Ah, but I could just use Gunnhildr Evermantle instead.
I’d rather AI art be allowed because it’s a tool like any other. Does a sculptor get mad when a chisel goes electric and now all his years of hammer use and expertise are thrown out the window for a tool that can not only replicate his learned skills but also reduce the time needed for a finished product by many factors? Yes. Does he inevitably adapt and learn to benefit from the tool and is now able to create works of art that were out of his skill range before? Yes or he fades out to obscurity. As a business and a platform that bridges authors and readers together CoG forces authors to learn how to code and doesn’t have an GUI interface that is user friendly. I’m sure many ideas and stories are going unheard and unwritten because of this. Now a tool shows up that can help bridge the gap between a normal bloke and an author allowing the bloke to get his ideas heard and seen but it’s gatekeeped from him? His only other way is to dedicate time he doesn’t have to a programming language that he doesn’t understand?
I think you get where I’m going. Now for artwork like photos and hand generated created work. I can see the argument that the author should get paid and their work is their intellectual property and shouldn’t be used in training of an A.I. However if you in anyway shape fashion or form make your intellectual property available in a public domain as a demonstration or as free content then it becomes public and can be used by the public or a private entity however they choose to. If I take your digital artwork from a digital gallery and there’s no agreement made between me and you about non redistribution then how I am at fault for using a publicly available product released without any disclaimer? If you post it to a site that specifies they can sell data or share data with third parties or their partners and affiliates your artwork becomes their IP upon you uploading it. Read terms and conditions don’t just press I agree if you really have a concern or are worried about your IP.
Be smart about information security. Be smart about marketing. Or should I say be careful? It falls to you as a producer to manage public access to your property. Once public access is granted or once you give demonstrations of product don’t be surprised it’s reproduced or used as inspiration for competitors or for innovations that change your industry especially with digital data and products. Artworks, poems, etc. if your book or literature is reproduced or copied then notify your publisher who has paid for it not to be reproduced. Call or email the website that it was stolen from.
AI is an amazing tool bridging the gap between the average man and a professional allowing the average man to become a producer instead of solely a consumer due to lack of education or means. To not allow usage of a tool is just causing undue stress and headache on your artists. Imagine having to mow a lawn with scissors instead of a lawn mower. Both can be done but one is less hassle and leads to a happier production cycle.
Ok rant over.
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It is so sad see a totally lack of respect and love for the literature and art in general to consider that a machine putting random colours or words devoid of soul and without any context and that has been ripped off by force from the soul and graves of so many cultures and person.
Soon there will no art , there will no passion and all will be electronic monkeys pussing digital numbers trying to fake there is some feeling and point of view somewhere.
Art is dead when in a forum of A game publisher people are defending get rid of all quality, all artist to put a computeresque program to put words like a grinding matchine.
Sure enough there will be millions of souless word combos with no single ounce of creativity or surprise anywhere.
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When I started this thread, AI was a novelty and fun tool to use.
Almost 3 years later, I’m having to come to terms with the fact that AI will be used by idiots who don’t know how to properly utilize that tool to create or aid their work, but instead use it to cheat themselves into feeling like a “creative” while stealing from real artists.
Here’s how I feel is what happens when phonies find each other in the wild
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The “average man” needs to explore who he is as a creator himself. Generative AI isn’t going to shortcut him into being an artist or writer, just let him play pretend.
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This comment just isn’t it for multiple reasons, my dude.
First off:
That is just not the same at all. It isn’t changing the tool, because generative AI isn’t a tool. It’s a machine that does literally everything for someone and takes out the entire creative process other than putting in a single prompt. The actual equivalent would be a sculptor who has spent years upon years perfecting their craft to then be put out of work by a literal sculpting machine. Again, it still takes skill with an electrical tool vs. a manual tool. I’m pretty positive almost no tattoo artists wants to go back to a needle with ink on the end of it. They probably all prefer their mechanical tattooing device just fine.
Then they should learn. Learn how to write. Learn how to code. Learn how to do the thing you want to do rather than let a machine literally do it for you. Since when did we become such a lazy, do-nothing, sorry excuse of a species that we have to invent things to do the things we already know how to do in the first place? And I don’t mean menial labor, I mean like, creative things. Things that need a human element, like art or diagnostic sciences. Things that need critical thinking and compassion and fresh perspectives from colleagues.
Since when did people want to stop learning to do the things that give them joy? I had a friend who wrote a screen play. He wrote it in notepad then put it into an AI generator to format it into a screenplay. Reading the screenplay and watching shows made me want to write one. So I’m learning how to write screenplays. I got a software that helps me format it as I write it, that also helps me learn how to do it. Why is learning so goddamn hard for people nowadays?
Whatever happened to taking the time and energy to hone a skill? Whatever happened to wanting to support creative artists that actually honed that skill in the first place? Whatever happened to people’s want to learn?
I’m just so tired of this argument of AI being used as a tool. Because that’s not what you’re talking about. You want an AI to generate a prompt for you to base a story off of? That’s fine. Or to come up with a couple of names to get the imaginary juices flowing, so that you can come up with some different, similar ones? That’s fine. That’s a tool. Those are prompts. Hell, even an AI to help catch grammatical errors is fine, but even then you should fix those yourself instead of letting an AI fix it for you. Because that’s how people learn. That’s how people thrive. That’s how people create.
It takes time. It takes commitment. It takes passion. It takes work. It will always take work. The moment it doesn’t, is the moment it will no longer be art.
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They don’t understand. They don’t understand why someone wants to learning a language by herself only to read and writing. Or learning to draw and paint colour theories for artists.
They don’t compute that writing painting any art comes from the brain soul whatever you call it of a living being and get sublimed and abstract in a physical medium.
You can go to a prehistoric cave full of painting wall anywhere in the planet and understand the feelings of the people who lived there.
You can cry reading the story of a dead slave child from two thousand years ago.
Ai don’t generates copy words from real human beins with no intention
or passion and learn what combos generate a positive response. That’s it. Makes the readers and person who write a prompt a lab rat.
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Because if there’s no agreement made and no disclaimer, then you’re not allowed to use it. Being publicly available doesn’t put it in public domain, it needs to be communicated.
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I think it goes back to the fact that many of these people don’t, in fact, enjoy the process of writing itself. To them, writing is just the means to an end, a hurdle to overcome on the path to the goal of putting out finished content. They want the content. Not to go through the process of writing it.
It’s easy to come up with ideas, but difficult to actually form them into a story. So, AI allows to “cheat”, because now you only need ideas/prompts to feed to it, if even that. And I’m cynical enough to believe the result doesn’t need to be of a sky-high quality to be accepted by at least some people; it just needs to be “good enough”.
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And if they wanted the content only to amuse themselves, there’d be less of a problem, I’d believe…
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Yes. I have no problem with people messing with it for personal uses. But when you use it, and then try to put yourself shoulder to shoulder with people who put actual blood sweat and tears into their craft, and demand to be treated the same as them, it becomes a problem. Guess I’m a gatekeeping elitist 
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And “content” is exactly all it is, because what value does creative work have to a person with this mindset if not market value? The cynic in me says “nothing.”
To engage with it on any other level would require a degree of discipline, self-examination, and understanding that would be too daunting.
Creators make decisions and establish ownership of their work, staking a personal claim and opening a part of themselves to the world. When someone removes themselves from the creative process to that degree, what are they risking? What are they sharing about themselves or their experiences? It’s cowardly.
How can someone make art worth experiencing when they won’t make that most basic connection to what they’re trying to create? It betrays a lack of true curiosity and a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to actually create anything in the first place.
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It is not.
The ability to take an idea and turn it into a finished product is what makes a creator a creator.
Throwing that idea into a LLM and waiting for it to hack up the work of real creators until it can fit their products into your mold? That doesn’t count.
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When it comes to visual art, I’m far below average, and I’ve enjoyed tinkering around with Craiyon making for the first time in my life things that are actually pleasant to look at, such as my profile picture on this site. But the idea that anything I’ve made is of equal creative dignity to the works real artists have invested hours of time (and years of practice) into is utterly obscene to me.
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Yes, there are-- and they are blatantly clear. All you have to do is pay attention to what you’re reading. No matter how low an actual human author might think of themselves, AI has extremely readily apparent catch-phrases that it uses repeatedly. Its so-called “dialogue” reads like nothing that a human-written character would ever say. Its prose is so damned pretentiously flowery and over-the-top that it cannot be mistaken for being anything else.
I couldn’t give a shit less what Steam does, to be honest. They’re one company that seemed to be far too gimmicky for my liking when they first began offering indie game “publishing” services; I’ve never wanted to list anything will them and never will. Between all of the fake games I’ve read about them hosting (resource/asset flippers) and how they still charge people to list something through them, without having a quality assurance department to make sure they host actual, playable games, I view them as a good example of what to stay away from. Their permitting AI is one more reason I won’t use them for anything.
Not at all! AI is extremely easy for the human eye to detect, if you take a minute to read some of the horrible shit it churns out and compare that against even a third-grade human. The toddler’s writing will be superior to the stolen, generated word vomit in every possible way. And if a few people end up being butthurt because they can’t use software to help lie, cheat and steal their way into something they can’t do, then who cares?
I agree with this COMPLETELY. Hell, read about the stupid shit that Udio and another company has pulled as well, regarding the massive music heist those dumb fuckers pulled, just because they can. Their asses need to be shut down permanently and everyone in both companies need to be hit upside the damed heads with a lifelong ban from working on anything related to AI.
They are not “creators,” game developers, writers, artists, musicans, or anything else. They are feeding a bunch of keywords into something that bottom-feeds on the Internet to find things tha roughly match what it was told to, steals those things and then slams them together into something extremely similar to digital vomit.
They are not people who have learned (whether they are educated or self-taught) not to lie, cheat and steal everything necessary to churn out junk. They don’t want to have to put any time or effort in developing a new skillset, since they have the ability to churn plagairized, effortless junk out far more quickly and soullessly than what anyone with the relevant skills can do.
I absolutely disagree with you there. AI generation does absolutely nothing to allow people to gain any sort of education or talent. All it lets people do is hedonistically engage in instant self-gratification and delusions.
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I totally agree with the sentiment, I have seen many amazing works be created using AI and overall many people are more involved in the creative process, I wager they’ll be incentivized to learn more about the art both involving tweaking the models and traditional art. The lora scene and small local LLM finetuning is legitimately crazy at this moment with the speed they are going.
And this is just the beginning too, the current model capabilities are still limited by the big companies, but they are pouring a lot of money into this, researchers aren’t just going to quit even before neural net is a thing so it’s not going to be any different, if this is just another AI winter like the one we got through, the models will still improve, even if it’s another 10 years, I honestly get the sense I was born too early.
This just keeps bothering me. I think this idea that AI is somehow “leveling the playing field” between people is most distressing to me.
Like, I’m a pretty average writer (and I’m working on it!), but I don’t think the success of someone who is further along in their craft is somehow unfair to me and something that needs to be rectified.
If I want to be a better writer, I should continue making time to work on my writing. That seems so obvious to me: if I don’t know how to do something, I will find a way to learn how to do it. There is nothing “gatekeeping” me from being a better writer. Nothing is “gatekeeping” me from being a writer at all. If you want to be a writer, write. Keep writing.
The only thing stopping someone from being a writer is not writing at all (and that includes using generative AI instead of writing).
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Making something available for non-commercial use doesn’t mean you lose your right to restrict its commercial use. “If you publish it in any form without charging for it, you lose copyright” just isn’t true. See for example the license terms for the coding language you’re bashing.
You’re absolutely right that artists should read the fine print of sites where they post their art – but the core debate isn’t over art whose license terms allow it to be used for third-party commercial purposes, but over fair use of copyrighted art, where its commercial use would usually be constrained by copyright.
The web is overflowing with material I can look at/ read / listen to for free but which I could be sued if I tried to copy and sell. The crucial question is whether training AIs on this material is fair use or the equivalent of copying it (fuzzily, with plausible enough deniability) and then selling it. Your post obscures this.
I couldn’t disagree more. Sometimes it’s obvious…but it shouldn’t be a surprise that a massive technological push oriented almost entirely around passing the Turing Test (the original sin of AI research, but that’s another discussion) regularly produces material that could plausibly be written by a human.
I work with people here in Nepal who use ChatGPT in their work (trying to get them to rely on it less, and use it critically, since telling them not to use it at all would be pointless). The idiosyncrasies of AI are not, in fact, easy to distinguish from the normal range of idiosyncrasies in their writing. Anyone who claims they can tell with certainty what’s been written by AI is mistaken, and mistaken in ways that can easily lead to slander and creating a market hostile to less fluent, more idiosyncratic authors.
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Of course, if the author has actually put it under CC0, then it’s fair game.
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It bothers me as well.
I don’t have musical hearing. I don’t have a singing voice. Even if I work on it really, really hard, I’m going to only end up mediocre to good and not exceptional. You don’t see me showing up to a singing competition with an AI voice program arguing that it’s just me “leveling the field”.
What happened to acknowledging one’s strengths and weaknesses? What happened to the idea that some things require, and are worth, effort? Effort is what makes a craft worth it. It’s the ability to look back and see how much you’ve improved. AI will not give you that. It will not make you get better at anything but using AI.
A writer can be a writer anywhere. You can have no access to your PC, phone, internet, and still write. If you rely extensively on AI for your writing, take it away and you’re nothing. The gap is still there because it was never actually bridged.
Addendum since I mentioned AI voice programs: tinkering with UTAU doesn’t make me a singer. Guess what all these people working with Vocaloid/SynthV and the like are called? Producers, not singers. There’s a place for them and the people who enjoy what they do, but they aren’t singers. Same goes for AI content. You might be a “producer”, but you’re not a writer.
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