look effortless.

But I wouldn't loathe the idea of "input prompt into computer, get art" so fucking much if the tech was even usable without sucking up basically every single image and every word on the internet without compensating or crediting anyone at all for their stolen labor and then proposing to replace them with art bots for a subscription fee.

Making my mass produced sneakers may put artisanal cobblers out of jobs, but making those sneakers doesn't involve stealing every pair of shoes ever turned and sewn by human hands, putting them in a hopper, and grinding them up into bargain brand sneakers that are then sold for profit.

The new and egregiously shitty part of the AI "art" hustle is the models literally can't produce usable/salable results without first being fed the entire stolen internet, which developers of the tech have admitted to.

And they don't then say "well I guess it's back to the drawing board until we have a large enough opt-in database of text and images that contributors were fairly compensated for," they say "but we have to use stolen data or we can't make money!" :-(

Boo fucking hoo. Poor and working class people go to jail for "but I have to steal because I don't have money!" Rich companies should be barred from doing business and have their assets seized and redistributed for this bullshit.

++100

People are being weirdly hostile towards the technology itself in this case though. I see the same people who would usually look at job loss in some industry being automated and say "this is a systemic problem of capitalism" are looking at generative AI and saying "this specific technology is bad and shouldn't exist". If you haven't seen that, good for you I guess, but it's definitely a thing and it's weird.

Because generative AI IS effectively bad. Other tools don't run around stealing the hard work of who knows how many artists dead and alive just to make a lifeless mash-up of it for techbros to drool over and later call those same artists who were robbed crybabies. There is an ethical concern to the use of these "tools". What is their actual benefit? Who actually benefits from them?

We're not "weirdly" hostile, we're rightfully hostile to something that takes others' work, removes all meaning and humanity from it and regurgitates it back in the form of soulless pixels. For... What, exactly?

Sure, it's a matter of livelihood but it's a matter of principles too. What's truly "weird" is how calmly some people are taking this entire situation. But hey, maybe when they create technology that rips out the heart of the things YOU do with passion and reduces them to a computer spitting out a sad, sorry caricature of it that holds no respect for your efforts or talents or those of thousands of others in your field, maybe you'll join our "weird" crowd too.

The locomotive and automobile put people out of business, too, as did many technologies that put goods from all over the world into your hands; technologies that you're blasé about and would miss if they were suddenly gone, despite the fact that their appearance did to others what you dislike this technology doing to you.

This is the way things go. It sucks to be on your side of it, but others have been there, and still others will be there after you.

The part about principles didn't make the cut for the response, did it? Ethics just tossed out the window. Cool!

Best of luck when it comes for you and people call you weird or naive for being mad about it. Hey, maybe we'll all be robots without any feelings left by then so there will be no one left to complain, just made to swallow down what the corporations want us to swallow down. Even better, no?

But there aren't any real principles to discuss, here. We're upset when we're the ones being replaced, and that's understandable -- but that people get replaced when society changes or technology advances is not a good argument to stop all change and advancement.

Nothing lasts forever. That includes professions and specialties.

It's not about being "replaced". It's about our work being STOLEN. Not "a future employment" but our PAST WORK. Every image on the internet ever has been fed to those AI bots, and they regurgitate frankensteins of the work REAL HUMAN ARTISTS did, not even bothering to credit them.

And then, someone who wrote "Give me a big titted supergirl" claims they can do the same job as the artist from whom they stole said "big titted supergirl"

I don’t think the plagiarism argument applies until and unless it can actually reproduce your work. Right now it’s an incoherent mishmash only useful for concept art or Tumblr shitposts.

I also agree with basically everything Morlock Holmes says about AI art, e.g.https://morlock-holmes.tumblr.com/post/737826171981529088/okay-ai-art-is-art-agreed-sure-how-ethical-is

I didn't say it plagiarized (Although certain AI programs can and have recreated an original artist's art almost perfectly depending on the prompt, especially when you get "in the style of" prompts. I've seen a lot of people try to pass AI images as Artgem originals, for example, because yes, the rendering is VERY similar, and Artgem is one of the artists whose work was fed wholesale without permission to those programs.

Morlock Holmes is wrong, by the way, using the same arguments that confuse programming and mathematical prediction for intelligence and learning. And I guess all the publishers that have been called out for using AI 'art' on their book covers, or the people who have published books done completely with AI, agree that it's far more than just "for Tumblr shitposts"

But your work isn't being stolen. AI is not reproducing your work; it is building off of it to create new work. This is what humans do, and have always done, as well.

Interestingly, the conversation about humans doing it is nearly the same: despite the fact that we arrange art into genres and movements, tacitly acknowledging that we are often just copying and interating off of one another, we are also hypersensitive to the appearance of copying when it strikes a particular emotional chord. Creed "ripped off" Pearl Jam; JK Rowling "ripped off" The Worst Witch. '1899' had triangles and space travel in it, so the author of a graphic novel that also had triangles and space travel in it claims she's been plagiarized.

And in the background of it all, there are people arguing about IP law; getting mad that corporations like Disney lobby for more restrictive legislation, that fanworks (which arguably are true instances of "stealing") inhabit a legal gray zone and are shrouded in risk.

My feeling, at the end of the day, is that this is about people feeling protective of certain works (their own, and those to which they're otherwise emotionally attached) but lacking an actual overarching principle or understanding of how the creative process works. It's also a lot of people complaining about capitalism while wanting capitalism to work in their favor, i.e. compensating them for endeavors that wouldn't be compensated in a society that's needs based and removed from the market.

There's absolutely no creative work in AI. A ton of artists have been trying to explain this to everyone. How the algorithm only recreates things based on the pixels it was fed, without any thought or learning because it CAN'T learn. It's programmed to to that, and without the work of humans, it's worthless.

Your analogy is wrong because, no matter my personal feelings about, say, the quality of JKRowling's writing and personal ethos, she didn't copy full paragraphs of The Worst Witch (And Books of Magic) to write Harry Potter. No matter how similar her work is to other previous work, it is still her writing, and her mistakes. AI takes the work and reproduces it, at times, verbatim. There was a HUGE scandal of an idiot programming an AI thing to reproduce the style of Kim Jung Gi not two weeks after his death, for example, and the thing was just doing that: copying Kim Jung Gi work and 'predicting' through programming how Jung Gi Would PROBABLY drawn a prompt. The thing is this: a Human copying and studying the work of Kim Jung Gi? Would also add their own experience to the work, and hopefully evolve into his own style. AI can't do that. It's not "Intelligence", it's a mathematical algorithm. And that mathematical algorithm was fed work that was stolen -bootleged if you prefer- from real human artists. Not, say, a hundred thousand "How to draw anime" books, studying the masters, trying to get WHY they put that pixel where they put it and reproducing it. Also, consider that a LOT of the people complaining ARE creatives themselves. In fact, MOST of the voices against AI are artists themselves. So the idea that we don't understand how "Creative process works" it's more than a bit insulting.

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(Anonymous) - 2024-03-01 05:07 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2024-03-01 06:23 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2024-03-01 20:48 (UTC) - Expand

Studios were trying to make people sign away their appearance and voice in perpetuity. For free in some cases, and without telling them why. It was beyond shady.

Whatever bizarre 'Other People's Money' arguments you use to defend the proliferation of AI, nothing like the above has happened before, and people should be worried.

NAYRT, but this comment is such a good illustration of the person you replied to's point? Literally all of the criticisms you made can be leveled at actual, real people -- the techbros drooling over lifeless mash-up AI art, the people who benefit from AI, the people who took from artists without permission, people with no plan about what to do about artists put out of a job by this -- all of this somehow you have translated into a hatred for the *technology itself* rather than the people involved in designing, making, using, and benefiting from the technology or who actually have the ability to set up society in a way to make this sudden automation not extremely disruptive. Really weird phenomenon!

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