AI Generated Art Discussion
Saturday, March 18, 2023 - 04:14
i am fascinated by AI art, and would love to hear opinions on the tech, the licensing issues as far as web scraping that's used to create the datasets, etc.
so i made a thread to talk about it. thoughts? it's certainly a useful technology, but the ethics (and as of yet untested legal waters) of using datasets that are derivative of copyrighted material are an interesting subject, as is the technology itself.
thoughts?
thing is though, we kinda "humanize" these algorithms by calling them ai. they are not artificially "intelligent" so much as they are algorithms trained using real people's creative works. you can study rembrandt, whereas a dataset that "learns" what elements of art are reminscent of rembrandt doesn't "know" anything.
take this https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/70USRzX6Jb2rrNOIoq3l for reference. no prompt engineering, just "boticelli's birth of venus"
the dataset knows what that painting is. it doesn't make something in the "style" it attempts to reproduce the actual painting.
thing is though, we kinda "humanize" these algorithms by calling them ai. they are not artificially "intelligent" so much as they are algorithms trained using real people's creative works. you can study rembrandt, whereas a dataset that "learns" what elements of art are reminscent of rembrandt doesn't "know" anything.
There are some pretty strong arguments that this is fundamentally no different to what actual humans are doing when they learn from the things that they see. AFAIK there are humans who have "exact" memories and can exactly recreate scenes that they have seen - Mozart could famously do the same thing with music, even after only hearing it played once. So the "AI" is not much different in this than a rare kind of human.
It's not really worth bothering to argue whether these things are "intelligent" or not - our idea of what "intelligence" really means is changing every day right now specifically because these things exist. We have to try and learn to live with the existence of this technology without creating a dystopia, and that's the only thing that matters.
Anyway, I came here to say that MedicineStorm started a more recent thread on the topic which had some really long and detailed replies in it, so there should probably be a link to it here! I'll add a link in this post if I can find that thread again.