AI is supposed to work with human input. AI is a tool for the artist, not a replacement of the artist. The human artist is the one calling the shots, deciding when the final result is good or when it needs improvement.
Comment on Visual artists fight back against AI companies for repurposing their work
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 1 year agoI’m talking from a perspective of understanding how machine learning networks work.
They cannot make something new. By nature, they can only mimic.
The randomness they use to combine different pieces of work, is not creativeness. It’s brute force. It’s doing the math a million times until it looks right.
Humans fundamentally do not work that way. When an engineer sees a design, and thinks “I can improve that” they are doing so because they understand the mechanism.
Modern AIs do not understand anything. They brute force their way to valid output, and in some cases, like with code, science, or an engineering problem, there might be one single best solution, which an AI can find faster than a human.
But art, DOES NOT HAVE a single correct “solution”.
lunarul@lemmy.world 1 year ago
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Absolutely.
Yet a lot of people are sharpening their knives in preparation to cut the artist out of the process.
lunarul@lemmy.world 1 year ago
And the difference in results is clearly different. There are people who replaced artists with Photoshop, there are people who replaced artists with AI, and each new tool with firther empower people to try things on their own. If those results are good enough for them then they probably wouldn’t have paid for a good artist anyway.
FooBarrington@lemmy.world 1 year ago
They cannot make something new. By nature, they can only mimic.
Explain it to me from a mathematical point of view. How can I know based on the structure of GANs or Transformers that they, by nature, can only mimic? Please explain it mathematically, since you’re referring to their nature.
The randomness they use to combine different pieces of work, is not creativeness. It’s brute force. It’s doing the math a million times until it looks right.
This betrays a lack of understanding on your part. What is the difference between creativeness and brute force? The rate of acceptable navigations in the latent space. Transformers and GANs do not brute force in any capacity. Where do you get the idea that they generate millions of variations until they get it right?
Humans fundamentally do not work that way. When an engineer sees a design, and thinks “I can improve that” they are doing so because they understand the mechanism.
Define understanding for me. AI can, for example, automatically optimise algorithms (it’s a fascinating field, finding a more efficient implementation without changing results). This should be impossible if you’re correct. Why does it work? Why can they optimise without understanding, and why can’t this be used in other areas?
Modern AIs do not understand anything. They brute force their way to valid output, and in some cases, like with code, science, or an engineering problem, there might be one single best solution, which an AI can find faster than a human.
Again, define understanding. They provably build internal models depending on the task you’re training. How is that not a form of understanding?
But art, DOES NOT HAVE a single correct “solution”.
Then it seems great that an AI doesn’t always give the same result for the same input, no?
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
The brute forcing doesn’t happen when you generate the art. It happens when you train the model.
You fiddle with the numbers until it produces only results that “look right”. That doesn’t make it not brute forcing.
Human inspiration and creativity meanwhile is an intuitive process. And we understand why 2+2 is four.
Writing a piece of code that takes two values and sums them, does not mean the code comprehends math.
In the same way, training a model to generate sound or visuals, does not mean it understands the human experience.
As for current models generating different result for the same prompt… no. They don’t. They generate variations, but the same prompt won’t get you Dalí in one iteration, then Monet in the next.
FooBarrington@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The brute forcing doesn’t happen when you generate the art. It happens when you train the model.
So it’s the same as a human - they also generate art until they get something that “looks right” during training. How is it different when an AI does it?
Human inspiration and creativity meanwhile is an intuitive process. And we understand why 2+2 is four.
You’re using more words without defining them.
Writing a piece of code that takes two values and sums them, does not mean the code comprehends math.
But we’re not writing code to generate art. We’re writing code to train a model to generate art. As I’ve already mentioned, NNs provably can build an accurate model of whatever you’re training - how is this not a form of comprehension?
In the same way, training a model to generate sound or visuals, does not mean it understands the human experience.
Please prove you need to understand the human experience to be able to generate meaningful art.
As for current models generating different result for the same prompt… no. They don’t. They generate variations, but the same prompt won’t get you Dalí in one iteration, then Monet in the next.
Of course they can, depending on your prompt and temperature.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
You are drawing parallels where I don’t think there are any, and are asking me to prove things I consider self-evident.
I’m no longer interested in elaborating, and I don’t think you’d understand me if I did.
BURN@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’ve tried to explain this to a lot of people on here and they just don’t seem to get it. Art fundamentally relies on human experience for meaning. AI does not replicate that.
Seems like people on this platform are very engineering focused, and many aren’t artists themselves and see it as a pure commodity instead of a reflection of the artist.
Peanutbjelly@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
artist here. nobody is thinking about AI as a tool being used… by artists.
the pareidolia aspect of diffusion specifically does a great job of mimicking the way artists conceptualize an image. it’s not 1 to 1, but to say the models are stealing from the data they were trained on is definitely as silly as claiming an artist was stealing every time they admired or incorporated aspects of other people’s art into their own.
i’m also all for opensource and publicly available models. if independent artists lose that tool, they will be competing with large corps who can buy all the data they need, and hold exclusive proprietary models while independent artists get nothing.
ultimately this tech is leading to a holo-deck style of creation, where you can define you vision through direction and language rather than through hands that you’ve already destroyed practicing linework for decades. or through hunting down the right place for a photograph. or having a beach not wash your sandcastle away with the tide.
there are many aspects to art and creation. A.I. is one more avenue, and it’s a good one. as long as we don’t make it impossible to use without subscribing to the landlords of art tools.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
I absolutely approve of AI tools as a way for artists to empower themselves. You know why?
Because there is human input.
The “best” AI art I’ve seen is the type posted by people who were already drawing before, and are using it as a tool to realise their vision. But that’s the crux of the issue, in these pieces a human conceived the them, the tools used to realize them, don’t matter.
But a lot of people are presenting AI as a something that replaces the whole person of an artist. Not a new brush for them wield in creatively intelligent ways.
FooBarrington@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Why does that “fix it” for you? Earlier you stated that AI cannot create anything new by its very nature. Why does the status of the output change if an artist uses it? Why is it art when an artist does it, but not if a non-artist does it?
Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
I often see the sentiment that AI art is only valid when it is created by people who were already drawing before. It’s a pernicious notion I don’t agree with at all. I think this is the birth of a new and exciting form of expression that can and should be explored by anyone, regardless of any experience or skill level.
Generative art allows more people to communicate with others in ways they couldn’t before, and to inspire and be inspired by others. The stuff people post online isn’t just a matter of pressing a button and getting a random result. It requires creativity, curiosity, experimentation, and refinement. It also requires learning how to use effectively use new tools that are rapidly evolving and improving. Generative art is not a passive process, but an active one, where human artists get a chance to create something unique and meaningful.
I believe that generative art, warts and all, is a vital new form of art that is shaking things up, challenging preconceptions, and getting people angry - just like art should. And if you see someone post some malformed monstrosity somewhere, cut them some slack, they’re just learning.
treefrog@lemm.ee 1 year ago
No bodies, no social circles. No joy. No suffering.
This is where art comes from. AI can make ‘something new’ out of inputs. The same way a toaster can make toast when you feed it bread. But neither the toaster nor the AI create art.
Because neither one can connect with or communicate what it’s like to be a human being. And neither is being shaped socially by other human beings.
FooBarrington@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I don’t need to know the background of a piece of art to know it’s art. I’ve seen AI generated pieces that touch me, and I’ve seen “real art” that I do not consider art. How can this be if you’re right?
The obvious answer is that art isn’t defined by who created it or how it was created, but instead it’s defined by the interpretation of whoever views it. An artist using generative AI to make something great is no less art than if they used a brush and canvas, and a non-artist doing the same doesn’t suddenly make it “not art”.
treefrog@lemm.ee 1 year ago
My point was within the context of the argument saying that it’s okay for copyrighted art to be fed to an ai without the artists permission because ai learns like people do and is essentially doing what people do to each other.
But AI don’t participate in culture and they’re not embodied entities. So they don’t have the relational capacity to get art, as I understand it. And therefore they don’t learn art in the same way people do, because they’re not touched by art the way people are.
It’s fine for ai to be used to make art. But to feed ai copyrighted art so the style can be mimicked, automated, and profited from… that feels a lot more like theft to me then if I went to the art museum and tried to ape a Picasso.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
It’s so wierd to see artistic expression reduced to an engineering problem.
Yeah, you can generate images and sounds, but claiming that’s art is like claiming a thousand monkeys could write the works of Shakespeare. Yes, its possible, but what enables it is randomness. Not creativity.
And in that process, you created a lot more of something else, aside from the works of Shakespeare.