battlewraith

This is a Ted talk from Dr. Heather Zheng, one of the researchers behind the development of Glaze and Nightshade, free applications that have been developed to thwart AI scraping on people's creative work. This is a good discussion of problems posed by generative AI and the limited options artists have in the face of large corporations assimilating their creative expression.

I don't think that anyone is making the argument that propaganda is a new thing that came into being with AI. And the fact that people have fallen for propaganda throughout history is in no way an argument that propaganda or misinformation campaigns are somehow ok or not something we should worry about. The ease and accuracy with which this technology makes the problem worse is something that merits action. One way of addressing this issue is requiring AI image and video generation applications to watermark content in such a way to make it instantly apparent that the thing being shown was generated via AI.

I don't have any condition like that and despite being able to draw reasonably well I would not be able to sit down and draw my family members. Most artists don't just sit down and draw something directly from their mind. Most people do sketches, preliminary studies, work from reference, etc.

And the extent to which human societies have progressed has largely involved fighting against these things. The fact that AI technology lends itself so well to propaganda and misinformation makes those issues more of a concern, not less. It's gasoline for the fire. Imagine someone built a robot that randomly started killing people and someone shrugged and said "well we've always had murder."

I was out of town for a month, so didn't see the last two episodes until a couple of days ago. There were a lot of things I liked about the show, but I think it suffered from everything being sort of shoehorned into this Peter Pan theme--to the extent that interesting issues, characterizations, ideas, etc. were just overlooked or discarded. My main gripes: --I don't buy that these hybrids would remain childlike for long. I think they would develop really quickly and in ways that would probably seem unexpected or counterintuitive to the technicians. The closest thing we got to that was the character that became convinced she was pregnant, but that wasn't allowed to play out. There's also no explanation why Wendy develops super hacking skills and the ability to talk to xenomorphs while the others are hanging out throwing pebbles in the pond--other then keeping things in line with the Peter Pan motif. --Nearly every human or humanoid character in the series possessed the self preservation instincts of a potato. It's one thing in the original film when you have a group of space truckers encounter an alien, while being mislead by an android. It's another when you have trained people who know they're dealing with dangerous lifeforms exhibit sustained incompetence in dealing with them. --At the start of the series, everyone is speculating that the hybrids will lead to great discoveries such as faster than light travel. By the end, Boy Kavalier tells them "you're just floor models!" Wtf? By the end of the episodes, I really didn't find myself rooting for anyone with the exception of eyeball creature. I do think it's interesting that the people ultimately responsible for the situation are trapped at the end. It could be interesting to see them have to put their heads together and think of a way to turn the tables on the hybrids. However, the genius made stupid decisions throughout and I don't have faith that the writers would actually redeem him. I was also convinced that Kirsh wanted to end humanity, but I guess that's not the case. It did inspire some dog costumes this year:

Why are you posting this stuff here instead of the AI art thread?

If it was identifiable as their distinct creations, yeah they or the IP owners would expect compensation --hence rules in this game about using copyrighted characters. Beyond that, this argument is just silly. Nobody owns genres, despite the fact that they may have been popularized by certain creators.

This is a weird argument. People get sued for copyright infringement. You can look into court cases and see what types of things constitute infringement. A style or technique alone is generally not something that an individual owns (eg. Monet doesn't own impressionism).

You come across as someone who doesn't understand art production or automation in this context. If I crop something, either physically or digitally, I'm making a decision and taking action on it. Digital work is definitely more flexible, but so what? You think artists don't make changes on physical paintings or drawings? You're fixating on one aspect of the process of image making and thinking that makes it equivalent to AI, that's ridiculous. You give AI some tokens and it gives you results based on what it's model thinks those tokens mean. You have no hand in the actual image making. You can make all these inane comparisons all day long but it's pretty easy to demonstrate the difference here. If you can't draw at all--Photoshop is not going to help you. All those layers and undoes will not make a difference. But you could go to Midjourney and tell it to make a portrait in the style of Norman Rockwell and it will do just that. The scraping involves breaking down the formal characteristics into a kind of vector math that is associated with tokens and filtered through a model. It's actually nothing like how a human artist actually learns and it's completely contingent on existing work that people have done. The AI doesn't ever learn anything and it can only be derivative because it's doing a pastiche of datapoints from it's dataset. Non artists trying to defend AI scraping don't understand the difference between that and a human being having influences.

Non-destructive editing is not automation. The only thing that you mentioned that would qualify would be auto saving, assuming you were using an application set up to do that. Undoing something you don't like is automation...really? So my pencil is a form of automation because it has an eraser on the back? Computers run automated processes to execute code. That doesn't mean that non-AI digital art applications are automated to create art or do editing. Any more than the gears that automatically turn on a bicycle mean that it's self-propelling. AI is bad for artists, actors, musicians, etc. It robs people of the benefits of actually developing artistically instead of having something do the work for them. Fortunately it's not about what I deem acceptable. Most creatives hate it and it cannot function without scraping their work. Even non artists are getting tired of the slop and fake videos of cute animals bouncing on trampolines, etc.

Both would be examples of me editing a photo. Neither are automated processes. Same with art. I can draw on a piece of paper. I can draw on the computer as well. Neither case is automation.

Wow, as someone who has been using Photoshop since the 90s, I didn't know it automated art and image editing. Maybe you can point out the hot key that will tell it to do my work for me, I must have missed it somehow.

Compensation for artists has been an issue for a long time. The concern with AI is not simply about compensation, it's about your creative output being used to train an automated process that is intended to replace the need for people like you. Most anti-AI people aren't focused on blaming afaik. They are just trying to keep AI content out of their communities and are focused on supporting creative people and not tech companies. Fallacious comparison. Technological development leads to specific goods and contingent services becoming obsolete. The type of AI being discussed is an automated process that seeks to replace the creative labor of human beings in general (ironically by scraping vast datasets of human creative output). So the logical extension of your statement is "no one mourns for the creative people."

This is one of the craziest AI takes I've ever read. The anti-AI crowd are mainly artists. They are the ones who actually create things for the society. And they actually do have a plan--don't indulge in this garbage. Try to protect your work so that it isn't laundered through an AI process that some company will profit off of. Etc.

The majority of the “good” reviews I’ve seen said something like “it’s an awesome album that was released with a movie.”