WotC So it seems D&D has picked a side on the AI art debate.

[Charlaquin]

You are stumbling into the wild conundrum of how many AI's are created... A second AI trains them by making many small changes to the better performing ones that were tested before a second AI tests the whole batch.

An analogy might be a PHD professor (Alice) & preschool teacher (Bob). Alice creates dozens hundreds thousands etc tests, that's all she knows how to do. Bob brings in a huge number of preschoolers & gives them those tests for Alice to grade. Dave then makes another huge batch of clones with slight changes based on the better performing test takers. The rest just get deleted or maybe archived for reference. That process repeats until the test takers meet some standard of acceptably good.

This is all fascinating stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with my argument.

When a google engineer testifies under oath that they don't actually know how the algorithm decides to show one thing or another it's not because the wrong engineer is testifying or because the engineer is unskilled. They could speak in generalities about the things they expect the algorithm to consider.

I’m well aware that we don’t really know how machine “learning” algorithms make the decisions they make (which is another reason we shouldn’t be using them, but again, tangent). Regardless, they are still ultimately assembling pieces from the human-created art seed art. You cannot have AI-generated content without a large database of human-generated content to “train” it on. So, again, it is ultimately a tool designed to generate value from the existing products of human labor, without having to compensate the humans who did that labor. If you want to quibble over whether the word “theft” is an accurate way to describe that, whatever. It’s unethical, regardless of what you call it.

We don't really know how things like consciousness & such work either

Ok?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

You cannot have AI-generated content without a large database of human-generated content to “train” it on.

I don't think that is the point at dispute. The point is you cannot have human-generated art without 300,000 years of human-generated art to train on.

 

[tetrasodium]

This is all fascinating stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with my argument.

I’m well aware that we don’t really know how machine “learning” algorithms make the decisions they make (which is another reason we shouldn’t be using them, but again, tangent). Regardless, they are still ultimately assembling pieces from the human-created art seed art. You cannot have AI-generated content without a large database of human-generated content to “train” it on. So, again, it is ultimately a tool designed to generate value from the existing products of human labor, without having to compensate the humans who did that labor. If you want to quibble over whether the word “theft” is an accurate way to describe that, whatever. It’s unethical, regardless of what you call it.

Ok?

I think you've made a lot of pretty serious misunderstandings about how these AIs build an image and are too eager to praise something as art when a human does the same thing as the chip'n dale magnum/Indi example from earlier showed.

 

[ReshiIRE]

I don't think that is the point at dispute. The point is you cannot have human-generated art without 300,000 years of human-generated art to train on.

Outsider art exists. As far as I am aware, outsider AI art is impossible now, and will probably stay impossible lalter.

 

[jasper]

Oh, you were asking about the show? That’s unequivocally art. Just because it takes inspiration from other sources doesn’t mean it lacks anything original. I thought you were asking about the specific image you put in the spoiler block.

EDIT: And a case could be made that the image and others like it are also art. It’s less clear-cut in that case, but memes certainly can be art.

What makes algorithmically generated images not art is that they are created by totally a different process than art is. Art is created when a person has an idea in their brain (which, yes, is influenced by the works of other artists, and it can therefore be debated whether or not any idea is wholely original, but that is tangential to the point), and use their learned skills to produce a new thing that expresses that idea. An algorithm doesn’t do any of that. An algorithm has no ideas and no skills with which it can produce expressions of ideas. You just give it a prompt and it looks through its database of art created by real humans, chops up bits of those works, and splices them together in whatever way it calculates will be most likely to satisfy the parameters you gave it.

Art is created by Elephant being handed a paint brush saw that on CBS Sunday Morning.
Art is created by a dog stepping on paint and walking across canvas.
Art is created by programmer who creates a program to slice together bits and blots, and shots.
Art is a bird nest which some red neck sprayed it down with hairspray and entered in an art show.
The program may put some artists out of work. But as a programmer, the batch of programs I created in 1998 put 2 accountants and 3 other employees out of work.
art is what other artists say it is.
Commerical art is what sales and leaves most of artists out of a check because they have no customers for their art.

 

[Charlaquin]

I don't think that is the point at dispute. The point is you cannot have human-generated art without 300,000 years of human-generated art to train on.

Of course you can. How do you think the first artists did it? How do you think children do it?

 

[Charlaquin]

I think you've made a lot of pretty serious misunderstandings about how these AIs build an image

What have I misunderstood about how they build an image?

and are too eager to praise something as art when a human does the same thing as the chip'n dale magnum/Indi example from earlier showed.

That’s not the same thing, as I’ve already gone over.

 

[Charlaquin]

Art is created by Elephant being handed a paint brush saw that on CBS Sunday Morning.
Art is created by a dog stepping on paint and walking across canvas.
Art is created by programmer who creates a program to slice together bits and blots, and shots.
Art is a bird nest which some red neck sprayed it down with hairspray and entered in an art show.
The program may put some artists out of work. But as a programmer, the batch of programs I created in 1998 put 2 accountants and 3 other employees out of work.
art is what other artists say it is.
Commerical art is what sales and leaves most of artists out of a check because they have no customers for their art.

Ok? But what image generation algorithms do is not creating art. It’s stealing art.

 

[cbwjm]

I've seen plenty of AI generated art, some of it is really good, even getting the fingers right! I'm not really concerned with how it got to the finished image, it still looks like art to me, so I consider it as art and would happily use some of it as inspiration for a PC or NPC in my games.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Of course you can. How do you think the first artists did it?

A proto-human fell into a puddle of mud, then put their hand on a cave wall.

How do you think children do it?

They learn from parents/caregivers. You think a child could make paint and paper on their own?