Yanir Kleiman: You say "must be created by a human artist", but a human most definitely did "create" this art in a sense; computers don't just decide to create art by themselves. These humans "cheated", but the distinction between what is considered cheating and what is considered original art is getting blurry.

So, hey, over on Whatever today I have something important to say about "AI" art and my book covers, and why moving forward it'll be an actual contract point that my book covers have to be human-created. whatever.scalzi.com/2024/06/21/a...

A Note on “AI” Art and My Book Coverswhatever.scalzi.com Well, Goddamnit, it looks like some “AI”-generated art got onto one of my covers, specifically, the cover to the Italian edition of Starter Villain. Some (actual human) artists tracked …

You say "must be created by a human artist", but a human most definitely did "create" this art in a sense; computers don't just decide to create art by themselves. These humans "cheated", but the distinction between what is considered cheating and what is considered original art is getting blurry.

No one believes that with regard to the generation of the art. A prompt is not creation. That's like saying speaking your order into the drive-in mic means you cooked your burger and fries.

So writing a prompt is clealry cheating, but what about creating a composition and enhancing it using AI? What about retargeting or "content-aware fill"? What about rendering a 3D model and making it pretty with AI?

You... didn't read the article, did you?

I admit I missed the PS on the first read! But I still think there is merit in this discussion. I'm not saying that anybody using a prompt to generate an image is an artist, I'm trying to say that AI in general *can* be used to make "real" and original art.

No it can’t. It can be used to make plagiarism slurry, as it’s trained on copyrighted materials. Sometimes that slurry might coalesce into a recognizable image, but it’s not ever going to be art.

Yeah, AI can only make art that's derivative of something else, literally. That's what it's designed to do. It will never make anything that's better than what already exists, only something that looks like it but is different.

Nah. Wrong in every respect.

AI software can't create images without using pre-existing images from the net. If it is on an air-gapped computer with no access to other images, can it create anything at all? No. AI art is just visual Mad Libs completed by stealing pre-existing art and saying you did everything on your own.

I had AI summarize it for me. Did that count?

"Making it pretty"? The funniest part about all these guys so determined to prove that AI produces actual art (rather than very costly digital turds) is that they also think what it produces is good. It's not only that it wasn't created by an actual human; it's that the crap it spits out is ugly!

That account works at META and has 3 followers and one visible post which is sharing one of your posts. I don't that account read your article.

“Creating a composition and enhancing it with AI…” ah, yeah. It don’t work that way. AI can’t “enhance”, at best it can “fill”, cleaner enlargement of low-rez, or “expand the frame” (which never looks good for specific images as compared to general demos). Even the non-ancestral renders add noise.

It can definitely work that way, see this video. Definitely not perfect and you may not like the result (a matter of taste). But it becomes complicated to say whether the human artist created this image or not, would you agree? youtu.be/wA4MnJUT6kY?...

x.comx.com

It's a different way of providing prompts, along the lines of pose information and depth mapping. This is interactive inpainting, not "enhancement." So no, I don't agree. It's not complicated. This reminds me of demo videos coming out of Siggraph back in the late 90's early aughts.

They never do.

Yep, all cheating. Only possible by stealing ideas without attribution or permission from human writers and artists who enhanced their writing or made things pretty with their own skill and creativity

If I go to hire an artist and they tell me they're going to use AI to make the 3D model they did pretty or "enhance" the art, I'm going to go hire someone else who knows how to use the skills they spent all that time developing.

Why not just say you have no respect for artists who put in the work to learn their craft and you want unearned credit?

All of that is cheating and laziness. Either you didn't want to learn a skill or you didn't want to pay an artist. Every artist I know is keeping a blacklist of people they refuse to work with for knowingly using AI Art professionally. I am also keeping a blacklist of "artists" myself.

If you don't want to actually create and want to have a LLM create for you, that's fine, but the price you pay is you are not considered a creator. You'll also never understand how good it feels to actually create something.

Did Martin Nebelong create these images or not? youtu.be/wA4MnJUT6kY?...

youtu.be

It's the difference between driving a car and knowing where the taxi rank is.

I commissioned an artist to create character art for my and my wife's D&D characters. I gave her a 'prompt' of a very basic description and a bit of their vibe. She created the art all on her own. And it was awesome, money well spent and supporting human artists. I created nothing.

Bingo. Telling AI programmed by someone else to create an image isn’t drawing or graphic design or anything creative. It’s an Uber Eats order. And you get what you get.

“And I helped!”

And I heard this in her voice!

I hear it. I hear a little kid's countrified voice. And I'm seeing the box in my mind's eye.

That’s the best analogy I’ve seen thus far.

Speaking of drive-throughs: bsky.app/profile/wolv...

Remember how we told you the whole "AI Drive-thru" thing was a terrible idea? Well: Womp wommmmp. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Look, I'm all for removing AI, BUT... bacon-topped ice cream IS NOT A MISHAP. It's a happynstance.

You've never appreciated the effort I put into curating my McDonald's order, John.

Which burger chain has the slogan "Have It Your Way"? Because I'm going to go there, to fully express my culinary vision.

That was Burger King. Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, Special orders don't upset us.

Except now they do, because ANYTHING extra is extra, even the basics like pickles.

If you don't claim you comes the burgers yourself, just that you got the burgers for me, would I care about the exact source? Are there mystical qualia infused into human-operated pixels? "Prompt generated art generally looks terrible" is true, but so does most manual art...

To be fair, if your goal is "use the power of work delegation to support human artists," that's totally a fine goal! But I feel that assumption (as opposed to, say, "get the best selling cover no matter the source,") wasn't clear in the blog post.

This is such a perfect way to sun it up!!

That’s a good take. Very concise- well done and thanks!

Damn, what a fantastic analogy.

In this case the copyright page could tell the reader Cover design by ImagineAI who was told by John Smith (e.g.): "Draw me a humanized evil looking cat in suit and tie that stands in a well decorated office of a company executive."

The readers could then decide by themselves whether this effort is worth of praise or not.

It is commissioning art not creating it.

💯

thank you that's very stupid

"When you think about it there's no difference between cookimg food with modern implements and selecting the food i want delivered by doordash because in both cases i chose what i wanted to eat"

I wasn't clear in my previous post, trying to raise 2 different points in a short text: First, I meant that there was human intention, someone uploaded this image, I did not mean that it is ok. You can steal someone's work and upload it as your own and get paid all the same without the use of AI.

Second, some AI tools allow much more control than just a text prompt, and you could invest quite a lot of creative agency in an AI generated image. Then the line gets blurred between whether it is an original creation or not. Should we rate art by the amount of effort it took to make?

son you are not smart enough to have this conversation with me

Hey human artist with a 30 year engineering career behind him here, I used to build neural networks with deep learning and machine intelligence. Nothing is blurry. If you were a proper artist you would know the machine sucks at its job. If you were a proper engineer you would know it always will.

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