Asklemmy @lemmy.ml

1y ago

Do you consider AI art “OC” ?

159 comments

No. It's like microwaving a TV dinner and saying you cooked.
- There are levels to everything. People have a very shallow understanding of how these tools work.
  Some ai art is low effort.
  Some ai art is extremely involved.
  
  It can often take longer to get what you want out of it than it would've to have just drawn it. I've spent 8 or 9 hours fiddling with inputs and settings for a piece and it still didn't come out as good as it would have if I had commissioned an artist.
  I've been using it to get "close" then using it as a reference when commissioning things
- That's a great analogy. TV dinners, while presentable at first glance, are both low effort and not that great.

I generally consider "OC" to mean specifically that it's original - you didn't get it from someplace else, so broadly yes if you're the one who had it generated.
But if it's a community for art or photography generally, I don't think AI art belongs there - the skills and talent required are just too different. I love AI art communities, I just think it's a separate thing.
- But following that logic “OC” would mean you didn’t get it from “someplace else”, but since AI is trained by looking pieces made by other people to learn, it technically did get it from someplace else.
  
  by looking pieces made by other people to learn
  Humans do it it's inspiration.
  Computers do it it's theft.
  
  Humans also look at other peoples art to learn, they might also really like someone else’s style and want to produce works in that style themselves, does this make them AI? Humans have been copying and remixing off of each other since the beginning of time.
  The fact that a lot of movie pitches are boiled down to “thing A, meets thing B” and the person listening is able to autocomplete that “prompt” well enough to decide to invest in the idea or not, is the clearest evidence of that, I personally don’t think that just because humans are slower and we aren’t able to reproduce things perfectly even though that’s what we are trying to do sometimes, means that we somehow have a monopoly on this thing called creativity or originality.
  You could maybe argue that it comes down to intentionality, and that because the AI isn’t “conscious” yet, it isn’t making the decision to create the artwork on its own or making the decision to accept the art commission via the prompt on its own. Then it can’t have truely created the art the same way photoshop didn’t create the art.
  But I’ve always found the argument of “it’s not actually making anything because it had to look at all these other works by these other people first” a little disingenuous because it ignores the way humans learn and experience things since the day we are born.
  
  Then everything that is created by a real person is not OC either. I don't know why people think that we're somehow special.
  
  You could make that argument about humans who look at other stories of art before creating one of their own, influenced by the others then.
  Let's say I give an AI a prompt to create a picture of a cute puppy of about six weeks old, but as large as a building, and instead of paws, each leg ended in a living rubber ducky the size of a car, and the puppy is squatting to poop, but instead of poop coming out, it's the great men and women of science like Mendel, Pasteur, Nobel, Currie, Einstein, and others, all landing in a pile. Oh, and if like the picture to be in the style of Renoir. I think we could agree that the resulting picture wouldn't be a copy of any existing one. I think I'd feel justified in calling it original content. I've seen a lot of hand painted works that were more derivative of other work, but that people all agree is OC.

It depends on the context for me. As a meme base or to make a joke and you don't have the skills? Sure. In an art community? No.

"Original Content".
Is it content? Yes.
Is it original? That depends on the context. What do you ask about, in what context? Where is it placed? Which AI? How was it trained? How does it replicate?
If someone generates an image, it is original in that narrow context - between them and the AI.
Is the AI producing originals, original interpretations, original replications, or only transforming other content? I don't think you can make a general statement on that. It's too broad, unspecific of a question.
- You absolutely can make a general statement. Humans don't make original content if you don't think AIs do. The process is basically the same. A human learns to make art, and specific styles, and then produces something from that library of training. An AI does the same thing.
  People saying an AI doesn't create art from a human prompt don't understand how humans work.
  
  Large language models (what marketing departments are calling "AI") cannot synthesize new ideas or knowledge.

AI art is not OC. It cannot be.
- Why would human art be then?
  
  Because humans can have new ideas.
- How so? What is it that makes art OC that cannot be applied to AI created art? I think it would take an extremely narrow definition which would also exclude a significant amount of human created art.

Nothing is oc.
There is a book "steal like an artist" by Austin Kleon that addresses this idea. Real short read and interesting visuals.
As for AI specifically. Ai image generation tools are just that, a tool. Using them doesn't immediately discredit your work. There is a skillset in getting them to produce your vision. And that vision is the human element not present in the tool alone.
I personally don't think terribly highly of ai art, but the idea that it's "just stealing real artists hard work" is absurd. It makes art accessable to people intimidated by other mediums, chill out and let people make shit.
- So an AI that is trained on many copyrighted Images from Artists without being asked, and then asking the AI to create from this Artist its drawing style. Is it not a copyright nor a steal?
  I mean, weird enough if a person would do that it would be more ok than an AI. But the difference is that you as a human get creative and create an Image, an AI is not really creative, its skill is to recreate this exact image like it would be stored as a file or mix it/change it with thousands of other images.
  I have no standpoint in this topic, I can't agree or disagree.
  
  This is my problem. The tech itself is fine, no one is arguing about training data and making art from trained data.
  But the source of all of that data was ripped without artists consent. They did not agree to take part in this. (And no, I don't think clicking "I Accept" 15 years ago on DeviantArt should count, we had no concept of this back then). Then on top of that people are profiting off of the stolen art.
  
  OC can infringe copyrights.

The way you put original content in quotes is weird.
OC as an acronym typically just means something that someone made. In this sense, yeah, if you make something with AI then it's "your OC'.
Original content used as the words generally means something slightly different and it's more debatable.
Having used AI art tools there is more creativity involved than people think. When you're just generating them, sure, there's less creativity than traditional digital art, of course, but it is not a wholly uncreative process. Take in-painting, you can selectively generate in just some portions of the image. Or sketch and then generate based off of that.
All that said though I don't think "creativity" is necessary for something to be considered OC. It just needs to have been made by them.
Would you call fan art of well known characters OC? I would.
- Nice animated PFP, very fancy.

Steam bans games that contain such AI content because they are not near OC. Except you train the AI on only your own Copyrighted Images, which mid journey and various other AI aren't. They are all trained on copyrighted images without asking.
- They accept it when you trained on data you had the right to [train and republish on]. That isn't limited to only your own content.

It's an interesting thing to ponder and my opinion is that like many other things in life something being 'OC' is a spectrum rather than a binary thing.
If I apply a B&W filter on an image is that OC? Obviously not
But what if I make an artwork that's formed by hundreds of smaller artworks, like this example? This definitely deserves the OC tag
AI art is also somewhere in that spectrum and even then it changes depending on how AI was used to make the art. Each person has a different line on the spectrum where things transition from non OC to OC, so the answer to this would be different for everyone.

Yeah, I do. I play with AI from time to time and people don't realize creating the correct prompts is a skill in itself, it's not just some magical doodad that does what you want out of the box. AI generated stuff is OC if you're the one who made it.
- So what's your definition of art?
  For example, I personally don't think hyper realism (people spending months "painting" an exact large copy of a hi-def photo) is art, for me it's just craftsmanship, no creativity even.
  AI feels the same, it's just a tool as the chisel or the paintbrush. What do you create when doing your prompts?
  It can be art I guess, but I also think it usually is not at all.
  
  AI is a tool like any other. You can't say that art made with some tool is not art just because you don't like the tool. When photography came around, there were people saying it's not a real art because it does everything for you.
  A world where banana taped on a wall is art, but something you spend many hours tailoring to your vision is not, well, that's not a world I can agree with. How can we claim some random splashes are art just because there's some vision behind them and at the same time claim that AI art created with some vision is not?

That's an interesting question. I haven't spent very much time thinking about how to define AI art. My immediate thought is that AI art can be OC, but it should also be labeled as such. It's important to know if a person created the content vs prompting an AI to generate the content. The closest example I can think of is asking someone to paint something for you instead of painting it yourself.

As someone who has been trying to get my vision for a piece to fruition using AI for months…I absolutely think AI is OC. The argument that it references existing work cracks me up because all of art history is derivatives of what has come before. I do think there is “low effort” pieces, but you get that in other mediums as well such as photography. Also…need I mention Duchamp and the urinal?

Yeah in the same remixing a song is considered original
- Mmm yeah like consider daft punk, songs made entirely out of samples from other peoples songs but tweaked and remixed enough to make something that anyone would consider original. I think people arguing essentially “it only counts as music if the songs they are sampling were originally recorded by them” are being a little disingenuous
  
  I really think it comes down to the individual. I personally think that Aldous Huxley's book Brave New World was likely derived at least partially from the book We by Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin but both Aldous Huxley and my 10th grade English teacher would disagree. I don't think it's wrong to take someone else's work and add upon it in a way you view beneficial. I view it as a natural evolution if anything and if it gives someone something to enjoy or makes the creative processes a little easier I'm all for it.

Absolutely not

I do, yes.

It depends. Did they really train a model and try a long time until something great came out? Yeah, definitely.
Did they take a real image as a basis and just let one or two iterations of a filter run over it? Nope.
The latter is how most people get those super realistic pictures without having a supercomputer or waiting a long time. They are basically faking.
- You don't know much about AI it seems. The super realistic ones are not just a filter over existing images, in fact they take as long to create as the non-realistic ones. I have a fairly shit computer (for AI, in general it's ok but it only has 4 GB VRAM) and I made some realistic images. Like this one: https://i.imgur.com/1qUK0BM.png
  
  This is not what I'm talking about. The images I mean are usually used to generate highly realistic porn.
  Like this one (NSFW)
  You can notice the "trick" because there's just some tiny, almost unnoticeable difference between the body and the face, like they don't belong to each other.

Not when it copies the art style from real artists
- What about humans who do original work in the style of someone else? Monet is usually credited with creating the first impressionist work, but does that mean we should discount the impressionist paintings of Renoir and Degaus?

Sure. It’s art just like many digital tool assisted products came before it. Is it always difficult art to make ? No but who cares. It’s OC as long as the source of this AI art is the person posting.
- Unfathomably based
  
  Based? Are you saying I’m biased? I’d be happy to discuss

No. Large Language Models only regurgitate what they've been fed.
- As do most humans most of the time.

Yea, the AI is a tool used by humans to make art. Like other artistic tools, you can use it in a low effort way to make stuff (like the abstract and ultra random modern art). Similarly, people can use it in a much more directed and creative way, such as by using ControlNet to determine the content of the art manually, then have the AI follow whatever style directed.
There are many ways to use AI art in a more involved way than just prompting and hoping for the best. Still, like the other artistic tools that have been invented, people want to gatekeep and call it not art. Don't listen to them, art is art regardless of how you perceive it. You may not think it as worthwhile, but it is still created only for aesthetic value and is thus art
- It's not art
  Modern art made by people who actually have marketable skills isn't low effort
  
  It’s not art
  I'm old enough to remember three similar statements that are equally untrue:
  Photography isn't art
  Photoshop isn't art
  Video Games aren't art
  Eventually, we changed our opinions. The same will happen for generative images. They are art.
  
  Yeah, let's put some banana on a wall to make some real art.
  
  Literally there's modern art that's just random splotches of paint thrown on a canvas. Both me and a toddler could create that with our skills. Regardless, those random splotches on a canvas are considered art because of the purpose they serve, not its quality

@WhatsHerBucket
In general, yes.

I think so, there's still a lot of creativity that goes into designing the prompts from what I've seen. AI is just another tool for artists to use and I think it could honestly be considered it's own medium, like oil painting or wood burning. But I do also understand the hesitation people feel around AI art and calling it OC.

No, it is it's own designation. It's halfway between OC and a repost.

It can be. There’s a lot of human controlled variables involved. ai is a medium for art and can generate stuff never before possible on this planet. Of course that depends on how it’s used. If you train a mode to copy an artist that’s obviously no bueno. If you train a model to generate nightmare fuel that can create videos from detailed prompts then go ahead

I do not.
I'm sure there's plenty of people who just want to play around with art generators to see what wacky stuff they can get and that's fine. But anyone who bends over backwards trying to convince others that AI generated images are genuine art are ultimately just resentful of the fact that there are people who can create things that they can't.

I could consider it OC if the training set is known, but not "art".

AI is trained by analyzing artists' work and then instructed to replicate art in a particular style, therefore, from the beginning of the process it wouldn't be original.
If an AI could create art without being fed galleries of images first and develop its own style that might be considered original.
- So any artist that went to art school isn't an original artist?
  
  Yeah, but one went to school to learn how to hone their skills and learn from the masters, the other stole it off of artists who will never see a dime off of it.
  Don't get me wrong, I have fun with AI art, but the moral question that hasn't been solved yet
- What do you think human artists do, exactly? You think they just learn to create art in a vacuum? It just magically appears?
  
  Humans can, in fact, create art without having seen others do it first. (e.g.: cave paintings from several millennia ago)
  I don't understand why anyone would assume humans only have the same creative capabilities as a computer when we have free will and all that good stuff that comes with being a conscious, intelligent living being.

It's new, but not original. With the recent influx of AI content that doesn't seem to be slowing down, I'd say we should make a new designation of GC - generated content.
- What people make is not original as well, you're always inspired by something.
  
  Inspiration isn't the same. It's more like if I found a bunch of pictures I liked, then traced my favorite parts from each one onto a single piece of paper to make one image made up of lots of small copied pieces of other people's work.

Depends on how it's synthesized. Some programs, like Midjourney, allow you to use to your own art as material to synthesize new art.
Aside from that, no. It's not OC.

If anything it's credit goes to the AI generator or the company that produced the AI generator, not the person who asked it to create something. Unless they only used it for a backbone and then adjusted and detailed it from there.
- Do you give credit to Canon for the photos taken with their cameras? Do you give Adobe credit for the digital art made in photoshop?
  
  So it's perfectly fine for all of the students in university to use chatgpt to write their essay for them and claim it's their work?

If you take the art and just trace and polish it and nobody is any the wiser, in that situation yes. At least until that is found out, in which I will refer to it as derivative work over original content. It's why I am calling some of the digital art I am working on AI derivative rather than full-on original content.
If all you do is generate an image, do no edits whatsoever, and then act like you did it, then I couldn't in good faith considering "OC" since you did nothing but type a few words and maybe click a few buttons or moved a slider 3 pixels to the left.

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