The End of Art: An Argument Against Image AIs

Consider donating to the Concept Art Association Artist Protection fundraiser: https://gofund.me/2df3dc07

And check out their recent AI town hall video:    / conceptartassociation  

Equity is fighting against AIs replacing many kinds of artists, their efforts are relevant to all creatives and they have good resources here: https://www.equity.org.uk/getting-inv...

A transcript of this video is available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12...

Spanish version of transcript:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a...

A site to investigate just one of the LAION data sets to see if you or your art are in there. A note that this site offers to sign you up for a future opt-out product- I have no idea what the nature of that product will be and would urge caution: https://haveibeentrained.com/

Open AI explaining how they invented their legal structure because nothing else worked for them: https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/

Stable Diffusion release info with no mention of “artists”: https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diff...

Imagen release info that explains how the data set it is trained on is “uncurated” and contains “a wide range of inappropriate content including pornographic imagery, racist slurs, and harmful social stereotypes.” This is another page you should do a ctrl-f search for “artist” on: https://imagen.research.google/

Dance Diffusion explanation: https://wandb.ai/wandb_gen/audio/repo...

Example of private medical imagery being used to train the AI: https://www.vice.com/en/article/3ad58...

A great article summarizing the data laundering techniques of AI companies: https://waxy.org/2022/09/ai-data-laun...

California Congresswoman Anna G. Eshoo writes OSTP urging investigation into unsafe AI release models, namely Stable Diffusion: https://eshoo.house.gov/media/press-r...

The best non-technical explanation I’ve seen on how diffusion models work: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRHrUyDM/

A good semi-technical explanation of how diffusion models like Stable Diffusion work:    • How AI Image Generators Work (Stable ...  

I did the drawing for this video, “Prey For A Spiritual Creature” on 18”x24” Strathmore bristol paper. From imagination for the sheer love of drawing!

Special thanks to my wife for her help editing the script, to my Patrons for their support, to my friends on my Discord for links, expert info, and first reactions, and to those who get the course, of course.

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Introduction
07:35 “The AI just collects references from the internet the same way artists do.”
15:26 “AI is just a new tool.”
23:12 “Artists will just need to focus on telling stories.”
29:17 “These companies cannot manipulate our access to these systems because of open-source projects.”
31:32 “Don’t people do the same thing with references as the AIs do?”
34:44 “The AI can never replace the soul of an artist.”
36:56 The Dance Diffusion Problem
41:41 Conclusion

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Reach out: stevensketches (at) gmail.com -- I have trouble responding to all my messages these days, but I read nearly all of them.
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Wondering what those buttons are on the side of my Photoshop? That's Sergey Kritskiy's Layer Factory found here: https://gumroad.com/a/726930547/FUszh

I'm usually drawing on Strathmore 400 Series Bristol Paper Smooth or in my Moleskine Sketchbook with some sort of .5 HB lead and very soft wood pencils, often 14B Pitt Graphite Matte or black Faber-Castell Polychromos colored pencils. I also like my Pilot Lucina fine point fountain pen (red with the gold tip), and Copic alcohol markers.

Some info on my digital set ups:
Clip Studio or Procreate on iPad Pro 12 inch with Apple Pencil.
Photoshop with a Huion Inspiroy WH1409 or Kamvas 24 Pro 4k on a 2019 iMac.
The camera I use for recording my pencil drawings is the Panasonic GH5.