People aren't looking at this from a business perspective. Right now a decent subset of artists hate AI, so it makes sense to try and target that market if it's large enough.
If artists suddenly started loving AI tomorrow, this pledge would be out the window. It's just business and marketing - nothing more, nothing less.
A non-publicly traded company doesn't have to strictly adhere to the bottom line. If they have steady cash flow, and the people running the company have a strong stance on AI, why would they have to change? Their app is fantastic, and if someone wants to add AI slop to their Procreate workflow they can just import/export from/to an AI slop app.
It’s a good rule of thumb that the profit motive will make everything worse, but it’s not like it happens 100% of the time with no exceptions (unless publicly traded)
But the people who use a tool like this aren't doing "slop" in the fist place, any more than they're importing the first stock art matching a keyword and calling it a day.
The stuff that gets the flak — I've seen some on posters in the U-bahn here, with a man exiting an airport luggage scanner while a robot scans his belly to reveal he's pregnant with a cat — are done by people with IMO no artistic standards to understand why editing is needed.
> I've seen some on posters in the U-bahn here, with a man exiting an airport luggage scanner while a robot scans his belly to reveal he's pregnant with a cat
The prompt here sounds like something a generative AI tool would struggle to make look poster-worthy, while also being something I'd expect flesh-and-blood artists in marketing to come up with, draw, and think it's a good idea.
This is to say, I can tell (bad) AI art from human art by a type of technical mistakes made, but not by absurdity of the depicted concept.
If Procreate wanted to maximize revenue they'd have switched to a subscription model way back instead of one time payment. I know it's hard to believe but some people are not making all decisions from a business perspective
Artists are increasingly souring on Photoshop and looking for alternatives in response to the increasing presence of generative AI in it, so in some capacity, yes it is.
As usual, the answer is complex and depends on degree, and the element of honesty in the artistic work. There were dishonest works before AI, but it makes it much easier.
I don't know a single artist that's doing commercial work that isn't using AI to speed up their delivery times. They're all using AI tooling because it's useful.
I know this because they've all reached out to me at one point or another and asked about tools/hardware/services/etc, and I've done my best to point them in the right direction. One that I'm particularly proud of bought himself a 3090 and is running his own models and doing inpainting stuff to great effect.
> I don't know a single artist that's doing commercial work that isn't using AI to speed up their delivery times. They're all using AI tooling because it's useful.
I am a professional photographer and writer. I am 100% AI-free: I don't use any generative AI for my writing, photography, or graphic design (I do some of that as well). I absolutely hate AI and want no part of it.
All of my friends working in professional photography and publishing are heavily using AI, both the features integrated by Adobe into Photoshop and Midjourney. They use computers in their work, but they are not programmers - they are what you would describe as standard creatives.
All the actual creative people I know don't care what other people are doing. What other people are doing is usually a sign of what not to do if you want to be creative.
"Creatives" so strongly against AI art I suspect are not creative at all. They are the same class of people who are so uncreative that the entire internet looks almost exactly the same, even though you could basically do anything.
We don't call the person on the Ikea furniture assembly line "creative".
With that said, I am bored to tears with the output of generative AI art on its own. It is like taking a 4 bar beat sample generator for music and looping the output 100 times creates a pretty boring song. Someone actual creative though can see that the beat sample generator can be used for the base material for something interesting musically.
Of course the creative fraud is going to be afraid of something new and happy if things stay uncreative and the same.
> All the actual creative people I know don't care what other people are doing. What other people are doing is usually a sign of what not to do if you want to be creative.
One of them showed a situation where the client wanted a complex object removed from the background. I've done some Photoshop in the past and understood why that would have taken hours. He then demoed an AI feature that did the job in a few clicks. The client was happy and he moved on to another task... Hard to argue against that.
Not really. Sociologically, I think it's a bad thing to want so desperately to remove stuff. That desperation was already borne from previous technologies, so it's just technology making things worse by apparently solving a previous problem that was already created by technology that ushered in a spirit paving the way for AI.
Or all my friends in that space are more technically minded than average. Sampling bias is implied. We're on hackernews afterall, normies don't really come here.
That's why I was clear about "my" friends, which necessarily limits the scope of what I'm saying.
> That's why I was clear about "my" friends, which necessarily limits the scope of what I'm saying.
This post:
>I don't know a single artist that's doing commercial work that isn't using AI to speed up their delivery times. They're all using AI tooling because it's useful.
I know this because they've all reached out to me at one point or another and asked about tools/hardware/services/etc, and I've done my best to point them in the right direction. One that I'm particularly proud of bought himself a 3090 and is running his own models and doing inpainting stuff to great effect.
Does not include the phrase “my friends”. The first sentence could be interpreted as a broad statement as well.
I went to an art school so a lot of my friends are artist of various mediums and some use A.I. for fun and profit and I haven’t seen any of them say negative things about it. I feel like the artist who hate A.I. now are modern day luddites.
It’s just a tool, adapt or get left behind. I wonder if this is how painters felt when photography became accessible to the massess.
People just notice the shittiest ones where some marketdrone uses Dall-E to create the most stereotypical shit and puts it on a massive billboard or poster with zero thought for anything.
With local models + local learning, you can create stuff that looks like the company's IP and use it as a jumping off point or for inspiration.
I don't think they disagree with not adding AI features. I think they disagree with the moral posturing. It would have been different if the devs simply said "We aren't adding AI features since we don't think it's actually that useful."
I find it slightly annoying and dishonest to present it as a moral position, but overall it's nothing that other businesses haven't already been doing. It's just not a big deal.
AI is not "stealing content" and it is not immoral.
This is literally the same line from record companies and Hollywood during the 80s and 90s, and they were rightfully mocked then. It is baffling how so many people are just repeating it now.
I've noticed the same. I think the actual reason behind is similar in both cases, something like "this is theft because it means I won't get paid" — which isn't really how that works but also explains Musk's X advertising lawsuit.
Like your respondant, I find the artists more sympathetic despite finding the argument itself bad.
I don't know if "theft because I'm not getting paid" describes artists' sentiment so much as "theft because someone else is making money on a tool that's 'using' my work/labor". Which I still think is an argument that requires opening a Pandora's box of IP law that should not be opened (because in the long run it won't benefit non-corporate artists anyway), but...
In general, I think the coming replacement of many jobs is a serious issue for society and one that deserves serious attention.
That said, the intellectually dishonest arguments irk me to no end and I'm simply tired of them. The artists upset over AI are more sympathetic than the RIAA (It's really quite hard not to be), but this stuff really wears at my sympathy.
And, unfortunately, it's impossible to actually tackle any issues unless without moving past the bad arguments.
> That said, the intellectually dishonest arguments irk me to no end and I'm simply tired of them.
I, too, get annoyed by People Who Are Wrong On The Internet; I'm trying to become more stoic, as I don't want to end up like my father.
I don't know if this will pass, or if the pro/anti AI split is going to be as permanent as the economic left/right split, or the libertarian/authoratarian split.
> This is literally the same line from record companies and Hollywood during the 80s and 90s, and they were rightfully mocked then. It is baffling how so many people are just repeating it now.
The difference with AI is that AI takes a 100% bit for bit copy and uses it, rather than humans who just use their impression to be inspired.
Yes, illustrators are notorious IP rentiers like the Hollywood studios and the RIAA. It’s the tech billionaires that are the victims of their vile, unjust monopoly tactics. These are coherent thoughts that demonstrate why it’s a good idea to argue from analogies.
I'm not praising tech billionaires, nor am I attacking RIAA/Hollywood or online artists as entities. Please don't start crafting strawmen. I'm criticizing the "stealing" argument because I don't find it logically sound; it doesn't matter who's saying it.
I am still more than willing to have a civil debate around the argument itself.
Why is it stealing to analyze images? I would be more convinced if AI used a fixed database during generation, or if it was considered a standard, acceptable practice to reproduce training data as "new" generations.
You don’t find the stealing argument logically sound because you immediately frame the theft as “analyzing” to suit your own narrative and then demand people engage with it, while proceeding to make further spurious claims like…
> I would be more convinced if AI used a fixed database during generation
Wow, I didn’t know that model weights, an elaborately compressed form of their training data, rewrote themselves every time they were invoked. Or that it’s only theft if I stole data from a fixed database to build my own service.
AI training is literally analyzing. That is how it works. Properly trained models (i.e., ones that aren't overparameterized or overfit) do not just "elaborately compress" training data as this is not possible. For example, you cannot compress 1 billion images into 1 billion parameters, and expect to retrieve them later.
If objective facts are "my own narrative", then no rational discussion can occur.
You absolutely can compress a subset of a billion images into a billion parameters if you throw out all but a thousand. Is it no longer copyright infringement if you also run enough irrelevant data through your algorithm alongside the images you’re stealing?
Don’t mind me, I’m just going to ‘analyse’ this UHD movie and produce a 480p video file in a different codec whose bits are almost entirely unlike those in the original and throws out almost all the information from the original. I’ll put it on a RAID array with thousands of others, mangling the bits of the ‘analysis’ even further. The right ‘prompt’ may cause the model to produce some imagery very similar to some of its ‘training data’ however.
You can use whatever weasel words you want, but bits go in and fewer derivative bits come out in both cases.
You’re right, purpose and intent matters, and the intent is to profit from the work of others without their permission and without crediting or compensating them in any way.
It has to do with what the resulting model is used for. It gets particularly dodgy if its commercial usage, because most if not all of the data used for training wasn’t licensed for that, making for a “laundering” effect.
Though I also think there’s an argument to be made that images need to be properly licensed to even be “analyzed” in this way, because it’s ultimately an unauthorized copy even if it involves picking the image apart and obfuscation. They were published with the intent of being viewed by the public, not for being reproduced in any shape or form.
It’s not baffling at all if you consider the point of copyright in the first place. That is, to promote the progress of useful arts and sciences. One does, and one does not.
Yup. Generative AI is the useful part of "useful arts and sciences". 99%+ of content that goes into training those models is, on its own, useless and worthless, and the greatest value by far it can bring to society is to be part of the training dataset. That also applies to art that may have had some value when published, but now languishes in obscurity - AI is giving it a second life, a way to benefit society far more than originally did.
So yeah, if we're going by the (idealized version of) intent of copyright, it stands strongly on the side of AI.
EDIT:
And before someone complains that SOTA models are trained and owned by private parties -- copyright is "promoting the progress of useful arts and sciences" by literally giving private parties a monopoly to make money off art as an incentive.
> By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself. [audience laughs and claps] ... there's no rationalization for what you do and you are Satan's little helpers, okay? Kill yourself, seriously. You're the ruiner of all things good, seriously. ...
> I know all the marketing people are going, "he's doing a joke..." there's no joke here whatsoever. ... I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too, "Oh, you know what Bill's doing, he's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market, he's very smart." [audience laughs] Oh man, I am not doing that, you fucking evil scumbags.
> "Ooh, you know what Bill's doing now, he's going for the righteous indignation dollar. That's a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We've done research. Huge market. He's doing a good thing." Goddammit, I'm not doing that, you scumbags. Quit putting a goddamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!
> "Ooh, the anger dollar. Huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market. Bill's very bright to do that." God, I'm just caught in a fucking web.
If artists suddenly started loving AI tomorrow, this pledge would be out the window. It's just business and marketing - nothing more, nothing less.