May 7, 2024

artificial witchcraft

There is so much AI witchhunting on twitter these days. I constantly get threads on how to identify AI art. Admittedly I am not helping my feed by clicking on them, but I get curious.

The thing is, I commit most of these art foibles myself. Fingers look weird? Structures and accessories have no clear purpose or practical function? Yes! That’s my art all the time! I just draw stuff! In the most recent AI identification tutorial I read, the author was calling out a particular picture as AI art because (1) why is the figure in the foreground holding the sword with that grip/at that angle? (2) what is the purpose of these structures on the rooftop? (3) why is there snow on some parts of the roof but not others? I do that kind of stuff regularly. The part about the swordsman is particularly relatable. I want the sword at a certain angle for the overall silhouette/profile and then can’t figure out how to work the limbs to make it happen and just fudge it. Oops, artificial intelligence!!

The saving grace (besides me not posting pictures on social media) is that my art is just plain not good enough to be made by an AI. I’m not saying this as a self-put-down—I’m a casual artist and quite open about my skills and shortcomings—but any AI output would be cleaner and more polished.

I don’t really get the hate for AI art. I did see one honest tweet that said “I don’t like AI art because I’m in school for an art degree and I want a job when I graduate, thanks.” That’s fair. I don’t blame anyone for stressing over the job market. But people on twitter seem to hate AI-generated works with evangelical fervor, even those generated by hobbyists who weren’t hiring anyone regardless. Myself, I enjoy drawing and looking at others’ drawings, and am not fussy about whether the latter is done by a human or computer (though of course passing off AI art as one’s own work is bad form).

A lot of the discourse about AI art centers around plagiarism and whether AIs have “permission” to be trained on people’s works. This is a concern, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to assign different standards to computers and people in this regard.

1.      If an artist posts their work in a public forum (e.g., twitter), then it’s public. Anyone who’s not blocked can see the work, be inspired by it, use it as a reference, etc. “Permission” is not needed—or rather it has already been given by virtue of being posted in public.

2.      Plagiarism is obviously bad, whether it’s tracing or simply copying too much of an existing work’s character design, composition, etc. That’s decided case-by-case based on a comparison of the two works. Referencing multiple works to come up with a unique composition is not plagiarism and is perfectly fine.

Part of the problem with AI is that it doesn’t “know” when it’s plagiarizing, and if given a narrow prompt, will generate an artwork based on whatever it has. So it can end up closely copying a single work. The person who gave the prompt may not realize this, and may distribute the plagiarized picture, compounding the issue. That’s obviously not great, but it doesn’t strike me as a reason to hate all AI-generated works, most of which don’t have that problem.

Written by Achaius

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