As an artist, I think it is a net negative for us. Disregarding the copyright issue, I think it’s also consolidating power into large corporations, going to kill learning fundamental skills (rip next generation of artists), and turn the profession into a low skill minimum wage job. Artists that spent years learning and perfecting their skills will be worth nothing and I think it’s a pretty depressing future for us. Anways thoughts?
I think it’s a typical case of automation, just in the field which was not even imagined to be possible by most people. If anything, it should be a impulse for artists to realize they are not some bourgeoisie freelancers or whatever, not safe from capitalism, but the proletarians they always were.
In particular, I think the problem is not the technology itself(it rarely is; in my opinion, it is always the application of the technology), in the same sense that advances in automation of production are. The problem is capitalism - under capitalism, automation causes people to lose their jobs and thus their livelihoods, and under socialism, automation decreases the amount of work humans must do and instead leaves them able to explore other hobbies that are not tied to their livelihoods.
There are certainly actual applications of AI art technology that are interesting and/or could be useful, and I think turning it into just a question of “AI art good/bad” is not a particularly insightful question and one that does not really get to the root of the problems with AI art.
Yes of course, in socialism art was heavily supported by state - in such situation AI wouldn’t be problematic at all, it would be just making art more accessible to masses who lack talent, persistence and free time for it.
Actually, it will do exactly the same in capitalism, most probably even more since capitalism is gating art anyway, but also with more casualties along the way.
This is similar to what I understand. Artists used to think they were this royalty of society, one of the courtiers of kings or whatever, and when kingdoms ceased to exist, they started to think they all can become Picassos with ruling as capitalist class. Nope, this is the reality.
Also interesting their arguments are literally identical like some of those used 200 years ago by the artisan guilds. Back then capitalism socialised production. Right now capitalism is socialising art.
I don’t understand why people hate artists so much. Do you honestly want to live in a world without artists? Is that what you are alluding to?
You and other people have argued, and cogently, that the introduction of AI art will be a blight on the artistic professions under the economic burden of a capitalist system. However, I want to bring up the counterpoint that under capitalism, art is already being maximally removed from public life and either reduced to marketable commodities, or confined to private spaces as a hobby, and this has nothing to do with any influence on behalf of AI. Instead, I want to point out what a great thing this could be, if capitalists wouldn’t fuck us all over with it.
The essence of what AI does is to open the door towards artistic creation to all those who suffer from lack of talent, time, or education to become an artist themselves. In due course, everyone will be able to print out pretty pictures, unique in the world, and hang them into their living room. They will just have to tell the AI the motif they want, and perhaps the setting and the style.
But in time they will figure out to tweak little things about their painting, tell it to make a sunrise instead of a blue sky, tell it to add mountains to the flat land, dress their family portrait a little more formal on special occasions, or reroute the motorway around a view of their city. They will experiment with different colours and directions of light. They will attempt to micromanage the AI in finer and finer ways; and soon, without ever needing the skill to draw or paint, they will experience something approximating the decisions actual artists have to make when it comes to composing a painting. It will enable them to express themselves independently of technique, much like a keyboard allows you to bring across your point legibly even if your handwriting sucks.
Not only that, but once come to maturity, AI art can be a godsend for the many other professionals who have to work with imagery without being trained as artists. It may once be able to draw plans, construct 3D models, and even compose illustrative videos for city planners, architects, designers of all sorts, writers, engineers, textbook authors, or scientists and mathematicians who want to visualise concepts from their research without learning to tame complicated software; and in return, playing with it can also provide them with inspiration for their work.
Of course, people who learn to make art properly must be rewarded for it, and there are plenty of things AI cannot do such as actually painting the murals or laying the mosaics, but there are enough people out there who are just bad at drawing, and at some point it often becomes a severe impediment to the otherwise brilliant work they are doing, and under a better economic system, AI would be there to help them without disenfranchising trained artists like you.
I agree, the potential of this technology is constrained by the society that uses it. And under capitalism, that means it’ll be converted into a tool for worker exploitation. There are so many possibilities for AI art but we all know that what’s really gonna happen is that artists will have to compete for work with robots now ):
Does a person know how to create a new dish or know how to better the flavour if all they do is microwave frozen food? I feel the creation of such a shortcut will destroy fundamental skills in the next generation (same with writing currently, as students are getting AI to write/cheat essays).
However, I want to bring up the counterpoint that under capitalism, art is already being maximally removed from public life and either reduced to marketable commodities, or confined to private spaces as a hobby, and this has nothing to do with any influence on behalf of AI.
I fail so see how artists can get better at art without dedicating most of their time to it (ie; creating bad art sometimes for their job). Sorry if this comes off as dick-ish.
My issue with this is that AI art generators are, buzzwords aside, nothing more than fancy human art remixers. Yes, they can grab characters from one style and transform them into another thanks to very complex math, but to make this possible they all make use of a huge database of copyrighted, stolen human art taken without the artists’ permission from the internet. No one asked us if we wanted our art to be assimilated into this monstrosity, and there’s even cases of generators outputting existing artworks virtually untouched, with artist watermarks and all. These art generators are breaking every copyright in the world, but artists alone don’t have much leverage and then nerds try to obfuscate things and make philosophical arguments to justify this. But these are not human artists taking inspiration from existing art and creating something new, it’s a machine remixing copyrighted works taken in without permission as raw material. And then the other issue is that due to the way neural networks work, you can’t ask the generator for its sources on any given output.
So it’s something that shouldn’t be allowed to be released to the public unless it uses only public domain artwork or artwork taken with the artists’ permission. And then it should preferably be able to include sources with the output.
That’s all aside from the economical implications and the effect this is having on the livelihoods of freelance artists everywhere.
they all make use of a huge database of copyrighted, stolen human art taken without the artists’ permission from the internet.
Are you trying to justify this very thing that corporations are trying to keep up for as long as they can? Because copyright should be abolished.
The issue I have with your post is justifying copyright. You’re justifying something that corporations have been trying to extend for many years. Copyright (and Intellectual Property in general) exists as a result of capitalism trying to profit from the distribution of works. You’re justifying the profiting from copyright. Is this really a proletarian thing to do?
Copyright should be abolished, yes. Under socialism. Under capitalism it’s a double-edged weapon, but it’s one of the only defenses we proletarian creators have against the capitalist class. I would hate it if a capitalist grabbed my music off Bandcamp without my permission and used it for their commercial project without even crediting me. Class perspective.
Agreed. The copyright system under capitalism is ass, but the Free Software community – I repeat, the Free Software community, not the “Open Source” community – has leveraged it to great effect. The bourgeois world has gone through the hassle of completely rewriting entire compiler toolchains (e.g. LLVM) – something that takes absurdly high levels of technical sophistication and work time to do – solely to avoid the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), its sponsor (the Free Software Foundation (FSF)), and its strong copyleft license (the GPL). Strong copyleft licenses like the GPL and Affero GPL, that require all derivative works to have the same license, scare the absolute shit out of Big Tech and are verboten in their organizations.
Another example besides tech is the Creative Commons. In particular, their licenses that have share-alike stipulations require re-use down the entire chain. And if “you can’t make money off my shit” is important, their licenses can also have Non-Commercial stipulations. I wonder just how much Creative Commons work has been used in training the various stable diffusion AI models.
Copyright, under these specific conditions, benefits the proletariat. It provides a battle-tested protection, however imperfect, against direct exploitation. A protection strong enough that the bourgeoisie strives to avoid it. They, and the petite bourgeoisie, flee from it, instead preferring timid “open source” licenses that permit capitalists to take the work of the proletariat and keep it for themselves.
Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, is tragically and terminally liberal. However, I believe his essays in Free Software, Free Society are absolutely worth reading for anybody that writes or uses code (read: basically everybody). Especially “Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism”.
It isn’t a class perspective at all. You’re justifying the petit-bourgeoisie in retaining their works so that they can continue making a profit off their work. It isn’t a defence of ‘proletarian creator’ nor is it a defence of most creators, because most individual creators do not copyright their works. Copyright has, and always will be, a defence for corporations, not for individual creators.
most individual creators do not copyright their works
Source? All works are copyrighted from the moment they’re made, they don’t have to be registered. You’re not being dialectical by saying “well, the petit-bourgeoisie also benefits from it”. While it’s true that individual proletarian creators still have the lower ground in copyright court claims, due to the lawyer purchasing power capitalists have, at the very least it provides a legal ground for defense. Having rules and laws under capitalism is better for everyone, proletarians included, than having none. If you believe a rule-less capitalism would be better, then you’re an anarcho-capitalist. And then, under socialism, there would be many more rules and laws than there are now. If there’s copyright under socialism or not (which historically there has been), that’s a whole different topic because the very law would have a different nature due to the political system in place.
Source? All works are copyrighted from the moment they’re made, they don’t have to be registered.
Are you confusing copyright with fraud? Fraud is definitely an issue, and should be addressed, but I doubt many people would throw a hissy fit over an adaptation of someone’s IP. Only corporations really care because it impacts their hold on the IP, and they can gain some money from those who ‘wrongly’ stole it.
Having rules and laws under capitalism is better for everyone, proletarians included, than having none. If you believe a rule-less capitalism would be better, then you’re an anarcho-capitalist.
What? I never said this. How come everytime I speak to one of you ‘anti-AI artist’ people, you always make up some sort of strawman?
You’re not being dialectical by saying “well, the petit-bourgeoisie also benefits from it”.
Dialectics is when you justify copyright. I did think about this dialectically. From a dialectical perspective, only the bourgeoisie benefit from copyright. the Petit-bourgeoisie may benefit as well, but to a much lesser degree, and proletarians do not benefit at all. Copyright is used to intensify the class differences of ownership. When it comes to copyright works, you don’t own the work. You also don’t own the ideas that came with that work. If you steal these ideas and utilise them as a form of ‘inspiration’, or even directly ripping off the IP so that you can create your own fan project, you would be sued. That is dialectical.
What is not dialectical on the other hand, is justifying copyright so that the petit-bourgeoisie can benefit more so. Copyright is nothing but antagonistic to the working class.
I’m sorry. It looks like we’re working with different definitions of copyright. We’ll just be misunderstanding each other, so please let me know your definition first, in order to move this conversation into a positive direction.
The real question is why you’re so obsessed with defending AI and calling out “anti-AI artist” people.
AI art is cool
I think it’s interesting. Certainly as someone with no artistic talent who role-plays and often needs references for settings, items, characters it stands to potentially make my life a lot easier for that.
I agree with what China is doing, namely that all AI generated visual works should require mandatory watermarking built into the process doing it. It shouldn’t be some big ugly thing that distracts from the work, quite the contrary I believe it should be tiny and unobtrusive or even invisible to the naked eye but I believe we should protect the efforts of human artists by allowing people to identify what is and isn’t AI generated visual imagery.
The watermarking is also essential for combating disinformation which even if the whole western world were to fall tomorrow and socialism established worldwide by 2030 would still be an issue from lingering reactionaries for many many decades.
I do agree that it is like industrialization in what it will do to certain professions. People still hire tailors to create special pieces, you just need a lot of money to afford that, some minimum wage person had little hope of hiring a personal tailor for custom pieces before or after the fact but now has access to affordable clothing. It will be the same with art. Sucks if you’re an artist but the automobile and steam engine sucked for those whose profession was stabling and shoeing horses too, yet we can’t hold back progress. People will still commission artistic works, it’ll just revert to being very skilled artists and very wealthy people.
There is going to be an adjustment period. What we need is not to ban AI art but to adopt socialism. A society that reaches communism or even the high stage of socialism will not need fear from this. No artist will starve because computers can generate art and there will likely if anything be a resurgence of moderate and low skilled people creating art as a creative endeavor in newly found free time once exploitation has ended. Oh people will still use computer generated art for their DnD games or this and that but with so much free time and unlocking of human potential, no one is going to ask a computer to paint the ceiling of a great new building of the people or a train station, they’ll have local artists do so.
Capitalists are not about to allow banning of a cost-cutting measure any more than they would have allowed banning the steam engine or mechanical factories to save the jobs of workers. They’re just not. So what we need once again is a new economic mode, we need socialism. That will harmonize everything. Until then, things continue to decay, conditions get worse for workers, all workers. And all we can do is try to have solidarity with and support one another. But not to go around acting like luddites, that if we smash the machines we can change things. This course is set, it has been done, it will continue to be done. All we can do is push for regulation under this situation and of course push for socialism.
Sucks if you’re an artist but the automobile and steam engine sucked for those whose profession was stabling and shoeing horses too, yet we can’t hold back progress. People will still commission artistic works, it’ll just revert to being very skilled artists and very wealthy people.
Can’t believe I’m reading this take on a communist website. If you’re arguing from a capitalists’ standpoint, then there’s the counterpoint that the existing art generators are full of copyrighted artwork taken without the authors’ permission, and so they should be deemed illegal (this would be true under socialism as well tbf). Then further generators would only be allowed to use either public domain or properly licensed artwork as its training set, which will inevitably lower the variety and quality of the outputs (sorry programmers).
From a communist standpoint we should stand in solidarity with the artists whose livelihoods are being put in risk and oppose unethical AI art.
Capitalists are not about to allow banning of a cost-cutting measure any more than they would have allowed banning the steam engine or mechanical factories to save the jobs of workers. They’re just not.
This is fundamentally different because the generators were fed basically every artwork on the internet, no matter if they were copyrighted or not, in order to make the thing work. They should have never been able to become public services, much less PAID services, and should have been restricted to academic circles as proofs-of-concept, due to the blatant and massive copyright infringement taking place. This is allowed to go on because artists are usually poor and have no individual leverage, but say, if tomorrow an AI movie generator was released that was fed every Hollywood movie ever and could output a Marvel-quality blockbuster with just a prompt and enough time, believe me, shit would be sued to destruction in days.
Artists should be collectivizing right now and preparing a lawsuit against those operating AI art generators fed on their copyrighted artwork. So yes, the proverbial machine can be smashed in this case, if only because it infringes copyright law in such a massive way.
Copyright is bad actually and should be abolished. It constrains creative potential and is a relic that has been weaponized under late capitalism to an extreme end. Intellectual property is disgusting nonsense.
Why should a genius invention that derives from an earlier idea entitle the holder of the earlier idea to all the money or most of it? Why should someone who sits on something they filed be able to demand someone who comes up with a practical use for it pays them money?
And why should someone’s kids or estate or some company be able to hold the rights to someone’s art and charge royalties for decades after their death?
We should have publicly funded research universities and laboratories that should churn out ideas for all to use and take in whatever direction they’d like.
I agree the capitalists are ignoring their own rules to plunder and create a machine for creating money without (as much) labor but they’ve never really been strict about following their own rules and it’s kind of an odd move to whine that they’re dishonest and not following the capitalist IP theory and rulebook.
Artists should be collectivizing right now and preparing a lawsuit against those operating AI art generators fed on their copyrighted artwork. So yes, the proverbial machine can be smashed in this case, if only because it infringes copyright law in such a massive way.
You think you can use the master’s tools to tear down his house while he just stands idly by and shrugs? It’s possible they could win a short-term victory but you are using the bourgeois legal system under the bourgeois government. But only if the bourgeois think they can use it exploit the proletariat further, to impoverish and hurt most people. If need be they could arrange very cheap licensing or hire artists to feed the machine, you’d at most set them back a bit. They can after all draw from many public domain artworks from dead artists, from artwork done by corporate artists under contract, and so on and so forth. Consider the manga artist who creates for some publication. They license all their work to them and that corporation can form an agreement to sell access for fractions of a cent per drawing to AI generators, perhaps in the hope of replacing their artists someday or perhaps just for some quick cash.
And it’s an odd legal argument you need make in service of it too. Can artists sue other artists who as art students studied their art for techniques which they copied? That’s what the AI company lawyers will say. Because the AI is doing something similar though a bit more direct. You can’t point to an exact lifting from a given work so much as broad learning from styles, trends, and themes and re-using them.
But all of art for all of human history has been taking from others, their themes, themes in nature, inspirations, idols looked up to. Which is why I find this idea dangerous. If the art was available for public viewing, is an artist who looks through deviant-art profiles and learns a style from them and then opens their own store a thief as well? Why not?
I’d almost fear more a ruling in the favor of the artists to prevail against that argument, a nightmarish dystopia where you’re fined or billed for your eyes wandering to a copyrighted work that you haven’t subscribed to a plan to view. A total monetization of all art, ideas, etc to an extreme draconian degree.
Copyright is bad actually and should be abolished. It constrains creative potential and is a relic that has been weaponized under late capitalism to an extreme end. Intellectual property is disgusting nonsense.
I agree that copyright has been perverted into a capitalist device that hampers creativity and innovation in current society, but look at how socialist countries have implemented the law and you’ll see it’s not an inherent contradiction, especially in the earlier stages of socialism. Just to be clear, I’m not in favor of Mickey Mouse law. Shit has to be regulated up to a rational point. But as I said somewhere else, if I, as a struggling artist, make something and upload it online just to show people, I don’t want some huge corporation to grab it and monetize it without my consent or approval, or a bigger, more popular artist to claim it as theirs, make money off it, and not even give me credit. That’s what would happen if we abolished copyright now, under capitalism, it would be a free-for-all, plain anarchy. Like it or not but it also keeps blatant robbery in check, under the current system. I strongly believe there would be laws with a similar good-faith purpose under socialism, with numerous clauses and exceptions so they couldn’t be abused.
You think you can use the master’s tools to tear down his house while he just stands idly by and shrugs?
It might sound idealistic and I don’t think it will be the end of the struggle, but it’s one of the only legal devices we have against them under the current system. Collectively we could achieve a lot as well.
If need be they could arrange very cheap licensing or hire artists to feed the machine, you’d at most set them back a bit. They can after all draw from many public domain artworks from dead artists, from artwork done by corporate artists under contract, and so on and so forth. Consider the manga artist who creates for some publication. They license all their work to them and that corporation can form an agreement to sell access for fractions of a cent per drawing to AI generators, perhaps in the hope of replacing their artists someday or perhaps just for some quick cash.
I guess so. It’s still worth fighting for. Pure cynicism isn’t gonna help the socialist cause. We want revolution, or fixing the cause of the illness, but waiting for ideal conditions will only prolong people’s suffering right now.
I can see where you’re coming from but I don’t buy the sci-fi hypothetical dystopian scenario as an argument in favor of AI art. Outlandish logical conclusions are also how liberals claim “authoritarianism” would end, but I digress.
Can artists sue other artists who as art students studied their art for techniques which they copied? That’s what the AI company lawyers will say.
And the human artist’s lawyer will say: one is a human taking inspiration from another human and making something creative out of it, the other is a computer program remixing existing artwork but not adding anything creative on top of it. Therefore it’s a purely derivative work. Some lawyers have already said it, AI art can’t be copyrighted because there’s no original creation involved.
Another way of seeing it would be if I made a sculpture and claimed copyright, then someone else started making 3D printed versions of the sculpture in random colors. I still hold the copyright to the underlying artwork, while the other person could maybe hold copyright to the application of a different material and coloring.
Again, sorry if it appears to you that I’m working under a capitalist copyright framework, but we live in a capitalist world and we’re even more fucked if we don’t even try to fight legally for the few rights we have. Cynicism helps the enemy in this case since it translates into inactivity. The nature of copyright itself and the question of its existence under socialism is a whole different topic. Let’s not fall into the “ideological purity” trap either.
Well said, from my understanding, unless UBI is a thing under socialism (which it shouldn’t be?) copyright laws would still be needed for the artist to make a living, no?
There’s no difference between a human looking at a piece of art or an AI doing it. I’m a human, and the art I create is influenced by art I’ve seen. It took Gundam to show me the beauty in cargo lifts.
There is a difference. You’re a human, not a machine. Don’t compare yourself to one. We artists don’t compare ourselves to them, either. But you’re right in that, to a layperson, AI art seems to evoke the same emotions as human art. But you know why that is? Because AI art is also human art, just remixed by a machine. The problem is that the machine can’t tell you its sources because either the programmers didn’t care about coding in credits and only took copyrighted artwork in bulk as raw material, or it’s very hard for the neural network algorithm to tell you how it came up with an output.
On the topic of inspiration, we as artists love it when other artists are influenced by us. “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” as they say. If another artist likes us they’re also a fan. That’s great. But we’re not fond of an AI pretending to be us in front of non-artists, because 1. it’s just a program that took our art (without permission) from its database because it was tagged as appropriate, and 2. it doesn’t even give us credit. I mean, as far as we know, the programmers who coded the AI didn’t even take one look at our art, they just mass downloaded whole websites and our art came along with them. We don’t like that.
Edit: Whoever downvoted me, at least refute my points.
I’m an artist. It’s my full time job.
So?
We artists don’t compare ourselves to them, either.
But you’re right in that, to a layperson
we as artists
But we’re not fond of an AI pretending to be us in front of non-artistsThese quotes all to me sound like you’re implying I’m not, and therefore my opinion is less valid.
Sorry, I was multitasking when I wrote that post and forgot that part. If you as an artist are alright with an AI assimilating your art, you could be one of the people donating their artwork to train an ethically-sourced dataset. It should be consensual like that.
I just keep wishing cryptobros would quit fucking up the things I have interests in. I love the idea of generative art, and was excitedly chatting with my partner over a music video someone had done that their GAN uncannily nailed the vibe of the song it was ‘videographing’-- and then they started telling me about how linked to crypto it’s become, how artists are using it to fake commissions(?!), how these networks are built on massive caches of stolen art and photographs-- and just like robotics, my interest in it deflated and I felt like I’d lost something else to these libertarian leeches.
Nah, don’t let em win! It can be yours wholly and seperately from said dorks
Same. There’s some really cool effects you can get using AI tools, and as an artist I think there’s a lot of applications for this technology, but copyright-infringing art remixers are not where it’s at.
under capitalism: will probably lead to more unemployment
under socialism: useful, but probably still disheartening for artists (not necessarily enough of a reason to stop developing it, but rather to make a distinction between human-made art and computer-generated art)Maybe under socialism (and under capitalism too, ideally) it shouldn’t be developed and released as an artist-replacement tool, but as an artist-aiding tool
I think development should be focused on aiding artists, but if some team did manage to create an AI that generates really high-quality images, I don’t think it should be withheld
Even if it was trained with copyrighted artwork without the original artists’ permission and it’s capable of outputting untouched images with the right prompt?
I was thinking of a socialist system where copyright isn’t a factor. Under capitalism or a very early stage of socialism, AI art generators will absolutely be abused by large corporations to use the works of smaller artists who can’t feasibly sue them
For a practical solution, limiting the input data to photos would remove the issue of stealing artists’ work (excluding photographers)
Fully agree.
and turn the profession into a low skill minimum wage job.
this was already a thing in many places, AI or not. (creative work salaries are absolutely abysmal in my country).
Artists that spent years learning and perfecting their skills will be worth nothing and I think it’s a pretty depressing future for us.
Artists worrying about losing their jobs and livelihoods is heartbreaking of course. But history will keep repeating itself by replacing humans with machines and AI if we don’t put a stop to the capitalist madness we live in.
I have way more to say about this but the brain fog is strong right now. Solidarity with you and all the other people at risk of losing their jobs to capitalist greed.
Thank you, I just feel like why automate something that people enjoy doing? When I think of a utopia, I think of having free time to socialize and to pursue your passions. I wish everyone can be artists (or whatever else you want), instead the only jobs left will be fry cooks (no disrespect to these skilled labourers), since it seems it will be the last thing to be automated.
It’s getting very competent, but I think it’ll be a long time before it can replace humans for complex art jobs.
It’s for the same reason AI assistants like Alexa or Siri can’t yet replace an actual personal assistant: lack of agency, lack of understanding, lack of gumption.
It appears to be threatening to become one of those instances where technology is moving forward too fast for society to adapt to it responsibly, but I think it’s going to hit a wall soon, and it’ll hopefully slow down long enough for us to find a way forward.
I don’t see AI art as being fundamentally different from other forms of art. In particular, I would liken it to photography where the artists guides the AI to produce scenes that they find to be aesthetically pleasing or to convey some idea they want to share. If we consider photography to be art, then I don’t see why AI generated art would be any different.
AI assistance can also save artists a lot of time. For example, you can already make a rough sketch of something and have the AI fill in the details for you. I see this as evolution of tools like Photoshop which save a lot of time producing different effects that were labour intensive to create previously.
I would argue that art predominantly lies in what the artist is trying to convey, as opposed to the technical skill itself. From that perspective, I think that AI assisted art lowers the barrier for people to convey their ideas. I see that as a net positive.
Regarding the question of jobs, I think that’s entirely a problem with the capitalist system. A lot of artists toil to produce things like advertisements, which are completely soulless and I generally would not consider to be actual art.
I was leaning towards being opposed to AI art, but you’ve convinced me the other way.
I imagine the same debates that happened twenty years ago will come round again, on whether digital art is really art. I’d say so. It seems much more obviously art than something AI generated, but there will be fine art buffs who reject it.
And before then, there would have been a debate on natural or artificial pigments or the virtues of rabbit skin glue over a synthetic alternative, and so on.
The employment thing is the problem, rather than the technology. But that’s not new. It’s even a meme to be a starving artist.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to finish this cave drawing.
PS There’s a good podcast episode on art history. RevLeftRadio,I think. Could be Proles of the Roundtable. Spoiler to hide sensitive description:
spoiler
The episode talks about a pigment made by crushing Egyptian mummies. The damn Europeans had no fucking respect.
That’s basically how I look at it. Every time a new medium shows up people panic about it, but in the end we just end up with more ways to express ourselves. The real problem is capitalism as usual.
And thanks for the tip, gonna have to take a listen.
I think the problematic AI tool here isn’t AI that helps artists finish artwork or automate menial tasks, but AI that has been fed with every copyrighted artwork on the internet and is sold as an artist-replacement tool.
That is problematic. It seems like just another type of exploitation. It’s more visible because the artist works alone, for hours, days, weeks, to produce one output. They can see their labour being stolen if it gets subsumed by an algorithm (or simply ripped off by a corporation if we’re talking general copyright violations). Whereas another type of worker, maybe an editor or an accountant, has the fruits of their labour stolen the old-fashioned way, through the wage relation. And it’s harder to identify which bit of the final ‘output’ was their doing.
As many have said, my main issue with it is it being implemented under capitalism. I think under socialism it could be responsibly used and be a tool for artists–I am an artist and I put great value on the human touch and human error, but it would also be fun to have a brain-to-paper device that can instantly put what I am trying to do into physical reality. There is beauty in art I make that is not the intial idea I had–yadda yadda “the journey”–but it would be cool as almost a new medium of sorts. I already draw, write songs, make beats, make video, write fiction, paint, photograph, and occasionally many other things, including a Google Deep Dream account where I occasionally make AI art by combining two pictures of my choosing as input–I see it as fast, fun, ultimately not as fulfilling as my human art but that’s okay because that’s not its purpose, and it has its own unique flair and still requires my artistic eye and a degree of skill to achieve something pretty.
I will say too, being an artist to make a living has always been my dream, and it is already just shy of an impossibility. I have seen artists that “make it” and a huge amount of them only do to any degree because they either sell out, hyper specialize, have daddy’s money / daddy’s connections, or something similarly capitalistic. AI art under capitalism to me is just more of the same at worst. Thank God capitalism is dying.
EDIT: Rereading my last paragraph I came off a little bitter…because I was a little bitter. I was having a bad mood when I wrote it. To addendum, I acknowledge there are some people who are successful simply because of hard work and a little bit of luck, and while I work hard I also spread myself incredibly thin and I have had plenty of fortune in other avenues of my life, I am already in some ways more fortunate than most people. Just wanted to clarify both the good and the bad.
I saw your profile ask, do you like hip hop, and thought, why yes I do. So I listened to some of your music and it’s – I think this is how the cool kids would put it – dope af – although I could be confusing my generational lingo and even be a generation behind. Loved the music and the lyrics with the images and the text showing up on the screen. And I mean this as a compliment: it’s like if Charles Bukowski rapped and edited videos.
I suppose this is why I’m not too worried about AI art. It won’t replace what humans make. I’ll still want to listen, watch, or read what humans distinctly produce because I turn to art to understand the human condition.
Hip hop was ruined some time ago. There are some great lyricists, even popular ones, but it’s almost all boilerplate and the videos look the same. Half the lyrics are product placement. I don’t begrudge the artists. (Except Kanye. The turncoat. Can’t believe it would be he who held the nail steady while Rowling and Rowan Atkinson hammered shut the lid on my childhood nostalgia.) But every so often, you hear an artist who, more or less, makes the art they want to make and not what a studio wants. And it keeps the art, the genre alive.
(If a studio does come along and offers you millions to make the music they want to hear, please don’t turn down the offer on my account!)
“hip hop was some time ago”
No it wasn’t. It’s just changed over time. Art reflects life, and more specifically hip hop reflects the material reality of New Afrikan people, which right now is unfortunately very influenced by capitalist culture, but again that’s just our material reality. It also doesn’t help that everyone steals from us and therefore there’s an oversaturation of trap beats, but there’s nothing wrong with hip hop itself.
I’m probably just nostalgic for 90s music.
So who would I be listening to now? Who’s good?
Honestly imo it’s best to go to Spotify or something and just start listening to some playlists. Not everything is a hit and not all artists have more than just one good song, but you’ll find what you like and don’t like just by listening, you’ll find one particular artist that you will like and will be able to branch off from there.
Also I’m bad at giving recommendations lol
Give me one name :D
Who’s your favourite rapper right now? Or most played?
I’ll recommend Stormzy to you. Heavy is the Head album. Also his freestyle about Grenfell Tower. “They gonna get me for this, so stay woke.” And they did. The bastards.
I love Stormzy!
I’m not sure what you like, but in general high quality modern hip hop artists IMO would be (I’m sure you’ve already heard several of these) (no order):
-Kendrick Lamar -XXXTENTACION -J. Cole -Earl Sweatshirt -Isaiah Rashad -Lil Darkie -Vince Staples -Childish Gambino -Little Simz -Angel Haze -Kilo Kish -JID -SZA -BROCKHAMPTON -Joji -Ski Mask tha Slump God -Kanye West (yes I know 😔) -Fukkit -Big Sean -Lil Wayne -Denzel Curry -DOECHII -Smino -Tyler the Creator -Tierra Whack
I’m no expert and even many of my favorite artists I haven’t listened to their whole discography.
I could definitely narrow this down if I knew what vibes you’re looking for, many offer very very different qualities and some are very polarizing (for good reasons).
Thanks for this list! These will keep me busy 🎧
Aight I got you, lol.
Playboi Carti, Shofu, Migos (rip Takeoff), and DaBaby are who I’m listening to now
I also make my own music, mostly instrumentals
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Will check out your stuff when I’m at work 😎
Almost two weeks late but clipping., JPEGMAFIA, JID, Zack Fox, and Ski Mask the Slump God; if you like Stormzy then def Dizzee Rascal, Kano, Flowdan, and Tempa T
I’ll take a look at these, thanks. I do like Dizzee Rascal and Kano, but it’s been a while since I listened to them.
Hey, just saw this and wanted to say thank you so much!!! That means a lot, all of it.
I have a new album I’m working on that’ll hopefully be out within a few months. I’ve been trying to focus on being more listenable to a general audience without sacrificing the art and the message. If a studio offered me millions, I’d take it and just infiltrate and 180 on em 😎
But again, hey, thank you for your compliment and thank you for taking time to listen to my music, it seriously means the world!
You’re welcome 😁
Please let me know when the album’s out.
It sure makes self publishing a bit easier. You can just sit down and try to narrow down the terms necessary for the AI to generate a sick, eye catching cover for your books/pamphlets. It puts more control of the final product in the hands of creators for the time being.
As for commercial artists, this shit obviously sucks. There’s a lot to be said for how these tools are developed through mass exploitation of their art for the data used to train the AI, all without neither acknowledgement nor payment for their work. This is without a doubt a kind of mass exploitation. After all, can you imagine how much it would have cost these developers to pay the artists for the literally tens of thousands of images they feed to these AI? Much easier to quietly collect scans online for free and chuck them in the set. Whose going to ever know?
I see a lot of potential for AI in producing propaganda. You can quickly generate eye catching imagery, and even text with stuff like ChatGPT, then do a pass over it to clean things up.
Wait till 720p AI video becomes a thing, that can then be upscaled to 1080p. Movie creation industry will also collapse.
I’ve seen AI fail miserably at drawing human skeletons. While it’s very good at making things that look realistic, or even beautiful, it’s still far from achieving complex illustration tasks (e.g. anatomically correct bones, architectural designs, comic strips that make sense, etc.).
AI can’t even draw proper Lenin.
It will most likely get there eventually and faster than we think since how fast it went from the experiments to being open to public.
Like everyone said, with every technology replacing human labor, the problem is only capitalism. I want to add that AI art will never replace human art because AI art is only useful, while human art is meaningful. Put up an AI-made art in a museum and nothing happens, it’s a picture on a wall, because the AI has nothing to say, nothing to make sense of. When watching human art, we start thinking about the why and the how, the History and worldview, the emotions, the thoughts behind it.
The reaction from artists community on the internet was very telling of how low the meaning of “art” have become in the capitalist world. Those extremely skilled individuals don’t see their talent being used for anything else than making profit for corporations, they can’t imagine being supported as artists making meaningful art and showing it to the people around them who will enjoy reflecting on it.
because the AI has nothing to say, nothing to make sense of.
Actually I disagree. The AI has something to say but it would be rather related to the mathematics, 1s and 0s, the algorithm generating the art rather than the artistic aspect.
My point was that, we can automate the process of creating images, but art as a form human expression cannot be automated. I’m not sure what you meant, but I don’t think it is contradictory right?
Following this, I think we get to the question: is all image production ‘art’ even if it’s done by humans?
Well it depends widely on your premises, plus there are a lot of philosophical answers to what is art. Worse, I don’t see a standard Marxist answer to that. We could consider that separating art as a form of meaningful expression and art as the craft of images is pointless since both are labor therefore both are either free or alienated. But we could also consider that all form of signaling and practical applications of image-making aren’t sufficient to cultural life and therefore “art” without practical purpose should be distinguished in order to be preserved by materially supporting artists
I agree that this is a worse problem under capitalism, but hypothetically under socialism, would there be UBI? (As I understand it, UBI is antithetical to socialism, as it gives all your power to the state). Or would artists get a cut of $ for every generated image (as it is currently, no artists are paid or part of these AI companies).
The precise inner workings of a future fully communist society will be determined through trial and error and trying to imagine them is utopian. Though we can start to think about art under the dictatorship of the proletariat. In my opinion it is reasonable to envision the practice of art as a profession the same way we manage academic research, with autonomous institutions that pay salaries to students and professors so they continue practicing their discipline both freely and with excellence.
Of course amateur art should also be made as accessible as possible
I’m sorry that all your responses have been programmers calling you a luddite and implying that artists are either hopeless amateurs or petite-bourgeois profit-seeking dilletantes. People seem unaware that existing and historical socialist countries have usually provided better support for artists and a more socially beneficial outlet. As some have rightly pointed out, high art under capitalism is little more than a physical NFT, a plaything for the bourgeois. In comparison, the DPRK is well known for its artists and sculptors who are hired around the world to create public art such as statues and monuments. AI-generated art represents the maximum level of commodification for art and specifically in the case of art this produces something deeply unsatisfactory to many, myself included. The reason is that art is at its base a form of communication between the artist and their audience, and in the case of performing arts this relationship is mediated by an interpreter. As a human being with subjective experience, what we find fulfilling in all art is this communication: we are experiencing some meaningful idea, emotion, through the artistic logic of its creator. The artwork also exists as a snapshot of the historical moment around its creation. And the act of creating art is as important as the role of the audience. Art does not really have a practical use value outside of this deeply human, subjective, irrational case, and so when AI is used to generate a finished product, or it is the primary source of the idea, the commodified artform that results is stripped of any historical context around its creation, and there is no one trying communicate from the other side, trying to express something from within. There is only the consumer and infinite stream of indistinguishable pseudo-art.
This has been the only response here that has made the most sense.
Thank you for this uplifting comment.
