A Recent AI Article in the Atlantic Raises a Number of Questions

It is interesting how they try to spin bullshit into diamonds.

First I will link to the article, and then I want to address — point by point — my concerns.

At the outset let me also say, I do not worry about AI, nor do I fear it. It appears to be an awesome and quite extraordinary tool for lots of things.

The problem is it wants to take over everything.

Including art.

From the article:

“Chen describes the process of training the tool on several hundred million images, a combination of licensed and publicly available media, which — importantly — have text (metadata) descriptions so that the AI associates word prompts with the images.”

The bold is added by me. What does he mean by “publicly available?” We know that stuff on the web is not “publicly available” as it is already covered by decades of precedent in copyright law. The ownership lies with the creator, not the ‘scraper’. This law has not been changed to allow massive scraping of the work of the creators, so what does he mean by this?

Notice no question from the reporter for clarification.

“DALL-E 2 knows what individual objects are “and is able to combine things in ways that it hasn’t seen in the training set before,” says Chen. “That’s part of the magic of AI, that you can kind of generalize beyond what you trained it on.”

Computers are indeed wondrous, and making them faster is glorious. But, ya know… they ain’t magic. They are model trained in probability. You know… code.

“If there’s an art to scaling these big models, there’s also an art to writing prompts. Evolving from single-sentence descriptions, creators are now attaching concepts like the mood they want or very specific details or textures. Prompts can now run for several paragraphs.”

Oh, please. Of course “prompt writing” is a bit of an art, but at what level would you put it against a symphony by Eliott Carter, or the writings of Edgar Allen Poe, or the paintings of Rembrandt?

Does it even come close? I mean, really?

An artist spends a lifetime developing their art and now someone can bust their asses, sweat blood, and wrangle a couple of paragraphs out of thin fucking air and THEY are not applauded?

“I think it’s really about personalization… all these adjectives that you’re adding [into a prompt] helps you personalize the output to what you want. It makes sense that prompts have grown in length and in specificity. It’s a tool to help people create the content that they want for themselves.”

I asked Chat GPT how many adjectives there are in the English language and it gave me this:

“It is difficult to give a precise number for how many adjectives there are in the English language, as new words and phrases are constantly being coined and added to the lexicon. However, there are a large number of adjectives in English, with estimates ranging from several thousand to over a hundred thousand. Some common adjectives include words like “happy,” “big,” “red,” “good,” and “expensive.”

Now how many possible decisions are possible in the creation of a piece of art?

Chat GPT to the rescue… sort of.

“There are an almost limitless number of decisions that an artist can make when creating art. Some of the factors that an artist may consider when creating a piece of art include the medium they will use (such as paint, clay, or digital media), the subject matter of the piece, the composition and layout of the work, the colors and patterns they will use, the techniques and styles they will employ, and many other elements. The specific decisions that an artist makes will depend on their individual goals and the context in which they are creating the art.”

LIMITLESS!

Kind of a bigass difference, wouldn’t you say?

“Addressing the controversial issue surrounding whether artist’s (sic) should be recognized, or paid, when their work is used to inspire an AI artwork, Chen defends OpenGI’s approach, saying the organization works closely with the art community.”

Awesome. Why then is it controversial?

Shouldn’t you say you work closely with a portion of the art community, letting the other portions of the art community pound sand?

“Our goal isn’t to stiff artists or anything like that. Throughout the whole release process we want to be very conscientious and work with the artists and have them provide feedback.”

What? You did not consult the artists before you scraped all of their “publically available” art into your database, did you? You just did it without anyone knowing, but now you want to work with us because…?

You can tell there may be a trust factor challenge, right?

“However, Chen also suggests that artists who use generative tools will still be able to rise above the crowd and make money because their innate talent means that they are better at using them. DALL-E 2, in other words, is — like a paintbrush or a video camera — a tool.”

Oh wow… where to start.

Nobody is going to want art that anybody can create. That is one of the more ridiculous statements about art I have heard. If it takes no talent (oh, yeah… the ‘prompt’ thing…hmmm) then how are you going to market it with a story that works?

“Hello sir, I see you are interested in my photo “Goat on A Cliff in the Andes”, do you have any questions?”

“No, I really like it. I was stationed down there for a couple of years and never got a chance to get this high into the mountains. Where did you find this remarkable shot”?

“Oh, I have never been out of LA county. I made up a paragraph about how cool this would be — and it was, like, really really hard to do. Then I stuck it into a box on the internet and got this back”.

Stunned silence.

“With DALL-E, we found that artists are better at using these tools than the general population. We’ve seen some of the best artwork coming out of these systems basically produced by artists,” Chen says.

Bullshit.

Do you think art is writing a couple of paragraphs?

“With AI you always worry about job loss and displacement and we don’t want to ignore these possibilities but we do think it’s a tool,” he continues.”

Then why are you? This is disingenuous at the outset. Chen, dude, you already stole, took, ‘appropriated’ the art from tens of thousands of unsuspecting creators. There are plenty of stories of artists being drowned in parody attempts, and good ones thanks to all that cool ‘training”, and losing parts or all of their livelihood.

You don’t want to ignore it is good rhetoric, but lots of people do things they don’t want to do. So what do you mean, exactly?

“You know, there are smartphone cameras but [that] really hasn’t replaced photographers. [Instead] it allows people to make the images they want.”

Yep. Nailed it there.

It allows PEOPLE to make the images they want. People.

Artist Don Allen Stevenson;
“He also explains how you can use Chat GPT-3 to generate better prompts. There are examples, too, of how these techniques can produce, rapidly, the virtual worlds which will populate the metaverse.”

So, remember a long time ago when “artists” were creating amazing art by writing 3 paragraphs of prompts? How amazing they were to write those prompts and ‘winning’ the visual world with astounding and cool stuff.

I believe that was only — well — in the same article. See above.

Now, fuck, you don’t even have to do that?

Ask Chat GPT to write your prompt, put it in the computer-pooter and it spits out the amazing art the world will love.

BAM!.

Click — You’re an artist.

And rolling in dough.

I am a photographer, designer, and photo editor. You can find me at my self-named website or at Project 52 Pro System (enrollment begins January 6, 2023) where I teach commercial photography online. This is our tenth year of teaching, and it is the most unique online class you will find anywhere.

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