The time will come, you can slowly see the tide turning :) Most people aren’t inherently against it, just (understandably) cautious, and at worst misinformed or radicalized about hating it.

What really helps is to start with showing something you really put your heart into, where you can explain your choices and techniques, before you tell them it was done with (help from) AI. There was a recent study where people actually seemed to prefer works made with AI, until they were told it was made by AI and not a person. This just shows there is an AI-bias under people, and being able to show that whatever you’re making was in fact largely a product of your creativity, not the AI’s, really helps.

I tend to make recordings and snapshots of work in progress and then turn that into one of those animations that blends frame to frame to show the entire process. Just being able to show that it wasn’t just doing nothing yourself and that it’s still your creation really helps make people understand.

People differentiate AI (the technology) from AI (the product being peddled by big corporations) without making clear that nuance (Or they mean just LLMs, or they aren’t even aware the technology has a grassroots adoption outside of those big corporations). It will take time, and the bubble bursting might very well be a good thing for the technology into the future. If something is only know for it’s capitalistic exploits it’ll continue to be seen unfavorably even when it’s proven it’s value to those who care to look at it with an open mind. I read it mostly as those people rejoicing over those big corporations getting shafted for their greedy practices.

Definitely not just you, I instantly said “holy shit this is one ancient meme”. I remember it too from the early 2000’s.

First of all, I understand your point of view. And I’ve been looking at artists being undervalued like your potential client for decades, before AI was even a thing. So I definitely feel you on that point, and I wish it would be different. That said, here’s my response. (It’s a bit long, so I put it in spoiler tags)

I told him he wasn’t looking for a composer, but rather a programmer or something

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I could also tell you about the written assignments that students hand in, and for which I can identify in less than 30 seconds which ones have been produced by AI (students overreact to their writing skills, it’s often laughable).

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As I tell them, those who have used chatgpt have “learned” to use AI, those who have done the work have learned to carry out research, to synthesize their ideas and to structure, articulate and present them.

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One last thing. As far as innovation is concerned, AI can endlessly produce pieces that sound like Bach, but it took Bach to exist in the first place, and Glenn Gould to revolutionize the interpretation of his scores for this to be possible.

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EDIT: Just want to add to this:

I have no interest in replacing this practice by entering prompts into an algorithm, even if I could make easy money from it.

That’s not something anyone should do. Because that’s not using it as a tool. That’s making it the entire process. That’s not the kind of AI usage I’m advocating for either. And you’re free to forego AI completely. Just like there are probably some instruments you never use, or some genre you never visit. I don’t like taking the easy way either, that’s why I make creative stuff as a living too. If I just wanted money I would go elsewhere too.

Again - if this is your argument - then the vast majority of things humans do would be “pushing down harder on the gas pedal”. Excluding AI, more people get born every year, water usage also increases every year, electricity usage too. Even if you got rid of all AI right now you would have to overcome those much more significant increases to make a difference. It just doesn’t even make a dent. And it has to, if you want it to actually reduce the impact of climate change and resource depletion.

The world does not stand still, even if we did everything we should to stop climate change. Technology that can change the world and facilitates happier, healthier humans is not a bad thing for a reasonable price. And as I just explained in detail, that price is not that significant in the grand scheme of things. Hence why there is no significant public outrage from this.

If you’re going to hold this position, you should really stick to the biggest polluters, which as you agree, are not getting enough pushback. I agree with that as well, and I would happily stand by your side here. But if someone is handing out pie, and you think everyone should be angry at someone taking 0.00532% of the pie, that is horribly ineffective at actually getting the change we need. Since basically nobody reasonable is going to agree with you. While for the larger polluters it is easily self evident they need it, and we still have a lot of trouble with that.

And Sam Altman went to the emirates asking for Trillions to scale LLMs. All of this for a little more convenience when tackling mostly mundane tasks.

I don’t know how many times I have to say this, but I don’t like the big tech companies use of AI. That does not say anything about the technology at large though. Screw OpenAI and Sam Altman. If your criticism is purely aimed at wasteful conduct by big companies, I’m all there with you. But there are so many smaller companies that also use AI and LLMs.

If you think that’s depressing, wait until you find out that it’s basically nothing in the grand scheme of things.

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And as others have pointed out the water isn’t gone, there’s some cyclicality in how the water is used.

I already know of the stats you speak of, and it’s not nothing. But as I explain below, on the scale of other pollutants and for how widespread it’s usage is, it is a footnote. There are far bigger fish to fry first when it comes to reducing water usage and energy usage.

Lets look up some stats together. Most sources agree that we use about 4 trillion cubic meters of water every year worldwide (Although, this stat is from 2015 most likely, and so it will be bigger now). In 2022, using the stats here Microsoft used 1.7 billion gallons per year, and Google 5.56 billion gallons per year. In cubic meters that’s only 23.69 million cubic meters. That’s only 0.00059% of the worldwide water usage. Meanwhile agriculture uses 70%. Granted not every country uses 70%, but a 1% gain there overshadows any current and even future usage.

And even if we just look at the US, since that’s where Google and Microsoft are based, which uses 322 billion gallons of water every day, resulting in about 445 billion cubic meters per year, that’s still 0.00532%. So it’s not hugely significant inside the US either, we can have 187 more Googles and Microsofts before we even top a single percentage.

There are plenty of other hobbies that are also terrible for the environment but we don’t tackle them because like AI it would be a drop in the bucket. Honestly ask yourself, if AI was such a big issue and would threaten lives, why is nobody actually taking serious measures for it? Why are there no public campaigns to get people to stop using AI to save the water? It’s because the stats are concerning, but not significantly so, and if the stats don’t actually back up the position that AI usage is slowly sucking us dry, people don’t stand behind it. If the advancement of AI allows us to save more lives through medical research, or allows us to farm more efficiently, it can easily pay back it’s investment. And those things outweigh the negatives.

However, as I’ve stated multiple times below, I despise the wasteful usage of AI, and therefore you won’t see me praising Bing or Google for their usage of AI in a way that makes no sense and just wastes resources. But the technology exists for everyone, not just those companies. There are more sustainable LLM models than GPT-4, and OpenAI can rightfully be criticized for not prioritizing efficiency rather that bigger and more power hungry models.

EDIT: Added US comparison EDIT2: Double checked some of the math

Most things produced by AI and assisted by AI are still human creation, as it requires a human to guide it to what it’s making. Human innovation is also very much based on mixing materials it’s seen before in new creative manners. Almost no material is truly innovative. Ask any honest artists about their inspirations and they can tell you what parts of their creations were inspired by what. Our world has explored the depths of most art forms so there is more than a lifetime’s worth of art to mix and match. Often the real reason things feel fresh and new is because they are fresh and new to us, but already existed in some form out there before it came to our attention.

That AI can match this is easily proven by fact AI can create material that no human would realistically make (like AI generated QR codes, or ‘cursed’ AI), very proficient style mixing that would take a human extensive study of both styles to pull off (eg. Pokemon and real life), or real looking images that could not realistically, financially, conscionably, be made using normal methods (eg. A bus full of greek marble statues).

Nobody is saying you have to like AI art, and depending on your perspective, some or most of it will still be really low effort and not worth paying attention to, but that was already the state of art before AI. Lifetimes of art are being uploaded every day, but nobody has the time to view it all. So I would really keep an open mind that good AI art and AI assisted art exists out there, and you might one day come to like it but not realize you’re seeing it, because good AI usage is indistinguishable from normal art.

This kind of AI approaches art in a way that finally kinda makes sense for my brain, so it’s frustrating seeing it shot down by people who don’t actually understand it. Stop using this stuff for tasks it wasn’t meant for (unless it’s a novelty “because we could” kind of way) and it becomes a lot more palatable.

Preach! I’m surprised to hear it works for people with aphantasia too, and that’s awesome. I personally have a very vivid mind’s eye and I can often already imagine what I want something to look like, but could never put it to paper in a satisfying way that didn’t cost excruciating amount of time. GenAI allows me to do that with still a decent amount of touch up work, but in a much more reasonable timeframe. I’m making more creative work than I’ve ever been because of it.

It’s crazy to me that some people at times completely refuse to even acknowledge such positives about the technology, refuse to interact with it in a way that would reveal those positives, refuse to look at more nuanced opinions of people that did interact with it, refuse even simple facts about how we learn and interact with other art and material, refusing legal realities like the freedom to analyze that allow this technology to exist (sometimes even actively fighting to restrict those legal freedoms, which would hurt more artists and creatives than it would help, and give even more more power to corporations and those with enough capital to self sustain AI model creation).

It’s tiring, but luckily it seems to be mostly an issue on the internet. Talking to people (including artists) in real life about it shows that it’s a very tiny fraction that holds that opinion. Keep creating 👍

Totally second the latter part - it’s the self destructive nature of being blindly anti-AI. Pretty much everyone would support giving more rights and benefits to people displaced by AI, but only a fraction of that group would support an anti-AI mentality. If you want to work against the negative effects of AI in a way that can actually change things, the solution is not to push against the wall closing in on you, but to find the escape.

This is like saying you can’t play video games because it costs electricity and you can go without. You can say it about literally everything that isn’t strictly necessary to live. AI isn’t just LLMs and only LLMs have a high environmental cost, and unless you are literally wasting the output like the big tech companies are, even that can be justified for the right reasons.

There is so much wrong with this…

AI is a range of technologies. So yes, you can make surveillance with it, just like you can with a computer program like a virus. But obviously not all computer programs are viruses nor exist for surveillance. What a weird generalization. AI is used extensively in medical research, so your life might literally be saved by it one day.

You’re most likely talking about “Chat Control”, which is a controversial EU proposal to scan either on people’s devices or from provider’s ends for dangerous and illegal content like CSAM. This is obviously a dystopian way to achieve that as it sacrifices literally everyone’s privacy to do it, and there is plenty to be said about that without randomly dragging AI into that. You can do this scanning without AI as well, and it doesn’t change anything about how dystopian it would be.

You should be using end to end regardless, and a VPN is a good investment for making your traffic harder to discern, but if Chat Control is passed to operate on the device level you are kind of boned without circumventing this software, which would potentially be outlawed or made very difficult. It’s clear on it’s own that Chat Control is a bad thing, you don’t need some kind of conspiracy theory about ‘the true purpose of AI’ to see that.

You don’t solve a dystopia by adding more dystopian elements. Yes, some companies are scum and they should be rightfully targeted and taken down. But the way you do that is by targeting those scummy companies specifically, and creatives aren’t the only industry suffering from them. There are broad spectrum legislatures to do so, such as income based equality (proportional taxing and fining), or further regulations. But you don’t do that by changing fundamental rights every artists so far has enjoyed to learn their craft, but also made society what it is today. Your idea would KILL any scientific progress because all of it depends on either for profit businesses (Not per se the scummy ones) and the freedom to analyze works without a license (Something you seem to want to get rid of), in which the vast majority is computer driven. You are arguing in favor of taking a shot to the foot if it means “owning the libs big companies” when there are clearly better solutions, and guess what, we already have pretty bad luck getting those things passed as is.

And you think most artists and creatives don’t see this? Most of us are honest about the fact of how we got to where we are, because we’ve learned how to create and grow our skill set this same way. By consuming (and so, analyzing) a lot of media, and looking a whole lot at other people making things. There’s a reason “good artists copy, great artists steal” is such a known line, and I’d argue against it because I feel it frames even something like taking inspiration as theft, but it’s the same argument people are making in reverse for AI.

But this whole conversation shouldn’t be about the big companies, but about the small ones. If you’re not in the industry you might just not know that AI is everywhere in small companies too. And they’re not using the big companies if they can help it. There’s open source AI that’s free to download and use, that holds true to open information that everyone can benefit from. By pretending they don’t exist and proposing an unreasonable ban on the means, denies those without the capital and ability to build their own (licensed) datasets in the future, while those with the means have no problem and can even leverage their own licenses far more efficiently than any small company or individuals could. And if AI does get too good to ignore, there will be the artists that learned how to use AI, forced to work for corporations, and the ones that don’t and can’t compete. So far it’s only been optional since using AI well is actually quite hard, and only dumb CEOs would put any trust in it replacing a human. But it will speed up your workflow, and make certain tasks faster, but it doesn’t replace it in large pieces unless you’re really just making the most generic stuff ever for a living, like marketing material.

Never heard of Cara. I don’t doubt it exists somewhere, but I’m wholly uninterested in it or putting any work I make there. I will fight tooth and nail for what I made to be mine and allowing me to profit off it, but I’m not going to argue and promote for taking away the freedom that allowed me to become who I am from others, and the freedom of people to make art in any way they like. The freedom of expression is sacred to me. I will support other more broad appealing and far more likely to succeed alternatives that will put these companies in their place, and anything sensible that doesn’t also cause casualties elsewhere. But I’m not going to be in favor of being the “freedom of expression police” against my colleagues, and friends, or anyone for that matter, on what tools they can or cannot not use to funnel their creativity into. This is a downright insidious mentality in my eyes, and so far most people I’ve had a good talk about AI with have shared that distaste, while agreeing to it being abused by big companies.

Again, they can use whatever they want, but Nightshade (And Glaze) are not proven to be effective, in case you didn’t know. They rely on misunderstandings, and hypothetically only work under extremely favorable situations, and assume the people collecting the dataset are really, really dumb. That’s why I call it snake oil. It’s not just me saying exactly this.

If you think I’m being optimistic about UBI, I can only question how optimistic you are about your own position receiving wide spread support. So far not even most artists stand behind anti AI standpoints, just a very vocal minority and their supporters who even threaten and bully other artists that don’t support their views.

It’s not about “analysis” but about for-profit use. Public domain still falls under Fair Use.

I really don’t know what you’re trying to say here. Public domain is free of any copyright, so you don’t need a fair use exemption to use it at all. And for-profit use is not a factor for whether analysis is allowed or not. And if it was, again, it would stagnate the ability for society to invent and advance, since most frequent use is for profit. But even if it wasn’t, one company can produce the dataset or the model as a non-profit, and the other company could use that for profit. It doesn’t hold up.

As it stands, artists are already forming their own walled off communities to isolate their work from being publicly available

If you want to avoid being trained on by AI, that’s a pretty good way to do it yes. It can also be combined with payment. So if that helps artists, I’m all for it. But I have yet to hear any of that from the artists I know, nor seen a single practical example of it that wasn’t already explicitly private (eg. commissions or a patreon). Most artists make their work to be seen, and that has always meant accepting that someone might take your work and be inspired by it. My ideas have been stolen blatantly, and I cannot do a thing about it. That is the compromise we make between creative freedom and ownership, since the alternative would be disastrous. Even if people pay for access, once they’ve done so they can still analyze and learn from it. But yes, if you don’t want your ideas to be copied, never sharing it is a sure way to do that, but that is antithetical to why most people make art to begin with.

creating software to poison LLMs.

These tools are horribly ineffective though. They waste artists time and/or degrade the artwork to the point humans don’t enjoy it either. It’s an artists right to use it though, but it’s essentially snake oil that plays on these artists fears of AI. But that’s a whole other discussion.

So either art becomes largely inaccessible to the public, or some form of horrible copyright action is taken because those are the only options available to artists.

I really think you are being unrealistic and hyperbolic here. Neither of these have happened nor have much of chance of happening. There are billions of people producing works that could be considered art and with making art comes the desire to share it. Sure there might only be millions that make great art, but if they would mobilize together that would be world news, if a workers strike in Hollywood can do that for a significantly smaller amount of artists.

Ultimately, I’d like a licensing system put in place Academics have to cite their sources for research That way, if they’ve used stuff that they legally shouldn’t, it can be proven.

The reason we have sources in research is not for licensing purposes. It is to support legitimacy, to build upon the work of the other. I wouldn’t be against sourcing, but it is a moot point because companies that make AI models don’t typically throw their dataset out there. So these datasets might very well be sourced. One well known public dataset LAION 5b, does source URLs. But again, because analysis can be performed freely, this is not a requirement.

Creating a requirement to license data for analysis is what you are arguing here for. I can already hear every large corporation salivating in the back at the idea of that. Every creator in existence would have to pay license to some big company because they interacted with their works at some point in their life and something they made looked somewhat similar. And copyright is already far more of a tool for big corporations, not small creators. This is a dystopian future to desire.

I think you are making the mistake of assuming disagreement with your stance means someone would say no to these questions. Simply put - it’s a strawman.

Most (yes, even corporations, albeit much less so for the larger ones), would say “Yes” to this question on it’s face value, because they would want the same for their own “sweat of the brow”. But certain uses after the work is created no longer have a definitive “Yes” to their answer, which is why your ‘simple question’ is not an accurate representation, as it forms no distinctions between that. You cannot stop your publicly posted work from being analyzed, by human or computer. This is firmly established. As others have put in this thread, reducing protections over analysis will be detrimental to both artists as well as everyone else. It would quite literally cause society’s ability to advance to slow down if not halt completely as most research requires analysis of existing data, and most of that is computer assisted.

Artists have always been undervalued, I will give you that. But to mitigate that, we should provide artists better protections that don’t rely on breaking down other freedoms. For example, UBI. And I wish people that were against AI would focus on that, since that is actually something you could get agreement on with most of society and actually help artists with. Fighting against technology that besides it negatives also provides great positives is a losing battle.

You’re confusing LLMs with other AI models, as LLMs are magnitudes more energy demanding than other AI. It’s easy to see why if you’ve ever looked at self hosting AI, you need a cluster of top line business GPUs to run modern LLMs while an image generator can be run on most consumer 3000, 4000 series Nvidia GPUs at home. Generating images is about as costly as playing a modern video game, and only when it’s generating.

It is understandable. But what is not understandable is turning a blind eye to the nuance and choosing hate over understanding. I’m glad you have not done so and done your own research, and I happily applaud you for that. But I meet plenty of people that blindly take some art social media influencer’s misguided (sometimes suspiciously conveniently so) ideas on how AI works. Big companies aren’t all that exists, and they are not the only ones making advancements. Or the majority of it, really. It just looks that way because they get all the attention and have all the means.

Pretending it is so is gives them far more unwarranted power than is healthy, as it creates a situation where people think they’re destroying the big corporations, but in fact are destroying the means for smaller creatives that operate in the shadows to keep up and compete. AI technology will never be restricted in a way that will just harm the corporations as it currently is. Stricter copyright laws are a common proposal but I’m sure Disney et al are just downright content if that what ends up with it, as they have enough data to their own to easily train their own AI. And banning the technology as a whole would open up cans of worms that it won’t be banned everywhere, leading to economic losses to the countries that do ban it.

I’m working day to day with professional artists from smaller companies that are using it for the right jobs to speed up their work. But their voices are unheard because if they speak up they get showered with hate and people calling them fake or frauds. Again, people that have created wonderful things without AI and deserve the title of artist multiple times over. They don’t have millions of followers to back them up, so they just don’t bother with and do what artists do, which is to create. Ironically, it’s also in part artists that are silencing other artists over AI, not the big corporations.

is super energy demanding so it actively hurts the environment for no real benefit.

While I agree with that, it should be mentioned that it’s mostly LLMs that require massively out of proportion energy. Generating images is about as expensive as playing a video game on high settings. Modeling software and 3D software also drain energy and producing art is just generally more expensive than consuming it. I think just saying ‘it hurts the environment’ is slightly misguided, since you can say that about literally everything. Humans existing at all is bad for the environment, but the balance of it is what matters. I do think LLMs go over the edge and big company’s insistence to shove it into literally everything is despicable, and not proportional to the benefit.

The energy would be so much better used solving actual problems

So one thing I want to mention there is that AI is downright revolutionary in medicine. You can’t look at technology as something that takes linear paths from improvement to improvements. The lessons learned in one area can also become applicable to other areas. AI can be used to detect cancers early, solve protein folding, find tumors on medical scans. And that’s from just the relatively little knowledge I have of it. So yes, image generation doesn’t solve such issue, but the technology that allowed them to exist does solve real tangible issues, and it’s popularity and spread is inherently linked.

If some people enjoy AI generation, then that’s fine but I think it shouldn’t replace a passionate, skill-based workforce.

100% agree. No AI should ever replace humans. I would rather see people get excited to make something because of AI, and once they have some success and secure funding, switch over to competent human artists. That’s how humans should replace AI in my eyes, not the other way around.

While I kind of get what you’re trying to say, I do personally think you have some point that the expression of the AI is more generic, but that’s kind of where the value is. Certain actions, even if you are manually doing everything, are repetitive and provide a low level of artistic expression. Like coloring in large surfaces, background characters, background buildings. It’s impressive to do so yourself and you can even get very good at it, but in a regular scenario they are unimportant by design. Sometimes you just want to get to the core of where your ideas matter. You can also use AI to upscale your own drawings to allow yourself to add more detail and work on a larger scale. I personally find it horrible and demotivating to manually upscale something I’ve drawn already. You’ll be tracing lines for hours if you want to do it well.

For the more detailed things that no AI is sophisticated enough to be guided towards, that’s something I would also draw myself and leave the AI out of, exactly because I want that level of finer control there. To me it’s about using AI for it’s strengths and not as a catch all, just like you don’t use a sledge hammer to kill a fly.

I do disagree with the framing that ControlNet ‘claws back’ control over the process. I see it more as it enhancing the control you already have. Because you are specifically priming the AI with very fine parameters. The amount of information you can encode in a string of text is just miniscule compared to being able to provide a texture that could realistically be 2K in resolution where you have 2048*2048*4(For every RGBA value) = 16777216 individual pixels that you could fine tune. Same thing with image to image, even doing a couple of iterations with that creates possibilities beyond human understanding of scale, same as other art. Now not every one of those permutations will be valuable, but the same can be said about drawn art. And driving it to the valuable creations is what an artist does.

A big part of my process is reflecting on the value the AI added, and whether or not I can still call something my own by the end of it. I even compare images I’ve completely made myself to the ones that I produced with the AI to ensure that. Especially when I started out I binned some ideas because I didn’t feel they were expressive enough. To me it is a requirement to be happy with what I created. And I think that’s something a lot of people understand in their own way. So I guess we must agree to disagree on that, based on our different experiences.

With ControlNet, you can control that very finely though. It partially combines computer graphics into the mix which is definitely not easy to get into.

But it’s different from drawing, that is for sure. Different decisions with different outcomes and different possibilities. But you see similar differences with every form of art. You don’t make 200 strokes for a photograph, or for a cut out collage, or algorithmic art, or sculpting. But you do make different decisions that are similar in nature. They shape the end product, and in a way no other person would do exactly the same. You still have to be involved in every step of the process, even if some steps are no longer done by yourself, they are replaced by other decisions.

Again, this is assuming they aren’t just clicking generate and calling it good to go, but if someone is using ControlNet they should be well above that, since the quality of blank generations is often not the best and demands refinement to anyone with an creative outlook.

This is why we shouldn’t confuse AI art, AI assisted art, and other forms of visual art, even if they all end up making an image as the end result. Something can be impressive when drawn, but mediocre if made with AI. Just like painting a scene isn’t the same as taking a photograph of that same scene, even if they end up being visually similar. Everything exists in context.

And yes, you are giving up some creative control for sake of convenience. But the question is how much. A painter that hand crafts their brushes will make a different painting had they used a pre-made brush. But we can agree I think that the creative control they lost by doing so is negligible. Artists generally lean on what they have produced before as references too. 3D sculptors can start with a cube too, but if they’re going to be making a person they will start with a mesh of a human figure, male or female depending on what they want. There is no shame in taking shortcuts in steps where it’s possible, even if it’s commendable if you don’t.

Art takes long and is expensive to produce, it would be unsustainable in this modern day to do everything from scratch every time. And as long as you focus on the parts where your decisions make the artistic intent happen, you can still make something unique and valuable in it’s own right.

Yes, I want it to go that way too. But that does take time. Which is why I think it’s a shame some people are really hostile to it indiscriminately. I get that the big corporations are absolutely wielding the worst aspects of it, and I hate that too. But once you go to grassroots and small corporations, suddenly there is a whole different view of it. AI is a product of humanity’s collective efforts, and as such all of humanity should be it’s benefactor, not a small group of people that just happened to have the most money and influence at the time. Especially if they had nothing to do with actually creating the technology behind it. And by making the story about them rather than the people using it as it should, it will inevitably lead to people falling behind to corporations, and widening the gap even further. Making artists even less valued than they already are. Which is something I’ve always fought against even before AI.