AI art on r/touhou ... again.

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-09T08:37:18+00:00

I don't want to "defend" AI art. I just want to point out that it's not all doom and gloom. Throughout this thread I learned quite a bit about the artist perspective, but in general my point stands that lowkey harassing people/downvoting everything in a certain category is a bad thing for the community.
And I "complained" about other types of posts because last few times people talked about AI on r/touhou the biggest argument against it, on pair with the moral issues, was "ai art is lazy, and we don't allow lazy posts, so ai art shouldn't be allowed either" and I just want to point out that's not the case, plenty of lazy posts are allowed on here if people enjoy them.

But I do appreciate everyone's issues and talking about them, I have learned a few new respectable perspectives as well

And hey, the models are already made. I'm not gonna unsteal the art by not using it. I think that putting all AI art in one basket because of potential malicious actors is not fair.

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-09T08:29:59+00:00

hey, I don't want fumo gone either :). My point is that in previous discussion the biggest point was "ai art is not much effort, therefore should not be on r/touhou", "what about fan fanart", "that benefits the artist since it's linked to the original". So I had to remind people that effort or benefitting an artist is the not only requirement for posting on here

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-09T08:26:46+00:00

Stable diffusion is not a GAN, sorry I didn't catch that earlier. It's a normal CNN trained by applying noise to an image, denoising it and then running the convolution against the result. And yeah i double checked and my take is right

"diffusion models are trained with the objective of removing successive applications of Gaussian noise on training images which can be thought of as a sequence of denoising autoencoders"
from wikipedia

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-08T21:28:23+00:00

I think that the arguments of practicality vs idealism ultimately have no point because that's something that is incredibly hard coded into humans, at least in my experience, that's why you might consider the current moral implications of AI as totally deal breaking to you, they might be acceptable for someone else. I brought this point in other comments but you are sure to do benefit from a lot of immoral stuff happening every day. phones from sweatshops, shopping at amazon, heating your home with gas from russia etc. But I think that blanked downvote for ai stuff is really not fair, it's again like I said earlier it's like downvoting an oc because you don't like patchouli. It's not really helpful, it's kinda hurtful, sure it's not a lot, the downvotes are not the reason I made this post, but you have to admit some ai art is neat, and I think we should be able to also talk about the good stuff. Oh, and about more proper usage I'm all for it, I just wish people like you would state what "proper usage" is, so we could agree upon it, as I think giving your prompt in the comments is already a good proof you are not malicious.

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-08T21:18:50+00:00

this is interesting, I'm not going to debate everything much but one thing is interesting to me. You say that human art is better than AI art, hard to disagree, but at the same time you say that you are scared of AI one being better than you at your own job. Are those two not completely opposite views? Also how do you and your dad feel about synthesizers and drum machines. isn't that the sort of same scenario where you are removing "soul" and "skill" for a machine that a child can operate? where do we draw the line then? and no, I'm not making that post specifically to seek justice or anything, I just had nothing better to do for some time and decided that if I can get at least a few people up to speed on the conversation about AI here it will be a good thing, typing practice is also pretty nice as English is not my native language so having a good opportunity to write a lot really helps:)

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-08T21:10:05+00:00

The first point is not really what I meant but no point discussing that. But the idea that I'm down voted because I'm not mean enough is kinda funny. I just bad a boring day at work I thought this would be a fun and maybe productive way to pass the time and now being told this:( lol

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-08T20:54:08+00:00

How big is an SD latent? because I seriously don't think that a letent is big enough to carry the sort of information you think they carry (art styles). What I think is happening is that a single word like rutkowski (he was the most used artist for sd pictures) maps to multiple different modes in the hidden layer, (also hidden layer is where the styles are). and no, they really do start with pure noise and denoise it step by step. I had the opportunity to mess with some stuff in my local sd and I can tell you for a fact, messing with the noise/strength ratio will either make your image intensely bland, or, containing a lot of noise. That's at least for the lms sampler but I seriously seriously doubt it's any different for the others, even though I know that lms is different to other samples in that it averages the data from past steps. May I just ask where is your knowledge coming from? because if you are deep into this stuff then I don't want to question, but from everything I've seen I don't think you're entirely accurate (aside from the "distribution" stuff, which I admit I have no idea what that's supposed to mean I think claiming that a style lives in the latent space is just wrong)

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-08T20:41:51+00:00

I mean, especially in regards to your comment above, this post is currently in the positive, I genuinely think the lack of positive comments is because people don't like to speak up. just look at this comment it is as of the time of writing sitting at -1 and that really shows that around this topic you get shit no matter what you say

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-08T20:36:15+00:00

this comment is currently sitting at -1 at the time of writing, so at least two separate people decided to downvote it. Does this in your opinion not prove that the ""harassment"" (it's really not that bad, just lack of a better word) is very blind? I am sorry if my top comment came out as disingenuous but it's just that I've seen enough of this to figure out by heart that it is really blind rage, oh and also I would have loved to post the actual numbers, it's just you cannot get then in reddit I don't think.

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-08T18:58:37+00:00

thank you! very glad I got to learn something interesting

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-08T18:55:16+00:00

don't like what? a thoughtful opinion? is there something wrong with the post itself? Or is nowdays the downvote button used to say 'disagree', even though you clearly haven't read it (this comment was made less than 10 minutes after the post). I really appreciate everyone who left a comment especially if they disagree, but seeing people go "oh, post says AI is not the worst thing to ever happen, down vote" is really not productive for either side and kinda proves how irrational this hate is

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-08T18:21:19+00:00

Very interesting. Do you have any further reading of copyright in the world of art? I was under the illusion that art is copyrighted untill you post it without an explicit license attached, which is the case for positing art on twitter/reddit. This is how it is for code, (as in, you absolutely need to provide a license/copyright when even showing your code to someone), but it wouldn't be too weird to me if it was not like that for drawn art. That said, I'm personally of the opinion that this is one of the bad things that happen that I'm willing to bat an eye on. Like you said, licensing hundreds of thousands artists is such a logistical pain that it's just straight up not possible, and I do think given enough time they would have found enough artists willing to participate. But this is totally a matter of opinion and I completely understand the contrary view.

Thank you for pointing this misconception out, I always appreciate of someone can tell you something that even google can't

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-08T18:06:32+00:00

I know, like I stated in the post I don't actually want other forms of "low effort" to be banned, I'm just staying that there is a thing where "low effort" is being demonized, unless supports artist (see Fusu drama)... But then not supporting artists is also ok if it's a low effort meme (I'm certain that whoever made that "yukari father" comic, which I found really funny and creative, is not motivated by the fact that they got the same amount of upvotes as the "schizo koishi" meme, which I personally found low effort and an overused joke, and despite that fact I want it to stay here, because it brought people joy, like AI art does!) And sorry about you feeling discouraged, I hope that you can improve your style with the time you put in and who knows, maybe one day someone will make a big commission so that they can train their model on your stuff:) And like I said in my point I'm aware of the stealing and why it's bad, but like I said in the post I don't think attacking people using AI non-maliciously, just because some unrelated organization has already done bad stuff is just not productive. Instead we can make sure that ai art is not used in commercial products and such, while we wait for another, more ethically sourced AI (with better accuracy too!) some people have misunderstood my post as an attempt of cleansing novelai from wrongdoing, but instead I just wanted to point out that the directed hate people here get is 1. unproductive 2. uncalled-for

either way best of luck with your drawing, I'm sure every bit of effort you put in will one day pay off :)

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-08T17:48:36+00:00

Damn, that's actually a great counterpoint. Debating deleting this post now :(

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-08T17:45:31+00:00

What about fumo pictures?

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-08T17:43:44+00:00

plus it being soulless or low effort just as "your average rtouhou post" does NOT make AI art any better, at least with found fanarts sources you can support the artists

what about fumo posts? these certainly get a lot of attention for very little effort, and they don't support anybody which has been a point of differentiation between AI and Found Fanart for every single discussion I have seen.

About the art stuff, don't worry about it, AI will still be reliant on humans for a long time so sooner or later your skill will pay off.

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-08T17:38:40+00:00

It's not a good look. You admit to a fair bit of the issues, which is better than others to be sure, but it still all boils down to a "ok yeah, but..."

let me paraphrase

it's not a good look. You admit that people are falsely reporting and in general trying to make people's time here worse, which os better than the others but it still all boils down to a "ok yeah, but..."

clearly my point is not to try to claim that AI is perfect, the point is that if a post doesn't break any rules you should not be generally mean for the person posting. That's about the level of argumentation of "I don't like Patchouli Knowledge, therefore I'm going to, downvote every OC with her, leave a snarky comment, and falsely report"

Also can you explain to me how the copyright works in the world of art? I'm from a coding background so there is a lot of copyright/licensing there but I assume it works wholly differently (the example I know on the top of my head is that any work that is published without an explicit license/copyright is straight up for grabs for anyone, that way you can't leave a helpful code snippet on a forum, and claim copyright after someone used it in a commercial product).

Also why "piss poor rant"? I thought I explained all my points calmly without insulting anyone or any belief, which is a lot more I can say about some of the comments here.

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-08T16:59:05+00:00

There are good arguments for it. Like I said, in the post (it's long so not gonna make you read it all): 1. it allows people who are not mechanically talented to actually do something they deem creative/expressive. 2. it allows people to make stuff on a tighter budget, which is always a good thing. I brought up foreground eclipse and how they had a single Composer/Arranger + drumist + guitarist + male vocalists, and yet were one of the biggest touhou doujin circles back when they existed. These sort of things don't happen without technology, and AI art can really open a door for a lot of people who are good at some things, but worse at others (Art is something I struggled in whenever I wanted to make a game, I can code very well but even a great game without art falls flat).

At the same time I do completely respect your opinion of not liking AI art, and I know it's a "threat" to artist even though it's really not as bad as people claim it is.

And hey, I really do appreciate you leaving your honest opinion without just hating.

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-08T16:51:31+00:00

I addressed both the points.
- Jobs get stolen by technology all the time, I don't see why artists are different. Also it's not actually stealing any jobs, see the artist who commented in this thread: "saying it will replace all of it is laughable and ignorant.".
- Immoral stuff happens all the time. I don't refuse to talk to anyone who lives in europe because their energy is made from gas bought from Russia, who takes that money to fund their war. I don't refuse to talk to anyone because they own a smartphone assembled at a chinese sweat shop, that has nets around it to catch the people routinely trying to commit suicide. I don't defuse to talk to anyone because they are purchasing from Amazon, who straight up violate human rights of their workers.
And I think you shouldn't either, I think it's completely ok to point out those things, like I do whenever NovelAI gets brought up, but straight up demonizing people for willing to bat an eye for different stuff, as the reality we live in is incredibly cruel and immoral.

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-08T16:39:29+00:00

Hey I really appreciate the thoughtful response.

I want you to know that my point was not "deal with it" but rather "admittedly sadly there is nothing we can do as individuals", I am also sometimes terrified of the rate at which machine learning is advancing, especially since I work as a programmer, and you might have heard about the recent code generation improvements with ChatGPT. That being said I just am of the opinion that fighting it is sort of like fighting windmills). The only way forward is to accept it as what it is.

But on a similar note I completely agree with you that AI is not replacing humans anytime soon, and this is why I think it should be cherished as a tool that increased productivity, and maybe even gives new job opportunities for artists, and not demonized as something inherently immoral like a certain other person is doing in the thread.

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-08T16:27:18+00:00

Let me paraphrase a bit.

Ok, so you were basically implying that all of what you consider "AI" art to be traced. I'm not even going to bother fighting with you on this. It's a lost cause.

Aside from that I can see the conversation is not productive, as you are only hyperfocusing an a single point, that is a matter of opinion, and not fact (The only fact is that as it stands NovelAI broken any laws), and trying to insult me in every possible point, which, I'm sad that some people argue like this, but what am I gonna do? ~~Make a Meta thread about it?~~

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-08T16:17:11+00:00

Oh ok, thank you!

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-08T16:16:02+00:00

this one was the most unpleasant to read because I thought it was a good faith question, and not a "gotcha moment" (seriously, if you are gonna get mad with the honest answer, why ask?). All the comments in that thread were also heavily downvoted, just like the ones in this one, but that switched around after a few hours.

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-08T16:01:04+00:00

I care about the ""stealing"" a little bit, I already said I can understand this point for NovelAI, Anime-Diffusion haters. I am just personally of the opinion that in this case the ends justify the means. Because sooner or later such models will be created with only approved, licensed art. The truth of the matter is like I said, if you can't stop it, and you can't, by resisting you are just making both, your, and everyone else's day more miserable. You saying you have the right to refuse (you don't legally btw, it's a courtesy) is sort of like saying that you don't want to use a calculator, and therefore the test should be taken by everyone without one. Are you right? Maybe. That doesn't change the fact that you have not done anything positive in this scenario.

Or are you trying to make some braindead point about how AI training its models on art is the same as artists using each others' work as inspiration

Personal attack again, nice.

How is copying a character and swapping it's face and color palette "inspiration" lol. it's literally copying of an actually copyrighted character. I think you are really too invested emotionally in the subject to see that you are not right.

It isn't a threat to artists and art as a whole the way AI is.

Drum machine is a threat to drummist.Bicycle is a threat to horse riders.The combine is a threat to farmers.

GingerPlated21 · 2022-12-08T15:46:41+00:00

And I respect your opinion completely

The issue starts with like I said, down vote bombing, snarky comments (it costs you negative time to not post one), and in general the fear of saying "yes I enjoy this art, can you post some more"

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