Does anyone else feel painfully unsure of their opinion on all of this? I honestly don't recall the last major thing I've felt this completely uncertain about. All my opinions generally lean in one direction at least a little bit.
On one hand, I think it might be ridiculous for an artist to get to "own" a "style" of art. In the first example on this page, none of the art looks plagiarized. It looks like what every artist has done: been inspired by or borrowed ideas from other sources.
But on the other hand, if left unchecked, this will further harm our creative industries. We're going to be starving out our artists because robots can generate art _far_ more easily than they can. If this continues, it disincentivizes anyone from trying the already very uphill battle of making a living by creating art. One might say, "capitalism, baby! we don't need those artists, because we have AI and look at what it can do in seconds!" But I think that even if AI can "discover" new art styles and trends, there's something lost by humans not doing it.
I don't think AI will be able to replace human creativity for discovering new paradigms as fast as it will replace human application of existing paradigms. And by doing the latter really well with AI, we're killing our ability to do the former. We'll end up with a sterile art trajectory.
I guess my uncertainty is: something about this _feels wrong_ and yet I cannot point to any one moral/ethical thing that feels wrong about it.
Artists don't generally try to OWN styles or prevent others from using them. They are the result of years of training, adapting, etc. They put their own spin on it. It's effectively a brand of that artist, and it's generally beholden to a sort of "honor" code that you'll likely get called out for breaching if you're flagrantly trying to pass it off as your own.
The core issue illustrating this is when people use an artist name in a prompt. If these models did not exist, if you wanted something in that style, you would likely be reaching out to that individual, or asking someone else to try to emulate someone. In that instance, the emulation is generally accountable. In these instances, there is no accountability towards the algorithm, as it's not making creative choices, to say nothing of moral or ethical ones. That was done by the individuals with venture-capital backing, using research loopholes to fund the legally questionable scraping of this data in the first place, which in some instances, violates the EULAs of the sites they were scraped from.
At the end of the day, these artists, styles, etc. would not exist without the artists who had no say in their "democratizing art".
My suggestion is to accept it as a thing that will be here and tune our expectations appropriately. Because if it is made illegal, it will be one of those things that's illegal-but-omnipresent, like sharing music on BitTorrent... The Western copyright regime doesn't blanket the world, and the advantages of these tools are so big that places it doesn't reach will just use them. The fact that this story is about a Nigerian engineer in Canada using software developed in San Francisco running on some computers in Northern Virginia to ape the artistic style of an artist from LA, none of these parties having ever met each other, indicates how empty the bottle is the genie used to live in.
> We're going to be starving out our artists because robots can generate art _far_ more easily than they can. If this continues, it disincentivizes anyone from trying the already very uphill battle of making a living by creating art. One might say, "capitalism, baby! we don't need those artists, because we have AI and look at what it can do in seconds!" But I think that even if AI can "discover" new art styles and trends, there's something lost by humans not doing it.
This has already happened.
People used to get paid to recreate paintings but now we have the technology to do it without a painter.
You used to need a musician whenever you wanted live music but now we just play a recording.
Basically, what you are describing is how technology has worked forever. I am not sure why people have chosen this particular instance of technology lessening capitalistic opportunities for artists to get their knickers in a twist over.
The same thing that has happened in the past will happen again. Artists will adapt and learn to use new tools, less people will make money via art, and people will keep making art anyways because the reason most people do it isn’t money.
> I don't think AI will be able to replace human creativity for discovering new paradigms as fast as it will replace human application of existing paradigms. And by doing the latter really well with AI, we're killing our ability to do the former. We'll end up with a sterile art trajectory.
This may actually end up making the few artists creative enough to create bold new art styles even more valuable, if they can basically not release their art and hide it behind a model.
Though I guess anyone with access to that model's output could then just generate a few samples and train on those, so maybe not.
It will change the landscape of the art market, but it won't destroy it. Digital art will be less valuable, canvases and sculptures will become more valuable.
The cost of materials and transportation and time using the expensive CNC machine will be the major costs of sculpture. Generating the same quality 3D models is at the very furthest 18 months away. And animating and rigging the models and giving them auto-generated RL policies will surely come very quickly next.
If you were going to make a 3D model sculpture you would probably want to just 3D print it instead of using a CNC. In any case sculptures aren't as simple as cutting a 3d form out of a hunk of metal; the variety of materials and techniques is arguably much more interesting than the shape at the end. And the physical nature of it by definition resists the infinite generative shit that AI throws on the internet; there isn't space in the world to store tons and tons of nonsense sculptures, and the cost and time of making them is nontrivial as well.
On one hand, I think it might be ridiculous for an artist to get to "own" a "style" of art. In the first example on this page, none of the art looks plagiarized. It looks like what every artist has done: been inspired by or borrowed ideas from other sources.
But on the other hand, if left unchecked, this will further harm our creative industries. We're going to be starving out our artists because robots can generate art _far_ more easily than they can. If this continues, it disincentivizes anyone from trying the already very uphill battle of making a living by creating art. One might say, "capitalism, baby! we don't need those artists, because we have AI and look at what it can do in seconds!" But I think that even if AI can "discover" new art styles and trends, there's something lost by humans not doing it.
I don't think AI will be able to replace human creativity for discovering new paradigms as fast as it will replace human application of existing paradigms. And by doing the latter really well with AI, we're killing our ability to do the former. We'll end up with a sterile art trajectory.
I guess my uncertainty is: something about this _feels wrong_ and yet I cannot point to any one moral/ethical thing that feels wrong about it.