@midlet here. Your favorite absentee community leader. It's time we had the talk. Where does art come from? It comes from people. Human beings, good talk.
So it's long been the rule in OCA that AI filters, and AI art are not allowed, but honestly when I created this rule software like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion didn't really exist, at least not at their current power level. What did exist was software that would take a photo and using AI "repaint" or "make art" out of it. I guess at this point you could (and I do) argue that this next wave is even worse, where there is literally no image input necessary to create...something.
People have been posting AI work in here with impunity for a while now, and the honest truth is I don't really have time to be in here being the art police. Let's just keep it real, there's currently not a lot of eyeballs on this stuff. I wish that wasn't the case, but it's the reality. All that said, I still keep an eye on my community, throw some upvotes around, put some stuff on the curated content page, I've been totally lax on moderation because it's too much work. My mods have held down the fort in long stretches of absence from me. I appreciate you all, but I'm coming down off my mountain to purge the community of AI art.
This is AI art btw
I'd love to say I don't have a problem with AI art, and it's just not for this community, but as I've learned more about it, and how it works, the companies behind it and all the nitty gritty, I actually do have a problem with it. That said, I'm currently investigating it. Keep your friends close and enemies closer sort of thing. I'm on Midjourney, I know what it's capable of, I know that if someone really wants to they could definitely mask the fact that they're using AI. The image I posted above has some tell tale signs, but I want to post other examples I've made that don't have any.
Other than the nonsense text which can easily be removed
Yes, I know. Holy shit. This is also a tiny sample. Over the past 5 days I've generated over 500 images I think learning the ins and outs. I may make a seperate post on my account talking about this, but back to the main point of this post.
AI ART IS NOT ALLOWED IN OCA.
I'm sure there are other communities that will happily allow it, this is not the community for that. This is for actual art made by people. Furthermore...
AI ART POSTS WILL BE MUTED
IF YOU POST AI ART WITH THE INTENT TO PASS IT OFF AS YOUR OWN ART YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE MUTED FROM POSTING IN OCA.
This is seriously shitty and dishonest and I'm disappointed that I'm seeing people doing this.
This is your warning. It's not my fault if you don't read this, it will be pinned. I don't have the time or patience to give a million warnings or leave a comment explaining why you got booted. Read the rules.
I will not be applying this retroactively. There's AI art in the feed right now and some that are AI and not disclosing it. Party's over, take it somewhere else. I will probably post a comment to let curators know it's AI for those that might care, also if any curators read this, do you care? Some people don't.
I know AI art is fascinating, it's even fun, I don't have an issue with the tech actually. I have an issue with the sleazy way the AI companies obtained the dataset that makes them work which was by a legal loophole that gave them access to billions of copyrighted images, and that is the literal only thing that makes these things valuable. I'll save all that for another post.
That's all for now. Happy creating, feel free to leave any thoughts in the comments.
THANK YOU @onchainart and @midlet !!! I mostly stopped posting in OCD because of the whole AI 'art' issue. Part of the most central premise of Real Art is that it come through the craft and mastery of a medium... i.e. it requires time, attention, energy, genius and effort. Typing a sentence into a programme is not mastery, nor is it craft of any kind. Passing it off as 'creativity' is a lie at the core of it. If we are not willing to put in the hours, make the marks with our hands and brushes, pencils and pens, play with the elements, get our hands dirty and labour to bring a piece to completion through our soul and uniqueness, then we are not making Art.
I'm totally onboard with you.
What the AI "artists" don't realise, is they are cutting their own throats. When there is flood of content, it becomes harder to stand out from the rest. Yawn, boring...
Ultimately, I believe the trend will be back towards traditional forms of artwork, where you can prove you actually created it by hand.
It was thought that photography would kill painting, it never did, as there is a world of difference between the two mediums.
However online, yes it will become difficult to differentiate between human and AI "art". AI is limited to the screen. In the off screen real world, it is plainly evident who the real artists are.
Looking at the developments in 3D printing, this may not stay that way. How hard can it be to have a machine fake the dynamics of a brush stroke on canvas?
I have always been a proponent of technology. Now we're entering an age where machines get to decide who lives and who dies. Time to revise my opinion.
Because you can film the artist painting the painting as evidence. The painting could be painted with witnesses or in front of the public. The artist could add a strand of hair, a drop of blood as a DNA signature.
Yes, that part, the AI deciding who lives and who dies, seems to be lost on the many people who like their shiny new play thing.
What do you say to a blind or disabled child or man with parkinsons who coudl never hope to make "real" art on their own, and have to depend on midjourney,a nd feel very proud of what they have made?
WHy not help them to further customize it instead of saying to the blind man on midjourney"Youre slitting your own throat here, you hajve no soul! Yorue cheating! Youll NEVER be an artist" Thats very harsh to tell certain fgellow humans who are just trying to have fun and feel like they can be an artist too
SOme peopel also may be terminally ill, dying, why not give them teh beenfit of teh doubt, find ways to make prompts based on codces generated fropm theri actual curated art styles, to make something base don theri face too maybe, or brush styles takenm from a neurofeedback EEG device, non invasive neuralink pbasically, to MAKE teh ai art even mroe4 customzied, showing us what this person MIGHT have been able to make in anotehr life without theri disability?
I think you are being too harsh and its not worth throwing disabled blind persons ai midjourney art in the trash, and destroying teh small ego boost theyc an get, just to preserve some misguided ideal of the aesthetic perfection liek some art borg lol
I agree with everything you say! AI is nothing more than remixing existing photos, paintings etc. It cannot be considered art. I see that many platforms have already excluded these "works of art". This shows that the majority of people, artists, don't want any soulless stuff. I myself am explicitly against anything that is not made of soul. Artificial intelligence is like that, it sheds its rubbish at the expense of artists, because it feeds off them, i.e. their ideas, and of course it pays no royalties.
I agree. Fascinating and sometimes beautiful as it all is, I feel it leaves me in the depths of the uncanny Valley. There are other communities which will surely be more suited to this content.
I vote most of my Hivepower in this community and will usually shy away from computer-created work entirely because I am not sure of the human-to-machine ratio of its creation. So I am fully behind this move. As it will help the computer artists that use the machine as a tool and not those who are just good with prompts.
I get your point that it is trained on the images and styles of artists without their will and although that may be difficult to stomach it is what all artists are trained to do until they can find their own true voice. Once you put your work out there it becomes part of the collective unconscious and there is no getting away from that. 'We are only as original as the reference to our source is obscured' Someone said that once and I believe there is great truth in it.
With all that said this technology really is magic.
So here's the thing. We're all humans and without even thinking about it we anthropomorphize things, especially AI partially because of the marketing and the name, but contrary to the name, it's not an intelligence. It's not referencing and it's not being inspired. These are all human things that humans do. It's just a piece of software. It is closer to an insanely sophisticated Photoshop filter than it is to any actual intelligence that exists.
Machine learning might be better called machine processing, or machine neural analysis or something like that because it's nothing like what a human is doing when they learn something. Even when a human can't draw well and has no training, they can still draw and communicate ideas with symbols. This software literally can't do anything without first processing artists artwork or photos or whatever. It has exactly zero value without the artists work adding all the value. The data is everything.
The worst skilled artist, while their work might not be aesthetically pleasing, it's still an expression of that person. These diffusion models are just a laundering system for IP infringement.
Very succinctly put indeed!
Here is news for you - I train my own AI with my own art (something new, which you are not up to speed on yet) but the examples you post are run of the mill Midjourney stuff and indeed boring, as are 90% of the 'housewife art', which is also a large percentage of the so called 'art' that finds its way onto this platform as analog art. Do more research, be more creative with writing prompts and don't rely on the pre-chewed models (I recognise them a mile away - it's what those use too lazy to actually create something unique). AI is for me a sketching tool to work out ideas. Yes, I post some of it, particularly those that have a large component of my own work, such as variations of my art generated with my trained Loras. Whatever turns out good might make it onto my analog canvas. I trained Loras with my drawings and also with my own portrait photos. I am going to train some on my paintings, but that is secondary, since what results I get from my drawings I can translate into analog paintings better than a finished AI painting.
I seen and watched art students in seminars with a photo tucked up on their canvas which they painstakingly copy, and also look over their shoulder at what everyone else is doing, so by the time they are done, it all looks alike - alike, just like the rest of the average 'housewife' art you find on AI and on here as well.
I taught art classes for quite some time, and been asked: how do you paint XXX, to which I reply, there is no formula, you have to look and observe. And that is what is lacking. If you cannot describe and transcribe a detail of a thing, you will not succeed, be that on canvas, or in writing a prompt.
AI is a tool that should be seen as such. How you use it makes the difference between an amateur and an artist.
The one thing I would criticize the various AI platforms are their 'forbidden' words, excessive censorship and restrictive rules.
Lastly, check out my blog here: https://peakd.com/ai/@thermoplastic/new-data-poisoning-tool-lets-artists-fight-back-against-ai-is-this-a-good-idea
Thank you for this. So relevant and important to have a community that put human skills first.
I'm trying not to demonize AI, understand where are we going and what is the good of it. Nevertheless, nowadays it is so easy to confuse what is made by AI or by human hands. I gladly approve and appreciate this rule for OCA.
I am looking forward to reading the next posts you might do about it and I will do my own research because I really don't know what is behind these companies.
Thank you
I agree. Also it's worth to consider that these machine learning technologies can be applied to almost ANY digital data. The images and text were first because that was just easy and quick to grab from the internet and process. That's why digital painters and writers deal with this now, it will spread to different digital art spheres - video, music, 3D (sight) etc. Programmers are already dealing with people using GPT for generating code, it will be everywhere. In HIVE it's probably best if people could post some work in progress documentation together with their work as a proof, but ultimately that also can be faked, so before someone develops some kind of working AI detector it will be hard to tell what is what.
I've been experimenting with it the last two days and I'm blown away. Like I knew I'd see this in my lifetime but I thought it'd take a lot longer. Yes, it's important to be suspicious of the people who control it, this is toooo much power. I'm also just at a total loss for the social implications and what it'll to do different jobs (try the chatbot?).
I think this is an obvious stance for a visual art community like this one. If someone wants to make an AI art community then go for it.
At the same time, for an artist who is not much of a visual artist (music, fiction, podcasting, vlogging) it's kind of a godsend because visuals are so important, I don't have a lot of money to pay an artist and this stuff is WAY more interesting than pexels. Soon half the popularly consumed music, fiction, podcasts, and vlogs will be artificially generated too. I'm not sure there is anything we can do...I mean someone could turn off the power grid, but I wouldn't want that. The future is STRANGE! That's all I'm certain of.
I'm still going to pay artists for my book covers (perhaps there will be one exception for something very specific) and album covers when I finally make one, and if I can generate a large enough income I'd pay artists for video thumbnails and all that too, but not quite there yet.
It seems to me a good initiative to support artists who strive to evolve their ways of expressing art in such a way that their effort is valued
So this rule is universal or only for those who don't disclose that this is AI generated art? If I say that clearly on my post and also use aiart hashtag, I am still not allowed to post? (By the way, I didn't even know that AI Art was not allowed because I don't post that often but also because I saw many users doing it).
I haven't been enforcing the rules. It's super time consuming, but yea it's not allowed here. I'm pretty sure it is in every other art community though and I think there might be one specifically for it.
Got it thank you. I was confused by the name in the beginning. Just Found a community called AI Art and Information and will post there I guess. Really wondering how some people with a couple of hundred followers are getting 800 upvotes on a community with a couple of hundred members. Asked a member there and waiting for the answer.
how would you be able to tell? What you show for examples are bottom of the barrel, run of the mill AI images one can spot a mile away. I know artists in my circles that use AI to develop their ideas (and so do I) which saves on sketching paper. I trained AI on my own past artwork, which flows into my results. Some of these results find their way onto my canvas, in the further process it gets massaged around, changed etc. If I take a AI generated piece which I based on my trained drawing lora, and I use it in my analog painting, how would you be able to tell? Or, what is the difference of Rauschenberg using solvent transfer to reproduce an image on his canvas, as opposed to me printing the result from an AI creation and overpainting it? There are all kinds of ways to skin a cat. AI is a tool, period.
Before posting on a community, one must strictly read and follow the rules. I think it is fair enough to ban the account if they keep on violating the rules. Basic.
Thank you for this post.
I pinned the link to the rules in the general chat on the Discord and have been dropping it in every moderationn comment I post because it does take looking and a couple of clicks to find, perhaps it should be pinned too?
Yea, good idea.
I am rather enthusiastic about IA art, but I agree with the fact that it's a shame for people to use it and pretend it is their own creation. I also agree that it doesn't have its place on this community, as it is a community for artists to share their personal creations. I think that an easy way to differentiate between the creations of AI and people is to be able to see the process. (but also by seeing the spectacular and sudden artistic evolution of the person)
But I didn't agree with your point of view about AI art and its issue ;
A piece of art is seeing by million of people - who will keep this inspiration in the back of their minds, until the day they use it unconsciously or not to create themselves their own piece of art, and maybe sell it after. It is basically the same process as AI for my opinion.
So I personally don't have any problem with that, but I can understand the anxiety of artists in relation to all this.
Here's the difference based on your example. I see some painting, and get inspired by it, later on I paint something and unconsciously pull from that experience. That's not what AI is doing. What AI is doing is more like, I take the ACTUAL painting, and sample it, only it's doing it with billions of images so it gets murky in the unprecedented scale that humans can't really relate to. I don't have a perfect replica in my mind of anyone's painting, and even if I was looking directly at someone's painting, I can't literally paint it exactly like them pixel for pixel. AI can and does. That's not being inspired. It's a piece of software, it can't get inspired. It knows nothing beyond what it's been fed and trained on. It adds nothing original to the table. Anyway though, I'm not upset you and other people are excited by it. It's amazing, I get it, but the way it's implemented now, I feel is grossly immoral.
I think you are mistaken on this point ; it does not sample images, it does not make a kind of puzzle based on the images. It learns from all of them, with millions parameters, transformed into concepts and ideas stored. But it does not actually keep any of its images in its database.
And it is for these reasons that I think this AI is REALLY similar to the brain. Because apart of our consciousness, the brain works like a machine, where our unconscious records billions of data and stores them.
So, for example, the idea of a "bike" has this or that image in our head: it can be bigger or smaller, of this or that color, it can be found in this place, it can be associated with this or that thing,...
This is basically how IA works, for then creating new images, original contents. Because it is an image that does not exist. Humans do not have the exclusive right to the word "original" I expect 😅
So... no, I don't give up, the functioning of this AI is very similar to our functioning as artists and beings with brains.
But, platforms like ArtStation makes it possible to disable allowing AIs to train with their images, if users so wish. I think it's a good compromise to lower tensions.
I hear what you're saying and I understand it doesn't literally collage images together. I've tested it A LOT, I see what it does. I honestly think the technical details are less important than the fact that it can't do anything without that data. Less data, and it would be worse. More data and it will be better. While no image that it makes is exactly like an image from the training data, that does not equal original imagery.
Whether it has been trained to steal artists work, or it directly collages from billions of images, everything it creates is based on the work and labor of other people. Actual artists, even if they're referencing other stuff, THEY still have to create it. Their mark comes from them. So yea, I respectfully disagree.
Dear @onchainart,
Our previous proposal expired end of December and the Hivebuzz project is not funded anymore. May we ask you to review and support our new proposal (https://peakd.com/me/proposals/248)?
Thank you for your help!
Oops - I inadvertently cross posted a AI post - what now? I have not been on for a while, so I missed this "new rule".
oh i didnt know, i wont post any ai arty in onchain art then
but if you ban ai art you should ban all people using photopshop, illustrator, blender, and all the artifically intelligent tools like even snap objects etc that people have been using for decades now lol
also photoshop or adobe onlien whatever has ai tools now built in, soon it will eb hard to avoid usin some form of ai if youre a digital artist using blender or photoshop or video editing
but im sure youll amke exceptions and one day youll have a post saying "At least 51% of your art elements must be Human " LOL
If this is true, I'll start painting and posting again.
I also support your opinion @midlet, I as a digital artist who loves and has a hobby in this field do not completely reject Ai art, which I reject Ai companies that take the artstyle of famous artists and use that artstyle as a reference algorithm in their Ai engine, that's very cheating and no respect for the dedication of artists to learn their unique artsyle.
If the Ai company is willing to pay royalties for the artsyles of the artists they use it might actually be very good.
But I don't think company capitalization is going to go that way.
With a curator at OCA like you, hopefully it will become an inspiration for other Hive art communities.
Thank You
Finally someone said it tbh i love ai art too but its just effortless and the extra limbs and repeative prompts make similar art. Also many artists have said their art was remixed and used in Ai data base so its better that we don't use it here atleast
I'm not an artist so I don't have much stake in this one way or the other. However, I've often wondered about the complaint of using data sets with copyrighted images. I think that complaint misses how AI works (or is supposed to work). Are humans not also influenced by copyrighted works? Whether an intelligence is artificial or natural I'm not sure I see the difference in that regard. To say that AI shouldn't "look at" copyrighted works is a similar argument to saying human artists should not look at copyrighted works. That is somewhat dependent on how good the AI actually is. The better it is, the more true that becomes.
Having said that, I think AI could make art that is just as good by not using any copyrighted works. There's practically an infinite amount available. I guess the challenge is in assembling a data set that is suitably large while ensuring it is free of copyrighted works.
And having said that, I still see the value of having rules banning AI. However, it will be impossible to tell in the very near future (with or without copyrighted images in the dataset). It almost already is. Like it or not, AI is here to stay.
Well... I both agree and I don't.
I see AI generations as sophisticated collages.
I often use them to generate elements which I then stitch together and paint scenes.. sometimes my images take several images and put them into one.
There is such thing as an artist that uses AI to their advantage to enhance their own creativity..there's also such thing as prompt craft, getting what you invisioned is extremely hard and alot of people just ask for something you want. I'm still too new to get what I want BUT I'm slowly getting there.
However, people passing it off as their own oil painting for example... that is misleading and unfair especially to traditional artists and to the person themselves.
I do think there is a happy medium.
Eventually the language of prompt craft will be accepted.
There is always one tell tale sign for me, that let's me know when something is AI art...when I look at it, I don't feel anything
I mostly agree with what you have written in here. I'm not a painter or illustrator, but I am a photographer & I like to do art photography too. Sometimes, but rarely I do some extreme editing so that the photo doesn't even look like a photo anymore. Am I allowed to post these kind of art photography in the community?
I also design & make my own jewelry - necklaces made of pieces of fruit wood - would it be OK for me to promote this kind of work here in OCA?
Thanks!
I am willing to burn through some of my RC to reply here with some personal experiences, not caring about rewards or anything since this is a hobby.
I have been experimenting (A LOT) with those systems, even registered to a website and later discovered how to make my Own AI Art, but lets not give them the benefit and call it ML Model generated Art, albeit not every art is "generated' when it comes to and from those models, there can be false positives.
Now I want to set some expectations here, I am a simply one who observes things unravel, I do not favor any "side" as to my eyes there are no "sides" as such.
For example I LOVE collages, and those tools are a god-sent when it comes to that but there needs to be some baseline things figured out before people can use those tools freely, they are no different than content-aware tools we have in photoshop or similar, they care fill in the blank type of tools (thats the technical thing about them).
The only thing I did not like was seeing the same artist names over and over coming up in prompts which was sad to see, thankfully some websites (lately) have taken it upon themselves to address the issue by providing proper citation automatically and link to each artists portfolio (which is a gray practice but still something for now).
Let us not forget, this is a Generated Art:
https://playgroundai.com/post/cleacubs501kus601yybe2yrc
Okay, so here is one of my articles where I made a few changes to a generated asset to make it more... well... not bad lets say:
https://ecency.com/hive-120078/@deepspiral/the-power-of-gratitude-a
The reason being is that I simply wanted to focus on writing and express through images, and only when I managed to bring about the desired picture I would post it.
There are ethics involved on everything, including such practices,
Did I mention that I love collages? yeah I do, which is what I am working on along such tools, I have also been using stable diffusion to create models of myself and others I know and then using them together (which is not currently as possible with any "AI" to do) and then creating some stories out of them, granted that the AI is used mostly for fill-in purposes (to glue things together) and create a synthesis.
There are people who will and should argue that prompting is art and I agree to some degree, however that is not where the artistry is... it is the whole thing, taking an image to photoshop, making changes, setting a basic scene, the more intentional and creative it is the better and closer it comes to real artistry. It is up to the people on how to use such tools just like photography was back in the day.
I am an artist who uses digital mediums as well as physical ones and it is sad to see such dichotomy right now, there should be more open minded understanding and respect all across the board.
I guess I did not have any intentions in this comment to project other than an opinion which can of course change at any moment, though here I hold this as a thought. I am not sure how I even got here, I guess I felt explorative!