AI and AI Art

[DoubleO]

Mostly an excuse to post a friend of mine experimenting with AI Art and MGS, the video itself he edited but it's crazy how the AI's art is becoming consistent now between pictures and no more 6 finger freaks. 
I love and hate AI

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What are your thoughts on it?

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[Aragorn]

No matter how impressive the technology may be, you can always tell when it's AI and it's an instant turn off for me. Be it in games, stand alone art, ads - i'm squarely in the camp of AI being theft that exploits the work of artists and nothing can really change that.

The tools are getting better and better. In an ideal world, they can probably be incorporated into an artist's workstream in an ethical way. But the reality is its biggest proponents tend to be people who have spent years and years pretending as if art isn't *real* work and will now scream off the rooftops that this is democratization and accessibility.

[DoubleO]

No matter how impressive the technology may be, you can always tell when it's AI and it's an instant turn off for me. Be it in games, stand alone art, ads - i'm squarely in the camp of AI being theft that exploits the work of artists and nothing can really change that.

The tools are getting better and better. In an ideal world, they can probably be incorporated into an artist's workstream in an ethical way. But the reality is its biggest proponents tend to be people who have spent years and years pretending as if art isn't *real* work and will now scream off the rooftops that this is democratization and accessibility.

I do not disagree. 

The people that use AI art properly you wont even notice they used it. What's frustrating is when art in general is now less appreciated because everyone assumes it's AI or that AI could do it in seconds so why should I care about your work? Like this for example...



If I had seen that 5 or 6 years ago on youtube, I'd have been gushing all over it, but now it's only mildly impressive to me because I don't know what work and thought dude put in versus what was just a 2 second prompt because AI can do everything you see and hear on screen. 

I had to ask my friend what he actually did and he told me he edited the facebook video above himself and it's just the images, if he had said he got ChatGPT to prompt all of that, I would've believed him.

[NateDog]

I hate AI "art" and that will not change. Ridiculous waste of energy and it is a blight on actual artists. I haven't an ounce of artistic ability in my body but I am completely on the side of people that actually use their own imagination and ability to create works over people that act like they're making anything with this shite.

[BULUPTAX]

I hate AI art, whenever an IG or Facebook page I follow posts an AI generated image I immediately unfollow

Artists are groups of people who always get dicked around in one way or another and this is just a new form of that. Seeing it advance is scary because it could easily be picked up by major corporations who don't want to commission artists and make it an unviable occupation.

Art is one of the only things we have that I still enjoy and I don't want to see it turn into something I can't stand

[Jassassino]

Yeah nah fuck AI

[Aragorn]

I think the worst part of it is if you're in the corporate sphere there is basically a hype merchant of some kind trying to sell you on an AI tool that's gonna revolutionize our entire existence every 5 nanoseconds. It's gotten to a point where some LinkedIn schmuck will try and sell you on an AI tool, with a post WRITTEN BY AI. And they all sound the exact fucking same with the exact same cookie cutter structure.

[Wayno]

Our technocratic overlords have decided we have to have AI so we're going to have AI. Even capitalism gave us consumer choice. You will be force fed this slop and you have no say. Get back to being good little digital surfs and don't question it.

[Dirty Duck]

I have a friend who is just totally into the whole AI schtick. He'll acknowledge the issues but in a very 'yeahhhh I know' kind of way but he uses ChatGPT for so much shit. We're going to China together and he used ChatGPT to make an itinerary that was so full of errors and just completely ridiculous and outside the realms of possibility. He's always sharing AI song covers or AI videos and he even used it to come up for slogans for posters he has to make for work and then gets upset when everyone is like 'wow that's so shit' despite the fact he didn't come up with it. He has essentially replaced googling with asking an AI chatbot.

It's very frustrating to me. I'm very anti-AI in the forms it's reared its head recently. The AI art, videos, music, it all just feels like a bad direction to take. Part of a thing being admirable and impressive is that it was somebody's idea that they either enlisted others to realise or realised themselves. Art in all its forms should be a celebration of human collaboration. Machines can be used as tools to reach that end but I have no interest in art where a myriad of the decisions were made by an AI.

This absolute buzzword-ification of it as well is hindering tools that artists have been using for years. Automated processes on blender or photoshop that an artist makes use of are now being lumbered in with fully generative AI. Every company ever is trying to shove it down our throats without actually bothering to explain what they're talking about. 'Enhanced by AI,' 'Now with AI,' 'Powered by AI.' These phrases have been true of many computer products and processes for a very long time...so what are they talking about? The spearheading of the phrase is flattening the public's understanding of what it truly means and obscures what 'AI' is actually in use. The advancement of these tools and the way in which they're used can very easily get out of hand. And who is in charge of it? Who keeps it in check? The corporations? The government?

Companies have been training their AI on sources like the internet archive and libgen secretly, these sites are then being targeted and taken down. The information isn't just being amassed but gatekept. These sites are some of the backbones of what the internet has been for since its inception. They encourage free access to information and learning, they are massive collections of human culture and history, preserved digitally. Some people have dedicated their lives to helping that cause. And now their work has been co-opted and is under threat of being scrubbed off the web. It's the kind of act you'd read about in a cyberpunk story.

There's an obvious hypocrisy in this using generative replications of voice actor's work to make this point, but it does drive home just how relevant the kind of things MGS2 was saying are to this situation:

[Aragorn]

Critical point - a lot of what is being packaged as AI is already preexisting technology.

AI is effectively just conversational ML and ML has been in use by every business under the sun for years and years now. Automation isn't new, machine learning isn't new - the only nuggets of innovation is how that information is presented (which is admittedly captivating at a glance) and LLM's incredible capacity at lightning speed theft under the guise of ''training datasets''.