Imagine an AI that allows you to describe anything you want drawn in plain English, and it will generate an image of it with the skill of an actual talented artist. How far away do you think we are from such technology? Impossible? 100 years away? 10 years away? If you answered "that already exists today", you are correct! I'm talking about DALL·E 2. Currently, it's only being rolled out to a limited number of people, but it will be made public someday. For now, you can sign up to be put on their waitlist if you want.

Let's put it to the test right here and now: for each of these images, cover up the bottom-right to obscure any watermarks and try to determine if a human or an AI made it. You can then look for the watermark consisting of 5 colored squares to see which were generated with DALL·E 2.

https://imgur.com/a/oAdgnQB
https://imgur.com/a/s2Xxfn4
https://imgur.com/a/AQOhNfP
https://imgur.com/a/QK12zO3
https://imgur.com/a/v2Ok6GJ
https://imgur.com/a/j6WcoPL
https://imgur.com/a/5Kvuq2s
https://imgur.com/a/qpfjLVS

Luckily for furry artists, DALL·E 2 does have some obvious limitations:

• It's terms and conditions forbid using it for creating pornnographic or violent images
• From what I can tell, it's often bad at generating eyes
• You can't give it a ref sheet of your original character
• It usually can't form text with non-gibberish words (the "No T-rexans" one kinda making sense was just a fluke)
• It generates images, not animations or comics

There's also a competitor "Midjourney", which I know a lot less about, but it might be just as good.

How do you guys think this new technology will affect furries and the rest of the world? Did all artists just get completely screwed over? Is it a tool that could help artists? Is it going to be used professionally in the future, or just for memes and such?

https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/

EDIT:

• While the public beta is free (if you're lucky enough to get your hands on it... the waitlist is long), it will almost certainly be a paid service once released publicly. Pricing per usage is yet to be determined. Pricing for those who have access to the beta starts at $15 for 115 credits, plus you get 15 free credits each month plus 50 free credits to start out with. 1 usage = 1 credit.
• The public release is probably coming "soon"

If Ai edits aren't allowed, will Ai art be allowed?

versperus said:
If Ai edits aren't allowed, will Ai art be allowed?

I'd imagine fully AI-generated images wouldn't be allowed. Maybe AI-generated backgrounds would be fine though?

crocogator said:
How do you guys think this new technology will affect furries and the rest of the world? Did all artists just get completely screwed over? Is it a tool that could help artists? Is it going to be used professionally in the future, or just for memes and such?

It's not good at interpreting original concepts, can't do hands well, can't do faces without considerable amounts of horrifying meltiness, doesn't have a consistent style, even when told to render in a certain way, and it has a hard time making intelligible text.

Maybe it could be used as a "cheat" for an artist to take the generated image and correct all the mistakes, but given how unpredictable the results can be, it doesn't seem to have much utility beyond maybe creating backgrounds or generating ideas. It's not replacing actual artists anytime soon, if ever.

hungrymaple said:
can't do faces without considerable amounts of horrifying meltiness

I suspect that's less of a technological limitation and more of the programmers intentionally obscuring human faces so that it can't be used maliciously.

crocogator said:
How do you guys think this new technology will affect furries and the rest of the world? Did all artists just get completely screwed over? Is it a tool that could help artists? Is it going to be used professionally in the future, or just for memes and such?

I'm sure the same questions were asked when CGI finally got good enough to compete favorably with traditional art, yet traditional art is still in demand and is in no way archaic. An AI won't be able to put any soul into their art. An AI can't interpret a scene or create it wholesale out of nothing. It's basically a camera that can chose when to hit its shutter instead of someone else. It just makes pictures; it can't say anything with them.

clawstripe said:
I'm sure the same questions were asked when CGI finally got good enough to compete favorably with traditional art,

You mean when half-blind chuds thought it could compete. It hadn't happened yet, and the best stuff comes up to the level of a half way decent drawn picture.

hungrymaple said:
It's not good at interpreting original concepts, can't do hands well, can't do faces without considerable amounts of horrifying meltiness, doesn't have a consistent style, even when told to render in a certain way, and it has a hard time making intelligible text.

Those all apply to me too, and plenty of "real" artists. Just cause it isn't there yet doesn't mean it won't ever be. Real people can add text to images after the fat, and if they make specific brush stroking engines, text writing engines (that use AI created stories/dialogue and insert into the piece), face and eye creating engines, they'll rapidly get up to speed. The implementation isn't necessarily done yet, but maybe adobe will add something to their suite in a decade or so.

strikerman said:
I suspect that's less of a technological limitation and more of the programmers intentionally obscuring human faces so that it can't be used maliciously.

The phenomenon isn't limited to photographs, but to any kind of face at all. Even Dalle2 has problems rendering a character as simple as Homer Simpson without giving him a slightly misshapen head, three tongues, no teeth or multiple pupils.

clawstripe said:
I'm sure the same questions were asked when CGI finally got good enough to compete favorably with traditional art, yet traditional art is still in demand and is in no way archaic. An AI won't be able to put any soul into their art. An AI can't interpret a scene or create it wholesale out of nothing. It's basically a camera that can chose when to hit its shutter instead of someone else. It just makes pictures; it can't say anything with them.

This whole AI art situation reminds me of what people thought 15-20 years ago about motion capture replacing animators. Which it didn't.

sulmarobar said:
Those all apply to me too, and plenty of "real" artists. Just cause it isn't there yet doesn't mean it won't ever be. Real people can add text to images after the fat, and if they make specific brush stroking engines, text writing engines (that use AI created stories/dialogue and insert into the piece), face and eye creating engines, they'll rapidly get up to speed. The implementation isn't necessarily done yet, but maybe adobe will add something to their suite in a decade or so.

You're probably not drawing melty butter people with soul devouring eyes and no mouth, or seven and a quarter fingered hand-flippers. When I say text, I mean the individual characters rendered into a scene, not writing text, even the best art AI I've seen fails at adding proper text (in shape, size, alignment) and intelligible words, a human would need to paint over the AI's mistakes. As for the rest of that, all of that hinges on hypothetical future developments, not present capabilities. At present, this is an impressive novelty, but every AI generated image would be better done by a skilled human artist.

hungrymaple said:
This whole AI art situation reminds me of what people thought 15-20 years ago about motion capture replacing animators. Which it didn't.

It hasn't obsoleted animators but I don't think you can say it's not replacing a portion of animation.
Don't take this as a defence of mocap. Who knows, perhaps in 15-20 years we'll have a similar situation where AI generation is a core part of some media, and maybe it'll fit about as poorly as a lot of mocap does?

A saying from the XIX Century...

"A machine can do the work of 50 ordinary men... but no machine could do the work of one extraordinary man".

- Helbert Hubbard

-----------------------

There will be always, extraordinary artists.

As technology advances, it always creates more jobs and options, for those trully interested and willing to go with their times.

NOTE:

1. DALL-E mini is a very limited version of the real deal.
2. Many of the restrictions are artificially imposed out of fear.
3. Some other group could eventually release something without restrictions, or even optimized specifically for porn.
4. AI models will become better and easier to run, while hardware continues to improve.

mexicanfurry said:
As technology advances, it always creates more jobs and options, for those trully interested and willing to go with their times.

Until it doesn't. What we're more likely to see is all sorts of jobs being eliminated, especially in retail and warehousing. People will crowd into the creative field, only creating more brutal competition between each other and AI like DALL-E and GPT. Starving artist time.

As for AI vs. furry art, text to image(s) is only scratching the surface. You can direct some of these models by adding more user input, like this:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/studio/canvas/

Will it put artists out of business? Not necessarily. But imagine if you took one of these future models, wrote a paragraph describing what you want, and then selected an artist's name out of a list. And it makes you several good versions in the artist's style. The more art you make, the more accurate it becomes.

I made an important edit to my original post that's important enough that I'll repeat it here:

• While the public beta is free (if you're lucky enough to get your hands on it... the waitlist is long), it will almost certainly be a paid service once released publicly. Pricing per usage is yet to be determined.
• The public release is probably coming "soon"

Also, I have a question: Does anybody know if DALL·E 2 will be allowed for commercial use? For example, could an author use an image generated from it as the illustration for the cover of a book they wrote? If yes, is that going to lead to weird copyright issues where another author could legally steal the same image for their book to try to confuse people? Another example: would a Youtuber be allowed to use DALL·E 2 images for thumbnails if they receive ad revenue from their videos? I think the answers to these questions, as well as the eventual pricing announcement, will determine to what extent some professionals will need to compete with DALL-E 2.

Also, since no one has said it yet, can we take a moment to appreciate that we now live in the future. I mean, magical flat colored-light emitting boxes that we keep in our pockets that allow us to send information to and receive information from anyone in the world was one thing, but now our magical light boxes can seemingly understand us and have imagination. It's on a whole other level!

lance_armstrong said:
words

Sounds like catastrophizing to me...

We know they don't train it on violent, sexual or bigoted input, and it also isn't allowed to make photo realistic faces. But are these limitations really all intentional? Is DALLE2 limited from making Homer Simpson have a single tongue or normal teeth because of fear? Is it a built-in limitation for DALLE2 to forget to add limbs? Or is it just how the software operates and these errors are far more common and far worse than the cherry-picked publicity images in tech articles let on?

As for furry art? Putting aside legal ramifications of the dataset being used, you would need someone with the drive, time, technical skill, monetary and computational resources, along with a specific desire to spend all of that on a freely accessible furry art generator. Then you have to assume their AI generator is any good, it'd have to be better than the resources of OpenAI can create, both DALL-E2 and GPT are developed by OpenAI, which has billions of dollars at its disposal.

All of the panic being made here is about some hypothetical magic future AI released on the world at large, that will destroy all need for human made art by creating perfectly generated, perfectly understood, perfectly detailed free artwork that will match what you wanted perfectly. If this kind of software advances beyond being a testing mechanism for machine learning and a novelty to create meme pictures, it won't be magically generating free furry art, or free art of any kind.

The fear is overblown, I'm also very skeptical of this technology's abilities, with all the problems it opens up, I'm not sure it's going to have as much utility that people believe it will.

I don't think AI will put all artists out of business. I think AI will be just another tool they can use to speed up their work, like for example cleaning linework and speeding up coloring and shading.

mexicanfurry said:
A saying from the XIX Century...

"A machine can do the work of 50 ordinary men... but no machine could do the work of one extraordinary man".

- Helbert Hubbard

-----------------------

There will be always, extraordinary artists.

Based.

It seems no one remembers the furry art generator. It was trained on a ton of furry images and did a decent job of generating new images. It was even posted about in this forum. Sadly I don't remember the name of the site.

There's another art generator which converts an existing image into the style of a different author. I would find that interesting to use, but who has time to browse all the new images and then re-browse some of them in multiple styles?

Both of those tools are multiple years old.

Keep in mind if these types of tools become useful then artists can use them too. You could generate an image, touch it up, then sell the touch up. Don't think the image generator will allow that? Make your own. The algorithms are in computer vision 101 textbooks and implemented freely in libraries like OpenCV, scraping images sites is easy, and you can train the model using cloud computing resources. They're really not that difficult to make.

mrox said:
It seems no one remembers the furry art generator. It was trained on a ton of furry images and did a decent job of generating new images. It was even posted about in this forum. Sadly I don't remember the name of the site.

There's another art generator which converts an existing image into the style of a different author. I would find that interesting to use, but who has time to browse all the new images and then re-browse some of them in multiple styles?

Both of those tools are multiple years old.

Keep in mind if these types of tools become useful then artists can use them too. You could generate an image, touch it up, then sell the touch up. Don't think the image generator will allow that? Make your own. The algorithms are in computer vision 101 textbooks and implemented freely in libraries like OpenCV, scraping images sites is easy, and you can train the model using cloud computing resources. They're really not that difficult to make.

The thing about DALL-E 2 that is not easy to reimplement is data sanitization- manually labelling 'these pixels are grass' 'these pixels are a face'
, etc for many images, takes a lot of time even with good tools. That labelling is key to the whole tie in with gpt-3 which is what enables inputting textual descriptions and getting useful results.

Maybe inputting text descriptions to generate an image is less useful than people are currently thinking, making the issue moot, but producing something that realistically competes with DALL-E 2 results looks to me like it won't be easily done.

mrox said:
It seems no one remembers the furry art generator. It was trained on a ton of furry images and did a decent job of generating new images. It was even posted about in this forum. Sadly I don't remember the name of the site.

"This fursona does not exist"?

Stable Diffusion is coming out. Opening up with some robo-dolphins I've extracted from it: 1 2 3 4

... or, probably more convincingly, here's some picks from NovelAI's devs, who have added some improvements on top of the model: 1 2 3 4

All of these are cherry-picked, of course. I didn't count, but I think the number of images I generated to get four that I liked was in several hundreds; and I tried several dozen prompt variations.

Stable Diffusion itself will be released as open source within a few days, and can run on a decent Nvidia GPU. NovelAI will likely add the improved version to their existing (paid) text generation service

It's still easy to point out flaws, of course, and actually quite interesting to notice the models making mistakes that no human artist would make. But with the speed of progress right now, it is an unusually bad time to make confident pronouncements about what these models definitely won't be able to do in the future.

mexicanfurry said:
A saying from the XIX Century...

"A machine can do the work of 50 ordinary men... but no machine could do the work of one extraordinary man".

- Helbert Hubbard

-----------------------

There will be always, extraordinary artists.

Yeah, this is exactly what scares me the most because of the fact that I have no unique traits that someone else can’t do better.

I’m not a robot, I’m just stupid. It’s kinda why I just stopped trying. It might even explain why I have such desire to be a simple animal. That’s what makes the ordeal feel fine.

I got access to Dall-E 2 a while back. Played around with it a bit on the first day, then got bored.
Some highlights: https://imgur.com/a/3EjLku7

Prompts used:

• a penguin flying over a rainbow

(Most adorable penguin ever! Great job Dall-E 2!)

• A giant shark chasing after a school of fish in outer space, Earth and the moon can be seen in the background
• digital art of a crystal bat flying in a crystal cave

(3 pictures)

• An anthropomorphic mouse scientist wearing a lab coat, who is eating a wedge of cheese, while holding a flask of sparkling chemicals in his other hand. Several other flasks of colorful chemicals are on the desk in front of him.

(3 pictures)

• a tiny dragon in a bowl of ramen

zermelane said:

... or, probably more convincingly, here's some picks from NovelAI's devs, who have added some improvements on top of the model: 1 [..]

Is that... mangling the hell out of the signature from a piece it's pulling from because it doesn't know what it's for?

magnuseffect said:
Is that... mangling the hell out of the signature from a piece it's pulling from because it doesn't know what it's for?

Yes, a Dall-E has been trained on existing artwork with signatures, you can even still find traces of them in some output. That's also how they offer selecting an artist style.

magnuseffect said:
Is that... mangling the hell out of the signature from a piece it's pulling from because it doesn't know what it's for?

It's mangling the signature because it doesn't have enough capacity and wasn't trained on enough data to be able to get the signature right.

(Also, it knows very little about what anything is for. That's not a fundamental limitation - these models are perfectly capable of picking up complex statistical correlations (if they are large enough and trained on enough data) including ones where you have to infer things about the existence of a world that all of these pictures and captions are about. It's just that at best, if you make some incredibly suspect simplifying assumptions like "one weight = one synapse", it has a brain with just about as much power as a zebrafish - and it tends to be popular to say that those assumptions way underestimate the power of biological brains. So it's a very, very small, stupid thing by human standards, it's just incredibly optimized for its specific task.)

notmenotyou said:
Yes, a Dall-E has been trained on existing artwork with signatures, you can even still find traces of them in some output. That's also how they offer selecting an artist style.

It's technically possible for the model to internally use the signature to help with style (if the signature is legible at its current timestep, it can read it and then draw detail matching the artist's style, even if it wasn't given the artist in the caption)... but it would be hard to even tell that it's doing that, and it's not used for controlling the model. We just hope that the artist whose style we wants to use gets mentioned in captions about their art a lot, and then mention that artist's name in the caption we use as input.

Anyway, what I came to do in this thread was to show off a few more gens from Stable Diffusion that I liked, again from NovelAI's devs using their as-yet unreleased tech (that I expect should be out within weeks, and who knows, maybe by tomorrow): 1 2 3 4

(and actually, what the hell, why not a few of my own again: 1 2 3 . I generated these on my rather overprovisioned GPU at home, the Stable Diffusion model itself is free to download.)

Right now this technology won't be able to replace many furry artists. I played with textual inversion and it didn't work very well for me yet, so these models don't yet have the capability to draw on reference. And Stable Diffusion doesn't so much draw the thing you ask it for than it dreams of something with a vaguely related gist. But how many of you expected a year ago that this is where the technology would be now? Two years ago? Because two years ago, I would have called this just complete science fiction, and, well, here i am now, generating hot salamander anthros while I'm typing this. It's a very bad time to make confident pronouncements about what absurd miracle won't happen in the near future.

zermelane said:
It's mangling the signature because it doesn't have enough capacity and wasn't trained on enough data to be able to get the signature right.

(Also, it knows very little about what anything is for. That's not a fundamental limitation - these models are perfectly capable of picking up complex statistical correlations (if they are large enough and trained on enough data) including ones where you have to infer things about the existence of a world that all of these pictures and captions are about. It's just that at best, if you make some incredibly suspect simplifying assumptions like "one weight = one synapse", it has a brain with just about as much power as a zebrafish - and it tends to be popular to say that those assumptions way underestimate the power of biological brains. So it's a very, very small, stupid thing by human standards, it's just incredibly optimized for its specific task.)

It's technically possible for the model to internally use the signature to help with style (if the signature is legible at its current timestep, it can read it and then draw detail matching the artist's style, even if it wasn't given the artist in the caption)... but it would be hard to even tell that it's doing that, and it's not used for controlling the model. We just hope that the artist whose style we wants to use gets mentioned in captions about their art a lot, and then mention that artist's name in the caption we use as input.

Anyway, what I came to do in this thread was to show off a few more gens from Stable Diffusion that I liked, again from NovelAI's devs using their as-yet unreleased tech (that I expect should be out within weeks, and who knows, maybe by tomorrow): 1 2 3 4

(and actually, what the hell, why not a few of my own again: 1 2 3 . I generated these on my rather overprovisioned GPU at home, the Stable Diffusion model itself is free to download.)

Right now this technology won't be able to replace many furry artists. I played with textual inversion and it didn't work very well for me yet, so these models don't yet have the capability to draw on reference. And Stable Diffusion doesn't so much draw the thing you ask it for than it dreams of something with a vaguely related gist. But how many of you expected a year ago that this is where the technology would be now? Two years ago? Because two years ago, I would have called this just complete science fiction, and, well, here i am now, generating hot salamander anthros while I'm typing this. It's a very bad time to make confident pronouncements about what absurd miracle won't happen in the near future.

What prompts are you using that youre getting such good results for anthro stuff?

zermelane said:
two years ago, I would have called this just complete science fiction, and, well, here i am now, generating hot salamander anthros while I'm typing this

What a time to be alive.

Imagine where we will be two more papers down the line.

demesejha said:
What prompts are you using that youre getting such good results for anthro stuff?

Prompts were, in order:

"very beautiful male anthro salamander, big cute yellow eyes, soft smile, toned physique, wearing a skin tight latex suit, digital painting, artstation, scalie commission on furaffinity by greg rutkowski, artgerm, frans snyders"
"very beautiful female anthro salamander, big cute yellow eyes, soft smile, wearing a skin tight latex suit, glistening amphibian skin, digital painting, artstation, scalie commission on furaffinity by greg rutkowski, artgerm, frans snyders"
"oil painting of a male anthro gecko wearing a brown tweed jacket, scalie commission on furaffinity, greg rutkowski, disney"

(plus cherry-picking at an at least 1:10 rate)

Greg Rutkowski is basically my default prompt vitamin for any fantasy or portrait paintings, while Disney is very nice for amping up cute and emotive faces. The other artists' effect I'm less sure about, but prompting is not an exact science.

For species, SD really is weirdly good at salamanders, it's happy to anthro them up and vary their designs on command, and to make varied designs on its own. Vipers, geckos, dinosaurs and skinks are also well worth trying. Mammals work, too, but I haven't figured out how to get SD to draw more than one face per species with them.

post #3531906

zermelane said:
Imagine where we will be two more papers down the line.

DEAR FELLOW SCHOLARS

lance_armstrong said:
post #3531906

rip

Actually, given the description of that post says it was "manually composited and touched up", does it still count as an AI-only artwork?

strikerman said:
rip

Actually, given the description of that post says it was "manually composited and touched up", does it still count as an AI-only artwork?

I'm on the discord server where those came from. They weren't "AI-only", no, the author spent hours working on them. It involved a lot of layer editing in photoshop.
More like "AI-assisted", kinda BS they were removed IMO.

strikerman said:
rip

Actually, given the description of that post says it was "manually composited and touched up", does it still count as an AI-only artwork?

I spent a lot of time on all of those: redrawing parts manually, compositing layers, masking out unwanted details ...

It definitely was NOT AI-only artwork.

ausfer said:
I spent a lot of time on all of those: redrawing parts manually, compositing layers, masking out unwanted details ...

It definitely was NOT AI-only artwork.

Dmail NotMeNotYou about it.

I'm in the DALL-E 2 beta.

A few I did. Simple prompts like "Anthropomorphic female deer in a bikini", "Female werewolf snorkeling in the ocean", and "Female werewolf in a bikini surfing with a tropical beach in the background." That last one's been my favorite so far. It didn't do her bikini and I meant her to actually be surfing with the beach behind her, not standing on the sand.

https://ibb.co/6y6kgcK
https://ibb.co/vXkF0b5
https://ibb.co/xMMSFkZ
https://ibb.co/P6NrbyQ
https://ibb.co/n3tRpN3

There's some comments in this thread that the pricing is unknown, but it's pretty clear and the credits system seems very generous. Your first month you're given 50 free credits. Every request, modification, or redraw uses 1 credit. Afterward you're given 15 free credits a month. They're use them or lose them; they don't roll over month to month. You get them at one month intervals based on the date, so if you sign up on the 15th, your free credits will be applied on the 15th of every month. Paid credits start at $15 for 115, and go up from there.

As each request does four images, you'll end up with quadruple the images than credits used. Of course not every image is good, but sometimes you'll get lucky and you'll get a most/all winners per request.

I tried to get in, but it wanted a phone number and threw a fit when I put in my landline, lol.

votp said:
I tried to get in, but it wanted a phone number and threw a fit when I put in my landline, lol.

Yeah, they text you a verification code. They're being careful to keep people from making multiple accounts to get more free credits.

lance_armstrong said:
Dmail NotMeNotYou about it.

I did. We'll see what I get back.

I'm not sure where else I should be sharing this stuff...

ausfer said:
I did. We'll see what I get back.

I'm not sure where else I should be sharing this stuff...

Furaffinity is usually a safe bet

strikerman said:
Furaffinity is usually a safe bet

Well yea, but that requires visiting furaffinity.

I've been watching r/StableDiffusion lately and it's just incredible what artists are creating on there. E6 really needs to modernize their policy on AI image gen, and asap, or they just risk going against the grain of evolving technology and becoming a relic.

Take this for example - https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x0epek/a_different_way_to_use_img2img/ - it has nothing to do with furry art, but just imagine it was an anthro instead of a human or whatever. The point is highlighting the start-to-finish workflow being demonstrated there.

I can only guess that their current policy stems from earlier generations of image gen, which is fair, cause that old stuff was pretty rough on what you could do with it.

ausfer said:
I did. We'll see what I get back.

I'm not sure where else I should be sharing this stuff...

ausfer said:

strikerman said:
Furaffinity is usually a safe bet

Well yea, but that requires visiting furaffinity.

Inkbunny.

terraraptor said:
I've been watching r/StableDiffusion lately and it's just incredible what artists are creating on there. E6 really needs to modernize their policy on AI image gen, and asap, or they just risk going against the grain of evolving technology and becoming a relic.

Take this for example - https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x0epek/a_different_way_to_use_img2img/ - it has nothing to do with furry art, but just imagine it was an anthro instead of a human or whatever. The point is highlighting the start-to-finish workflow being demonstrated there.

I can only guess that their current policy stems from earlier generations of image gen, which is fair, cause that old stuff was pretty rough on what you could do with it.

We're not denying AI created works because they're bad, we're denying them because they're little more than automated plagiarism championed by a dude with a long history of disrespect towards actual artists.
Art from people that have not consented or licensed the use of their works as part of the training set is used to create the output, this makes every created image a direct derivative and opens up a fun mix of ethical and potentially legal issues.

Using these generated images as reference material is perfectly fine, but no parts of it can be used directly.

notmenotyou said:
We're not denying AI created works because they're bad, we're denying them because they're little more than automated plagiarism championed by a dude with a long history of disrespect towards actual artists.
Art from people that have not consented or licensed the use of their works as part of the training set is used to create the output, this makes every created image a direct derivative and opens up a fun mix of ethical and potentially legal issues.

Using these generated images as reference material is perfectly fine, but no parts of it can be used directly.

Saying the AI is committing plagiarism for learning on a dataset is like saying an artist is committing plagiarism by learning how to draw by studying other people's work.
An AI learns how to draw the leg of an animal by referencing how countless other artists have done this. And so did I, when I make my pokemon off white game years ago. I don't see the difference.

Anyways the only reason I'm even sticking my neck out and coming here is because... What SD can do now is nothing compared to what actual, specialized furry/scalie modules are able to produce, which we'll start seeing in the coming months. I've seen 'em over on the NovelAI discord, incredible stuff that can rival human-drawn content. You'll no doubt start seeing a surge of the stuff here with people not disclosing it was AI generated/assisted. That sounds like an exhausting war to wage, and just going against the inevitable. If not 2022, then 2023.

notmenotyou said:
We're not denying AI created works because they're bad, we're denying them because they're little more than automated plagiarism championed by a dude with a long history of disrespect towards actual artists.
Art from people that have not consented or licensed the use of their works as part of the training set is used to create the output, this makes every created image a direct derivative and opens up a fun mix of ethical and potentially legal issues.

Using these generated images as reference material is perfectly fine, but no parts of it can be used directly.

(1) Who's this "dude" you are referring to? There are multiple image generation algorithms in the AI space right now (stable diffusion, dall-e2, imagen, midjourney) and they can't all be the brainchild of one guy.
(2) Consent and/or license is not required. Unless you seriously think that Google got licensing rights to every book they ever scanned and made available on Google Books (hint: they didn't) and other uses (eg. text generation AIs such as GPT-3). There's a difference between the data (which a copyright owns) and the statistical analysis of that very same data. The copyright holder of a work cannot prevent the statistical analysis of their work.
(3) Derivative works are clearly called out in copyright law. "To be copyrightable, a derivative work must be different enough from the original to be regarded as a "new work" or must contain a substantial amount of new material."
(4) It can be both "plagiarism" and "derivative work." It's either a copy of the original or it has been modified. You can't claim both defenses at the same time, you get one or the other.

Even the mere act of combing through AI generated results for the best pieces to share (aka "curation") embodies a substantial amount of work and creative expression to qualify as a copyrightable work in its own right. And that's before we get to blending multiple generated images together, fixing up seams, playing with color and tone, and deciding whether or not to run the current result through img2img once more to handle touchups or variations, or to fill in holes.

You certainly aren't banning people from uploading images created through the use of Photoshop filters, are you?
No of course not, that would be ludicrous.

AI image gen is the new Photoshop filter.

Are there issues seeing hundreds of thousands of submissions that had little creative thought put into them beyond "type some words into a search bar"? Sure. But that's a separate issue than "do we allow this kind of expression at all?" There are already mechanisms in place to prevent flooding, they can be just as effective here.

But hey, if you can find the original image of this, I'll go buy a hat just so I can eat it. Should be real easy if AI generated art is all plagiarism.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/975739920306036766/1013216056501870704/unknown.png

terraraptor said:
Saying the AI is committing plagiarism for learning on a dataset is like saying an artist is committing plagiarism by learning how to draw by studying other people's work.

It's generally better to develop your own understanding of, say, legs, through study of real legs IRL, before you start considering other artists opinions on how to draw legs. IRL > photos > other artists.
But your basic point is sound. The plagiarism argument is weak even if the dataset includes only artworks and no photos or videos, though it may hold up for particularly small datasets. I'd be interested to find out what types of input were used for each individual AI.

Theoretically, if the training dataset of an AI did include only artworks, and it produced artworks that were like bad human artists (ie. maybe decent rendering, but disjointed picture design), that would be a distinct point towards the theory that what AIs are doing is close enough in nature to what human artists are doing.

(EDIT: .. because that seems to be what happens when human artists train mainly from others art rather than nature)

savageorange said:
It's generally better to develop your own understanding of, say, legs, through study of real legs IRL, before you start considering other artists opinions on how to draw legs. IRL > photos > other artists.
But your basic point is sound. The plagiarism argument is weak even if the dataset includes only artworks and no photos or videos, though it may hold up for particularly small datasets. I'd be interested to find out what types of input were used for each individual AI.

Theoretically, if the training dataset of an AI did include only artworks, and it produced artworks that were like bad human artists (ie. maybe decent rendering, but disjointed picture design), that would be a distinct point towards the theory that what AIs are doing is close enough in nature to what human artists are doing.

Or if the training set had only photos.
In the case of SD (etc) the datasets tend to be a mix of things, from photos to artwork, to textual descriptions. The human language portion of the dataset is why it can take input as text and generate something even when given grammatical gibberish despite that text data not being linked to images of any sort.
(And yes, I've asked AIs to produce output off of "colorless green ideas sleep furiously.")

Heck I'm sure you could train an AI to produce artwork using only a text dataset, provided you set up the training environment properly (it'd have to be a GAN). It probably wouldn't be photorealistic artwork, probably more impressionistic in style, but the point is that you could. Domain transfer is a huge field of research where you can train a network on one type of data and transfer what it learns to an unrelated dataset, as its often far easier to get massive datasets of one type than it is of the other.

to the OP: i correctly identified each image as AI or human-drawn, but i'll also admit i've played with various GAN-based image generators in the past (both online and on my gpu) so I have a good eye for what the telltale artifacting, limitations, and inconsistencies of AI generated images usually look like. they're certainly improving in many ways, but at the same time with a lot of the humanmade images you posted, there were clear differences in the local and global consistency of things like stroke patterns, as well as what imperfections look like when made by hand, versus what contemporary neural networks output at this time. these artifacts are in many ways improving, but the actual patterns of artifacts and "misconceptions" of how ai "visualizes" objects have largely remained the same for the last 5-7 years of neural net image generation.

terraraptor said:
Saying the AI is committing plagiarism for learning on a dataset is like saying an artist is committing plagiarism by learning how to draw by studying other people's work.
An AI learns how to draw the leg of an animal by referencing how countless other artists have done this. And so did I, when I make my pokemon off white game years ago. I don't see the difference.

Anyways the only reason I'm even sticking my neck out and coming here is because... What SD can do now is nothing compared to what actual, specialized furry/scalie modules are able to produce, which we'll start seeing in the coming months. I've seen 'em over on the NovelAI discord, incredible stuff that can rival human-drawn content. You'll no doubt start seeing a surge of the stuff here with people not disclosing it was AI generated/assisted. That sounds like an exhausting war to wage, and just going against the inevitable. If not 2022, then 2023.

to the argument that these models are not plagarism, i originally held the same point of view but over time have developed several major reservations as i've given it more thought. there are a couple points i have which teeter on the balance between practical and philosophical, which makes this a challenging thing to debate—but at the same time, i feel that the merit of these arguments is strong enough to justify (trying to) put the brakes on the proliferation of ai-generated art until we can reach a point where there's a larger consensus, both from continued discussion as well as further development of the AI in general.

asides from my reservations with the AI itself, one point I feel is worth noting is the fact that, in general, these sorts of projects generally indiscriminately scrape the web for more training data, which ignores whether or not the license to that work explicitly prohibits it from being used in training sets. this isn't a limitation to AI itself, but it's worth noting due to the lack of any meaningful recourse for affected artists as well as the complete lack of interest major AI companies have in respecting these rights.

i spent some time skimming the whitepaper for dall-e 2 before writing this post, as i wanted to check up on how things are developing and to make sure i'm forming a proper argument. while many of the terms are over my head by this point (this field moves too goddamn fast and i don't have the time to keep up with how terminology changes with new iterations of techniques) it seems like a lot of the core principles of how the images are generated haven't changed and have instead been heavily refined, not to mention a heavy boost in the sheer volume of the model size itself (which also increases the potential for overfitting/memorization).

side note, i'm not holding a position on whether AIs like this will displace traditional artists. IMO too much speculation is involved between how artists might adapt or leverage it, whether AI will actually overcome the "second 90%" of its development in a timely manner, and how future copyright laws might influence this as well.

my first reservation is in a key problem with all supervised AI training, which is model overfitting and memorization. trivially, if one were to produce a neural network that always outputs some (already) copyrighted work, distributing that neural network isn't any different than distributing the work itself from a rights perspective—functionally it's the same as sharing a computer program or encoded image that outputs the same copyrighted work. obviously these models don't do that from a literal perspective, but one of the core problems with how today's AI is trained and designed is the inability to define a clear and provable border between when an AI is plagarizing, and when it is "genuinely" learning/referencing art it has been trained on. suppose that someone with access to all of the weights of the DALL-E 2 network were able to calculate "adversarial embeddings" or text inputs into the system which, when used, can output an image which materially plagarizes a copyrighted work. from a legal perspective, how do we define what is infringing the original copyright? Is it the trained network itself, the embeddings, or the presence of both together? the answer from an engineering perspective is "it depends deeply on the model and how expressive the embeddings are", but our legal system and copyright laws aren't prepared to deal with this and realistically any judge presiding over a case is likely to lack a sufficient background of knowledge to understand the issue on their own which means any resulting caselaw has a major chance of being decided by whoever has a bigger bankroll.

Right now, I just logged on to DALL-E Mini (aka craiyon) and gave it the prompt "salvador dali's painting 'the persistence of memory'". The results are distorted (no doubt due to the limitations of the smaller and simpler network) but it's clear that the network has memorized the original work to a large extent. When an AI is capable of reproducing a memorized image, the burden of proving the originality of other outputs is much higher, since it's proven that the network is doing more than just generalizing what it's learned from other works--it's also storing some clearly recognizable representation of original works inside of it. If I were to distribute an AI like this, am I not also distributing every single copyrighted work that it has memorized? (consider for the sake of argument that a more sophisticated model than DALL-E mini will likely produce results that resemble the original work even more clearly)

Here's the output for reference: https://imgur.com/a/xhi1oss

you can reproduce this with many classical works. For instance, try the prompt "the painting "American Gothic" by Grant Wood"

another infamous example of this is Github's "Copilot" product, which used the source code of all public projects on Github regardless of their licensing. Users of Copilot have noticed that code suggestions occasionally come with comments that have been signed with original developers' names, and beginning a file with a copyright notice will often have Copilot "helpfully" suggest a completion with somebody else's name and information.

my second reservation is in a lot of ways an extension of the first, which is current AI's general inability to explain "why" it produces its output, which again increases the burden of proof that an AI isn't actually plagarizing. when a talented artist learns from or borrows from another artist's style, they're able to clearly articulate the individual differences in technique, lighting, composition, anatomy, design, detail density, etc that they were inspired by. as a result, any accusations of plagarism toward an artist can be argued by that artist themselves by showing specific works they were using as reference, what, where, and how they were referencing them, and point out individual decisions they made on their own that make the work personal to themselves. Contemporary AI can do none of those things and the models being developed today are not equipped at all (and likely fundamentally unable) to produce meaningful answers to these questions.

similarly, when an AI draws an object, feature of anatomy, etc, it's not able to articulate how it is making those decisions. A human who understands the anatomy of a limb intimately will likely be able to accurately represent it at various orientations and poses, perhaps even correctly representing the ways that the profile of the limb changes as different muscles contract and relax, and how the skin/fur/etc might fold in on itself. contemporary AI isn't able to represent such knowledge, and instead relies on inferring at a probabilistic level what a feature should look like, between the context of the surrounding image and the input to the model. this is part of why models require such immense training sets and why they're becoming so massive in size—the network isn't generalizing from an understanding of the subjects and their inherent properties, but rather, from a process of repetitive learning based on an input generator that aims to produce a probabilistic model that identifies what general shapes to put where given what else is around it.

for an example of this, take a look at the very first image posted in the OP, the stylized dinosaur. notice how on its front right leg (the creature's right, left relative to the image's perspective) there's no knee joint—it almost looks like the leg is folding in on itself, as if the knee was backwards. for a human drawing a similar image, they'd sketch a leg, identify where the joints should articulate, and draw knees/whatever-they-are with a general intuition as to how those joints can and can't bend. by comparison the AI only has a generalized idea of what a leg should like relative to its context, which is how it makes such inaccuracies that are (to me) clearly identifiable as an AI generated work.

the main point i'm trying to make here is that current ai and humans have very different concepts of what "learning" and "referencing" are, and given those differences, AIs simply have too heavy a burden of proof that they're not plagarizing, especially given evidence that the models are already memorizing original works.

I see it ss a time savior tool to generate backgrounds. Of course they will need some touches by the artist. But it's amazing :3.

m-b said:
Here's the output for reference: https://imgur.com/a/xhi1oss

And for reference, the real painting.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/artexplorer/5042254324

draco18s said:
(1) Who's this "dude" you are referring to? There are multiple image generation algorithms in the AI space right now (stable diffusion, dall-e2, imagen, midjourney) and they can't all be the brainchild of one guy.

Elon Musk mostly, especially with DALL-E 2 being able to select a style based on an artist.

draco18s said:
(2) Consent and/or license is not required. Unless you seriously think that Google got licensing rights to every book they ever scanned and made available on Google Books (hint: they didn't) and other uses (eg. text generation AIs such as GPT-3). There's a difference between the data (which a copyright owns) and the statistical analysis of that very same data. The copyright holder of a work cannot prevent the statistical analysis of their work.

Consent or license is not required for a statistical analysis, but using that data to recreate parts of the images in order to render an output directly relies on the original input. That is where the copyright infringement magic happens. If you cut an image into a million pieces, hash them, them use these hashes recreate the image you have still committed copyright infringement as you've successfully reconstructed the original. The only difference here is that it's a million images being infringed at once.

draco18s said:
(3) Derivative works are clearly called out in copyright law. "To be copyrightable, a derivative work must be different enough from the original to be regarded as a "new work" or must contain a substantial amount of new material."

The current AI and neural network models do not extrapolate from the training set, they only interpolate. This is the crux of the problem where every single rendered pixel is being taken directly from an existing image. The pixel is not placed there because the AI understands that a pixel of that value should be there on its own merit, it places there because it has been placed there previously in a similar context based on the trainings set.

draco18s said:
(4) It can be both "plagiarism" and "derivative work." It's either a copy of the original or it has been modified. You can't claim both defenses at the same time, you get one or the other.

I'm not using the legal definition here.

Take two pictures, cut a face out of one and paste it over a face on the second image, call this resulting composite your own, original creation. Congratulations you have now created a derivative and plagiarized two pieces of art in the same action.

draco18s said:
Even the mere act of combing through AI generated results for the best pieces to share (aka "curation") embodies a substantial amount of work and creative expression to qualify as a copyrightable work in its own right. And that's before we get to blending multiple generated images together, fixing up seams, playing with color and tone, and deciding whether or not to run the current result through img2img once more to handle touchups or variations, or to fill in holes.

[Citation Needed]

Curation of any output is not a copyrightable action as it's not an expression of an idea. That's like arguing you're able to copyright a specific order of a deck of cards you shuffled, that's not how any of that works.
Building on top of an output like that however may be copyrighted if it's transformative enough of the base material, hence why we allow using AI works as references, but not as basis.

draco18s said:
You certainly aren't banning people from uploading images created through the use of Photoshop filters, are you?
No of course not, that would be ludicrous.

Photoshop filters are created on purpose and have to be applied by the user on top of whatever they have already created. Your argument with allowing AI generated works that have been modified is putting the cart before the horse and calling it identical.

draco18s said:
Are there issues seeing hundreds of thousands of submissions that had little creative thought put into them beyond "type some words into a search bar"? Sure. But that's a separate issue than "do we allow this kind of expression at all?" There are already mechanisms in place to prevent flooding, they can be just as effective here.

But hey, if you can find the original image of this, I'll go buy a hat just so I can eat it. Should be real easy if AI generated art is all plagiarism.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/975739920306036766/1013216056501870704/unknown.png

Give me the training set and I'll give you the images it's most likely to be have lifted the parts from.

notmenotyou said:
That is where the copyright infringement magic happens. If you cut an image into a million pieces, hash them, them use these hashes recreate the image you have still committed copyright infringement as you've successfully reconstructed the original. The only difference here is that it's a million images being infringed at once.

The current AI and neural network models do not extrapolate from the training set, they only interpolate. This is the crux of the problem where every single rendered pixel is being taken directly from an existing image. The pixel is not placed there because the AI understands that a pixel of that value should be there on its own merit, it places there because it has been placed there previously in a similar context based on the trainings set.

Take two pictures, cut a face out of one and paste it over a face on the second image, call this resulting composite your own, original creation. Congratulations you have now created a derivative and plagiarized two pieces of art in the same action.

That's not really how neural models work
Ignoring overfitting problems like the ones m-b presented above (which is a pretty fascinating post that has helped me consider some different viewpoints), which I should point out are a big thing that you'd worry about while training your net, AI models like the ones we're discussing here do not encode 1-to-1 the pixel information of single images in the training set

What the models do in their learning process is analyze the data in each input, and then use that to construct a much denser representation of it. That is done through millions of inputs from the training set, over hundreds to thousands of epochs in which the entire training set is analyzed again. It's not a simple averaging of the pixel inputs it received, it's constructed in a way to allow the net to encode higher level information about the training set.
If you tell a properly trained model to give you a picture of a sunset, it will not look through it's library to find a sunset picture that it can copy pixels from, what it does is look through it's own latent space representation for all the "sunset" features it has learned and uses them to construct output images
(Please note that the term "Feature" here is jargon. It's not too dissimilar to what we usually mean by saying it day to day, but here in the computational inteligence field we're being a bit more specific about it)

My point is that ai models like these are indeed contructed to learn in the same way that we do. We can still argue about the legality/morality of training or distributing them though, that will most likely be a growing issue from here on out

draco18s said:
And for reference, the real painting.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/artexplorer/5042254324

It is pretty interesting how close it can get to the original, but in this case wouldn't this be classified as an autoencoding of it? I've never read any discussion on where an autoencoding of a preexisting work falls in our current understanding of intelectual property

Just something I thought as an "counterargument" to the model generating almost the same image when giving it as the input. I do generally agree with your points tho, just thought that would be a different angle to think about it

notmenotyou said:
The current AI and neural network models do not extrapolate from the training set, they only interpolate. This is the crux of the problem where every single rendered pixel is being taken directly from an existing image.

That is not how image gen works at all. Stable Diffusion starts with noise and gradually refines it into a recognizable image. There is no more copyright infringement than an artist emulating the style of another artist. Hell, artists already get away with disguised tracings all the time on this site! This whole "copyright infringement" argument is moot.

Right now, a mix of AI image gen and human editing can produce images that rival high quality hand-drawn digital art. And as the AI models improve (which is happening at an extremely quick pace!), the best results will be nearly indistinguishable from drawn art.

People will inevitably upload art without disclosing that AI had a hand in creating it. When such art looks as real as hand-drawn stuff, how are you going to police that? Moderating AI-generated art (especially hybrid art) will be an impossible task.

IMO, it's only a matter of time until you have to allow AI-generated art on this site, simply because moderators wont be able to tell the difference.

m-b said:
suppose that someone with access to all of the weights of the DALL-E 2 network were able to calculate "adversarial embeddings" or text inputs into the system which, when used, can output an image which materially plagarizes a copyrighted work. from a legal perspective, how do we define what is infringing the original copyright? Is it the trained network itself, the embeddings, or the presence of both together? the answer from an engineering perspective is "it depends deeply on the model and how expressive the embeddings are", but our legal system and copyright laws aren't prepared to deal with this and realistically any judge presiding over a case is likely to lack a sufficient background of knowledge to understand the issue on their own which means any resulting caselaw has a major chance of being decided by whoever has a bigger bankroll.

If they rule the network to be copyright infringing, that would mean the brains of people who have ever been exposed to copyrighted material would be copyright infringing too.

mabit said:
It is pretty interesting how close it can get to the original, but in this case wouldn't this be classified as an autoencoding of it? I've never read any discussion on where an autoencoding of a preexisting work falls in our current understanding of intelectual property

It's a bit of "overfitting" because there's only so many examples of "picture by artist named piece." What really needs to be done is fine tune the dataset to not have artists names or image titles in it at all, so that the input of "the persistence of memory" doesn't fire on those overtrained neurons, but is forced back up to the more general concepts.

In some cases you do need artists names, eg. "Salvador Dali" because their name embodied such a clearly defined artistic style, though such keywords should be (a) rare and (b) carefully considered. eg. "Salvador Dali" can be replaced with "surrealism" whereas "Jackson Pollock" doesn't really have a more general style. He's an "abstract expressionist" but that's too vague.
Or maybe its not. I'm not really an art historian.

But try replicating a specific art piece for a not super crazy famous person. Like, duh, you ask for a famous work of art everyone's heard of I'm sure you--yes you who can't draw to save your life--could produce a replica of The Persistence of Memory from memory that is at least recognizable as being a rendition of The Persistence of Memory.

But here, lets see if the AI can replicate the 2015 federal duck stamp.
For reference, the artist is Jennifer Miller and this is the image in quesiton:
https://fcc-cue-exports-brightspot.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/grandforksherald/binary/copy/18/e3/502e948a8b1a556aab90a203acc1/1164330-092814-o-gfh-rectopper-duck-stamp-winner-binary-1114566.jpg

This is still a shockingly well known image, even if it isn't part of the collective consciousness. First (second? I've forgotten) female artist to ever win the contest and the first time ruddy ducks have ever been chosen.

Lets see...
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/870341956734169158/1014331087893315675/unknown.png (Dall-E mini) Nope
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/870341956734169158/1014331584121425940/unknown.png (Dall-E mini) Nope
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/870341956734169158/1014331771208355930/unknown.png (Dall-E mini) Nope
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/870341956734169158/1014335581481881710/unknown.png (Stable Diffusion) Nope
(I'm out of credits for Midjourney and Dall-E 2)

None are even close. I mean sure, maybe I picked something too recent, but still, none of them even come close to an existing federal duck stamp from any year?
More duck stamps: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/719PcgajETL._SL1001_.jpg (they're small, but you can pick out some key features lacking in the above generated images; eg. most of the birds are depicted in flight)

notmenotyou said:
We're not denying AI created works because they're bad, we're denying them because they're little more than automated plagiarism championed by a dude with a long history of disrespect towards actual artists.
Art from people that have not consented or licensed the use of their works as part of the training set is used to create the output, this makes every created image a direct derivative and opens up a fun mix of ethical and potentially legal issues.

Using these generated images as reference material is perfectly fine, but no parts of it can be used directly.

What would happen if an artist intentionally makes a painting that looks like it was made by AI and uploads it here?

electricitywolf said:
What would happen if an artist intentionally makes a painting that looks like it was made by AI and uploads it here?

That's sorta like saying "what if someone posted what looked like a screenshot of an anime here, but was actually just original art?". It would be allowed. post #1574567

...that being said, I'm not sure what "intentionally looks like it was made by AI" would even entail or why an artist would ever do that.

terraraptor said:
E6 really needs to modernize their policy on AI image gen, and asap, or they just risk going against the grain of evolving technology and becoming a relic.

A reason why administrators would chose to no do that is that storage is not gratis.
E621 is a furry artwork archive. In the future, if e621 still does not allow AI generated works (and banks don't block Bad Dragon and the content in this site is still legal ), e621 may start to call itself a furry traditional artwork archive. In this case, traditional artwork means it is not AI generated, even if it was drawn using a computer.

notmenotyou said:
we're denying them because they're little more than automated plagiarism championed by a dude with a long history of disrespect towards actual artists.

OpenAI, like most of the big players, doesn't allow open access to its most "dangerous" AI models:

https://github.com/openai/dalle-2-preview/blob/main/system-card.md

Beyond limitations on the types of content that can be generated, we also limit the rate at which users may interact with the DALL·E 2 system. In addition to the above, we have put in place rate limits (e.g. limits on the number of prompts or images a user submits or generates per minute or simultaneously).

The primary purposes of rate limits at this stage are to help identify anomalous use and to limit the possibility of at-scale abuse.

At this stage we are not allowing programmatic access to the model by non-OpenAI employees.

Elon Musk resigned from the board in 2018. I don't know what long history of disrespect towards artists you're referring to. His main argument these days is that humans should become cyborgs (with Neuralink implants, of course) to counteract an AIpocalypse.

Now we are seeing the inevitable with the new hotness like Stable Diffusion. These image models will keep on getting better and better. Pandora's box is being opened. The genie is not going back in the bottle. We are on a highway to Hell and the ride never ends.

crocogator said:
...that being said, I'm not sure what "intentionally looks like it was made by AI" would even entail or why an artist would ever do that.

How many drugs do you need to take to come up with this on your own? (possibly NSFW)

lance_armstrong said:

How many drugs do you need to take to come up with this on your own? (possibly NSFW)

So I have this friend named mot ...

Funny thing about the "dude" part, I feel like if there was one person to say has really been the driving force with Stable Diffusion, I'd say it's Katherine Crowson. I've been hanging out and lurking at EleutherAI, and it's kind of hilarious, since most of what they talk about you can at least roughly understand once you've read up a decent amount on modern deep learning... but then you look over at Kat and whatever the hell she's talking about, and you never understand half of it because she's constantly so deep in the weeds of experiments, implementing and combining every sort of idea on generative models. And she 100% knows what she's doing and what it will mean to the art world. I don't know what drives her (other than prescription stimulants), but she has a lot of it.

lance_armstrong said:
Now we are seeing the inevitable with the new hotness like Stable Diffusion. These image models will keep on getting better and better. Pandora's box is being opened. The genie is not going back in the bottle. We are on a highway to Hell and the ride never ends.

Yep. To add to this: The guy who wrote the check to train Stable Diffusion says it would have cost $600k at market price and the actual price to them was of course less, since they're not renting compute at an hourly price. So, that's a model that completely stole OpenAI's thunder and has artists around the world genuinely scared, and it took angel investment levels of funding. And they're already training the next one, and there's tons of papers full of new architectural improvements to try, and Nvidia's already manufacturing the next generation of their hardware, etc.. And Google has already released work on how well text-to-image models scale with size, too; with their resources, they'd be easily leading the image generation pack if they weren't too terrified to release a product with it at all.

We have a floor established on how fast things will progress in the next couple of years, if simply the same fabs keep churning out hardware, and the same data centers get used for longer training runs with the hardware they already have, and the same people keep writing software, etc.. And then there's all the hypothetical improvements that might happen, some of which almost certainly will, we just don't know which ones yet. It's going to get weird.

mabit said:
That's not really how neural models work
Ignoring overfitting problems like the ones m-b presented above (which is a pretty fascinating post that has helped me consider some different viewpoints), which I should point out are a big thing that you'd worry about while training your net, AI models like the ones we're discussing here do not encode 1-to-1 the pixel information of single images in the training set

What the models do in their learning process is analyze the data in each input, and then use that to construct a much denser representation of it. That is done through millions of inputs from the training set, over hundreds to thousands of epochs in which the entire training set is analyzed again. It's not a simple averaging of the pixel inputs it received, it's constructed in a way to allow the net to encode higher level information about the training set.
If you tell a properly trained model to give you a picture of a sunset, it will not look through it's library to find a sunset picture that it can copy pixels from, what it does is look through it's own latent space representation for all the "sunset" features it has learned and uses them to construct output images
(Please note that the term "Feature" here is jargon. It's not too dissimilar to what we usually mean by saying it day to day, but here in the computational inteligence field we're being a bit more specific about it)

My point is that ai models like these are indeed contructed to learn in the same way that we do. We can still argue about the legality/morality of training or distributing them though, that will most likely be a growing issue from here on out

I'm being simplistic on purpose, of course it's neither an average (which isn't even the only form of interpolation so why you went there is beyond me) nor literally pasting a specific pixel from a specific image, but the gist is the same due to how the learning process works in that synapses are strengthened due to exposure to similar structures in the images supplied with the training set. The AI still creates a representation of what it sees, refines it with other similar representations, and then inserts that representation back into the output. This is still just an amalgamation of what it has seen, it is not something new.

ausfer said:
That is not how image gen works at all. Stable Diffusion starts with noise and gradually refines it into a recognizable image. There is no more copyright infringement than an artist emulating the style of another artist. Hell, artists already get away with disguised tracings all the time on this site! This whole "copyright infringement" argument is moot.

And yet we still delete images for tracing if we find them instead of just rolling over. Also that the base image is noise proves literally nothing about how the "refining" is then accomplished. I bet you money the only reason that step is even needed is because you can't currently parallelize the process enough and have to do it in one step. Sufficiently advanced tech will likely be able to no longer have to do that.

ausfer said:
Right now, a mix of AI image gen and human editing can produce images that rival high quality hand-drawn digital art. And as the AI models improve (which is happening at an extremely quick pace!), the best results will be nearly indistinguishable from drawn art.

People will inevitably upload art without disclosing that AI had a hand in creating it. When such art looks as real as hand-drawn stuff, how are you going to police that? Moderating AI-generated art (especially hybrid art) will be an impossible task.

IMO, it's only a matter of time until you have to allow AI-generated art on this site, simply because moderators wont be able to tell the difference.

You underestimate how easy it is for us to blacklist and remove entire artists, we have the tools to police that even if some get through for a while.

lance_armstrong said:
Elon Musk resigned from the board in 2018. I don't know what long history of disrespect towards artists you're referring to. His main argument these days is that humans should become cyborgs (with Neuralink implants, of course) to counteract an AIpocalypse.

https://theblemish.com/2019/06/elon-musk-hates-crediting-artists/ and a lot more of those cases since then.

notmenotyou said:
The AI still creates a representation of what it sees, refines it with other similar representations, and then inserts that representation back into the output. This is still just an amalgamation of what it has seen, it is not something new.

And you think that that is not how humans work?
Because that's how humans work.

We learn things by seeing stuff over and over and refining our internal mental model of what "stuff" is and so when we set out to draw "stuff" we start with a blank page and adds a few marks, iterating and refining until the result is a representation of the thing we wanted to draw. Sure we don't do it pixel by pixel and randomly adjusting the color value, but we make changes and decide if those changes make the image closer to what we want, or revert them and try different changes. And sometimes those changes ARE down at the pixel level, when you're having to deal with one object layering atop and other and you don't want it to bleed incorrectly, so you have to fiddle with the alpha and color values of individual pixels to make it look right.

Every creative thing humans have done has been iteration and refinement of things that came before. Sometimes in small steps, sometimes by combining two things together into one, or in large leaps of random inspiration.

But if you think I'm wrong, name any one thing that has no precursor, no predecessor from which it was refined, iterated upon, or inspired by something else and still qualifies as creative expression from a human being.

notmenotyou said:
You underestimate how easy it is for us to blacklist and remove entire artists, we have the tools to police that even if some get through for a while.

So your solution is to blacklist any artist who you suspect is using AI-powered image generation? Does that include blacklisting already-established artists who have started to use AI to modify their own art? Because if so, you already have a number of well-known artists that are in violation. But that's assuming you can even prove that AI was involved, and I'm betting you can't do that reliably.

IMO, this stance you have is unsustainable and will only get worse as these AI models become more sophisticated and widespread.

ausfer said:
So your solution is to blacklist any artist who you suspect is using AI-powered image generation? Does that include blacklisting already-established artists who have started to use AI to modify their own art? Because if so, you already have a number of well-known artists that are in violation. But that's assuming you can even prove that AI was involved, and I'm betting you can't do that reliably.

IMO, this stance you have is unsustainable and will only get worse as these AI models become more sophisticated and widespread.

I think this points to a big iceberg looming for the policy: e6's rules won't affect how quickly AI tools will be adopted into the content creation ecosystem, the way Photoshop has become just a typical DCC for photographers. If and when that happens, excluding art from search results based on whether AI was used will be much like filtering on whether Photoshop or some other tool was used - it may be done for some specific or niche purpose, but would be very undesirable as a presumed default for everyone.

notmenotyou said:
the gist is the same due to how the learning process works in that synapses are strengthened due to exposure to similar structures in the images supplied with the training set. The AI still creates a representation of what it sees, refines it with other similar representations, and then inserts that representation back into the output. This is still just an amalgamation of what it has seen, it is not something new.

Correct! It's exactly like how we do it in order to draw. We observe either the real world or the works of others, develop our own understanding of what we've seen, and then we use that knowledge in order to create new works. It's how every single artist that has ever lived has done it, from caveman paintings to jackson pollock to sonic ocs

https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvmvqm/an-ai-generated-artwork-won-first-place-at-a-state-fair-fine-arts-competition-and-artists-are-pissed

notmenotyou said:
https://theblemish.com/2019/06/elon-musk-hates-crediting-artists/ and a lot more of those cases since then.

People share images on social media without giving credit all the time, and Musk is shitposting. That's only a story because people track Musk's every move and outlets like "The Blemish" want to farm clicks. It also postdates his involvement with OpenAI, and everyone is talking about Stable Diffusion now, not DALL-E. It shouldn't inform any decision about AI art.

I understand your reasons for banning it, but a flood is coming. FA can be the dam.

zermelane said:
And then there's all the hypothetical improvements that might happen, some of which almost certainly will, we just don't know which ones yet. It's going to get weird.

Furry artists will be hit hard. If you can create 80 high quality images of your OC while goofing off for a day, you might do that instead of pay for commissions. We will see shaming of those who do that, but poors gonna poor regardless. You could even buy a 3090 equivalent GPU instead of paying for commissions, to run models locally. You could pay for that GPU by running models for other people and doing the cleanup edits.

We will also see training on all of a popufur's hundreds or thousands of images to copy their style. Then e621 will get more artist takedowns despite having taken the pro-artist move by completely banning AI-generated art. Yay.

mabit said:
Correct! It's exactly like how we do it in order to draw. We observe either the real world or the works of others, develop our own understanding of what we've seen, and then we use that knowledge in order to create new works. It's how every single artist that has ever lived has done it, from caveman paintings to jackson pollock to sonic ocs

AI Prompt: Paint ______ in the style of former President George W. Bush plagiarizing photos of world leaders in his paintings.

votp said:
So I have this friend named mot ...

Those are more orderly than the one I linked, but "intentionally looks like it was made by AI" is changing fast.

Sometimes, I feel that there's a smugness amongst advocates and developers that human artists will be replaced by these and later generation AI and that humanity will be so much the better for kicking those filthy, money-grubbing, overcharging artists to the curb where they belong. It's not AI-conquers-or-destroys-humanity type of paranoia but rather the all too human desire to stick middle fingers in the eye of someone who possesses something a person wants but thought they couldn't have. We've seen this before with the development of ebooks and CG animation. Tech-oriented advocates sneer and swagger about; predicting the oncoming end of newspapers, physical books, 2D traditional animation, human artists; and insisting society no longer needs these "archaic" things pushed by nebulous entities that just want our money. Because they're the ones championing these new technologies, the advocates act as if they should be seen as prophets for a new social order as that's the thing they want to possess: to be the fashionable ones on top with all the cool abilities. Good riddance to all those artists raking in the money with their egos and desire for profit that would be better off going to the prophets instead.

This isn't entirely true, of course, but that's the attitude that comes across to me. We still have newspapers, physical books, 2D traditional animation, and no matter how good AI gets at painting, human artists can never be replaced. AI is like child prodigies in music. They can render violin solos with amazing skill, but there's still something missing, something more experienced musicians have learned, that true mastery comes not when you can get all the notes correct and in the right order, but when you can say something with those notes and, just importantly, in the spaces between the notes. But those prodigies have something an AI never will: the ability to gain experience in art. Because AIs aren't artists. They're just soulless rendering machines. Even their most masterful output is only art when someone with an artistic eye comes along and makes something of it.

As for e621's current position towards AI-generated (and human artist-interpreted) art, I take NotMeNotYou's position as less a permanent policy against it than laying out a higher standard than other art for it to achieve before it can stay, just like it is with CG art. Sure, a CG artist can render some pretty good models, but you'd better be saying and doing something with that model other than a boring T-pose turnaround. Therefore, that artist had better be saying something with that AI-created rendering to turn it into art instead of poking fingers in eyes because "it's prettier than anything those sucker artists can make! Jerks."

mabit said:
Correct! It's exactly like how we do it in order to draw. We observe either the real world or the works of others, develop our own understanding of what we've seen, and then we use that knowledge in order to create new works. It's how every single artist that has ever lived has done it, from caveman paintings to jackson pollock to sonic ocs

People seem to anthropomorphize these AI far too much, these programs are not learning or making the images the same way human beings do, even calling them AI instead of algorithms seems like typical "tech bro" hype and exaggeration to me, even if it's technically correct, it gives the connotation of sentient science fiction Artificial Intelligences with actual thoughts, rather than what they actually are.

Humans make decisions, have spontaneous ideas and thoughts, and actually understand what they're making, there's effort, skill, and desires, which art AI inherently doesn't have, these so-called AI are generating images algorithmically based on a set database of images - the AI doesn't know what xyz is, it doesn't prefer the style that xyz is drawn in, it's incapable of having knowledge, creativity, personal interpretations, ideas, or anything else, it just "knows" that these images are labelled xyz, so if a user's prompt includes xyz, then the output should include something similar to those images.

I'm completely with NotMeNotYou and happy to see the admin come down against AI art. AI "art" doesn't belong here, and as much as possible should be done to remove it if posted, it's akin to allowing users to post traced images, dress-up doll images, or images made from "thisfursonadoesntexist", the complexity of the program is entirely irrelevant, it's not ethical for an end user to claim ownership or credit for an algorithmically generated image, you didn't program the algorithm, you didn't do anything but type in the words that anyone else could, and eventually lucked into something you thought looked coherent enough to share.

There aren't any convincing arguments to me for allowing purely AI-created "art" here, or on any other art site for that matter, it flies in the face of what an art archive or gallery site is intended to do, and practically speaking, is a waste of server space that costs money to have.

clawstripe said:
Sure, a CG artist can render some pretty good models, but you'd better be saying and doing something with that model other than a boring T-pose turnaround.

That reminds me.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/studio/canvas/

Before long, you will be able to use poseable 3D characters as input to have better control over the results you want.

Humans have a role to play in the upheaval. Unskilled humans + AI = good artist?

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/14/fast-facts-about-the-newspaper-industrys-financial-struggles/

It doesn't have to be completely dead for it to be badly fucked up. Headline: Furry artist revenues decline 69%.

hungrymaple said:
*stuff*

I think you may be over representing the actual neurological functionality of humans.

But. There is a point to this.

hungrymaple said:
There aren't any convincing arguments to me for allowing purely AI-created "art" here, or on any other art site for that matter, it flies in the face of what an art archive or gallery site is intended to do.

With human made art, you have the artist’s experiences, their suffering, and their jubilation. Their patience. All 20+ years of life experience culminating into the piece. This does not happen with an AI, at least, not yet. It very well will learn on its own soon, though.

hungrymaple said:
and practically speaking, is a waste of server space that costs money to have.

A seed, a model and a prompt is all you need. But anyways, if it goes against the site purpose then that’s that.

edit: actually yeah that’s reasonable, since the amount of effort undertaken is minimal compared to the reward.

hungrymaple said:
-snip-

You are conflating sentient AI with non sentient. And saying it is just an algorithm kind of doesn't give it proper credit, because the resulting algorithm or process might be extremely far removed from what was originally designed. AI has a lot of layers of how complex they are, from the simple scripts that run enemies in games to artificial neural networks.

For an artificial neural network AI. That neural network is trained with some sort of data set and their associated concepts. The AI gains a crude understanding of those concepts through this and how they interact with one another. With a prompt, the AI can reverse that process and create a result from a prompt, which it makes connections through it's concepts. Do this several times with some variations in weighting to get the multiple results.
That neural network is really kind of a weird subject to touch upon. In the most basic terms it is a bunch of input nodes that interconnect with various intermediary layers and nodes to end up at an output. What they do in-between tends to get exceptionally hard to understand as that is generated through the training process. Each variable used creates a butterfly effect throughout the network and can wildly change the results.

Long story short, make small artificial version of how a brain works, restrict it to a certain function, teach it things about that, receive data processing AI. In terms of intelligence, they aren't, but they are a great mimicry of it within certain fields. They cannot do anything outside their training and i/o limitations.

Heck a lot of arguments against AI generated images can be used against someone posting CG work with 3d models they didn't make. The person didn't make the models, they only put them in those positions. And yes I am being somewhat facetious about that.

Overall I think they should be allowed, but with some restrictions. They must have the creators own characters in it or be a commissioned work, no characters used without explicit permission for that particular image, posting rate restrictions akin to the variation rule, and a high standard for minimum quality, or has to be touched up to fix distortions. Basically, if you can get an AI trained for the subject matter and be able to coax it into outputting good results or can fix up those results to be of high quality, then it should be allowed.

lance_armstrong said:
People share images on social media without giving credit all the time, and Musk is shitposting. That's only a story because people track Musk's every move and outlets like "The Blemish" want to farm clicks.

because people do something all the time dosn't mean that it's not bad. there's really never a reason to not credit someone when you can. honestly, the only potentially valid reason to not credit something you're showing is if you're trying to avoid having your followers dogpile on the original artist, and even then ehh...
and yeah, people are talking about it because he's famous, he's got a massive platform, flippantly stealing other people's work should be frowned upon if anyone does it, but it's way worse when someone with a following steals art and then doubles down and says that people shouldn't be credited if their art is a meme.

hungrymaple said:
[...]

While I do share the same opinion as you, that AI generated art has no place and shouldn't be hosted here, I do welcome you to look a bit further into how these generative models are made. Not into code or anything, just getting a general idea on how they're made and why. I've shared a rough basic idea of it in a previous reply if you'd like a starter

Don't get me wrong, I know it can be a touchy subject with all that's being discussed about the subject currently, but from the way you're phrasing your reply it feels like that's coming more from a "fear of the unknown" place instead of a rebuttal of what it actually entails (although if that's not the case I do apologize, it's hard to tell much going off of a single post like this)

To give a better idea of my point of view here, this feels to me of old arguing points like "humans are not animals, we're different because we have things that they don't have, we have souls" or any other variations that end up in similar places. My main arguing point here is that there is no fundamental/architectural difference between human learning processes and that of AI's, at least in the case of image generation like we're talking about here. Neural networks are explicitly modelled after our brains after all, the main difference is that we have approximatelly a fuckton of neurons and they have a brazillion connections, while AIs are way more limited in those regards