AI/LLMs AI art bans are going to ruin small 3rd party creators

[soviet]

I write poems, lyrics, song words, and so forth. Thousands of 'em, maybe over ten thousand now, since not long after I was old enough to write.

I design and write all sorts of stuff for my D&D games - homebrew settings, adventures, rules, maps, you name it.

I play* music with some guys, some of it freeform-ish (we come up with a tune /melody on the fly then write words for it, flesh it out, and add the words in), some of it pre-written; about 98% of it original, the other 2% are either straight covers or Weird-Al-like rewordings of others' songs. Up to about 40 hours worth of finished (if highly-variable quality!) songs now, if not more.

I used to draw until I realized I just wasn't any good at it, and packed it in. I'm also useless at painting, as some of my poor embarrassed minis can attest!

With the poems-lyrics and the music, the implementation and creative pieces go pretty much hand in hand, but are IMO still separate things: the creativity is thinking of it and the implementation is actually playing it (or, sometimes, getting someone else to play it - I can come up with what I think are some pretty good guitar lines or riffs in my head but can't play guitar worth sheeite, so someone else has to play 'em).

With the RPG stuff, it's often a variant on the old saw "15 minutes of creativity packed into 4 hours of implementation".

* - well, not so much lately; covid kinda killed it for us. We'll get back at it one day....

This only makes sense though if you get a fully-formed idea in your head of a poem, a piece of music, or a picture, and then the implementation part is simply the act of transcribing that defined thing into an external medium.

That's certainly not how it works for me. When I sit down to write part of an RPG book I might have a rough idea of what that section should cover or include, but I don't know the details or the wording or the structure. Balancing things out ("I need another example here, that sentence needs to be longer, the rhythm here is wrong, what if this happened instead') is a constant process. There is no space between 'I have a complete idea' and 'now I must transcribe it'.

Similarly with poems, I've never sat down and planned to write a poem. What's happened is that a particular image or phrase has struck me, often out on a walk, and then I've had to sit down and write down the lines as they flow out of me, bearing in mind a sense of flow and structure, and then later I've refined that draft into a more balanced poem by adding bits or editing bits (not much, normally they flow out fairly complete). Unless you count typing them up, again I don't see any part of the process that is transcription of an idea rather than development or refinement of an idea.

I paint warhammer models. I don't think I've ever sat down to paint something with a full vision or plan in mind. I will have a rough idea of what I want but then when I start to block in the main colours I will realise 'oh actually the straps need to be a warm brown rather than black, to contrast with the armour' or whatever. It's fairly unusual not to overpaint at least one small part of the model to improve the overall balance of the colour scheme. Similarly, by now I have a bunch of recipes I know will create an effective gold, an effective red, etc. But it's quite unusual to paint something and not end up adding at least one new recipe to my arsenal.

 

[Maxperson]

I’m not even sure the initial scraping the internet to train even on copyrighted material was unethical, but if not it was right at the edge. There’s a notion of fair use for transformative and/or educational works.

I think it is. They are taking images that don't belong to them and then using those images for monetary gain. That's flat out an unethical use of intellectual property that they don't own.

 

[Older Beholder]

This only makes sense though if you get a fully-formed idea in your head of a poem, a piece of music, or a picture, and then the implementation part is simply the act of transcribing that defined thing into an external medium.

Exactly, you haven't created a book until it's written down, not to mention that the editing process exists.
The idea that you're just transcribing an entire book that's already written in your head is baffling.

 

[Maxperson]

His post didn't have any notation about it being digital art only. I hardly took it out of context, it was worded far too generically.

"There seems to be a fundamental difference of opinion about whether the underlying creative intent or the human assembly of pixels is art. I think art is when pixels get created in response to human creative intent. You think that it's only art when you have the human creative intent and the human creation of pixels. ~ @FrogReaver"

The first sentence clearly sets the context at pixels. It's not a general statement. It's a specific one. If you cut out the context, then post only the second sentence, followed by an accusation that it is claiming that art other than with pixels is somehow not art, then you seem to be deliberately taking the comment out of the clear context that it was posted in.

Frankly I think it still a valid point as the definition does exclude music which is the obvious one (and music is a bit of a hot button topic with AI generated channels pumping stuff out) but also would mean regular video game play, which involves a lot of changing pixels any time you play due to camera movements, is 'art', while deliberately creating something in it (the actual part most would say is art) isn't. Even if I still find it very funny, this clip of me launching some poor person off a bridge in Warcraft involves a lot of pixel changing, but sure isn't art, especially the part I wonder where the heck my wasp has gotten to

A cinematic WoW pvp compilation can be art. The random one-off kills in that time aren't

You seem to be saying that there is a difference between pixels as used for art and pixels as used for other things. Is that correct? If so, I agree with you. It's like when you paint a house, that's generally not art. When you paint a mural on a wall, that is art.

 

[Eric V]

Exactly, you haven't created a book until it's written down, not to mention that the editing process exists.
The idea that you're just transcribing an entire book that's already written in your head is baffling.

Yeah, this reminds me of people who refer to themselves as authors, even though they haven't written anything, because they have a general outline for a book rattling around in their head. Insufferable.

 

[Older Beholder]

Yeah, this reminds me of people who refer to themselves as authors, even though they haven't written anything, because they have a general outline for a book rattling around in their head. Insufferable.

Also see: Milo Winter, The Age of Scorpius.

 

[Mecheon]

You seem to be saying that there is a difference between pixels as used for art and pixels as used for other things. Is that correct? If so, I agree with you. It's like when you paint a house, that's generally not art. When you paint a mural on a wall, that is art.

I don't think its the pixels at all that make it art. I think its the intention behind it, the desire that this will be art. Regular gameplay of a video game isn't art, but it sure as heck adjusts pixels. On the other hand you can then turn it into art by editing and adjusting things

 

[soviet]

I guess I can imagine someone whose brain works differently to mine writing a complete poem entirely in their head and then transcribing it afterwards as a separate act, albeit in that case the writing (creating) process happened already.

But thinking up an idea of a picture isn't the same thing. I am aphantasic, so I see no images in my head at all, but even if one were hyperphantasic, and could see a completely realised fully detailed mental picture, the act of translating that to an external medium surely involves infinite questions of translation and interpretation, shade and proportion.

 

[FrogReaver]

I think it is. They are taking images that don't belong to them and then using those images for monetary gain. That's flat out an unethical use of intellectual property that they don't own.

And we have many carve outs allowing for using intellectual property you don't actually own or have permission to use.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

There have been multiple times in my life when I've wanted to see a physical reference image for something I can picture in my head, and I've found a perfect match by conducting iterative Google image searches using carefully-worded search terms. Not just, "That image I found is good enough," but, "That image I found is exactly what I was picturing in my head!" (If your wondering how that's possible, it usually happens when I'm imagining how something I read in a book would look, and I discover a visual artist who read the same book and pictured it exactly the same way I did.)

That kind of thing happens more than you think.

I had a decades-old ring design in a sketchbook that I decided to finally make real. While I was trying to decide which jeweler to work with on the project, I found out a jeweler I’d bought from- but never worked with- had a nearly identical design in his product line. It was close enough I just let him make it his way (with a minor tweak).

A guy I knew on a guitar board posted a video of a new riff he came up with that he was stoked about working into a new composition. Unfortunately, it was nearly identical to a riff Tony Iommi did with Black Sabbath in the 1970s. He wasn’t a Sab fan, and hadn’t heard the song (which was a deep cut anyway). He was devastated.

Same basic thing happened to me one time when I was composing a song. I had a great intro I’d worked on for a few weeks, and was moving onto the main body of the song. I turned on the radio, and they were debuting the new track from Joe Satriani. My intro sounded like a stripped down version of his (and then transitioned into a song VERY unlike what I’d write). There’s no way I could have heard Joe’s song before that moment, and yet my song intro could easily have been criticized as “derivative”.