this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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I don't think that is a fair comparison. Electronic musicians don't outsource song construction to an algorithm that copies all the other songs on the Internet. Even though they can use midi instruments, sequencers, and samples (which do carry a known risk of copyright violation) they're still composing or performing.
The entire point of generative AI is to generate things not present in the training set by teaching it to abstract the concept.
It's a very fair comparison because in both cases you take the physical skill requirement that takes years to learn and even longer to master out of producing art. To make a good electronic song you need to compose, but you don't need to know how to physically play the instruments. To make a good image you need to know how to compose it, but not how to physically draw it.
That's a good argument. I get this. The problem that I see is that you aren't very present in the art. The AI is 100% leading you with what it knows. AI is essentially helping you create a collage of all the styles and bits of image content on the Internet. How are we going to develope new styles? A human can use their imagination and skill to create something groundbreaking and pioneering (artists had to break ground and fill the world with this art for AI to be even able to do this). AI is just going to continue to remix remixes of remixes. It's sad to me. That's not really what art is about. I'm not saying AI art isn't useful. It's a remix machine.
Now that depends on how much agency you give yourself, doesn't it? If you just give Midjourney a prompt and call it a day then yes. But the result won't be very good, will it? Similar how you could just input random notes to a synthesizer and get shitty music in return.
The problem is that the majority of people does exactly that and then shares the resulting images online, making it appear that is all there is to it. You can however express yourself artistically by using prompt engineering to get something good and than working with that to further approach what you imagine by editing the result. There are many people out there who could not artistically express themselves as they lacked the ability to translate their vision to a canvas. With the help of image generating AI they can finally express themselves. I think this is something beautiful.
While I do agree with you that our current AI image generators won't be very innovative, this is by design and not necessity.
This is what you would have gotten in let's say 2017 when asking an AI what it thinks a dog looks like (s. DeepDream).
And a couple years later you can achieve this with Midjourney.
Things are developing very fast and in the end of the day, even if we would never get an AI that can innovate art there is nothing stopping humans from just doing it themselves as we have always done over millennia. You can already greatly increase the creativity of existing image generators by tweaking the randomness factors and those algorithms don't just remix existing images, they are actually creating their own. You need the training set of existing labeled images to train the AI as it doesn't know what a frog is, nor a tree or anything really.
This is indeed a concern. If you feed too much AI generated images into the training of an image generator it causes a sort of degenerative disease in the AI that results in inferior results. Some sort of AI incest so to speak. The prevalence of AI art on the internet and the inability to reliably differentiate it from human art is proving to be a challenge for making new training sets.