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AI Art

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GardenerBriareus said:
You seem to understand film as a medium wherein the director controls everyone else like automata, which is neither the norm nor a particularly effective means of creating good movies*.
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Er... maybe I'm just confused about who's arguing what, but isn't that the point of the whole director comparison, that they don't have total control?

Arcus said:
That traditional forms of art require and help to train up a lot of skills that AI art doesn't, because you're delegating a significant portion of the process?
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I'm not clear on what significance you ascribe to this. Lots of things mostly build up skill at the thing you're doing, but if you're doing the thing for it's own sake rather than to prepare for something else, isn't that fine?

But with things like ControlNet in the picture, it's not even unusual for people to be practicing traditional art skills as part of the AI art process. Or 3d modelling. Or just simple moving points around in 3d space using 2d controls. (Okay, that last one is more something I'd like to get better at than something I'm actually getting better at...) It really depends on the person.

-Morgan.
 
firefossil said:
Making art using digital tools is both obviously a distinct way of creating art from using solely analog tools, but often if not largely intended to mimick the results produced by other methods.
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If you've ever actually tried holding a pencil or tablet pen, you would immediately recognise how fucking absurd you're being.

But I'm not going to argue with you any further. Fortunately I don't have to give a shit about being efficient enough for commercial work since I draw as a hobby.

Morganite said:
I'm not clear on what significance you ascribe to this. Lots of things mostly build up skill at the thing you're doing, but if you're doing the thing for it's own sake rather than to prepare for something else, isn't that fine?

But with things like ControlNet in the picture, it's not even unusual for people to be practicing traditional art skills as part of the AI art process. Or 3d modelling. Or just simple moving points around in 3d space using 2d controls. (Okay, that last one is more something I'd like to get better at than something I'm actually getting better at...) It really depends on the person.
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The thing is, improvement as an artist is tied to how your capacity for visualization outpaces your ability to actually transfer those visualizations to canvas. As you get better at putting things to paper, your mental imagery also improves, and you get better at spotting mistakes. Basically, you're always trying to "catch up" to the image in your head. But if these programs are already able to spit out fully formed images competent enough to pass muster for most people, how are you training your visualization skills, or your ability to spot mistakes? Maybe I'm wrong, and someone who has actually tried both ways can tell me I'm being an idiot about this.

There's also just a lot of stuff you just don't consciously think about when you're simply looking at something. Consider that most people, despite the fact that they're constantly looking at the world and at visual media, aren't just able to reproduce what they've seen effortlessly.
 
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Someone did a twitter thread exploring dangers of the newer Midjourney models. He generated pictures of politicians comitting adultery, and it is starting to become convincing enough to pose a real danger for defamation at the speed of thought. He speculates it won't be long until Q-Anon generates pictures of democrats diddling kids. Won't link twitter thread due to breasts showing, but the twitter handle is @JuustinBrown, thread on May 26 2023.

 
Arcus said:
Maybe I'm wrong, and someone who has actually tried both ways can tell me I'm being an idiot about this.
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It sounds like the sort of thing that's going to be different for different people. If nothing else, some of us don't have mental imagery in the first place...

Lazor said:
He generated pictures of politicians comitting adultery, and it is starting to become convincing enough to pose a real danger for defamation at the speed of thought.
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That's not really new though, is it? I'm pretty sure I can remember some AI company or other offering a reward for a method to detect generated images because of this, though I'm not having any luck coming up with a reference. (Even though I'm sure someone mentioned it in this thread... bleh.)

-Morgan.
 
Morganite said:
That's not really new though, is it? I'm pretty sure I can remember some AI company or other offering a reward for a method to detect generated images because of this, though I'm not having any luck coming up with a reference. (Even though I'm sure someone mentioned it in this thread... bleh.)
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But obviously it's a bigger issue than it was last year, when their eye would look like a nostril half the time. And presumably will be an even bigger issue next year.

Not sure if this was linked already:

techcrunch.com

Fake Pentagon attack hoax shows perils of Twitter’s paid verification | TechCrunch

A fake, AI-generated image depicting an attack on the Pentagon went viral on verified Twitter accounts, but there was no such attack.
techcrunch.com techcrunch.com

Fake Pentagon attack hoax shows perils of Twitter's paid verification
A fake, AI-generated image depicting an attack on the Pentagon went viral on verified Twitter accounts, but there was no such attack.
...
Within about half an hour, the image appeared on a verified Twitter account called "Bloomberg Feed," which could very easily be mistaken for a real Bloomberg-affiliated account, especially since it had a blue check. That account has since been suspended. The Russian state-controlled news network RT also shared the image, according to screenshots that users captured before the tweet was deleted. Several Twitter accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers, like DeItaone, OSINTdefender and Whale Chart shared it. Even an Indian television network reported the fake Pentagon explosion. It is not immediately clear where this fake image and news story originated.
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(These particular images actually looked super fake, FWIW.
But still better than they would've generated last year. )

Voikirium said:
Like $100 (not entirely unwilling to go even substantially over but around there ideally) for a fullbody+simple background (probably like, the sun or something) but like, it's a High Elf Archmage and well, none of them dress simple.
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[moved to PMs]
 
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Arcus said:
The thing is, improvement as an artist is tied to how your capacity for visualization outpaces your ability to actually transfer those visualizations to canvas. As you get better at putting things to paper, your mental imagery also improves, and you get better at spotting mistakes. Basically, you're always trying to "catch up" to the image in your head. But if these programs are already able to spit out fully formed images competent enough to pass muster for most people, how are you training your visualization skills, or your ability to spot mistakes? Maybe I'm wrong, and someone who has actually tried both ways can tell me I'm being an idiot about this.
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That's very much a thing when making AI art. That's why tools like inpainting, controlnet and similar exist, as people want to have more control over posing and composition of what the machine is producing. And you can easily tell the difference between images made by an off-the-cuff prompt and something you've spend a few hours adjusting and fiddling with to make the output better match what you had in mind.

Making goog looking AI art is a lot more complex and effort intensive than people make it out to be in this thread.
 
some examples for the thread of what Azel is talking about:

Edit: if anybody wants links to the original creator's post of the images and the album that these are part of send me a PM as I'm fairly confident that linking to the post on r/stablediffusion would probably be a 2 click NSFW risk as there is a fair bit of NSFW stuff in that subreddit from memory.

Edit 2: I really should elaborate on those first three images as they aren't labelled or explained. the first two images are inputs to the/a ControlNet Extension for Automatic1111's Stable Diffusion WebUI whilst the third image input is a 'colour mask' for a latent couple extension. I'm not particularly familiar with using either extension myself as when I'm running stable diffusion it's on an AMD card with DirectML or on the CPU, so really small images or really slowly generated images. not particularly conducive to getting familiar with all of the levers that stable diffusion has let alone experimenting with integrating it with other methods beyond stable diffusion. however, that should be sufficient for people to search the information out themselves or prompt bing chat for an explanation as I doubt I'm the best person to explain it beyond this.
 
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People who say we need to listen to artists need to listen to artists who use AI. The folks here like me who actually use AI or participate in the AI art community keep saying over and over that:

1: Being better at drawing will let you get better results.
2: Having a better intellectual understanding of art principles will let you get better results.
3: Understanding the idiosyncrasies of how AI art programs work will let you get better results.
4: Looking for the right supporting art modules and models will let you get better results.
5: Having time and patience to navigate the unexplored expanses of AI 'thought' through trial and error will let you get better results.

Some people see a bad picture and they conclude AI sucks and can only produce cheap garbage to drown out real artists. They see a good picture and conclude AI is terrifying because it lets the philistines copy artists with no effort, skill, or understanding. The difference between the bad and good pictures is in fact "effort, skill, and understanding". When people brag about their cool art piece they developed using AI, you don't see the vast sea of failed prompts and generations were crud, or the intermediate steps they went through the polish it.

The piece in the above post probably took hours to complete. It required a wide variety of skills and expertise. They didn't just hit a button and make it happen.
 
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It is, quite often, a case where people, most loudly proclaiming how AI art will damage artist because it lets anyone generate pictures, do not understand the sheer amount of time and effort that goes into getting a proper picture. Hell, even when challenged as pointed people keep trying to simplify the process, as was seen previously with attempts to try to and argue that directors are artist but prompters are not, despite the fact that both do in fact more or less require same style work: directing someone you can't control perfectly to get what you want.

In the other thread regarding cryptocurrencies, there was argument put forth that AI art is bad because it allows people to generate porn, and this is bad because it threatens sex workers jobs. Which is just... are we really turning to such luddites that we must protect sex workers jobs existing? That OnlyFans is now a job that needs to be protected?

Like, don't get me wrong, sex workers definitely need better legal protection all around, as the field is very exploitative towards its workers, but idea that we have to protect jobs, not people, is just... weird.

It is weird because it feels like these people will argue for defense of artist and art producers, because these are somehow "special" jobs. Meanwhile, they will happily defend use of computers, photographs and all these others tools that have almost killed or totally killed former fields. Nobody seems to want to return to time when each cloth was handmade, or calculations were made by humans, or that call centers were places where humans connected calls with wires. For some reasons, same people arguing for defense of artist don't argue for defense of those jobs.
 
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My position on AI art, which nobody asked for:

AI art is good because it allows anyone to produce creative content. It's a new tool with new methods and means of use, and calling it 'garbage' outright is as silly as calling photography somehow a lesser field than say, oil painting, or sculpture. Art is subjective, and what is deemed art changes with time.

That said, AI art is bad because:
  1. Training sets are often made using licensed imagery without the knowledge or consent of the creator, which is bad because art is very much a profession that relies on exposure, and if your personal style is put into a blender and used to churn out a horde of derivative stuff, nobody will recognize your work, or credit you, which leads into the other point:
  2. The products of AI art are used to undercut the jobs of people who make art for a living, ignoring the context of the short-term profit-driven shareholder model of capitalism we live in, which values utility above all else and will kill you if you do not contribute or can no longer do so. People who make art for a living dedicate vast amounts of their time, energy, and learning ability to craft items for sale, and like coal miners being told to 'learn to code' when they're 40 years old and have a mortgage to pay for, there's only so much you can do to ease or compensate for the obsolescence of their income source when the system will chew them into hamburger if they don't have one.
  3. The rapid and uncoordinated development of the technology is outpacing the ability to regulate it, allowing scammers and frauds to mass-produce imagery and content that, in our ill-prepared and post-truth society, can serve to promote panic and tangible chaos that can cost lives and cause real harm. (This is more applicable to LLM's overall, including speech synths and more).

There are various other contextual issues it worsens, but these are the two biggest quibbles.

If you want a 4., you could say it allows individuals to propagate a narrative that devalues human creativity by making art another product to be churned out and consumed, but that's a bit more fuzzy and has to do more with the Silicon Valley brain-worms of 'Move fast, break things'. I'm willing to eject that on the principle that the first two points are far more easy to prove as causing actual, tangible harm.
 
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Vadrigos said:
The rapid and uncoordinated development of the technology is outpacing the ability to regulate it
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Is it really advancing that fast? As far as what I know from ML researchers, there's no fundamental advances in the field since the 2017 paper on transformers, everything else has been small incremental changes. It's just hype built by major corporations and some old research actually being used.
 
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Arcus said:
Google "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI"
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I have concerns about the article, particularly when it portrays LoRA as a new and revolutionary technology. It should be noted that Google has a longstanding history of developing parameter efficient tuning methods, as evidenced by the following sources:




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The writer appears inexperienced in advocating Google's shift towards Open Source Software, as they highlight capabilities that are already commonplace at Google.

Their emphasis on the novelty of "model fine-tuning at a fraction of the cost and time" and personalized language models suggests that they are either not affiliated with Google or are out of the loop on current practices.
 
Vadrigos said:
My position on AI art, which nobody asked for:

AI art is good because it allows anyone to produce creative content. It's a new tool with new methods and means of use, and calling it 'garbage' outright is as silly as calling photography somehow a lesser field than say, oil painting, or sculpture. Art is subjective, and what is deemed art changes with time.

That said, AI art is bad because:
  1. Training sets are often made using licensed imagery without the knowledge or consent of the creator, which is bad because art is very much a profession that relies on exposure, and if your personal style is put into a blender and used to churn out a horde of derivative stuff, nobody will recognize your work, or credit you, which leads into the other point:
  2. The products of AI art are used to undercut the jobs of people who make art for a living, ignoring the context of the short-term profit-driven shareholder model of capitalism we live in, which values utility above all else and will kill you if you do not contribute or can no longer do so. People who make art for a living dedicate vast amounts of their time, energy, and learning ability to craft items for sale, and like coal miners being told to 'learn to code' when they're 40 years old and have a mortgage to pay for, there's only so much you can do to ease or compensate for the obsolescence of their income source when the system will chew them into hamburger if they don't have one.
  3. The rapid and uncoordinated development of the technology is outpacing the ability to regulate it, allowing scammers and frauds to mass-produce imagery and content that, in our ill-prepared and post-truth society, can serve to promote panic and tangible chaos that can cost lives and cause real harm. (This is more applicable to LLM's overall, including speech synths and more).

There are various other contextual issues it worsens, but these are the two biggest quibbles.

If you want a 4., you could say it allows individuals to propagate a narrative that devalues human creativity by making art another product to be churned out and consumed, but that's a bit more fuzzy and has to do more with the Silicon Valley brain-worms of 'Move fast, break things'. I'm willing to eject that on the principle that the first two points are far more easy to prove as causing actual, tangible harm.
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1: Derivation is an inevitable and normal part of the artistic process. In addition to the obvious reality that artists draw inspiration from art they have seen throughout their life, there are plenty of cases of specific artists and franchises being derived. The AI doesn't do anything millions of people haven't already done. It looks at images. It learns patterns and associations. It is then able to apply that understanding to make new art, from scratch, without access to the images it previously looked at. Honestly that's less overtly derivative than say someone drawing a piece while actively looking at the reference artist piece.

2: Artists already use computer tools and have for decades. Sure there will be artists who don't want to learn Python or whatever, but that only gates them out of the most experimental AIs that haven't been made layman accessible yet, not AI in general. While I don't doubt that it will put some of them at a competitive disadvantage, that disadvantage will simply be against new more computer savvy artists.

The exact effects of how AI will percolate are somewhat uncertain. Will traditional artists start shifting their expertise to storyboarding and clean-up, with the AI tending to handle the middle parts? Or will they feed their own personal art to train an AI model to act as their own 'understudy'? Will they work in tandem with an AI quick enough to react in real time to drawing like here or here?

3: Fakery like that was an issue before AI, especially with regards to the internet. In the long term "don't trust what you see on the internet" will only become more intense.

4: Art has always been a consumer product and has only become so even more with the rise of mass media entertainment.
 
ninjasaid13 said:
I have concerns about the article, particularly when it portrays LoRA as a new and revolutionary technology. It should be noted that Google has a longstanding history of developing parameter efficient tuning methods, as evidenced by the following sources:



The writer appears inexperienced in advocating Google's shift towards Open Source Software, as they highlight capabilities that are already commonplace at Google.

Their emphasis on the novelty of "model fine-tuning at a fraction of the cost and time" and personalized language models suggests that they are either not affiliated with Google or are out of the loop on current practices.
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Ultimately I'm hardly an expert on this research area, so I wouldn't be able to comment on the accuracy or lack thereof of this paper.

Vadrigos said:
AI art is good because it allows anyone to produce creative content.
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Anyone could already produce creative content before this. Sure, most people couldn't create works to the same level of technical sophistication as those who have spent years working to get good at it, but even a child's scribbles can count as art. People are just so eager to trade for easy technical mastery they can't see what they're losing in the exchange when they feed their ideas into a program that strips away any semblance of individual expression from the finished product.

I want to relate how Pixiv recently had to specifically ban AI-generated content from its Requests system because people were abusing the system by sending mass requests to multiple AI art creators and then cancelling most of them as soon as one of them came back. This isn't going to lead a mass renaissance of indie creators who up till now were merely held back their lack of technical ability.
 
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Arcus said:
People are so eager to trade for easy technical mastery they can't see what they're losing in the exchange when they feed their ideas into a program that strips away any semblance of individual expression from the finished product.
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AI users can still benefit from technical mastery.

AI users can still engage in individual expression.

AI allows for people to make semi-coherent art pieces with minimal amounts of either, those people are very excited about their new toy, but that doesn't mean its all there is to it. There is a difference between someone who just writes some 3 word prompts and hits the generate button over and over, vs someone who spends hours sketching, generating, regenerating, taking to a new program, editing, generating, putting through the personal model they built, etc etc.
 
Arcus said:
Can you tell at a glance if a piece of AI generated artwork was created by a specific person?
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Going from "strips away any semblance of individual expression" to "tell authorship at a glance via signature style" is a rather dramatic goalpost move.

The answer to the latter is that it will generally be more difficult to tell the difference between two AI users than two conventional users, yes. The main factors driving a 'style' will be the models they select, train, or combine, as well as which programs they use and in what ways. Put another way style would be more a top-down process than a bottom-up one. I don't see the issue in that.

The answer to the former remains "obviously individual expression is still a thing". Every time you select a prompt, select which generation you like, decide whether to make permutations of the generation you like, or change the prompt in response to results, your preferences are sorting for end results. Ones that would differ from another person with different preferences. That is individual expression. Even moreso if you do any of the advanced stuff.
 
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One thing I can say for artists is that we're probably not as screwed as voice actors.

The book narration job market kinda imploded this year; youtube's suddenly full of videos of the Master Chief reading you Meditations or whatever.
 
ninjasaid13 said:
Is it really advancing that fast? As far as what I know from ML researchers, there's no fundamental advances in the field since the 2017 paper on transformers, everything else has been small incremental changes. It's just hype built by major corporations and some old research actually being used.
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MEGABYTE: Predicting Million-byte Sequences with Multiscale Transformers
the paper proposes a way to achieve the creation of a transformer based LLM model that in experimental testing with a 1.4B parameter model has a context length of 1.2 million tokens (900 thousand words average) and is 40% faster than a 350m parameter model at outputting four times as much tokens coherently. assuming typical RAM usage of 2gb per 2000 tokens, that'd be 600gb of ram and would be a context length that would allow an LLM to hold a conversation with a single user for 60 days assuming a typical daily conversation length of 6000 tokens.

As regarding specifically stable diffusion, most of the innovations and advances aren't really focused on the transformers themselves but rather everything around them. for instance, quantization techniques have become a de facto requirement for LLMs as it brings the hardware requirements down to something affordable for the home user whilst retaining much of the model's capabilities. Whilst the same is apparently possible for stable diffusion; it hasn't caught on as the models themselves only take up roughly 4gb storage and VRAM requirements for stable diffusion increase in direct proportion to the resolution of the image being generated.

TLDR: large language models are moving very quickly thanks to ever shrinking compute requirements from quantization techniques. whereas stable diffusion is seeing immense improvements thanks to extensions for Automatic1111's SD WebUI as well as experiments with text to video work.

Ralson said:
One thing I can say for artists is that we're probably not as screwed as voice actors.

The book narration job market kinda imploded this year; youtube's suddenly full of videos of the Master Chief reading you Meditations or whatever.
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yeah... voice acting really needs to get onto that. like that channel is hilarious in concept but so problematic it's not funny. At least they're not say creating campaign mods for Halo:MCC and then using it for the VA for example.
 
Ralson said:
One thing I can say for artists is that we're probably not as screwed as voice actors.

The book narration job market kinda imploded this year; youtube's suddenly full of videos of the Master Chief reading you Meditations or whatever.
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That topic makes me think of the tendency for certain animated works to go for celebrity voice actors over professional voice actors but them not necessarily being as good as its different fields of expertise. For book narration, sure those folks are out of luck, as a steady tone and cadence makes sense there. For someone voicing a cartoon character that needs precise comic timing and the ability to change emotional tones three times in five seconds? That's gonna be a lot trickier to replicate.
 
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firefossil said:
Going from "strips away any semblance of individual expression" to "tell authorship at a glance via signature style" is a rather dramatic goalpost move.
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"Strips away any semblance of individual expression from the finished product."

It's not a goalpost shift unless you lack reading comprehension.

In any case, I ask because people often don't just ask for commissions from any random artist, they often have specific artists in mind or people they like to get commissions from. People have favourite artists they follow and admire, etc. I mentioned what happened on Pixiv because it's a demonstration of how when it comes to AI art, the individual creators are seen as interchangeable cogs and treated with approximately the same amount of respect (absolutely none, it turns out).

If AI art creators cannot find a way to effectively distinguish themselves from each other, ultimately the approach is a dead end for the indie scene, and the only ones who will benefit are corporations and larger studios who do have an interest in being able to maintain a consistent style across their art team (well, assuming they don't get fucking cancelled for adopting AI art).
 
Arcus said:
In any case, I ask because people often don't just ask for commissions from any random artist, they often have specific artists in mind or people they like to get commissions from.
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This might be a culture difference, but my wife and I have commissioned about 4 pieces of art, and each one was from a random artist we found online that we felt matched the style we were going for. I know that at least a few of my friends go about it the same way.

While there are artists we enjoy the art of, they are popular enough to be outside our price range so trying to hire them never crossed our minds.
 
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