Anti-AI tools for user created images

[PaulEC]

Sorry, but I simply do not accept that anyone should be able to steal other people's work; any more than I accept that it's OK to break into someone's house and take whatever they want!

[Pšenda]

53 minutes ago, PaulEC said:

Sorry, but I simply do not accept that anyone should be able to steal other people's work, any more than I accept that it's OK to break into someone's house and take whatever you want!

I think that, as in most cases, there will be a division of the world into two parts - a part where absolutely everything is allowed and personal rights and interests are of no concern to anyone, and a part where play a big role and are respected. Something like GDPR (although in the context of the discussed problem only for illustration, but I assume that the majority can imagine what it probably entails, how much it annoys us, but that it actually also protects us/at least tries to protect us privacy and personal data that would otherwise roam the Internet completely uncontrolled and with impunity). In my opinion, in one part of society, laws will eventually be adopted that will try to ensure - that the learning process of AI will take place in a controlled manner and with the consent of the authors of the works that were used for learning (considering the huge scale, very complicated, but I think it will ultimately necessary - and yes, it will be hugely expensive, and AI-certified services like this will not be cheap either). However, this is the only way in a certain part of the world it will be possible to use AI services, for example, in the creation of advertisements (seemingly a faster and cheaper way than paying for a DTP studio), because only in this way will the output not be attacked for "stealing and misusing the work", which of course will soon result in a whole legal an law industry that uses AI to search for potential crime victims.

 

P.S. I am afraid that the translation using Translator will not be very successful in this case.

[v_kyr]

1 hour ago, PaulEC said:

I simply do not accept that anyone should be able to steal other people's work

Kind of reminds me of a country where when confronted with the fact that they steal and copy copyrighted/licensed things from other manufacturers worldwide, they simply said that "... in our country it is considered a great honor, to be copied"! 🤔

[PaulEC]

I'm sorry, but you are the one comparing apples with oranges!

There is a big difference between using your own skills to create something new, based on or influenced by, someone else's work, and using AI to troll the internet for other peoples images, altering them a bit, then claiming them as your own! I just don't see how it is fair for an artist to spend hours (days or weeks) working on a project, just to have someone else come along, type a few words into a box, and then use that persons hard work without their consent! 

[PaulEC]

If you don't know the difference between art and a ruler there's not much else to say! There is (but maybe you can't see it) a difference between being influenced by someone else's art and plagiarism!

There is a big difference between using your skills to adapt a play as a musical, and taking a painting or photograph and letting a bit of software alter it slightly!

[Westerwälder]

Ich Spreche kein Englich daher muss ich mich auf eine Übersetzuung verlassen die das auch nicht richtig kann!
Bei der KI scheiden sich die Geister weil zwischen der alten und neuen Welt ein Unterschied im Denken ist. Die KI benutzt vorhandenes Wissen und macht daraus etwas anderes aber niemals etwas Neues. Ein Kreativer Künstler beschäftigt sich mit SEINEM Werk und produziert etwas neues was seiner Gedankenwelt entspricht.
In der Welt in der die KI entstanden ist achtet man selten den Künstler bzw sein Werk so hoch wie in Europa. Das zeigt sich doch auch dass die Amerikaner mit den Daten der Nutzer Schindluder betreiben um dem Nutzer Werbung unter zu jubeln. Datenschutz ist doch für viele Amerikanische Unternehmen ein Fremdwort.
Aus diesem Grund werden doch auch Bilder und Texte aus dem Netz für die sogenannte KI missbraucht!

I don't speak English, so I have to rely on a translation that doesn't really do it either!
When it comes to AI, opinions differ because there is a difference in thinking between the old and new worlds. The AI uses existing knowledge and makes something different out of it, but never anything new. A creative artist deals with HIS work and produces something new that corresponds to his world of ideas.
In the world in which the AI was created, the artist or his work is rarely respected as much as in Europe. It also shows that the Americans use the data of the users to do scams in order to cheer the user on with advertising. Data protection is a foreign concept for many American companies.
For this reason, images and texts from the Internet are also misused for the so-called AI!

[Mr. Doodlezz]

My take on the matter: AI is based on the back of an entire community, our community, designers, photograhpers, 3D artists and other visual creatives.

Most of us creatives have never asked for something like this because we don't need it – we can come up with the ideas ourselves, that's the essence of real creativity.

Artists are never named as sources in AI-generations, let alone get paid for it. But who get's paid instead? The providers – nice exploitation!

The ultimate goal can only be to replace the majority of this community because it is cheaper, easier and accessible directly by the industry without prior experience. »An AI could have generated that (and about 20 variants in less than an hour) and would be way cheaper than you, so why should I commission you in the first place?«. Or »Here's a bunch of generations for reference I like, do it like this.«

It seems to me that as a designer you are forced to follow suit, otherwise you cannot keep up. And in doing so, you are betraying your own principles and all the artists and designers on whom the generated images are based. At the moment, no matter what you choose, it almost seems to me that as a creative you can only lose. It feels like we are on the brink of an evolution that is not in our favour.

Incidentally, I read in Affinity's latest post on Instagram that they're looking at ways to implement AI, which doesn't surprise me any more with all that's happening on the subject, but it does make me sad. 😔

[MunchkinWorks]

47 minutes ago, Mr. Doodlezz said:

Incidentally, I read in Affinity's latest post on Instagram that they're looking at ways to implement AI, which doesn't surprise me any more with all that's happening on the subject, but it does make me sad.

Not surprised. Especially if they want to keep up against Adobe. We can only hope these are AI tools that'll help and assist artists, designers and photographers and not prompt-to-image with questionable training databases.

Or they're waiting until the hype dies a little so they won't get as much backlash as everyone else got (see deviantart, artstation, even adobe firefly).

But man, I agree with your sentiment. "An AI has given me 30 variations" is going to be the new "my cousin's son can do this for free"

[PaulEC]

34 minutes ago, MunchkinWorks said:

We can only hope these are AI tools that'll help and assist artists, designers and photographers and not prompt-to-image with questionable training databases.

This is it! AI could be a great help with things like cutting out objects with complex edges, improved inpainting, colourizing and so on. If AI can help with some of the jobs that are very difficult and/or time consuming to do manually, I'm all for it. But, as I've indicated before, I object to spending hours of my time producing a piece of design or artwork, only to have someone come along, type some words in a box and make use of my hard work for nothing!

[Mr. Doodlezz]

1 hour ago, MunchkinWorks said:

my cousin's son can do this for free

Exactly! I had »looks like the finger painting my kid made during breakfast« in mind. 🥲

[Mr. Doodlezz]

9 hours ago, LondonSquirrel said:

Have you ever heard of schools (in the art sense). The old masters, the impressionists, cubists, etc.

8 hours ago, LondonSquirrel said:

The art world is full of people who copy all the time such that it is hard to know in many cases who really did something first.

At least students can name the few artists they passionately studied over years instead of automatically detecting and extracting characteristics of endless works of the internet's entirety in mere minutes. No student learns to imitate their master, to prove how perfectly they can imitate them.

The reason why artists study a master is because they revere their style, they want to create something similar themselves, out of pure enthusiasm for creation and to pay respect.

AI is the complete opposite in almost every respect. Absolutely no respect for artists, absolutely no personal connection to the result, instant disposal and re-generation.
It's just there to mass produce and make a profit for the two end users (provider and generator) in it, but not for the real artists. There is absolutely nothing creative about it, apart from the tapped training material.

[RNKLN]

All very interesting. I came across this one via Kottke.org: https://www.everythingisaremix.info

One big hour of entertainment related to this topic.

[Bobby Henderson]

There is a lot of specific things in graphic design that AI-based art generators can't do, at least not yet. My biggest concern are the motives behind developing these tools. Ultimately what is the angle they're playing? Are the developers deliberately trying to eliminate just about any kind of creative job (writing, visual art/design, music production) or will all the possible job losses across multiple creative industries just be incidental? The developers of these AI tools seem to be in some kind of arms race with each other. The possible fallout from their advances in technology remind me of the "Ian Malcolm" character Jeff Goldblum played in Jurassic Park. Early in the movie Malcolm has this line of dialog: "but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."

[Ana-Irina]

It's hard to tell what the endgame is, but one thing is for sure: AI is being developed fast and it will get better and better. Also, AI won't go away. They will find ways to bypass copyright. So, you can either try it out and see how you can use it for your benefit, or you can sit on the sidelines and complain about AI stealing your work or your job. It is obvious that it will replace some people. We just have to better than it, use our creativity to surpass AI and think conceptually. AI is really bad at generating smart content. It cannot insert meaning into anything. But we can. We need to go back to doing things old school...think Paul Rand and Paula Scher and Milton Glaser. AI will take over everything that looks good from a technical standpoint, so that battle is already lost. We need to find ways to create meaningful work again. We need a second modernist movement, to go back to the principles of design, to learn how to communicate again and find our humanity. 

I think this might me the challenge of our lifetime, to prove that we are better than machines. Otherwise, we deserve whatever fate it's coming for us.

[Mr. Doodlezz]

13 minutes ago, Ana-Irina said:

So, you can either try it out and see how you can use it for your benefit, or you can sit on the sidelines and complain about AI stealing your work or your job. It is obvious that it will replace some people. We just have to better than it, use our creativity to surpass AI and think conceptually.

I think with this approach we would put more energy into our work and possibly even exploit the work of others if also using AI as a foundation or tool, but inevitable we would produce the next wave of training material that improves AI performance and does not fix the real problem at all.

Also, for me, it's not the use of AI and certainly not the fear mentioned in the video posted above that bothers me. I admit that I toyed with DALL•E a few months back and even based one of my works on a generation, but that’s when I wasn’t fully aware what it means and stopped right then and there.

Ultimately, the way in which creatives have been, are and will be exploited for the common good (if you really want to call it that) is my biggest concern, and I don't think we can or will be able to change that retrospectively, or control it in the future, without developing counter-measures now to protect work we don't want to find in any training set.

–––

By the way, the often heard argument »if you don't want it to be used by AI, don't put it on the internet« bears the same mindset as »if you don't want strangers to hit on you, don't dress like that« – both statements are absolutely wrong, selfish and ignorant for obvious reasons, and miss the real intention.

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, LondonSquirrel said:

I have looked at ChatGPT for programming ...

ChatGPT still requires knowledge on the part of the user. It can produce workable programs, but only if you know what to ask for and what not to ask for. In other words it is a tool. It will not make somebody who has no knowledge of programming into a great programmer or produce great programs for a non-programmer because they will not know what to ask for. The reviews that are being done of ChatGPT are invariably being done by programmers who know exactly what to ask for, which is not a fair test IMHO. Unless that is what they want to test.  ...

Pretty logical isn't it, the better and more precise/exacter you describe what you are after, the better will be the results. - Pretty much the same as with searching engines!

Further there are already startup projects (see for example Cursor) for incorporating GPT based AI into tools like programming editors directly, so developing software with text-generating artificial intelligence that shortens the paths between source code and GPT due to a tool. Which gives a taste of how code editors (and IDEs) might change in the near future.

According to the Cursor developers, the advantage of the direct integration of the AI is that ten to 100 lines of code can be generated and inserted from the editor with little effort. For example, on the Mac, all you have to do is press CMD-K to enter a prompt. The editor should be even more practical when it comes to having existing code revised by the AI. In this case, the proposed changes will be highlighted. Apparently, Cursor also automatically transfers the source text to the AI – which eliminates another work step.

In addition, GitHub Copilot is integrated directly into the app and, in addition to local files, files on other servers can also be accessed directly via SSH. Apart from a few functions and the AI, the software is still in its early stages of development. In addition to the colored syntax highlighting, it currently doesn't offer much and is therefore behind other code editors. - For future versions, the developers plan to use AI to automatically fix errors as soon as they appear in the terminal. In addition, it should be possible in the future to request GPT to write documentation with a mouse click.

So all in all things will evolve here too over time and may also change some ways of software development! - And of course you have to know one two ... things about software development in order to make any (good?) use out of it. Without previous knowledge, no matter in which application areas, you won't get any far even without AI here!

[VectorVonDoom]

On 4/4/2023 at 9:40 AM, StrixCZ said:

Well, maybe not embrace it but we surely need to accept the way things are and learn to adapt since this can of worms can't really be closed now that it's open. Trying to fight it is as futile as trying to play tug of war with a speeding train...

Oh yes it could be pretty much closed, it depends on the outcome of the upcoming legal battles. It might be decided that these companies can only use public domain images or that artists have to opt-in and not this opt-out nonsense that is just PR. 

[VectorVonDoom]

Another problem I’ve run in to now is if you create anything more complicated than a stick man the ai crowd turn up accusing you of posting ai output as your own work even though if they knew anything about graphics it obviously isn’t. In theory you shouldn’t care however if it’s aimed at someone trying to sell work and these idiots turn up then potential customers read what they have to say and will put at least some of them off. Arguing your case is like banging your head against a brick wall, it’s a total waste of time as they always know better.

Hopefully the courts side with artists but money talks so I’m not holding my breath.

[tudor]

On 4/7/2023 at 2:57 PM, LondonSquirrel said:

ChatGPT still requires knowledge on the part of the user.

Not really. For example, ChatGPT made me an Adobe Illustrator JavaScript that worked from the first try. I am not a programmer, I barely understand some JS code. I just described what I needed in plain English. Any Illustrator user could do that. I can only imagine how much more advanced those chatbots will be in a few months/years.

AI chatbots are not just tools. A drilling machine is a tool that helps me drill more holes, faster. An app like Affinity Designer is a tool that lets me create better and faster. AI chatbots will completely replace the need for a human in the creative process. The clients will simply talk directly to a chatbot instead of paying a designer or programmer to do that for them.

[dcr]

It occurs to me that maybe a potential, albeit very limited, solution is to fill the Internet (i.e., your website, image sharing sites, etc.) with really, really bad art so when any automated AI bots or whatever go trolling sites for "training" images, they get a lot of really, really bad art and "learn" how to make bad art.  Would probably also be helpful to upvote or promote bad art for the same purpose so the bots don't "know" it's bad art.

[nezumi]

I hope Affinity team will not waste time on AI and just keep on improving tools itself. And I mean both - AI generation and protection against AI. Its just a waste of resources. I would rather see good automatic tracing in Designer rather then some AI useless bloat just because everybody are doing it, fascinated like kids in circus for the first time. "Look mom, a picture!".

Thats why I love Affinity in a first place - its not bloated with garbage.

[Mr. Doodlezz]

20 hours ago, dcr said:

bad art

Fun idea! But what’s bad art? Is it really bad if it’s intentionally bad? 😁

»Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.«

[VectorVonDoom]

13 hours ago, Mr. Doodlezz said:

Fun idea! But what’st bad art? Is it really bad if it’s intentionally bad? 😁

»Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.«

Yes, bad art is bad whether it is intentional or not.

[Mr. Doodlezz]

46 minutes ago, VectorVonDoom said:

Yes, bad art is bad whether it is intentional or not.

The thought I tried to imply was rather what makes art bad – isn't that highly subjective? 

Art that one might think is bad because it’s off the norm might be appreciated by many others and vice versa. 

Even if it does not follow basic principles, it could still be intended as a statement or style.

But I feel I'm drifting off topic here and entering a philosophical space. 😁

[VectorVonDoom]

13 hours ago, Mr. Doodlezz said:

The thought I tried to imply was rather what makes art bad – isn't that highly subjective? 

Art that one might think is bad because it’s off the norm might be appreciated by many others and vice versa. 

Even if it does not follow basic principles, it could still be intended as a statement or style.

But I feel I'm drifting off topic here and entering a philosophical space. 😁

Not always some of it is simply bad and many would argue isn't art at all just rubbish.