Raw LLM Responses

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about AI art yet, but a Rush lyric comes to mind. "All this machinery making modern music can still be open-hearted Not so coldly charted, it's really just a question of your honesty" A lot of these "AI art bros", as we're calling them, seem to be lacking that honesty. Generating AI art is more akin to commissioning it from someone else than to creating it yourself. I think most people, if they were showing off a commission, would be quite up-front about the fact that this is not their own handiwork, this is a commission. But they don't seem to take the same approach with AI Art. There's nothing morally wrong with ordering fast food every now and then, but don't claim it as your own cooking or pretend to be a master chef for ordering it. Steamed Hams, anyone? Not to mention a diet of nothing but fast food is often horrendously unhealthy. Git yu some proper nutrition, boi. But as more of your own vision goes into a project and you have a greater degree of fine control over the output, you start to get more of an argument for claiming it as "your own work". The value of art doesn't come from the medium in which it's presented or the process by which it was made, but from what the artist is communicating to the viewer. Whether drawn by hand with a pencil or sculpted and posed in a 3D modelling program, both of those are perfectly valid art. I think that's probably what the next big leap forward will be for AI art: making better tools to control and manipulate the image to do proper iterative design, to make something you can more authentically claim as "your work". We are not there yet. I'm not sure yet what I make of the "AI art is here to plagiarise my style" argument. I can see the concern. But I'm not sure what makes the difference morally between an AI program studying your artwork to recreate it, and a human being doing the same. AI art programs have to scan millions of images from across the internet to learn how to do what they do, which some define as theft and/or plagiarism. But human artists learn to improve their craft by studying each other all the time, and nobody seems to get particularly up in arms about that or calls it plagiarism unless they specifically copy one style. Using one artist's work as a source of inspiration, alongside others, maybe to study how they handle anatomy or clothing or scenery or motion or whatever, seems to be generally accepted. Humans can study the real world around them alongside their studies of other artists, and real-world photography is often a large part of an AI's training data as well. The main difference I'm seeing with an AI is the scale. If an AI is being trained SOLELY on one artist's work with the express intent to copy that particular style, yes, I can understand the outrage. But as far as I can tell, most of these machine learning algorithms don't single people out - what they do is more akin to the first thing, where all the art is clumped together in a larger "study", so to speak. It'll be interesting to see how these AI Copyright court cases pan out. The technology is still in its infancy, it will evolve over time, and I'm sure our approach to and attitude about it will evolve with it. So far I've seen its potential as an inspiration engine and in "concept art" - early days of a project, making a rough draft to get an idea of vaguely what this thing is going to look like. But it lacks the ability to understand the world in the same way we do, it doesn't know anatomy or composition so it gets them wrong, it is a black box of Cargo Cult Thinking. And until the Singularity hits and we see the birth of true Artificial General Intelligence, I don't see that fundamentally changing. I don't want to see it replace traditional artists. Quite apart from anything else, I don't think it even can - in its current form, it needs real artists to give it training data. You could train it on a pool of other AI-generated art, but that would be effectively digital in-breeding and would not produce pretty results. I can see it becoming a tool like any other; just don't try to toss out the entire toolbox and replace it with this. Plus, I imagine that a lot of artists aren't necessarily in it for the money, but some of them are, and either way they still need money to keep doing what they do, it's only fair that they be compensated for their work. If AI art threatens their income and livelihood, then yeah, something needs to be done about that. And there's inherent value artistically and historically in preserving traditional techniques for the future, letting them sit side by side. 3D modelling software didn't replace pen and paper; we still have and still use both. Synthesisers didn't replace the Piano. The written word didn't break intellectual integrity in academic debate, as Socrates feared.