Listen, I live in a state where anyone who commits a violent crime, before they catch the person the police say, “he was hallucinating, they were hearing voices” aka mental illness is why they are doing this as a way to take away more rights. Also in this state if you are in a conservatorship for mental illness you legally are barred from voting. How can you say hallucination is not a loaded term? It is different from headache because people are not stigmatized for migraines. No one is taking away your voting rights for migraines. No one is saying you are a murderer for migraines.

I know how it is used in a non psychiatric way, I brought that up it can be used in colloquially. That doesn’t diminish the way that it can be used to harm and stigmatize an already stigmatized group of people. There are other terms that can be used, but this is used because people want to humanize AI and do not care about dehumanizing people who have psychotic disorders.

The fact of the matter remains that AI creators are not people who specialize in human brains, but they act like computers and human brains are one and the same. Similarity doesn’t equal the same processes. They can choose different language but they do not. They could call it a processing error, a glitch, a distortion. All would be accurate, but no, they chose a term that is harmful to a minority group because no one cares about stigmatizing them.

I feel like you are one of the people who feel that AI is just going to be the future with no real problems to anyone who matters. We can’t stop it, we can’t regulate it in any way whatever; and people should just move out of the way, give up and if they can’t find a place in the new world, die already. Artists don’t matter, writers don’t matter and anyone impacted by this new system doesn’t matter. The algorithm is all that matters.

Because I don’t use the exact correct wording, I use a short hand that is easier for my brain to remember, and you are pedantic, I can’t know anything about LLMs, machine learning or anything about this. Because I don’t say it has a training set of a large model of images that are tagged in specific ways that they can take out antagonistic images or images that create artifacts and refine the model in appropriate ways. You therefore throw out the idea that bias exists due to tagging systems.

Honestly I don’t care if you don’t think I know anything about this. You are a stranger on the internet and this conversation has gone on too long.

Those aren’t quite the same as a hallucination. We don’t actually call them hallucinations. Hallucinations are a medical term. Those are visual disturbances not “controlled hallucinations”. Your brain filtering it out and the ability to ignore it makes it not a hallucination. It’s hallucinations in a colloquial sense not medical.

Fundamentally AI is not working the same, you are having a moment of where a process from when in the past every shadow was a potential danger so seeing a threat in the shadow first and triggering fight or flight is best for you as a species. AI has no fight or flight. AI has no motivation, AI just had limited, bad, or biased data that we put there and spits out garbage. It is a computer with no sentience. You are not really error checking, you are processing more information, or reassessing once the fight/flight goes down. AI doesn’t have more information to process.

Many don’t see people with psychotic disorders as equal people. They see them as dangerous, and and people to be locked away. They use their illnesses and problems as jokes and slurs. Using terms for their illness in things like this only adds to their stigma.

I don’t see these grants or public funding ever covering a private company for one. And for two, I don’t see AI art ever actually getting to the point where it fully replaces artists. As of right now it is good. But it doesn’t understand space or lighting at all. Because of how AI works I’m not sure it ever will. Because it is trained to make a homogeneous rendering of what you are looking for, even if you use a base image, most people have an image that is lit heavily in the front, but because of this it never is able to render shadows correctly. Unless they hire people who are artist or art critics to finely train the data set, which I doubt they will, then the more you look the more uncanny valley the images get. They also have a hard bias in all of their images they generate. Which is difficult to overcome.

AI is an amazing tool, but it is a poor replacement in total. The people who act like it is a total replacement are like the people who in 2015 told us self driving cars were just one year away, and have been saying it every year since. Maybe when quantum computing becomes the standard for every person AI will be able to. But there is just a fundamental misunderstanding of art, artistic process, how art get made people seem to have.

Open AI might be sitting on Microsoft money, but how many other companies has Microsoft gobbled up over the years? Open AI if it starts to struggle will just fall under the Microsoft umbrella and become part of its massive conglomerate, integrated into it. Where are our AR goggles that we are supposed to all be wearing, Microsoft and Google both had those? So many projects grow and die with multiple millions thrown at them. All end up with crazy valuations based on future consumer usage. As we all can’t even afford rent.

There is also this idea that people wouldn’t willing contribute if just asked. The problem is no one has even asked. Hugging Face is an open source distro people willingly contribute to. And so many people upload images to Creative Commons which could be used. I’ve done it with many of my photos which I have no problem being used in a data set, for commercial use even. But my commercial images, no please. The idea that you can’t train smaller models on the vast array of Creative Commons images and public domain, you absolutely can. You can also ask people to contribute to your data set and give credit to them. A lot of people are angry at lack of credit.

There is no reason for any of this to be private enterprise if they are going to blatantly steal copyright images when sources like Creative Commons exists, not give any credit to the people they steal from, and sometime even steal from places they shouldn’t even have access to.

As an artist who studies data science, I would say doing art and generating art are an entirely different process. AI has no reference outside of the information we give it. It had no real understanding of lighting, spacial awareness. We can tell it every tank is a cat, every flashlight is a pig and it will never question it. If we tell a toddler that every tank is a cat, they may call a tank a cat, but they will never think a that “cat” is a house pet. They will never think that “pig” will oink or be turned into steaks. An AI however would if your language conventions were the same in the prompt.

If you go to the art walk and go home and try to recreate a style, you were inspired. If an AI model is trained on many styles and you tell it “portrait, woman, Van Gogh style, painterly, blue tones” then do you understand what you asked for? Was the ai inspired by Van Gogh? Did the ai study his techniques? No. It broke down his art pixel by pixel, rearranged it in a filter styled overlay over a woman, most likely a young woman-because of algorithmic bias which has been studied- in shades of blue. Humans take the time to study the why, the how. Ai does not. Humans are not just meat robots.

I should say I’m not against AI art. I’m against gathering against consent. If it was opt in, or if there was some type of pay for program that would be fine. Even if it was pennies each month. But the fact that they scrape without consent. Or are now going back and adding it into TOS where it never was before feels scummy. AI art has a place, and is a helpful tool. But it’s not a replacement for artists, it has many flaws still, that might never be worked out.

Thank you for helping me with line break.

I agree that copyright lasts far too long, but the idea I can post a picture today, and in a hour it’s in an AI model without my consent bothers me. Historically there was a person to person exchange. But now we are so detached from it all I don’t think we can have that same affordance of no types of protections. I’m not saying one person can solve this. But I don’t see UBI or anything like that ever happening. As a person who has lived on disability most of their life, people don’t like to share their wealth with anyone for any reason. I’ve never been able to sell art for a living and am now going to school for data science. So I know about both ends of this. Just scraping without consent is unethical and many who do this have no idea about the art world or how artist create in general.

Ok, so I have a psychotic illness that comes with delusions. My personal spiritual practice has helped me move away from the delusions I had based around Christianity and the absolute fear I had. I also have delusions around philosophy which isn’t religious in nature. Gently correcting me away from the personal rituals I built to help me stay grounded would harm me. They were developed with a psychiatrist. Everyone’s life is different, everyone’s culture is different. I know facts are facts, and they help me know what’s real, but my brain literally has a hard time with this distinction, so this duality of a spiritual practice has helped me build a barrier with reality and the reality my brain wants to make. I don’t ask anyone else to participate or force anyone else to believe it. Why would you want to correct this?