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 creativity. Generative AI homogenizes art and creativity.

Every artist worth their salt knows how valuable the creative process is. A great writer knows what kind of story ideas work and which ones don't. They know how to write a story because they understand the process behind it. They know how to create compelling characters, interesting settings.

A great artist understands how the colors they mix together and the lines they draw can all come together to form the picture they have in their head over hours and days of work, or even longer for long-term projects. Artists can use a wide variety of tools to convey what they want, and it's rare to find artists who have the exact same style.

Most artists have one thing in common: they have an idea of what they want, they have the skills and know-how to create it, and they can keep that idea in their head from the start of the project to the end of it, or even improve upon it as they work on their writing or their artwork.

Even artists and writers who are just starting out knows this. They know their own limitations, but they also work to improve their skills with every piece of art they make, whether they share it with others or keep their work private. There are many artists here who are testament to this, whose galleries you can look through and see the gradual improvement and refinement of their individual art styles. Some artists may even have multiple different styles of art.

Generative AI, on the other hand, boils down to the following: insert your idea into a Large Language Model (LLM) trained on other people's works, text and images taken from anywhere on the Internet, and the machine will produce an image/body of text for you. You don't know what the end result will look like. There's no discernible process behind it. You don't do anything aside from turning an idea you have into a "prompt", and let the Generative AI produces a result in a few seconds.

These results, particularly with AI-generated Images, often contain inconsistencies and errors. A regular Human artist would be able to catch any mistakes in their drawing and writing in the process of creating, and correct for them. That's not the case with Generative AI, where errors are baked into the final product. Furthermore, in most cases, you can identify which Generative AI tool was used to create an image because all images generated tend to have a similar look, and thus identify the image as generated by AI. In other words, you only see which Generative AI tool the person chose to use. There is no individual spark. Nothing to express the artist's own style, or their own creativity. They just feed their ideas into a Generative Large Language Model to do all the work for them.

A tool that is usually a subscription-based service, as far as I know. "AI Artists" don't even properly own the tools they are using, as is the case with all subscription-based services. But the companies investing in it and the people who are Pro-AI will say that Generative AI "democratizes creativity/art", a phrase that is meant to encourage people to sign up to these services to use them.

This is what I mean when I say "Generative AI homogenizes art and creativity". By its nature, Generative AI homogenizes creative expression. It has already created a generation of self-proclaimed "artists" who are all dependent on paying subscriptions to Generative AI tools to express their ideas. It is already creating an environment where a good chunk of art and writing online can all be traced back to these tools.

It is a scenario where companies who own Generative AI tools control where art and writing come from, and how it is expressed. Tools that can only work because they scraped the art of Human artists for the data they need to even work in the first place.

As a personal choice and on principle, I will never use Generative AI for any aspect of my work.

I respect the work of artists and writers who use their own hard work and skill to bring to life the ideas, images and worlds they created in their minds. To put in that time and effort requires genuine passion and dedication to the craft.

On the other hand, Generative AI tools are a product of want for instant gratification without the need to do any work.

But it is worse than that. So many people will flock to using Generative AI, because it's easier to get a machine to make something that satisfies their wants for them, instead of learning and developing the skills to do so. So many people are willing to spend money on things created by Generative AI instead of supporting Human artists.

To quote what Hayao Miyazaki once said: "We Humans are losing faith in ourselves". That's the most direct way I can describe it. Many people would rather use a machine to make art for them; would rather praise images, text, and videos (OpenAI Sora) made by machines, rather than give any credit or love to Human artists.

Because they've come to see Human artists as an "obstacle"; because they see the acts of drawing, writing, and even making videos as not something to be respected, but something to be "automated away", to have the Human element stripped out of it.

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 visible on blogs. It’s unclear what was done with this data and what data (if any) has been sent to Midjourney and OpenAI."

Everything any user of Tumblr has posted from 2014 to 2023 has just been scraped and sold. News like this just affirms my decision to no longer post anything for DeviantArt, and to not share any original work I write here, or elsewhere. Even social media is a no-go these days. My heart goes out to everyone on Tumblr who is an artist that is against Generative AI, but just had all their content over the past ten years scraped by the platform. This is all just...exhausting for me to learn about. The bad news just keeps coming, and likely won't ever stop coming because tech companies will just keep pushing this, and they'll keep pushing it as long as people continue to pay the subscriptions to use these Generative AI tools.

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 rest of eternity in any project they want, with no consent and no compensation. If you think that’s a groundbreaking proposal, I suggest you think again.”

There has also been cases of SAG-AFTRA actors reporting contracts that would give studios the rights to use the signatory's voice for future projects. As emphasized in one particular Netflix contract revealed some time back, the contract gives the studio "free use of a simulation" of an actor's voice "by all technologies and processes now known or hereafter developed, throughout the universe and in perpetuity". In translation, they'd own your voice forever, and you almost certainly wouldn't see a penny from your voice being used.

It even got people pointing out that this almost perfectly mirrors a recent episode of "Black Mirror", where a woman accidentally gave the rights to her personal data to a streaming company by agreeing to their terms and conditions, and the company went on to create an series about her life with an AI-generated version of her. I wish both the Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild all the best of luck, and hope they get all the support they can to win in the end.

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 work makes them an "artist" or a writer. This was done at Marvel Studios, with the director reaching out to "AI Vendors" for the purpose of creating this intro. Some people will tell you that "it fits the theme", and even laugh at you for daring to criticize the use of AI art because of the aforementioned "theme".

All of this was found out while the Writers' Guild of America is currently on strike, with one of the reasons being the AMPTP rejected their proposal to not use AI as "literary" or "source" material, to not write scripts using AI, and to not train AI on material written by WGA members, and instead offered yearly meetings to "discuss advancements in technology."

The reveal trailer for "Secret Invasion" was in September 2022. The Writers' Strike started in May 2023. Even before it became a main issue for writers in the strike, a company like Marvel Studios was already developing a show that used AI-generated artwork for its intro.

I can only imagine the consequences of this going forward.

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:

https://help.artstation.com/hc/en-us/articles/11451085663501-AI-Artwork-on-ArtStation

How is ArtStation dealing with questions of artist permissions and AI art generators?

We believe artists should be free to decide how their art is used, and simultaneously we don’t want to become a gatekeeper with site terms that stifle AI research and commercialization when it respects artists’ choices and copyright law. So, here are our current plans:

We plan to add tags enabling artists to choose to explicitly allow or disallow the use of their art for (1) training non-commercial AI research, and (2) training commercial AI. We plan to update the ArtStation website’s Terms of Service to disallow the use of art by AI where the artist has chosen to disallow it. We don’t plan to add either of these tags by default, in which case the use of the art by AI will be governed solely by copyright law rather than restrictions in our Terms of Service.

We welcome feedback on this rapidly evolving topic.

This...It is impressive how they've outdone DeviantArt in their response. It is Epic who owns the site (i.e. the same guys who own Fortnite), so I can honestly say it somehow explains it.

But...Their excuse is they don't want to be gatekeepers? That language explicitly sides with AI Art, and their "plans" are no different than what DeviantArt is doing. Why is it on the artists specifically to "choose to allow or disallow" use of their art for training AI?

The bold says it all. Their reasoning is they don't want to be a site with terms that "stifle AI research and commercialization". By saying they don't want to be "a gatekeeper", by using the term officially, that may have opened a door that cannot be closed, one that could taint or shut down any protests against AI Art's commercialization, monetization, or presence on art sites. Pair the two statements together, and it seems to all but villainize regular artists, and sites that don't allow AI Art.

They've effectively chosen a side in the AI Art debate in favor of AI-generated images. My heart goes out to all the artists on ArtStation who will be impacted by this, and those from here who thought ArtStation would be a better site for their work.

It isn't them announcing their own AI Image Generator, but the language is a lot worse.