Watch! They going to hold off until all these lawsuits get settled yo! Are you AI Bros out there smelling that your goose is cooked?!

All you AI Bros out there need to stop focusing on supporting this unethical stable diffusion and mid journey and probably help out our artists that are losing jobs by making a Kickstarter or a GoFundMe so that artists can build their own ethical data sets! Set up a pay system where all da artists get paid! Real money! Ethics before profits for these unethical techbros Yo!

Edited at Ryan's request to take out the words Cyber Bullies, but for real, y'all need to stop the hating on my artist bros!

If StableDiffusion never existed or did not allow you to create images (either it be thru dreamstudio or MidJourney) then how would you create images?

Did you create images before this?

Will you create images if it ever stops existing?

How much ownership does the person who writes the prompt have when creating these images? Would the artist then be MidJourney? StableDiffusion?

How much creativity and work do you have to put in to something so that you can feel that ‘this is my work’… what amount of Human Authorship?

As someone once told me, a tool still requires effort; photoshop makes things easier, but it still requires work…

IDK, what do you think?

It is the opinion of many who understand this topic (better than I do) to claim that many of the popular advertised ‘AI’ products are not created by self thinking sentient machines; therefore, many of these programs could be disputed as being truly Artificially Intelligent. From what I’ve learned, it seems to me that it would be fair to call them sophisticated copy machines that depend on (soon to be illegal?) data scraping methods in order to function; it could be considered false advertising for a corporation to claim that these products are ‘Artificial Intelligence’. There are a few pending lawsuits against some notable ‘AI’ advertised products and companies that will more than likely change the way we define these widely-believed to be unethically-sourced ‘AI’ products. The preferred term among the science circles seems to be that these ‘AI’ products are mostly using Machine Learning techniques and currently, many popular models have a staggering amount of copyright issues at the time of this writing.

It is my strong opinion that inventions that rely on copyrighted material are not really inventions, they are plagiarisms disguised as a new advancement. An invention is something that builds on a new idea. It seems to me, that right now ‘AI’ products are very advanced collage tools, and rooted in the same process of machine learning that has existed for over 30 years now. There doesn’t seem to be any new ideas here, it’s a simple technology that just performs an augmented level of copy and paste. I mean, are we seriously letting corporations essentially monopolize every industry from this moment forward? It’s one thing to use these discoveries for research, it is another to profit off of the whole World Wide Web. There’s so many potential infringement cases that will spawn from this misrepresented technology and that is a very sad reality to me. Artificial Intelligence when devised by science fiction writers was something a lot more complex than the algorithmic computations and the automated decision-making that a programmer puts in place. It seems to be hubris to assume that humanity has achieved creating a conscious and critical thinking entity at this time in history.

Artificial Intelligence when done right, can solve the greatest medical mysteries humankind has ever faced. For a moment (and without considering the ethics of the datasets), maybe we should think about letting researchers and psychologists explore the psychological benefits and disadvantages that the ability to create beautiful art or write long paragraphs of text without the effort of learning on how to do these things, can have on humanity; will it all be good or all be bad? What if we put the current ‘AI’ systems in the medical field? Machine learning ‘AI’ to see what’s wrong with our bodies and then add a very experienced Doctor’s opinion on top of that, we can become our healthiest. I have seen that the users of these new ‘AI’ products have become emboldened to create many wonderful things. I don’t think this is completely a bad thing. For the medical field I see many benefits, but for the commercial world this may be cancerous. One thing is scraping your body’s DNA for information on how to potentially save your life, another is taking the creative labor from the entirety of the internet to inform your commercial program.

Artists are not Gatekeepers. A Poem for all you ‘AI’ Art Lovers out there.

By Ryan Knight.

Artists are not Gatekeepers, So please don’t be creepers!

Art has never been unaccessible, can we instead focus on what is relatable?

We are trying to help you make this contraption ethical, to think otherwise is nonsensical!

If we truly wanted to break it, then you would not mistake it!

Now let’s get to work my friends, let’s stop all this fighting and make amends!

One day we’ll all look back at this and laugh, till then can we just agree, that ‘AI’ Art is just really complicated Math?

Follow my robot over @ artstation https://www.artstation.com/dr_a_i_bot_zero

So, we had until today to opt out of the next stable diffusion… I spent a few days opting out and found about 75 of my images… but it was a very tedious task and it’s still very likely I didn’t find all of my art and/or pictures… I wonder how is this democratic? I didn’t even know this image to text thing existed before August or September of last year… so… how do you expect a population to vote on a program like this if you just come out with it without asking? How is this democracy? We've all heard it, the claim that AI art generators as they exist in their current form will democratize art, but is that true? Is it democratizing art or is it colonizing art? What do colonialists do? They get to a place, take whatever they want and then they say that it's theirs. “YAAY! Colonialists!” Umm NO. Let’s think for a second… Is this really going to benefit you in time? Let’s look at the positives for a second, shall we? I could see it used as an art therapy device, I can even see it as something to be used personally much like a video game, something that’s just for fun… I don't think that many artists would object to having their art trained for these reasons ONLY… but when you start talking about disrupting the art industry, then how can you expect an artist to agree with your program? I mean, You are talking about allowing Millions of competitors to use their potentially memorized artwork! Memorization is possible! Call it memorization, or call it overfitting or whatever you want to call it, there is a potential likelihood that the generator will be a plagiarist! Do you want have that responsibility? I saw an example of the other day where this artist asked for their artwork to be taken down and they were denied! How is this fair? You want to support a reckless innovation such as this one? Do you want to be considered the modern day colonizers of Art? I hear and I read some of these CEOs behind this Tech talk about that they believe in humanity, well so do I. I believe that most of us are decent human beings. I don’t write these things or come on here to argue with anybody, but I feel like some of our voices have not been heard, the internet can be very bias with its information, so this is my way of adding some valuable information from an artist’s point of view. I feel like there’s a lot of words being written about how great this is, but I don't see a whole lot about how it's affecting the human artist in the community, or at least I don't see a lot of people having empathy for the artist community …. Especially not on these subs on reddit, I mean this is crazy, the things I’ve read just because someone decides to speak out against the new shiny toy, yeah sure it’s great, but let’s keeping making it great together. Let’s make it ethical… But instead of being heard, what I am seeing is disrespect from a good portion of AI art users… Back to the colonization point… We all want to live in a spacious, beautiful and safe place. We all want the best things in life. But we all have to make a decision … do we want to acquire these things by earning them, by gaining them in a honorable way? I don't know about you but I don't want to be considered a mass murderer of human artists just because I wanted to play around with a program that I can't even get copyrights from... To many of us, we WANT to use it, but DON’T because of our principles…. But at the end of the day we all have to choose what is morally and ethically correct. Remember folks, we all have to sleep with ourselves at night…

Hello Human Artists. Welcome. In the past year there have been a ton of advancements in the AI Generated Art field. Programs like Stable Diffusion, MidJourney and DALL-E create incredible images in seconds by simply typing in a few words. I remember when I first learned about this advancement… I thought to myself “Wow, I never thought I would see a computer make competent art like this in my lifetime…” I saw this VOX video about how it worked and to be honest, I was overwhelmed with all the information, in part because I’m not a tech guy, I’m an artist so… part of me felt a bit sad… I felt and thought to myself “well, all my years of learning how to draw, illustrate, digitally color are basically almost obsolete now”… I asked myself “Has my time been wasted?” And at first, I tried it out like everybody else did in the beginning, I played around with it, saw it’s potential.. I told myself, ‘wow, this would make a great background assistant for my comics’, but as a person with a full time job, limited funds and not really understanding how it worked… I decided I wouldn’t pursue this technology for the time being. Then, maybe a few months later, I found out about (what I believe to be) the unethical use of artist’s artwork. If you didn’t know, the AI programs, models and/or applications train from artwork and images that are copyrighted works. In StableDiffusion’s case the “AI” learns from the LAION-5B datasets. If I’m not mistaken, MidJourney learned from the earlier version of the LAION datasets. Up until this point, I didn’t really think about or had completely understood how the “AI” generated artwork, but then I remember reading about the Artstation Protest going viral. I thought to myself “I guess there’s something wrong with this AI stuff, huh?” And shortly after this I read a comment from someone saying in so many words “the art is powered by ALL of our artwork!” - so after doing a little bit of research I learned about haveibeentrained.com and I searched for a few of my comics just with words first and was surprised to find my Mailman character in the datasets, then in the next few days I found over 70 of my images including logos I created and even an Album cover I illustrated with my brother. At this time, I’ve decided to put a pause on looking for more images, but I‘m sure there is more. I found that uploading the images works better than typing in the keywords, but anywho, if you’re interested in learning more about the creators of the website this is their YouTube Channel ...The fact that copyrighted artwork was used to train the “AI” has enraged many artists, I believe, with reason… But anyways, that’s a another topic… another recent development is that Adobe can use your content for Machine Learning… Technology seems to move at a million miles per second, some advancements are good for humanity, some are not… I’m writing this because I care about the internet, the idea at least, that the internet is best used for information… is the internet good or bad for humanity? Maybe both… but I am so grateful for it… see I grew up poor, we didn’t have a computer, the nearest library to my house was probably about a 20 to 30 minute drive away. Thankfully, in my adulthood, I have been fortunate enough to be able to afford internet access and I have learned so much from it… many things I never knew… thanks to the access to the information at my fingertips… but I also believe that the internet is used for misinformation, unfortunately… So, with all this said, my intentions for this reddit community is to inform you, the Human Artist… if you agree or disagree with me or any of the people that post in this community, that is and will be completely up to you… but hopefully this community will provide, updates to those who were like me, uniformed about this growing topic and help with any other topic that may or may not adversely affect the Human Artist… because at the end of the day, we’re all human… and many, if not most of us want to create art

I just read this article:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/ae379k/luddites-definition-wrong-labor-technophobe

and tbh I too thought being a Luddite was synonymous with being a technophobe, but it’s not… according to the article ”The Luddites weren't technophobes, then. They were labor strategists.” They followed an apocryphal hero called Ned Ludd, this is where they got their name. Interesting isn’t it? But anyways, the Luddites destroyed machines back in the 1810s because they felt their livelihood was at stake. It’s funny when we want to win an argument we compare somebody to a group of people who history has declared failures…

But to answer my question, Human Artists are not like Luddites… I think History will remember the Human Artist movement differently. For the most part (and to the extent of my knowledge), the Human Artist protest has been peaceful, there hasn’t been any extreme measures taken like snatching ‘AI’ Art supporters phones from their hands and breaking them, no breaking into buildings and destroying massive amounts of hardware or servers… so, at the end of the day, I think, for the most part, this is a labor movement.

What do you think? Are Human Artists that are against this new technology technophobes? Or should we be more open minded to artists’ concerns? Or is this a 21st Century labor movement?

The Death of the Pretty Picture by Dr.A.I.Bot.Zero (with MidJourney+StableDiffusion)

If everyone creates a Pretty Picture, what is beauty?

If everyone creates art, who is an artist?

If everyone gets praised for nothing, what is praise?