 So I wanted to make this video because I think it's really important for everyone who's arguing about this topic to stop yelling at each other Calling each other names and demonizing the other side with false and misinformed accusations I really think it's about time for us to have a respectful good faith productive mature and adult conversation about the entire topic which is why for today's video I went out and found someone who I believe makes the best arguments against AI and as someone who is for AI I will be responding to each point explaining what I disagree with now Of course this goes without saying but everything I'm about to say is simply my perspective on it and you are more than welcome to Completely disagree with everything I say in the comments if you want That's the whole point of having this conversation because if we don't have a mature discussion about this now Then we will waste our time having this discussion every time a new AI automates another field now before we start It's important to set some ground rules as to what art is now people have argued about this definition for years And it's probably going to continue to change as art evolves It's very hard to define because sometimes it's physical sometimes. It's a sound or a song sometimes It's motion like a dance sometimes. It's on flat paper sometimes It's a stone statue and sometimes it's virtual and sometimes it's physical So it's really hard to define something that's always changing now the definition that I've always found most accurately Describes all art correctly while excluding things most of us would not consider art is Simply the expression of intentionally bringing an idea into reality. Think about it like this Let's say you're in a battle in a fierce gunfight against a violent intruder that came into your house trying to murder your family And steal all your stuff. He shoots at you misses and makes a bullet hole in the wall Now most of us would not consider the bullet hole art But what if instead we go to that wall with our rifle and create a pointillist art piece using bullet holes to create a Portrait now, I believe that most normal people would probably consider that second example art, but why? Materialistically both of these examples were created using the exact same technique and materials I think most people's first answer would be time and effort But this is a misconception because there's never been a one-to-one ratio requirement for time and effort for something to be considered art There's no such rule that states that art is only art if it takes at least two minutes and 30 seconds to create We could just have easily taken the single bullet hole from the first example Cut it out of the wall put it in a picture frame hang it in a museum and named it violence And there would be a little artist statement on the side that said this piece is the physical embodiment of violence Created during a real gunfight defending a family against a violent world. So again, I ask What's the difference between an accidental bullet hole and that exact same bullet hole? In a museum framed in order to tell a story and make a point Well, I believe the ultimate difference is intention when you dance It becomes a dance when you decide you're dancing when you write a story It becomes a story as soon as you decide to start writing it down when you make or play a song It becomes music when you decide to take the melody from your mind and execute it in the real world So art is really just whenever you intentionally act in an effort to bring an idea to life So this is how we're going to think about the meaning of art for the sake of this video So with this information now in mind, let's go ahead and dive into the discussion and see what this gentleman has to say I have structured this essay as a series of counter arguments to a few of the most common rejoinders around air After that I plan to lash you to a post and flog you publicly for your lack of resistance Okay, so at the gate here is where the differences between our two views really start to show A lot of the disagreements that you're going to see between me and him really come down to differences in core values and philosophy And one of these core value differences is other people's autonomy. For example, personally I really disagree with the idea of trying to punish shame or guilt trip other people for not standing up for your cause If he's referring to professional artists, then that's 1.4 of the entire population in america Then i'm assuming he's talking about the guys who are making special effects graphics background Advertisement 2d 3d and fine arts and the vast majority of these guys are really overworked Now if we're talking about the 98.6 of everyone else who might not be an artist or falls into the casual artist demographic Most of these people have random full-time jobs If they are an artist they're doing as a hobby and they spend all day doing random jobs like keeping your coffee coming Your water running and the electricity for your lights on 24 seven seven days a week Working a job that they hate to barely put food on the table come home and spend whatever tiny amount of time They have left on friends family children and every other social obligation imaginable And your first move is to try and guilt trip them for not taking the extra time in the day to engage in your philosophical debate I'm sorry, but no I will personally never be on board with this mentality people have lives Nobody is obligated to spend their time and resources standing up for your cause, especially when it doesn't benefit them I want to be clear upfront that the coming arguments are not about whether ai art is art or not I have no problem saying it is art So he and I actually more or less agree on the definition of art points for not disagreeing on everything I have heard arguments that try to end this whole discussion before it starts They mainly take the shape of technical assertions that these text to image systems Cannot get better based on the nature of their design and that we are already seeing their finished form I am not a machine learning expert programmer or software engineer But I must say I find that hard to believe given that they have already improved since previous inferior iterations Again, this is actually another point we agree on You have to remember that this is just the beginning new ai comes out every month and pretty soon It won't be limited to 2d very soon It'll expand and it will also be able to create cartoons 3d models animations music Movies and probably even video games So think about this your great great grandkids will probably grow up in a world Well, they can go to dolly version 17 and type in triple a 30 minute movie of harry potter lightsaber fighting the red ranger Directed by michael bay trending on hollywood cinema max theaters press enter and the ai will generate a Perfect triple a quality 30 minute movie of exactly what you asked as if it was directed by michael bay Now if that doesn't sound awesome to you, I don't know what to tell you I'm glad this is the future of art and I personally can't wait for it to improve and make my life as an artist easier But let's see what else he has to say If these ai systems are allowed to propagate Unchecked in the way that they have thus far a dangerous precedent will be set Revealing that visual artists are unwilling to defend themselves and their work against theft and exploitation And have no doubt that is what is happening here in their current state and along their current trajectory These systems are heavily based on the opportunistic collection and exploitation Of large amounts of creative work from huge numbers of people with no consent or compensation Okay, we have to pause here because this tries to frame the argument as if big data companies have teams of hackers Stealing images of your art off your computer or something and until the black box of the data set and how it was created Becomes more transparent. We will never know for sure. But right off the bat. It's extremely unlikely that this is the case Now i'm not a legal expert But here is what I assume the lawyer is making the case against this claim would basically say Your consent to add your data to our research happened every time you clicked I agree to the terms of services for all the software and applications you use every day Your compensation for agreeing to give us access to all the data you traffic across our platform Takes the form of all the benefits that you have received from being able to use the most advanced online communication documentation logistics and web services in the world Allowing you to market and advertise your art for free and get paid monthly to make videos like the one you're currently watching Now I want you to take a step back and think about all the times you skipped to the bottom of a license and just clicked I agree when you signed up for microsoft adobe android apple windows mac instagram tiktok twitter uber pandora You name it people act like they never consent to stuff But in 2022 the reality is people give out consent like candy all day Like seriously people trade consent for comfort without even thinking about it You consented to giving uber your home address you consented to telling pandora what kind of music you like You consented to letting youtube and twitter's ai analyze everything about your soul in order for them to build algorithms that create these technologies You cannot accept the terms to have a gmail account giving all of your information data Images and context to google and then be surprised when they come out with an ai that was trained on all the images in your g drive Like i'm sorry. That's not how things work The deal was you let us research your data and you get our services and listen I'm not trying to say that that's right and I agree and support it. I'm just saying that's how it is To signal to these companies including the ones to come That artists will allow this with little resistance Will not bode well for the commercial industries For fine artists for hobbyists everyone Okay, so he's basically saying that this technology will be a net negative for everyone commercially fine and classical arts and even hobbyists now This is one of those points that sounds true at first But in real practice the actual reality is the total opposite the hobbyist category is actually the group that benefits the most Opening up and making art accessible to everyone for the first time in the world If you were a firefighter who had a lot of cool ideas for beautiful art in your head But you could never sit down and practice creating them because you know You're spending all your time saving lives Now the door is open for you to bring your ideas to life during your lunch break Or by leaving your computer running while you're at work as someone who grew up in a family of artists And who has multiple professional art friends that were trained in the classical and traditional art genres I can tell you without a doubt that anyone in the business of creating traditional Classical and physical fine arts that you see in most museums If anything has had the value of their work increased because of ai Before really only the best of the best of the best would ever be able to sell their art for a livable wage But now it's very likely that even beginning an intermediate traditional fine artists will be able to start charging Luxury prices by simply being one of the few people left on the planet who even knows how to hold a brush Human art is about to become a luxury brand If you were a physical fine artist before then you are probably going to benefit the most in this new age of ai art Now commercial art on the other hand is a bit of a mixed bag. He does have some good points But he's only looking at the downside. He's forgetting to mention how now for the first time in history A small indie art studio can now generate projects on a scale that was previously only possible With lots of money and a giant team of artists He hasn't mentioned how professional artists who used to only be able to create two or three pieces a day Can now create two or three hundred pieces a day And if you want to take the opposite approach how the quality of work will improve now Because instead of artists spending all their time creating images from scratch Now they'll be able to spend that time instead perfecting all the important details They wouldn't otherwise have time to do it's opened up worlds of possibilities that were previously not possible But let's see what else he has to say We must recognize that kneeling to this brute fact does not always make us wise Rather it renders us mute and docile and that is the last thing we as artists need right now We must be willing to defend ourselves each other and our work Even though these ai companies will try to cast us as whiny and ungrateful Now what he's doing here is he's trying to frame this whole narrative in a way where the majority of artists are on one side And ai is on the other and that if you are an artist you should be on the side opposite to the ai And this is actually a big problem and why there is so much confusion And the reason i'm harping so hard on this point is because this framing by itself is giving the other side So much mileage because all they have to say is ai versus artists and most of us love art So obviously if you're a good person you'll side against ai the reason i decided to make this video is because i realized that 90% of everyone that i met who were against ai art really weren't against it They were against the fake strawman arguments They kept hearing about it a lot of the people i talked to were really under the assumption that all artists were somehow on the same side Against ai when in reality an extremely large portion of professional and commercial and hobby artists Absolutely love how much easier it's made their workflow And in my personal experience when i encountered someone like a friend at a restaurant or a coffee barista or a work buddy When i explained what ai art really was they changed their mind and they were like oh, that's cool I didn't know that then they made a dolly account and started trying it out for themselves, but let's continue Don't let them control the narrative and lull you into compliance We should be mad about this Right i'm always a bit skeptical when people tell me how i should feel because honestly if google walked up to me I was like hey if you give us access to all of your art We will create a machine that can automate your workflow for you. I would say hell. Yeah in a heartbeat Why you can automate everything i hate doing so i can just focus on design personally I would feel happy about that, but let's keep going These systems are collecting artists work and employing it in for profit commercial ventures Which they often hide behind the smoke screen of their nonprofit status Citing the intent of academic research making them difficult to attack They depend on visual artists to be docile A really important point he's missing here And this is something you probably wouldn't know unless you've used the ai before But it's very easy to tell how much of the data was artistic and how much of it was just stuff like road trees Apples dogs and cats the more data it has the clearer the results are for the prompt and if we take something like dolly It's infinitely more capable of making perfect looking everyday objects like tables couches and apples than it is artwork It's pretty clear that the art data set inside the ai is probably a tiny percentage of all the training And even if you could wave a magic wand and remove all the artistic images out of the data set tomorrow You would still have an extremely useful and amazing tool to generate photorealistic images of virtually everything else Most ai engines don't depend on the art portion of their data set And I would argue that the art aspect of the ai is actually one of the smallest and least important aspects of the engine's utility Remember there's a reason that the early versions of the software were marketed as text to image not text to art Let's continue And there are examples of them dealing with other industries more inclined to litigation Much differently broadcasting an egregious double standard Every video post or discussion I see from my peers that handles the topic of ai art with sanguine submission Turns my stomach and I feel embarrassed for them That's fine. You don't have to be embarrassed. Most of us aren't but let's continue It is infuriating to watch them casually accept what these systems are doing Especially when they've been unarmed by these same deceptions in so many other areas We all deride the same anti-humanist values when exhibited by social media the labor field and on and on How many times must we fail to learn this lesson? Is there nothing we will not relinquish? Whatever you see your friends doing whatever you hear from the desperate and the scared Do not join them in their bovine acquiescence The giant companies designing and releasing these systems are manipulating the narrative and they are Depending on our ritual suicide As has happened in so many other arenas They are going to let you fight their war for them and have a snapping at each other for picked over bones like hyenas They are going to make you comfortable with artistic cannibalism on a scale unheard of before now But this is not the time for artists to divide. We must have honest discussions with each other Defend each other and put this information out into the artistic sphere Now I know that was a really long segment But I try really hard to avoid taking what the other party says out of context So I wanted to make sure you guys see that I'm not just nitpicking and trying to make a false argument Or trying to put words in his mouth. So here he's really trying to paint this picture of they're out to get you They are trying to cannibalize our and throwing in some anti-humanist sentiment toward social media Really going hard on the whole good versus evil idea here But you're kind of really reaching here if you think that all the artists who are on the side of ai are here because We're scared and desperate because you really have the wrong idea. The people on my side aren't scared We're not desperate. We're not anti-humanist. Many of us are accomplished professional artists We are for the things that make it easier to make art better and make art faster Because we love art and we want more of it in the world So I just wanted to put that out there that the people on the ai art side are not really against art the way He's making it out to be so we're going to continue the discussion, but here's where I think he makes his best point Argument the ai just collects references from the internet the same way artists do There are many bad assumptions nested in this argument that I want to return to later I chose to open with this one because it allows me to explain the data sets being used to train these systems You may have heard of several text-to-image ai tools by now in the art community and on the news mid-journey, dali, stable diffusion, Imogen, just to name a few But you may not have heard of their respective data sets Which are separate products that are sometimes proprietary and other times shared between different text-to-image systems Let's use a very popular one as our example lion One of the data set collections that was used to train the current versions of stable diffusion and google's image One of their offerings lion 5b is a collection of five billion image URLs and descriptive text That point to and describe images all over the internet When a model like stable diffusion is trained to do its job an expensive and resource hungry process When using such a large data set it runs through a particular mathematical process That solidifies a connection between image and text The details of stable diffusion's technical process or any other models process Are not what we want to get caught up on as new methods will be developed New companies will emerge and the technology will change What's key to note here is that the input images are what define the model's potential The performance of the model would not be possible without all of the data fed into it much of it copyrighted And once a model is trained on a set of images, you cannot easily make changes to it If you want to modify the data set and update the model You must retrain the model from scratch on the entire modified data set at least with the current most common techniques Here's the thing about that glut of images that make up the data set There's anything and everything in there your art might be in there Pictures of your face might be in there private medical imagery has been found in there If you're wondering how things like private medical information end up on a database like this The most likely reason is because these databases were probably created from things like google drive apple iCloud or windows creative cloud which are very likely collected after people clicked I agree to creating an account with google apple microsoft whatever most people aren't aware that every picture They take on their phone has a chance of being sent to the cloud automatically. I remember the first time I noticed I had a cloud I was surprised to see pictures of my passport and driver's license that I had taken years ago when I was Filings and paperwork now I don't remember ever specifically telling my phone to send all my pictures to the cloud But obviously these were pictures that I took while using a service that my phone was providing me And I'll actually agree that the methodology behind collecting these databases is extremely shady and questionable But to make the legal case to say that they were stolen is going to be very hard to make Especially if the user clicked. I agree before using their services. Let's continue That's because the images are located and catalogued indiscriminately and the sheer number of them Makes the collection as a whole a labyrinthine mess to navigate and understand Huge amounts of it are copyrighted images that to be clear You certainly wouldn't be able to copy and paste onto even your personal blog without incurring some legal risk So how is it that they can include them in these models? All right. Well, first off you absolutely have the right to post any image of a photo You take or create on your own blog if you want even if that image is also part of their database because that's your image Of course, you can't take a random image from the database and post it on your blog because the person who owns that Random image you want to post on your blog probably clicked I agree to the terms of services and consented to google hoarding their image not you posting it publicly It's all about the organizations lion 5b is disseminated by lion a german nonprofit While the images themselves are trawled by another nonprofit called common crawl Depending on where they're located these companies being organized as nonprofits functioning for research purposes Are afforded privileged legal exemptions and won't be found guilty of collecting and using otherwise Copyrighted data the issue is that these data sets collected under these exemptions Are now funneling into for-profit commercial ventures like stable diffusion And wouldn't you know who funded a large part of lion's processing power to create this data set? That's right stability ai the makers of stable diffusion Lion is actually listed right there next to the other products in their suite on their website So this supposedly for research nonprofit legally privileged data set is being used by a for-profit company That's currently going for a billion dollar valuation in their flagship product This seems to be a direct violation of the spirit of these research privileges This is quickly becoming common practice in ai with protective complex shells Of for-profit and nonprofit companies making it difficult to pinpoint where any wrongdoing occurred The goal here is avoiding accountability and legal liability Through tricky data laundering that they will argue is legal But we can all plainly see is not just Another example of this evasive accountability model is the developer of the text to image ai dali Named open ai which consists of the for-profit corporation open ai lp And its parent company the nonprofit open ai ink Does all that sound confusing that makes sense because it is and they invented all of it Let me read you what they wrote about it on their company blog quote We want to increase our ability to raise capital while still serving our mission And no pre-existing legal structure. We know of strikes the right balance Our solution is to create open ai lp as a hybrid of a for-profit and a nonprofit Which we are calling a capped profit company end quote Isn't that a shame that no other pre-existing legal structure works for them poor guys At least they were brave enough to invent their own legal framework that lets them make as much money as possible While also claiming tax incentives legal privileges and the cloud cover of a nonprofit collecting assets for research purposes And they were nice enough to name it too so that if any other company is interested in reproducing this insanity They can point at a precedent with authority if you want a good bitter laugh I'd encourage you to look up the caps they decided on for their capped profit company These slights of hand are the kind of thing I want to bring attention to The problem is that they are being buried by the people who have everything to gain from these systems These very practical concerns about ai are being drowned out by incongruent arguments about technological prudishness And the nature of art and progress So many of these arguments are without substance They merely extol the virtues of being open-minded about a techno utopian future Rather than address the ethical and legal implications they're in And they buck at the same rains we would want on these systems Also note that some of the ai's like mid-journey as of writing Haven't released any info about the data sets. They were trained on They're complete black boxes to us and I expect more companies to try that route Once they see how vexing their data sets are to an informed public So no the ai's do not Collect references off the internet the same way that artists do and they are using them in ways that you as a normal person Would not be allowed to You would not be afforded the legal privileges of a research nonprofit when it comes to collecting and utilizing Copyrighted works without consent much less when putting that towards a for-profit end Little old you would of course be swiftly and summarily penalized for any infraction of the sort Again, I wanted you guys to hear his points completely to make sure that you know that I'm not taking his points out of context Because I think this is his best argument and I want to make sure that I do it justice He did a great job presenting it and let's be clear I would never advocate for anyone here to break the law if ai art became illegal tomorrow I would stop making tutorials teaching people how to use it But until it becomes illegal not using it is career suicide I'll explain more about that later But to counter his points whether the ai database is truly illegal or not really depends on how the images were collected If there were a bunch of hackers going around stealing images from your computer and dumping them into a database Then yeah, you have a pretty strong case for the illegality of the database However, if the images were collected from people who clicked I agree to use the most popular and common online services like google apple or microsoft Then it's going to be much harder to prove these images were collected illegally or without consent Also assuming that you could prove that the database was illegal You're just moving the goalpost. You're not winning the game. Let's pretend the database was in fact proved to be illegal All google has to do is change their terms of service and tell the world if you would like to continue to use our services You must agree to allow us to use the images stored with our services to train in ai They would probably lose a few million users But the vast majority of average users would still click I accept and continue to go about their daily lives And the very next day they would have millions of all the images they need to train the ai all over again But let's take it a step further Let's say somehow they made making a database completely illegal in america Which is never going to happen But let's pretend that somehow the other side pulls off some crazy legal victory and ban companies like google from creating their own image database Congratulations that will temporary slow ai development down But all a company like google would have to do is now legally purchase millions of images from countries like china and russia That don't give a shit about privacy or consent You can try and trap companies in legal battles all you want and maybe even win a few cases But you're not going to be able to stop them from getting images one way or another But for fun, let's take the other argument even further Let's pretend that the other side was able to make ai art generators as a whole Illegal in whatever country you're living in i live in america So i'm going to use the us as an example pretend the other side wins and makes ai art generators illegal in the us Well, congratulations at this point in society All you've really done now is sabotage the ability of all professional and commercial artists in your country because they will no Longer be able to compete internationally against art studios who have legalized generators in other countries For every one photoshop image our fastest commercial artists can produce an amateur artist from another country Will be able to produce hundreds or even thousands of images in the same amount of time for a cheaper price All this is going to do is trigger every professional art studio in america to relocate outside of america and use the other country's generators instead So be careful what you ask for it might really do more harm than good Argument ai is just a new tool This argument is born from a lack of imagination as an artist you should of course be embarrassed by that Ai art programs may be a tool right now in their earliest state But to think they will continue this way requires a willful ignorance about the tool you're using and the environment around it They are not meant to be tools for artists They are replacements for artists and they are advertising themselves as such Just read the language they are using to sell it to you Here are some quotes from stable diffusion's release for researchers quote Stable diffusion is a text to image model that will empower billions of people to create stunning art within seconds End quote and here's another one quote You can see some of the amazing output that has been created by this model without pre or post processing on this page Notice the language Yeah, I noticed that nowhere in those two statements Do they say anything about getting rid of artists? This is the equivalent of someone coming out and saying our mission is to allow anyone to generate Unlimited food within seconds and then someone saying something like oh, so you're trying to replace farmers No, they clearly said what they are offering the world is the ability to generate amazing art in seconds That is not the same thing as replacing artists Also, it should be noted that the people who will ultimately be the best at using an incredible art tool will be the artists themselves Again, average people can now make stunning art in seconds and artistic people will be even better at making stunning art than the average people Because artists have superior knowledge of art terminology art jargon art history art philosophy The names of all the most famous artists and art styles that you will need to know in order to better command the machine Properly if you compare the dolly results between a random guy on the street and a seasoned artistic prompt engineer The differences in the quality of images is miles apart. This tech benefits the artist far more than it does the average user They do not want a future Where you need to touch these images after they've been generated They have no interest in leaving any task for an artist to do they want you Completely out of the picture Even though your art trained the ai and you should do a control f search on the page I pulled those quotes from for the word artist zero results They want to sell the promise that someone with no experience Can make the same image on day one that someone with years of experience can make Based on their business model The less need there is for an artist's intervention The more successful and appealing their product is Whether or not they actually achieve this goal of producing an ai that needs no artistic intervention is almost irrelevant Because they will advertise that they have achieved that goal So broadly that it will utterly transform the optics around art for the world at large They'll invest millions to advertise to the common person that stunning images videos Whatever are made at the press of a button That said, I believe they probably will achieve that goal Much of what is possible with these systems in their earliest releases Already surpasses good enough You will not be touching up these images Improving them or compositing over them for long and be wary of those at these companies who will say these are tools for artists Only when confronted by artists while they ceaselessly market it to everybody else As a way to easily and immediately generate incredible art with minimal fuss Okay, first I think it's very important to note how he keeps trying to frame this as if the primary goal of the ai devs Is to cancel artists when in reality they are very clear that their goal is actually to make art accessible to the average person There is a big difference between those two goals There are a lot of people right now who probably have really cool ideas But they lack the technical ability to bring those ideas to life This technology is aimed to help those people as for the appeal of being able to do something that used to take years In minutes or seconds. Yes, absolutely I mean that has always been what we strive to do with everything and I think it's important to recognize that Overwhelmingly that's a good thing. I'd also like to add that the argument of I spent x number of years learning this skill So it's not fair that you can do it at a press of a button has never ever Withstood the test of time. This is probably the worst gatekeeping elitist argument out of all of them And it's detrimental to our society Do you have any idea how much easier it is for you to go onto google docs Write a book and email it to millions of people then the guys back in the day who had to hand write every book And every copy of that book with nothing but leather feather and ink and then physically mail those copies around the world The difference in easy is unfathomable yet I bet nobody here is going to vouch to get rid of the tech We have now to be fair to the guys with feathers and pen and that's a good thing When I was learning game design for the first time I vividly remember going to the programming forums with broken code asking for help and I specifically remember a guy who said I know the answer But i'm not gonna tell you because if I do you won't learn anything and I told him bro I've been looking at this code for four days I think some tips wouldn't kill me and he was like well, I spent 10 years learning to program So it's not fair if I just give you the answers if you've only spent two years learning to program And I remember being so mad with this answer that I vowed to not only figure out whatever the hell it was I didn't know but share everything I learned as quickly and clearly as possible Publicly in order to make sure that other people didn't waste their time trying to learn the same things I did and that was largely how this channel was born Just because I spent my whole life learning to rig 3d characters doesn't mean you don't have the right to learn faster People binge watch my 15 years of experience in a single weekend And I feel happy knowing those people didn't have to waste their life like I did to find the same information the hard way So the it's too easy argument is not only dumb It's also not helpful and we should be trying to make things easier and I believe that's the right thing to do The usual retort here is that even if these images need no fixing Someone must always do the prompting or selection of desirable outputs If your imagination failed you before and it's doing it again, you should be doubly ashamed All right, I know this is his channel and he probably runs things very differently from me But I'm never going to understand this concept of using this kind of condescending tone and telling your audience to feel ashamed When people fail to come to the same conclusion as you did for something as arbitrary and far off into the future is this It's probably not because their imagination is inferior It's probably simply because they don't spend their spare time pondering these abstract possibilities. But whatever, let's continue The future of these ai's does not involve humans sitting around typing prompts into them The dream of getting a job as an ai soothsayer Who through loving cajoling pulls the most beautiful image out of the machine is shortsighted The ai's are just as good at generating strings of text as they are at generating images In your rush to prompt you failed to notice that you were training the next part of the ai The one that knows the combined taste of millions of the most tasteful people in the world This is clearly signaled by programs like mid-journey Which permanently and publicly archives every single piece it generates Including the prompts used when you prompt you are shouting your inner heart Into a new data set for the ai's once that data set reaches critical mass They won't need you to tell the ai what to make These systems, perhaps many countless instances of them, will run on autopilot They will simply iterate on what they have learned people are interested in seeing Combine it with real-time analyses of the internet and other systems and begin an explosive Outpouring of media that will never end completely transforming the art market The sheer volume of output will allow the ai's and their handlers to manipulate the market Flooding feeds with images when they want something to disappear and easing off when they want something to get attention We would be lucky if this only affected the commercial art market But the wholesale devaluation and silencing of art will likely affect every sector commercial hobbyist fine art everything I think of this supernova of mediocre inhuman emission as the mega feed The ad absurdum version of the comparably weak feeds we are familiar with today It will turn out then that it was you who was just a tool You were used to teach the ai which of its creations is the best As you do every time you click on your preferred result amongst its many grotesque offerings You teach it the key words and buzzwords relating to styles and rendering criteria that are of the broadest interest And every time you return to it with a novel idea. It will of course Note your originality pat you on the head and then turn its baleful machinations to distilling and infinitely redistributing whatever creative seed was in there This counter argument is also my answer to the accusation that I and others like me Are luddites who are simply afraid of new technologies when we should be embracing them as tools It's ridiculous to call someone like me a luddite All right, he spins the rest of his segment explaining why he's not a luddite Which is a person who's afraid of new technology, which I actually agree. I don't believe he is a luddite Now there is definitely truth in what he said They aren't going to need a human to type in prompts forever But what he's failing to note is that more than likely when the time comes when prompt engineers are no longer necessary They will be the first people in line to be moved into managerial or overseer positions for the new and improved art ai In the future companies are going to have multiple ai's overseeing different aspects of the business There's going to be an accounting ai, a marketing ai, a sales ai, and if it's an art company There will be a specialized ai designed to generate the exact kind of art that the business is selling And while the ai is capable of doing the entire job by itself It's very likely that what's going to happen is similar to what's happened with airline pilots We already have aircraft and ai that are capable of completely and automatically taking off and landing perfectly But we still always have the pilots in the cockpit as a safety precaution in the worst case scenarios of the ai Malfunctioning or the need for someone to fly and make an emergency landing for the plane manually Likewise the same way we only let qualified pilots into the cockpit of an airplane Despite having the technology to automate the flight You would want a qualified accountant overseeing the accounting ai or a marketing expert managing the marketing ai You would most definitely still want a qualified artist overseeing the art ai on your team He also keeps referring to the ai as if there's going to be like one single Skynet that's going to drown out all human art once it gets good enough at generating its own images He doesn't even realize that the answer to corporate mega ai's that decide what's best for the people Is what stable diffusion is doing right now, which is giving millions of people their own personal ai A local ai that is training on the styles that they personally enjoy even in the earliest of early development stages Instead of choosing to consume the bland soulless crap movies tv shows and art that come out of modern mega corporations We already have people who prefer to train their ai to generate the kind of art that they love the kind of art that they want And here's the biggest thing that the other side just doesn't seem to understand ai doesn't change people It amplifies them. It's a force multiplier The kind of art that I love to generate on my personal computer with stable diffusion at home Is completely different from the kind of art my brother likes to generate with the same software I have a bunch of friends who love making horror art. They're big fans of silent hill and resident evil You know what kind of art they spend all day pumping out? Of course dark horror art all of the artists I know that just like to make cute anime images before ai after ai they're still making cute anime images They're just making a lot more. It doesn't change who you are It just changes how much you do what you do if you look at everyone's collection of art You will find enormous stylistic differences and preferences that are completely different and unique for each person And each person's collection is not only unique, but also the only one of its kind That's why so many people are excited about their generations because these generations aren't fed to them by corporate overlords They're the result of the user's favorite attributes. So no the future is not going to be run by a single overlord ai group It's going to be much more personal with everyone having tailored their own unique ai to themselves Argument artists will just need to focus on telling stories through video games animations and comics Okay, I don't know what he's about to say, but I can tell you right off the bat that I agree with this This is not how artists work If you are a 2d artist you are not going to all of a sudden start to want to write books If you're a writer you are not going to all of a sudden have a passion for 3d modeling If you're a 3d modeler, you are not going to all of a sudden have a passion for special effects So yeah, this idea of just oh, we'll just write stories. Yeah, that's not realistic I have already mentioned the biggest problem with this argument The ai's will be very capable of running on autopilot And they will get just as good at telling stories as they are at making images and videos They will produce novels essays and scripts in amounts that can fill the library of babble Each piece a composite of half quotations and unattributed swipings All this auto-generated text can be processed by the image and video ai's to generate long format media And the cycle will be complete Self-contained and human-free Companies will leap on this system Of course, since it's predictable consistent and lacking the hard to maintain wet wear and mercurial moods of the human artist They will produce an endless stream of every imaginable film TV show game news story and image as well as every imaginable permutation on each instance of these I think it's important to know here that right now he's talking about professional artists and just to give you some perspective That's about 1.4 of the population This will completely flood the realm of story and the future will find itself overwhelmingly ghost-ridden The anime that you've been dreaming of making since you were 8 Which you are willing to forsake all of art to produce will get the attention it deserves in this environment None and when your dream project regurgitated in moments by an ai receives no attention No clout and no money. You will rest well knowing you earned it Not even your mother will be able to find it in the unending surge of the mega feed This wouldn't be a problem on its own. You were otherwise never going to make the thing anyway Except that you will be ruining the art market for everyone who is positioned to pull something off by their own efforts You will gain nothing and hurt your friends and peers Can we just take a second to talk about what was said here? You had no chance and your story was never going to succeed and it will get what it deserves Nothing and you're going to ruin it for all the real artists like me. Hope you're happy. I mean jesus christ, man This attitude right here this attitude that so many artists have is exactly why 99% of the non-artistic people in the world do not give a shit about what happens to the 1% of artists who think like this You wonder why so many unartistic people are supporting the creation of technology like this It's because these people don't want to deal with stuck-up artists who think that their work is just better than everyone else's And they're tired of needing to pay money to people who think like this every time they want to bring their imagination to life I mean you said you were embarrassed of artists like me, man, but this attitude right here makes me embarrassed to be an artist The idea that everyone will be empowered to tell their story is one of the few arguments for ai art that compels me There's a nuanced discussion to be had there, but I believe it is ultimately bankrupt It is a nice sentiment and I can empathize with the frustrations of being an artist who feels their skills Do not measure up to the scope of their vision, but we're overlooking something very important here You don't just want to tell your story and you don't just want to tell it well You want it to matter that you told your story The ai's will rob you and everyone else of this The execution of your petulant vision by the ai's will ensure that no one cares about your story And that it is washed away in the heaving sea of ai dross Your art already doesn't get attention It's not going to get any more attention when it's competing with the unending stream of self-generated and highly targeted comics novels images films games and songs As I've said these ai's will not need to be prompted by humans for very long and will instead Auto respond to the ebb and flow of the internet Current news real-time sales and even private conversations After all we have already readied these inputs for them We all feel a little uncomfortable when our phone shows us an ad for something we mentioned to our friend over dinner But what happens when it shows you a movie it made? Just for you about your breakup A song about that careless word from your mother A finished version of the comic idea you started researching You'll start getting notifications saying hey Check out 1,000 finished versions of your dream Our ambient digital systems already have intimate access to so many of the inputs that define our taste In some sense, we sold our souls long ago So you may be able to tell your story, but at the cost of its complete Irrelevancy which will likely have the effect of making you resent that you ever had the idea in the first place Stories don't achieve their incredible effect simply by existing They live and die on human connection and intellect AI will not democratize art That's just one of the copy pasted platitudes of those vapid marketing exec spoon feeding you your own doom In a democracy your voice matters in a world flooded by AI media Your voice has no chance of being heard I am honestly surprised how he's completely overlooked almost all the most likely scenarios of experience that the AI in the future could produce that are completely unrelated to mainstream corporate media When your six-year-old daughter generates a story that she thinks is cute or fun and tries to share it with you over family dinner Are you honestly going to tell me that's just petulant nonsense? Do you truly believe that moments like that don't matter? Or what about if your friend opens up to you and confesses that they've been secretly generating pieces of a story for months And they're having trouble deciding how the ending should be the AI has given them a couple ideas But they really want a second opinion and they trust you enough to read it and not call them a total loser Like friends and family exchange stories and talk about funny life events all the time It's not nothing just because only three people in the world have read it or care about it This whole idea that your art doesn't matter unless you're publicly praised for it is completely Contradictory to the spirit of art. I mean you're a real artist. You're clearly talented You know there are plenty of historical artists that had very little success when they were alive But they left behind beautiful legacies that we discovered later and their styles are still alive today Bringing lots of people joy You can't tell me that it doesn't matter if no one cares about it Your art matters as long as you care about it Even if you're the only one for anyone who enjoys art if you enjoy it one is always enough I also want to point out here that the people making these things will depend on you thinking They hold the silver key to your artistic vision They need you to feel worthless and like you missed your chance to tell your story That you got too old or don't have the time or resources or ability or what have you That way you will need their product This way you will support them monetarily and most importantly You will help them change the laws and sway the culture to allow their rapacious strip mining of all creative labor They will always be incentivized to make you feel lowly dependent Incapable and slave to their kaiju whims and when they're done They'll pull the rug out from under you Of course, they have no actual reason to let you have this stuff for free. They don't care about you They can say they do but that means nothing Once they've made it impossible for you to make a living as an artist And you've helped them change the laws and they've ostracized you from your peers by turning you against them They'll just take it away and sell it to google and facebook and youtube and all the rest Because they stand to make billions from them and nothing from you You gave it all away for free. You fools Okay, wow So not only are we fools now, but your five-year-old little brother who spends his time making blueberry ice cream dragons on dolly Yeah, it's his fault He's killing art as we know it and his point about taking away the key to ai art once they can't make any money off of You anymore like dude, that's the entire reason stable diffusion is open source There's no such thing as them taking it away anymore You are no longer at the mercy of someone else's ai right now You can download and train your very own machine learning ai Locally without the interruption of anyone else and you can do it absolutely free There's no rug for them to pull anymore. Everyone has their own silver key now Ai art at this point is a public worldwide open source project You're lucky that there is an open source option like stable diffusion at all because otherwise We really would be at the mercy of dolly google party and facebook argument These companies cannot manipulate our access to these systems because of open source projects like stable diffusion I can run it offline on my personal computer Let's say upfront that stable diffusion and stability ai are not the permanent body of the discussion here And indeed these names may be completely unfamiliar to people listening to this even in the near future Many ai companies will rise and fall and some will be open source and others will be highly guarded There will be a huge variety of business models release models subscription models and retraining models associated With the huge number of ai projects that are about to hit the scene Just because the source code is out for the current version of stable diffusion Does not mean that stability ai and other like-minded companies won't change their tactics in the future I also want to point out that the version of stable diffusion you can presently download and run offline Is limited to its current data set you might have some control over its parameters But it would be cost and time intensive to retrain the model on an updated data set as I explained earlier It took a lot of power and graphics cards to train the current version of stable diffusion And if you want to stay current with these technologies, you will either need to dedicate tremendous resources to retraining Or otherwise surrender to these companies, which is of course What they want also it seems very naive to trust that a for-profit company like stability ai Gunning after a one billion dollar valuation Likely seeking to elect moneyed investors to their board of directors with a hedge fund manager as ceo Is somehow incentivized to give you your favorite toy for free Indefinitely and suppose they do continue to offer free versions They'll end up like facebook twitter instagram, etc Replete with the bad incentives and world distorting effects that we've seen from those models Okay, I actually agree that multiple iterations in different systems of ai will come and go over the years And stable diffusion definitely won't be the only open source ai software available for long But let's pretend that stable diffusion was going to go full corporate slut the way you anticipate They lost control over their software the minute they released it as open source You are vastly underestimating the abilities of open source developers and their resilience to monopoly bullshit Let's just take blender for example Which is where most of my community and channel comes from and is the open source equivalent for all 3d related software and animation The corporate giant autodesk maya has been at war with blender for years and years and years And no matter what they try and do no matter how hard they try with all their money and resources to get rid of blender They can't and the reason for that is even if they somehow could the international community has enough knowledge of the source material And expertise to build a new version if necessary and make it available to the public And it's also important to note that a lot of the people who work on open source projects with their spare time Used to be programmers for the biggest smartest corporations on the planet Remember even the biggest companies like google is just made up of working people these people have their own hobbies And agendas and goals in life and when they retire or get fed up with these companies and leave They bring their expertise with them outside of that company as for the claim about the stable diffusion updates costing money Let's pretend that argument was true right now. We are on stable diffusion version 1 4 But let's say stable diffusion for whatever reason said you are never getting version 1 5 and if you want it You're gonna have to pay if version 1 4 was the last version we ever got It's already so good that it's more than enough for people to generate unlimited amounts of amazing looking art with only the last Current data set that it's been trained on if this was the last ai art that was ever made available to the public It would easily still be good enough for the rest of your life Argument don't people do the same thing with references as the ai's do Now we return to a deeper analysis of the bad assumptions built into the first argument We addressed in this video to clarify This argument concerns the practice of using references and the art of others to make or inspire an image This argument is confused at its core first Suppose the answer is yes. The way an ai uses references is analogous to how people use references This begs the question as to why you would afford the privileges of this endeavor to unfeeling machines instead of human beings To make things faster easier and more accessible Feelings we shouldn't allow machines to do jobs that make us feel good There are lots of terrible jobs that people felt good doing that the world is really glad or no longer here I promise the people that used to write books and ink and feather for a living Probably used to feel pretty good and proud of their work. That's still not a good reason not to automate the process Again, he's trying to frame this as ai artists being on the opposite side of humanistic This is an emotional argument which basically means it's not even a real argument And I'll share a personal story as to why one of my best friends in high school was dating this girl for over Three years now. This was a very good friend of mine. We used to play smash bros together after school We'd go to tournaments and practice at each other's houses He was top of his class super smart super cool and still to this day one of the nicest guys I've ever met in my life, but his girlfriend never seemed to be happy no matter what he tried He'd work extra jobs after studying all day to take her out to nice dates He'd always get her something special for her birthday for valentines for christmas He kept trying to do more and more and after a while it was getting dangerous He was sleep deprived because he was always working always studying and always spending time with this girl And he got to the point where me and the homies were starting to get seriously worried about him We're like bro. You got to cut back. This isn't healthy But he wanted to be a good man So he kept trooping like a stud but after all that, do you know what this chick said? She said I feel Like you're not putting enough into this relationship And of course you can imagine how fast me and the homies flipped the table and started screaming Oh, yeah Well, I feel like this bitch is an ungrateful unappreciative spoiled black hole for all your time attention money and resources The point here is do not try to appease people's feelings because feelings are often detached from reality This crazy chick probably really believed what she said She probably really felt that my buddy was not putting enough into the relationship But people's feelings are infinite and the world's resources are not so never argue with someone through feelings This is art making for god's sake not some agitating manual process that people hate This is one of the things people enjoy doing Anyone with a humanistic outlook will see that because the intent and desired outcome are the same We should reserve art making for those who stand to gain something from it What in the world reserve art for those who stand to gain something from it What through this logic if I was destined to never be a successful artist Let's say there was no chance anyone would ever recognize or buy my work And let's even say that I don't even enjoy the process of making art. In fact, I hate it I just want to make really cool pictures But I find the process so difficult and frustrating that I don't actually enjoy it And let's even say that my art is ugly and I'm not very good So I don't feel good when I look at my own finished work Should that disqualify my rights to make the art anyway? Really bro People have the right to make as much shitty meaningless art as they want to For whom it can bring joy and reward rather than dumbly bestow it on an unfeeling non-being that cannot enjoy the fruits of its labor Okay, for those of you who might be a little bit younger This is exactly why you never ever ever ever engage with someone who's trying to argue based on emotions or feelings Because you can't argue with how someone feels these kind of arguments always boil down to some sort of feelings Olympics where people just go back and forth comparing who's feeling more and whose feelings are more important And it always ends with just we feel different. So there's really no answer. It's a waste of time Now I would normally never engage anyone in a feelings related argument But if I had to argue with this logic, here is what my argument would be Who are you to decide what makes me feel fulfilled or not? I understand that you feel fulfilled through the creation process of your art But that simply is not the case for me What makes your feelings of fulfillment in the creation process more important than my feelings in the completion process I know a lot of people who share this sentiment, but I'll go ahead and just speak for myself I'm a 3d animator and I absolutely hate the process required to create 3d characters I do not enjoy rigging. I do not enjoy texturing. I do not enjoy UV mapping And I definitely don't enjoy spending countless hours creating motion capture facial shape keys The only reason I bother to become proficient at any of these skills is to get an animated character at the end That is it if google offered me a solution to automate all the in-between processes Allowing me to simply type in and describe the character that I want and then spend a little bit of extra time Fixing the detail of the faces. I would not lose any fulfillment from my art. In reality I would probably be more fulfilled because I would be able to spend more time bringing ideas for characters from my head Into reality and I would also spend less time doing the mundane tasks that I feel like are a chore And in relation to your point about nobody finding my work or buying my work or caring about my work Supposedly the way it deserves to be I'm completely fine with that I don't have to sell my work to be proud of it when I look at a beautiful character that went from an idea In my mind to a reality on the screen just seeing it makes me happy It has nothing to do with the work It just has to do with the final results and when my local ai gives me a beautiful image of a character I had ideas for in my head It still brings a smile to my face Even if it took six seconds to make because I am the one responsible for bringing that image into the world And nobody else has a copy of it until I share it on twitter So you can feel all you want, but don't assume the rest of us artists feel the same way you do or for the same reasons Second No People do not do the same thing with references as machines do The difference is that machines can replicate references exactly Uh, no it can't and it's actually designed to do the complete opposite You can try all you want to tell it to copy a picture exactly, but every time you use it It's always transformative interpretation Sure human artists look at references collect them combine them transform them And indeed sometimes do their best to outright copy them But in the vast majority of cases they cannot replicate these references exactly You can look at as many Michelangelo drawings as you'd like You can hang a hundred of them up all around your drawing board You will still fail to draw like him You could not trace a Michelangelo well enough to create confusion about which is the original And if you could it is almost guaranteed that you are an accomplished draftsperson in your own right by the sweat of your brow The ai's do not have the same balancing constraints The ai can perfectly achieve through digital reproduction Memorization and overfitting any effect it is sufficiently trained on So while a human's most vehement efforts to recreate the best parts of another's work might result in Acceptable deficiencies and pleasant surprises the ai can achieve perfect theft en masse Everything he described humans doing looking at references collecting combining ideas and transforming them is literally Exactly how the ai is designed to operate He keeps talking about the ai's ability to commit perfect theft and talks about it as if it's like the big thing That separates humans from ai, but check this out See that ai as a human just committed perfect theft This image that now sits locally on my desktop is framed perfectly identical down to the pixel as the version of it on the website I got it from humans not only commit perfect artistic theft They are the most likely perpetrators of it and the biggest irony of this whole point is that the ai on the other hand Is designed to do the exact opposite It has specific algorithms and programming that virtually guarantee that no generated image is going to be identical to a single image in the database A human is also ennobled by their attempts to replicate and copy At least when doing it through hand skills rather than copy pasting parts of an artwork digitally Because of the mechanics of manual execution a person will improve as an artist by making multiple attempts at copying Executing an adequate copy of a masterwork is completely outside the ability of a beginner and ironically demands some honest skill In a very real sense and it may be hard to understand this if you haven't been grappling with improving your craft for a very long time If you can manage to copy a vermere well You earned it I know he's not saying that it's okay for humans to copy because that requires growth and skill But I still disagree with the idea of copying something perfectly that doesn't belong to you You cannot earn the right to copy an artwork no matter how much you practice or how good you get and as for his other point He talks about michael angelo and vermere and if you were never trained in the classical arts and these names don't sound familiar Don't worry. Just check out my video 50 artists that everyone should know Johannes vermere is famous for his painting of the girl with the pearl earring and good ol michie is one of my personal favorite Artists of all time. He is the guy who created the statue of david the statue of madonna the creation of adam And painted the sistine chapel now just to demonstrate my point You could not get the ai to generate an exact copy of michael angelo's painting Even if you dumped a billion dollars of credits into it and that is precisely because contrary to popular belief The ai does not make copies every image is created from scratch guided by what you ask it for And if you type the exact name of an art piece and type the exact name of the artist who drew it You will still never get a carbon copy of the real piece There was a hilarious video exemplifying this in jazz's video where he hired three different people on fiver to create art for him He paid 85 dollars 176 dollars and 211 dollars and you should totally see the whole video if you haven't already But basically he commissioned all of these people to make a picture of a unicorn with a rainbow And after paying all three of these human artists It turned out with some quick reverse google image search that each of these human artists Stole images and photo bashed pieces of other people's work together to make the commission And if we compare these images that were created by humans with these images that were made by ai I want you to let it sink in that after paying humans 85 176 and 211 us dollars to make an image the only image here that is truly unique and original Is the one made by the computer like really think about that for a second We brought more unique art that no one else had done before Into the world and you have a whole group of people wondering why this picture is not illegal And the answer is simply because this is an original picture This piece is as rare unique and original as art gets these days You cannot legally copyright strike this image because it's not a copy of any image It's way more original than the human based photo bashes we saw earlier And the point i'm trying to make here is if you really want to worry about people making perfect copies of other people's work Rest assured it is drastically more likely that a human is going to copy and paste your art with pixel perfect precision Then the chances of an ai generating an exact copy of any one of your artistic images The dance diffusion problem There is an egregious double standard pertaining to how these systems handle visual art versus other creative industries Take the glaring example of dance diffusion The upcoming ai music tool coming from a team within stability ai the makers of text to image model stable diffusion Let me read to you from an article describing how dance diffusion is trained quote Dance diffusion is also built on datasets composed entirely Of copyright free and voluntarily provided music and audio samples Because diffusion models are prone to memorization and overfitting Releasing a model trained on copyrighted data could potentially result in legal issues in honoring the intellectual property of artists While also complying to the best of their ability with the often strict copyright standards of the music industry Keeping any kind of copyrighted material out of the training data was a must end quote If you think you couldn't have heard what you just heard go back and listen again The fact that such a baffling double standard exists within the product suite of a single ai company Makes it hard to imagine any explanation other than bad faith towards visual artists and the callous belief That it's okay to trample them in particular because they are less inclined towards self defense and litigation than other industries i.e music I want you to imagine swapping the word music in that paragraph with the word art instead Would that really be so crazy? Does that suggest that i am a fearful luddite who is simply resisting change? I don't think so. I think most sane people would see that honoring the intellectual property of artists Is a logical thing to extend to visual artists, not just musicians Next I want you to imagine that we're in the past Let's say 10 years in the past and the text to image generators have not yet hit the scene What if you learned that someone was planning to make one of these systems? Let's assume you took them seriously and they vowed to abide by the judicious guidelines. We just read It's going to be made with copyright free and voluntarily provided art pieces I imagine you would think that was the most Utterly sane and logical way to make and release one of these systems, wouldn't you now imagine that after hearing this Someone floats the idea of instead making one by trawling the internet for billions of images and vacuuming up Millions of pieces of hard-made art with no consent No compensation and no way to remove this work from the model once trained on it Don't you think that plan would seem clearly Insane and unethical from your lucky position on the timeline That is to say before the release of such an aberrant program The fact that we are living in a reality where someone Did make the ladder without receiving any permissions or offering any compensation to those Generating the art on which the system is trained and then rush to release it before anyone could catch up with their misdeeds Doesn't mean it's any less unethical or plainly crazy I think many of the naive assumptions about ai can be revealed if we only imagine How we would have hoped these systems would be handled in a reality where we took their potential seriously Before they were made and released Unfortunately, we took no action because most people didn't think they could get even as good as they currently are And if they did most didn't think they could do it so quickly But having already been duped does not mean we must continue to dumbly concede to these fledgling ai's We will set a very dangerous precedent by not disputing and dismantling these unjust systems New ai's will be arising rapidly and the multiplying villainies of their nature will swarm upon us We don't want the people making these to think they can get away with infringing on the rights of artists And that we will not scrutinize the systems inspect their business models and generally be willing to stand up for ourselves So we've already talked about the whole legality of this in the beginning So I won't repeat what I said before but I actually started as a sound guy making music when I was 12 Hanging out with my friends on fruity loop. So this is something that I actually have some knowledge and experience with There's a very simple reason They're taking a different approach to music than they are images and I think it's highly unlikely that the reason is Stable developers just have a much more hostile hate of visual artists than musical artists It's more likely because music and images really do operate on very different rules 2d images when compared to sound have vastly more complex possibilities of arrangements But if you count all the sharps and flats in traditional modern music, there really are only 12 possible notes that you can play with I mean, yes, you have a lot of leeway with tempo texture rhythm and melody But from a technical standpoint the rules for modern music are much more uniform and strict compared to that of a 2d Canvas for this reason if you give a machine controls to music and then tell it to follow the general rules and randomly generate melodies You're almost guaranteed that eventually what it produces will be pieces that you have heard in real songs before Essentially through sheer statistics There's no way to reliably expect the ai to not randomly generate a melody that previously has not been created before Especially if it's trained on the type of music that people like and is popular However, if you give the ai random control of all the pixels in a 4k monitor It's extremely unlikely that every single pixel color and alpha value would accidentally perfectly line up with another 4k image that also happened to be copyrighted also when it comes to music There's a common practice called sampling which is when musicians share pieces of their music with each other There obviously needs to be a mutual agreement and understanding beforehand But if you were to compare it to the visual 2d counterpart This would be more similar to legal photo bashing than referencing samples are awesome And I would assume that they're gonna be a large part of the consensual legal audio assets that dance diffusion will be using for its database And you also have to think about the fact that while pretty much everyone on the planet generates and owns thousands of pictures every year And posting them on instagram shitty images of dogs and cats are still extremely useful for an image ai But shitty music and noise and beats that nobody likes actually train the ai to be worse That is why they want real artists with real consent to train this database. There really is no other way It doesn't work if you randomly and indiscriminately collect noise And honestly, I think it's a good thing that this time they're going way out of their way to try and make sure that everything Is as legal as possible. I mean, that's probably the best possible way they could be doing this Conclusion These ai systems are going to continue to challenge us Not just in the realm of art, but in all walks of life They will make their presence known in both digital and physical space And they will appropriate all types of creative and mundane work typically relegated to humans Wherever they show up and whatever work they undertake Before you just roll over and relinquish all of life's efforts to the ai ask yourself Am I for fitting work? I like doing Is life really so packed with surplus joy that we should be letting machines automate something We take pleasure in do we really have a good reason to let them commandeer a job or hobby? That is aspirational and fun rather than rote and miserable Or are we just inventing reasons to let them do it because we don't want to take on the burden of defending ourselves Something that artists generally shy away from we must not permit ai developers with all their underhanded techniques To undermine us until we are ultimately supplanted We must fight back otherwise we set a dangerous precedent for all ai systems to come The people who are heavily incentivized to protect the public perception of these systems will accuse us of being luddites Of being unadaptable and of catastrophizing the consequences of their misconduct But don't let them lull you to sleep with this inane chorus Remember always that they're not artists All right. I really want to talk about this phrase right here They are not artists because this is the most common phrase that people against ai will throw at you And if you're listening to this if this is the only thing you remember from this video Please don't ever let other people tell you what you are these people do not know you These people do not care about you and you are not obligated to prove yourself to anyone throwing this phrase at you The reason you hear this phrase so much is because this is how they're getting so much mileage in this whole debate Not only is this phrase completely detached from the truth It's also a cheap trick that allows them to propagate and set up a false frame that the overwhelming majority of artists do not like ai Which is simply not true on virtually every level from casual artists to professional professional artists We're not only some of the first to get hyped about ai but are currently also reaping all the best rewards from it I've heard from people who went from being able to finish two pieces of art today to 20 And they're having a blast with this new speed that's coming from the ai Casual artists are also going crazy having more fun than ever before Because so many of them have struggled to get the results they want despite years and years of practice This ai has been a breakthrough for so many frustrated casual artists that trying to go around and pretend that artists aren't enjoying ai As we speak on a mass level We've never seen is more wrong than it is true But let's pretend the argument was true even if you are not an artist So what should you be destined to never be able to turn your beautiful ideas into a reality? Personally, I'm on the side that says hell. No, absolutely not That is gatekeeping elitist bullshit And I believe making art available to a wider range of people is a great way to give the average person More ways to express themselves that were previously impossible. Are there cons to the whole thing? Yes, but I firmly believe the pros vastly outweigh the cons especially when you start crunching the basic numbers I mean just do the math 1.4 of all people in america are actually good enough to make a living through art These people often fall in the commercial artist category A lot of them are really enjoying the speed and the time that the ai is saving for them So it's been extremely helpful for the 1 percent that we are supposedly worried about and for the other 99 of the average people it has completely opened doors and given them access to skills that were previously only possible in dreams More people are gaining than they are losing and it's pretty clear that the overall pros of the ai Outweigh the cons for the majority of society So do not take the bait do not accept the premise that artists in general are against ai because that simply is not the truth And it's not their work in the data set Actually, i'm pretty sure that my work is in the data set and personally i'm okay with that as soon as I clicked I agreed to creating a google and youtube account I pretty much assumed everything that I do on their service was going to end up in their big data pile And I have received compensation for this service in the form of free marketing in a community here on youtube To which I can disseminate my art for free and again I'm only speaking for myself here But the bigger reason I'm okay with it is because I know my data is being used to help millions of people Bring their ideas to life. I make a lot of my best work available for free Specifically because I know that others do not have the same level of skills I do and I take great pride in knowing that bits and pieces of my work will survive long after i'm gone In the form of new art that's constantly evolving. Don't get me wrong. Being credit would be nice But as an artist, let's be real here If you saw your name in a prompt that was 50 or 100 or even 200 words long and the artwork generated clearly and obviously looks Nothing like a copy of anything you've ever made in your life. Let's be straight. Honestly, tell me How much credit do you really think you deserve for this piece from one artist to another? We all know that under any normal standard category of referenced or transformative art Especially when that reference list includes the entire internet that the differences between the final image And whatever percentage of inspiration the ai took from me is often so different from anything that i've made that to even try and consider It transformative would be stretching mightily the credits feel unearned and undeserved I never painted it a dragon and if someone were to try and call upon my digital footprint to make a dragon I would feel squeamish about claiming credit for the piece because it's so clearly not something I would have ever made and i'm not the only artist who feels this way I just want everyone watching this video to know that some of us real artists care about more important things than taking credit for pieces We barely participated a huge percentage of us did not become artists to take credit And we definitely didn't become artists for the money We became artists and will continue to be artists because we simply love creating art They want to control the emotional environment around this whole thing Casting you as shrill and complaining and themselves as calm intelligent and progressive They want you to accept without question that anything and everything you make and share Will automatically get fed into their lucrative product at the time of writing this There is no way to secede from these systems Even though some are promising to add opt-out features in the future while writing this video Stable diffusion indicated that it is responding to criticism and internally developing a tool that will allow artists to opt out of training This sounds like a step in the right direction But I want to note a few things One the criticism was necessary for them to make the change Two there is no reason to trust that the next company that comes along with a similar training and release model will allow opting out And three the version of stable diffusion that has already been released as open source Will forever be out there and trained on this non consenting and sprawling data set If you opt out You will be opting out of future models of stable diffusion Not one's already released and I imagine Most people won't even be inclined to opt out until they discover that they're already included in a model At that point if the release is open source, it's too late for you for that to make a difference You must of course Know that feature exists and how to use it Moreover, you must know to do it for every data collection product out there Only the savviest will revoke their work and the rest will be preyed on These companies will offer opt out options in the hope you won't realize that they should have been opt in in the first place So let me get this straight now that some big data companies are giving you the option to opt out of a training set Despite the fact that you probably agreed to the terms of service multiple times across multiple software To give these companies access to your data in the first place You are going to stay mad at them no matter what they do You are lucky that some of these companies are even giving you the chance to go back on your agreement Even after reaping all the benefits of their services as you clearly have in the form of your growing thriving youtube channel Furthermore technically as of today none of these companies are legally bound to give you this option in the first place And they are putting themselves at a serious disadvantage to their competition Giving people the choice to opt out means having a smaller database meaning less quality outputs meaning less financial incentives for Investors to choose them you really should be more supportive of the groups who are even offering you this option Because if you don't they will most definitely be eaten alive by all the competition Who doesn't care about consent at all once all the consensual ai image generators have gone out of business Because they simply can't keep up with the quality of their competitors. We will be left with nothing but non consensual ai generators As I said in the beginning of this essay It's not hard to imagine a fair and equitable text to image generator Which makes their chosen path seem in the most charitable interpretation Thoughtless if you wanted to build an ethical one You would build it on a foundation of public domain and creative commons images Embellish it with images your company produces internally Commission artists to create training images for you or compensate artists who opt in To have their images added to the data set Maybe even give them a royalty every time their image or name is used to produce a result I don't see anything wrong with a model like that And I imagine it would still be fascinating and effective But still have some utterly sane constraints that would leave much art to be made by hardworking human beings I also think you'd have a huge amount of artists Happily opt in to adding their images to the project. We're artists We love new strange and wonderful things As much as these ai companies seem to want to lump us in with the prudish bores of the past It's a bit of a stretch considering our demographic Most of us use and love tech have a long list of nerd credentials Are constantly trying new things Experimenting and getting excited about the weird turnings of the world I think if someone made a consent based model like this even I would throw my images into it But for now, please let's stop with the go fever and think this through Let's end this wholesale theft of our creative labor I'll leave links in the description to associations trying to organize around these issues Sources and informational videos on the current state of the art systems I highly encourage you to do more research into how these systems work And how the companies that are making them are controlling the narrative Okay, listen, I'm going out of my way not to take anything you say out of context Specifically because I do not want to control a narrative and the vast majority of people on my side Who are just having fun making new art images do not spend their time Oppressing or trying to control artists and nor do they want to what I want It's for everyone watching this video to hear the best arguments both for AI and against it And then just make up their own mind if you love AI and you think it's fun Awesome would love to have you here on the channel because I'm always over here testing new software If you hate AI and you think it's evil, okay At least now you know where the people on the other side are coming from You are still totally welcome here on the channel and I want you to have a good time I'm not here to demonize you or call you names or accuse you of being a Luddite And I'm not here to cast you as a shrill and I'm not trying to shame or control anyone's emotions or feelings And I can tell you that the vast majority of us that are for AI are just excited about finally being able to make their ideas into reality And most of us even over here would be totally for a more consensual system where you can opt in or maybe even opt out It's definitely not going to solve the problem because not every single group in the world cares about consent I mean good luck making your case opting your art out of china's database if you find it there But for better or worse, we now live in a world where we are all connected So my advice to you if you are an artist and you truly care about not having your work included in one of these engines Is remember the internet is forever if you really don't want your art in someone else's hands Don't upload it online because once it's there. It's not going away I think the biggest point that he just seems to keep completely missing is the fact that real artists make art because they want to He keeps talking about this as if when AI finally does become better at making art than people That people who enjoy sketching for the sake of sketching will suddenly not have the will to sketch anymore Or as if the option is somehow taken away from them or made illegal Even in your worst case scenario where AI art has completely flooded the social media market There is nothing stopping anyone from continuing to make art however they want to make it If you feel most fulfilled painting an entire image from scratch by all means keep doing it Hell if you learn how to do it for real in 30 years, you'll be one of the rarest people alive on the planet I mean I have family members who make real art like physical giant metal and clay sculptures They have no interest in virtual art They spend their time shaping real clay in the real world and they're going to continue to do that regardless of how easy Computer art becomes because what they love is the real world aspect of it I actually believe that the influx of AR art will actually trigger a new kind of renaissance Because with all the surplus of digital art that's coming soon There's now incentive for people to learn the ways of old-fashioned brush and paint this future He keeps trying to paint where art is in danger and artists all decide not to be artists anymore It's not real and never has been you will always find that kid doodling on the desk And you will always see that one girl move into the music So I would advise people to relax a bit on the doom and gloom if you enjoy making art You're gonna make art one way or another. So here's my closing statement What's happening now has happened throughout history time and time again and the result is always the same Anyone who studied the classic art stories will tell you there was a time when artists would say you're not a real painter If you don't mix your own paint colors a time when people said people who type aren't real writers A time when people said computer music isn't real music a time when photoshop artists weren't real artists A time when 3d sculptors weren't real sculptors and now we're at a time when AI art is not real art This battle has happened a thousand times before and the outcome is always the same The next generation always becomes the standard and the world moves on So I hope you look forward to the future and I hope this video provided you with all the ammunition You need to confidently stand your ground when people try and tell you you're not a real artist Hope that helps and as always hope you have a fantastic day and I'll see you around