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in earnest, i’m pro–ai art for the same reason i’m pro–sample/remix/mashup—namely, art maximalism. it’s all good, throw it all in the soup. the gripes aren’t unique to ai, nor to art, and they aren’t going to be addressed by relitigating “is it art? is it bad?” over and over.

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AI Generated Curiosities

@ai_curio

· Sep 9

i think it's cool that people will steal art, badly paint over it, and put it in their portfolio but it's cool when they do it because the original artist used midjourney. class. with rhetorical enemies like this who needs friends to help prove your points?

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Brendan Zabarauskas

@brendanzab

Sep 10

I’m a big fan of remixing, appropriating, etc, but I’m not sure that equating ai art to mashups and remixes is quite right. There is a tool in the middle that kind of… erases the connection to the source material, and the scale/power dynamics are different.

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and

Like I think the tools should provide pointers the significant artistic influences that went into an image. It’s kind of the least these companies can do.

8:17 AM · Sep 10, 2022Twitter for iPhone

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and

See some other thoughts here:

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Brendan Zabarauskas

@brendanzab

· Sep 7

Replying to @brendanzab and @smestorp

I’ve said in other places… it’s a massive amplification of the ‘choosing not to show how you got there’ that some creative people do. Which… okay (I guess?) at that the scale that the people and companies training these models are doing it, it just seems really… not cool.

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i agree devs should make models able to at least name their influences. i’d hope it’d help human artists get due credit. i also think the results would be surprising—and make people mad in new ways, when an “obviously” derivative work is really a synthesis of unrelated sources.

skelton jon

@whyevernotso

Sep 10

i think an ml model just doesn’t fit into the same ontology as props, where we size up whether a human remixer respects their sources when trying to tell what’s a reference or ripoff, derivative or innovative, &c.; nor copyright, where we…uh, try to…protect artists’ livelihood.