Eye-of-The-Shaper

Summary: Generative AI tools homogenize art and creative expression. The machine does all the work for you, and the images generated tend to have similar looks, allowing you to identify which Generative AI tool was used on sight. Users of Generative AI tools do not own the tools they use, as you need to pay a subscription fee to use most of them. In this scenario, the companies who own the Generative AI tools control where art and writing comes from, and how it is expressed. People use it because they see Human artists, and the process of making art, an an "obstacle" between them and their gratification, something to be automated away by machines. Full post: A number of CEOs who have created Generative AI models, and I presume those who liberally use Generative AI and call themselves "artists", have argued that Generative AI will "democratize creativity", "democratize" art. I disagree wholeheartedly with this, for one simple reason: Generative AI does not democratize art and

Tumblr’s owner is striking deals with OpenAI and Midjourney for training data, says report I had been composing a draft for a journal post to express my views on Generative AI in no uncertain terms, but this article came to my attention and I decided I need to spread the news, and compose this journal to express my thoughts. Because the news just keeps getting worse and worse. Now Tumblr's parent company is going to sell data scraped from its site as training data to OpenAI and Midjourney. The Lifehacker link provides more details, but to provide a lengthy quote from the Verge article: "According to 404’s report, Automattic plans to launch a new setting Wednesday that will “allow users to opt-out of data sharing with third parties, including AI companies.” But it cites internal posts that suggest the company scraped an “initial data dump” containing “all Tumblr’s public post content between 2014 and 2023,” including — apparently by mistake — content that wouldn’t be publicly

I mentioned the Writers Guild of America Strike in my previous post about AI Art as it pertained to the Secret Invasion intro. With June 12th now come and gone, the Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists has also gone on strike against the AMPTP. Once again, the subject of AI came up as a major issue for the Screen Actors Guild, as it did for the Writers Guild. Here is the proposal: "Groundbreaking AI proposal which protects performers’ digital likenesses, including a requirement for performer’s consent for the creation and use of digital replicas or for digital alterations of a performance." According to Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the union's chief negotiator, said proposal involves involves the following: “in that groundbreaking AI proposal, they proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get paid for one day’s pay, and their company should own that scan, their image, their likeness, and should be able to use it for the

To be honest, I had already heard of this development before the shared post above, but I waited to see if at least one other post talked about this before making my thoughts known. Simply put, I have been fuming over this. The past nine months have been bad enough with the surge in attention given to AI content, so much so my retirement from posting anything to the site has partly been driven by the AI trend. I have no intention of contributing anything to DA anymore because of the site's embrace of AI-generated art. But this recent developments is a step on the path towards the worst yet to come. Marvel Studios/Disney, one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world, has used "AI-generated art" for the two minute intro of "Secret Invasion". This isn't an art website like DA (can they even be called that, anymore?), nor a Youtuber trying to cash in on the AI trend for views. It isn't even one of those people who think inputting a prompt into a machine that does all the

Oh for goodness sake. In the past day, there has been a lot of uproar over AI Art in Artstation after the site featured AI-generated Images. It is my understanding a lot of artists packed up shop and moved over there because, at the time, there was no AI art featured on ArtStation. So, after mass protests on the site in regards to AI Art being featured, what was the response? In chronological order: "“ArtStation’s content guidelines do not prohibit the use of AI tools in the process of creating artwork that is shared with the community,” a spokesperson for Epic Games, the owners of ArtStation, tells Kotaku. “That said, ArtStation is a portfolio platform designed to elevate and celebrate originality powered by a community of artists. Users’ portfolios should only feature artwork that they create, and we encourage users to be transparent in the process." That was yesterday. Roughly twenty-four hours later, a further statement was made in their Q & A: