The OatmealOct 7

Let’s talk about AI art.

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art

Show threadMark T. TomczakOct 7

@oatmeal Honestly, great take from multiple directions.

This weekend, I made a t-shirt and a logo for a nonexistant studio in about an hour.

How'd I do it?

Text layout in Zazzle's store and clipart in Canva. Didn't push any of the AI buttons; did definitely use someone else's drawing of a dog and someone else's image of an upward-pointing arrow. And someone else's fonts. And someone else's t-shirt printing machinery.

Because my goal wasn't to create any of that; my goal was to composite it into a mildly-entertaining seasonal shirt I could wear. And because it took an hour, i could do that between the things people in my life care about me actually accomplishing.

Enjoy making Clipart, loser.

Thank you! I have not aspired to more in this domain.

Show threadImpertinenzijaOct 7
@mark @oatmeal Nu'uh. What you've made is called a mashup aka a collage. And ppl have been doing that since there's any other medium to use and things to cut 'em up. Eventually you've decided what's going into your motive, you didn't let the stochastic parrot decide that for you or hit the button until it felt okayish enough.
Show threadMark T. TomczakOct 7

@Impertinenzija Thing is... I don't see much of a distinction. Collaging and using a tool like stable diffusion are

  • both constrained by the materials at hand

  • both shortcut a lot of hand-work (at the tradeoff of the previously-mentioned constraints; if the AI gets 90% of the way there I need to do the last 10%, and if I really can't find a clipart that works for this logo I have to freehand it, or change my vision to match what I can see in front of me)

  • both involve the creator's eye and mind to know when to stop instead of what to start with

I think these are on a spectrum that includes things like sprite comics and "You're The Man Now Dog" mashups.

(... maybe one of the reasons the mass negative reaction to AI felt so odd to me is that I was there for YTMND. We had fun with it and nobody considered it high art. I think AI generated sits comfortably alongside memes in that sense.)

Show threadImpertinenzijaOct 7
@mark Technically you're right, but the middle management types nowadays are pretty quick to decide that all those pesky ppl creating stuff just eat off their slice and do not create fast enough. And: I don't see YTMND killing jobs.
Show threadMark T. TomczakOct 7

@Impertinenzija Yeah, that's true and I don't know what to predict from it.

Cards on the table: I have never been and expect I will never be in the business of preserving people's jobs if the job is redundant. I'm just not in favor of paying ditch-diggers if a ditch-digging machine is 100% better in every way; I'd rather free them up from having to dig ditches, even if, in the limit, that means we pay people for existing (our ancestors foraged and shared and literally got food for existing; in an era of far more abundance I don't see why we cut ourselves off from what our ancestors had). If my job gets replaced? Oh my God how nice that would be. I'd go do something else.

What I have seen that I'm excited about is more people being able to participate in the creation of art (the final product) because they can have a machine do art (the intermediary work) that other people can do but they can't pay those people to do. I see people using machine-generation for things like first-pass storyboarding on a video project so they aren't spending time creating draft pictures of the scene that the audience will never see. And these aren't projects gated on someone not being paid to do that work; these are projects where, if the work wasn't free, it just wouldn't get done because the end-result isn't intended to make money so there's no money to pay a storyboard artist with.

It's lowering the floor on the cost of the process, and when you do that you always let more people in. Rarely do I see letting more people in as a bad thing.

Show threadImpertinenzija
@mark Well, if it was letting more ppl into whatever creative process there is I'd agree with you, but what I see is less ppl learning whatever craft there is in the businesses, meaning they end up merely pushing buttons, not being aware of the hows and whys and being replaced as soon as they're not useful anymore. At least for now. And feeding ppl just because they're there... I'm in fact quite into this idea, but I don't see an awful lot of politicians backing it. Do you?
Oct 7 at 6:40pmWeb
Show threadMark T. TomczakOct 7

@Impertinenzija

Do you?

I don't, and I don't see much future of the species as a whole if we don't fix that. The perpetual back-pressure of "We have this better approach that frees up people's time but instead of making everyone's lives better it lets this one guy afford a second yacht" is really slowing us down.

But I have to assume that's a fixable issue for the same reason people who are against AI making everything soulless have to assume they can talk people into not letting that happen.

Show threadImpertinenzijaOct 7

@mark We have to fix it.

AI at my workplace doesn't make things soulless but annoying. I write tech news. We have to rewrite test summarys at least once (da SEO gods hate duplicate content). So we have this AI tool. Last week I ended up rewriting stuff myself because it randomly adds empty paragraphs, sounds like an ad or doesn't rewrite shit. Or it hallucinates.

Hallucinating AI seriously hurts real ppl. Did you hear about that Deloitte thing in Australia?

https://apnews.com/article/australia-ai-errors-deloitte-ab54858680ffc4ae6555b31c8fb987f3

Deloitte Australia to partially refund $290,000 report filled with suspected AI-generated errors

Deloitte Australia will partially refund the Australian government for a report filled with apparent AI-generated errors. The report published in July includes a fabricated court judgment quote and references to nonexistent research. Researcher Chris Rudge alerted the media about the errors. Deloitte reviewed the report and confirmed some inaccuracies. The company agreed to repay the final contract installment, with the amount to be disclosed later. The revised report published Friday disclosed the use of Azure OpenAI in its creation. Quotes and references to nonexistent reports were removed but the report's recommendations remained unchanged.

AP News
Show threadImpertinenzijaOct 7
@mark And sorry for moving away from the arts. I don't think it will hurt the arts too much, either, not the stuff that matters anyway. But it will hit hard everywhere else.
Show threadBrett ROct 7

@Impertinenzija @mark Putting aside (briefly) the climate issues, my concern re: art is that new experienced artists will only come from those with enough spare money and time to gain art experience on the side. If humans stop designing greeting cards, billboards, music album "covers", illustrations on how to assemble your new desk, airplane safety brochures, or any other art job that pays the bills, how will new artists gain experience?

*Apologies to anyone in these example jobs, I'm ignorant

Show threadMark T. TomczakOct 8

@swiftone @Impertinenzija I think there's definitely a concern there. The story of "you can get a job in this industry doing ephemeral work that will pay the bills but not be particularly remarkable or fame-inducing" is a story that these AI technologies challenge and disrupt.

I don't think that ends artists getting experience; I've seen enough people upload their things for free on the internet to know that people do this because they like the way it feels to do something that means something to them, not because they're going to get paid for it. But it sure would be unfair if only the wealthy can afford to have the leisure time to do that sort of thing.

We need universal basic income yesterday. This is only one of the reasons.