I find it interesting that the people who defend “AI Art” as “making art more accessible”, seem to forget that to generate those images, you have to have either and expensive phone or expensive computer. You can get a pencil and paper from the dollar store. Or even take a pencil from Ikea and doodle on a napkin from a fast food joint. Or find some mud and make shapes with your hands.
Art has always been accessible. It might not be great, but it has always been accessible to everyone. No matter the skill level.
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Even poor people are artists!
See the joke is that many artists are “struggling” artists, see
AI will never replace humans with anything.
It’s not a living being, it’s basically not real.
The word “use” could have a much broader meaning (or be more nuanced), but I do agree that making money from anything AI produces is scummy.
I’m certain that’s not what I mean in regards to AI-produced images. Again, in that AI image generators have LEARNED (in as much as any machine can “learn” anything) to make an original image that is not solely nor explicitly derived from any number of other images, regardless of their origin (be it other AI programs or humans). I realize that might sound contradictory, but in regards to anything that’s “similar” that’s getting into styles.
For an example, Norman Rockwell never painted a picture of Dinosaurs with cybernetic augmentations firing lasers on a glowing grid pattern battlefield with galaxies in the background (this is what I mean by being “derived from”) but an image with those items could be made to appear in a Norman Rockwell style.
If we’re going to say this and that looks similar to X, therefore “stolen” - I can’t agree with that reasoning. Take human artists who make photorealistic images. Would they have issues with each other claiming everyone else stole their art style? I would hope not.
Now… I did like your post up until this point because I felt it was misrepresenting what I was saying.
If tomatoes grow from a vine, and I have a tomato plant at home that bears fruit, that’s almost like someone saying I stole a tomato from the store simply because anyone can get 
from the store too. false equivalency? Anyway…
Similar to if someone were to use an AI image generator to make an image then someone else says the image was somehow stolen… from what? I don’t know.
Or are we suggesting that if/when someone uses an AI image generator that they’re doing it with malicious intent to pass off as their own, thinking they’ll get away with it? That’s why when you used the word “insight” I wasn’t sure if you were thinking I was justifying that as a reason to use AI.
Well, it wasn’t. I’m doing away with the notion of “stolen” and saying that images are created. Yes. They have a database of styles, but what else would there be to build off of or use as a reference when a human using it asks for (for example) “Something in the style of Picasso”.
If that’s enough to reason that the resulting image is then “stealing” from Picasso… Then I don’t know what to say. I refer to my Futuristic Robo-Dinos a’la Rockwell example.
I fear this becoming a reality too. Ultimately, that is up to corporations if they want to do good or evil.
It’s not so much that computers can work fast as it is efficiently. Yes. It seems “fast” to us humans, but I’d presume there are a LOT of calculations involved.
If superheroes… let’s say a ‘Speedster’ was real, and he’s also an artist. If they can work so fast and make whatever in what seems mere seconds, does it still lack value?
So the idea that if something is made (relatively) fast it automatically lacks value is, imo, not an argument.
I mean, what if a human artists gets the full idea of a work of art in their mind first? It might be a flash of inspiration or worked out over a period time, but there comes a point when the work is essentially finished. The only thing left to do is apply it to a canvass, or chisel it out of a giant slab of marble, or physically express it in the medium of their choosing. To take it from concept to reality.
You can be assured if said artists could create it in an instant - they most likely would.
I agree.
Rocks are not living things, but they’re real. And sorry to break it to you. Somewhere on the hard-drive of a server there are a series of 0s and 1s that together function as they were coded. Whether it’s a calculator or an AI Chatbot or Image Generator. Or maybe I’m misrepresenting what you believe the word “real” to mean. Is computer code real?
(Don’t answer if you don’t want to. It’s just something to ponder)
AI is nothing more than a tool. Photoshop is a tool, MSPaint is a tool.
We can worry about machines all we want, but it will always be the human factor that matters in the end. It can be used as a toy, but I don’t think it should be used to replace anything a human can or would be able to do that would benefit society.
Or would that be wrong? Like if an AI program discovers the cure for cancer? 
Sure, if superheroes were real and could draw insanely fast, that would have value. That isn’t the case with AI though. It really isn’t about the speed of generation, it’s just that AI can never deliver quality and by extension it’s worthless. When you can generate a billion images in no time, how could they ever have value?
Then it wouldn’t be art. I’m fine with using computers to screen for medical issues and develop cures if that’s a possibility.
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Interesting aspects, though I feel I need to get it down to a more technical perspective to point out the issues with AI art:
Human artists get influenced by many things in nature, life, media and so on. If they look at a Picasso, they get in touch with his work on ways where Picasso (or any other, to make it less abstract, living artist) does often not get by-passed in their rights.
For example a museum likely has the permission of artists (or their descendants) to show these pictures. Or the website you saw it on often also is allowed to share the image in that resolution under that specific license. Important here is that it is not a sure fact that your source is providing said images without consent of the right holder.
While we don’t know what a soul or consciousness is, we assume that the human artist brings in a personal perspective into it which makes the art emerge. In contrast to a person who plagiarizes specific paintings that do not look different to the source.
AI models may work different, depending on your stance of if there really is a soul. But what surely is different is the role of the AI creators.
AI these days are working by artificial neural networks. You probably saw images like these before:
The left circles represent the user’s input in some encoded form. The blue cycles take the input, do mathematical calculations based on them and the weight value of themselves to pass the data on. Usually there are many more columns and rows of blue nodes where one’s output is another’s input. Green is the produced image.
(if you cannot see it well, the connections are arrows pointing to the right)
The training process of an AI is to give it images and textual descriptions of said images, usually crawled from the same source and, due the amount of the data, without much manual verification. That way the AI learns which text results which image.
The result of said training are the weight values of the node.
So when you say AI got so good that you cannot always tell which artists it was influenced by, or that it even is AI art, you basically describe the benefit of having many blue nodes and very fine tuned weight values.
That’s it. That is the main difference to cheap AI models. Not more, not less.
Now, that might be not that much different to the human brain in principle. (Though not in fact, our brain has magnitudes of more neurons - in number, complexity, and connections)
What does make the difference here is that the AI was trained by people with purely commercially interest and without personal creativity on what the AI is used on to create.
To archive an cutting edge with their AI model, the creators need to feed it as much data as possible. Interests of the artist are so much in opposite to that that they are ignored. That is part of the reason not only the weights but also the training data is such a well kept secret for a company as many assume the data is basically an illegal collection of copyrighted material.
But given how important AI is to the economy (of a country) there is not much interest to protect the right-holders against that.
So tl;dr, the AI is just a machine that in practice was made from stolen goods and is commercially offered for use. There is no creativity or creation from thin air that is not based on these stolen goods.
On an abstract level, the set of weights represent the copyright infringements, like an illegal copy of a song is represented by the bits of the hardware medium it is stored on. So when you make an AI picture, these weights are inevitably producing your image! It is entirely unimportant if you make it create a Picasso or a Norman Rockwell variant of a cyberpunk dinosaur.
The counterexamples you list do not have this aspect, for example tomato seeds are distributed in the world willingly. For some goods that aspect may be questionable, like how silkworms were basically stolen from China. But just like history made that “okay”, AI generated art may be declared “okay” as well. It is just that HMF does not want to rely on that and we also decided to have a personal stance on the matter as well.
That the AI model users do not have any bad intent or did not pay for that (sometimes), that surely has an effect for them on a legal level. Ethical level aside for now. But this platform here is adding to the distribution to the images. The forum software does even mirror embedded images, so we even host AI art if we allowed that.
Regardless of how innocent you are, it can be problematic for us if stolen goods somehow, in some form, found it’s way in what we knowingly provide to the public.
That we simply don’t want that in respect of the artists comes on top of that.
That actually is an interesting argument, but not in the way you think!
I read an article that argues that AI art should be legal because it behaves like photographs of nature:
The photographer did not arrange the mountains, the trees or the rivers they take a picture from. They also did not place the sun in the sky for the lightning. They also did not ask for permission of these things to be photographed. They “just” aimed the camera and took the shot.
The timing, position and rotation of the camera is not that complex, you could store that information in a small amount of numbers. Digital cameras even do that automatically.
How can that be art?
How can AI images, that also were generated by something that was simple taken, based on it’s own set of numeric values (here the user input, not the weight values), be not art?
That was the gist of the article. However, I ended up not agreeing to it because I see a difference between photographed art and photographed nature. The latter just is, it has no artistic value before it is added by the photographer. But the first has that.
When a landscape photographer walks into a museum and does a photo of the landscape that is a well-centered Picasso, then that is not a landscape photo. And the photographer has not the right to sell that photo as their own creation.
That AI images are not a well copied original art is, I think, just a technical difference between AI and cameras. Not an aspect of art.
I think you can transfer that to photo-realistic art as well.
That is a perfect example that the technology itself is not bad or good. Already today machine learning provided indispensable results in protein-folding which is used in making medicine. I am almost certain that AI will save billions of life in that sector.
Another example that is already tested successfully is the control of plasma in fusion reactors.
The difference to AI art here however is the training data is entirely different. Protein structures or sensor/actor data are not copyrighted goods.
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Chop! Chop! Dad slave!
Kinda sorry for quoting/posting this here, but it would’ve been off-topic where it was originally posted. I just have to say that my jaw dropped when I read this.
Heck! If the person who was complaining about their parent being a “hard-ass” expecting them to get a job, the least that person could do is pull their weight and take care of chores. I don’t know if they do already, but that’s not the point. It’s implying it’s the job of their parent. Like they don’t already have an occupation.
I could go on, but then I can’t help but to change the focus on the person that was complaining (and saying what they should or shouldn’t do). And I’d rather not get into that. Because that’d be like giving advice, and they apparently have no interest in getting any.
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The idea here is, once someone is an adult, it’s none of their parents’ damn business what’s going on with their life. And if they’re still living with them and feel their adult child should contribute and they’re not, they can kick them out. The point being, they can worry about their own affairs, and take care of their own matters, which they would have to do anyway if they didn’t have the free labor of their children around.
I got two unpopular opinions for the price of one!
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The Last of Us Part 2 is better than part 1. Not by a lot, only slightly
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I prefer Abby over Ellie.
I love Joel, but both him and his surrogate daughter ar mass murdering psychopaths. Ellie isn’t likeable in the second game and she isn’t meant to be either. I still enjoy her story arch and playing as her.
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Abby and Lev are way more compelling than Ellie and Dina.
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I have not seen Jurassic World: Rebirth yet, but I have read some reviews and articles that have been posted about it, and the wider franchise. And there’s one thing that keeps popping up that tells me how out-of-touch some of these people commenting are, or just how little attention they’re paying.
A lot of them keep bringing up the line from the first Jurassic World, where the character Claire says that people aren’t impressed by dinosaurs anymore, and keep saying that this very idea is not believable. They think that people would still be in awe of dinosaurs to the point where the need for hybrids wouldn’t be necessary. Now, setting aside the meta implications that the statement is really the film producers talking about the people who go to see dinosaur movies, I think this is a take where they really aren’t thinking about it fully.
In the world where the Jurassic franchise takes place, the public has now known for certain that dinosaurs exist again for about 18 years at the time Jurassic World takes place - I’m going on the assumption that each movie up to this point takes place roughly around the same year they release. So the public has known that all the talk about an island with dinosaurs is real since that T. Rex rampaged through San Diego. If the years are the same, or at least properly aligned, that’s 18 years from that event to the creation of the Indominus Rex.
Now, tell me: all the children born in that time, who grew up in that period, who have never known a world where dinosaurs were not alive, do you think they’d be as awestruck as those remember a world where they could only be seen in books or as toys? Does anybody remember how quickly the public as a whole stopped being impressed at automobiles? At space travel? At the internet? At CGI itself? Are these people leaving these reviews truly incapable of imagining how quickly the normalization of something like living dinosaurs would take place? Even once they broke out and started showing up around the world, now just causing traffic problems like cows in India?
I keep seeing this take everywhere in association with opinions on the new movie, and how this view is why the World era of the franchise has been lackluster, and I really think they’re not considering the ample evidence of how quickly public boredom sets in, and are accusing the wrong culprit. The issue that makes the Jurassic franchise just so-so these days is the same reason why nobody is really all that excited about Harry Potter anymore, despite the phenomena it was. Why nobody sees Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man portrayal as the big deal it was at the time anymore. Why, despite only one poor performance in the history of the character, nobody is really enthused about seeing The Joker in a Batman movie anymore. All of these examples of public boredom have occurred within the last fifteen years only, and for the same reason that Jurassic is no longer the juggernaut it was: over-saturation. Too much exposure kills the wonder.
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I don’t know if it’s an unpopular opinion or not, but I’ve come to realize I just don’t care about Superman or Batman anymore. It’s not that I dislike the new Superman or Batman actors, or have any specific love for the old ones. I just don’t care. I haven’t seen The Batman, that Penguin thing, the Joker or Joker 2, or the new Superman and I doubt I ever will… just don’t care.
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The Batman is actually a really good movie, the only thing that bugs me is that its again a “realistic” Batman. I’d like to see a more fantastical version again, like the burton movies or the animated series from the 90s.
I also haven’t seen the rest of the movies
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Why even make another Superman? They made the definitive nearly half a century ago.
Give me a Detective Chimp movie, give me a Heckler flick, give me a Space Cabbie movie, give me a Haunted Tank Commander nickelodeon.
Yeah, they keep doing it wrong with these modern Superman movies. In the original, Superman is unique on Earth, the only super-powered being (that has revealed himself) and up against entirely Earthly foes, with Lex Luthor representing the pinnacle of human intelligence and resources being set against this otherworldly embodiment of power. Any first entry in a Superman series must have Luthor as the first main bad guy to establish Superman’s feats against our normal world, to define the limits of that particular incarnation of the character’s power. Other, more alien or godly threats can be introduced in the sequels.
But, what did Man of Steel do? Pit Superman against his own fellow Kryptonians, with identical powers, in his very first outing. What is this new one doing? Virtually every DC superhero who isn’t in the Justice League is already in this movie. Do people not understand that the slow world-building was what allowed the MCU and the Monsterverse to succeed as shared universes, and is why the MCU at least is now floundering with no more world to build, and why DC’s previous attempt also failed by taking this same step of just throwing everybody in with no building for themselves?
No… they do not. Executives and money men just want “instant franchise” and don’t want to do the work to get there. They think the Marvel Cinematic Universe effectively laid the groundwork already and they can just cash in.
Man of Steel rushed to bring in Zod.
Batman V. Superman rushed to bring in a “world-weary” Batman who didn’t earn it.
Justice League rushed in half of the league.
The only one who even vaguely did it right was Wonder Woman.
I don’t even know who most of the characters in the new Superman movie are (I don’t read comics). Why is there a dog in this? What’s with the stupid haircut guy? I know these are comic book characters, but it’s just like the complaints about Marvel and Star Wars and needing to watch entire seasons of other shows to understand what’s going on (and please don’t explain who those characters are - I really don’t care).
I’m tired of reboots and instant franchises. Instead of trying to develop “properties” and built-in trilogies, can we just make good movies again?
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Carrot cake is an abomination, doesn’t deserve to be classified as a cake, and needs to be destroyed.
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I agree with one of your points!
the other two are hogwash… Carrot cake is delicious!
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Misspelled.
No, carrot cake is disgusting, and the act of baking any should warrant being hauled off to The Hague.
Obviously. Taste is subjective and no one is “right” or “wrong” when it comes to taste. For example, I think bananas are absolutely disgusting, but I recognize that most of the world enjoys them. Corn, also, is absolutely gross, but I recognize that most of the world enjoys it.
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