Ethical AI art generation? Adobe Firefly may be the answer

Adobe trained new AI generator on Adobe Stock, licensed content, public domain.

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[Dark Jaguar]

"Ethically sourced" AI? It's less likely than they think.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

"AI might put the mediocre ones out of a job though."

But on the other hand, it might put us atrocious artist into a job. I have the artistic ability of a tree stump. I do, however, have ideas, ideas for which I lack the physical skills to express visually. AI image generation might help me--the worst artist in the world--express my ideas.

By extension, I can also see it being a godsend for the physically disabled who want to give artistic visual expression to their ideas.

I'm not INHERENTLY opposed to AI art generation. I'm opposed to theft of course, and while teaching a human to draw using previous samples is one thing, it's another when it's a corporate owned soulless entity. That does change things morally. Further, putting artists out of work is a threat under our current social systems. Provide a basic minimum standard of living and eliminate poverty, THEN we'll talk about how this tool could benefit people. As it stands, it threatens instead to put artists out of work and replace them with... nobody. Not even you. Some corporate executive will just say "make the thing" and an AI will do all of it for free. No art staff, amateur or otherwise, required. It evens the playing field by putting talented artists out of work, not by putting those with ideas but no means of expressing them INTO work.

Even if you have unique ideas, it doesn't take much to make another AI create a similar but legally distinct version of it and just sell it anyway without bothering with your permission.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

Your contention takes my statement out of context. What I said was that using automated tools or lackeys to produce work, and THEN subjecting it to mass reproduction diminishes the role of a so-called artist. And I stand by that statement, and shake my fist at clouds.

And that applies to professionals or to hobbyists. Again, the involvement of the tool-user at each step, with active engagement and editing and re-direction, is the bright line I draw. Offering a prompt and taking the end result as presented doesn't cross that line.

Workman-like product can be produced with that easy approach, and I am happy to accept it as craft, but not as art.

I think we can argue whether or not it's art all we want, but critically, the real argument is whether or not it was created by someone. I'd argue no. In the same way a monkey taking a picture shouldn't give the man who owned the camera a copyright on that photo (nor the monkey, unless the monkey asks for it), neither should any "artist" get credit for telling an AI to make something, and then the AI makes it. They get, at BEST, copyright over the specific text they typed into the prompt. Who does it belong to? I'd say it's best if art generated by AI belongs to no one at all, unless the AI asks.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

There is no such thing as 'unethical art' and suggesting that there is ... that's terrifying.

There is also no such thing as an ethical Adobe product and suggesting that there is ... that's terrifying.

Of course there's such a thing as unethical art. Art created by abusing people is unethical. We even have numerous laws meant to decompile industries built around this sort of unethical art. Do you want me to spell it out further?

 

[Dark Jaguar]

I never said that any of those mediums aren't real art, and it's either highly dishonest or just plain foolish to act like AI art is the same as digital art. I can fully accept that there are uses of AI in art that serve as extentions of the artistic process, but that's the key here: the process. In art school you are taught not just to improve the product, but how you get there. That is preserved in digital art, but is completely eliminated in most AI generation. A good number of the people using AI aren't using it to generate parts of a work, but are instead generating graphics that are fully completed pieces from the get go.

And yeah, people are telling the AI what to do for now, but it seems like no one is considering the long game here. No one is thinking about how it will change or dictate tastes. There is a real possibility that art becomes fully stagnant as it fully becomes a means of entertainment rather than expression, endlessly remixing existing artwork into ways to elicit the greatest amount of pleasure possible. There is a real risk that we are creating a psychological trap that we are not prepared to get out of.

It's so rude that people here are acting like any reservation is irrational, any hesitation or criticism is symptomatic of some kind of personal failure in understanding rather than a failure in the current state/expression of the technology. It's important to be worried, because this is not utopia and giving in completely to the idea that any technological development is necessarily progress is highly dangerous.

It's also worth pointing out that some of these examples of luddite fear of the future, as in talking about the fear of cars, miss that the dominance of cities designed for cars rather than people really HAS become a social disaster and the fears over cars were in fact quite justified. It's hard to get that across however, because of a generational failure of imagination to see how cities could be designed any other way. The fear here is that if AI art becomes the norm, future "artists" won't be able to even conceptualize how are could be done in different ways. This HAS been an issue in the past in fact. The era of classical realism was so engrained that art that went very intentionally unrealistic was seen as disruptive and, frankly, "bad", reacted to even worse than Wind Waker in the "realism obsessed" gamer culture of the early 2000's.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

At the end of the video, I see CSI's "enhance!" is finally here.

Oh sure, if you don't mind the complete loss of CSI's accuracy. You can never use AI to reconstruct the original license plate data in an image if not enough data to show said number wasn't already in the image in the first place. The AI, like us, will "invent" based on it's biases.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

Its a gray area because there is no line between what is fanart and what is original art. Example, "realistic mario" fan art. Its art of mario, but looks very different from the source material. The gray area is how similar/different must it be to be considered copyright infringement? Thats why its a civil matter, and not a criminal one. Whether a company will win the lawsuit is never clear cut. I sell merch at anime conventions, there is a loooooooooooooooooooooot of fan art being sold at cons.

Mad Magazine for example made numerous parodies of all kinds of copyrighted characters.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

So humans are able to look at other artist's work posted on the Internet, learn from it and profit from it - but AI is not?

At the pace of AI progress, how long do we really think that's going to be an effective strategy to "protect" artists?

AI is not self aware. It doesn't have nor deserve rights like humans do. If AI doing so threatens the wellbeing of humans, it doesn't deserve to exist. Humanity first.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

Can someone please stop the ride?

I’d like to get off

Tuck and roll.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

There's the argument that there is some inherent value in works created in full or in part by a human. Yes, but that argument doesn't extend to every kind of work. Should we get rid of printers altogether in favor of scribes because there is more value in the scribe being a human than the printer being a machine?

And there is an important point behind this. You're free to think that artistic works in particular belong to some special category of work that others do not, but you have to actually demonstrate it and not state it blindly. I could place the same value statements on the comparison between a sewing machine and manual sewing and you'd have no particular right to question me. Why is it suddenly that art in particular is being singled out as opposed to any other human activity so aggressively?

Humans are capable of a variety of tasks, and they naturally assign a higher value to those which they themselves are capable of versus others. A carpenter might believe and hold the opinion that there is some higher value in the act of carpentry as compared to other forms of work, because that is a task he can perform well. An artist might believe that there is some higher value in art as compared to other forms of work because they can do it better than they can do other tasks, like carpentry itself for example.

Even more so, a person can believe that because they are at all capable of performing some task in any capacity, that it therefore follows that it has a higher value. A low-quality artist could think that they have a right or that we have an obligation by force to provide them with an income because they have that skill and took time to learn it so we must provide them a return on their investment.

Cars replaced horses. The horse riders clearly believed that they provided value to society that shouldn't be taken away, much as the scribes thought they had some particular importance that a printer does not provide. But that's an obviously massively biased and one-sided reasoning: they want to continue to get paid, and will take steps towards ensuring their continued need in the economy specifically to get paid, not merely because the value in their work is there on its own merits.

What is then the merit of an artist? That they are specifically good at what they do? That they exist at all regardless of their skill level, and certain rights automatically follow from their existence? That they are human or sentient or intelligent, and specifically that they are a human in itself as being a human as opposed to a machine and not as performing some specific task or action, like the nature of being an artist?

Clearly as far the end goal is concerned, namely the final artistic work, AI is somewhat competitive and with more time will likely be even more so. Hence the real problem isn't that the AI specifically will affect the economic value of human production. The manual sewer had already seen the effects of the sewing machine first hand and thus had to adapt to survive in a new environment. You could argue there's a certain quality to a scribe's work that a printer just can't replicate, but is that a specific action they perform purposefully, or the mere fact that they are human at all, regardless of whatever they are actually doing? Should we also replace printed packaging boxes with millions of hand-drawing overworked warehouse workers just to satisfy this criterion? Even better, why use a digital calculator when you can instead hire a person who's good with maths and give him a job opportunity?

I hear you saying, but art in particular is different in many ways than a calculator. Says who, though? The naturally self-interested artist themselves? If you asked a person experienced with stone tools whether they'd prefer power tools they can't operate, would they have an incentive to say yes? Is Tim Cook ever going to walk around in public with a Samsung and sing its praises? Either way, something else is doing your work better than you are. You just happen to think artwork is in a special category where a computer cannot philosophically think or obtain emotions or truly draw. But it still gets the job done regardless. It may not be technically "creative", but it sure performs all of the processes that just happen to lead to a creative end product very well.

Art is for humanity. The satisfaction of work is for people. It would be one thing if replacing these jobs meant businesses took that money and just paid people a stipend to keep on living work free, like The Jetsons or something. That's not what's happening. These billionaires are just keeping the profits themselves. If AI is only serving giant corporations, then the tech doesn't deserve to exist.

An argument can also be made that we addressed the advent of the combustion engine entirely wrong too. I love technology, understand. I find it fascinating and both my career and hobby directly involve it. However, I understand that technology can be implemented either for the sake of humanity, or against humanity. Certain social structures need to be rethought before AI is something worth pursuing.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

You have proved my point. The horse carriage rider who had a fixed skill and prefered to keep doing what he does best tried hard to keep himself relevant in the age of cars not because the horses themselves had some advantage in particular, but only due to self-interest and his lack of will to update his knowledge.

The artist will be soon be the same. You can think there is some specific process with art that doesn't apply to industrial work and there aren't any defined steps to what makes a good painting for example versus what defines the function of a motor engine. But we already see that the AI cares nothing for these deeper questions, the output it presents to us fullfils all our expectations of what art is like whether we admit it or not. Adapt or get left behind.

And as I have mentioned previously, I don't believe that there's any specific right afforded to someone with a job that they should keep it at all costs. Some forms of labor will just cease to exist like it or not, we're not going to keep finding excuses to make these people still work if they aren't going to learn anything new. Will there be people specifically on the lookout for human art like there are people who prefer handmade stuffs? Surely. But don't kid yourself there isn't a lot of marketing involved. Just like how people can take a look at random drips of ink and call it a masterpiece.

Your "point" is apparently that art should no longer be a career path, that AI should produce it from now on and let it be stripped from humanity, and that the people deprived of work (with a skillset that doesn't transfer to other career paths) don't even deserve anything more than to starve and die somewhere out of sight.

This attitude is anti-humanity, and pro corporate. I reject it entirely.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

I did not say that art shouldn't be studied or become a career. I did say however that art on its merits of only being a human production won't be relevant soon enough. If your standard is "at least a talking, walking being made it" regardless of how good it actually is, you're in for a rude awakening.

You keep acting like I'm somehow ignorant of the economic realities. I know. I just don't care about that. I think the economy should serve people, not the other way around, and if something this devastating to people is going to happen, it should be stopped by the force of law. I know full well that outside of that, economic forces will pressure corporations to do this. This is the problem with capitalism as faith (with the god being the "invisible hand of the market"). The market can make terrible decisions, and it should be prevented from doing so in some cases.