• RustyNova@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Devils advocate here. There’s open source services that offers AI gen for free, as long as you have an internet connection.

    So a potato phone could be used and that’s all that’s required.

    -# Doesn’t make it more accessible than actual pen and paper but the gap is not that big either

    • o1011o@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I would argue that ‘free’ just means the cost is hidden and you might end up paying it anyway through the societal effects that the energy demands of LLMs cause. That is, there’s a cost and it will make it back to you somehow or other because that’s how tech oligarchy works.

      • RustyNova@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Definitely. But the point here is the accessiblity. If you gotta argue about the accessiblity you gotta set the record straight on both sides

        I’m pretty against AI. I just like my facts corrects

      • Zwrt@lemmy.sdf.org
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        7 months ago

        Llms arent the same ai as image gen though.

        Your thinking of ChatGPT like services.

        StableDiffusion on al old laptop will take less energy then a modern game, maybe slightly more then a digital painting software.

        Its also fully open source and offline, you can check the code if you want.

  • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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    7 months ago

    The main thing here is that image generation trough an llm doesn’t even count as creating.

    Asking is not creating. In these systems people ask an llm to use a genai tool, the people never actually touch the tool themselves. (They wont even allow it lol)

    Thats why ComfyUi with stable diffusion and not chatgpt is the standard for serious art work using ai.

    They are fully open source, offline and they don’t require any more energy then playing a video game.

    Also workflows look like this, more accessible means a different set of skills can now get you similar results. But it is still skill.

    you indeed dont need to know how to hold a pencil to build that.

    (Also there are more and more models exclusively trained with artist consent)

    So yes, ai does make art more accessible to a small group of technical people. Most people know no one in this group.

        • Ms. ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.zip
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          7 months ago

          Economic cost of mtf lower surgery in the US. It also includes electrolysis, travel, and housing for surgery related stuff. That said almost all of it is just surgery and hospital bills charged to insurance. I only have paid about $35k and they want another $4k out of me but I’m fighting it. Gearing up for a legal battle soon yay

          • grue@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            It’s gotta be cheaper to do medical tourism and get something like that done in another country.

            • Ms. ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.zip
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              7 months ago

              It sure is! My insurance is actually really good though and I got a plan specifically to cover this. I was told several times by multiple people and departments I wouldn’t have to pay more than my out of pocket max. Which was a lie apparently and out of pocket max doesn’t always work like advertised. Thus the imminent legal battle

  • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    Aight, here’s the thing.

    All art is, at its base, about translating a person’s inner concept into an external form. Sculpture, painting, poetry, dance, whatever.

    To do any art form, there is a barrier to entry. If you want to be a dancer, some part of your body must be mobile, right? Even if it’s just your eyeballs, dance by definition is about the human body moving.

    But, what if you can’t move your body? Is that, and should that be, a barrier? Why can’t a person get an exoskeleton device that they can then program to either dance for them, or to respond to their thoughts so they can dance via the gear? Well, in that case the technology isn’t here yet, but pretend it was.

    Obviously, it wouldn’t be the same as someone that’s trained and dedicated to dancing, but is it lesser? It still fulfills the self expression via movement.

    That can be applied to damn near every form of art. I can’t actually think of any that it doesn’t apply to at least in part.

    There is a difference between a human sitting down (or lying or standing) to write a book and just telling a computer to generate a book. But it doesn’t completely invalidate using a computer to generate fictional text. The key in that form is the degree of input and the effort involved. A writer asking an llm for a paragraph about a kid walking down the street when they’re blocked isn’t the same thing as telling it to write the entire book. There’s degrees of use that are valid tools that don’t remove the human aspect of the art form.

    Take it to visual arts. A person can see things in their head that they may never develop the skill to see executed. They may not be physically capable of moving a brush on canvas, or pen on paper. A painter of incredible skill may be an utter dunce at sculpture, but still have vision and concepts worth being created.

    The use of a generative model as a tool is not inherently bad. It’s no worse than setting up software to 3d print a sculpture.

    The problem comes in when the ai itself is made by, and operated for the benefit of corporate entities, and/or when attribution isn’t built in. Attribution matters; a painting made by Monet is different from a painting that looks like Monet could have done it, but it was made by southsamurai. If I paint something that looks like a Monet, that’s great! If I paint it and pretend it was made by Monet, that’s bullshit.

    A “painting” by a piece of software that’s indelibly attributed as generated that way isn’t a big deal. It comes back to the eye of the beholder in the same way that digital art is when compared to “analog” art via paints and pencils. It only really matters when someone is bullshitting about how they achieved the final results.

    Is ai art less impressive? Hell yes, and it’s pretty obvious that it isn’t the same thing as someone honing their craft over years and decades. An image generated by a piece of software with only the input prompts being human generated is not the same as someone building the image with their hands via paint/touchpad/mouse/whatever.

    This is still different from the matter of using ai instead of paying a human to do the work, which is more complicated than people think it is.

    But, in terms of an individual having access to tools that allow them to get things inside their head out of their head where it can be seen, it has its place. It just needs to be very clear that that’s the tool used.

    And yeah, I know this is c/fuckai, and I’m arguing that ai has its place as a tool of self expression, and that’s not going to be universally satisfying here. But I maintain that the problem with ai art isn’t in the fact that it’s ai art, it’s the framework behind that that makes it a threat to actual humans.

    In a world where artists can choose to create art for their own satisfaction without having to worry about eating and having a roof over their heads, ai art would be a lot less of a threat.

    • Proud Cascadian@lemmy.worldOPM
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      7 months ago

      This “art” costs far more environmentally than any other. It uses mass amounts of electricity and water. It’s nothing like, say, eating steak instead of salad, or driving a pickup truck to work. The “miracle” of AI has to come from somewhere, after all.

      • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        Sure, but so does everything. Pigments have to be mined or synthesized. Paper comes from cut down trees. Brushes are either synthesized or from natural hairs. Ink is a vat of survival chemicals.

        Electricity by itself is just one resource. You could argue that by centralizing the resource like that, you can easier reduce environmental impacts overall via more sustainable, less damaging energy production.

        Ai isn’t a miracle, any more than air conditioning is, or refrigerators, or Christmas lights, or even just a stove. It’s a tool.

        Again, I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind here. It’s just for the enjoyment of babbling about the subject, maybe having a nice conversation along the way. I have very definite opinions about the way generative models are being used, the impacts it’s having, but a lot of the time that’s not really interesting because pretty much everyone hates the slop factor.

        But that’s, to me, like objecting to shovel because someone is using it to dig under your house. Misuse of a thing isn’t the same as the thing itself

      • Lumiluz@slrpnk.net
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        7 months ago

        Running a local gen model for 500 images uses less electricity than playing Baldur’s Gate 3 for 30 minutes.

        Edit: Correction; less than 5-10 minutes depending on settings.

    • RandomVideos@programming.dev
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      7 months ago

      or to respond to their thoughts so they can dance via the gear

      But thats not whats happening with AI “art”. Thats whats being attempted with other technologies

      I have seen a lot of disabled artists complain about bring used in pro-AI arguments

      • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        Yup. And it isn’t even just artists. Disabled people that aren’t creatives on a professional level object to it as well. It’s an unpleasant form of ablism, trying to pander on the backs of those poor, sad disabled people.

        But it is all a spectrum of technologies, when applied properly.

        The properly part is the bottom panel of the posted comic, imo. The various generative models aren’t actually about helping people, they aren’t about expanding human creativity. They’re about trying to cash in on a growing technology.

        That doesn’t mean that ai can’t be a good thing. It just means that it’s a bad thing in the way it exists now, or at least in the form that’s being shoved down the public’s throat.

        Had the big ones not stolen the training data, were they not being used to leverage corporate goals over humans, they could be a very useful thing.

        • RandomVideos@programming.dev
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          7 months ago

          Had the big ones not stolen the training data, were they not being used to leverage corporate goals over humans, they could be a very useful thing

          AI still has the problems of spam(propaganda being the most dangerous variant of it), disinformation and impersonating real artists. These could be fixed if every AI image/video had a watermark, but i dont think that could be enforced well enough to completely eliminate these issues

          • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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            7 months ago

            Those specific flaws are down to the same issue though. The training data was flawed enough, in large part due to being stolen wholesale, that it skews the matter towards counterfeits being easier. I would agree that in the absence of legislation, no for profit business based on ai will ever tag their output. It could be an easier task for non profit, and/or open source models though. Definitely something that needs addressing.

            I’m not sure what you mean by spam being a direct problem of ai. Are you saying that it’s easier to generate propaganda, and thus allow it to be spammed?

            As near as I can tell, the propaganda farms were doing quite well spreading misinformation and disinformation before ai. Spamming it too, when that was useful to their goals.

            • RandomVideos@programming.dev
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              7 months ago

              As far as i know, the twitter AI tags its images

              Propaganda is more of a problem with text generation than image generation, but both can be used to change peoples opinions much more easily than before

    • MoonlightFox@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I have seen AI “art” that has moved me emotionally, and been inspiring, increased my immersion etc.

      The AI satire video about US workers in a sweatshop factory was politically important, and made me laugh.

      I once made a picture of a cat that was busy working tirelessly in the style of Rembrandt, and it was emotionally moving. I saw myself in that cat. 🥲

      I and friends used AI for immersion when roleplaying.

      This supports your point of giving people the ability to artistically and quickly express ideas without being a skilled artist.

      I also believe that the ethical issues of ownership, and theft from authors and artists are huge issues.

      The environmental issue is not my biggest concern considering how cheap and quick some genAI can be. So all gen AI isn’t automatically seen as unethical due to environmental concerns to me.

      Also, has image generation gotten worse? I feel that all generated images are more “correct” but has this bad look to it now, that it did not previously have.

    • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      You haven’t demonstrated what place image generators have in your example, though. There are blind and paralyzed painters that can create incredible works, because they practiced.

      Maybe these chatbots have some place (I think they’re fine for creating memes and forum slop) but I think it’s sad that potential artists are robbing themselves the opportunity to build skill by outsourcing their artistic impulses to a chatbot.

      • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        It isn’t about that, not really. It’s about what art is and isn’t, and how the tools are made more than how they’re used.

        To reframe it, the problem with the generative models isn’t really people using them, it’s how they were trained in the first place, and how we handle differentiating between ai output and human output.

        All of the corporate ones stole the training data. And that includes works by living artists. It was, and is, entirely possible to train the software without shitting on people. It would be slower, but i don’t see that as a negative because it would also end up better in the long run because it would also be more selective.

        I also don’t think that anyone will deprive themselves of any skill that they would have put the effort into to begin with. There is a big degree of laziness/unmotivation in humans. People that just want the end product and not the journey there. I don’t see a problem with that tbh.

        Anyone that would use ai as a way to skip over years of practice to get a specific image/piece out of their head into visibility isn’t the sort to have done it to begin with. They’d give it a try, see that what they want isn’t going to be realized in what they think is a reasonable time frame and just quit

        They never would pay someone else to do it either.

        The ones that would, they would anyway, though they might use ai while they’re learning.

        Lemme give an anecdote that might be interesting, though not as some kind of proof or whatever. I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything, I’m just babbling my thoughts.

        Used to work for a guy. Quadriplegic, with limited arm/hand control. Details don’t matter much for this, but it all depends on where the spinal injury is.

        He enjoyed working with wood. Had a lathe, saws, vises, all kinds of tools. He’d work for weeks on some things, getting it all just how he wanted. The same things, I could turn out in a day, they weren’t exactly complicated things.

        But he would still go buy something like a chair. Why? Because his guests needed a seat, and it would take him a month to make.

        Ai generation is pretty much the same use case. It fills gaps. Someone that’s driven to create is going to create because the process is part of that. Without a drive, a need to create, most people will just buy the chair. Divorced from a capitalist system where artists have to lose to ai products rather than just create for the sake of creation, the ai problem isn’t much of a problem. Remove that from the equation, and then artists can create only what drives their passion instead of having to worry about commissions and sales to pay the bills.

        Slap a permanent kind of marker on ai output, and you’ve got a swathe of the other issues knocked out. The cat is out of the bag. The knowledge exists. When that happens, you have to adapt society as much as you have to adapt the technology itself.

        • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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          7 months ago

          We were talking about accessibility, and you still haven’t actually demonstrated how chatbots make art more accessible.

          The fact is, they don’t. Anyone can make art.

          Creating chairs isn’t accessible to your uncle because he just wants somewhere to sit. A chair is functional first, so, a chair must be able to serve that function. Not everyone can do that or have the tools to do that. There’s a firm limitation on access for making furniture.

          Art isn’t functional like that, or if it is, function comes second. You don’t paint merely to create a picture, you paint to express yourself. The point of art isn’t merely the end product, it’s the journey of creation and the feeling of “I did that!” Everyone can do that and everyone can get the tools to do that, even if they aren’t good at it - and everyone can get better!

          The question of accessibility is firmly against chatbots.

          • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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            7 months ago

            I wasn’t talking about accessibility, that’s just what you latched onto out of all of it. I’m not sure why, other than it being a part of the comment, but it was never the primary subject of the comment.

              • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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                7 months ago

                I’m not arguing. I’m expressing my internal responses.

                I’m not trying to convince anyone, change any minds, and I’ve said so at least twice.

                I’m just talking about the general subject matter. It applies to the OP concept, but isn’t exclusively so, or directed at that as a primary goal.

                I mean, you get that it’s okay to be tangential, right? A post can be a springboard rather than the sole topic of discussion or expression. Hell, every response to a post is at least a tiny degree off since it’s filtered through a human brain before being responded to. It’s a matter of how far, or how broad.

                The OP image even purely about accessibility of art, it includes capitalist motivations for ai generators, which I did directly address.

                Not every comment has to be a debate. People can just talk, say their little thing and that be that.

          • Lumiluz@slrpnk.net
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            7 months ago

            Damn, certain historical artistic architects and furniture makers would strangle you with a 2×4 for that statement.

            Imagine being that much if an art purist asshole.

            • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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              7 months ago

              Buildings and chairs can be artistic, obviously, but they are art second and they don’t even need to be artistic at all.

              In contrast, art doesn’t even need to be functional to be art. Architecture and furniture without function aren’t actually architecture or furniture. In fact, once you take away function, art is the only thing that remains. After all, a chair no one can sit in or a building no one can enter may not be furniture or architecture, but they can still be sculptures.

  • Etterra@discuss.online
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    7 months ago

    What they mean by that is that they have no artistic ability and no interest in learning anything about how to actually make art, they just want a product to spec for free.

    • epicstove@lemmy.ca
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      7 months ago

      Doesn’t that require a load of computer power? My computer could start a house fire opening a PDF.

      • jannaultheal@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Depends on your hardware (such as your graphics card). But it’s definitely possible and a lot of people do it.

        • WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works
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          7 months ago

          I’ve always been sketchy about the energy requirements argument. It’s not like artists don’t take a lot of energy to create their work. If you hire someone to spend all day making a painting for you, you’re may be talking a day’s worth of first world-level energy consumption.

          • bishbosh@lemm.ee
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            7 months ago

            Sure but that person doesn’t stop existing if you don’t hire them. A GPU would otherwise consume no energy.

  • Death_Equity@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    The artist used stolen materials to make art. The AI “artist” used stolen materials to make “art”.

    One makes money, one doesn’t . The market has spoken. Actual artists will be able to continue on not make much money doing what they love and that is the meta of their chosen path. If you are an artist and you feel your job is threatened by AI, make better art or join the club of people who had their jobs taken by technology; you will have company. We still have cobblers, blacksmiths, and woodworkers; artists should take note of their revised business models.

    • Proud Cascadian@lemmy.worldOPM
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      7 months ago

      This is very confusing. AI also isn’t technological progress, just like how leaded gasoline and Flexplay wasn’t technological progress.

      • Death_Equity@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        It is a technology that makes a skilled process easier than it has ever been.

        Is a calculator not technological progress?

        Is a CNC machine not technological progress?

        There is no valid argument that AI image generation is not a form of technological progress. What took an artist a half hour or a day takes an image generator minutes.

    • Proud Cascadian@lemmy.worldOPM
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      7 months ago
      • Clip art from the 90’s was made with passion
      • It didn’t threaten the environment as much
      • There wasn’t any attempt to outdo real artists
      • You don’t have it as a business model
      • There isn’t an uproar about it
      • Nothing was stolen to make the clip art
      • _stranger_@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago
        • ✨behold passion✨

        • everything threatens the environment more nowadays

        • clip art artists constantly threatened the lives of people who called them fake artists.

        • there were clip art business!!

        • everyone hated it then, too

        • the gaping hole in the soul of every artist who got paid to make clip art would disagree with that last one.

    • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      I sometimes try using Ai to make a simple Clipart type image. Getting something decent only comes with a stroke of luck. Most of the time it is absolutely infuriating.

  • grue@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    The part I hate most is the “$800 phone” part. At least get a proper PC where you’ve got a fighting chance at being able to create stuff instead of a smartphone/tablet with an interface designed purely to consume, damn it!

  • hungryphrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    7 months ago

    I think it seems to usually be more about disabled people, who ai bros tend to consider either too stupid or physically unable to make real art, which is bullshit. There are amputees painting with their feet, who knows how many artists who have prosthetic hands or chronic pain. And don’t even get me started on mentally disabled people.

    • aeshna_cyanea@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      I’m sure all disabled people love hearing “Oh this other disabled guy showed extraordinary willpower and overcame his disability against all odds why can’t you”

      • Taleya@aussie.zone
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        7 months ago

        Gotta say, most disabled people i know - myself included - would happily hold AI underwater until the bubbles stop

    • Omega@discuss.online
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      7 months ago

      The game Katawa Shoujo, which was actually made by a cooperation between people who were on 4chan, depicts amputees and disabled folk, one of which is an artist which draws with her feet, with many of them having traumatic experiences that you hear of as you get to know of them more personally

      It’s good. I like it.