Greg Rutkowski, a digital artist known for his surreal style, opposes AI art but his name and style have been frequently used by AI art generators without his consent. In response, Stable Diffusion removed his work from their dataset in version 2.0. However, the community has now created a tool to emulate Rutkowski’s style against his wishes using a LoRA model. While some argue this is unethical, others justify it since Rutkowski’s art has already been widely used in Stable Diffusion 1.5. The debate highlights the blurry line between innovation and infringement in the emerging field of AI art.
@raccoona_nongrata @fwygon
Rutowski, Monet, and Rockwell could also not create without human art.
All creativity is a combination of past creativity.
Even Monet.
Even Shakespeare.
Even Beethoven.
They could though, any sufficiently observant human can make art, even if they’ve never seen any before. Humans are compelled to create representations of the world around us, just as expression or out of curiosity. Humans have independently “invented” art multiple times across our history as a species.
We do inspire and learn from eachother, but it’s not strictly necessary. This type of AI model will never spontaneously create art because that’s not how it functions. It requires human art to fulfill it’s fundemental function, else it would just sit there printing nothing.
@raccoona_nongrata
Actually. It is necessary. The process of creativity is much much more a synergy of past consumption than we think.
It took 100,000 years to get from cave drawings to Leonard Da Vinci.
Yes we always find ways to draw, but the pinnacle of art comes from a shared culture of centuries.
Stable Diffusion, sitting on its own for 100,000 years or a million would not create art, that is the distinction.
A human could express themselves with art in some form or another having never been exposed to other human art. Whether you consider that art refined doesn’t really factor into the question.
@raccoona_nongrata
A machine will not unilaterally develop an art form, and develop it for 100,000 years.
Yes I agree with this.
However, they are not developing an art form now.
Nor did Monet, Shakespeare, or Beethoven develop an art form. Or develop it for 100,000 years.
So machines cannot emulate that.
But they can create the end product based on past creations, much as Monet, Shakespeare, and Beethoven did.
Sure, but those individuals are responsible for their proportional contribution to that 100,000 years, which can be a lot to a human being, sometimes a life’s work.
If you stopped feeding new data to Diffusion, it would not progress or advance the human timeline of art, it would just stagnate. It might have a broader scope than if you fed it cave drawings, but it would never contribute anything itself.
People don’t want their work and contribution scooped up by a machine that then shoves them aside with literally no compensation.
If we create a society where no one has to work, we can revisit the question, but that’s nowhere on the horizon.
@raccoona_nongrata
Actually this is how we are training some models now.
The models are separated, fed different versions of the source data, then we kick off a process of feeding them content that was created by the other models creating a loop. It has proven very effective. It is also the case that this generation of AI created content is the next generations training data, simply by existing. What you are saying is absolutely false. Generated content DOES have a lot of value as source data
@raccoona_nongrata
In fact, generating content purely for the purpose of training itself is one of the core techniques in training machine learning models.
No, humans create and develope styles in art from “mistakes” that AI would not continue pursuing. Because they personally like it or have a strange addiction to their own creative process. The current hand mistakes for example were perhaps one of the few interesting things AI has done…
Current AI models recreate what is most liked by the majority of people.
And what if the human running the AI likes one of these “mistakes” and tells the AI to run with it?
But that’s still not how it works for an artist. I don’t mean stumbling upon an accident and using it in your work but deliberately creating something that’s not liked and perfect the way you do it. For someone who just instructs a tool and generates images in rapid speed they go a very different path.
@selzero @raccoona_nongrata @fwygon But human creativity is not ONLY a combination of past creativity. It is filtered through a lifetime of subjective experience and combined knowledge. Two human artists schooled on the same art history can still produce radically different art. Humans are capable of going beyond has been done before.
Before going too deep on AI creation spend some time learning about being human. After that, if you still find statistical averages interesting, go back to AI.
@glenatron @raccoona_nongrata @fwygon
I mean, yes, you are right, but essentially, it is all external factors. They can be lived through external factors, or data fed external factors.
I don’t think there is a disagreement here other than you are placing a lot of value on “the human experience” being an in real life thing rather than a read thing. Which is not even fully true of the great masters. It’s a form of puritan fetishisation I guess.
@selzero @raccoona_nongrata @fwygon I don’t think it’s even contraversial. Will sentient machines ever have an equivalent experience? Very probably. Will they be capable of creating art? Absolutely.
Can our current statistical bulk reincorporation tools make any creative leap? Absolutely not. They are only capable of plagiarism. Will they become legitimate artistic tools? Perhaps, when the people around them start taking artists seriously instead of treating them with distain.
@glenatron @raccoona_nongrata @fwygon
This angle is very similar to a debate going on in the cinema world, with Scorsese famously ranting that Marvel movies are “not movies”
The point being without a directors message being portrayed, these cookie cutter cinema experiences, with algorithmically developed story lines, should not be classified as proper movies.
But the fact remains, we consume them as movies.
We consume AI art as art.
@selzero @raccoona_nongrata @fwygon I try not to consume it as art. There is plenty of original art by real artists. The averages of that dataset are less interesting to me than the original data points.
@selzero @glenatron @raccoona_nongrata @fwygon And thousands of people’s creativity is in the Marvel movie, but one person hammering out a prompt on the AI art. They’re still vastly different. Even the most banally corporate movie is still a work of staggering human creativity and _working together_.
Stable diffusion image generators are not.
@aredridel @glenatron @raccoona_nongrata @fwygon
Humans are also machines, biological machines, with a neurology based on neurons and synapse. As pointed out before, human “creativity” is also a result of past external consumption.
When AI is used to eventually make a movie, it will use more than one AI model. Does that make a difference? I guess your “one person” example is Scorsese’s “auteur”?
It seems we are fetishizing biological machines over silicon machines?
@selzero @glenatron @raccoona_nongrata @fwygon no. Human relationships of cocreation over purely extractive ones. It’s not the biology (though humans have human relevant social drives simple algorithms don’t), it’s the relationships.
It’s obscuring that as if these clusters of Gpus care about creating and form relationships based on them that is so offensive.
@aredridel @glenatron @raccoona_nongrata @fwygon
I don’t understand, can you elaborate please. How is it not biological?