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‘Mass theft’: Thousands of artists call for AI art auction to be cancelled
(www.theguardian.com)
Phrases my friends would never use:
AI Art
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2025
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Technology
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I prefer the term "AI Fabrications" because of the dual-meaning of fabrication. On one hand it implies industrial fabrication, on the other hand it implies fabrication as in a lie. Because AI is both of those simultaneously. It is industrially fabricated and it is a lie.
In Croatian (and I suspect many other Slavic languages) art is umjetnost which is a variation of the word umjetno which means artificial.
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It would be kind of funny to offer AI schlock for sale and then give the buyer a framed copy of the prompt instead of the print itself
I would respect that as a kind of performance art.
Prompt, seed, model, LORAs, and better hope it's a sampler that reliably produces the same results each time for the same input as not all of them do.
In principle all samplers are deterministic because they use PRNGs, any and all actual non-determinism you see is due to GPUs, underlying acceleration libraries playing fast+loose with numerical accuracy. Which they do because the models are generally robust against noise which is exactly what lacking numerical accuracy (or quantisation) is, but you can get into situations where, on direct comparison, it does make a difference.
Nah, inability to produce the actual image is the point. All the "artist" did was type in a box, so that's all the purchaser gets.
I love the high bar of philosophy and taste being set by the discussions here about what is and isn't art, so please don't let this note distract from those.
Joints like Christie's and the stuff they sell is largely a money laundering operation. Without decrying what's coming out of the modern art scene, art collection is where a lot of the capitalists rinse their stolen wealth. There's an entire economy around this practice. Here's a company that will hook you up with the vaults, the lawyers, jewelry to swap, and travel accommodations.
So obviously generative output bots do not make art and- and- BUT ALSO nothing capitalists value is real, they only believe in their fiat. It's all always just money crime game to them. Always.
Don't see a problem tbh, value is set by what someone will pay. If someone will pay for it then it is worth that.
The problem is not the price.
The problem is Ai "art" is inherently stealing the work of other people, and not in a way that a painter can say they were influenced by some other painter.
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Artists are inspired by each other.
If I draw something being inspired by e. g. Bansky, and it's not a direct copy - it's legal.
We don't live in a vacuum.
Counterpoints:
Artists also draw distinctions between inspiration and ripping off.
The legality of an act has no bearing on its ethics or morality.
The law does not protect machine generated art.
Machine learning models almost universally utilize training data which was illegally scraped off the Internet (See meta's recent book piracy incident).
Uncritically conflating machine generated art with actual human inspiration, while career artist generally lambast the idea, is not exactly a reasonable stance to state so matter if factly.
It's also a tacit admission that the machine is doing the inspiration, not the operator. The machine which is only made possible by the massive theft of intellectual property.
The operator contributes no inspiration. They only provide their whims and fancy with which the machine creates art through mechanisms you almost assuredly don't understand. The operator is no more an artist than a commissioner of a painting. Except their hired artist is a bastard intelligence made by theft.
And here they are, selling it for thousands.
It's also a tacit admission that the machine is doing the inspiration, not the operator. The machine which is only made possible by the massive theft of intellectual property.
hard disagree on that one… the look of the image was, but the inspiration itself was derived from a prompt: the idea is the human; the expression of the idea in visual form is the computer. we have no problem saying a movie is art, and crediting much of that to the director despite the fact that they were simply giving directions
The legality of an act has no bearing on its ethics or morality.
Except their hired artist is a bastard intelligence made by theft.
you can’t on 1 hand say that legality is irrelevant and then call it when you please
or argue that a human takes inputs from their environment and produces outputs in the same way. if you say a human in an empty white room and exposed them only to copyright content and told them to paint something, they’d also entirely be basing what they paint on those works. we wouldn’t have an issue with that
what’s the difference between a human and an artificial neural net? because i disagree that there’s something special or “other” to the human brain that makes it unable to be replicated. i’m also not suggesting that these work in the same way, but we clearly haven’t defined what creativity is, and certainly haven’t written off that it could be expressed by a machine
in modern society we tend to agree that Duchamp changed the art world with his piece “Fountain” - simply a urinal signed “R. Mutt”… he didn’t sculpt it himself, he did barely anything to it. the idea is the art, not the piece itself. the idea was the debate that it sparked, the questions with no answer. if a urinal purchased from a hardware store can be art, then the idea expressed in a prompt can equally be art
and to be clear, i’m not judging any of these particular works based on their merits - i haven’t seen them, and i don’t believe any of them should be worth $250k… but also, the first piece of art created by AI: perhaps its value is not in the image itself, but the idea behind using AI and its status as “first”. the creativity wasn’t the image; the creativity and artistic intent was the process
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Since art has been used to funnel large sums of money, I doubt they plan to cancel that.
Yeah, I don't care what they do in the name of commerce. I just wish they wouldn't call it art.
They don’t have to pay the middle man now!