Not every piece of art you don't like was made by AI

[Umbran]

Refusing to acknowledge that systems are changing and moving toward ethical (ie someone paid someone else for the rights) models just so you can continue the same old arguments is transparently refutable.

Bollocks yourself. I was among the first on these boards to say - if the folks who make generative AIs actually license their training sets, the problem goes away. And that is still true.

But the people behind the major AI systems are not suddenly pouring millions of dollars into the art and literature communities. They are not going back to those online sources they scraped, saying, "Folks, we are sorry - we really should have paid you. So here's what we owe you."

Until they do that, no, systems are not changing. The proof is in the royalty checks.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Refusing to acknowledge that systems are changing and moving toward ethical (ie someone paid someone else for the rights) models just so you can continue the same old arguments is transparently refutable.

They're not though. That's the problem.

Multiple ones have said they will, and have taken no action to do so, and are continuing to use their outrageously unethical models to generate vast amounts of cash whilst they wait for people to forget.

If they were remotely serious about it, they'd literally stop their models from operating until fully ethical/licenced ones were available - it wouldn't even take that long. But they don't want to spend money, not when they can pay lip service to an ideal and then just... not act on it.

No, it's not. When an accusation of this nature happens, it gets spread on social media very quickly. When proof is shown, it hardly gets talked about at all. That's the exact same situation as I described in my posts. The accusation gets spread because people are into sensational things, which AI art is right now, but the proof of innocence does not get spread like that, because proof isn't sensational. It's boring.

You haven't provided a single example of this actually happening to an artist who was falsely accused of using AI. So far the only high-profile case I'm aware of strongly worked in the artist's favour, and directly contrary to your blithe assertions, the refutation was the much bigger story and much more reported on than the accusations! So without examples you're flatly wrong at the moment.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Several of the more recent AI art accusations with WotC and other companies haven't been about art pieces built from scratch using AI, they've been about pieces that were enhanced with AI in-filling tools that can add, alter or enhance details within a nearly-finished work. That is much harder for an artist to disprove - simply having work-in-progress files of the image won't do it, since these embellishments are added near the end of the process, once the image is otherwise complete or nearly complete.

Sure they will - why do you think they won't? Your "near the end of the process" doesn't hold up - they'd still be added in a way tracked by the history. Further, the only accusation of that nature I'm aware - the single one - was 100% correct. Can you show me some wrong ones?

 

[trappedslider]

I guess Michelangelo and Raphael used AI cuz mean look at those fingers

 

[Blue Orange]

Bollocks yourself. I was among the first on these boards to say - if the folks who make generative AIs actually license their training sets, the problem goes away. And that is still true.

But the people behind the major AI systems are not suddenly pouring millions of dollars into the art and literature communities. They are not going back to those online sources they scraped, saying, "Folks, we are sorry - we really should have paid you. So here's what we owe you."

Until they do that, no, systems are not changing. The proof is in the royalty checks.

My fear is it would be prohibitively expensive, even for companies as wealthy as Google or Microsoft. How many artists have they scraped? What kind of licensing fees would they pay each one?

It's a very powerful tool (you can tell when the thread on it is 535 pages long), but there's no way it could have been obtained ethically. If they had tried to negotiate licenses and royalties to thousands of artists, it would have taken them years as each artist insisted on their own terms, big IP holders like Disney would have refused in order to develop their own platforms...and someone else who didn't bother with ethics would have jumped out ahead and made a huge amount of money.

It's not something I personally would have done--I'm not that unethical. But that's one of the many reasons I'm not a billionaire.

 

[Blue Orange]

What's amazing to me is how long AI art has been a problem in role playing games. Check out this obviously AI generated image from 1st edition AD&D? You might think AI is terrible about rendering human hands today, but look at this attempt at a face found in the 1st edition Player's Handbook.


View attachment 347877

In all seriousness, we should all take great care when we make accusations of any kind.

You know, it's funny. Of the three full-page illustrations in or on that book, the front cover is endlessly parodied and iconic in an age when that word is vastly overused, the paladin in hell was famous enough to make its own module, and that one...well, you never heard about it.

 

[trappedslider]

My fear is it would be prohibitively expensive, even for companies as wealthy as Google or Microsoft. How many artists have they scraped? What kind of licensing fees would they pay each one?

It's a very powerful tool (you can tell when the thread on it is 535 pages long), but there's no way it could have been obtained ethically. If they had tried to negotiate licenses and royalties to thousands of artists, it would have taken them years as each artist insisted on their own terms, big IP holders like Disney would have refused in order to develop their own platforms...and someone else who didn't bother with ethics would have jumped out ahead and made a huge amount of money.

It's not something I personally would have done--I'm not that unethical. But that's one of the many reasons I'm not a billionaire.

and some folks would respond about it being prohibitively expensive with "And that's a problem?"

 

[Blue Orange]

and some folks would respond about it being prohibitively expensive with "And that's a problem?"

Right. My point is that's why they won't do it. I suspect they couldn't even if they wanted to (which being profit-maximizing corporations they probably don't). They've backed themselves into a corner, so to speak, so they might as well keep ripping off artists and making money.

I've sort of moved to a place where I'm beyond hope, I should clarify. I'm not actually endorsing this sort of thing.

 

[Umbran]

My fear is it would be prohibitively expensive, even for companies as wealthy as Google or Microsoft. How many artists have they scraped? What kind of licensing fees would they pay each one?

Yes, it would probably be expensive, perhaps prohibitively so. At least, for those uses.

There are uses of such AI that don't have the issue of only being useful if you steal your dataset from creators - you can, for example, train these AIs to simulate data used in many sciences, because they already have huge datasets available. For example, CERN has enough data on its own, and could share data with every other particle accelerator on the planet to train AIs.

But, big tech companies can't make oodles of dollars doing that.

If they had tried to negotiate licenses and royalties to thousands of artists, it would have taken them years as each artist insisted on their own terms

I expect there'd be far more efficient ways to go about it than asking people individually to license their work.

But, let us be clear - if the business model is not viable if they ethically source the data, then the business should fold. Like, if you can't afford to pay your employees an appropriate wage, you don't get to have your business "succeed" by shafting them.

They are not entitled to make these AIs.

 

[Scribe]

Yes but then I don't get a free to use tool that puts many artists to shame... /s