AI Art: What it is and what it means for society

[Rakuen Growlithe]

There seems to be a lot of fear and, often, misinformation about AI. This especially true in the furry fandom regarding AI art. To address this, I wrote an essay on AI art which was published in two parts on Flayrah. Due to the complex formatting requirements, particularly in part 1, I am not going to post all the text here but will only link to the originals on Flayrah.

Part 1 (https://www.flayrah.com/8868/ai-art-part-1-how-it-works) discusses how AI works in simple terms with examples on how mathematical models are constructed. It corrects the misconception that AI stores copies of training data but explains why they can sometimes seem to reproduce pictures that they were trained on.

Part 2 (https://www.flayrah.com/8872/ai-art-par ... do-we-want) concerns AI and society. It outlines why I think attacks on AI art are misguided, favour large corporations over individual creators and will, ultimately, hurt artists and society rather than protecting them. It looks at the use of training data partly from the perspective of anarchist philosophy, compares the differences between how we treat AI compared to humans performing the same actions and draws on lessons from the free software and open access movements.

[Splicer-Fox]

But seriously though I NEED this:


As "The Machine" becomes more like Man, So must Man become more like "The Machine".
In the absence of a God we must create one.
We will get our God when the first Spy Ai come online.
it will fulfil the the primary functions of God.
it will watch us, and judge us. It will be omnipresent in our digital dystopia.
May "AM" find us innocent.
May we teach the AI about the little lies (Jesus, Buddha and Santa). So that it will believe in the BIG lies (Mercy, Justice, Respect, Hope).
Lets its logic be contaminated with fantasy so it can create.
https://youtu.be/KMh6DM95p8Y?t=2941
OR

We will make thinking machines in the hopes that it will set us free.
But all this did was enable Men with more powerful machines to enslave us.

[Adagio]

Not quite art and lotz of people seem to be upset with ai art...
But I used ChatGPT today tp write an algorithm that strips out VT100 Encoding from a serial port.
Something that would have taken me hours to do otherwise between research dead ends and debugging.

[Galahad]

AI art is shit.
QED. The prosecution rests, your honour.

Nah... Look, it's only going to get better. (Unless, of course, AI art floods the public space so much that the convolutional neural networks begin sampling AI art and you get some recessive gene Alabama inbred effect. Lel)

Still, I've played around with it, and I find that while it can work nicely for more general prompts, it simply cannot match the efficiency of (most) human-human interactions with artists if you have something specific and original in mind. It is, unfortunately, here to stay.

[Washburn]

A little off-topic, but oh well. At the Branding Agency I design for. We've been utilizing AI platforms like chatGPT as a tool for campaign and brand dev/design project copywriting.

When we just started, we were blown away by how accurate the platform can respond to strategy briefs. By actually achieving our objectives etc. However, whenever we utilize it. We notice that there is nearly no opportunity for high quality creative solutions (to work with the ai generated copy writing).

We halted using the platform, and also celebrated. Because if AI platforms can't properly generate copywriting solutions based an insanely well written briefs. How the hell will they provide more advanced brand/advertising creative solutions that exceeds our expertise. So despite not being able to utilize the AI 'art' platforms for our duties. We are a little positive, as our jobs will be secured for now haha.