[HN Gopher] AI doppelganger experiment - Part 1: The training
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       AI doppelganger experiment - Part 1: The training
        
       Author : julienposture
       Score  : 206 points
       Date   : 2024-05-19 16:19 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (julienposture.substack.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (julienposture.substack.com)
        
       | AndrewKemendo wrote:
       | No, two artists are the same.
       | 
       | As an artist, if I'm not constantly pushing the boundaries of how
       | I'm expressing myself via media then I'm just telling the
       | audience the same thing over and over. Im not actually changing
       | as an artist, I'm simply producing the thing regularly that is
       | expected of me.
       | 
       | This is 99% of professional art you find your style and then you
       | do that over and over for money so that you can survive in a way
       | that you like.
       | 
       | If you did this with a Thomas Kincaid, it would be trivially easy
       | because Thomas Kincaid has built his entire portfolio around a
       | very specific type of art that does a very, very specific type of
       | thing.
       | 
       | Similar for Kahinde Wiley
       | 
       | On the flipside you're not going to be able to reproduce
       | something from Duchamp or Picasso - their styles changed because
       | they as individuals in the world changed, and they had to change
       | their approach in demonstrating how they interact with the world.
       | 
       | I totally can understand the perspective from professional
       | artists who have developed a style and capability to produce
       | something that they feel comfortable with and live on that
       | 
       | we could sit here and debate about the aim of Art or otherwise,
       | but the reality is, if the core of what you do is reproducible
       | because you have focused on commoditizing your medium or
       | expression type (such that it is so recognizable immediately by
       | any human - eg Kincaid) Then you should not be surprised if your
       | limited vocabulary is fairly easy to replace
       | 
       | The art masters cannot be replaced, you cannot predict what
       | they're going to do next because they change the rules entirely.
       | This is how we know a great artist from a mediocre artist.
        
         | ecjhdnc2025 wrote:
         | > The art masters cannot be replaced, you cannot predict what
         | they're going to do next because they change the rules
         | entirely. This is how we know a great artist from a mediocre
         | artist.
         | 
         | I agree that in principle the best working artists are those
         | who know how to create, modulate and discard artistic languages
         | over time -- creating and abandoning rules for sequences of
         | work -- but AI systems can clearly be unethically trained to
         | mimic art in those styles, and there are many living artists
         | (or estates of recently departed artists, supporting their
         | families) whose incomes are defined by some periods of their
         | lives where they worked a particular set of rules in a way that
         | became definitive.
         | 
         | So it's not enough to say that great artists won't be affected
         | because they change the rules all the time. Most of them will
         | still be ruined by this, because as soon as there's enough work
         | in the new style it can be stolen.
        
           | jsheard wrote:
           | > because as soon as there's enough work in the new style it
           | can be stolen.
           | 
           | This is where the oft-cited comparison to previous advances
           | like the camera breaks down - AI has an ongoing parasitic
           | relationship with the mediums it is displacing. The camera
           | doesn't need a thousand photorealistic paintings of a new
           | subject to be made before it can capture that subject going
           | forward. AI is an unprecedented situation, as far as I can
           | tell, where a new artistic medium greatly de-values prior
           | ones while also being reliant on those other mediums
           | continuing to be used at scale in order to avoid stagnating.
        
             | ganzuul wrote:
             | This week I completed a sculpture which I intentionally
             | made to be non-photographable by choosing lighting and
             | materials which showed off high reflectivity and high
             | chroma so that screens would not be able to reproduce it.
             | To the human senses it is something that really steals your
             | attention, perhaps because we have becomes so used to the
             | constraints of our reproduction technology and this is not
             | that. The Prussian blue pigment sucks you into the astral
             | realm and the gold is hypermodern reference to the Apollo
             | program. It started a lot of conversations.
             | 
             | The work is a critique of photography, prints and screens
             | and all of postmodernism. It also is also a warning about
             | being satisfied with mediocrity.
        
               | astrange wrote:
               | I always find it philosophically entertaining when I see
               | a material in real life that can't be photographed with a
               | phone like this. (Of course that includes gold foil,
               | mirrors, blue LED concert lights, the sun, the moon...
               | so, pretty common.)
               | 
               | But try making one that can't be videoed or 3D scanned
               | with Polycam.
        
             | ecjhdnc2025 wrote:
             | I agree wholeheartedly.
             | 
             | As a photographer I am shocked to see other photographers
             | who are AI proponents making the comparison to the
             | beginning of the photography era. (Though it's usually the
             | very bad photographers or those who haven't _actually done
             | any reading_ about the impact of photography on art who
             | make this point)
             | 
             | Art's one hope to avoid this parasitism is to move back
             | into the realms of the purely physical, I think (and as a
             | photographer that includes me).
        
               | Eisenstein wrote:
               | The fact is that it _is_ much like that, because no one
               | then knew what was going to happen and it _seemed to
               | them_ like an existential threat. The mechanism of how it
               | works or its relationship with our previous technology is
               | irrelevant. The comparison is about _everyone freaking
               | out because no one knows how this is going to play out_.
               | 
               | But history has shown time and again that carving out a
               | niche in art by using technology is always fleeting and
               | any security you think you had was illusory. Just looking
               | at Hollywood, you have: (a) transition to sound (b)
               | emergence of televisions (c) transition to color (d)
               | effects revolution (e) digital replacing practical
               | effects (f) digital replacing film
               | 
               | Each one of those transitions obsoleted a generation of
               | specialists with niches, yet Hollywood and the people it
               | employs are still doing just fine.
        
               | AndrewKemendo wrote:
               | Which is precisely the point
               | 
               | The majority of people complaining are complaining that
               | their "specialness" is being commodified
               | 
               | What actually happened was they commodified themselves
               | and their work, in order to gat paid and maintain their
               | position in the world as an "artist"
               | 
               | They are now pretending that that what they were doing
               | had more value than it actually does simply because it
               | takes skill and craft and they define themselves by it
               | 
               | Guess what, making metal fenders by hand takes a shit
               | load of skill and craft, same with exterior plaster
               | artists same with molding and crowning artistry - 100% of
               | those kinds of workers were replaced perfectly by
               | Machines.
               | 
               | You cannot replace demand for art qua art - because you
               | are selling a moment in time of an artist expressing a
               | fully felt emotional release. You can't buy that because
               | it cannot be created via money. It is a unique and
               | temporal experience that can only be done by one person
               | at one time in the world.
               | 
               | you can however, replace demand for art in service to
               | commerce and it is a function of capitalism that that
               | will be replaced because by function, it is in service of
               | promoting a commercial behavior, not the expression of an
               | artist in communicating themselves
        
             | Zambyte wrote:
             | Do we want art to be highly valued? Doesn't that make it
             | out of reach for the masses? I think making art more
             | approachable is a good thing. I probably would not have
             | gotten into visual art if I could not use a camera, and had
             | to paint or even dance. The camera de-valued painting by
             | saturating the visual art ecosystem. Image generation does
             | the same once again.
             | 
             | Consider: generative art technologies (as all good
             | technologies) raise the skill floor, without lowering the
             | skill ceiling.
        
         | BadHumans wrote:
         | At a certain point, art sells because of the artist not the
         | art. Picasso's sell because they are Picasso's. An artist
         | starts by creating a style that separates them from the pack
         | but eventually turn into a brand that sells because they
         | artwork is from that artist. For people that successfully are
         | able to turn into a brand, great, but I feel new artist are
         | going to be heavily kneecapped by AI.
        
         | zephyrthenoble wrote:
         | You are presenting opinion as objective fact for a subjective
         | medium, which is surprising to hear from an artist.
         | 
         | This argument, and this article, are not about the "great
         | masters" but about amateur and professional artists who find
         | their efforts easily reproduced and outproduced by AI. These
         | people are not protected by "This is a REAL Picasso" and some
         | of them could lose their financial security because of it.
         | 
         | The article indicates that style can be copied in as few as 20
         | to 30 images. Could you imagine being an artist who is
         | attempting to gain notoriety, publishing low quality pngs of 20
         | of their works for their Etsy store, and then someone trains a
         | LoRa on that and profits off of your images? Hundreds of hours
         | of time in an attempt to start your art career, to have it
         | duplicated in seconds by computer. You have no time to grow as
         | an artist, because your required contribution to the data set
         | has already been made.
        
           | AndrewKemendo wrote:
           | My takeaway is that as with many of the artists, they are
           | reacting to the philosophical no mans land that cheap
           | computer reproduction is putting them into...From TFA:
           | 
           | >As I'm contemplating this Cronenberg-like transformation of
           | the image, I can't help to be struck by the triviality of my
           | own work. There's something confronting in facing a
           | computational doppelganger, something akin to the uncanny
           | valley. I'm surprised at how much this affects me, even
           | though my whole schtick is to be reflexive and critical about
           | style, what surprises me the most is that even though the
           | output if "objectively" a failure1, I see myself in it. But
           | maybe what I see in the generation, what I find actually
           | disturbing, is the part of my work that has already been
           | objectified and commodified, the parts of my style I spent
           | years making digestible for clients, consistent for social
           | media, and reproducible for easy production.
           | 
           | This feeling is not present in artists who are not commercial
           | artists or otherwise produce VOLUMES of similar work -
           | because it is functionally impossible
           | 
           | Why?
           | 
           | Again, as with picasso et al... they are performing the work
           | of an artist. Namely it is a lifetime oeuvre - not a single
           | period - that defines an artist.
           | 
           | This is my point, and you can disagree, most commercial
           | artists are not producing art, they are designing propaganda
           | for corporations. It takes artistic skill, but it's not what
           | I would consider relevant for the author
           | 
           | The author sits at the intersection of capitalism and art -
           | that you can produce designs for money repeatedly and so
           | predictably as to be identically imitated is proof enough for
           | me
           | 
           | Nobody can reproduce or copy my art because it's PHYSICAL and
           | hanging on my (and many others' including our own jacquesm)
           | wall. They can try, but forgeries are very hard to do.
        
             | astrange wrote:
             | > This is my point, and you can disagree, most commercial
             | artists are not producing art, they are designing
             | propaganda for corporations.
             | 
             | Tbf I think the artists most threatened are the ones doing
             | fetish or furry commissions for individual clients paying
             | $100-$300.
             | 
             | Corporations need to be able to make revisions to a style
             | or have artists advise them on where to make changes. AI
             | isn't good at that. (Getting better though.)
        
         | HiroshiSan wrote:
         | Goodluck replicating and replacing a leyendecker or a Gibson or
         | a Rockwell. Getting to that level of technical proficiency is
         | more than just settling into a style.
        
         | freetinker wrote:
         | I'm no artist, but I'm not sure I agree. As an example, Cubism
         | (Picasso) or stuff by Pollack (arguably another 'great') seems
         | quite distinct and therefore reproducible - at least visually
         | if not physically (paint texture, etc.).
        
         | micromacrofoot wrote:
         | what if ai is the next great master
        
           | AndrewKemendo wrote:
           | Then I believe that's quite the feat of engineering and we
           | should all rejoice in the birth of AGI
        
       | voiceblue wrote:
       | Related: "Invasive Diffusion: How one unwilling illustrator found
       | herself turned into an AI model" [0].
       | 
       | It's astonishingly simple to train both LoRAs and Embeddings
       | nowadays -- if you combine it with tech like ControlNet, you can
       | more or less have direct control over the illustration as well
       | (see this example I converted to Hollie Megert's style with
       | barely any effort [1] using the model from [0]) -- but FWIW I was
       | playing with the WhatsApp AI stickers recently and human-made
       | illustrations still have a "je ne sais quoi" that sets them
       | apart, vaguely reminiscent of "realistic" animation vs. "squash
       | and stretch". I would not be worried as an _artist_ *, but I
       | would be worried if I am making assets for corporations in
       | Corporate Memphis [2].
       | 
       | [0] https://waxy.org/2022/11/invasive-diffusion-how-one-
       | unwillin...
       | 
       | [1] https://i.imgur.com/ZwtKug5.jpeg
       | 
       | [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis
       | 
       | * In fact, I think I'd be excited, it can be a great tool, and
       | people who lack artistic sensibility might find it almost as hard
       | to use as to make art themselves. However, I do think there needs
       | to be some kind of protection from having your 'style'
       | commoditized without consent, _using unauthorized images of your
       | own art_.
        
         | deprecative wrote:
         | That last part is the issue. Once the material is released
         | publicly there is zero way to prevent it from being used for
         | training. I like the idea of these things but they're
         | predicated on theft and exploitation.
        
           | jsheard wrote:
           | There are active countermeasures in the form of
           | Glaze/Nightshade, but I don't know how effective those turned
           | out to be in practice.
        
             | ccgreg wrote:
             | I wonder if Glaze/Nightshade makes it difficult for
             | software to describe the image for a blind person?
        
               | GaggiX wrote:
               | Not really, because Nightshade should have made image
               | labeling more difficult, but if you try it, you'll see
               | that it doesn't do anything; multimodal models are too
               | powerful nowadays to be fooled by small adversarial noise
               | generated using CLIP LPIPS (small enough not to be too
               | noticeable to us).
               | 
               | And Glaze does not try to interfere with labeling.
        
             | astrange wrote:
             | They don't work, and nothing in the category can ever truly
             | work.
             | 
             | Models and adversarial data are equally powerful - you can
             | find an adversarial example for any current model, but you
             | can also train a model that can handle any existing
             | adversarial data.
             | 
             | Any image is a good example of /something/ - at worst it's
             | only an example of itself and irrelevant for any other
             | class. Don't know if there's a name for this principle but
             | it's kind of like a Church-Turing thesis for data.
        
         | spywaregorilla wrote:
         | > However, I do think there needs to be some kind of protection
         | from having your 'style' commoditized without consent, using
         | unauthorized images of your own art.
         | 
         | 1) Hire artist to copy the style for 10 images
         | 
         | 2) Train model on those
         | 
         | problem solved.
         | 
         | If you choose "using your images specifically" to steal your
         | style as the hill you want to die on, then you're going to find
         | it's a very useless line of defense.
        
           | voiceblue wrote:
           | That's common enough that there's a name for it [0].
           | "Stealing the style" is not so much a problem as
           | commoditization, which may find some measure of defense in
           | terms of trademark ( _not_ copyright). In this case, for
           | example, the model is named _hollieMengert_v1_ , and we are
           | referring to the style as "Hollie Mengert's art style".
           | 
           | [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
        
             | spywaregorilla wrote:
             | There is absolutely not defense unless "hollie mengert's
             | style" is trademarked; and even then the protection extends
             | only to that name, not the artistic style itself.
             | 
             | Clean room design has nothing to do with this. It is
             | perfectly acceptable to overtly copy a style.
        
           | pbhjpbhj wrote:
           | Just because you hired artists to copy someone else's work
           | doesn't mean your model isn't the result of copyright
           | infringement, indeed it makes it somewhat more obvious imo.
           | 
           | Maybe that would be Fair Use, but things like purpose, weak
           | transformation (in the hired artists copies), competition
           | against the original, and business motive would all suggest
           | it relies on non-Fair Use copying.
           | 
           | I don't know why you think something that involves direct
           | copying shouldn't be a 'hill to die on' for a copyright
           | infringement claim?
        
             | spywaregorilla wrote:
             | Not copy the work. Copy the style. Because style is not
             | copyrightable.
             | 
             | What I'm saying is that if you believe that your personal
             | style is your valuable asset and choose to protect it by
             | saying people can't train on your images; you ought to be
             | aware that it's trivially easy to build a model that
             | replicates your style and does not require your images.
        
               | burnished wrote:
               | Hiring someone for work is not trivial, though it is
               | practical.
        
           | astrange wrote:
           | Style is largely in the eye of the beholder; SD1.5 was used
           | to make a lot of images that looked like Greg Rutkowski, and
           | people presumably believed they looked like his style, but he
           | wasn't in the training set and it was a coincidence.
           | 
           | Of course this is mostly only possible if you limit yourself
           | to looking at digital art. A JPEG of a gigantic abstract art
           | oil painting is pretty different from the real thing.
        
         | vunderba wrote:
         | Corporate Memphis seems to have that very "flat almost clip-
         | art" style to it.
         | 
         | Generative art is ideal for this type of stock art use case
         | where 90% is simply good enough for the vast majority of
         | situations.
         | 
         | I feel like the gig economy (things like Fiverr) are
         | unfortunately going to get absolutely crushed by generative art
         | systems since most of their customers aren't that particular
         | and are likely fine with anything that DALL-E / SD can pump
         | out.
        
           | jsheard wrote:
           | > I feel like the gig economy (things like Fiverr)
           | 
           | Predictably this is already happening, it doesn't take much
           | browsing in categories such as tattoo design to spot the
           | hallmarks of AI generated artwork. To add insult to injury
           | they often pretend they aren't using AI, so they can up-
           | charge for more intricate artwork that _would_ take more
           | effort if they weren 't really just adding more synonyms for
           | "detailed" to their Midjourney prompt.
           | 
           | Fiverr does have a dedicated category for AI art, but they
           | don't seem to be making any effort whatsoever to keep AI art
           | out of every other category, so it's pointless.
        
             | asabla wrote:
             | > it doesn't take much browsing in categories such as
             | tattoo design to spot the hallmarks of AI generated artwork
             | 
             | Which is kind of interesting. My first tattoo has its roots
             | from it. Where I used ChatGPT together with DALL-e to
             | express the concept I wanted on my body, and not a direct
             | translation of it.
             | 
             | Worked out pretty well, got a lot easier to discuss how and
             | what things would work and how to apply them.
        
             | grugagag wrote:
             | Soon enough generative art will be everywhere and the style
             | uniformized so when some brands will want to differentiate
             | themselves they will hire people again. They could charge
             | more for the service, whoever survives the generative AI
             | squeeze...
        
               | krisoft wrote:
               | > and the style uniformized
               | 
               | Why would the style be uniformized? It is neither
               | observed to be happening with generative art, nor is it
               | desired.
        
               | grugagag wrote:
               | Can you tell when art is AI generated? I already can and
               | that is what I am talking about. In time this will become
               | more and more clear to the the market and in cases where
               | it matters they will hire a human.
        
               | bongodongobob wrote:
               | No you can't. Some of it? Of course. All? You definitely
               | can't.
        
             | iamacyborg wrote:
             | > categories such as tattoo design
             | 
             | It's wild that this is a thing when the tattoo artists job
             | is literally to create the artwork for you
        
               | MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
               | Isn't it their job to put it on you? My understanding is
               | many people bring in designs. That's the easy part that
               | is so replaceable, whereas needling someone's skin is not
               | strictly ai replaceable quite yet.
        
               | iamacyborg wrote:
               | It depends on the person buying the work I guess, but
               | most tattoo artists that I know wouldn't be overly happy
               | with being given an image and asked to just tattoo it.
               | 
               | They're artists after all, not artisans.
        
           | numpad0 wrote:
           | Has GenAI _really_ been good enough in stock art use cases,
           | or are they given temporal leniency? I feel they're mentioned
           | too often for that to be the case.
        
           | lz400 wrote:
           | This comment thread could be from 3 years ago. What you're
           | predicting I think has for the most part already happened.
           | Everyone I know who used to commission Fiverr stuff has
           | switched to AI.
        
         | LettuceSand12 wrote:
         | Where can I learn these techniques?
        
           | nickthegreek wrote:
           | Stablediffusion subreddit
        
         | krisoft wrote:
         | > I do think there needs to be some kind of protection from
         | having your 'style' commoditized without consent, using
         | unauthorized images of your own art
         | 
         | I worry any attempt at that will strangle all creative
         | endevours. Copying others style is not a new thing. It is the
         | stuff culture is made of.
        
         | Der_Einzige wrote:
         | Can we just talk about the fact that the most popular fine-
         | tuned model for SDXL is called _PonyDiffusion_?
         | 
         | The circumstances of its creation, and the whole entire world
         | of like, booru websites that you have to explain to boomers in
         | suits with VP titles who are trying to invest in this space is
         | just surreal.
         | 
         | It's like a reverse of when they were raising their kids and
         | giving us "the talk" as children. Now we have to give them "the
         | talk" about what the word "doujinshi" means... for science!
        
       | gedy wrote:
       | The challenge I see is that (in the US at least), "style" is not
       | copyrightable in the arts. IMHO this is a good thing because
       | artists learn and copy from one another, and if it were
       | copyrightable that would lead to no end of lawsuits between media
       | companies.
       | 
       | So my concern is trying to apply copyright to training AI models
       | can easily slippery slope into more draconian copyright rules for
       | human artists.
        
         | nicklecompte wrote:
         | I don't think there is a slippery slope in the foreseeable
         | future, unless you buy into sci-fi views of AI being like a
         | human. We need to update the laws around copyright in response
         | to these machines. It's similar to why copyright laws exist in
         | the first place: the concept was developed in response to the
         | printing press.
         | 
         | At some point there will be a real _I, Robot_ problem about an
         | AI artist that actually understands what its drawing and doesn
         | 't depend on interpolated plagiarism of inhuman amounts of
         | data. But we aren't even close to that yet.
        
           | armchairhacker wrote:
           | Style is hard to objectify. It's a lot easier to determine
           | whether a 3D model depicts Super Mario than whether it's in
           | the "modern Nintendo" style.
           | 
           | Style is also very broad. It's even harder to determine
           | whether an 8-bit NES sprite is in the "old Nintendo" style,
           | because 8-bit sprites don't have much flexibility to
           | distinguish themselves.
           | 
           |  _Broadness:_ imagine if whoever first came up with the "low-
           | poly 3D" or "flat material" or "voxel" aesthetics could
           | copyright them and prevent anyone else from selling anything
           | in those styles. What defines a style as narrow enough that
           | it can be copyrighted? And what if that definition changes,
           | e.g. if a a specific voxel style gets copyrighted, then
           | someone else discovers a brand new way to render voxels super
           | efficiently in only that style?
           | 
           |  _Objectivity and similarity:_ an artist can make a concrete
           | object or character which is very similar to a copyrighted
           | one but also clearly distinct. This is very important,
           | because if "similar" objects could violate copyright, where
           | is the line when something is dissimilar enough? Ultimately
           | it would be very far for small artists, who can't afford to
           | risk lawsuits; vast swaths of clearly _not_ similar
           | characters and objects would be blocked off from them,
           | because in the eyes of the law and without good
           | representation, they're no longer "clearly" not similar. In
           | fact, it may be hard for an artist to even come up with an
           | object or character that doesn't risk a copyright lawsuit,
           | since there are more copyrights that anyone could fully know.
           | (At least to my knowledge, with copyrightable characters and
           | objects this hasn't been a frequent issue; but if it is,
           | copyrightable style will make it worse, so for the sake of
           | the argument...)
           | 
           | Copyrighting style is basically copyrighting the "similar"
           | works. There's a fine enough line between whether a character
           | or object is "similar to" or "the same as" another (again to
           | the best of my knowledge). But there's no fine line with
           | style. If one tries to define a style with objective criteria
           | like making their "style" a specific stroke thickness and
           | color scheme, generative AI users will just create art which
           | falls right outside of this criteria. If one tries to use an
           | AI classifier (ironically) to deduce whether something is
           | "the same" or "similar but distinct", it will be foiled by
           | AI-adversarial manipulation and its effectiveness will be
           | endlessly disputed in court. And if one defines their style
           | with very subjective judgements, that leads to the issue
           | above.
        
         | leobg wrote:
         | One reason for that is that, like with ideas, society benefits,
         | from styles intermixing. So making them "copyrightable" would
         | be to the detriment of society.
         | 
         | But the other reason might be that it has just not been
         | feasible to actually measure things like "style". And if you
         | cannot, in your lawsuit, put into words what you claim is, and
         | where its boundaries are, it's impossible to enforce it.
         | 
         | It's very much possible that people will forget the former
         | reason and jump on the latter, now that one might be able to
         | use AI to actually quantify, measure, and map things like
         | style. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see companies like
         | OpenAI play Good Samaritan and "helping legislators" solve the
         | problems generated by AI. Only after they have secured the own
         | datasets, of course.
        
       | sanjayk0508 wrote:
       | but the question is, is it copyrightable?
        
         | rvnx wrote:
         | Fast-forward in a few years, perhaps we could claim that if
         | even a basic computer is able to do the same, the originality
         | of the work is low, it may not meet the threshold for being
         | copyrightable ?
        
         | artninja1988 wrote:
         | Are you talking about artistic styles? No, they're not
         | copyrightable.
        
       | ninetyninenine wrote:
       | AI is to the point where it can create it's own style. We talk
       | about these styles as if it's some kind of sacred thing. What you
       | don't realize is that we're past this point.
       | 
       | There's a latent space of different art within a certain style
       | category, but there's the latent space of different categories
       | itself. AI can already traverse the space between art in a single
       | style category AND it can traverse the gradient space BETWEEN
       | categories. It can even go beyond that.
       | 
       | AI has turned everything into a freaking best fit curve.
       | 
       | Copywrite is such a mundane question. It's just a fight against
       | the inevitable truth. That human creativity are just points on
       | that curve. Nothing more, nothing less.
       | 
       | I view this as a BAD thing. Copywrite is good, it's great. It's a
       | law that implies what humans create has meaning. But we have to
       | face the truth. That the output we produce is in actuality just
       | one part of a high level pattern. That's all we are.
        
         | monadINtop wrote:
         | lol sometimes I wonder if the reason so many tech bros make so
         | many grandiose statements about how AI has already trancended
         | the bounds of human creativity is because they've never really
         | had actual experience with art and literature and music growing
         | up. They say things like this and then you go and look for an
         | example of these incredible works of artificial art and it is
         | the biggest pile of shit you have ever seen.
         | 
         | Just like how they think that these glorified typing assistants
         | function identically to the human brain. I mean maybe they
         | really do replicate the level of creativity and intelligence of
         | the people who believe these things, but maybe the people with
         | decades of research in linguistics and neuroscience are right
         | to be skeptical.
         | 
         | Its kinda like when people talk about research mathematics like
         | its all adding really big numbers together or calculating
         | really tricky integrals.
        
           | ninetyninenine wrote:
           | Not yet but this is not too far off:
           | 
           | One day you're going to encounter something that really moves
           | you.
           | 
           | And then you'll realize it was procedurally generated, by an
           | AI.
           | 
           | We're only about 1 - 2 years into AI. Think about the pace of
           | progress.
        
             | astrange wrote:
             | There's a long tradition of random art and if you like
             | that, there's dril GPT and Magic card GPT that produced
             | lots of good absurdity. Of course, there's a human curation
             | pass after it to let it be called art.
             | 
             | https://x.com/drilbot_aww/status/1792077476338057292
        
               | ninetyninenine wrote:
               | We just started on this. Imagine what the next two
               | decades will bring.
               | 
               | This long tradition of stuff you speak of has only been a
               | couple years at most. Draw the trend line. Extrapolate
               | the inevitable consequence.
        
               | astrange wrote:
               | A lot longer than that!
               | 
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_art
               | 
               | Could also count elephant paintings and such.
        
           | spywaregorilla wrote:
           | Your dignified belief in the supremacy of human ingenuity
           | will be cold comfort to the young artists struggling to find
           | employment
        
             | monadINtop wrote:
             | Yep, you're right. But idk why you phrased that like it's a
             | rebuttal to my criticism. This is another failure of our
             | economic system, for incentivising the owners of art
             | production to churn out literal mindless slop to cut costs,
             | instead of safe guarding artists and creators for the sake
             | of their intrinsic value to society and humanity.
             | 
             | Since, of course, they must eternally seek to reproduce
             | capital to the detriment of everything else.
        
               | spywaregorilla wrote:
               | Well your argument is admonishing tech bros as if they
               | don't get it, but generally they do get it completely in
               | this context. The goal here is not replacing great art.
               | It's replacing art assets.
               | 
               | Comes off as naive and distracting to me.
        
               | monadINtop wrote:
               | The distinction is philosophical. Tech bros consider "art
               | assests" or consumer oriented products as art. In their
               | eyes its capibility as a tool for profit is a downstream
               | effect.
               | 
               | My point was that since their entire purpose in life
               | revolves around developing and refining technology for
               | the reproduction of capital, it reveals their blindness
               | to any deeper aspect of the human condition than what can
               | be sold for a profit. When people post 3d versions of the
               | Mona Lisa or a shitty remix of Monet's water lillies with
               | breathless praise, it's because in their eyes the
               | stylistic reproduction or reinterpetation of the literal
               | shapes and colors on a flat screen is all there is to
               | art, not merely because it demonstrates utility in
               | replacing already exploited sectors of creative workers.
               | 
               | I don't think we disagree about any of this. I think that
               | I'm just making a tangential point to the article in
               | response to a dumb comment, while you are talking about
               | the subject more directly. Otherwise I fail to see what
               | you think is naive, if only because I've seen so many
               | examples of this rot of understanding around the essence
               | of artistic expression from the mouthpieces of silicone
               | valley and our wider, increasingly corporatized, culture.
        
               | spywaregorilla wrote:
               | > My point was that since their entire purpose in life
               | revolves around developing and refining technology for
               | the reproduction of capital, it reveals their blindness
               | to any deeper aspect of the human condition than what can
               | be sold for a profit
               | 
               | And I think that's grossly missing the point. The vast
               | majority of people making art are just trying to make
               | something look aesthetically nice within some sort of
               | provided communication framework. And that's perfectly
               | fine.
               | 
               | Frankly I think elevating artists to the pedestal of the
               | illuminating the human condition is very damaging to
               | their actual interests
        
               | monadINtop wrote:
               | Is creating things of aesthetic quality not of value with
               | respect to the human condition? Is not some subset of
               | that aesthetic quality derivative of the intuition and
               | intention of a human mind? Sure, if you want to build
               | some tehchnology to make designing packaging for dog food
               | more effecient go ahead, as long as it isn't the previous
               | dog food packaging creators that are being made to absorb
               | the economic cost of the new technology (which they are).
               | 
               | But I hope at last some subset of human art strives to do
               | more than that, and I think it's a bad thing that the
               | incentive to increase revenue at the expense of quality
               | has now expanded past being a tool to improve efficiency
               | of laborious tasks and is now instead cutting costs via
               | cutting artistic value.
        
           | astrange wrote:
           | If you need intelligent things to act exactly like a human
           | being I think you're going to look bad in the future where we
           | have aliens or uplifted ravens and this looks
           | racist/speciesist.
           | 
           | Being trapped in a computer with no environmental interaction
           | is obviously a big difference though.
           | 
           | > but maybe the people with decades of research in
           | linguistics and neuroscience are right to be skeptical.
           | 
           | Like other kinds of academics, many of those people are
           | cranks so they're not necessarily right. For instance, some
           | of them are Chomsky.
           | 
           | (But it's their job to be wrong most of the time so of course
           | this is expected.)
        
             | monadINtop wrote:
             | No, you need intelligent things to be intelligent.
             | 
             | And it would probably be good to distinguish between
             | "things that appear superficially intelligent" and "things
             | that have genuine capacity for internal experience" while
             | you're at it, since the popular perception on this forum
             | seems to be to just declare that physicalism/materialism is
             | obviously correct and explanatory and we can just brush the
             | hard problem of conciousness under the rug. People are so
             | eager to endow the statistical model that has been designed
             | to produce responses that are statistically feasable in a
             | given context (a very impressive feat of technology to be
             | clear) as having internal experience.
             | 
             | Chomsky happens to be more right about LLMs than 90% of the
             | popular discourse will ever be able to understand, which
             | isn't that suprising considering the impact if this
             | "crank's" earlier work.
        
               | astrange wrote:
               | Chomsky's critique of LLMs was somehow not even correct
               | about his own theories
               | (https://x.com/profraha/status/1634311282135318529). And
               | of course has the usual problem of 1. claiming LLMs are
               | random statistical models (they aren't, the sampler is)
               | 2. claiming instead of generating correct text they only
               | "seemingly" generate correct text and not explaining why
               | this is any less impossible.
               | 
               | But people have built explicit grammar knowledge into
               | LLMs (it's in llama.cpp) and nobody seems to need it to
               | make English text.
               | 
               | Of course the main reason Chomsky is a crank is that he's
               | completely convinced he's right about politics despite
               | his unbroken record of endorsing every mass murderer in
               | the world as long as they're anti-American.
        
               | monadINtop wrote:
               | Oh right ok like I guessed, you have a ideological
               | problem with him and his entirely irrelevant activism
               | offends you, and so discredit any of his actual technical
               | analysis on the subject. Maybe you do have the same
               | faculty of reasoning as a LLM.
        
               | optimalsolver wrote:
               | I swear there's a personality type that simply can't
               | resist injecting their politics into unrelated
               | conversations.
               | 
               | It's truly fascinating.
        
               | int_19h wrote:
               | Materialism is rather obviously correct when it comes to
               | consciousness just based on what we know brain damage
               | does to humans.
               | 
               | But what does this have to do with problem of
               | consciousness or internal experiences? There's no reason
               | why the latter cannot be a material process.
               | 
               | As for the linguists... people forget these days, but
               | before the AI winter, there were many experiments trying
               | to build an AI by modeling the language. And what they
               | learned from it is that when you have enough compute and
               | just throw it at a neural net, you get better results
               | (there was even a joke about AI progress being inversely
               | proportional to the number of linguists working on it).
               | Which, to put it bluntly, means that our understanding of
               | language is still very lacking, and quite likely to be
               | fundamentally wrong some respects. I don't think those
               | people are in a position to judge at that point; not
               | until they figure out language enough to _program_
               | something that can talk as well as GPT-4 does.
        
               | monadINtop wrote:
               | There is zero understanding of the cause of internal
               | experience. We can't even strictly define what it is. My
               | contention isn't that materialism doesn't appear to be a
               | reasonable canditate for cognitive process, but that we
               | still have no idea HOW any of that happens. We may never
               | know.
               | 
               | People who claim that it is obvious that neural networks
               | and LLMs replicate the functioning of a brain, any brain
               | - let alone human, are just wrong. They are wrong to
               | assume that it is obvious that just making bigger LLMs
               | will somehow generate a being with the capacity of
               | internal experience, whatever that may mean. They are
               | wrong when they act like they have solved the problem of
               | understanding cognition by just forgetting to mention the
               | hard problem of conciousness. They are even wrong to
               | simply assert that neurons and neural networks are "to
               | do" with cognition. Hallucinogens and brain damage affect
               | subjective experience, and both of those things are
               | involved with the vascular system of the brain. Would I
               | be right to say the vascular system produce cognition?
               | Why doesn't anyone argue in favor of that view since it
               | is not too far off from the same reasoning?
               | 
               | Obviously, it's reasonable to assume that neurons are
               | somehow involved with subjective experience, most serious
               | neuroscientists and other researchers would hold that
               | same assumption. But you need to EXPLAIN how, preferably
               | with evidence. It is the burden of the one claiming they
               | have finally figured it all out to present a convincing
               | theory, or at least conjecture the path to get there.
               | Loudly and smugly asserting that your assumption is
               | correcter than the other people who have spent decades
               | working on the problem doesn't make the problem dissolve,
               | but it is especially irritating when the incentive of the
               | loudest people doing so is in the pockets of the
               | shareholders they are indebted to.
        
         | saintfire wrote:
         | Wish we could apply that logic to software. AI is in a magical
         | universe where we all pretend copyright isn't a thing just
         | because we don't like it.
        
           | ninetyninenine wrote:
           | You missed the point.
           | 
           | You view it as a war against human rights. Copywrite.
           | 
           | I view it as a lost war. The war against human meaning.
           | 
           | We're living in a bubble. Where we pretend it all still
           | matters and that AI will always be inferior to everything we
           | do forever and for all eternity.
           | 
           | All bubbles will eventually pop.
        
             | nonrandomstring wrote:
             | > I view it as a lost war. The war against human meaning.
             | 
             | If "human meaning" goes, all else goes with it;
             | 
             | Social media, search, education, ambition, creation,
             | innovation...
             | 
             | And along with that goes Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Apple,
             | Meta, Amazon...
             | 
             | There's nothing that exists outside that "bubble" of human
             | meaning,
             | 
             | Technology must preserve it, or technology dies.
             | 
             | Unless you are confirming what many have already said..
             | that digital technology has become death cult?
        
               | ninetyninenine wrote:
               | Human meaning won't go out the door.
               | 
               | It's just we will no longer be able to differentiate it
               | from machine generated content.
               | 
               | Machine generated content will become more superior and
               | more prolific such that it will cheapen human meaning.
               | 
               | You'll find people will begin clinging onto the last
               | vestiges of human created things like real painted art or
               | vintage sculptures like they do vinyl records and non-
               | digital books: An exercise in irrationality in attempt to
               | reverse a war already lost.
               | 
               | Perhaps that is what will save human meaning in the end.
               | Self delusion. We will deliberately ignore superior and
               | better content and tell ourselves that human works are
               | and always will be the best. That's a little of what's
               | happening in this thread already.
        
               | int_19h wrote:
               | Human art and appreciation thereof is already by and
               | large an exercise in irrationality, so I don't see why
               | this is necessarily a qualitative change. If people want
               | to imbue "human made" with a special meaning, that's
               | really no different than thousands of other ways we
               | pretend things into being every day.
        
               | ninetyninenine wrote:
               | Yeah. The difference is at one point in time we didn't
               | pretend, now we do. And therefore the lie we tell
               | ourselves is more obvious. Many people will see through
               | the lie.
        
               | nonrandomstring wrote:
               | Indeed. It's entirely arbitrary.
               | 
               | I think, in using terms like "rational" the grandparent
               | is confusing AI with science and presuming some kind of
               | objectivity. One cannot make any sensible claim about
               | what is "more superior" (the "more" is redundant by the
               | way) since quality of art and meaning is not arranged on
               | any cardinal scale. Humans get to define what is better,
               | and that's the final judgement. And should they choose to
               | define AI as "meaningless", then it's meaningless.
               | 
               | Now as to whether it will be "more prolific", that's a
               | another matter. Cockroaches are already far more prolific
               | than humans.
        
               | int_19h wrote:
               | I think they are arguing that _by already established
               | criteria_ , AI art can easily exceed human art in
               | quality. So we can of course rejig our criteria, but in
               | doing so we cannot help but acknowledge that the original
               | ones no longer cut it.
        
           | spywaregorilla wrote:
           | Do you want a world where google can sue your open source
           | project because it utilizes it's style of coding?
        
             | pbhjpbhj wrote:
             | Maybe? If they show you started with their code and
             | abstracted your code from their's mechanistically, then it
             | seems reasonable to say that you copied from their code.
             | 
             | If you, a person, read their code and imitated the style -
             | assuming it to be definable as Google's style and not
             | easily confused with the style of others (which would
             | suggest it was not distinctive) - then yes, why not? You
             | would have directly abstracted the essence of Google's work
             | from them.
             | 
             | They should be entitled to the copyright for at least 7
             | years, maybe up to at most 14!
             | 
             | Could you expand on what you mean by "its style of coding"?
        
               | ninetyninenine wrote:
               | I'll have ai randomly generate unique styles of code and
               | start copywriting it all.
        
               | pbhjpbhj wrote:
               | Copyrights only apply when there is copying; independent
               | production is allowed. As it's tort (mostly!), you only
               | have to prove they copied on balance of probability (in
               | jurisdictions I'm familiar with), but you still have to
               | show they copied.
               | 
               | Fwiw, copyright is named for "rights", legally
               | allowed/restricted activities. "Copywrite" is the verb
               | meaning to write content for a publication, content being
               | referred to as "copy" in this context.
        
               | spywaregorilla wrote:
               | Ok let's try a different argument.
               | 
               | You think the world would be a better place if Monet was
               | able to sue Renoir out of the impressionist movement?
               | 
               | Or if Spielberg was able to sue director's trying to
               | emulate the Spielberg oner?
        
               | pbhjpbhj wrote:
               | Impressionism has scope. Most people can tell a [famous]
               | Renoir from a Monet and would not think Renoir copied
               | Monet (in general). The devil is in the detail, courts
               | have too decide what is too close and what isn't, but
               | it's very much 'I know it when I see it', I feel.
               | Allowances to be made for distinctiveness.
               | 
               | I'm not a movie buff, I know a few films from Spielberg's
               | oevre, but I've never seen anything that I thought was a
               | copy of his style ... perhaps you have examples you feel
               | are so close that 'a blind man on a horse' would see
               | (sic) that they are copying Spielberg's style?
               | 
               | I like the change of tack though, would appreciate some
               | more push back.
        
           | astrange wrote:
           | Whether or not there are copyright issues depends on the laws
           | of specific countries. In general though it's a lot more
           | legal than currently legal things like Google Image Search,
           | because it's much more transformative than making thumbnails
           | of other people's images is.
           | 
           | But if you don't want it to be legal then just pass a law
           | saying it's not.
        
         | croniev wrote:
         | Human creativity _turns into_ a point on that curve. One
         | mission of art is to find a different dimension, out of the
         | curves reach, until eventually it becomes more common and the
         | curve can be fitted to it again. AI cannot think outside of the
         | box because it cannot think at all, there is no meaning behind
         | what it does.
        
           | ninetyninenine wrote:
           | >Human creativity turns into a point on that curve.
           | 
           | All human creativity are points ON the SAME Curve.
           | 
           | It doesn't matter what turns what into what into some point
           | on the curve or finding a different "dimension"
           | 
           | If you come up with an algorithm that can traverse that curve
           | you've found the algorithm for human creativity.
           | 
           | We are close, deadly close, to the end.
           | 
           | Especially given the fact that these AI algorithms literally
           | treat the problem as a best fit curve from a mathematical
           | perspective. Like the analogy I made is not even really an
           | analogy, it's the reality of how these algorithms actually
           | work.
        
             | mistermann wrote:
             | "We're at the tippity top of the mountain, but we're only
             | halfway up".
        
               | ninetyninenine wrote:
               | We're at the foot of the mountain. We only just started.
        
               | mistermann wrote:
               | Surveys of humans strongly demonstrate that they are
               | rather impressed with their mountain climbing
               | accomplishments thus far. The main shortcoming to
               | humanity is only the actions of those other people.
        
             | astrange wrote:
             | > All human creativity are points ON the SAME Curve.
             | 
             | That's what they said about mathematical proofs.
             | 
             | > If you come up with an algorithm that can traverse that
             | curve you've found the algorithm for human creativity.
             | 
             | And that's what they said about programs that take finite
             | time to prove whether or not other programs halt.
             | 
             | Neither of those turned out to be true though. (In
             | particular, because the curve you're talking about is
             | infinitely large and so you cannot compute on it in finite
             | time.)
             | 
             | Also, real world things cannot be reduced to their bit
             | descriptions because they have metadata even if their
             | descriptions are identical:
             | https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
        
               | ninetyninenine wrote:
               | >And that's what they said about programs that take
               | finite time to prove whether or not other programs halt.
               | 
               | An actualization of human creativity exists. Your brain.
               | 
               | The existence of your brain as a physical thing indicates
               | that human creativity can be actualized. It's literal
               | proof via existence.
               | 
               | It's the complete opposite of what you describe. We have
               | proof that it is 100 percent possible.
        
       | rulalala wrote:
       | Please is there anything like this for writing? I am serious, I
       | do write and want to experiment. Please would you have any
       | suggestions for me? Thanks for your time.
        
         | Kuinox wrote:
         | You can finetune a llama3 (not instruct) model on your own
         | text.
        
         | emporas wrote:
         | Writing is the simplest of all. Really trivial actually. I
         | create new styles almost every other day. See the latest entry
         | on my blog for a style i created last week, and this video [1].
         | 
         | Different styles can be created by taking advantage of the
         | context window.
         | 
         | 1) Take some random style of a writer, a blogger, or even a
         | website.
         | 
         | 2) Generate some examples you may like, and annotate them,
         | something like: Example Chapters.
         | 
         | 3) Put the machine to describe the text of Example Chapters.
         | 
         | 4) Select some keyword descriptions, and ask to imitate the
         | writer's/blogger's style plus the keywords.
         | 
         | 5) Generate some more examples, and delete the previous ones.
         | Now it will start converging a lot better.
         | 
         | 6) Ask the machine to use the Example Chapters as a reference,
         | and DO NOT REPEAT examples. Do not repeat has to be written
         | exactly like that.
         | 
         | 7) Generate 1 or 2 chapters of your desired text, by generating
         | 10 different drafts, and stitch them together by editing them a
         | lot by hand. That's plenty difficult and time consuming.
         | 
         | 8) As soon as you have 2 good pages of the text you like,
         | delete the examples you do not need them anymore.
         | 
         | 9) Ask the machine to continue the 2 Chapters it has written,
         | but it doesn't actually need to continue something. Just ask to
         | to write the story, but in the prompt it has to be asked to
         | continue.
         | 
         | 10) It is best the 2 Chapters of your story to have the same
         | characters with exactly the same names as the story you want to
         | write.
         | 
         | 11) When you ask it to continue, obviously you continue using
         | the same style of writer/blogger plus keywords.
         | 
         | It comes down to a lot of experimentation.
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33FcIL6tFnY&pp=ygUNb3duIHN0e...
        
       | numpad0 wrote:
       | imho the whole GenAI and artists and luddites thing is way
       | overblown and mis-characterized. The outputs simply aren't up to
       | snuff and people hates it. The negative emotional outrage comes
       | first, then the logical explanation ex post facto, everyone can
       | see that.
       | 
       | By the way, I have one of numerous back-burner ideas about the
       | GenAI rage problem - why isn't anyone trying to "close the loop",
       | like by attaching a gaze tracking and mood detecting device to a
       | human(like a camera pointed at such tool's developer) and chaos
       | monkeying the image with noise, maybe with a bit of help from
       | generative algorithms, until the human is satisfied? Then
       | operation log of that monkey tool can be put into GAN side of
       | diffusion or made into a new tag for embedding or something.
       | 
       | I think that saves everyone's time a lot. There shouldn't be
       | ethical concerns to it, at least to same degree that running A/B
       | tests on unsuspecting bunch is considered totally ethical and
       | morally acceptable.
        
       | mattkevan wrote:
       | I've been using generative AI in my art for a good few years now
       | and have a few thoughts on this.
       | 
       | Yes it's trivial to train a model on a particular style, I've
       | done it many times, including on my own art. It can make things
       | that look pretty good!
       | 
       | But it can't make anything great, not without a lot of luck or
       | creative input from the user.
       | 
       | It can make something that looks similar to a style, but it can't
       | explain what makes that style good, why it should be chosen over
       | another and the thinking behind it. An artist would have no
       | problem answering that.
       | 
       | As I understand it, generative AI is a sort of average machine,
       | in that if you ask it for a picture of a dog, it'll give you the
       | most average result for the prompt, model and whatever randomness
       | there is in the system.
       | 
       | Therefore, the lowest common denominators - stock photos,
       | Corporate Memphis, clipart etc are in big trouble. AI images
       | don't need to be great to displace them, just good enough.
       | Average.
       | 
       | However, for creatives, AI tools are a wonderful opportunity.
       | It's not everyday a brand-new medium comes along.
       | 
       | When photography arrived, it was possible to make a perfect
       | representation of something at the click of a button. Instead of
       | killing art, it unleashed a wave of creativity. Art no longer
       | needed to be about drawing pictures of things or people and could
       | get more abstract and experimental.
       | 
       | So with AI. It won't kill creativity, it's just another creative
       | tool. I've had a lot of fun over the last few years exploring
       | what it can do, and it'll be exciting to see how art changes with
       | its arrival.
        
         | mattkevan wrote:
         | As a follow on: One of my friends is a professional illustrator
         | and was concerned about the impact of AI on their work.
         | 
         | As a demonstration I trained some models on their styles. They
         | were worried right up until they saw the output. Yes, it looked
         | superficially like their work, but the slightest glance showed
         | it to be absolute crap. Anyone who would consider using the AI
         | version of their work over commissioning the actual artist
         | would absolutely get what they paid for.
         | 
         | However, they have found the models to be very useful in
         | exploring concepts and compositions, becoming an essential part
         | of their creative process.
        
           | GaggiX wrote:
           | It's possible that your model wasn't great, for my
           | experience, in the past I uploaded an AI image in the same
           | style of a certain artist to a website that organizes anime
           | images, someone tagged it with the artist's tag because they
           | thought it was made by him, also the image I uploaded got
           | much more "likes" than anything made by the artist in months,
           | and it's not like I'm spamming images, that was the only
           | upload. (I later removed the tag, of course)
        
             | astrange wrote:
             | Part of the reason for that is those artists are doing
             | commercial art, which means the "style" is imposed on them
             | by the customer/series character designs/etc, and they're
             | not putting their whole ability into it.
             | 
             | It's like how it was easier to automate office workers
             | because they just followed steps in a process and didn't
             | use creativity.
        
               | GaggiX wrote:
               | I mean, the artists you see on Twitter or other platforms
               | usually have a dominant art style, their own, but even
               | without changing the art style, you can still be really
               | creative with the composition, actions, and so on.
        
             | mattkevan wrote:
             | The model was good, it's just that the illustrations needed
             | to convey specific concepts and were created for particular
             | purposes, something gen AI is not good at without
             | significant guidance.
             | 
             | Superficial style is easy to replicate, the underlying
             | meaning and thought process is not.
        
             | Der_Einzige wrote:
             | Just call them what they are, "booru" websites. The AI
             | community needs to actually understand what these are and
             | why they just happen to give us extremely large, high
             | quality, well taged datasets. Yes, the AI community will
             | have to admit that coomers have been really good for AI
             | development. Yes that will rustle feathers.
             | 
             | A lot of AI researchers are either playing dumb or are
             | actually ignorant of this space. A lot of really talented
             | folks are operating in the shadows and should be at NeurIPS
             | and ACL presenting and bartering for VC funding rather than
             | posting anime waifus on /g/ and staying anonymous on
             | discord...
        
         | astrange wrote:
         | > As I understand it, generative AI is a sort of average
         | machine, in that if you ask it for a picture of a dog, it'll
         | give you the most average result for the prompt, model and
         | whatever randomness there is in the system.
         | 
         | "Generative AI" isn't a single technology. Text and image
         | generation don't actually work the same way (have the same
         | model architecture), which frankly makes it absurd we invented
         | them both at the same time.
         | 
         | But for text at least this isn't true; LLMs have fractal
         | complexity, which is why they work. ("Average" text would just
         | be the letter 'e'.) It's harder to say how diffusion models
         | even work.
         | 
         | It makes them easier to handle if you train them to act like
         | this though, but try playing with a "base model" and you'll see
         | all kinds of inhuman results.
        
           | pbhjpbhj wrote:
           | AIUI diffusion models of images are trained to make a noisy
           | image into an image without noise (reverse diffusion). Then
           | when an image is required, the system starts with white
           | noise, and maybe a prompt, and then iteratively performs
           | reverse diffusion - guided by the prompt - to produce a final
           | image.
           | 
           | You can enhance an image by [forward] diffusing it, then
           | feeding it to the NN created to perform the reverse
           | diffusion.
        
         | croes wrote:
         | The only must be good and cheap enough to convince management.
         | 
         | That's the main problem, not that AI is as good or even better
         | as humans but that it's considered good enough.
        
         | birracerveza wrote:
         | >It won't kill creativity, it's just another creative tool.
         | 
         | I've been banging on this drum since AI's inception, and will
         | continue do so.
         | 
         | Even if machines were capable of directly reading our mind and
         | outputting a perfect representation of exactly what we wanted
         | at the mere thought of it, it's still a mere tool bound by the
         | creativity of its artist, even if the artist were the AI
         | itself.
         | 
         | Art is dead. Art is always dead.
         | 
         | Did people complain when digital paintings became a thing?
        
           | aenvoker wrote:
           | > Did people complain when digital paintings became a thing?
           | 
           | Yes. A lot. All the same complaints. "It's low-effort
           | cheating. The machine does all the work. It's soulless. Art
           | requires a physical process. It looks like crap. It will put
           | 'real' artists out of business."
           | 
           | But then, they also complained loudly when _Impressionism_
           | became a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gentle_Art_
           | of_Making_Enemi... So, it's good to keep an historic
           | perspective.
        
             | mattkevan wrote:
             | As far as I can see, the whole history of art is a long
             | argument about whether something can be called art or not.
             | It's always art
             | 
             | As a recent example, Tron was disqualified for a visual
             | effects Oscar because it was all done on computer and
             | therefore seen as cheating, instead of being recognised aa
             | both an incredible achievement and a precursor for the next
             | 40 years of filmmaking. [1]
             | 
             | Imagine the howls when the first film with significant
             | amounts of AI effects is released.
             | 
             | [1]https://www.slashfilm.com/1177735/why-tron-was-
             | disqualified-...
        
         | Zambyte wrote:
         | > But it can't make anything great, not without a lot of luck
         | or creative input from the user.
         | 
         | That seems true of "non-generative" art too, no?
        
           | mattkevan wrote:
           | Yes, absolutely. It's why all the people saying AI is the
           | death of creativity are wildly off the mark.
           | 
           | Still needs an artist to guide it.
        
       | wormius wrote:
       | I only have a Ryzen 5 3600x and a 7650xt, and downloaded AMD's
       | LLM tool. It runs, and chats. I have thought about training it on
       | the 4500 pages of LJ entries I saved to PDF (I know I'd have to
       | extract the text, and then spell check that puppy. or not. Maybe
       | I should just leave my misspells if it's a doppleganger).
       | 
       | But it seems it'd take a few weeks of running nonstop to train?
       | Everywhere I'm reading says it's hard to determine the actual
       | time required.
       | 
       | I would think 4500 pages of text would be a large enough volume
       | to train. (assuming 500 words per page? If not more)
       | 
       | What's a good minimum number of blog entries/words to train a
       | thing. I would think the more the merrier, but I ain't spending
       | non-stop processing for weeks at a time.
       | 
       | I hate AI, I have no idea why I even want to try this, but... The
       | data is there and it's local to my machine not shared with
       | upstream, so I figure it'd be fine to mess with. Is my estimate
       | in the ballpark?
        
         | dmbche wrote:
         | If you hate AI, why do this?
         | 
         | If you just want to do it, why not just do it?
        
           | baq wrote:
           | Not OP but I'd personally would rather be an informed hater
           | instead of a believer hater.
        
         | codercowmoo wrote:
         | Depending on the finetuning tool you're using, you can just
         | start the training run, and then it shows you how long it'll
         | take. Like give it 5 mins to stabilise, then see the estimated
         | duration.
         | 
         | Axolotl is a good finetuning tool if you need one.
        
       | DeathArrow wrote:
       | The work of a good artist is much more than a style. You can
       | express ideas, tell stories, generalize, convey something in a
       | specific manner. If style can be reproduced with ease, the other
       | qualities of what makes art great are harder to reproduce by AI.
       | So if your art is more than just a style, you shouldn't be
       | worried about AI.
        
       | smarm52 wrote:
       | Unclear why this is relevant. The author has no credentials
       | except for a few pictures. And so it's unclear what rigor they
       | bring to this project.
       | 
       | https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/20/crosswords/wordle-review....
       | 
       | https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-96...
        
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