pouët.net

ANNs? Yes. Perhaps. Although they do need a LOT of data, so if you didn’t have a reservoir of data, you wouldn’t go developing them, right? Who developed them? Entities that held a lot of (hijacked) data looking to put it to use. So, there has to be some sneaky intent from the very start (or even before).
LLM prompt-to-result machines? (The actual subject). Theft is definitely their essential nature. It’s their heart & soul.

Which are, very obviously, usually ANNs.

What’s the purpose of this observation?
To me it seems like:

Me: humans are mammals. Thieves are humans that steal.

NR4: thieves are usually mammals.

More like ANNs per se aren't evil, but an evil subset exists.

The number of fingers checks out!

9!

LLMs were used in Amiga demos even back then? Tsk tsk.

This is going to have very little to do with AI generated images as such, but what you're touching on here is a subject that's been intriguing me for quite some time.

Personally, IDGAF about corporate copyright in the context of the scene and I think it's sad that a lot of sceners seem completely content with using platforms that impose these and various other content policies on their work. At the same time, a lot of sceners work professionally as composers, illustrators, game developers etc. which of course means there are bound to be views on copyright that align with the megacorps. This is part of the inherent duality of the scene.

And while it's true that the scene to some extent "originates in a punk, graffiti, give a shit on copyright, bitnapping, collage, reworking", this duality has been there since day one - a duality which can only partially be resolved and explained by the fact that scene productions are exempt from the laws of economic profit.

There's no small amount of irony in a gang of vehement software pirates crying "Scandal, scandal!!!!" over stolen code - and yet, as with the DIY spirit of punk and graffiti, the scene has always followed some internal, loosely but largely agreed-upon code of conduct. Bitnapping, collage, reworking - yes. But also a strong culture regarding originality, unique ideas, skilled craftmanship and grind.

People have been called out for ripping, stealing, faking, cheating, scanning and so one since forever. And, as in any creative community, it's part of a continuous, ongoing discussion about where certain lines are drawn and if there's a proper way to cross them. Just like with the discussion we're having here, now.

@grip: Great summary. :)

Now i wonder whether bifat's "bitnapping" was intentional or not. Either way, nice word. =)

grip: calling out the lamers for ripping and being unoriginal, voting them down is super cool and fine. but copyright? i mean... sorry, who cares. using 4gentE's uber-inclusive (and hence, useless) definition of art makes it appear like AI would be a threat to art. it's not. AI is a threat to illustrators and designers. they'll get sorted out like the computers and translators. bitnapping is a word we in TEK were using in the eighties. I don't know if we have termed it (I still had milk coming out of my nose when they wrote these scrolltexts.)

This isn't really in direct response to you, bifat. I'm just riffing off your post in a bitnapping kind of way. :) I can only speak for myself, of course, but this is another aspect of this discussion that intrigues me. (Not the one about art: With regards to art, I think it's safe to say that there are probably as many definitions of art as there are humans in the world. There's some common ground but once we start tracing the topography, rifts appear. I think it's counterproductive, though perhaps inevitable, that this discussion seems to have fallen into one.)

It's very interesting to me that the most likely threat of AI is targeting jobs within the professions - that is, the type of white collar and service economy employment that was supposedly going to keep people in the west busy after moving most of manufacturing elsewhere. Illustrators and designers, probably. Translators, clearly. But also programmers, administrators, managers etc.

It's always easy to look at the past with some amount of amused distance and the present with a comforting shield of disconnect, but threatening people's livelihood is very serious stuff and things can get ugly really fast.

AI is far from the only threat here, but it is a convenient surface for projecting various class dynamics not yet fully realized. I expect things to get much worse before they get better, and expect spillover on the scene, because a lot of sceners are right in the line of fire.

It may seem as if I'm veering far away from the original topic here, but I do think this is perhaps the most important one of the many factors affecting the general attitude towards AI. In these types of conflicts, few give up without a fight.

As for AI on the scene, consider the following parable: Chess players, especially professional ones with elite rankings, have been using chess bots with varying levels of "AI" for decades. At first, they were mere curiosities offering little resistance except for beginner players. But as they got better, players started using them when studying and practicing. We're now at a point when no human can realistically beat a chess bot at full strength, and new AI chess models are studied by top players for ideas and inspiration. In that sense, AI has changed the game of chess forever.

In tournaments, however, use of these bots are considered cheating and grounds for disqualification. In part, of course, because they can outlast any human in both skill, speed and endurance - but also because it turns out that the audience isn't really interested in seeing two computer programs duking it out. Humans enjoy watching human feats.

It seems, as Krill says, this is largely true for the scene as well. And, as with chess, it can sometimes be hard to discern between chess bots and Magnus Carlsen, between AI and painstakingly hand-placed pixels - until pointed out. I find some comfort in that thought.

Not at all if you consider Dikkie Dik's original prompt was for himself to showi the middle finger...

wrong.

computers have been replaced by computers and computer operators (a huge industry btw, much bigger than in the 1940ies).

professional translators say that they are not going to be replaced anytime soon since "AI" cannot understand "context".

machine translation is just a tool for them that needs a lot of manual editing.
for the public it's good enough to auto-translate a web site or some phrases but how many times have you hired a translator for this task before MT was an option ?

besides, I find that line of thinking ("they'll get sorted out") highly immoral. would you say the same thing if it was your head on the chopping block ?

you can be certain that software development will be "outsourced to AI" as soon as possible. they are working on it but it's just not as "easy" as image synthesis (9 fingers or a glitched pinky may not be so obvious but even minor coding mistakes may have severe consequences), so it will most likely not become an issue until 20+ years from now.

the biggest threat that AI poses is the devaluation of content (on a much larger scale than it already has).
I for one am not looking towards a future where human made content is drowned out by AI hallucinated noise, and it's bad enough already, just give it a couple more years.
but, Pandora's box has already been opened and now it's too late.


last but not least:

haha, good one.

what we have with AI image synths right now is more similar the situation in the 80ies when (audio) samplers became widely available. it took a few years but good luck trying to use copyrighted content [from a major label] in your music, even if it's processed, put into very different context, and just a second of audio.

sure, when there's no money to be made, the content industry is less likely to sue but good luck with a (non-profit) game that uses "AI"-synthesized Mario characters and garners larger attention.


haha but on the topic of AI compos: how about an "endless AI" competition where people are continuously submitting new entries created via script-generated text-to-image prompts -- until the end of times. be amazed by pretty pictures (and soon music and after that code) for the rest of your life !

See this is exactly what I keep trying to communicate. And fail. You seem to be content with the idea that something, some exotic abstraction you call “art” is going to survive. People? Screw them. Their families too. That’s what you’re saying. Are you really that kind of person? Actually, I doubt it, but that’s how you present yourself.
Art is people. Art means nothing without people. Art is communication. Without understanding there is no communication. These machines do NOT understand. Anything. Two machines exchanging artifacts copied off human culture between themselves is not and can not be art.


So your idea is that people need to be “sorted”, meaning you want to let capitalist system force a new, less humane and more exploitative way of working with “art” onto them. And all that in the demoscene, in a completely non-commercial setting. This is so stupid, so rude, so inhumane, so unnecessary.

do you think all art is digital?

do you think people are suddeny going to stop painting watercolours of pretty rivers. or people are going to stop making interesting thngs out of driftwood, or doing grafitti etc etc?

I can see no evil in machines making work unnecessary. AI is entering the toolboxes of today's illustrators, and a future illustrator's job description will look differently from today's. Perhaps it's even more on the creative side than today.
You see, bsp, computer revolution has sorted out, sorry, replaced the human computers, albeit gradually, and at the same time created magnitudes more of new jobs with somewhat different descriptions. That's not to say that exactly the same will happen to illustration.
In any case this is entirely orthogonal to capitalism. Capitalism is neither problem or solution here - it would work the same in other economic systems.
Once you release novel artwork into the public, you literally let go of it, you submit it to an ocean of cultural archetypes, where it inevitably interacts with all the other cultural memetic particles in an endless process of inspiration, recombination and plagiarism. Everything else would be against human nature, I believe. The artwork is relevant only in the moment of novelty as it enriches our common culture. After that it can be used as some kind of paint in a painting tool. If you take your art serious, don't give a FF on copyright.

you know what else is against human nature? glasses. what a load of cruel bullshit. genuinely gleeful evil. detestable.

Creating all kinds of technological stuff, including glasses, has been part of human nature since Homo habilis, perhaps even long before.

wayfinder, i that's your way of saying that you disagree? today's illustrators can be happy about capitalism's protection of marketability of their assets. I was talking about art. as much recombinant work as you do, in art you need to add something genuinely new, of your own.

bifat trolling it, wayfinder counter-trolling on elite level >9000
:) 10/10

There will be robots doing all of that stuff, because capitalism.

Just please read this thread from the start to end. After you’ve read it, if you still have a need to say what you’ve said here, then please do not answer my posts.


Sorry, are you an illustrator? If not, then why are you so happy to force illustrators to do their job in visually unintuitive way? Why? Why should they? Because of a rat-race chase for every cent of profit? Or are you a venture capitalist perhaps? People are trying to tell you that they love to paint, they love to pixel. They love the process, and to a high degree the process shaped them, made them who they are today. I don’t understand why are you so eager to take from people what they love, for some it’s their whole lives? Why should this shift be mandatory, forced? You just won’t yield going deeper and deeper. All that because you released an objectively bad prod, and got teased about it. Prod is not the problem. Things you say are getting worse and worse, I’m telling you. As you said commenting on my comment under the prod, you meant no harm. And I know you didn’t. But you’re writing unnecessary inhumane stuff here.