I think you're already getting at the "why", which for many situations you can view it as a leveraged investment. This site shows education as the biggest expenditure, and there's some argument about that resulting in an overall return on investment. If that is really the case then there's a large opportunity cost in not overspending.
The analysis is not always done sufficiently (or without bias) but that's the idea.
While not as bad, MLM style companies share a lot of the same techniques as described in this article. Seems like a lot of them hold people primarily by indoctrination rather than actual force
We're talking about accessible fresh water. If it evaporates and then rains over the ocean then it's lost, or as the article mentions, if it becomes contaminated then it's not longer usable as fresh water
Makes sense to me, the whole structure of the artist booth is about connecting with the person that made the art. Why would you want to see a booth showing artworks that weren't even created by the person in front of you but by an AI?
If anything, an AI artwork booth should be manned by the engineers that built and trained the image model and well as scraped the training data. Then they can meet all the people they non-consensually took artwork from :P
I don't think the question is really about whether AI art is real art. (But it could be about that, as I'm not familiar with commercial cons in the US.)
Some years ago, around the time I became aware that AI art is a thing, the artist scene around Finnish cons had already decided to ban it. And the reason was obvious, as the same people are also very eager to police others who might be selling pirated products.
They don't care legal constructs such as intellectual property. They don't really care about economic constructs such as copyright. What they care about are authors' moral rights. If the model was trained without obtaining a permission from the authors of every work in the training data, they think using the model to create art is immoral.
> What they care about are authors' moral rights. If the model was trained without obtaining permission from the authors of every work in the training data, they think using the model to create art is immoral.
Art is not created in isolation. It is a result of the artist's exposure (aka training), both intentional and incidental. If an artist wants an AI model to get permission before training on their work, then the artist should get permission from all the artists they were exposed to that shaped their artistic expression.
In what way? It certainly does not mean the same thing to a developing artist as it does in the context on an LLM, so I do not even know why people bother with this wordsmithing.
The problem is that if this argument is allowed to stand, art, as a human endeavor will shrink 99% or maybe even 100%.
Oh and this happens in a very underhanded way. Courts, governments and companies (including OpenAI and others) demand copyright is respected by humans. They impose great penalties when humans cheat, and then this happens:
If these companies were forced to abide by the rules courts impose on humans, they would have to buy billions worth of books. But of course, "that's not how copyright works". Of course, these companies ARE using copyright to avoid reciprocating:
So this is yet another "rules for thee, not for me" situation involving companies worth billions of dollars. A situation that's really hurting people's livelihoods ...
I can't disagree with your AI doomerism perspective. I firmly believe that AI companies should buy one copy of whatever work they use for training. While this won't provide the never-ending royalty stream on copyrighted material that corporations strive for, it would foster the mindset that AI companies must pay society in some way. And I truly think that if AI companies are going to train on all the knowledge in the world, their profits should go back to everyone in the world. i.e., LLM models are a public good.
I have an almost unshakable conviction that LLM-type AI systems should become a repository of all human knowledge. When LLMs give you an answer, you should be able to ask, what are the sources behind your answer? People won't do this, but curious, wanting-to-learn people will. Which leads to one of the important questions. How do you keep people curious?
But all these companies violated that on a massive scale. It's done. They're not paying. Oh, and when asked what the consequences are for people doing illegal downloading, ChatGPT helpfully answers:
> About $750 to $30,000 per copyrighted work
> Can go up to $150,000 per work if it’s considered willful
... it was definitely willful. And these are amounts that would bankrupt even OpenAI. But I guess only you and me will have to pay these sorts of amounts, not big companies ...
I don't disagree with either of you regarding the doomerism, but Anthropic just paid out the largest US copyright settlement ever, based upon their exposure to the liability of $150k per copyrighted work they faced.
I haven't gotten my $150k for one (like a lot of people, I wrote an IT book that chatgpt can 95% repeat sentences from), and nobody I know has gotten theirs either.
The settlement is for $3k per protected work of class members. Are you a class member? You should've been contacted by your publisher if you were. If you weren't in the shadow library, then you are not in the settlement.
People would say: I love when a person does that, it's cool to see someone's inspirations and participate in the process and journey of them developing their artistic talent. And I don't really care to be involved in an AI doing that
>If the model was trained without obtaining a permission from the authors of every work in the training data, they think using the model to create art is immoral.
Honestly, they aren't even that logical. Most of the anti-ai rhetoric is anti any usage, even that which is fully licensed.
I think that you can probably do some interesting things. Sol Lewitt made art that was just instructions to be interpreted by another human. But the medium needs to be the instructions rather than the isolated output of the machine.
>Why would you want to see a booth showing artworks that weren't even created by the person in front of you but by an AI?
I'd suggest people learn about Andy Warhol's factory where they mass produced "art." Art is obsessed with "thing-ness," that is, being able to hold and own the artistic object. It's why people without record players buy vinyl that they listen to on spotify. And the way I see it, the main problem with AI art is that (1) it's all digital, and (2) there hasn't been an artist willing to develop a model themselves in order to create unique pieces that exist in the real world.
Don't get me wrong, I think the visual arts are going through a shift that will rival the advent of the photograph, but we are at the birth of this new period. I think it's fair to say that we are in the "this is bad" period before new art movements using the technology start to emerge (e.g. photography), as well as art movements that move away from the medium (e.g. modern art). Art has always been in conflict between being about the idea and being about the skill to bring that idea to life.
I'd suggest people learn about Andy Warhol's factory where they mass produced "art."
Ditto for Picasso, and many artists even going back to the Renaissance when great painters and sculptors sometimes had apprentices finish or duplicate paintings/sculptures for them.
But this isn't that. AI is something else entirely.
I don't recommend using the Warhol argument. It's become a trope used by AI-über-alles people who have little knowledge of and often zero experience in the arts.
My entire point is that art is an inherent contradiction. Art can be anything. Fucking Duchamp’s readymades should make any concern about AI worthless. He was literally putting someone’s trash in a gallery and it was art.
The reason why artists are mad about AI is the same reason artists were mad about the photograph… they were selling a product like craftsmen, but calling themselves artists. Yes, there is a crisis for getting paid to be someone else’s creative, but there is no crisis in creativity. In fact, there has never been more freedom than now.
Wild that you claim others misunderstand art via an ill conceived attribution to "thing-ness", but make all of your arguments on the grounds of said "thing-ness".
Duchamp's R Mutt is an abstract commentary.
The actual vehicle of this commentary, the upside down urinal, is wholly arbitrary.
>Wild that you claim others misunderstand art via an ill conceived attribution to "thing-ness"
I don't claim others misunderstand art. I'm saying that art as a product that can be sold for income, where people want to own it, is tied to thingness.
>The actual vehicle of this commentary, the upside down urinal, is wholly arbitrary.
Yes. I agree. I'm generally confused by what you're trying to say here. I also know there are a many copies of Fountain... which again, demonstrates the concept of thingness in art I'm trying to talk about.
You typically can't hang a performance art piece in a gallery all day. You certainly can't sell a print to people at home. The fact that they care about the original instead of holding equal value to the print is exactly what I'm talking about. Digital creations don't have the same thingness, because you'd literally need to do something like get the original RAM that rendered the piece to identify it as "the original."
It seems you have abandoned your thesis in order to retain your belief that concerns about imagegen tech "are worthless".
Defining "concerns about AI" broadly as "is it art?" while obstinately denying the possibility for real concerns about imagegen tech: theft of intellectual property by the wealthy, environmental, economic, expressive, and on and on.
> I don't claim others misunderstand art.
> gp: I'd suggest people learn about ...
Is a passive aggressive way to say "you misunderstand this due to your ignorance".
> I also know there are a many copies of Fountain... which again, demonstrates the concept of thingness
> gp: Fucking Duchamp’s readymades should make any concern about AI worthless.
If anything this "demonstrates the thingness in consumerism".
My point was you are ex post facto conflating your opinion of the items in the gift shop with the named artist's own expression.
Ok but no one gets away with that type of art at comic cons. Also, people happily buy prints of digital artworks from real creators there. Peoples relationship with art at a convention is very different from the art that gets displayed at musuems
I mean, sure. I’m just saying you can make the same argument about the photograph, and people did. Technology changes what art can be. We should not be surprised that a new tech has come along and upset the apple cart in a very similar way, with a very similar amount of grumbling.
> This technique allowed him to mass-produce images, echoing the consumer culture he sought to critique and celebrate.
Critique, yes. Celebrate, wat?
I tend to categorize Warhol as an artist that if you hate their work you should love it because the point is to coerce you to hating it to lead you to the realization that the arc of factory mass production bends toward lowering quality.
I highly doubt Warhol used his chosen soup brand because he felt it was the pinnacle of soup and represented how even mass produced quantities can have excellence in quality.
More likely he was saying this piece is to art as this brand's product is to soup.
I'm old enough to remember when such arguments were had about 'real art' coming from pens, pencils and brushes, not programs. Took a good long time for 'digital art' became a category.
I don't think it did take that long actually? And I don't think it's even a good comparison. AI art vs human art isn't the same jump as physical media to digital.
There was also a brief moment where digital art wasn't cheating as long as you didn't use layers and the clipboard.
This too will pass. Soon everything is going to be rendered at 60hz in real time, and demands that everything needs to be rendered by hand will be as absurd as claiming every frame of a 3D game needs to be hand rendered in Photoshop.
I remember this as well, but I also remember those who thought that merely expressed their disapproval.
This time around the response as been aggressively adversarial. Not only do they disapprove of the new thing but anyone who express a contrary opinion is considered a target.
"I can vouch for myself and others - that we are there to just buy cool shit and not ‘connect’ with the artist."
Who is "we"? Art, to me, is about pouring your heart and soul into something in a way that AI can trivially emulate, which makes it dangerous when placed next to art that actually has a lived experience attached to it.
I can slap a prompt into AI and get some graphic design slop that to the untrained eye looks "close enough" to the vendor next to them that actually made the art themselves. This is dangerous and spits in the face of people who pour themselves into their work.
At best, put the AI art generators into their own little special corner. But don't put one-shotted AI art next to actual crafted human created art right next to one another and say that they're equal. The brush strokes are imaginary. That's a grift.
I think you should understand the terms as "toxic masculinity" as opposed to "positive masculinity". It's not saying masculinity is toxic. Or if you want, as opposed to "true masculinity" - reframing masculinity as a positive thing when expressed correctly.
Why do undesirable or desirable behaviours need a sex/gender label at all? Asshole behaviour isn't gender-specific. Maybe people should just focus on criticizing specific undesirable behaviours, and praising specific desirable behaviours.
If you replaced "males" in that sentence with ... well, let's be honest here, pretty much any other category, the statement would likely be deemed entirely unacceptable and the comment censored (ie [flagged][dead]) in short order.
Regardless of how the statistics for that specific set of behaviors break down my personal experience is that both the application and acceptance of such terminology (ie referring to various sets of behaviors which it might make sense to group together based on whatever metric) is highly selective in a manner that's convenient for the party expressing it. The statement is often true but the grouping superfluous, included only (seemingly) to push an agenda.
In this specific discussion, the traits labelled as toxic masculinity were as follows:
> You’re not allowed to feel things. Emotions make you weak. Just suck it up and power through. Bottle it up.
The person who most embodies these traits for me, in my life, is...my mum. I don't view them as exclusively toxic any more than I view them as exclusively masculine, either. Sometimes you really do just choose to hug your kids even when they were aggravating little twits five minutes ago and you're still mad at them, and that's a good thing.
> The group of traits often described by "toxic masculinity" are overwhelmingly displayed only by males, so... it makes sense?
Even supposing that were true, why does it make sense to invent and use a discriminatory label for a whole group? You just assert that without justification. Is that acceptable in any other context or for any other group? Do we speak of toxic blackness, or toxic femininity, or toxic Islam?
Crime is also overwhelmingly associated with race. Intelligence quotient as well. We don’t characterize race by statistical facts because we would offend the outliers.
I think it’s important to follow etiquette in common language rather then label entire minorities or groups based off of statistics.
There is a correlation between crime and race. Also Race and poverty. The causal association has yet to be determined but the correlative association exists.
But there is no corresponding discussion of "toxic femininity", or if there is, it is that discussion is framed as more "toxic masculinity" from the "manosphere".
It's a term used to apply guilt across all males to subvert any actual debate.
The term is overused. Females have extremely toxic behavior as well. But the term toxic feminist is not used to label them. It’s nowhere near as extreme.
It's strange. Clearly at some point society at large came to believe that the current crop of terms at the time was undesirable. Yet various modern analogues are treated differently.
Depends on what you mean by polite company, I think. I'm sure there are a lot of conversations among men, who are polite to each other, talking about women being on their periods or hysterical or whatever. Is that no longer the norm? My friend group doesn't do it but given the rhetoric we've seen on HN and elsewhere "locker room talk" is still a thing.
I don't think you'd need to be similarly selective about the phrase "toxic masculinity" at least on average. Hopefully you see the point I'm trying to make?
Of course it's also possible that I live in a slightly different bubble than you do.
I can also be used for derogatory connotations; Another example is for Smash Brothers specifically, the Byleth character's ultra move has a flat image of a character in their game and people call it "png sothis" (character name) to suggest that it's low-effort or not well made
It's dumb, but energy wise, isn't this similar to leaving the TV on for a few minutes even though nobody is watching it?
Like, the ratio is not too crazy, it's rather the large resource usages that comes from the aggregate of millions of people choosing to use it.
If you assume all of those queries provide no value then obviously that's bad. But presumably there's some net positive value that people get out of that such that they're choosing to use it. And yes, many times the value of those queries to society as a whole is negative... I would hope that it's positive enough though.
The analysis is not always done sufficiently (or without bias) but that's the idea.
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