AI Created Image won TWAB AOTW (Destiny)

by EffortlessFury , Tuesday, February 07, 2023, 22:26 (436 days ago) @ Cody Miller

My worry about AI art is going to be about who controls the algorithms. A big corporation? No bueno. Open source and democratic? Now we are talking.

Not only the algorithm matters, the database for training makes a lot of difference too, both in terms of potential and ethically.

Not sure there is anything wrong with training databases ethically either.

Human artists literally do the same thing. You consume art in your field to learn and get better. I watched a bunch of movies to learn the basics of editing. How's that different than an AI looking at images to learn the basics of making one? In neither case did anyone give either me, or the AI permission to learn from them.

If you don't think an AI should be allowed to learn by looking, then you must accept that every human must get permission from every artist whose work they consume in order to learn, OR that a human be potentially forbidden to learn from a certain work of art - an absurd notion.

If you publish your work, it can be used in learning. Seems pretty basic to me. Curtailing that just creates logical and artistic absurdities.

The reason why it has always been okay is that A. It takes a considerable amount of time and effort to practice and apply that learning and B. Most people inherently develop a style that is unique to themselves. These two facts need to be taken in conjunction with one another. An algorithm completing this process in a fraction of a fraction of the time a human can, while being able to reasonably replicate the styles presented to it, is not the same outcome as before.

Someone could spend their life going through this process and developing their own style, which AI could now replicate with little to no effort. A human learning from that person's art style cannot conceivably replace them in the marketplace in short order, and it is still not likely to be similar enough that the original artist would be replaceable. Now, that is a much more possible.

Look at AI being used to reproduce people's voices. It is the exact same process and result for audible content as this is for visual content. Would you also say that by putting their voice out into the world, training AI on it is justified (whether on their speaking voice or a character voice they perform)?

All of this resides in a very blurry region of plagiarism, IMO. The human brain is a filter for the content they consume in the process of training their brain, which creates variety and does so over a long period of time (which is a limited resource that each of us has to spend).

One time, someone argued to me that, simply because they existed, they had a right (and almost a responsibility) to take whatever they could from the world (and its resources). Even if that meant making the future less sustainable for others, it was still right and fair for them to do so, even if their present existence depended on others not having behaved that way in the past. Is the response to that attitude to say, "well, we should just get used to people trying to take everything they can," or do we fix the loopholes in society that allow people to take far more than what is fair (to the point that others suffer)?

Technological progress comes, whether we like it or not, but that doesn't mean we should abandon any attempt at ethics.