[HN Gopher] Greg Rutkowski Was Removed from StableDiffusion, but...
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Greg Rutkowski Was Removed from StableDiffusion, but AI Artists
Brought Him Back
Author : ecliptik
Score : 50 points
Date : 2023-07-30 18:24 UTC (4 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (decrypt.co)
| Avisite wrote:
| I really dont think using his name in a prompt had as much to do
| with his style to some degree, but more that it had an unusual
| amount of influence on the resulting image compared to other
| artists. Like his name had an unusual weight to the model that
| made images higher quality. Images that are nowhere close to his
| style still had "by Greg Rutkowski" in it. in the same way they
| have "Masterpiece, Best Quality"
| jsheard wrote:
| If Rutkowski didn't already exist, would AI artists ever be able
| to arrive at his style from first principles? It seems that all
| novelty entering the AI art ecosystem comes from riding the
| coattails of non-AI artists, they're literally incapable of
| producing, for example, fan-art of a newly revealed character
| until non-AI artists produce enough examples to train a LoRA on.
|
| Months on from the release of the new Zelda game I still can't
| find _any_ on-model AI art of most of the distinctive characters.
| They just can 't do it without a LoRA, and you can't make a LoRA
| without many existing examples, so they never could have put
| those characters to paper using AI if the design only existed in
| their head. Conventional artists have to do it first so that AI
| artists can follow.
| cheald wrote:
| By the same token, you had no ability to conceive of any
| original character before it was shown to you; why would an AI
| art model be any different?
|
| A fan artist must observe a character's official depiction
| before they can produce their own variants of it. Most humans
| do not produce art in a clean room, either - we all produce a
| synthesis of the existing art we've been exposed to. A LoRA or
| dreambooth model incorporating a novel concept is conceptually
| similar to a fan artist being shown a new character so they can
| produce new derivations of it.
|
| You could produce "police sketches" of a previously unseen
| character based on shared description, but it would likely fail
| to capture the nuance of the individual just as police sketches
| would.
| jsheard wrote:
| > By the same token, you had no ability to conceive of any
| original character before it was shown to you; why would an
| AI art model be any different?
|
| I've yet to see a LoRA produce a meaningfully diverse and
| high quality range of interpretations based on just a single
| piece of character key art, or brief appearance in a trailer,
| the way the conventional fan-artists do. What actually
| happens is that those conventional artists produce a wide
| variety of interpretations, someone scrapes those hundreds or
| thousands of images, and then trains a model using _that_
| dataset instead. The model needs the variety and novelty that
| the human artists bring to the table, otherwise it would just
| over-fit to the official art.
|
| When I was looking for examples of Zelda AI art I noticed
| there is a LoRA for Purah, and the first version was posted
| on CivetAI not when her TOTK design was revealed, nor when
| the game came out, but a month later when there was a wide
| enough corpus of existing fanart to scrape together a decent
| model with. It only works by piggybacking off the non-AI
| artists effort.
| cheald wrote:
| I get what you mean, but my point is that fundamentally,
| what's happening in the LoRA and in the human artist is
| conceptually similar - each learns through examples what it
| is about a character that makes that character distinctive,
| and then attempts to reproduce it within some set of
| constraints. Neither is capable of doing so without first
| being exposed to what it is that makes that character
| distinctive. Human brains are obviously far better at
| interpretation than current AIs are (and have the advantage
| of actual will and intent), but I don't know why one'd
| expect a model that's never seen a character to be able to
| reproduce the essential nature of that character.
|
| I rather suspect that you can get more variation than you'd
| think from a homogenous dataset, though - I've trained a
| LoRA on myself that can produce photorealistic renderings
| of me, as well as anime, Disney, Pixar, and Dreamworks
| styles, all of which actually feel pretty "me"; I don't
| have any human-produced drawings of myself as a Disney
| character or renderings of me in a Pixar movie, but the
| model does a good job of projecting what I'd look like
| given what it knows about "Disney-style" drawings, plus
| what I've taught it about what I look like.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Putting greg rutkowski in a prompt produces compositions that
| have a fantasy/sci fi edge, more muted earth tones, areas of
| both clean and rough brush strokes and areas of large contrast
| with a tendency towards a central focus. It also makes for
| better dragons/castles/etc. Nothing magic.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| Artists using AI maybe could have. "AI artists" are largely a
| bunch of obnoxious trolls with a shallow understanding of art
| history, technique, etc, such that this seems unlikely. Almost
| all AI art I see is within a narrow range of stylized realism
| or anime/manga-derived work.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| There are novel artists using Stable Diffusion or Firefly as a
| photoshop-like-tool. Not txt2img, but stuff like inpainting,
| controlnet, contextual modification, LORAs trained on their own
| portfolio and such.
|
| They are obscure for the same reason most artists are obscure.
|
| But most "AI artists" you are talking about are would-be
| consumers looking for something specific, not creators looking
| to pull something novel out of their head.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Probably something similar? I don't see why not.
|
| I don't look at that kind of artwork all that much, but
| Rutkowski's pictures seem to have a very D&D/Tolkien-ish
| quality to me, to put it in some words. I'm pretty sure other
| artists made works in similar styles.
|
| I do recall purchasing a poster with a similar look around 20
| years ago, when he'd have been 14-ish. He might be a prominent
| artist in the genre now, but he's far from the first or that
| unique.
| lfuller wrote:
| Greg Rutkowski is most well known for his work on D&D and
| Magic the Gathering. You recognize his style as he was one of
| its pioneers.
| [deleted]
| neilv wrote:
| > _"If he contacts me asking for removal, I 'll remove this."
| Lykon said._
|
| My interpretation of the article is that the entire reason this
| person created this was because the artist had objected to being
| in a generative model. When the artist was removed from the
| popular generative model, this person created a model/tuning
| specifically to put the artist back into one, and distributed it.
| They seemed to do this well aware that the artist didn't want to
| be in a generative model.
|
| That sounds aggressively adversarial and abusive, and so the
| quote above sounds disingenuous.
|
| Consider the analogy of a bully who is hitting a victim, and the
| bully demands that the victim ask the bully nicely to please
| stop. Humiliating the victim, and making the victim acknowledge
| the bully's power over them. Also, this is only after much damage
| is already done to the victim. And, in this case, after the bully
| has called over a mob to also beat the victim, and knowing that,
| even if the bully stops, the mob will continue.
|
| The person in this case might not have the self-image of a bully,
| but is instead thinking of it as the usual Internet get-out-of-
| jail-free card: such as when you post someone else's content,
| when you're pretty sure they don't want you to, and without even
| trying to get permission, but you think it's all OK if you say
| "I'll take this down if they ask me to". (Related: The YouTube
| copyright violation disclaimer "I don't own this! All rights to
| the owner!", maybe even referencing the "All rights reserved" of
| a traditional copyright notice.)
|
| Wherever you stand philosophically on copyright and related
| matters, and whatever jurisdiction and economic conditions you're
| under, it's maybe also helpful to consider the bullying question.
| One can stray into that accidentally, and that's harder to
| justify.
| arjun_krishna1 wrote:
| based
| wccrawford wrote:
| If this person was genuine, they would have asked permission
| first. It wasn't like they had to ask a lot of people who are
| hard to contact. Just 1 person.
|
| I'd have had more respect for this person if they'd just said
| "Sorry not sorry." instead.
| cateye wrote:
| Greg Rutkowski's art style is similar to Gustave Moreau's,
| Rutkowski shouldn't be permitted to create his artwork.
| throwaway69123 wrote:
| There are too many artists applying human stylegan to their
| artwork! Something must be done to stop this unethical
| practice.
| causality0 wrote:
| _A digital quagmire where Rutkowski himself struggled to
| differentiate between AI-generated pieces and his genuine works._
|
| Is this hyperbole or did he actually say this? How could someone
| spend tens of hours meticulously painting something and then not
| be able to tell if he did it?
| drdaeman wrote:
| And if they're somehow (just theoretically) genuinely
| indistinguishable even to the author - this prompts to question
| the value of originality.
| cheald wrote:
| Nonsense. A neural net of sufficiently high parameter count
| can learn a function to reproduce any digital representation
| of information. This argument would suggest that anything
| which can be represented digitally is therefore of minimal
| value.
| drdaeman wrote:
| > This argument would suggest that anything which can be
| represented digitally is therefore of minimal value.
|
| Uh, not really like that. The original was about value in
| comparison, not an absolute value. I don't really see
| what's immediately wrong with an idea that anything digital
| has questionable value compared to its clones generated by
| a trained neural network (but absolute value of those could
| be still very high). It could be wrong - but it's not
| immediately obvious to me.
| vitorgrs wrote:
| Weirdly this is like the best compliment I ever heard to AI
| Art.
| dale_glass wrote:
| I suppose that means that he's having a hard time explaining to
| how to distinguish the AI version from his works. Like there's
| nothing along the lines of "This is clearly not my work because
| I don't draw dragon wings this way" he can say.
|
| Not that he forgot what he drew and what he didn't.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| That reads to me as "he looked at the details of the AI art,
| and had a hard time finding obvious issue in the 'technique'",
| not that he forgot about art he made.
| Loveaway wrote:
| Man I feel for the artists. Seen a lot of outcry among people
| I've worked with too. It just seems so unfair. Like what are we
| doing? We automated away one of the most pleasing, satisfing and
| skill intensive endeavours humans can undertake. A dreadful
| reality we'll probably have coming to our jobs soon enough too.
|
| Bitter truth is though, it's not going away. The genie is out of
| the bottle, and if you are a talented artist, you absolutly need
| to embrace AI. If you take a look at DeviantArt AI section for
| example you'll see: The bar has been raised. It's masterpiece
| next to masterpiece now. Talented artists + AI = Simply stunning
| work.
|
| It feels heartless, but what can we do, will you be able to stay
| competive without AI? It feels you'll be just hampering yourself
| for idealistics reasons.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| We didn't automate away art. We automated away the technical
| skill of digital illustration, which a totally different thing.
| Now, instead of artists also having to be illustrators, we've
| opened up being an artist to a wider audience.
| wccrawford wrote:
| While I do think many of them are stunning, there are quite a
| few that are obviously AI-generated with almost no human
| interference... Or perhaps none at all. The scenes don't make
| _sense_ visually.
|
| I think to be commercially competitive, you need to embrace AI.
| But to just do good art, you can still get there the old-
| fashioned way. It's similar to CNCs in that you can get a
| computer to do it for you, but you many, many people still do
| it completely by hand. And some people go half-and-half.
| lolinder wrote:
| > Others sided with Lykon, alluding to the fact that Rutkowski's
| art has already been in circulation in SD1.5 for years.
|
| Fun fact: we have yet to reach the one year anniversary of the
| initial announcement of Stable Diffusion [0]. A lot has happened
| in one year!
|
| [0] https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diffusion-announcement
| justinclift wrote:
| > While Lykon maintains he'll readily concede to Rutkowski, he
| said he believes he is acting on behalf of the greater good.
|
| Sounds pretty unethical. :(
| watchtower wrote:
| Yup, that's pretty much it. Followed by the next sentence:
|
| > "If he contacts me asking for removal, I'll remove this."
| Lykon said.
|
| ... as if Greg hadn't taken a clear stance.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| But he didn't specifically tell _me_ to stop!
|
| There's no stopping this technology, but we can do without
| all of fake "for the good of humanity" stuff. If you want
| free pictures in someone's style without paying an artist for
| them, just be honest.
| vasco wrote:
| Interestingly enough, Rutkowski might have been the biggest
| artist beneficiary of this AI hype cycle.
| Aerroon wrote:
| The only reason I know he exists is because of SD. The same
| goes for a few other artists. Now I even know roughly what his
| art like like.
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