Unangbangkay

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Josh Tolentino | weeaboomer, Gamist
| work: RPG Site, Game Rant, Gamecritics | ex: Siliconera, Destructoid

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nex3
@nex3

I think part of the reality around stochastic-model art that gets lost in a lot of the discussions is the materiality of the money behind it. One of the rehosts of my post from yesterday mentioned people using it as a "free art button", but I think it's really important to understand that it's only free because it's subsidized. Maintaining these massive probability databases isn't free, nor is scraping the entire internet to generate them, nor indeed is running an individual probability cascade to generate one image. And that's not even getting into the colossal number of engineer-hours invested to create the underlying technology—extremely expensive engineers who are a highly-specialized subset of the already-overpaid tech sector.

The companies that are allowing people to use these models are making a conscious business decision to underwrite randos on the internet using them for free. They're also making a decision not to try to enforce any kind of (dubious) copyright claim on the images their models generate. The interesting questions aren't "is this art" (imo it is bad art) or "is this intrinsically moral", they're "who are the capitalists exploiting with this" and "how does that exploitation function".

I hate and oppose this technology not because it's impossible to use it to create good art, but because the overwhelming actual use will be to harm artists and culture. As @tef likes to say, "the purpose of a system is what it does", and so far these stochastic models mostly seem to convince people with money to give less of it to people who make art. This is great for capitalists because it means they have to pay less for their art even if it cannot be made by these models, but more importantly because it turns the means of art production into capital. Suddenly whoever has the most money to invest in data centers and Ph.D engineers gets to charge rent on all the low-end commissions that would otherwise have gone to a bunch of different humans.

Technology is not neutral. If we fall into the trap of thinking about it as an object divorced of its material context, the capitalists have already won.


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in reply to @nex3's post:

Agree. And this is not a "future possible problem" , btw. Macmillian and Tor.com are already using "AI" art for book covers (that look like shit, they didn't even bother to hire someone to clean it up so the human figures are... geometrically challenged). Which is another way book publishers found to underpaid artists, just like they underpay editors and writers and... you know, the people that are involved in actually creating the book.

It's practically a guarantee that they'll be charging for it in short order. It'll still be significantly cheaper than commissioning an artist that has to put in actual physical work, but there is no way they're not going to monetize it. Probably when it gets good enough at hands for people to stop mocking them.

It's always shocking (but not surprising) to see ostensibly anti-capitalist people defend their AI indulgences. I've even seen artist friends using this shit. If I "just don't understand it", then I don't want to understand it. I'm tired of being required to understand the nuances of blips on a downward trajectory into an abyss.

there's nothing inherently capitalist about the thing itself: it's a kind of visual randomizer (or paragraph blender, if you want the language one, but I'll just talk about image synthesis here). they're interesting and even kind of engaging to play with, though kinda shallow.

how they were built, what goes into them, how they're valued, and how their creators and a lot of others hope for them to be used are all bleakly capitalist.

i maintain that planning to Disrupt and Revolutionize and Capitalize artistic endeavors is very different than just fuckin around seeing if you can make a picture of grimace committing an OSHA violation or clowns crashing a rowboat into the twin towers or whatever. i don't see what's shocking about exploring an interesting, randomized curve full of semi-sensical noise while also disliking capitalism

Something I'm missing from this is: Usually giving out a free or cheap service to the masses in the tech industry is done to gain adoption, then abuse this adoption to bring in a more realistic price.

I don't doubt better models will be developed that will be attached to a service that charges a premium (still cheaper than freelance). But if the goal is to develop a system that allows companies to underpay for art, what would this extra adoption bring? Training data?

wait it's training data isn't it

I think training data is some of it, but I think it's mostly just advertising. They want everyone to. be familiar with this stuff and used to using it so that once they start charging (less than human artists) people will think of it as an easy and readily accessible tool for a small fee. If it had only ever been available to researchers and a few journalists (as it was initially) before being made available for charge, there's a good chance the public would have seen it as inaccessible and specialized.

Worth noting that this is exactly what AI Dungeon did. Started free, then sold the tech to VC and went commercial and started locking shit down and spying on users.

It's what they all do, because it's the only thing tech knows how to do.