The fishing metaphor is amazing: doing stuff because we can, without WISDOM. That really sums up everything.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

Cliff Notes for all of Human History. Haha.

One of the first high-profile artists I've seen engage with the implications of AI tech deeply and philosophically, rather than just handwaving it away as "just another great tool that will aid creativity, haha". I feel like a lot of professionals who are also public figures are downplaying AI simply because it undermines their own sense of identity and they don't know how to deal with that, so they'd rather continue to sell gumroads and courses while assuring their audience that nothing strange is happening at all.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

That is pretty scary to hear. There should definitely be a lot of cautious experimentation. Ignoring it isn't going to solve anything, but neither will full blown acceptance. Also, I think us artists are in a really weird spot. We are supposed to be the most open, most progressive, most flexible and accepting of the new. We spend out lives fighting "real life" and doing our level best to stay forever young and mentally plastic. So, a lot of people may want to trash this tech but also don't want to have gotten to "that age" where we are griping about the effect a new tech is going to have on "the kids these days." That is just so old-fogey. But, all new tech should face challenges. Artists are exactly the people who should be using our plasticity to look at this from all the angles everyone else is missing. But it is hard to see all the angles when something so gigantic looms in front of one's face.

@Y0UT0PIA

Жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug Yeah, 'cautious' definitely isn't happening, the monetary incentives are too strong. Any concession to safety and ethics one research group makes is going to be the edge their competitors need to churn out something more advanced two months earlier than anyone else, and that's the group that'll get all the funding thrown at it. I agree that those of us who are truly creatives shouldn't miss this opportunity to comment on a historic turning point, to transform uncertainty into artistic projects that try to make sense of the unknown. This could even be a great opportunity for a few people to start a career on that basis. But the vast majority of artists really are closer to skilled craftsmen. Designers and illustrators solve visual problems for a client, and though there's a degree of creativity in that, for the most part this kind of artist makes a living based on their technical mastery. Since it's now becoming possible to automate this, I feel very worried for those peoples futures,a(nd in a broader sense all of our futures, actually). As was said at one point during this podcast, it doesn't seem like anyone has a plan for what a society where the creative sector is largely automated could look like that won't be deeply pathological.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@Y0UT0PIA Cautious never happens. Humans suck at cautious. For better or worse. Each generation has their moment like this. Their apocalyptic change. But, I really do think we are approaching a point that we can't even imagine beyond. That is the most troubling thing to me. Science Fiction hasn't imagined anything past AI, Nano-tech, Extreme Bio-Tech, Virtual or Augmented reality, etc, in a long time ,as far as I know. Once you hit the idea of your own replacement, or abandoning reality for a God Box virtual experience, i am not sure there is anywhere human left to go. And that strikes me as different than previous freak outs. Like, none of this would feel at all out of place in Transmetropolitan. The craftsmen lost the battle in June of 2022. 100% no speculation there. It has come. It just hasn't been fully adopted by the suits, yet. Less than a year at most. There was a fantastic article in Harpers in... 2005? by the man who invented the idea of a Flash Mob. The whole Flash Mob movement was actually an experiment by this one guy who was trying to see how long an anti-establishment, anti-corporate strategy could last before it got assimilated as a marketing tool. A year and a half before Limp Bizkit was doing a flash-mob concert to promote a Nissan, or something like that. This isn't even anti-establishment. So, a year may be overly gracious. Hopefully issues 2 and 3 of Abolition of Man paint a picture of what the plan should NOT be. That is always the easier task. What it SHOULD be? Hopefully Luciano has some ideas when we chat. He is the best bet I know of for a man who may see a way forward.

@teukchao

Жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug I was having this conversation with my husband, we are in our early 30s and he's a hardware engineer, and he said what you said, this could be the thing that we can not understand 'where our kids are coming from'.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@teukchao AI maybe the next big one. For people my age - not so sure about early 30-year-olds - I think the major "that isn't even..." argument is most likely to happen over gendering and pronouns. "That isn't even a gender," or, "You are not a man," etc. are probably some pretty common parent/child arguments these days.

I watched a Proko interview with a developer in which this very young computer programmer said all the AI guys want the automation to go in a good direction and are on the artist's side, but the bigger picture is that they feel really good about what they do. People will lose antiquated jobs, but the cost of all items involving labor will sink to zero and that means everything will be so cheap that everyone will have a better life, it will be like a Utopia. When questioned it was so clear that there were massive lacunae in his thinking, for example that mining is a part of the production of computational machines. I am shocked that people who have no idea of consequences are bringing about this revolution. He is not an economist, and the arrogance of stating that a total collapse in the price of everything will lead to prosperity is astounding. He doesn't even apologize about not knowing the subject. Being a developer and programmer seem to be enough to make him an expert on everything. It was beyond horrible.

@LivingtheLine

Жыл бұрын

The myopia is astounding.

@Sarandosil

Жыл бұрын

That interview reminded me of that Sidney Harris cartoon. 1)Invent general AI 2)then a miracle occurs 3)post work utopia "I think you should be more explicit here in step two"

@odddraft

Жыл бұрын

I've talked with more than one programmer talking like they have been sent like god's gift on earth like their job is the only one that will truly lead to progress. "Prices will go down to zero" Yes... but if you keep more and more people without jobs, there will be no way for them to afford cheap stuff either. Especially with the housing prices, inflation and everything. Our goal should be to have MORE jobs that allow us to live and and enjoy our lives - and creativity is one of the main enjoyable things that we are left with. His response was plain and simple "It's not my fault you chose to build up a skill in something that's replaceable". I made him notice that all jobs could have the same faith. He doesn't care because he thinks his will be the last to be replaced, so by the time he will become "useless" we will already be living in his unobtainable utopia. I was so upset, I don't understand people who think like this.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

That is terrifying. They do not seem to understand much about human psychology either. Putting the entire population out of work though automation is going to be psychologically devastating for humans, as far as I can tell. That is exactly what issues 2 and 3 of Abolition of Man are all about.

@MrArchilus

Жыл бұрын

@@odddraft I'm just gonna laugh at them when they get replaced as well

This might be one of the most profound and insightful discussions I've heard in a long while. It's gonna take me a while to figure out how to deal with all these feelings, but it's so relieving to know I'm not alone with them.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

We would love to hear what you come to after the long ponder. I have been grappling with this non-stop.

@fluxophile

Жыл бұрын

​@@clubgrubbug Where I've settled might seem bleak, but ultimately I think what AI has done to our understanding of "art" reflects something much deeper about the nature of reality, information, and the human search for meaning: Information in the universe is mathematically degenerate. A single colored pixel is a single colored pixel, regardless of who decided to encode it, or from what 'inspiration', or if it was chosen purely at random. IP, copyright, notions of human authorship - it is now more abundantly clear to me than ever before that these things are merely a coping mechanism for us to convince ourselves that our feelings of original creativity are objectively meaningful. AI is now a tool that is so powerful as to be able to capture the multi-dimensional "exploration" that humans have done into visual (and auditory, written, etc.) forms, and basically collapses it down into a form of "information" that can be systematically explored, as opposed to 'haphazardly' explored, as humans have been doing for thousands of years - researching, copying, getting inspired, making derivative works, adding little twists on things to explore slightly new directions and variations. Soon, we will need only think of a prompt to see a million different representations of it, utilizing thousands of years of human expression in an instant and flattening it into a line. People have posited for hundreds, if not thousands of years, that 'true creativity/originality doesn't really exist, since everything you know is built on all that you have seen before.' - and we've resisted taking that thought to its full, mathematically degenerate conclusion, because we like to feel special. AI is telling us that we're not really too special to evade that conclusion - nobody is, because all information is degenerate. Debates about "what is art?" feel, as I saw someone refer to it recently, "maximally trivial." Art is an abstract term humans made up to give ourselves some distance from the apparent randomness and space-filling quality that information in the universe tends to embrace, but the term never really had any objective meaning. I have a feeling that this was kind of Duchamp's point with readymades, in a way. If 'art' can bend to become whatever we call 'art', and now a systematic information-synthesizing machine can produce pretty much any image (soon, any text, any 3D model, etc.) in the blink of an eye with labels we've trained it on, and it allows us to broaden our definition of 'art' - it feels like further confirmation and illumination of what he was getting at. Art doesn't exist. And, simultaneously, art is everything - or rather, anything can be art. My point is kind of messy, but ultimately: "art" only exists to the person using the term, and in the specific context of their usage. I haven't found any satisfactory conclusions in many debates about this where I've landed on what "art" is, unless it's a definition so broad that ultimately renders it a useless word. I've seen the definition posed that "art is any intentional provocation of senses and emotion", but that renders so much of the natural world 'art', and also prompts us to question what 'intent' (and, further, 'sentience') even are in the first place, that it feels like an eternally futile game of wheel-spinning leading us to more and more vague/broad definitions.

@fluxophile

Жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug I have no idea where all of that philosophizing leaves us, in relation to what we should do with our feelings and desire to express ourselves. Frankly, this kind of stuff is leaving me wondering about the nature of philosophy itself, and its utility. But I do know this: I still feel some urge to create, and to feel emotionally and spiritually moved by things. If that feeling, and the act of seeking it out through the sheer doing and making of things, I guess we can call that "art". I'm gonna keep doing it, but I don't know if I see a value anymore in trying to define it (which some people will inevitably see as "gatekeeping", no matter where your definition lands.) What AI does concern me about, deeply, is what happens to us if it gets so good at pushing our dopamine buttons that we just sit in a state of maximal, endless pleasure, fed to us by a machine - the point where it is so compelling that we fall into its biases (which were born from the biases of its training data) so deeply, we can't see the forest for the trees. Nothing in this reality is "good" or "bad", but I don't think most of us really appreciate what social media has done to art and creative expression, yet we are so compelled by it that we can't resist it. I fear the same will happen with AI art - much like the conclusions you and Dave reached in this conversation!

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@fluxophile Jorge, you are detailing exactly the ontological de-centering I was pointing out. These AI make rote math of the one thing we really still had left as unique to the type of thing we are as humans. That downgrading of semantic creativity to mere syntactic content manipulation is brutal. It is brutal to find out that this is really all we were all along and even more brutal to share the world with something so much faster than we are. There is art before Duchamp and 'art' after Duchamp. I did not think another artist could ever have the impact Duchamp did. The existence of AI art-making might be bigger. And, yes, it is a word that has become entirely in-definable and totally useless. I always come back around to, who cares if it is art or not, was it interesting? "Is this Art" is a question that has no answer. "Is this interesting?" still has a large subjective component, but at least there is a scientifically verifiable state of being interested, so the question at least becomes answerable.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@fluxophile I think Luciano Floridi, who is writing issue #5 of Abolition, has the best idea of what Philosophy can and should be: Conceptual Engineering mixed with a healthy dose of teaching the ability to distinguish between close questions (Is thi Art?) and open questions (is this interesting to person/entity x?). That outlook is the only way we can actually have useful, future forward, path defining discussions about where we, as a species want to wind up, and how best to get there. I feel more of an urge to create now. Maybe it is a sense of competition, maybe it is a last howl in the wind, maybe I am just inspired by this new artist as I have been by many before, I don't know, but I really am fired up to MAKE right now. And, as Dave and Sean made clear to me, the true worth has always been in the making, not in the final product. The dopamine rush is real. I cannot tell you how many times I have popped open Midjoureny or DallE on my phone and treated it like a game. At least once a day since I started messing with this stuff. It is a very real threat, and to those whose technical abilities are not already developed the quick, easy hit is going to be soooo much more tempting and a real barricade to actual growth.

You know, if so many people are absolutely okay with replacing culture with algorithms and are gleeful about it (I see a lot of such people), then maybe we as society deserve whatever cyberpunk dystopia we are building

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

We do seem to be dead set on turning all life into simulation. The foolish hope of being able to control the simulation drives that, but the 'control' in the goal should be enough to expose the flaw in the plan, The Abolition of Man.

@enough2715

Жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug these people wish to create a God out of AI. They can pretend to be enlightened by their lack of meaning in life, but this is humanly impossible, they are desperate to find meaning in AI. Id feel sorry for them if their ideology wasn't being funded by the elite. It's extremely frustrating seeing people rally for ai art as something "accessible," as if you don't need a computer to create it, which are expensive. It's a painful "first world" view of accessibility. Ai should be used to make work easier, not life. These people are being manipulated into thinking life is work, therefore ai art is necessary for quick production. People saying this will be a push for UBI are so incredibly naive. People should have never gotten this point in the first place, where they rely on money to live. "Well that's the world we love in, deal with it" yes that is the world we love in, and the few artists who can have careers out of their hard earned skill are actively being automated and replaced. I've been reading your comments here under this video and I find them very refreshing, you are pointing out the larger picture that people are either blind to or are simple to afraid to confront.

@nobody-nk8pd

Жыл бұрын

@Moon Child pretty true

Fascinating discussion. Was reminded of a quotation from Ruskin: “It is not what we get but what we become by our endeavours that makes them worthwhile.” With AI image generators it seems to me that what we get from them is a kind of instant gratification (a polished end result rendered in seconds, with no effort) and what we might become by relying upon them is more lazy, and less appreciative of true human creativity.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

As with all technological advancements, yeah, it will remove us further from reality and push us further into simulation, which is extra strange with art because art is already a simulation and has been accused of being such at least as far back as Plato.

@LivingtheLine

Жыл бұрын

That's a great quote, very succinctly hitting the point we've circled around in several of these conversations. Good old Ruskin.

What a soulful man Dave is. I'm moved by him as a person and as an artist.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

RIght? You can feel it emanating from him, and to see pain on a person like that was, ooof, how touching! We got so blessed by this conversation.

Most of the new generation of AI apps haven’t been created as tools for artists to use. They have been created to use artists as tools. To exploit and commodify them. They aren’t just complicit in their own demise but they’re willing to pay a subscription for the privilege.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

Absolutely no doubt this is going on. Midjourney just started offering free computing hours for time spent rating images. Very dubious.

@gusmendonca8160

Жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug There seems to be no concern or focus on ethics at all with these developers. And I'm someone that frequently incorporates new technology into my workflow and have been working with various forms of AI for over 5 years.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@gusmendonca8160 They try to make a show of their ethics by banning certain workds, etc. But it is all just show. Very obviously so Have have you been using AI? I am curious.

@gusmendonca8160

Жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug I first worked with a generative design AI system back in 2009 on a large industrial design project. For the past 3 years, I have used several AI systems in my daily design work but for generative imagery, I use my own customized Stable Diffusion. I have lowered the weights of other imagery to zero and have trained it with several thousand images made up of my own designs. The outputs now look far more like my own. I also never directly use the raw output. There is a way to do this with better ethics but I'm afraid you can't put this genie back into the bottle. But I do hope that highly professional studios and designers will have a more ethical approach to these tools.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@gusmendonca8160 I barely know what any of that means, which is part of the problem. Most artists, like myself, have zero coding ability or tech savvy to take that nuanced of an approach to this stuff, so far at least. And, yes, the box is open and the consequences will be what they be. Typical Silicone Valley approach. Fuckers. i say as I use one of the tools they built to talk crap about them. Haha.

PS. Dave was one of the first digital Artists i was exposed to upon Entry to Art School. He has had my respect for years. But now hearing him speak in a way that so closely mirrors my own thoughts and feeling. He has my sword if necessary. ( granted, im a Nerdy art weakling, And my sword is Wacom Pen. ) But for my first few years in school for Graphic Design. It was all about Dave Mckean. And David Carson and Stephan Sagmeister.. Delightful to see the man. And hear his words.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

i will be right there next to you, wielding a T-Square.

@goth_ross

Жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug HAHAHA!!! T square will definitely get some work done!!!!

@goth_ross

Жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug youve actually given me a kinda awesome image in my head of an assasins creed type character . decked out with t squares. rulers. Jacket lined with exacto knives. Sharpened paintbrushes. Acetone Bombs. You get it. i like it. lol

@LivingtheLine

Жыл бұрын

@@goth_ross Draw it up and tag us on Instagram. I would love to see it!!!

the sick feeling isn't anxiety, it's how the brain tries to see stuff and AI is never really right. I get headaches when I look at too much AI stuff.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

As uncanny as the valley gets, for sure.

@madox4061

Жыл бұрын

i'd also say he's talking about the general anxiety and dread that comes with a machine replacing one of the most fundamental hamn activities there are, wiping thousands of jobs including his own

Draftmen podcast on AI brought me here. Thank you.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

Thanks to the Draftmen Podcast then! Very grateful to have you here. Hope you found the conversation stimulating.

i really feel dave, his motivation to make art is exactly what keeps me doing it. at some point in my life i realised i would simply wither without it. nice statement!

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

Same. The machines can do what they will but I am going to draw even harder

Reminds me of the Human Condition by Hannah Arendt. I think the best example of this ease of access to machines conflicts with human values is the automation of industry, like how they mention the art forger @ 40:44, mass manufacturing can take the artisan attention of human made stuff to supply an identical mass of cheaper stuff. Making the authenticity of actual human made stuff a quality of its own to market

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

A friend of mine told me - after this conversation, I think - that this AI stuff is the Industrial Revolution for the Fine Arts. I think he has that entirely correct. Farmers would have been making the same argument that Dave was about the value of the process, the value of the actual labor, how that is what enriches our lives, gives us meaning, creates the growth of the individual, etc.

@Sarandosil

Жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug yes. people have made the same arguments about many processes when they were replaced by another throughout history. I have frankly been shocked at how easily artists have fallen back on these arguments as if they're compelling to anyone who doesn't already find meaning in the process, or if we ourselves wouldn't scoff at them in other contexts (wait, why would anyone want to be a coal miner? I asked myself in 2016). Up to now if you wanted to spend your life drawing (as I do) because it was compelling to you, you were safe finding meaning in it because there was no other way to produce the results of it. Now there is, and it's our turn now to confront the fact that the things humans find meaning in are ultimately arbitrary and vulnerable to insult from reality. It's been... interesting, for lack of a better word, watching people less nihilistic than I am grapple with this. I hope everyone who is unmoored by this finds their way to the Carl Sagan quote about love making the vastness of the universe bearable. There's no other answer that I've ever seen.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@Sarandosil Accurate through and through. My biggest take away from this whole experience of getting involved in AI is that we, as a species, really need to grow up. The only problem with any of these revolutions is we were not mature enough or self-restrained enough to use the tech properly.

This was a really great talk. You guys really took a look at this from a variety of great angles. As someone who's spent too much time in the last week playing with these AI image generators I've come to a few realizations myself. I've come to view the process of using them as "artificial intelligence assisted art direction treasure hunts". At least to begin with. Creating cool looking images actually becomes fairly trivial pretty quickly. "x in the style of y" is not too difficult with the right style prompt. Just search through a database of images with prompts and pick a style you like and you can just churn out cool looking stuff. But you don't get any lasting satisfaction from it because it took so little effort. It's basically a video game. But like video games, you can get good at them. You can study them. Playing around with prompt weights image-to-image generators unlocks an entire new dimension of things. And that's even before we get to things like textual inversion. Like the title of Dave's book, you can have a conversation with them, and take what they say and learn to get what you want (and sometimes be surprised but what it gives back and explore that instead). The challenge isn't to get something artistic(ish). The challenge is to get something specific. And because the output is easy, iteration costs less, and so the challenge shifts from getting nice output to nailing the intent. I'm challenging myself with some prompts from some friends that are honestly hard nuts to crack. But the process of doing it is actually quite rewarding precisely because it's not easy. It's just a very different kind of challenge from traditional art. It's not about how well I can draw (because I can't draw well), it's more can I recognize a good idea when I see it and help it explore that. Now we can have all the fish we even want whenever we want. Except no fish died in the process and now everyone is much more picky about the kind of fish they want. Think about how good we've gotten at spotting CG in movies. Or bad photoshopping jobs. Now the challenge isn't to get enough fish, but to cook it well. The challenge of getting the AI to give me what I want has, funnily enough, gotten me interested in learning to hone my digital art skills, because if I've learned anything from playing with these things, it's that cool is easy, but specific is hard.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

Thanks for the thoughtful comment, Matthew! Yes, getting what one wants with these things drove me freaking crazy. Zero patience for it. While making Issues 2 and 3 of Abolition I just wanted to go draw the panel I needed so many times. It is indeed a new skill set that one can journey through towards competency. I was definitely not willing to put in the time to learn all of the image-weighting protocols, the other - - commands, etc.I think us old school artists really are just bothered by the fact that this is an entirely new and different set of skills one can learn to get the results that used to be exclusively our realm to produce. Now, the AI weights the balance in favor of good writers and/or coders. I hope people get more picky. People who care will. The masses, as always, will dash with the AI right towards the average but that is nothing new. At this point the AI images bore to tears. I am doing one last thing with AI and then maybe never again? We shall see. I know it is there if it makes sense for a project or process, but, damn, this all has really made me want to DRAW!

Well I saved this interview for the first time I was back in the office (funny enough talking about AI and the digital world...I work in an archive) since covid and it really helped me get through it.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

Very happy to hear you are better from COVID and able to get back to work. I am just getting over it myself. Not fun.

As much as 80% of what we do may be directed by procedural memory (or muscle memory) with little to do with consciousness. What we do is a big part of who we are. 'The journey' is what makes muscle memory. If we cede that to AI algorithms we may be giving up more than most of us imagine.

@LivingtheLine

Жыл бұрын

Yeah, this is an interesting one because it is so easy to demonstrate yet so difficult for some people to accept. You are what you do, as it were. Who knows what a few generations of full autonomous processes would do to people.

@liamdickson5841

Жыл бұрын

@@LivingtheLine Even the way we take notes, with a keyboard, or even a virtual keyboard. I like to do it because I hate my hand-writing. I like the sheen of a smart font. There is some real value in the extended memory of clever computerised storage and retrieval systems, but taking notes with a pencil would better build muscle memory and imaged memory, associated with semantic memory, making my direct recall better. If I'd been doing this consistently the ascetics would probably be at least somewhat improved by now, too. I think this has a parallel in the midjourney images. How much do they offer beyond the sheen (without the intervention of human created narratives)? What will we do when the plastic's all melted?

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

It really is distressing to think both that the AI is taking this away from us and also proving that this is about all that we are as well.

The hopeful thing I am considering re:ai generated creative content is that, with the advent of any technology, there is a period of extreme indulgence in that tech which is somewhat promptly followed by a period in which even the faintest hint of that tech in something becomes annoying (ie: early synths in music), after the ubiquity reaches the point of self-negation. Humans develop a knack for recognizong the synthetic, and I think theres a likelihood we will arrive at that with the ai art, too. And it will evolve, and our relation to ot will evolve. But there might be a point where the value associated with a genuinely skilled and actualized artist, in the flesh, could increase as a result?

@clubgrubbug

2 жыл бұрын

That is where I see hope as well, it could cause a popular reaction against everything we worry about here and cause a trend back towards the opposite, but, the existential crisis of a shifted ontological status that Dave is bringing to light is very real and once those shifts happen they are permanent. Copernicus, Darwin, Freud and Turing forever changed the world and any counter reaction to them was small potatoes and ultimately a losing effort. I am pretty sure this has re-ontologized us in an equally significant way. We just haven't seen the results yet.

@laurenhousego767

Жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug yes the industrial revolution changed the world and left enormous numbers of people unemployed. However, in terms of art, it didn't render craft or artisans obsolete, and it also opened up many markets and industries that couldn't have even been imagined beforehand. I'm an artist and educator and I can relate so much to Dave's existential crisis caused by Midjourney. Since I discovered it a couple of weeks ago I've been really struggling with the classic stages of grief: denial (just a tool), anger (that these images are being made from billions of data inputs of works by artists without their apparent knowledge or consent, and are now being used to destroy their careers + why are coders trying to ruin everyone's livelihoods), bargaining (maybe it could be interesting for new ways of thinking/working), and acceptance (it's happened and it can't be undone). I don't know where we are heading, but I know that no CGI-generated imagery will ever replace the feeling or meaning of a simple, raw pencil drawing on paper made by a human hand. Art means something to us because it's deeply connected to our lived experiences, our stories, our complex social and cultural structures, and our mortality. A machine, no matter how good its algorithms or aesthetic results, cannot substitute what drives humans to make art. AI-generated imagery is good news for capitalism, and what could be more meaningless than that?

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@laurenhousego767 I think I am cycling between all of those stages on the daily, still. It is a lot to process. The capitalism of it all is bothersome, but I remain even more deeply bothered. Bothered by the reverse argument that if this is soulless crap, just a bashing together of what it has seen before, then that is all art by a human is as well, a mash up of past experiences expressed as an image. Even if that is not the case it is a feasible enough suggestion to cause wide spread psychological damage.

@BrianReplies

Жыл бұрын

Does that always apply? The “period of indulgence” thing? Film photographers were upset at digital photographers for all while. But now it’s ubiquitous. There has been no “well…we have had enough of this digital photography thing. We are done with digital files. We want the authenticity of images created from exposed film on the dark room. That’s the real thing.” No. Nope. That has not happened there at all. It just continues to grow and film photography is a nostalgic niche relegated for fine art photography alone.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@BrianReplies I think it is only ever a small, 'hip', counter-reaction, but always small and niche as the rest of society eagerly follows the change.

This second half is interesting to hear as I work on the other side of the screen from your trio's conversation. While Dave McKean is talking about bibliotherapy and art therapy I am writing a book that I se as a form of civil protest in art. This book, and probably the others I've written, are probably all part of my mental health.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

I am going to have to refor.ulate my teaching to focus on that self-care aspect, for sure. This conversation drove that home for me.

Truly an amazing talk, it was terrifying... interesting, but terrifying. All this just adds to my struggle for passion and meaning as a creative. My knee jurk reaction to all of this is complete push back, like Dave said ''100% AI free'' ...anyway. If anything, this made philosophy tangibly relevant for me. Congratulations on a grate video (the podcast itch was scratched :)) )

@clubgrubbug

2 жыл бұрын

Glad you enjoyed it but sorry to hear it has an impact on your creative juices. Hopefully reframing the center around the benefits of the journey rather than the end is helpful. That is what I have been mulling over for the last few days. Also, very glad to hear that philosophy became tangibly relevant. That is how philosophy should be, when done right. It is one of the reasons I love Luciano's work so much.

Great interview!

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

Thank you!

Didn't think I would watch all of it but wow, really fascinating

@LivingtheLine

2 жыл бұрын

While we were recording I would occasionally glance at the clock and think, that can't possibly be right... we all had a lot to say!

@clubgrubbug

2 жыл бұрын

Glad you stayed for the whole chat! This topic is so important.

@AndrewBuckleBookReviews

2 жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug yes, I totally agree, it was an eye opener.

If these AI image generators are “tools” then they are tools of CONSUMPTION not creation. Its basically a way to create a highly tailored feed of content that’s being delivered based on user specifications (prompt) rather than the algorithms on sites like KZread.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

It is a weird mix of both as it currently stand, with people like me definitely using it as a tool in my own process, but the gamification side and the pure entertainment side are all in the very odd mix. In the future: 100% we will be watching tailor generated content driven by taste-maker algorithms. Terrifying shit.

This conversation is long and dense. It's going to take me a few listens to work through it all. Kudos.

@clubgrubbug

2 жыл бұрын

That is the biggest compliment possible, imo, thank you! What a blessing our audience is too, so deeply engaged.

@johnm.withersiv4352

2 жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug This is a remarkably thoughtful comment section. I appreciate that too as someone that stops in video by video.

@clubgrubbug

2 жыл бұрын

@@johnm.withersiv4352 We are blessed with followers, like yourself, who arw consistently engaged and thoughtful. It is pretty awesome. Glad this video is getting extra love😁

@johnm.withersiv4352

2 жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug It's double length. It needs double love.

"The facilitation of convenience" The seed of our own destruction revealed at last.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

Expediency is definitely a dangerous temptation.

This was brilliant

@clubgrubbug

2 жыл бұрын

Thank you. Sean and I are still reeling. Gonna be months, at least, before I will know how to move forward.

@dean1380

2 жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug It's a conversation i will be returning to often thank you all for it

If you work on the 'creative' side of communication, you will always be one step behind the people who create the communication technology. I was behind when Adobe took over. I was behind when the web exploded and killed print. I was behind when HTML layouts changed from tables to CSS. So, this is no surprise.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

Oh, for sure. We can't use it until they make it. I am sure Adobe has worked very closely with artists over the years, but it is pretty obvious, given his interview with Rob Salkowitz for Forbes, that the creator of Midjourney gave the impact of this tech zero forethought. Stable Diffusion being open source also leads me to suspect that was not a heavily debated move. Open AI, being run by Elon, I would think there was at least more philosophical diligence done, but who knows. The only company I know for sure has an AI Ethics Board is Google, and we have a video forthcoming with a long time acquaintance of mine who served on that board for many years. Rumor has it that Google's Art AI way out performs all these others, but they have been more reticent to release it. But, at this point. Really? Far too late. It is open source. People obviously understand the training method well enough to replicate it very easily. This is the world now.

@Erik-vf9yn

Жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug Philosophical dillegence by the guy who doesn't let his workers have unions? Don't know about that. It's kind of wild to think Google is the only one for sure considering ethics. Really, wild. I wonder what the people at Google then think about what has been recently happening. Do these AI companies even at all communicate with eachother? Regardless, it really seems like a field the public should have more say, or, you know, any say at all in.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@Erik-vf9yn Oh , I agree. Certain technologies really should be debated and discussed un public awareness campaigns, to be followed by votes. These things change the world so fast and so dramatically amd we just get pulled along for the ride, having to adapt at speeds we just are not capable of. I always go back to C.S. Lewis talking about progress as not being blind. It should be towards a goal, and if one realizes they are moving further from the goal, then the most progressive thing to do is backtrack.

Im halfway trough and you guys even not scratched the surface of ethics, copyrights, counterfeiting art, identify theft and overall legality problems of most prompt to image AI generators.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

We recorded five of these videos, each about two hours long, all with different guests, trying to get as broad a look at the issue as possible. Sadly it is a massively broad topic so breadth and depth was hard, but I do think we did a better job than any other content I have seen about AI yet. The other thing is that you are looking for very fine-grained, practical, policy based conversations about laws and ethics. We are not lawyers or policy makers, so i think our concerns tended towards the coarser grained, meta issues of humanity's understanding of itself and the psychological impact of sharing the world with this tech. Our chat with EU, UK and Google policy advisor, Luciano Floridi might be more of what you are looking for. That should be out in February when issue 5 of Abolition of Man drops.

@rogueninja185

Жыл бұрын

Ethics? That s exactly what they focus on this video. Legality problems are what I would call scratching the surface of the problem. A smokescreen to cover the most important questions that are related to human identity, which again, is what they take on here. That is the core of the problem, not the copyright shenanigans.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@rogueninja185 👏👏 Yeah, I have been trying to warn people that the copyright issue is a non-issue diversion that pushed too far will be more damaging to artists that the AI. If we copyright style no one ever gets to make art again.

I'd like to add the perspective I've heard from a friend who's a painter. How much this is a product (and the next step maybe) of mass disseminated artworks. She sells her one of a kind hand painted canvas in a gallery and that's it, the AI is changing none of that for her, because paints and brushes aren't going anywhere, nor the fact her paintings only exist as one physical copy. It's probably just the beginning of the end of a business model based on mass distribution of artwork reproductions many artists like her never had access to as a means to make a living to begin with.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

I really hope that continues to be the case, and I hope this actually makes real paint on real canvas done by someone with real accrued skill more valuable. That is very likely in the short term. It is the commercial artists who are most at risk right now, for sure. But, I also see a day fast approaching where 3D printing technology is used to create physical objects. They already did it with a fake Rembrandt. I do not know if it accounts for things like transparent layers of glazes, but I do know it created a texture map to mimic the impasto quality of his work. Once the printers can control opacity and layers, game over.

@valdopeixoto

Жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug i think there's always the unique object made by human hands appeal in a painting that we already know we're not getting when we buy a book. I don't know if buyers will accept those terms in a painting.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@valdopeixoto I sure hope so. Hopefully this all pushes the value of hand crafted things up. Coture!

@MariaSurducan

Жыл бұрын

But art isn't just gallery art - it's also game design and illustration and advertising. That's how the majority of artists make a living, through copy-rights and licensing. Those who make a living by selling physical canvases are a minority.

@rogueninja185

Жыл бұрын

@@MariaSurducan Exactly. Selling through galleries was supposedly from a bygone era where only a chosen connected few made a living through art.

Does art really imitates life? For how long can we say that? If you remove the human factor from creativity/art what’s left? Too many questions from something that’s really emerging and no one can really say where is going to lead. Great discussion with master Dave McKean - too bad the book is already out of print. Congratulations guys….

@clubgrubbug

2 жыл бұрын

Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it. I keep coming back to Dave's point that just because we don't know where all this will lead doesb't give us a pass to go ahead and just do it without speculating very seriously about the pros and cons. And, as C.S.Lewis would point out, we should be progressing TOWARDS something, not just aimlessly seeing whete new technologies and ideologoes take us.

@johnpotten5136

Жыл бұрын

The book will be back in Dave's online store once he's caught up on current orders.

@BrianReplies

Жыл бұрын

You can’t remove the human element. A human has to put the words in. Even if we constructed a script that auto puts thousands of prompts in….all of those images would be the result of the person writing the script and thus initiating the process…not of the script entering the terms itself. Art can only be created if a mind…with intention…initiates a process. A machine cannot do that. It has no will and no self and so it cannot initiate anything which means it can’t create art. It may seem to us like it is…but the appearance of something doesn’t mean that thing is present. It’s a mirage.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@BrianReplies I don't think it will be too long before you have an AI text generator randomly generating endless prompts that are automatically fed into an AI image generator, thus removing humans from the process entirely. I don't know if having a human set that up and then walking away is enough for me to personally consider the rest of what comes as a human element still being involved. No more than my parents being responsible for my own creative production just because I have their DNA and a lot of environmental input from them.

Important conversation that touches so many issues - the economic repercussions for the "creative industry" alone should have global panels including unions, policymakers, creatives around the world to make up a "plan" on how to handle this, like Dave McKean mentioned. It is disturbing how little there seems to be happening so far to address this "disruptive" developments. I think it would be great if you repeated parts of this discussion with some of the people behind midjourney. I don't know if they would participate but it would be interesting if they would provide background information.

@clubgrubbug

2 жыл бұрын

Glad you see some much value in this chat. We should be talking to Luciano Floridi at some point. He was on the Google AI Ethics committee and has written policy guidance for the EU and UK. The majority of his career has been focused on trying to get ahead of the curve on these ethical issues. Sadly philosophy, academia and law are some of the slowest moving human institutions and tech is the fastest. I would love to talk to someone at Midjourney. All attempts at contact so far have failed.

@tinkthankaudiovisualprojects

2 жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug We did an interview with Philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh from the University of Vienna recently, on "AI and Climate Change" for a German NGO. He had some interesting thoughts on how AI could be regulated, one of his main takes was that it needs new regulatory bodies for "Future Technologies" which 1. Understand the Matter 2. Can work at a faster pace than the existing institutions... Also he (no surprise there, being a philosopher himself) suggested that these institutions should involve Philosophers as Ethics experts since questions like "what defines an AI as sentient" need to be answered. The lack of this knowledge and definitions got quite obvious in the discussions about the Lambda chatbot. Like Dave McKean mentioned, in the field of AI Image creation, unfortunately the virus is planted, I guess we will see a Midjourney or Dall-E created cover on every major magazine in the next year... I was thinking as a minimum policy, the AI created images should have have a mandatory (invisible) watermark to be able to check if a certain image is AI created....

@clubgrubbug

2 жыл бұрын

@@tinkthankaudiovisualprojects Sounds like a great interview, I will have to make time to listen to it. There are bodies that do this stuff, at least in the EU and UK. I am not sure about in the US. And they absolutely should include philosophers because they are the only ones trained in the proper way to deal with this stuff. Conceptual engineering, as Luciano calls it. DallE already did a cover for Cosmopolitan, so yes, 100% That is a great idea. There might be some metadata attached to the files at least. I wonder how it could work on print material?

@tinkthankaudiovisualprojects

2 жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug There are existing regulatory bodies, Mark Coeckelbergh says they are not suited for the pace that these technologies are advancing - he was on the advisory board on AI to the European Union himself ... I think what you guys perfectly made clear is that the "creative industries" have their own philosophical questions to solve, limits and guidelines to define. issues that are unique to the arts and AI that is working in this area. The question if there is "intent" is not so relevant for most data analytics AI, for a image creation it definitely is. Looking forward to more talks from you guys on the subject. I had been following the developments of AI over the last couple of years with growing irritation and it felt really good listening to some of my fears & doubts being formulated in a much more eloquent way than I ever could have done it myself.

@tinkthankaudiovisualprojects

2 жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug yes, there are invisible watermarking technologies that are maintained in screen and print, read about that some years ago. Could be that it's even integrated in Photoshop, don't remember.

Speculation hasnt scratched the surface. Time will tell.

@clubgrubbug

2 жыл бұрын

Agreed. I think the ontological shift is the only thing I can be certain about at this moment. How that shift affects the species is pure speculation, but as Dave points out, "We don't know, so lets wait and see how the cards fall" hasn't been the wisest approach. So the more speculation and surface scratching we can do now the better.

56:24 Bingo. This was my immediate impression of why Midjourney seems to imitate Dave McKean's work.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

His visceral reaction to that almost made me weep while saying it. So touching. I cannot imagine the place he is in right now.

@kahyangni6808

Жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbugsame. The look on his face kind of speared into me

To answer the question about ‘forging’ more art being a good thing, think about it like this: if an Ai could mimic the voice of your beloved dead grandma, and it sounded just like her, and the voice was programmed to say: “I love you, and I’m so proud of you” - would it have any meaning or power whatsoever? To me, it would be a meaningless curiosity, at best.

@LivingtheLine

Жыл бұрын

An excellent rebuttal :) by the way, the service you describe is no doubt in the works, amd I have no doubt a great many people will avail themselves to it (ghoulish as it may seem)

@RampantDaydream

Жыл бұрын

@@LivingtheLine There are already vocal simulators, but it's meaningless. Part of Art, like approval, is validation. If it's not earned, it's kind of worthless.

Artstation concept art commerce will take a hit. But can AI ever truly simulate a Crumb, Kirby, or Herriman? These artists have a vision rooted in their own unique experiences and even individual flaws. Even artists known for their skill and virtuosity, such as Frank Frazetta and Kim Jung Gi, still have art strongly informed by their lives, culture, and personal idiosyncrasies. I understand the argument here of an ontological shift. Will future generations even pick up a pencil (or Wacom tablet) when a prompt will do? I remain cautiously optimistic that enough still will, because it’s so fun. Anyway, good to see a philosophical discussion on AI instead of the millionth Midjourney tutorial on my feed.

@LivingtheLine

2 жыл бұрын

This came up during our interview with the Gist, but was left on the editing room floor. My thought being, everything that already exists eventually will indeed be copied ad infinitum. The question is how do you get more of those people in the future if anything is available to you instantly via text prompt? I told Mike Pesca, maybe cynically, that may be all of the ideas have just been had, like they're just Pokemon and we have collected them all. I think a Novelty Pokemon Extinction Event is certainly a possibility.

@clubgrubbug

2 жыл бұрын

I do wonder when, if ever , the AI will start producing unseen styles and unique voices. That feels far off, but, left entirely out of all of these conversations is Harold Coehn's AARON project, and AI Art Maker he stared programming in the 1970's, and the Algorist movement in general, many of which developed code that produced unique approaches to visual arts. I remain hopeful that human greats will still be great because passion drives them. Once they carve a style out it will be open for copying, but that was always the case. But, yes, that still leaves us ontologically shifted, and that, especially as an educator, has me in a daze.

@LivingtheLine

2 жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug well, while the AI is still quote unquote bad there is definitely some unique stuff coming out. I think issues two and three of Abolition of Man are excellent examples -- people will see what I mean when they come out. But as it improves it's going to flatten out all of those so-called imperfections.

@clubgrubbug

2 жыл бұрын

@@LivingtheLine The art in those issues is lovely and unique, true. And, surprisingly consistent. DallE and Midjourney also have very distinct, predictable "personalities" after interacting with them both for a while as well. So, maybe I am wrong. What will be really fucked is when one of them starts producing endless unique styles native to itself and choosing which to employ when and providing a tag to users to ensure that approach if they want it.

@marsmckay

2 жыл бұрын

An AI already produced an entire Tezuka comic years ago. It even got translated by Fred Schodt who translated Phoenix and Astro Boy, among others. It's not a great Tezuka comic, but it reads like one. I can see how someone who didn't know Tezuka's work wouldn't be able to tell the difference. I talked with him about this recently and he's convinced that there will be no comics translators in three years, it'll all be done by AI.

It s unbelievable how most people can only see what s immediately in front of their eyes...worried with copyright and the superficial smokescreen of legal issues, as if that is what s most important. The whole human experience, the "midjourney" from start to finish that allows us to enjoy the process is what we re loosing and fast. Of course this is just the beginning and it will permeate all fields of human culture and experience. I think some will realize the real danger only when writers are replaced. Maybe then, if they re not stuck in a dream of being human already, maybe they ll wake up. It will be too late though...It already is. I ve never seen something so scary being released into the world to be honest. These AI are cannibalizing artists work and putting out corrupted sons of all those lives so fast that soon there will be no exclusively human created imagery to feed them. If there is truly a soul that is uncorrupted in a symbolic sense we will lose it forever at that point. The gold that so many artists and non artists aspire to will be tainted. I sincerely think that we already got to a point of no return. This strongly reminds me of Tsutomu Nihei's work, Blame (and Biomega to a certain extent), in which the main character goes on a epic quest in a derelict, ever growing world, to find some mythical lost " net terminal genes". These are hidden supposedly in some type of primordial human (from that time's point of view), that holds the key to gain control of some digital plan (the Netsphere) and return control of the "AI infected" world to humans. I think that author truly saw so far in the future it s almost inconceivable. Thus people regard that work as mere fiction...But as so many science fiction authors before him, they truly played the part of the prophet. If you have a link to those episodes you said would be released in october/november, please share. I am very interested. Thanks

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

My cousin! You obviously see it. Glad to have you here. We need an army of us. The videos we mentioned are now all posted in a playlist of AI discussions that can be found on our playlist page. Also, please, please check back in on Monday for my review of the brand new graphic novel Land of The Dead. That book is essential and gave me the perfect sounding board for wrapping up twenty some odd years of thought on the nature and importance of human creativity, and a slew of other important lessons.

I still remember when working with symmetry meant being a lazy artist. now, everything is a procedural process, even a concept now. currently, it´s possible separate the art from the artist because they are ontologically unconnected.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

An Midjourney does a lot of symmetry. I push so hard against my students who plop everything smack in the middle of their compositions and here comes the AI art proving symmetry is indeed the default setting for human makers. Duchamp separated art and artist, so that isn't anything new AI adds to the conversation about art, imo.

Any chance to get an interview with the Midjourney people? The thing that strikes me from watching events around facebook is that Zuckerberg seems to not understand what he's doing and what effects he has on the world. What are the Midjourney people aiming to achieve with their work? There are probably very obvious answers to that question but I think it's worth grilling them anyway.

@ArtOfWarlick

2 жыл бұрын

The creator of Midjourney has been very transparent about what he hopes to achieves. He has said consistantly that his goal is to "democratize art-making for everyone".

@LivingtheLine

2 жыл бұрын

@@ArtOfWarlick there's that D word! Very interesting.

@LivingtheLine

2 жыл бұрын

@@ArtOfWarlick it's certainly going to cause image making to proliferate. Now how that relates to art making is another matter.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

I wish! If we could get their attention I would go hard.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@ArtOfWarlick Never trust that goal. Same as making everything more transparent. It is a great way to shift the power structure by moving everyone over to your new gatekeeping system under the guise of freedom and democracy. Decentralization is what Gods do when The Tower of The People gets too close to the clouds.

1:00:35. Absolutely, the work Dave McKean does digitally, can be analyzed by numerics and reply. That involves the process of creation itself. Actual painting programs are quiet about this "posible" monitoring. I repeat, they-are-quiet. Stop for a minute and check out the number of your software "updates" in 2022... and compare that number with updates some years ago. Someone had to said and it´s been said.

@LivingtheLine

Жыл бұрын

This is a very interesting theory...

@aitoralvarez

Жыл бұрын

@@LivingtheLine Im sad it is...

@LivingtheLine

Жыл бұрын

@@aitoralvarez I wonder if there's anything in the terms of service that would permit or forbid that kind of monitoring.

@aitoralvarez

Жыл бұрын

@@LivingtheLine Sequences with coordinates and actions collected in big data backups and send with all those updates. Sounds very crazy. Computing its not my field. Ah... please, just forget it.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

It is a plausible idea. Record the process of all working artists and derive data from that. That would be completely insidious!

1:20:48 Where does art education go when humans are replaced with machines? Interesting concern. However, what state is art education in now? High school students taught underfunded functional history and craft without a real tangible economic purpose beyond the small handful that carry it into determination anyway?

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

I teach at community colleges, so we are very focused on career paths and matriculation to 4 years. I am less comfortable with the later, and the former is now an even more dicey path. Going to take a lot of rethinking. The general state of higher ed art ed is a pyramid scheme aimed at filling mfa programs. I already battle that. This makes the battle harder, but I am happy for the challenge and the chance to experimebnt. Academics, in thr large, probably won't grapple with this in their frameworks for at least 5-10 years. Probably 15 - 20.

what's the book Dave is referring to at 20:00? great convo

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

The Artist and The Machine? Sounds like an academic work.

image generators put the user in the position of an executive producer or an art director, it's almost like midi for music

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

I would disagree. Adobe is a better analog to midi. They took the physical tools and made them digital. A midi user and an Adobe user still have to make the compositional decisions. Here all they do is make subject matter and style suggestions/requests, and the AI does all of the composing. It is a very different thing and quite a jump forward from Adobe or midi.

@LOGICZOMBIE

Жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug - fair point, what about the executive producer or art director comparison ?

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@LOGICZOMBIE Art director seems pretty close. "Hey team, I need x, y and z." Except now the team is the AI.

i think you can defiantly find meaning in Art made by a digital intelligence. this is happening due to AI being given data to learn from at some point it will be taking information from all art ever made, if not already. that being the case you can be proud that you were a part of the growth of maybe our only chance to remove corruption for the system we live in.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

I agree. A significant aspect of meaning is what an audience gleans from a piece of work rather than what the author intended to embed within the work. Intention of the author can only ever be accessed by the non-author through behavioral cues anyway, so intent is always a dubious explanation for intelligence, meaning, creativity, etc. Thank you! We are very proud to be a part of this time in history. What an amazing thing to be witness to.

The cows eating grass sounds like The Far Side. Also was that a hint at Dave's next Folio Society book being Gilgamesh?

@clubgrubbug

2 жыл бұрын

That is what I was thinking too. Gary Larson, right?

@liamschulzrules

2 жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug Woah you were like lightning there. Maybe you're an AI. Yeah thats his name.

@clubgrubbug

2 жыл бұрын

@@liamschulzrules Haha. Just being a slug watching UFC and messibf with DallE 2 on my phone.

@clubgrubbug

2 жыл бұрын

I had not caught that about Gilgamesh but now that you point it out that makes sense.

There is not enough computing power for AI to meet demand and the cost of its use will sky rocket. So there will still be a market for human artists.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

That very well could be. it is astonishing how much is being produced on Midjourney every second. I wouldn't be surprised, however, if this stuff gets integrated into Adobe products, so that the computing is happening locally rather than through a server. There would be be a market for human artists even if we had unlimited computing power. I worry more about the incentive-for-young-artists concern, and the general devaluation of the creative impulse, which has already started. A terrifying article for The Times UK recently leveled an attack on creativity and creatives. If that sentiment spreads we are really in trouble. Then there is the race for who controls the AI in the end. Once it can fuck, feed, house and entertain the WEF and ilk there is a very real chance they just eliminate the rest of us plebs and get the sustainable, curated humanity they have been working towards.

Claiming youre an artist thru using AI is like saying you can spell and have good grammar with Spellcheck.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

Haha. But, someone who is poor at speeling may have all kinds of interesting things to say in writing an if spellcheck helps them get it out i am good with it. The longer I spend with the AI stuff the more comfortable I am with it as a tool for creation. One of the change points for me was having all 80-100 of my Art Appreciation students use Midjoureny to make a collage this semester. The results were generally so poor and so uninteresting that I am much more convinced that one still needs to be a competent creative to make anything worth consuming with the AI. There will be an infinite amount of shit produced with it, and all of my concerns remain, but I am at least more open to the positives of the tech now and trying to focus on and lean into those to help shape the space into something I am more on board with.

Mid journey should be renamed Pandora's box

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

It is and it is WIDE open.

@LivingtheLine

Жыл бұрын

I keep thinking of Pandora and Narcissus.

@destructard

Жыл бұрын

more like shitjourney amirite

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@destructard Haha. It does produce some pretty compelling imagery, but it also seems to have headed towards a boring average since we started using it.

Something obvious is being missed here: 1. AI art is good when you have an open spec or no client. 2. Its a really really bad tool when you have a detailed spec because it has a large non-deterministic element (via the random seed, which has a massive effect). 3. The people who get copied most (Greg Rutkowski, WLOP, etc) do so because they tagged their work on the web extensively to make themselves easy to find. AI found them. Nobody will make their mistake again. 4. The AI generators are locked to today. Real paying clients want the new stuff of tomorrow. If you don't tag your new ideas in the image metadata and/or do keep your online images smaller than the training sizes (which isn't difficult as its already 768x768 - if one side is smaller, you've already won), AI won't find them moving forward. Most online AI generated art out there is 1 above; amateur creators either following the latest prompt trend (ink punk or whatever), or just doing what AI is good at (pretty portraits, head and shoulders only, so no sausage hands or three legs to fix). As soon as you have a detailed spec for 2, it takes forever in Photoshop getting it right; photo-bashing all the stuff AI is not good at (hands, right number of legs, and having to comp multiple subjects if the spec requires it, because AI is only good at single subject images). 3 hours for a single image is not uncommon for me, which is about the same as a work using stock or my own photography as inputs. You're really not making time with AI for commercial work. Its easy only for easy stuff, which is like everything else; nothing hard-to-do comes easy! 3 and 4 are the obvious paths to get past the issue of AI for content creators. If future artwork is not presented on the web fully tagged as per 3, then AI art will quickly become irrelevant for commercial work. Artists have suddenly learned what tagging with correct metadata can do, and will either stop doing it or maliciously miss-tag (which is both a very human response and one I strongly recommend to break the machine!). Its likely there will soon be the equivalent of the no-follow tag in webpages, but specific to AI image trawls (and it should be permissive rather than on exception, *which is the single main point artists need to raise to kill AI art stone dead in its tracks* - if a particular permission metatag is not on an online image, it means you can't use it in an AI-training image web-scrape, and if it is, the artist has a claim not against the hydra of copied work, but direct at source with the source model developer/trainer - 2 or three lawsuits will kill it). And of course, to state more of the obvious point of 4 above, clients don't want ideas from today as that is the past, they want tomorrow and AI can't learn what it hasn't seen. If 3 is done properly, it never will moving forward. New artists with new ideas will not be naively tagging their work so AI learning can ingest it like taking sweets from a baby anymore. The only real gain/loss is that easy, derivative artwork from the past is easier to create. Not sure if that's as unexpected as people think! Also worth noting that places where AI images would do well commercially - such as generic stock images - are already banning AI images.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

1. And when your own idea is vague. 2. No worries, the client won't need to communicate with you any more. They will communicate with the AI. 3. That is a great point and a painful lesson to learn. 4. I am not sure this holds, entirely. My own art has been pushed into the future just by dent of seeing the AI work. It most definitely can show us new looks and new avenues. I have used it to design comic page layouts that are unlike any I have seen before. Innovation with tech always will come from abuses of the tech. Use it wrong and you will see the future. Trends are trends, same for any other tool. Again, we are imagining a world where clients use the tech themselves. Also, a world where the AI is better at what it is doing. The improvements from when this episode was recorded to now are astonishing. It is only going to get better and more semantically intelligent. My understanding of the AI is that you could un-tag all of the images on the internet and it would be too late. It is a neural network that has already learned. Un-tagging everything could indeed lock it to today, but even then prompt writing, prompt rating, which images are chosen for upgrades and variations, etc. are all still avenues from training data beyond tags. At this point the box is open and the demons are loose. No putting it back. Good luck, though. More self-regulation will be the one key and humans suck at self-regulation. It is easy to take the heroic stance while an issue is hot, but as it cools down, the tech gets better and easier to hide, and financial incentives become clear, those places will cave. May take 15-20 years and new management, but it will come. That said, I am in a much better place about AI art than I was when we recorded this. It is here. It is going nowhere. It is fun. It has made me push myself and lit me up wuth a ton of project ideas, both with and without AI.

@shambhangal438

Жыл бұрын

As a FWIW funny aside: Stable diffusion 2.0 is on a path that should fix many of the issues artists have with stable diffusion; AI artists must now rely much less on default settings that cause the model to be able to just 'replicate the work of an existing artist'. But, I find it hilarious that there's AI artists out there previously eye-rolling at all the traditional artists crying foul about losing a living/copyright with 'they should shut up and face progress'. These are the exact same AI artists saying the recent Stable diffusion 2.0 should be burned to a cinder and then dropped into the face of the sun for good measure, never to reappear... because their favourite prompt no longer works and they can'be be bothered to learn the new one!

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@shambhangal438 I can't keep up. This stuff changes almost hourly.

Ai is the clip art of the future. All ‘brain’ and no ‘mind’.

@LivingtheLine

Жыл бұрын

But INFINITE royalty-free clipart.

Fascinating discussion but despite the best of intentions to end on a positive note I really struggle to be convinced. Especially Mckean's last comment about ''only looking at the why'', which to me felt somewhat contradictory to the previous point about 'toppling conceptual bullshit''. Surly ''only looking at the why'', so divorcing it from the skill or the craft, is kinda the same spirit as Conceptualism ?

@LivingtheLine

Жыл бұрын

I suppose that depends on what "why" you think we was addressing. Surely a "why" could encompass someone's social or emotional needs.

@billyliar1614

Жыл бұрын

@@LivingtheLine The philosophical basis of Conceptualism is the assertion by Duchamp/the art mafia that it is the intention or 'concept' which is important rather than skill. While I would agree that we should certainly value the humanity or ''intention'' behind an act of creation, an assertion that this is pre-eminent above skill or craft I would argue seems no different in substance to the claims made by adherents of Conceptualism. Let's think how this could play out in reality - eg. two people apply for a college place. One student presents a crude drawing, the other a portfolio of highly accomplished work and the tutor says ''never mind about all that, what we really want to know is why you did it'' So the unskilled guy gives some pseudo-philosophical answer about his Existential dilemma or something (a bad example I know) which they find impressive, the skilled guy doesn't, so they give the guy who has no artistic skill a place on the course rather than the skilled guy. What they would be doing then in such an instance is assessing someone's ''intent' or explanation rather than their artistic skill-level, which I guess to a large extent is what art colleges do already. To my mind, rather than curtailing the culture of Conceptual bullshit, it would be putting rocket fuel under it. I personally feel that craft is important and should not be devalued, irrespective of the ''why'', whatever that means.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

I noticed that fracture in what he was saying as well but chose to let it go. I have noticed a lot of people going on about how idea is all that matters now, and you are right, that is exactly the lesson Duchamp taught us 110 years ago.

@billyliar1614

Жыл бұрын

@@LivingtheLine ''Surely a "why" could encompass someone's social or emotional needs.'' What are we, painters or social workers ?

@LivingtheLine

Жыл бұрын

@@billyliar1614 I understood your initial point re: Duchamp. I was just trying to say that I didn't completely understand Dave's last point about the "why" and thus could imagine a ton of different interpretations of it, including the many "why"s I personally have. I e "I want to" or "it fulfills me". I'd need to rewatch that part of tue conversation to contribute more than this on your point. I was pretty wiped out by the end there.

1:26:08

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

Powerful wisdom, right? So blessed to have learned from such a soulful master.

Sadly, AI is doing line art now... I'm sure you've heard about that guy who taught AI to rip-off Kim Jung Gi shortly after he died... It might not be at Charles Dana Gibson, or Franklin Booth levels yet.. but "yet" is the keyword.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

Yeah, it is getting much better. I am working on a short, five or six page, follow up story to AoM #2 & 3, using the same style prompts and the images are WAY more resolved and legible. The idea is that the short is a groundhog day and I will remake it every couple of months to create a record of the improvements but also have a narrative reason for the repetition. That should be up on Patreon soon.

The problem with AI is that the art it creates is too perfect, and doesn't look handmade. People love handmade things so it makes the art feel cheap. Some of the most famous artist do not create perfect looking work and that is one of the charming things about their Art.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

I do already miss the early days of midjourney, where the results we wackier. That was the charm of it all for me. Now, with the photo-realism, it is less interesting. The prompts have to have the style cues built in better now. I think the 'masses' have always veered towards cheap, automated production but there will always be a place for the connoisseur. It is Marvel vs Uncivilized. Uncivilized has the much higher quality, more thoughtful, artful comics but sells significantly less. So, my guess is we will see the same here. The masses happily consuming AI dreck and the sophisticates enjoying hand made couture items.

@Erik-vf9yn

Жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug I wasn't aware Uncivilized was a brand as I don't really read comics personally. I thought you meant either it's people who are civilized and like marvel or those uncivilized, lmao.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@Erik-vf9yn Haha. No. Uncivilized is an awesome small press company. We should be talking to then soon!

How much does the unconscious add to the source of art? Does AI art come from an unconscious of data?

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

For me, the unconscious is the primary source of art and what I see from the AI suggests that it is working in a very similar way to my own brain in terms of hallucinating imagery based on what it has been exposed to.

I feel like we are going to have to become teachers ob how to become humans again, and how to navegate new technologies in a healthy way. Is that it? Back to process, back to intuitive paths and happy accidents 🤷🏻‍♀️

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

We just recorded an awesome chat with the guys at www.youtube.com/@freethepeople and my major takeaway from that is pretty much what you just said. No matter what happens with AI, the best route forward is making sure human beings learn how to find things they care about enough to struggle to get better at. How we do that? I have no idea. That is what I will be chasing from here on out, though.

I'm not sure if Dave is aware but in the modern world of social media and algorithms, drawing and creating things is actually not good for your mental health, because the majority of it just fucked over by the algorithms. Creating for 90% of people nowadays is undoubtedly going to be nothing but endless discouragement. Even the process of drawing is disturbed when you know that nobody is going to give a shit about your work because it will be unfairly buried. I barely enjoy the process of drawing anymore. And i don't share a lot of it either. I used to share everything. The point where the algorithms took over organic social media growth was truly a turn in the wrong direction. I'm glad i got to my point of artistic development before the internet went down the pan as it has. I can't imagine how the kids of today make any progress i really can't. And now they want to algorithmize our work as well? its gone too far.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

It is definitely an unhealthy world we have created for ourselves, at least until we figure out how to adapt to it, but I fear we may never. That said, the one thing I do know can save us is connection, and sharing ones art is a great way to do that. It may be foolish to keep pushing back so hard, but what else do we have to do with our time here on earth but try to make out little part of it as much better as we can. Art seems like an important part of that, to me. Yeah, the algorithms have been awful for us and as an educator I am faced with the repercussion of it on the daily. But, again, personal connection goes a hell of a long way, and if I can calm myself down enough to be honest about it the reall issue is that the bottom of the barrel gets lower and lower, so the energy required from me to lift people up out of it is greater, but percentage wise I am not sure that there are any more people at the bottom of the barrel. I still have a ton of amazing kids every semester. It is just hard to see it and feed it when I have had to lean so far into the barrel. Also, I just realized it could seem like I am making fun of your handle. Totally unintentional use of "barrel," apologies.

@MrArchilus

Жыл бұрын

I think it cannot be overstated how destructive of an invention the social media have been

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@MrArchilus Agreed.

@heinoustentacles5719

Жыл бұрын

The trouble is that people are all hanging around on social media. When I go on people's personal websites I see all sorts of stuff I've never seen before, and it's easy for me to respond in a way the artist will see.

I can imagine a future where Ai can create video games by having one person talking to an interface about what they want and the Ai turns speech into code extremely fast and accurate. Individuals will make games effortlessly from their imagination.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

And this is probably not as far off as one might guess. The rate of improvement is nuts.

@barrelrolldog

Жыл бұрын

Thats not what AI is doing with art though. I am an artist, AI cannot create what is in my head. What i want to draw, what i plan to draw. It cannot help me, it cannot even finish something i have started drawing or make the process faster. What it does it make up some random nonsense from other artists work based on a prompt i give it. It could even do that of my work, if i fed it only my work. But it would not be creating anything new, it would not be solving my problem. Those videogames would be a mish mash of old videogames and they would likely be too random to be any good. Which is fine for a mess about, but nothing more.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@barrelrolldog I don't think this is a proper understanding of the AI. It isn't just bashing the work of others together. It has formed concepts about images in its latent space, kind of like you or I forming concepts based on life experience. This whole copyright issue is a total diversion, innaccurate, and a diversion from the real problems of AI technology. Also, fighting the copyright battle in the legal system will retroactively screw over so many artists and so much of art history that I would think very long and hard before chasing legal actions.

@barrelrolldog

Жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug No it is not forming concepts. It has not and it can not. and it is not using anything new, its all derivative and using others work. It's algorithms, not ideas. This is one of the dangers with this thing, people simply don't understand, people who are not familiar with it, with what goes into the creative process. and therefore think what it is doing is more than it is.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@barrelrolldog I believe the opposite is the issue. People do not understand that the AI does not store information, and now that it has been trained it does not need continued access to the images in the training data, or from anywhere else. It has 500 some odd categories it has assigned weights to and these form 'concepts' that allow it to interpret the text and essentially hallicinate an image of that cluster of concepts from a randomized noise pattern. That was the breakthrough DallE 2 made. It was exactly that AI no longer needed to photobash, you could now delete all training data and not give it access to new images, and it would still be able to make the same pictures it does now.

Is it any different to painters not making and mixing their own paints, canvas and brushes, those skills used to be part of the creativity of the paintings. Photography is also just a push of a button, creativity is more about expressing a vision. It is about the end result. If you enjoy making your own paints or if you enjoy using technology to create images, that is personal choice. Just because some like painting, doesn't mean that is the only form of creating images. Art is creative expression, whatever tools people use is just part of. The machines are just tools. What we do with the tools is what makes us creative people. Maybe you only take photos of yourself, or maybe you use it to document memories, or maybe you use it to make your imagination visual. Remember how the old painters reacted to the invention of photography. Its funny how people react to new things. I bet some protested the wheel lol

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

The point Lewis makes in the bit of The Abolition of Man we used for the book is that your argument is true, true, true, at every step of human history until we use science to conquer human nature, and at that point we are conquered. The fret about AI is that we actually are approaching a point where it is reasonable that we have built our own erasure. And, even if we have not, each of those technological revolutions you describe completely changed human society, and we would be wise to get as broad a view of the potential impact of a tech as possible before we deploy it. That is what conversations like this are about.

@heinoustentacles5719

Жыл бұрын

I bet some protested the rifle, too.

@codeXenigma

Жыл бұрын

​@@clubgrubbug I love playing with AI but honestly skeptical it can replace all jobs. In theory we already have technology that can replace lots of jobs but hasn't. Why don't all shops use self-serving tills? We could replace all truck drivers with a tram system. In fact that would be far more effective than using AI. Goods could be transported far quicker if we used trains, rather than truck drivers. We have machinery knowledge that can do any repetitive task, so why isn't everyone making them for their business.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@heinoustentacles5719 I cannot imagine why🤣😂

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@codeXenigma I doubt it will replace all jobs, but it will alter the landscape of what jobs are, for sure.

1:40:00 - Nah, comics are going to go the same way. Already someone's created a European looking painted comic using AI. You think that publishers won't welcome a way of producing a whole comic at the fraction of the cost of what it takes to produce a comic now? No more paying $300 a page for a top flight penciller who'll miss deadlines anyway

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

What I mean by comics being safe is not the making of the images in the panels, but that a human being, at least for a while, is still going to be needed to manage page layouts, guide the AI to produce images that actually communitate the story, hold together on a page as a meta composition, generste implicature and closure, make sure words and images reaonate. All of the formal stuff that makes comics the thing they are. The AI might be able to mimic it, but it won't be good comics without a human hand. Single images are way less complex things. So, yes, the image makers may be in trouble. The pencilers and painters, but the storytellers are not, yet, at risk. In my estimation.

@gonzalo5162

Жыл бұрын

I've seen some of these AI comics, and they're absolute garbage.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@gonzalo5162 Hopefully you takethe time to check out our book, The Abolition of Man. We took great care to have it be something more than the schlocky gimmick books, and just straight bad horror-SciFi stuff that is starting to flood the space. Dave's book Prompt is super thoughtful as well. Hopefully you can get a copies of both books. We would love to hear your thoughts on if we overcame the garbage or not.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@Norma Neumann The AI has its strengths and weaknesses just like a human artist. Issue 1 is more like painted illustrations, issues 2 and 3 are quite lovely, almost like stone lithographs, issue 4 is very illustrationy again and issue 5 is more designy. I quite like the lithographic look it produces. Very expressive and emotive in a way I envy.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@Norma Neumann Sean and I have been pretty anti AI since the beginning and are becoming more so day by day. Abolition is not kind to an AI future.

Great conversationnthat give me a Little bit of Hope in final victory of human brain in the war against artificiali intelligence. I Just add a Little personal thought: AIart made by MidjourneyAi Dalle2 stablediffusion are to art as p0rn0grafy s to love. It's pure mental m@sturb.... that leads to addiction: you can't stop generating images. Visual bulimia grows, pleasure decreases.And the great nothing finally triumphs.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

Really glad you found hope in this. Please, please come back in February when we release our Interview with Luciano Floridi to supplement his issue of The Abolition of Man. he is a philosopher from Oxford who founded the Philosophy of Information as a discipline, and has provided digital ethics policy guidance for the EU, UK and served on Googles AI Ethics Committee. Our chat with him let me much more hopeful.

@TheReginadistracci

Жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug I can't wait to listen to him.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@TheReginadistracci Check out his books as well. The Fourth Revolution is an awesome starting point and written for non-philosophers.

Just wait until they’ll be able to make AI art move. Then you’ll really see visual art invaded by DJ culture. Seriously though, I’d say it all boils down to education. If creative people think this process doesn’t have much to do with creativity let alinea art (and I’d agree with them), people should be taught to be creative, and to recognise it. Sadly, creativity doesn’t seem to a priority in most schools. I for one don’t expect a big push-back against AI after the initial bloom has withered. Their never has been a pushback against CGI for instance. I’ve been watching the Sandman Netflix series with mixed feelings exactly because of this CGI overabundance.

@LivingtheLine

2 жыл бұрын

"DJ Culture" hits it exactly for me.

@clubgrubbug

2 жыл бұрын

DJ culture is exactly right. Long before the AI the abundance of remix culture is what led me to the idea of the Banal Content Apocolypse and the idea for the story in issues 2 and 3 of the Abolition series. And, sadly, I think you are correct with the CGI/VFX analogy. This stuff will dominate and any pushback will be hioster Michel Gondry doing stop motion with cotton balls.

@clubgrubbug

2 жыл бұрын

I am, as an educator, really grappling with how this should change my approach to art education. How do I refocus my approach to further highlight the creative outlook you mention. It is a beast of a task.

It's called "Midjourney" because it's the middle of the road between tradition and future "end game" art. Prompting is just a clunky and transitionary period and it's really goofy. Future art tools will be infinitely more personal and the developers know that. It's a great name.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

Shifting the scale of it all, yeah, that works. I think that is where the bigger, hidden rift is: between those who want to scale up because they think it evolves humanity, and those who think scaling up will destroy humanity. I remain unconvinced by either side of that larger issue.

@DemWaifus

Жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug The latter makes no sense, it's just luddites preaching doom. The way tech is heading is like brain chips hooked up to AI. How in the hell could you argue that would be bad for human expression? You can argue you don't like it but that's where the argument should end! Even if you didn't want to go that far, a machine can absolutely read your intent by mere brush strokes if it studied how you work enough. You could augment your work with something like PS to draw 1000x faster. It'd still be you in control. And again even if you don't want to go that far -- your art could be used as a sole prompt to create other media such as movies, video games, books, and music. Simply drawing a picture that the AIs could then bring to life to enjoy in a more interactive form. That will happen and if you argue that's somehow going to destroy humanity there is something seriously wrong with you. It's not like we'll be stuck in pods alone either, AIs could combine two people's works in a more intuitive fashion than current collaborations. Whether you wanted to link up your brains or just have something less intrusive. Machines are made to help us, not to destroy us. Unless chatGPT escapes into the internet and kills us all anyway.

@LivingtheLine

Жыл бұрын

@@DemWaifus the amount of self delusion in these kinds of prognostications is staggering. Your self, your intentions and goals, don't exist independent of your learned skills, but in tandem with or even because of them. If we reach the hellish future you're describing, there won't be any human intention, because there won't be any human beings. Skills and crafts aren't an inconvenience to be bypassed, they shape the way we think and feel and process the world. There is no relationship between drawing, and telling a computer what to draw. There is no relationship between composing, and asking a computer to compose something. The labor isn't an unfortunate byproduct of the intent to create. The labor is inexorably tied to the product, and the lifelong acquisition of skill has shaped the intent.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@DemWaifus @Iz I think saying something is 'seriously wrong with" me is an overreach there. Jesus, dude, we are just sharing ideas about a massive technological development that is less than a year old. It is going to be a messy discussion as we all sort through the implications of something so game changing. If you can't be gracious to other human beings during such a period... I dunnno, man. I agree that all of that stuff will happen and I agree that some people will choose to go that route, it will probably be pretty spectacular. What thise like me worry about is whether the entities we are describing at the end of the chain of technological advancement are the same kind of thing as a human now. It is quite possible that we advance ourselves out of the picture or evolve ourselves into something that is too far gone from the demands of our own biology to be healthy. This could be the first time a real evolution happens by non-natural means. That is worth slowing down and asking questions about. And, none of this in me trying to play Imminent-Doomsday, just pointing out the large possibility, pondering the likelihood, and trying to get the conversation about avoiding the negative outcomes of this possible future on the table. If you are truly interested in my chain of thought there is a paper I published in 2014 on my website that deacribes the conditions of Hyper-History and the banal, Content Apocalypse. At the end I present the dilema of the scale shift and leave my amswer to it umreaolved because I truly do not know how to resolve it. Maybe you have the missing piece?

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@LivingtheLine Kalyan has been talking a lot about this over the last few days. AI reinforces the lesson of Duchamp, the technique matters not, only the quality of the idea, but, the ability to have the truly great ideas is often tied to having gone through the technique gaining phase of learning. McCloud talks about that in Understanding Comics, how the idea is the most important, but most beginners start with the surfave technique and learn their way through form and into concept. Maybe now the concept is all we will be trained on? That is an immediate worry for me as an educator. And, it may or may not be a good thing for art. But, that is tied to some non AI related musings I have been grappling with.

I will never buy anything generated by an AI promulgator. Disgusting. People endlessly pleasuring themselves with endless distractions is utter, inhuman muck.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

Not even our thoughtful, philosophical, experiment with the tech, or Dave's heartfelt time capsule of his initial emotional response to the tech?

I will give you my opinion before watching the podcast.... I think AI is going to destroy the joy of creation as it is going to be very easy to create amazing images/animations very quickly. Because of the way we function as humans the more work we invest when creating something the more we value it. I think a lot of artists who will solely be using AI as a creation tool will burn their creative juices very quickly and will give it up completely or will continue using it because it going to be basically their job. We value the art created by good artists because we value the quality of their creations. These creations are the result of years and years of work and struggle. These years form the way every artist interprets these years of life experience - this is what moves his hand/arm when painting/sculpting something. I compare AI art to fast food - it is very addictive but it is bad for you. You may do it from time to time but do not sell your soul to it because it is going to kill it.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

That is one of the core worries we have, especially for kids who grow up with this stuff. It dis-incentivizes pushing through and building skill. I am finding more comfort with the thought of AI as a tool and am finding ways to use it in my work that are helpful. But, like you said, not as an all the time thing. Only when it makes conceptual sense. That is what we will have to train people on. When it makes sense and when it is just being lazy.

@vllad74

Жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug It goes to an even deeper level - it is going to destroy the sacred connection between body and mind/soul. Basically what I mean is that at some point our bodies will become redundant. Look what is happening now - most people are glued to their phones... What about in 10 years...?

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@vllad74 The goal has always been to dominate the Environment. We now view the Body as part of the Environment. Something to be conquered and manipulated to our will. The Gnostic temptation is to view the mind/soul as seperable from the body. To escape physocs. This tech stuff is the latest attempt at that. It won't go well.

The conversation needs to switch to the utility of CREATING the art? Not just the final product? How many millions of people have decorated their entire homes with wall art and trinkets from Homegoods and Kirklands and other stores like that that have ready-to-go art which is mass produced in China? Are they thinking about the process? No. They are not thinking about the artist and this “higher plane” stuff at all. They are only thinking if they like it and if it matches the colors in their living room. They care about and value….the end result. I think that that’s primarily been the case for 99% of all art pieces that have been sold in the lifetime of anyone alive today. Yet you are down on “the final product”. The thing most people value most. Also…the “minuses always creep in layer” with technological advancements? What were the minuses of not having someone standing in every elevator to guide it to your specified floor? That’s what happened when push button panels went in. Other than people losing their jobs anyway. And I guarantee that they found another low skilled job right away. Nobody is thinking about any downsides of NOT having elevator ushers in every elevator in the world.

@LivingtheLine

Жыл бұрын

First off, I don't think any of us is "down on" "the final product". The actual thing itself doesn't need a defense, in my estimation-it has plenty of defenders. However, as Mr. McKean points out, until now an image didn't exist in a vacuum, but had a specific set of style and cultural referents attached to it, and whatever the circumstance, had a creator or creators attached to it as well, however invisible to you. We're defending the process because it has been entirely left out of this conversation up until this point. Because it is what creates new artists. Because art making has been a human activity for longer than words recorded it. Because art making itself (which this is not) gives individuals purpose and meaning, and can in the right circumstances communicate that meaning to others. That you would compare making art to elevator operation is very instructive.

@LivingtheLine

Жыл бұрын

I don't think you're wrong, by the way. It might very well be 99 percent (or some other large percentage) of people who solely value art owning/viewing rather than art making. But whatever the percentage, the other side derive tremendous benefit from the process, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, and in terms of their own skills. It's hard to imagine the same could be said for elevator operators. Although I have to imagine at least some of them loved their jobs as well. (I used to dream of working as a postman...)

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

I think you just described why refocusing on the procedure rather than the outcome is a healthy move to make, especially in the face of AI.The fact that we do all spend so much time doing this stuff day to day shows how psychologically important to us it is to make our surroundings meaningful and a lot of the sense of meaning comes from the process of decorating, choosing, etc. Will that same pleasure be derived from the AI process? Sure. Along a different set of metrics. What I worry about is that art, as a method of training, is a wonderful way of teaching critical thinking and observational skills. If we lose programs that focus on the technique of doing we lose a lot of that to the conceptualist training model which has proven so destructive to society and the value of the arts. Hahaha. That is a very niche and particular example. I am not sure the impact on the structure of the world was as great or cost as many jobs as AI art. Elevator operators existed at the very beginning of that industry, so the number of elevator operators wouldn't have even been that large, and going up and down in elevators is not a core human behavior that seperates us from other animals. Inventing things like elevators is, making art is, operating elevators is not. So, sorry, I don;t buy the analogy.

Interesting, but the sound quality.... If you think you have something important to say, get a proper microphone!

@LivingtheLine

Жыл бұрын

Dave McKean could talk to me on a tin can with string and I'd listen.

@swapticsounds

Жыл бұрын

@@LivingtheLine Yes, I listened to it from start to finish, and shared the link with others. But I think they haven´t listened to it.

maybe the 'prompt' is an art outlet for left brainers...

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

I have definitely seen a lot of writers jumping on the opportunity to actualize all of the things they are trying to describe to artists. Funny to think that this AI thing is an art-making "left brainer" or at least was made by hardcore "left brainers."

Can you not read the signs my brethren? Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? - Ecclesiastes 1

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

Apparently we have read the same signs, because issues 2 and 3 rely heavily on the verse you quoted.

@meisterjoshi4523

Жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug My statement and the verse was directed towards prompting an eschatological perspective of history and art in itself in which there seems to be an apocalypse (etymological = uncovering of essences) of things. You lot did a great discussion on the current affairs of things relating to AI and artistic pursuits and I did not mean to criticize you by my comment.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@meisterjoshi4523 I did not take it as criticism at all. I was very excited by it because issues 2 and 3 of The Abolition of Man revolve around a cult/company that operates under the slogan, "In a world where there is nothing new under the sun, choose to change the sun." Ecclesiastes has always struck me as the most useful book in the Bible and Abolition 2 and 3 are very much about the human need to stay busy with work. To paraphrase Lewis, from the original essay, when you see through all thing you see nothing at all. So, the eschatological view is exactly the one that worries me the most.

@meisterjoshi4523

Жыл бұрын

​@@clubgrubbug Agreed. I was actually very glad you mentioned it too. Lewis and Chesterton have a lot to offer for us these days. Hillsdale College has a full online course on the work of Lewis and mentioned the "The Abolition of Man" first so you can check that out if you're interested in it, it is a very beautiful course. In my opinion I believe that God is now calling each one of us to decide which way to go. There is no way to go for humanity and bit by bit each one of our "ego" crutches will be removed. Whether one chooses Neoplatonic Orthodoxy or mere "leap of faith" protestantism does not really matter that much. What matters is the way each person chooses to relate to the transcendental and to seriously reflect not only on the hypothesis but rather on the hypostasis of an ultimate Godhead.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@meisterjoshi4523 I definitely am not capable of attatching any spiritual worldview to the emergence of AI. It strikes me that any philosophy that promises a tramscendent escape from reality as we know it is making the same error that the technologists make. Bodies suck. It would be lovely to escape them. We never will. There is no mind or soul to seperate from a body, so we must make.peace with reality and our badies as they are. At best, we get to die and be done with all the hassle. That sounds great to me. An eternity spent singing songs to a Creator that created this miserable existence just to cure its own lonely state sounds about as bad as an eternity burning in Hell, to me. Lewis has plenty great to say but my interest in him has nothing to do with his religious beliefs. Sorry😔

I find weird people wondering "oh, why would anyone want to create this", when the answer is so obvious: These algorithms exist because everyone wants to create art and everyone appreciates art, simple as that. And maybe these people are not good with writing or painting or composing songs, but they know what they like, they know what they find pretty or interesting, they know what they love. Most artist take about these machines which give the power to the viewer to create the art he wanted to exist... they tend to ignore what the art is for observer and only focus on their own perspective as art creators. In many cases, this whole debates resembles to what people used to say about photography when it was invented. "Oh, it's not an art form, it's not creative". I think "prompting" is the new photography : there are lot of creativity when coming up with a prompt, maybe most people won't put a lot effort to it, but you can say the same about conventional art. If you want, you can really make a prompt as detailed as you wish, not only that but there is also YOUR selection of the countless images that the AI will produce, much like a photography selects a moment to capture with his camera.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

I am glad Someone gets it! (Sorry. Couldn't resist)

@LivingtheLine

Жыл бұрын

Do you believe then that this is art making? Similarly, do you believe that photography is art making? Certainly the latter had several heavy craft components that were neccrssary at an earlier stage, and certainly a photographer has a curatorial compositional role. But both activities imho are so far removed from drawing and painting and illustration etc as to be wholly different things entirely. Also, I would hope that a conversation about these tools would have SOME space for the perspectives of artists. It is us who served as the unwitting trainers to this tech, and who will ultimately be displaced by its usage.

@someone1861

Жыл бұрын

@@LivingtheLine I believe without a shadow of a doubt that this is art. But it is a new art form. In the same way that photography was not a continuation of painting, but something of its own. The same applies here. This is not painting nor photography - although the "stigma" is somewhat similar to what they said about photography during the first decades after its invention. But, yes, it is art. There is a technique, you have to know about art, and artistic styles, and know how to describe a scene, because these algorithms, as great as they are, can't just plug into your brain and read your mind to know what you want, you have to tell it in your own words. I would say this is a new branch of art creation, that requires lots of writing skills, knowing how to describe a scene well, and also a knowledge about which scene to choose, a curatorial job similar to a photographer who takes 100 photos of an event and chooses the 5 best ones. On the artist's perspective, where I wanted to get was: you go into a museum, you see a beautiful painting, it touches you, it moves you. On the debate of “Oh, What is Art?”, what difference does it make if that painting was made by a robot or by a human? None. Art speaks for itself. It is not a matter of ignoring the artist's perspective, but rather stating the fact that the public will have its own perspective of a piece of art, which is at least as valid as the artist's one. About artists having their work used as inspiration/training by others... This has happened since forever, it is not a new thing. There is a great documentary on KZread called "Everything is a Remix" that shows very well how every artist essentially "stole" other artist. It seems to me that the “complaint” here is solely because a robot is doing X rather than a human doing X. But they are both doing X, the only difference being how fast and cheap one of them can do X. They are both getting something and remixing, and putting it all together. I believe there are two debates to have here, a more philosophical debate about "Oh, what is art?" and a vitally important economic debate. This automation is obviously going to affect artists economically, just as other automation forms have affected, for example, miners and supermarket cashiers. This is a legitimate and important debate. And there are proposals like basic income that society will need to have in the coming decades, not only for the artists, but for more and more professions affected by automation.

@LivingtheLine

Жыл бұрын

@@someone1861 first off, thank you for your acknowledgment of the second strand above, it's an important point and as you say, it needn't be tangled with the rest to be important in and of itself. As to whether prompting is art- I think an analogy will be most useful here. Let's take computers out of the equation for a second and imagine that you are a writer working on an illustrated book, and you find an amazingly skilled group of people working remotely from you, in another country, who are willing to do highly skilled work fast and for little compensation. You "prompt" them with text description of what you want to see, in as much detail as you want to see it, and they return the results to you. Under what circumstances would you label yourself the artist in this scenario? Your end result is at the mercy of others, separated from you and not a direct representation of your own ability. Similarly, if your friend is sick and you use WebMD or a similar decision tree to diagnose them, are you a doctor? If I operate a fork lift, am I a body builder? If I drive a car, am I a really fast horse? It seems to me, if AI art is art, it is the algorithm itself that is "the artist". Hence the decentering discussed by all of us at the tail end of this video. Realizing how much our perceptions of art and meaning and beauty might simply be meaning-seeking mechanical behaviors, and how many of the things we thought unique to people may be reducible to machine algorithm.

You guys lost me at the comparison of the pandemic lockdown to a universal basic income proof of concept, somehow completely ignoring the fact that people were losing their mind because of all the deaths/illnesses in their families and the, well, lockdown of everything, and not because they didn't have to work. While I find the rest of the conversation insightful, having such a shallow opinion thrown in the middle invalidates the rest of the video a bit...

@LivingtheLine

Жыл бұрын

This is one of the hazards of presenting a long unedited conversation like this. In the moment I may have considered rebutting the point or adding additional information or even taking a completely opposing view, but it's difficult to do something like that in the course of a focused conversation and not derail everything unnecessarily. Suffice it to say I agree with you that UBi is functionally untested and possibly even untestable as a concept. I also think that Carson's position is a very interesting one. Truth is, we could probably debate the point at great length. You can get a lot more insight into his views with issues two and three of Abolition of Man. Very glad that you enjoyed the discussion. Thanks for listening!

@LivingtheLine

Жыл бұрын

I could be briefer and just say that just because one of the three of us let a particular point slide by, doesn't mean that we're tacitly agreeing with the others, especially on points slightly tangential to the conversation

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

I was speaking about my little cul-de-sac during the first month of lock down and what I saw there. Most people in the first month of lock down had not had the personal impact hit them yet. Alternately, I have been living with a partner who has been bed ridden from COVID since January, had to withdraw from school etc., real, true, impact on life circumstances. It has a much different effect on a soul than boredom. We are not bored. We are over-taxed and at our limit. This is not the situation in which people go nutso from boredom and start riding quads around on their lawn. People in my situation don't have the time or energy for that. So, I stand by the comment as a worthwhile observation. If a random observation in the middle of an off-the-cuff, opening-salvo discussion about a topic the world is going to be debating for decades to come ruins the rest of the video for you... maybe rethink where that 'shallow' designation should be aimed. Also, what is this insane standard people see to have where one misconception invalidates all other agreeable and correct observations? We are getting nowhere as a species unless we can leave credit where it is due, regardless of errors in other areas.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

Another good example, on the opposite end of "all things are possible to you" are lottery winners. How many of them come into money with no passions to turn it towards and then have miserable lives afterward?

I saved this interview until I had time to digest it. Great video. I have come to terms with A.I. art, especially after Corridor Digital made a video about it. I can see chinks and gaps in A.I. art that don’t seem like they’ll be filled in without talent, hard work, and as Dave puts it, the journey through creativity. Just like A.I. generated writing, A.I. generated art can’t quite deliver on the level of human creativity. It will be very useful for people who aren’t talented but would like to have some art that is ‘good enough.’ At least, I think that’s how it will go.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

I am starting to agree. This semester my department gave our Art Appreciation students an assignment to make a collage out of at least five images generate by Midjourney. The number of students who printed out five squares and glues them next to one another with no cut and paste of elements was staggering and gave me a lot of hope that one will still need to be trained to do anything worth looking at with this tech. That said, I do think trained individuals, like art directors, will be able to do a lot more all on their own and this tech will still cost people jobs, as new new-tech will do.

@LivingtheLine

Жыл бұрын

I wish I could be as optimistic on this as you, Aaron!

Some digital illustration artists are stressing themselves out over tech they don't understand, others are learning to use the new tech to speed up their existing process, and all traditional artists aren't being impacted by it in any way. The "stolen" works are part of models used by MidJourney and Dalle, but were never part of models like Stable or models that have nothing to do with digital painting. All the doom and gloom just looks insane to me. More mental illness than reality.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

It is really weird to watch people refuse to listen to explanations of how the tech works. Like, "Dude... this is not actively stealing from your art while it makes pictures. It was trained on them a year ago and no longer needs access to them," goes entirely in one ear and out the other. What they are really trying to avoid understanding, and what is indeed gloomy and doomy, is that this tech shows that we ourselves are not much more than what these machines are doing. When that realization becomes part of our understanding of ourselves as a species, that we are just paredolia machines hallucinating semantic meaning into a meaningless world, ooof. We are in for some wild times.

@enough2715

Жыл бұрын

Keep spaming this same comment everywhere, it's not helping your case.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@enough2715 Who is spamming? We are having a chat about how a lot of artists who remained willfully ignorant about AI for around six months are now getting whipped into a frenzy about copyright and they don't even understand the technical aspects of how this tech works, or the self-harming legal consequences of chasing this foolish idea of making style copyrightable. As far as I can tell, you are the one trowling KZread for videos about AI to find a specific person whose opinion you disagree with so that you can scold them for it. Well, as one of the content creators of this video, I do want the kind of thoughtful and engaged comments that started this discussion. That is why we made these videos. Their feedback is compelling Your post? Reactionary trolling. Entirely useless and embarassingly childish look for you.

@EvolvedSungod

Жыл бұрын

@@clubgrubbug They might mean that I posted the same comment on a couple videos, but generally I don't think it's spam to repeat yourself in different videos when making a point about the videos content.

@clubgrubbug

Жыл бұрын

@@EvolvedSungod Agreed. I found your comment compelling and it strikes me as way more spammy to follow someone around all of YouTuibe accusing them of spamming. Oddly obsessive. The internet is a strange place.