hmm - I have a little trouble calling AI-generated images art, even if it looks nice

Yeah, hard pass from my side also.

It is dead pixels to me.

Meh, I faced similar skepticism about data visualisation, or even just digital art, last year.

Art is about choices. The computer doesn't spit out any old random image but something the user instructs it to generate. Often the user than has to further choose from the array of generated images, or tweak the prompt to get it closer to their intent. At all stages the user is undeniably choosing self-expression, and if that's not art, then I don't know what is.

The actual implementation, the details, are just scraped from actual artists, and it shows.

It is plagiature, and poorly executed plagiature.

For instance, in this image the "squiggly bits" near the sun are recognizable as Gustav Klimt-inspired, but only superficially.
It's just some squiggles that look a bit like Klimt's works - on close inspection, it is just trash.

Plenty of artists produce absolute trash. Especially some of the famous ones...

And yet, they are artists, not a bag of fermenting stolen art.

Nonsense. No theft or plagiarism beyond the sort of inspiration has happened beyond the sort of inspiration that any artist gets from seeing somebody else' work.

It is literally theft.
Works scraped and recycled without consent or consultation.
That's theft.

And there is no "inspiration" involved.

LLMs can be made to regurgitate personally identifiable information from its training data. Text-to-image generation is no different, it's ultimately just regurgitation of stored bits.

It is no more theft than anyone else seeing an image, having their brain (quite literally) altered a tiny bit by seeing it, and going on to create something of their own. Art is there to be viewed. Viewing it is not theft. It is not reasonable to say "you can come to the gallery but we forbid you to be inspired by what you see."

Regurgitation seldom results in anything coherent. What the image generators do is rearrangement, which is an awfully big part of what humans do. They are not literally "inspired", but the principle is much the same (and actual inspiration is necessary for the prompts anyway).

Humans also are fully capable of reproducing their training data with sufficient prompting. 😀

Bits are copied with digital precision.

There is no interpretation, no inspiration, no adaptation involved in GenAI.
Just patterns stolen and re-applied.

No, sorry, this just doesn't make any sense to me at all.

Humans are fully capable of digital-level precision; look at forgeries or hyper-realistic paintings.

There is absolutely and undeniably adaptation in creating an image based on text to mimic a specified style. There simply can't not be.

There is inspiration in the un-emotional sense of making a thing look somewhat like another thing, based on a memory of those things.

There is interpretation in that many different possibilities are valid for the same prompt and some arbitrary way of proceeding must be decided upon.

And forgeries are illegal.

Hyperrealistic paintings are not, because they are as much an interpretation as any other painting.

A text-to-image model has no mind. It's just data being shuffled around.
Algorithms don't stop being algorithms for happening in a black box.

We prosecute forgers, we don't say their reproductive skills make their talents invalid.

The act of making a copy does not itself constitute any sort of immoral act. It's the permissions and consent that go along with it.

It isn't relevant that image generators don't have minds. If anything, that shifts the burden to the users. Using them to make a perfect reproduction could certainly constitute theft. Using them in general most certainly does not, nor does the initial scanning of electronic material used in the training data.

No, once again, as the courts have established, the product of an "ai" does not have value.
It cannot be copyrighted.
It is simply not a creative product, just a mathematical derivation of existing works.

The user is not a creator. They're deluded if they think they are.

LinkedIn is chuck-full of such deluded CEOs who think that they themselves are the ones producing all the value in the company, and that their workers can just be replaced with "ai".

They are mistaken. So is anyone else who thinks writing a prompt is somehow a creative process.

Eh what ? Sorry but that's bonkers.

Which part?

That there are CEOs who think they produce the value?

Or that these CEOs make exactly the same mistake you are suggesting?

That creating a prompt is not a creative process. That is self-evidently wrong.

Creating a prompt is not a creative process of producing an image.

Compare to comissioning a work from an artist.

You give them a prompt.

They use their vision and technical skills to produce the work.

The prompt is merely a limitation on the creative process.

Writing microfiction can be a creative process, and microfiction could serve as prompts, but nothing changes the fact that writing the prompt is not part of the creative process of the image.

With the image generator, you are simply stealing someone's vision and technical skills. There is no creative process involved, except the creative processes that were ripped off in training the AI.

Nope, sorry, still bonkers.

contrast with using tools for drawing, painting, sculpting, etc

most often the artist is not even touching the drawing or the painting, only the tool is.

one could argue that such artists are not being creative, they're just applying forces on the tools, and it's the unintelligent tools that are doing the job. therefore it's not art?

on to printing and 3D printing. does the use of printing tools make the output not art? or maybe the art already done by the time the printing equipment gets involved?

@know I had not created my aspect "Free-Thinking a s o" to permit such publications = "Frree-Thinking" is an aspect for "Free-Thinkers" ! it's a place for these and those who want to share their reflections and thoughts about thiss & that ... this painting/drawing is cool, but it is not a work made for free-thinking ... please use this aspect with care, thanks !!

Again: It is like comissioning an artist. The prompt is just a limitation on the creative process of the image, not part of it.

I've been commissioned to produce images and creative control belongs with the client. They provide instruction, I make an image, they give feedback -> repeat until done. Okay, it's not the same as them actually picking up a metaphorical paintbrush, but that doesn't matter : they are unequivocally part of the creative process.

As a constraint, not as an enabler.

They do not at any point start becoming the astronomer/artist/equivalent.

They know what they like, when they see it. That's a constraint, not creativity.

Constraints can sometimes feel like creativity.
Like, an artist can say "I am going to do this work in this particular style, which sets heavy limitations on the tools I can use" - the constraints can then help overcome choice paralysis, by removing choices artificially.

But still, removing choices is not the same as making choices.

Still nonsense ! They actively tell me which parts of the image need adjustment and how. And removing a choice is absolutely making a choice.

Honestly this is exasperatingly silly. I'm giving up for now.

You are just incorrect.

"The Doors playing volleyball in Toronto" is not a creative process that leads to an image.
Even if you have a tool that then creates the image.

The only creative process involved in creating the prompt is just that - creating the prompt.
It ends there.

You do not become an artist just because you have a basement full of captured artists forced to carry out your dumbass prompts.

That claim simply has no merit to it. We are at an impasse, so I'm muting and moving on.

It has the merit of being undeniably correct. Sorry, not sorry.

The discussion is interesting, but AI is a fact and all we can choose is how we deal with it.

is a movie director an artist?

someone else writes the script, then actors perform them, with the director prompting them and the cameras to capture the scenes in certain ways, and then choosing the cuts. no creativity there?

@Alexandre Oliva They give awards for direction.
A director has vision and skill (whether good or bad) and applies these in doing their job.

But your claim here seems to be that since the dude that wrote a one-liner that inspired the screenplay is causal to the whole thing, that dude also deserves credit for the work of the actors, musicians, playwritghts, etc. etc.

And that is simply a wrongheaded idea.

You can at most get credit for what you did.

And what you did was write a stupid one-liner. It could be a great stupid one-liner, but the most you can claim credit for is a stupid one-liner.

Just because the tool contains stolen vision and skill, doesn't mean you become an artist.

you appear to be disputing a strawman. I'm just trying to think it through.

let's talk about skill, for example. I suck at web searches, my wife is a wizard. there's skill in that. it doesn't make the search prompts or results creative, but there's still there. it's an art in the older sense.

now, we know (at least I assume) that the neural networks we're talking about are not creative. so ISTM that it must follow that either (a) their output is never creative, or (b) whatever creativity appearing in their output is carried over from creativity in the prompt input.

(let's please not be distracted by copyright law; law is not a matter of morals or philosophy, it's a matter of power)

as a software developer, I often find myself writing a few (or a lot of) words and symbols in text editors to get computers to behave in novel ways. I'm pretty sure that there is creativity there, and the compilers and interpreters and computers and whatnot are tools that turn the mathematical algorithms I've devised and expressed in those "prompts" into (hopefully) useful actions and outputs.

just like hydraulics and engines are technologies that multiply human force, enabling people who do not possess superhuman strength to build (and to destroy) both beautiful and mediocre things, computers, compilers and generative LLMs seem to be tools that enable people to build both beautiful and mediocre things.

what sets beautiful from mediocre apart are the skill and dedication of the people and the quality of the materials involved in the process, methinks. though most of the outputs of LLMs are bound to be junk (garbage in, garbage out), I do see room for true artists to master the use of these tools and use them to bring us new and wonderful kinds of creative works.

The creativity was in the training data.
It never stopped being in the training data.

Prompt-writing is just prompt-writing.
The only skill involved is knowing the cheat-engine you're putting the prompts into.
People who think they are artists because they can write prompts deserve a special kind of derision.

They are the bird prancing about with stolen feathers in Aesop's fable.

Or Elon fucking Musk buying a company and saying "I created this car".

Fuck that shit.

I don't think creativity in making the training data is relevant to creativity in the process of reusing it, for the same reasons that making something new is creative, but making another copy of that isn't.

You seem to be repeating your argument, without as much as discussing how it differs from the creative processes that go into writing software (including one-liner scripts) and using that to get creative outputs. That suggests you consider them fundamentally different. I'm curious as to why. To me, both amount to skillful use of (automation) tools, so your so-far unjustified dismissal comes across as unconvincing to me.

There is no creativity in reusing it, obviously.
There is no vision, no skill, nothing.

It's just a dumbass consumer pressing a button while the world burns.

Software is creative when there is skill and vision involved.
If you're just using pre-made assets and pre-made scripts, it is not very creative at all.

But still more creative than punching in a prompt into a txt2img generator.

AI is the biggest existential threat the human race has ever faced. It needs to be erased, memory-holed, and further development into it made illegal. By force if necessary. I don't care about the feelings of the sad losers who think AI is legitimate or that AI art is art. Die mad about it.

I disagree.
It's worthless.
But that also means it's not very dangerous.

The problem is that millions of absolute fools think it's progress, and insist that we must invest into it resources that we cannot afford to sped.

The energy cost alone is prohibitive, at a time when we should be REDUCING energy use, not increasing it.

The only existential threat is human stupidity and greed.