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

[Dannyalcatraz]

I think assuming someone doesn't actually know what they're talking about and is just being arrogant is a rather immature way of handling someone who speaks authoritatively.

Mod Note:

It might behoove you to refrain from calling out your fellow ENWorlders like that. Civility is strongly preferred here.

If you think someone is being a jerk, report it instead of responding in kind. Confrontations in thread don’t really help to keep the conversation going.

 

[Charlaquin]

Yeah I’m not convinced artists have any reasonable expectation of being asked or compensated in order for their art to be used to teach a tool how to perform its purpose.

When its purpose is to repackage their art and give it to people so they don’t have to pay for the labor that went into it, I think they do.

I agree with your broader socio-economic concerns, but I refuse to pretend that automation technologies are the “evil” here.

I can’t really get into what the culprit actually is without breaking forum rules, but I’m also sure I don’t need to.

I think we’re fundamentally in agreement. If we lived in a society where artists didn’t need to work to eat, these tools wouldn’t necessarily be unethical. But we don’t.

 

[Charlaquin]

Not to get too overtly political, but this is a recurring trend Ive seen with people going out of their way to defend AIs is that they tend to co-opt very far leftist ideas about intellectual property whilst not applying it evenly across all kinds of IP; just selectively against art in particular.

I don’t want to speak for @doctorbadwolf but, uhh… well, I get the impression they and I have pretty similar political views, and uneven application of leftist ideas isn’t something I would accuse them of.

 

[Emberashh]

I don’t want to speak for @doctorbadwolf but, uhh… well, I get the impression they and I have pretty similar political views, and uneven application of leftist ideas isn’t something I would accuse them of.

Yeah I don't think they were doing that, I was more thinking out loud. Ever since these AIs effectively went viral Ive had this conversation more than a few times and Ive picked up on some trends that they reminded me of as I was responding.

 

[FrozenNorth]

I mean, if we want to be consistent, the point of comparison shouldn’t be an artist studying another specific artist’s work and trying to imitate it (which depending on how directly they copy it could actually be considered forgery), because that’s not remotely analogous to what these algorithms do. It should be an artist studying a huge swath of different artists’ works and letting what they learn influence their own style. But if we do that, it becomes clear what the difference is: algorithms do not have their own style to influence. They do not have their own ideas that the “study” of other artists’ work can influence, nor do they truly study in the way we do. What they do is build databases of different images and directly copy elements of different images from that database. The artist has a concept in their own brain, which they came up with, no doubt affected by a combination of things they learned from studying other artists and their own individual tastes and experiences, and they then apply their learned technical skills to try to bring that idea into being as best they can. Algorithms don’t do any of that. They assemble whatever bits and pieces of the works in their database their programming predicts is most likely to satisfy the prompt they are given, and arrange them in a new way.

So if a artist takes a pile of magazines, cuts tiny pieces of images from each magazine to makes a collage, then sells the collage, is she being unethical? Seems to me that most people would say no.

 

[FrogReaver]

Consent was not given. They’re generally trained on image hosting sites like DeviantArt.

There's a conundrum there - if the art is out where everyone can freely see, then people can freely draw inspiration from it. They can even use it as the basis for creating a different enough work (no consent or attribution to the original creator necessary). Even though it would run into copyright issues if the art was directly reproduced or remained too similar to the original.

However, change that to AI art using freely viewed art as the basis for then creating new and substantially different art and suddenly it's unethical. The human didn't need consent. The AI does. The human didn't need attribution, the AI does. Etc.

Now, maybe there's some technical argument in how AI Art programs store the images that could constitute copyright infringement. But I find it very unlikely that the final product violates copyrights on it's own.

The bigger concern for AI art and copyright is going to be between themselves. If one AI Art program produces a similar image to another despite it being obvious that they both did so independently then does the one have a copyright case against the other? I think the only thing the courts can do there is say AI Art is essentially uncopyrightable.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

When its purpose is to repackage their art and give it to people so they don’t have to pay for the labor that went into it, I think they do.

On this point, I think we will simply continue to disagree.

I think we’re fundamentally in agreement. If we lived in a society where artists didn’t need to work to eat, these tools wouldn’t necessarily be unethical. But we don’t.

So, where we differ is, this doesn’t mean that the tech is unethical. It means that the system is unethical.

To me, the distinction is very important. It encourages people to focus thier attention at the right targets.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

When its purpose is to repackage their art and give it to people so they don’t have to pay for the labor that went into it, I think they do.

I think we’re fundamentally in agreement. If we lived in a society where artists didn’t need to work to eat, these tools wouldn’t necessarily be unethical. But we don’t.

On a fundamental level, I think that you're conflating a few different issues.

At the top level there is the issue of copyright, or to put it another way, the protected property interest recognized under the law that artists have in their work.. This isn't a simple issue- because this is a legally created interest (that does not exist separately, or even "morally" to many people), you would have to examine the exact legal contours of the right and if it's being violated. For example, many places that offer services to display your work also requires signing away certain rights in your work. Other places do not have the individual rights, but have purpose-built archives (stock images, etc.) that might be licensed from the rights-holders. Finally, despite Mickey Mouse, copyright is not forever- there are a LOT of images in the public domain.

And all of this is assuming that there is copyright infringement in the use; sure, obvious cases are obvious (Getty images, anyone?). But as they say- the cat is already out of the bag. This technology will get used, and they only question is whether court cases determine that it can only be used on work that has already been licensed, or not. And if the former, then we'll just see them trained on public domain, with licensing agreements on an additional corpus owned by various corporations, and perhaps some artists hired to produce more images. But not some sea change in the use itself. "The avalanche has begun; it is too late for the pebbles to vote."

But moving on just from the images, I don't know that you're thinking about this in a broad enough scope. This isn't about art or artists - at least, not really. Yes, they will be affected and we can already see that. But this will affect vast numbers of people. Writers. Architects. Attorneys. Doctors. Programmers. All sorts of professions that, previously, were thought to be beyond the scope of mechanization. It's not the end of various professions, just as prior technologies didn't end other manual labor; but it does mean that the number of people required for many professions will go way down.

All that said, fundamental issues about fairness in society aren't addressed one way or the other by these tools. The tools themselves are neither ethical, nor unethical, just like steam engines weren't. But they will have profound impacts on us.

 

[Umbran]

Sure, but that doesn't mean you need to have seen Art before you could make it.

As a practical matter, you cannot, because unless you are raised by wolves, you are inundated with art from the day you are born, no matter what human culture you belong to.

Being able to make art without having seen art before is similarly lost to the sands of time. Such a person no longer exists.

So to suggest that only one proto-person had an original thought hundreds of thousands of years ago and everyone else is effectively just a derivative is very demeaning to what artists attempt to do today,

That isn't what I said. So, this is a strawman.

 

[Emberashh]

As a practical matter, you cannot, because unless you are raised by wolves, you are inundated with art from the day you are born, no matter what human culture you belong to.

Sure, but we're not really talking about the practical are we? The question of whether or not an AI is actually producing genuine art, in the same way that a Human does, is more a question of philosophy than of realism.

Theres also an important nuance in that even within truly human-made art, many pieces that are produced wouldn't necessarily "count" just on the merit that a human made it and called it art.

Once upon a time when forums like this were more commonly populated on the internet, I was actually a part of a digital art scene that was based around making artistic images to insert into one's signature. This mostly revolved around using stock imagery as a basis and incorporating it as part of a composed piece.

And commonly, most artists (myself included) had zero issue picking up whatever bits of photography we wanted, even if we were going to unethical means to do so. We (mostly) weren't selling these images for profit, and as it was it was early 2000s internet; nobody cared about piracy and ripped versions of CS4/5 Photoshop were plentiful.

But the thing was, you couldn't just take a stock image, crop it to size, and then call it art. Nobody tolerated that sort of nonsense, and doing minimal edits weren't gonna fly either.

And I imagine once the dust settles as far as image AIs go, their products will be seen in the same way. If all you do is generate an image and present it with little to no actual work, you're not making art. If you utilize that image as part of a composed piece, then you are.

I know it'll be tempting to say thats how its already being used, but it really isn't.

That isn't what I said. So, this is a strawman

I mean, you did just say this:

Being able to make art without having seen art before is similarly lost to the sands of time. Such a person no longer exists.

Whether you intended to say it or not, you are implying that only this one person had the opportunity for original thought and all that followed are merely derivative.

And of course, anthropologically speaking this doesn't support your argument in the way you think it does. Isolated communities of humans and proto-humans have reinvented art numerous times throughout history, without ever having been exposed to another culture or example of it.

You can argue that culturally modern art is struggling with originality, but even artists tend to agree with that. People like Banksy do what they do for a reason, after all, and its why we have serious artists making art out of increasingly esoteric materials and subject matter.

But that has nothing to do with the philosophical question of where art originates from and if humans are capable of it even in a vacuum, thus distinguishing them from an AI who we all recognize fundamentally cannot function without the data they were trained on, and in fact can't even function with only its own inputs, which is another distinction humans have.

Edit: And more to the point, if you recognize that at least one human had the capacity to make art when no art yet existed, then you are acknowledging that this is possible for humans to do.