AI Art Generation: Beneficial or Problematic?

Started by Lyndis, November 21, 2023, 12:17:44 AM

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GloomCookie

I think AI has the potential to disrupt major industries in ways that I'm sure not many people are thinking about. For example, if they can make deep-fakes of real people... why not make deep-fakes of fake people? Think about the future in which AI actors and actresses are used to produce movies, with everything from their voices to their actions being directed by AI. The models are built using an amalgamation of different people until they produce the perfect archetype for that genre, and then they have the AI build essentially any kind of movie they want. No longer are the movie studios in months or years long negotiations with the Screen Actors Guild, but instead they can produce a movie whenever they want using an actor or actress that never, ever grows old unless they need them to, and can still produce a movie at any age they need the protagonist to be a hundred years from now.

Generations of producers could be involved with a particular 'faux actor' since everything is done via computers. People watch these because unlike a movie requiring some expensive actor, they can devote the special effects necessary for a fraction of the cost. You think I'm kidding, but... what happens if Pixar decides to do this with any of their animated films? Toy Story was 100% computer generated, and it was only because of voice actors that the film wasn't 100% artificial. Now what happens if, a hundred years from now, the copyright on Tom Hanks' voice runs out and suddenly we get the next Toy Story that uses an AI fake voice to bring Woody back to life?

It's not too far off even with the technology of today. It's shocking how far programs like Blendr have come due to people animating countless porn parodies of films, so much so that you could almost watch films made with Blendr and chart what year it came out by the graphical fidelity. Couple it with AI voice, and suddenly you have yourself an exceptionally powerful tool in the hands of the average person.

This will be both good and bad. Imagine the backlash the first time someone like AOC, already on a lot of Republican's shit list for a laundry list of reasons, suddenly having porn parodies of her made (and there are already some out there) and released to the public prior to her next campaign season. Imagine if Sarah Palin, who already had people like Tina Fey impersonating her on TV, having deep fake nudes released by some angry Democrat because how dare she be hot and run as a Republican? These are the things that will absolutely ruin lives.

But there's also incredible potential for good. Imagine some teenager sitting in their bedroom putting together a short animated film using AI tools and voice bots to produce a film that gets them some recognition, and they keep at it. In their twenties, they go to film school, learning the structure of movies and figuring out what works and what doesn't, learning formal AI tools and such in class and applying it to their work, and by the age of 30 has produced his first full length film and released it as a self-published work similar to self-publishing books today. It would be incredible seeing the potential that could come out of this as entirely new genres we can't even imagine come from this.

So yeah, there will definitely be good and bad, and it'll take a lot of people putting their heads together to figure out how we're going to navigate this road going forward, but I do think AI has the potential to do a lot more good than harm, even with the bad actors out there doing horrible things.
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Zaer Darkwail

Overall, any tool, technology, or discovery can be used good or bad all based on people using it. Bad actors have turned many beneficial things into harmful things over the existence of humanity overall. AI is one such milestone and tool introduced in our era and we are in front seats to watch it be born and evolve in its early stages.

Besides art AI affects majorly labor-driven industries and workplaces; already Amazon has robots doing inventory tasks in storage houses. Soon robots driven by AI can be flipping burgers in fast food places and long run even restaurant chefs are replaced by AI. Ofc these things are not yet possible but the rate and speed how human civilization now advances in tech it could be seen in our generation.

With this comes the huge big question; what works humans can do that AI cannot do? Not that many, and there is lots and lots of people on Earth who need jobs and income to get money to get by. This is the reason why all major AI developers press on governments to develop and already establish universal basic income. This works similarly to how some countries in the EU have basic income for those who are unemployed but not retired yet. But it's working without the caveat that you need be actively search for work; you get the basic income just by registering and cash flows in to ensure you can buy food and pay bills. Basically, you can live without ever working in your entire life. It would also lead education to be free as well (basic one anyways, albeit in Finland example higher education is free as well so long you can buy books/supplies yourself and get a discount for those as a student).

As an alternative to that, it will not be pretty at all what the consequences will be. Starvation, medical needs, and survival mode kicking in for lots of people can turn them very desperate and violent.

GloomCookie

Since we're discussing UBI, I thought I'd share this video.

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Zaer Darkwail

I say sorry in advance for this going a bit deep to a side subject (albeit it relates to AI Art as we are discussing AI in general now), the problem with UBI is who is going to pay for it. The tax route definitely would not work, nor the government printing extra money cause it would cause inflation or even hyperinflation which would be catastrophic to the economy.

But if not by tax, the government needs to pay for it but how? Simply cutting much of expenses or bloating in their own internal cost in running their systems and investing their existing tax income differently. Ofc what they need to cut is their own kind of hydra to deal with, more so some countries aren't as wealthy as some others (and there is ofc local economy where need to take consideration of local prices in goods to determine how much UBI value is there compared to US). Or they run things differently; for example US has schooling and prisons run mostly as businesses run by entrepreneurs (there are some government funded but they are a minority). In Finland example schooling and prisons are paid for and run by the government itself.

US gained a bit over 5 trillion in taxes, so UBI would take half of that with present tax rates. Tax revenues go for government activity (salaries and infrastructure maintenance) and for goods and services for US citizens. Now salary cut could work but likely not be enough. Infrastructure maintenance is public facilities and transport, which need improved a lot to cut any extra expenses from those to gain more revenue to spend to UBI.

So, overall making UBI itself a reality needs major improvements in how governments are run. Regardless, even if UBI cannot made into reality it does not erase the problem which is avoidable but rather an eventuality in the future and it's better it gets addressed now before the crisis is already happening.

MightyMaiden

We're going well wide of the original topic here, but UBI has already worked in innumerable test cases in a wide swath of countries including local-to-me tests in Canada where people I know had their lives directly improved by it until parties in power changed and the programs were scrapped. (yep I'm bitter)

One of the major benefits of UBI is minimal management overhead compared to existing systems. Huge numbers of expensive-to-manage welfare and low-income support systems can be eliminated and condensed into the UBI program which while perhaps not a 1 to 1 cost replacement, can certainly offset UBI costs dramatically rather than existing on top as an additional cost to the economy.

Of course, if a country already lacks any form of welfare or economic protection for its most vulnerable, then UBI is equally a non-starter, but wealthier nations need to lead by example.

Of course, this hardly relates to art AI or otherwise since a skilled artist who's able to earn a living income for their work is relying as much on their business acumen as their technical ability. Artists, as with many fields make money by being known, by skilled marketing, customer management, and value adds, etc. The most qualitatively skilled artists aren't necessarily the most successful, the ones who can sell themselves and their products are.

In fact since AI art has been for the time being determined to be uncopyrightable, selling it is highly problematic as there is nothing to sell, given that when selling artwork in the modern age, outside of physical artwork, the rights are really what are being negotiated and currently AI art has no rights available to it to negotiate.

Zaer Darkwail

Indeed, a pure AI product has no copyright protection and copyright is where money comes in (and protects your income) in the artistic field. Only if AI creates something and is then edited by an artist or skilled image editor, thus including 'human effort', it then gains copyright protection.

In my vision, AI Art can be useful in a corporation setting in producing raw ideas and rough work sketches faster. Or help multiple artists working on the same project and brush all their work with AI program to 'unify' the look of the work to be nearly similar to each other despite different styles the artists possess (like in animation or comic, as usually, artists of different styles need to have period training themselves to specific style so workflow and quality are same; with AI it can be skipped entirely possibly the training period and jump right into production phase).

When comes to freelancers; I view AI Art generator to be a useful tool that can help create quick works that artists can then edit and redraw to meet their own quality standards for the final product.

When comes to non-artists; I have already seen already trend in tabletop gamers using AI art generators to create their characters or NPC's or images for settings. They do not aim focus to on generating income or money; just have fun with it. As I myself use AI Art generator for fun, I find actual joy when after several prompts and tests I achieve something that looks beautiful, albeit it's a random chance but still over time I have through experimenting grown more competent in getting desired results faster.

It may not be true art nor I would call myself an artist, but it's a skill regardless which can improve and I find enjoyment result of hard work in using the program which can sometimes go in whacky directions. But this does not diminish for joy of seeing real artists working in art programs and it has inspired me to try to spark my own creativity using digital tools to create art, but continue still play around AI Art generators as maybe in a year or two I use digital tools to use my earlier AI experiments to be drawn properly.

I do understand that the theft of art; basically taking an artist's public work to train a digital program and then make a profit from said software is wrong and should addressed for sure (as you cannot take artist's public work online and place into book cover, I view it same deal as AI uses the art as reference to function and provide paid service). But I do not understand (nor accept) otherwise demonizing AI Art generator users and treating them as thrash for using the software.

MightyMaiden

None of the generative AI models I use are for profit. None of the training I have done using images is for profit. I do all my AI generation on my own home PC(s) using freely available open-source products. 

Interestingly while we complain that these companies are using our data to generate new products without paying us (a value which would be with fractions of a penny based on any individual work's value to the greater whole), the entire business model of search engines is the same. They ingest our generated data, more or less in the same manner using robots crawling the web, then return their own, monetized product, based on that gathered information we generated. (News companies removing themselves from Google's monetized platforms, for this reason, have almost universally discovered their mistake and come back. In Canada, the ridiculous solution was to put media companies onto a UBI system, but that's a different rant)

Why is it that few complain about this? Is it simply because individuals are already making money off it to have their livelihood stolen from them? I think companies like Ask Jeeves and AltaVista would argue otherwise.

Now I can't speak for LLM models like chat GPT, but if you think you can exactly reproduce a work by any artist whose work has been used as training material, I say, good luck, and more power to you as you have figured out how to reverse engineer not only the PRNG system, but the entire maths involved in creating diffusion models. Sure you can complain that they're mimicking your style, but then so are folks I can hire from fiverr.com to rip off other people's work.

Legislation should be used to stop bad actors, things like deep fake porn and other deliberately malicious works, are abhorrent REGARDLESS of the technology used to implement them. Regulating technology just means your regulations are out of date before they're implemented. The AI process I use to create my character art today is already wildly different from that which I used 6 months ago.