After I made this unrelated post, I was informed by @MysticMushroom1776@lemmy.dbzer0.com that lemmy.dbzer0.com was a pro-genAI instance.
It was honestly shocking for me to hear that these two things can coexist and I would like to share the discussion which was correctly moved for being off topic from the above linked post.
I think we owe it to ourselves to discuss topics like this with an open mind.
Here is my statements in reply to MysticMushroom1776, I wasn't able to record their reply before it was removed for being off topic bit I hope they can come here and we can continue the discussion.
Others, please also feel free to discuss with us.
'Wow, I didn't know [that lemmy.dbzer0.com was a pro genAI instance] As an anarchist myself I have to say that is really disappointing.
Anarchist communities [especially in real life] need humans otherwise there is no community. GenAl is a stolen facsimile of a human who can never understand morals or praxis. It can never understand freedom or control. It will however poison our communities (look at what SpaceX/Anthropic is doing in Memphis, TN) make us more predictable (and thus easier to control) and isolate us from other humans within the community which is so important to us.
Even with the most moral genAl you can possibly have, one that is totally FOSS and self hosted on a single gaming GPU, a lot of this is still true.
~~Obviously, this is the wrong place but I have to ask,~~ [prior to moving the discussion to this thread] what makes you think the extreme negatives of genAl (specifically to the anarchist community) can be excused?
... [I do not have a copy of mushroom's reply]
I pirate and seed. I'm also a fan of the megathread And for the most part, I think data is data. However there is a big difference between my pirating a book like the Lord of the Rings (which is credited and I can see the title of) and how Meta scraped Anna's archive and funneled all that data into an approximation of all combined work.
If I pirate the book, the Lord of the Rings to read it. I might enjoy it, I might talk about it to others, quote it, share it with my daughter, I might use the ring of power an an allegory for authoritarian control with a powerful technology, I might even decide to buy my own copies of the book.
What Meta did and then released as open source, won't allow a person the freedom to do any of that. The works were consumed and are used in silence to camouflage as human thought. No credit will ever be contributed. And so no one can even hope to appreciate the original works that was used in training.
The other concerns I have with (local) genAI that I think are deeply important to anarchists specifically.
- Isolation of humanity
- severing of our ties to community
- increasing predictability
- method of control
Photo is genAI made and sourced from the following article:
Nice to block you too. It'd be nice if we could have that convo where we were, but I guess you are a coward and a Disney-Adult who can only mischaracterize discourse.
All your arguments against AI existing because a chud exists who will generate pr0n with it? Make me want to ask if you think trans women should be allowed firearms.
Your points may as well be:
I'm actually okay with the porn. The images are uncanny and irrational but I don't have to look at them. Blocking you now, because you're a vicious little shit goblin that doesn't seem able to read anything that's not actively going down on you.
Everyone is free to have opinions. That's the point of art. You can love it, you can hate it, you can not even consider it art yourself. It's all subjective. When you learn to respect opinions by agreeing to disagree or using the block button if you can't work things out you make the experience better for yourself and others.
Its not art. Its an image without art, like a pie chart generated with Microsoft office. That's fine. Sometimes you want a pie chart or a tits octopus but aren't willing to bug an artist about it. But you're probably a lost cause, in every sense.
You can have that opinion. But we're in a world where this is considered art:
Not everyone does. Something is art when some people consider it art. If someone considers a pie chart to be art then it indeed is art. It's all subjective based on opinion. I'm not going to avoid saying that this:
Is a form of art to me and some people just because it upsets you or you disagree.
That's also subjective. I think the same about you. For example I think that you are a pro-capitalist and pro-copyright liberal. Who, either due to ignorance or malice supports the most subtle yet most systemic aspects of the capitalist world we live in right now and is unwilling to question your support of those. Things like copyright, how someone can own bits. That's my opinion though, and I know you will disagree.
Edit: I originally wrote a big long comment in response to this. I notice that you've been getting dogpiled for your opinions on art. That is bad and I support your right to express your opinions and tastes. So I spoilered the comment so you don't see this massive wall of text because I don't want to pile on, but I do want to have a critical discussion. I don't know...maybe wait until the people have stopped dogpiling you before you unspoiler the original comment? Hope you're doing okay.
big long comment
I'm not here to tell you what to think, but I actually think that both images are not art. In my view, the purpose of the banana piece is to stimulate this exact discussion, i.e. to deliberately exist on the boundary between art and non-art, so reasonable people can definitely disagree. I see you've been getting dunked on for your opinions on art, which isn't cool and I don't mean to police your tastes. But I do want to comment.
In my view, the banana stuck to a wall is performance art. It is presenting an ordinary banana as if it was art. It's quite funny 😆. But the banana itself and duct tape itself?...not really art. The image? Not really art. It's funny, it's definitely worth something...but it's not art. It's a banana. It's a random product of evolution, and the image is just a photograph of that with a piece of duct tape. (You could argue, perhaps, that the cultivation of that breed of banana is art...but that's not what's on display here. It's just a banana.)
It's not the same class of thing as a painting. In particular, it's not the same class of thing as a toddler drawing some crappy little scribbles. That is art. It's incompetent art, but it's art. I can't quite put my finger on why...but I think it has something to do with the intentionality of the toddler. It has to do with the fact that something is being attempted. There's a story to that toddler, what they wanted to achieve with that scribble, what they wanted to communicate if anything. You feel me? I'm not an art critic, so I am absolutely willing to admit that my opinion is a little imprecise.
Similarly, I don't think that the AI generated image you provided is art. Perhaps it is straddling the boundary since someone prompted it into existence, but it is not within the interior of art. It's compelling, it's aesthetically interesting...but it's not the same thing as a toddler scribbling on a paper. And if you were to eventually change my opinion on this image, you would basically have to convince me that you (or whomever was the person who caused this image to come into being) were more intimately involved in the creative process.
That doesn't mean you can't like it. That doesn't mean you can't even present it like art, critique it like art, or enjoy it like art. But I would argue that it, along with the banana, are not art. They're each some other category of objects.
I suppose you could then argue that presenting AI generated images as art then is a performance art piece, like presenting a banana taped to a wall as art. In my view, this has two problems:
So I am not necessarily against the use of AI within a larger art project, but the idea of presenting an AI generated image to me with no further modification of the product...the first few times it was neat, but now it's taken over our culture. And it was never art to begin with. It was (and sometimes still is) a compelling technical product, but it's not art in my view. That does not mean you should feel bad about enjoying AI images or whatever, whatever makes you happy, but I do feel that calling unedited AI generated images "art" is a category error.
Again, reasonable minds can differ on this issue. I just want to offer my perspective.
That's perfectly fine. The great thing about art is that it's subjective to everyone. Some people don't consider any digital stuff art. Some people think art needs to be 100% original (collages aren't art to them) and in this day and age people have differing opinions on whether AI images are a form of art.
It's all subjective. That's kind of the point of art. We make of it what we make of it. I remember one artist who ate the fat removed from his own liposuction (made it into meatballs) and considered that art. I think that's gross and creepy and isn't really art but that's also my opinion and there will be people who disagree with me. Some people don't consider photography art. I don't really agree.
If you want some context on the AI image, it's the result of me feeding garbage data to the stable diffusion model which caused it to panic and spit out a lot of random stuff. Then I picked the ones that had the least amount of form or structure in them. Some might consider this more equivalent to those partly corrupted photos that happened when a thief stole a laptop belonging to the photographer, wiped it, and it was recovered but the photos were partly corrupted and she decided to use them as art because the effect was interesting. That's what I was going for with that anyway, something like it. Which is what I created !stable_diffusion_abstract@lemmy.dbzer0.com for as well. Whether someone would consider this similar to that is up for debate since I'm intentionally messing these images up as opposed to photos becoming corrupted by chance.
How can anything a person uses to express meaning not be art? This is the example I always go to:
It's blatantly generated. Those kids aren't stacked plausibly. It has that font. The cardboard bouncer becomes a real boy halfway down. And yet, it is visually conveying a complex idea, as surely as if you scribbled it by hand. Someone envisioned this metaphor and put it in front of your eyeballs. An opinion has been smuggled from their brain to yours. Then somehow, in our boundless creativity, people confidently assert they've grasped the one true nature of art, and nuh uh that doesn't count.
I've had people insist any stick figure would count, but this photorealistic depiction of the same concept doesn't. Like "intent" is a magical property imbued by the little bones in the wrist. Every moment of your lived experience led you here, so whatever you draw is True Art. When pressed about whether that applies to sweatshop animators' on-model traces of Homer Simpson's face, they suddenly can't agree with each other.
I've had people insist a grenade dipped in paint would contain the essence of my artistic message, whatever that happened to be. Even if I had to do it a couple times to pick the shredded canvas I like best. The way I pulled the pin that time must have been an exact sequence of microscopic decisions to precisely control the shrapnel, unlike trying different seeds, which is a slot machine.
I've had people insist a prompt itself is art, but only the prompt. Obviously a human wrote it with a clear picture in mind. They were trying to distill that mental image with such clarity that even an idiot robot would get it. But if the robot produces a render matching that description to the writer's satisfaction, well that's complete coincidence. Sure it captures the vibe they wanted, better than however many mechanically-similar examples, but nahhh, there's no way that curation reflects their inexpressible desires.
I've had people insist this political cartoon about unreliable age restrictions lacks meaning. Even though they understood it was a political cartoon about unreliable age restrictions. I put it to you that if an image is about something... that is its meaning.
I've about had it with people insisting silly things about what's right in front of them.
People using it for things they're not experts in is fine even if they wouldn't use it for things they are experts in. Does that really need explaining? If a program can instantly do a better job than I could manage in a week, I'm not enticed by the promise of personal growth, I'm looking at a week of frustration and saying "pass."
All reports of lost skill go 'we gave this guy a calculator and now he's slower at long division by hand.' Okay. How fast was he, with the calculator? If you make hard things easy and then yank the tool away, humans tend to get frustrated.
Linus Torvalds uses this tech to help code and Cory Doctorow uses this tech to help write. These men are curmudgeons of the highest order. To insist there's no utility is blatant nonsense. They have found value in the chatbot that almost does whatever you ask. Go figure.
You didn't read what I wrote and you can't now because the other sloppers thought it was too mean to your mechanical sycophant. Ask it about unaliving options.
I read every blathering word and nearly started my reply with "Gish gallop."
If you don't care when some of your objections are addressed, you don't mean anything by them.