First off, sorry if this is the wrong to community to post to - I’ll move it somewhere else should it not fit the community.
My best friend quite often is a contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian, I feel like. Discussing politics, veganism, the problems with using Amazon, what have you, with him is nigh impossible because he insists on his opinion and won’t budge. I feel like he just feels superior to other people, or at least to me, in a way that he just won’t change his mind, doesn’t hear other sides, and argues for the sake of arguing.
Now, in a recent discussion, I asked him if he knew why images aren’t displayed properly in my Firefox-fork browser (Mull). He gave an answer and asked why I would use a custom browser instead of Firefox itself to which I responded that it’s more privacy-focused and that I didn’t like Mozilla’s implementation of AI in their browser.
Long story short, it devolved into a lengthy discussion about AI, how the fear of AI is based on ignorance and a lack of knowledge, that it’s fine that AI is used for creative projects because in most cases it’s an assisting tool that aids creativity, doesn’t steal jobs etc. essentially that it’s just a tool to be used like a hammer would be.
What pisses me off the most about all this is that he subtly implies that I don’t know enough about the subject to have an opinion on it and that I don’t have any sources to prove my points so they’re essentially void.
How do I deal with this? Whatever facts I name he just shrugs off with “counter”-arguments. I’ve sent him articles that he doesn’t accept as sources. This has been going on for a couple hours now and I don’t know what to tell him. Do you guys have sources I could shove in his face? Any other facts I should throw his way?
Thank you in advance
Edit: A thing to add: I wasn’t trying to convince him that AI itself is bad - there are useful usages of AI that I won’t ignore. What I was concerned about is the way AI is used in any and all products nowadays that don’t need AI to function at all, like some AI-powered light bulbs or whatever; that creative jobs and arts are actively harmed by people scraping data and art from artists to create derivative “art”; that it’s used to influence politics (Trump, Gaza). These things. The way AI is used in its unmonitored way is just dangerous, I feel like
The thing is, they aren’t really counter-arguments. For example, I mentioned that AI being used to create art is theft* because artists aren’t credited and their art is used to create amalgamations out of thousands of pieces of art. He argued that it’s just the same when an artist draws inspiration from other peoples’ art and creates their own - which is just plain false. In his eyes, this might a valid counter-argument but it isn’t, right?
*copyright infringement
Hey, can you articulate the difference though? Stating this as a plain fact seems kinda like you’re constructing reality to fit your opinion and maybe that’s what your friend is pushing back on.
It’s true that AI is often trained on copyrighted images, but artists use copyrighted images as references all the time. I know AI can’t be literally “inspired,” or have artistic intentions, but like, what actually is the difference? Other than philosophical differences that involve like, the inability to emulate actual creativity.
Seems like AI is just faster, because it’s a computer that can do tons of adjustments instantly instead of iterating over time like a human. Anyway, just food for thought. I don’t think AI is going to replace artists entirely but a lot of companies are definitely going to try to see how far they can take it.
I think the main difference is intent, inspiration, and feelings portrayed through art. AI may be able to replicate a certain style or use a motif, but the three aspects I mentioned are absent with an AI. It is, indeed, difficult to put into words what you mean - I’ll give you that.
So like, I guess I’m just wondering how that refutes his point that it’s a tool for artists then.
I personally am aware of people who run local LLMs trained on their own art so they don’t have to spend as much time sketching or doing linework.
Maybe you’re just not as open-minded about this as you could be? It’s being used in sketchy ways by a lot of people, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a place, especially at the idea stage.
Saying that AI is a tool like any other artists tool also doesn’t refute OP’s point about art theft.
It’s not theft, the artist still has their work. If anything, it’s copyright infringement. When some 16-year-old aspiring artist uses another artists’ work as a reference or traces something, what’s that?
I guess you could call it practice, but then doesn’t AI do the same thing by iterating based on its dataset? Some AI outputs look terrifying and janky - so did my art when I was younger.
I dunno, like this issue isn’t as simple as I used to think it was. If we look outside of economics (because artists need money to survive, like all of us) is there actually a problem here?
I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about all of this, but it’s pretty obvious AI isn’t just gonna go away like NFTs did. I really am interested in discussion, I’m not trolling.
Whatever you decide to call it, the problem exists.
When you trace or use existing art as reference, you’re using this to learn and not passing it off as your own design. Equivalently, when training an AI model, it’s the same. I don’t think the training part is a problem. The problem comes when producing work. A generative model will only produce things that are essentially interpolations of artworks it has trained on. A human artist interpolates between artworks they have seen from other artists, as well as their own lived experiences, and extrapolate by evaluating how some more avant garde elements tickle their emotions. Herein lies the argument that generative AI in its current state doesn’t produce anything novel and just regurgitates what it has seen.
There’s also the problem of “putting words in someone else’s mouth”. Everyone has a unique art style (to a certain extent), just like how everyone has a unique writing style, or a unique voice. I’ll speak on voice first since more of us can relate to that. Having someone copy your voice to make it say things you did not say is something many will be very uncomfortable with. To an artist, art style and writing styles are the same.
The economic side is also a problem. And while I don’t expect generative AI to go away, it can be done in a way that is fair to the people whose work have made it possible and allows them to continue doing what they do. We should be striving towards that.
Yes, but how does that negate its usefulness as a tool or a foundation to start from? I never made any assertion that AI is able to make connections or possess any sort of creativity.
There’s a common saying that there is no such thing as an original story, because all fiction builds on other fiction. Can you see how that would apply here? Just because thing A and thing B exist doesn’t mean that thing C cannot possibly be interesting or substantially different. The brainstorming potential of an AI with a significant dataset seems functionally identical to an artist searching for references on Google (or Pixiv).
So is this your main issue? I’m just not sure that that is really a valid reason, since many people are very uncomfortable with like, organ donation, pig heart valves, animal agriculture, ghostwriters, real person fanfiction, or data collection by Google. I’m sure there is something in the world that most people see as either positive or neutral that makes you very uncomfortable. For me, it’s policing.
On the economic front, I agree - these companies should have been licensing these images from the start and we should be striving to create some sort of open database for artists so that they are compensated. It’s possible that awarding royalties, while flawed, may be a good framework since they could potentially be paid for all derivative works and not simply the image itself. But that may be prohibitively expensive due to the sheer number of iterations being performed, so it’s hard to say.
It is useful. Never said it wasn’t. I’m pointing out problematic uses of an otherwise good tool.
Maybe it’s easier to think about this through the lens of the end goal. We want good art to exist. We want good art to continue being produced for the foreseeable future. What inhibits this from happening? If artists stop producing art and AI can’t replace them, then we stop getting art. The point about current AI not being able to create the kind of art we care about is that we still need human artists. So how do we ensure that human artists continue producing? By making sure they get properly compensated for value they produce and that their work does not get used in a way that they don’t like. I’m personally not a fan of forcing people to work, so my preferred solution would be to give artists what they want in exchange for their work.
I’m not sure if I understand this correctly. Are you saying that an interpolation between two existing artworks can still make interesting artwork? If so, then yes, but if that’s all you’re doing, it severely limits the space of art that you have access to compared to something that also interpolates with a human being’s unique life experiences and is also capable of extrapolating by optimizing for the emotional cost function.
For sure, yes. I’m not arguing that AI has its uses. The main thing I was discussing with my friend was that the way AI is used commercially right now is damaging to a lot of industries, that it’s a trend being used by companies to make their products looks better than they are, and that they profit off other peoples’ work. AI is a tool, yes, but what I was so adamant about was that there should be regulations and policies that make clear what is and where it’s ok to use and what isn’t
Then I would steer away from arguments which are more debatable and stick to ones that are more robust and focus on the present and future than the past, and avoid anything that can get mired in debate. I’d focus on what the specific problem is (we will have fewer artists due to competition with AI) why it’s a problem (cultural stagnation, lack of new inspiration for new ideas) and why alternative solutions to regulation wouldn’t work (would socializing artistic fields work as they’d no longer be subject to market forces).
You should read these two articles from Cory Doctorow. I think they’ll help clear up some thing for you.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/
I’ll check these out, appreciate it!
I read the first article, and I recommended you do as well, as it’s the best take I have seen on image generation.
It sounds like you and your friend both have your minds made up already, but reality is more nuanced, and the truth is somewhere inbetween.
“AI art” isn’t copyright infringement, or “stealing”, but it’s also not art. It’s a neutral technology.
I agree it is being used unethically (and overused) by corporations, but it’s fundamentally a problem with how our society uses and reacts to it. Like so many other new technologies, the true issue is with capitalism, not the tech itself.
Probably the best single-line reduction of the whole issue here in this thread. Well said.
However, I do think it’s also cultural in the tech companies. The modern tech culture was borne from an attitude that was 100% rooted in “well the law says we can’t do this, so we’ll do this instead, which is different on a technical and legal level, but achieves the same end-result.”
This was heavily evident in early piracy, which went from centralized servers of Napster and Kazaa to the decentralized nature of Bittorrent entirely in response to civil suits for piracy. It was an arms race. Soon enough the copyright holders responded by hiring third parties to hide in swarms to be able to log IPs and hit people “associated” with those IPs with suits for sharing trivial amounts of copyrighted data with the third party. That was responded to with private trackers, and eventually, streaming.
Each step was a technical response to an attempt by society to legally regulate them. Just find a new technical way that’s not regulated yet!
The modern tech companies never lost that ethos of giving technical responses to route around new legal regulation. Which, in itself, is further enabled by capitalism, as you astutely pointed out.
It’s not theft, because the artist still has their original art. It’s copyright infringement, if anything.
Right