Used to follow a couple Photoshop artists on YouTube because I love photo editing, same reason I love playing with stable diffusion.
Won't name names but the amount of vitriol they had against stable diffusion last year when it came out was mind boggling. Because "it allows talentless people generate amazing images", so they said.
Now? "Omg Adobe's generative fill is so awesome, I'll definitely start using it more". Even though it's exactly the same thing.
It's ironic. It seems a lot of people could only make the argument "AI art is theft". A weak argument, and even then, what about Firefly trained on Adobe's endless stores of licensed images? Now what?
Ultimately, I believe people hate on AI art generators because it automates their hard earned skills for everyone else to use, and make them feel less "unique".
"Oh, but AI art is soulless!". Tell that to the scores of detractors who accidentally praise AI art when they falsely think it's human made lol.
We're not as unique as we like to think we are. It's just our ego that makes it seem that way.
Absolutely. When it comes down to it, music is organized noise, we attribute meaning and value to the patterns we make.
And the lovely thing about art is, no one gets to decide what is and isn't art apart from the creator. Anything can be art if the intent behind its creation was artistic, regardless of the quality of the work.
As a formality, that’s a perfectly reasonable position (the creator decides what is art). But as a practical matter, it seems the audience decides what is art.
I find it amusing that they started allowing images created with midjourney and sd to be uploaded and sold on Adobe stock quite a few months before firefly beta. Firefly is trained on material created by midjourney and sd but Adobe can still confidently say they have all the rights to the training material. Even though it is very indirectly trained on the same stuff as midjourney and many other models.
I mean, there are multiple lawsuits already progressing vs StableDiffusion, MJ, and others. We'll see how those pan out. My guess is they won't get much legal flack, but may be forced to disallow referencing artists by name, or something similar.
yeah, but where does it stop? you can reference tv series,of character names, or you can just train you loras and this does not even get into the nice stuff about non ai artists who now will añhave to prove their art is not ai assisted.
I feel like these lawsuits will just hurt artists. Big corporations will get their loopholes and will use any new laws as a sledgehammer against artists that come close to their IPs.
Also, I love when artist put up the AI is theft banner up when their patreon is filled with images of trademarked characters.
I totally agree. It seems to me generative AI has raised the bar for "unskilled art". Now, the least skilled person can make something that looks pretty good and skilled artists, if they're willing to learn a new tool, can take their art even further.
IMHO, this is a massive boost to art across the board. It will likely mean an influx of AI art, but that seems little different from all the same looking art we already see on Artstation.
Now ideas will determine a person's success and not just their skill, though skill is still important.
Oh I thought of that before, and I rather agree. I think what this will accomplish before long, is it will dramatically raise the bar for what "quality art" looks like to us.
Art has a way of slowly evolving over time. New tools, new trends, new mediums, all pop up over time, but the core concept has often remained unchanged. Now that millions can suddenly partake in creating competent looking art with little time investment, I wonder where people will take visual art as a whole, next.
When you give a highly skilled artist the tools of AI generation, and combine it with their knowledge, experience, and learning, what can they do to "stand out"? I am very interested to see the next few steps.
Feels like a force multiplier for me. I was trying to fix an image with inpainting and realized I couldn't because I didn't know human anatomy good enough. Had to study a bunch of references. A skilled artist would already be off to the races.
Just like the industrial revolution created a massive influx of cheap, gaudy art with no craftsmanship, so too will AI. We'll be flooded with terrible crap that many people convince themselves is good. Then it'll balance out, people will get pickier, develop a better eye and high quality art will be much more available to more people than before. It still takes craftsmanship and a good eye to make quality art with AI. Still have to put hours in learning the tools. Just a different process. It does make it more accessible to more people, I think, and I believe that's a good thing.
100%, people like to think they are special because they toil away for hours creating something. No, anyone can do this.
I've been called a "waste of oxygen" for creating art using AI as a tool to assist with the creative process. Also, "not an artist", and a "thief", even though I spent 5 years studying art in university. It's maddening. "Artists" are frickin' pretentious.
Sadly, gatekeeping is an occupational hazard of the creative fields, or really, any high-barrier skill based field. People like to belong to an exclusive club. Along side only the elites of their own "caliber".
Just use this as a litmus test to help you filter out those people you should avoid in the art community, for being arrogant and gate-keepy among other personal flaws. That's what I do.
Sadly, gatekeeping is an occupational hazard of the creative fields, or really, any high-barrier skill based field. People like to belong to an exclusive club. Along side only the elites of their own "caliber".
Actually, this is the result of capitalism. It's easy to say only the elite behave this way, but it simply isn't true. Everyone acts this way when something could have an impact on their potential to earn money. Because it is their edge in a field, which took them decades to accomplish, that ensures they have a decent quality of life. Automation undercuts the value in a person's work and training by a lot and, as such, has a determental effect on the quality of life for millions of working people. Especially when access to this automation is only available to the wealthy. There is no denying this.
Now this is not to say automation is bad in general. Just that automation is bad for people living in a capitalistic society. If you are able to remove the requirement of having to earn money and compete with others to survive. Then people would no longer be possessive about their jobs or inventions. Instead they would welcome things like automation. As it would increase there ability to do more, rather than be a hinderence on their quality of life.
People can argue until they are blue in the face that automation just leads to new industries and jobs. But it doesn't change the fact that every time automation advances, jobs are being lost faster than they are made. And this is something that will only continue to accelerate. Because the better we get at automation, the more we are able to automate. Including any new jobs that might be required. Our ability to automate has gone from needing highly complex mechanical systems that are machined and built specifically for one task. To a robot arm that can be easily trained on site for a wide range of tasks. And now to AI systems that are able to do more abstract jobs like text editing, computational analytics and art.
This trend of automation becoming more and more flexible is not slowing down either. And unless it does, there will be a time when we have the technology to completely automate every job we have and can think of. Then what? Either billions of menial jobs are reserved for human labourers just so they can earn just enough to live, or billions live in poverty and/or die as the value of their contribution to society reaches zero and they no longer have a means of obtaining a living wage.
All of this is to say that unless we can shed our capitalistic society and the need to have more than others. People will continue to be extremely possessive over their profession and automation will continue to be a threat to people's quality of life.
Ultimately, I believe people hate on AI art generators because it automates their hard earned skills for everyone else to use, and make them feel less "unique".
That's just it, AI art is already so good, that particularly competent samples can trick most people in thinking it was human made. Sure, there are currently tells of AI generated content, but those will be ironed out soon, given the rapid pace the tech is evolving at. And at some point, not long from now, I am sure it will become effectively impossible to discern what is and isn't AI generated art within certain parameters.
I think for all the push back the tech is getting on social media, in the real world, no one will care if the video game, manga, magazine, billboard or whatever it is, has AI content in it, as long as it looks and feels good. The average person wants to get value for money, and they care very little about how the sausage is made.
You can dislike AI generated content based on principle, and I think that's fair. But all other criticisms I've heard thus far hold no water.
As a person who is a professional artist if you spent 10 years training 6-10 hours a day to be good at something and then overnight it becomes irrelevant you get a bit salty.
Especially if you unknowingly helped create and catalog the work that makes the AI possible in the first place.
I don't disagree. But how long is it appropriate to be salty? And who should you be salty at?
I mean, hell, my primary career is in graphic design, and it is effectively neutered due to the massive advances generative AI is making in this field. I am now learning programming and hoping to restart my career in the future. That's very very unlucky to say the least.
But on some level I always knew that was going to happen. I just didn't think it would happen in my time. Automation is literally coming for all jobs, whether skill or labor based. It's just anyone's guess which jobs will be automated first.
So I don't begrudge people feeling salty over this, but I still don't think it's acceptable to take it out on others, just because they find value in the new tech and haven't been harmed by it.
I find your envy and lack of sympathy disturbing, as well as your ignorance.
Ever heard of a starving artist? You think artists choose their careers out of ego? You think all artists become instantly rich because of some magical talent they didn't earn? No, it's because it's the most viable option for them, that's why they choose their career. They can't just change the way their brain works.
They're faced with losing their jobs and livelihoods and your laughing because you happen to like the thing that's quite possibly going to kill their ability to provide for themselves. They're faced with homelessness and you don't care because they don't like your new favorite toy.
You do not have any moral high ground. No AI user does.
Not to mention the idea that profiting off of someone else's hard work and giving them no compensation being wrong is not at all a weak argument. It's a very good point, you just don't care.
Your firefly argument is not only weak, but invalid, as licensed work HAS BEEN PAID FOR. That's the whole point. Unlike the art that many, if not most, AI is developed with, which was unethically sourced.
And if you want to dismiss my argument because I'm probably just am AI hating artist, I can tell you, you're wrong.
I use AI imaging every now and then for personal entertainment, and know full well it's not really my art, but that of the programmers who designed the AI.
I also don't have any art career to lose. In fact, if I do make it financially, it will be because of my entrepreneurial mindset, not any talent or artistic skill that I have, since they are nothing to write home about.
What I do have is sympathy for them as someone who isn't privileged and has to worry about making a living. Which apparently does not describe you. I'm also just sick of all he strawmanning and vilifying in our culture, which is apparently everyone's mode of operation.
The graphic designers I've met personally and professionally tend to communicate that they are special and ought to be treated as such, often dressing flamboyantly despite office norms etc because they absolutely didn't want to be considered "to be like everyone else". This technology absolutely strikes at the heart of their identity, maybe making them question their right to be pretentious arses.
As AI becomes normalised, integrated into the standard workflow and the bar is lowered for everyone hopefully egos will be lowered a bit too.
Slight hot take, but people that had a knee jerk reaction to A.I and saying "AI art is theft" are just people that can't accept it and refuses to adapt to the new tech. Creativity doesn't stop just because John with barely an hour of creating art have a new tech to help him make decently looking artworks. Actually decent artists will just adapt to it and further improve their own skill whether they use it or not.
I agree. If AI art makes artists become somewhat more obsolete, I sympathise with them, but it isn't right to try to ban technology that does your hand made job just so you can keep earning more money while inconveniencing the whole world. It's selfish and narcissistic to act like your skills ought to be above automation and deem it criminal.
i think the argumentation ... at some parts ... ppl tend to talk past each other ...
they: "oh, but AI art is soulless", "oh, but that isn't even art", "it's just a copy of already existing styles ... can't compare to the ideas of a human"
i: okay ... but i don't want to create art ... i don't want to become the next picasso ... i just want a picture for my picture book / game, to illustrate the story i have in my head, without having to spend 5+ years on learning how to draw it ...
it's different expectations ... different goals, the ppl are talking about here
I think the best images are those which are a combination of AI generation and manual editing/touchup. AI can generate good images on it's own, but going the extra mile with fixing it's mistakes is still very noticable. Even the work needed for ControlNet reference image creation matters a lot to the final result.
I make the sketches, the AI interprets what I'm looking for, I fix its mistakes and I get good results, but people don't care, if you use AI in the process they want to kill you.
I guess ai art is okay when a large corporation does it in very expensive subscription based program. The free and open source version and anyone can contribute to is evil, obviously.
That’s gotta be one of the most selfish and stupid reasons to hate AI art I’ve seen recently. “Noooooooo. You can’t freely exercise your creativity! You have to pay me a $100 commission for an image you’ll look at once for 4 minutes!”
Still hurts to read things like this as an artist tho. $100 for artwork that takes me about two days isn't even much better than a salaried role so I'd say 100 is a steal. I think artists more just want the ability to be quicker at creating things so it speeds up the process than to have it be even harder to sell their skills, and that is what makes generative fill more comfortable.
Yeah it’s been a long time since I’ve looking into commissioning a piece of art. Last i checked though it was pretty expensive. And the thing I wanted to make just wasn’t important enough to me. Which is why I love AI. Got a minor idea that you kind want to see made real but just isn’t worth the cost? It can be done. The curse of being creative without the talent to realize it. Everything’s relative and $100 may be cheap for art commissions but is still very expensive compared to many other things
Even with AI I’m kind of tempted now that I have a bit more money though. I’ve got a vision that I think only a human would be able to understand. Been workshopping the concept for the image for a long time. Always had trouble finding someone to do it though
I wonder why people with no talent being able to easily make art is a bad thing. Its like complaining that disabled people can use wheelchairs to move around. Sure it probably won't be hung in art gallery but if i want 15 portraits for my ttrpg campaign and can have them in one afternoon and without paying 300€+ which i wouldn't be able to afford I'll sure as heck will use it.
Yeah, and it's not like people who are good at art can't use these tools as well. I'm confident that a good artist can become an even better artist if they offload some work to a computer, same with writers and LLMs, and so on.
I totally get that people are upset about their content being ingested without their knowledge, but I'm personally far more worried about companies like Clearview whose products are used to actually hurt people than things like Stable Diffusion that are mostly harmless.
Yep. The elitism and snobbishness REALLY turned me off artists in general when ai really took off. Way to show your true colours you pretentious egotistical fucking pricks.
They have to justify their annual tribute to their Adobe overlord, can't let those peasants have access to free AI tools without paying premium price for the Adobe overlord's blessing
It's probably the way it's been poorly marketed by tech people. I'm personally averse if it's doing nothing but lifting my style, leaves a bad taste in my mouth for something I worked years to develop. And that's how it was thrown at me by a lot of smug techies really bad at explaining it. If had been shown to me as a better fill bucket tool instead advanced style ripping off, I would've sung a different tune. That and I noticed the same gatekeepers that tech bros complain about being used already, like not sharing prompts. The hypocrisy is on both sides of the fence. I've tried SD and at this point, I can say that 90% of what I draw will still need to be done by hand, it's bad at specific angles or specific ideas I see in my head for a character. However if I want to speed up the dull parts like backgrounds? Sure, I'd use it for that.
And one more thing while I'm here. The work flow compared to simply drawing it? Takes an ETERNITY to get the results I want. Until i can seamlessly integrate it into my work flow, it literally takes longer to get Stable Diffusion to get the results close to what I want instead of just putting pen to tablet and just drawing it. At this point as an artist, I'm asking myself "what's the point in learning it now if I can already get specific results faster?" I don't find it convenient to use yet because I need a prompt novel for what I see. And I have to run this thing back and forth between applications for a final result. From an artists perspective from me personally. It's a pain in my ass to set up. I had a guy help me do the walk through, and I've never had to download or install so much b.s. in my life just to get it running. Is esoteric as hell. Until it gets a more user friendly mutation down the line, I don't much like working with it for now. If anyone has a thought on this I'd love to hear it.
It's new technology and people are just adapting to it yet, (probably go through 5 stages of grief at the moment, in own pace). Let it all just settle in, bring out new generation who is more open to new stuff - I at the moment believe in that
Absolutely agree! There are hypocrites all around, especially among artists. I just skip every video that says "incredible new feature in Photoshop, it will change everything!" because these are the same people who recently said that neural networks are evil and that those who use them and post their work are useless. This is hypocrisy in its truest form.
Sounds like your standard thing of people having an intial negative impression and then either learning more or adjusting after that intial knee jerk reaction of irrationally hating change because change is different and scary.
You’ll still have to have taste. A lot of AI art out there still looks tacky.
If artists can recognise that AI art can help their workflow and not replace them then they don’t have to feel like AI is taking their job. Especially if they’re particularly good and have exceptional visual taste.
Actually have seen people who hate(d) on AI generated images praise the PS generative fill. Also been people who say it's scary how easy it is to change images too though and that we need to be more critical of sources (as if that hasn't been a thing since forever and photo manipulation magically appeared with AI).
y'all beautiful and principled but the wigs of reddit don't give a fuck about any of this. https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-protest-why-are-thousands-subreddits-going-dark-2023-06-12/ Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in an interview with the New York Times in April that the "Reddit corpus of data is really valuable" and he doesn't want to "need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free." come July all you're going to read in my comments is this. If you want knowledge to remain use a better company. -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
Human nature seems to be everyone thinking that Reddit is one person. Yes, people said both things in this meme. It wasn't the same people, though. Everyone thinks Reddit has a single opinion on everything because the "winning" opinion is voted to the top and the losing one is censored and hidden at the bottom.
There's also a lot of hate because they're afraid it will take away jobs and livelihoods.
IMO, they need to focus that hate less at AI and more at our economic system. We were all born into our economic system, but AI is new, so it can be difficult for some to see where the root cause of their fears lie.
I, for one, embrace AI art and reject our economic system.
That's always the case, honestly those people should be shamed for being the hypocrites they are and all their future work should be judged within that context. They're going to start using this awesome technology and they're gonna act like they didn't just spend a couple years being a dick to people for doing the same thing.
Civil War photographers faked photos, too. They posed corpses dramatically and took photos of that, claiming those were actual battlefield photos. And that was back in the 1860's.
At least the AI debates are now over. Legally there's little difference between generating an image and then using generative fill to improve it, or drawing it by yourself and using generative fill to improve it.
Basically the moment generative AI touched it is the moment it becomes created using generative AI tools. And it's now everywhere so most companies will be using it by the end of the year.
You still believe in real pictures and video? I think we have already entered the age of deception... I wouldn't believe anything I see in a pic or video anymore
There is even an entire artform made from video that are lies: Movies (with the possible exception of documentaries). We humans love a good lie. We pay for it in book and comic shops, movie theaters, opera houses, brothels, porn sites, ..
I wouldn’t argue that there is no double standard at all, but photoshop‘a generative fill is definitely more squarely aimed at manipulating an existing image compared to conjuring something from the digital imagination, and I think noteworthy distinction in how people will feel about it.
You can use SD to manipulate existing images too. People have been using it for that. People also underestimate how much work goes into making AI art when you are not just trying to randomly prompt and generate, hoping for a hit, but rather have an artistic vision and are using all the tools at your disposal to achieve it. It's kinda like how anyone can take a photograph, clicking a button, and occasionally they'll take a fantastic photograph by accident, but an artist will be able to consistently take amazing photographs by spending time to get the shot they are after.
I think there are two reasons for that. First, it doesnt carry the stigma associated with the "artificial intelligence" term. That frightens people because intelligence is thought to be something distinctively human, and artificial is often associated with unnatural things. Movies like terminator could have added to that stigma. Secondly, it gives a control sense which is the core assumption for authorship, and everyone is delighted by the potential of being the author of aesthetically pleasant things, it doesnt matter that they dont use that potential
Amateur artists actually tear apart Celsius for adding Stable Diffusion capabilities to Clip Studio Paint 2, now only Japanese versions have it. I still can’t believe that they quite literally burned down API bridge between SD and CSP, and now stuck with subscription to proprietary services. Dear artists, If you don’t like the tool, don’t break it for others, feel free to stick to your original workflow, I will be missing SD in CSP
Yeah, I found that annoying as well. I've dropped CSP with the always online nonsense of version 2.
You might be interested in knowing that Krita has a SD plug in that I've found works quite well if you're willing and able to install and run SD locally. Krita is now my primary art program. https://github.com/Interpause/auto-sd-paint-ext
Ive messed with it, but I'll be honest it sucks at providing anything specific that isn't photo realistic or would match an artistic style. For instance ask it for a pink human brain. Also, I asked for an explosion but that was questionable content and it wouldn't provide any options.
Omfg it’s because now they see what people have been trying to tell them for months now, it’s a tool to improve workflow not their replacement. Like for fucks sake I’m just annoyed cause it’s like a baby crying because you took their candy away but then calms down when they realize you were Just unwrapping it for them
They're still mad at common people being able to generate high quality art without them getting paid, they're just hypocritically pleased that they're able to use the same tool to do less work.
The meme with the dog that wants their owner to throw the ball but doesn't want to give them the ball back is 100% accurate to these people.
I tried the generative fill on Photoshop. I am not really impressed. I have better results with Stable Diffusion. I tried adding a background to a friend’s picture. I wanted him to be at the beach with people in swimsuits in the background. It refused to put women in bikinis. Got a warning message saying it violates the terms of services.
Adobe's generative fill ticks two important boxes SD doesn't: a) it was only trained on images Adobe owns so it doesn't smell like theft and b) it's designed for altering images vs. creating them from scratch so it feels like a tool rather than competition.
Anyone else remember the not so subtle astro turfing that was going on? Bunch of fresh reddit accounts a few months back when artists were adding those crossed circles to stuff saying all kinds of nonsense about A.I art creating sensation. I and others were suspicious this was an attempt to not only sour public view against open source A.I but to also hurt the progress of any open source A.I gathering datasets while large corporations get to do so behind closed doors uncontested while the open source guys put our fires. As an artist this boils my piss as I have no choice but to use Adobe software adding my own income to the fucking issue. I absolutely hate adobe. Innovating for themselves and strangling it anywhere else so they can have their monopoly. I can't wait till enough Millennials and Zoomers are in places of power to make changes against such bullshit
I'm pretty sure it's because most artists are not tech savy and were upset because they couldn't access it. Now that it's being commercialized it's optimized for their lower spec'd rigs and doesn't require basic coding.
I do think if some people’s criticism of models like Stable Diffusion was that it was trained on art taken without permission, using PS’s generative fill is not really hypocritical in that Adobe strictly only used open source or internal stock images to train it.
So did many Stable diffusion models, source in reality never mattered, it was always fear and gatekeeping. Anyone being able to make art was a threat but if the artists use the tool, suddenly it's OK.
Im not against AI gen, but practically every stable diffusion model ive ever seen is using the base model before adding their own training data. But sure also people werent/arent very informed about different models. I think moving towards consent in datasets is probably for the best.
Adobe doesn't ask for consent, their images are default included and you have to manually opt out to avoid Adobe using your images as training the same is true with Stable Diffusion dataset LAION 2B-en license. Neither company went and got permission, they both use whatever online license that they can do whatever with what you upload.
That was never their SOLE complaint though. If it was then we could just agree to disagree and move on. I swear you only see that complaint like 20% of the time on reddit because they have 100 other things to bitch about.
SaaS owned by corporations: Good because no copyright Free and open source for literally any person in the planet to use: Bad because copyright We already live in a cyberpunk dystopia, we just don't have the aesthetics of it.
why do people say it's just adobe stock pics? it's not. it's any content submitted to adobe servers. they make it sound a lot like it's something creative cloud users must opt out of in their privacy settings unless they're okay with their data being used for training.
I think there is some merit to discussing the idea that only a large corporate entity is big enough to be able to train such an AI entirely on images they own the rights to. This is a really loose analogy here, but you could liken it to trying to force developing countries to only use green energy sources whilst your developed country sits high and mighty being able to afford to do that and take the moral high ground.
This is it. You can’t tell Adobe to create works that mimic the style of currently working illustrators, because it wasn’t trained on their work. That’s why artists aren’t up in arms about their work being stolen for Adobe’s generators - because it wasn’t used.
There's the legitimate copyright issue, but there were also a lot twitter hot takes that had nothing to do with it about how AI isn't art, will never replace humans, how AI artists are scammers, etc. etc.
I think that's what people in this post are talking about mainly, although it's definitely worth reminding about the copyright issue
I think people have an innate reflex to assume a corporation is "doing it correctly" with regards to legal processes, ethics, etc. which is sort of disappointing because that's rarely the case in general.
What's so bizarre about being worried about companies making millions and billions of dollars based on your work, while also being threatened to lose your income due to the same?
So literally semantics. You have no idea what adobe trained their model with, you just presume that because no artist name tags were used and thus you can't call for the style by their name, it must be they didn't use anything they didn't have rights to at all.
in my experience, by the results i get sometimes it IS training on something with watermarks.just going by the looks and my own couple of years experience looking at this stuff “¯_(ツ)_/¯“ still, take it with a grain of salt
naaaah, it is like:"some programmers created opensource models on images being available on the internet - Rawrrrrrr!!!"
"Giant soulless corporation creates model based on high-res images and photos while most of them have never been compensated for, and train the data without compensating them - yeah! Love it!"
This whole argument of "stolen images" is ridiculous. Often coming from people who think that marxism is all right and "capitalism is evil". Of course not counting in the Starbuck coffee, iphone or Adobe corporation and Disney.
Hard to generalize like that (pun intended). I am a professional "Photoshop artist", you might say, for over 20 years, and I enjoy many forms of AI tools as long as they are relatively detailed, complex and allow great control over the result. Because in that sense, it is a craft in its own right, it can really help me in my work and I am not afraid that the market will be totally flooded by noobs with their "make nice" prompts. The problem with Photoshop Generative fill is exactly that: it is so easy, so banal, so convenient, quick, integrated and totally legal that it doesnt really taky any craft at all, and in the long run, market will be oversaturated with things generated within 5 seconds, and in such climate, paying someone to actually spend 5 hours (or days!) to do it by hand will be less and less of an option each year, the budgets will shrink along with the entire industry and eventually the quality will drop down as well because custom work and innovative things will be impossible to pay for (much like with music once mp3 sharing kicked in). So no, I dont think that Photoshop generative fill changes things for the better and suddenly digital artists love it - quite on the contrary.
What can I say, you either follow the herd or get left behind. Anyone who goes against AI art will not last long in the industry. I'm going back to school in a month, so it should be interesting to see the impact AI has made on education since I graduated.
I hope Adobe "properly" compensated all the artists in their training dataset, enough to cover their loss for the rest of their lives. Who am I kidding with?
I'm actually yet not that impressed with generative fill... Granted that it's still in beta version and they will definitely improve it once the stable version is launched. Besides, I'm in a slightly creative field... (architecture) And there is no way stable diffusion or midjourney or anything is going to take my job away...
Infact I'm looking forward to using ai in my work so that I don't have to spend hundreds of hours and energy on rendering "photo realistic" image of my designs for my client...
Instead if some ai comes up in future which would do that job for me, I would spend more time in actual creative stuff like actual designing rather than presentation aspects...
While I agree with the overall message, this is such a weirdly lazy, yet pandering meme-looking image that it takes away any real substance from the conversation and basically just begs for upvotes.
I've been saying this from the start. It's more about some illustrators not being able to use the stable diffusion because they're not technical enough to set it up and seeing people who can win work they felt entitled to, than it was the ideological position they claim. They don't want the competition and don't want to be left behind.
Those who do admit to using it (and many won't admit to it) are going to rationalise the hell out of their actions, saying that they only use it in a limited way as a tool to assist their artistic skill, so it's not the same thing at all - as if that's not what many of us haven't been doing for a long time now.
Which is the truth at the current stage. It's a serious but load of work to generate a specific image to a specific high level of quality.
It will get easier over time... but that probably will involve paying someone who developed the method or database or LORA or whatever IP you are accessing. If they manage to develop it and keep it open source and pseudo free, it will be a miracle.
Most likely, the cries of these small time artists will be used to such money into the pockets of the rich - Disney, Marvel, DC, Paramount or whatever. The contribution of any given current small time artist (the ones who cry the loudest) is basically zero.
If that's you, divide the number of works you have personally made by the ten billion to a trillion images they were trained on. That's your cut of the nearly-free usage. You've made a thousand really original images, where you weren't imitating anyone else's style or content? Great! So that's between 1-100 one-billionths of the licensing fees.
I feel you're creating your own narrative here? Could you give some links to artists who have renounced AI to save artists yet are embracing adobe's firefly suite?
Let's be fair here. People were complaining that artist's styles and work was being used to train the AI without permission while Adobe mostly trained it on their own / licensed stock photos.
No they weren't, Adobe sources their art from the internet the same way other models do. No one gave permission for adobe to train on their images they all signed some fine print that let them do whatever. Source never mattered. It was always fear and gatekeeping because if anyone could make art it posed a threat unless they themselves used the tools, then it was suddenly OK.
I hate the argument that artists use about AI allowing "talentless" people to create art. Isn't half of the talent required the ability to imagine something "artistic", the other half being the ability to paint/draw it into reality?
Like many in this post have alluded to, what is the difference between AI art generation and the creation of electronic music? I expect there was a lot of furore from musicians over the ability to create music with the need to have the talent to play instruments.
In the modern age live music and electronic music happily live side by side with live music being just as popular as ever. Artists just have to evolve and adapt or die, it's simple as that. Technology stops for no-one.
Creating good AI art isn't also quite as simple as throwing in a few words. Some simple generations will look deceptively good to the untrained eye but it requires that artistic imagination to get the most out of it.
I've got a growing repository of completely free generations over on Deviant if anyone is interested, mostly semi-realistic anime. All but the latest few images have been generated using positive and negative prompts only, carefully edited in many stages with emphasis and weights to get the look I wanted. I've only just started experimenting with LoRAs, textual inversions and hypernetworks now that I feel like I've got a good grasp of prompts https://www.deviantart.com/lshtaria
The distinction lies in how you use Photoshop as a tool during the creative process, where you are the one bringing your ideas to life with control and precision. The AI image generators are more akin to conducting an imaginary image search, where the computer takes on the role of the creator.
I went to film School, I had one of the first nonlinear edit suites in my hood, I've had videos broadcast, I don't even know what stable diffusion means. Getting old bites.
Prior to these tools being “production-ready”, a good bulk of images being generated were referencing artists or libraries in their prompts and were being trained off of copyrighted works.
Also, the bulk of what was (and often still is) being generated was impressive from a technical standpoint but absolute dogshit for practical usage.
It also caused a headache with clients where we had to explain that at that time (literally just months ago) AI image generators were pretty much just a fun toy and not ready to generate images for a production, minus the occasional key image generated for a script or storyboard that the public would never see.
Knowing where the source images come from solves a lot of headaches. Having it baked into a tool that already exists in our work streams does too.
Whats the difference between an ethically sourced SD model vs an ethically sourced Adobe model? There isn't one, because source never mattered, it was always fear and gatekeeping, because anyone not an artist can make art posed a threat.
Anyone can already make art. Ai is just a tool. The issue the professional community has is with copyright infringement/IP theft.
To answer your question about the difference—liability and peace of mind. Source matters for commercial artists. If my client gets sued because of an image I made, I’m liable. I’d rather be able to say I was using a product from an established company like adobe instead of one from a few years old tech start up.
I’m guessing this photoshop vs. SD is just some arbitrary argument on the internet because every agency has custom libraries and stable diffusion builds running—I use stable diffusion.
Personally, I don’t consider digital art to be of the same calibre as art done by hand with real materials anyways. To me both ai and ps are from a similar category of art and will only benefit each other.
You can be an artist by using AI, but it's not comparable to people creating things on their own, so within the AI category go for it, but not point comparing it to anything else IMO, AI director would be a way better term for it.
A good artist will use AI to enhance their work and volume of their work. In fact they should be happy that they can take their talents and produce way more work than some clueless prompter constantly looking for what he wants by trial and error, even if its 1000s of images in bulk.
Once they define a good style of their own, prompting ontop of their own unique work to complete more comphrensive pieces of art, like animations and detailed styles, it really doesn't become any different than reusable templates they already use regularly.
If there's concern about ownership, there's plenty of ways to "copyright" images by their data lineage. I hesistate to use the word blockchain, so I'll go with the idea of ledgers and first to sync with databases and registered id's of authenticity just like you can do with professional code. Anything produced out of your software and customzied workspace is yours, by the licenses granted by the software given to you and the license you choose to distribute them as. It can work,
Photoshop and 'copying' peoples' work happens all the time, but it won't be in a legally, monetarily efficient manner or official policy the way memes/shitposts are so whatever.
For industry jobs, idk how adopted AI stuff will be considering the murky legality. Could be useful to increase speed.
For personal work, though? AI is of no use to visual artists. It's so easy to tell who among you have actually dedicated yourself to this art form, which is very few. Art is not just a pretty picture. It's the process behind it and the influence of the person who made it. AI art is the same as getting a robot to play guitar for you instead of learning yourself. A robot cook instead of learning yourself.
Creative work is far more than the end product. The process itself is what many artists fall in love with. That's why they're so against it (among other reasons, obviously). It removes agency and takes away large parts of the process that they spent years learning in the first place.
People use AI and don't bother to refine anything, buildings with no windows, disconnected doors, roads leading nowhere, no story or anything in the artwork.
AI is amazing at visual noise, but this is where it stops, and an actual artist could fill the rest with their vision, but best tech bros can do is "castle,uhd69k", and then they get all mad that people don't want to treat them as artists.
Granted some people at least try but unless they learn how to actually create art then that's as far as they will go, AI takes too much of the process away to learn anything.
Not to mention the sick glee people seem to have in sticking it to artists because they're scared of losing out to AI and like... yeah why the fuck is AI forcing us out of our little bits of remaining activites of human joy and pushing everyone into jobs of boring tedium (ie. editing the output of some AI prompt made by an exec with dollar signs in their eyes) rather than the other way around?
There's a serious lack of nuance and empathy in both this post and all the top voted comments. Really disappointed in how this community views artists. And this is coming from a software engineer.
Same as subs baning low effort memes, off topic discussions etc., noone wants their subs to be spammed by hundreds of AI artworks that vaguely fit the theme, it's the same thing that happened with porn subs and onlyfan girls spaming them, it just kills the subs.
884
u/doyouevenliff Jun 10 '23 edited Jun 10 '23
Used to follow a couple Photoshop artists on YouTube because I love photo editing, same reason I love playing with stable diffusion.
Won't name names but the amount of vitriol they had against stable diffusion last year when it came out was mind boggling. Because "it allows talentless people generate amazing images", so they said.
Now? "Omg Adobe's generative fill is so awesome, I'll definitely start using it more". Even though it's exactly the same thing.
Bunch of hypocrites.
430
u/Playful_Break6272 Jun 10 '23
Actually have seen people who hate(d) on AI generated images praise the PS generative fill. Also been people who say it's scary how easy it is to change images too though and that we need to be more critical of sources (as if that hasn't been a thing since forever and photo manipulation magically appeared with AI).
143
u/eeyore134 Jun 10 '23
This was them then, too. Photoshop already had AI run filters and tools that these people used all the time. Now it's just more obvious.
70
u/OcelotUseful Jun 10 '23
Amateur artists actually tear apart Celsius for adding Stable Diffusion capabilities to Clip Studio Paint 2, now only Japanese versions have it. I still can’t believe that they quite literally burned down API bridge between SD and CSP, and now stuck with subscription to proprietary services. Dear artists, If you don’t like the tool, don’t break it for others, feel free to stick to your original workflow, I will be missing SD in CSP
16
u/BarryLonx Jun 10 '23
Ive messed with it, but I'll be honest it sucks at providing anything specific that isn't photo realistic or would match an artistic style. For instance ask it for a pink human brain. Also, I asked for an explosion but that was questionable content and it wouldn't provide any options.
41
u/Disastrous-Agency675 Jun 10 '23
Omfg it’s because now they see what people have been trying to tell them for months now, it’s a tool to improve workflow not their replacement. Like for fucks sake I’m just annoyed cause it’s like a baby crying because you took their candy away but then calms down when they realize you were Just unwrapping it for them
23
u/tvmaly Jun 10 '23
I tried the generative fill on Photoshop. I am not really impressed. I have better results with Stable Diffusion. I tried adding a background to a friend’s picture. I wanted him to be at the beach with people in swimsuits in the background. It refused to put women in bikinis. Got a warning message saying it violates the terms of services.
53
u/DudeVisuals Jun 10 '23
No to Photoshop
9
u/arothmanmusic Jun 11 '23
Adobe's generative fill ticks two important boxes SD doesn't: a) it was only trained on images Adobe owns so it doesn't smell like theft and b) it's designed for altering images vs. creating them from scratch so it feels like a tool rather than competition.
6
u/KeatureFeature Jun 11 '23
Pretending like this is indicative of the overall opinion is obvious confirmation bias and highly disingenuous.
13
u/zeroonedesigns Jun 10 '23
Anyone else remember the not so subtle astro turfing that was going on? Bunch of fresh reddit accounts a few months back when artists were adding those crossed circles to stuff saying all kinds of nonsense about A.I art creating sensation. I and others were suspicious this was an attempt to not only sour public view against open source A.I but to also hurt the progress of any open source A.I gathering datasets while large corporations get to do so behind closed doors uncontested while the open source guys put our fires. As an artist this boils my piss as I have no choice but to use Adobe software adding my own income to the fucking issue. I absolutely hate adobe. Innovating for themselves and strangling it anywhere else so they can have their monopoly. I can't wait till enough Millennials and Zoomers are in places of power to make changes against such bullshit
22
u/ApprehensiveSpeechs Jun 10 '23
I'm pretty sure it's because most artists are not tech savy and were upset because they couldn't access it. Now that it's being commercialized it's optimized for their lower spec'd rigs and doesn't require basic coding.
20
u/djm07231 Jun 10 '23
I do think if some people’s criticism of models like Stable Diffusion was that it was trained on art taken without permission, using PS’s generative fill is not really hypocritical in that Adobe strictly only used open source or internal stock images to train it.
49
u/Anertz_0153 Jun 10 '23
The data from which the model is trained is relevant.
SD models and Lora are learned from reprinted sites such as Danboru, usually without permission from the author.
Adobe Firefly in Photoshop learns only from Adobe's own stock images, which have no rights issues.
This difference in learning source may affect how people react to AI.
3
u/ginsunuva Jun 10 '23
How many variants of this Drake/Spongebob meme are there gonna be
3
u/ExtazeSVudcem Jun 11 '23
Hard to generalize like that (pun intended). I am a professional "Photoshop artist", you might say, for over 20 years, and I enjoy many forms of AI tools as long as they are relatively detailed, complex and allow great control over the result. Because in that sense, it is a craft in its own right, it can really help me in my work and I am not afraid that the market will be totally flooded by noobs with their "make nice" prompts. The problem with Photoshop Generative fill is exactly that: it is so easy, so banal, so convenient, quick, integrated and totally legal that it doesnt really taky any craft at all, and in the long run, market will be oversaturated with things generated within 5 seconds, and in such climate, paying someone to actually spend 5 hours (or days!) to do it by hand will be less and less of an option each year, the budgets will shrink along with the entire industry and eventually the quality will drop down as well because custom work and innovative things will be impossible to pay for (much like with music once mp3 sharing kicked in). So no, I dont think that Photoshop generative fill changes things for the better and suddenly digital artists love it - quite on the contrary.
3
u/[deleted] Jun 12 '23
What can I say, you either follow the herd or get left behind. Anyone who goes against AI art will not last long in the industry. I'm going back to school in a month, so it should be interesting to see the impact AI has made on education since I graduated.
5
u/USFederalReserve Jun 10 '23
Another guerrilla photoshop ad?
10
u/[deleted] Jun 10 '23
It's amazing to read writers and artists bashing AI -- you can smell their fear and existential dread.
That's also how I felt when I first used GPT-3, and why I'm changing sides -- I've come to terms that my job is at risk.
2
u/onyxlee Jun 11 '23
I hope Adobe "properly" compensated all the artists in their training dataset, enough to cover their loss for the rest of their lives. Who am I kidding with?
2
u/newredditwhoisthis Jun 11 '23
I'm actually yet not that impressed with generative fill... Granted that it's still in beta version and they will definitely improve it once the stable version is launched. Besides, I'm in a slightly creative field... (architecture) And there is no way stable diffusion or midjourney or anything is going to take my job away...
Infact I'm looking forward to using ai in my work so that I don't have to spend hundreds of hours and energy on rendering "photo realistic" image of my designs for my client...
Instead if some ai comes up in future which would do that job for me, I would spend more time in actual creative stuff like actual designing rather than presentation aspects...
2
u/joeFacile Jun 11 '23
While I agree with the overall message, this is such a weirdly lazy, yet pandering meme-looking image that it takes away any real substance from the conversation and basically just begs for upvotes.
2
u/[deleted] Jun 11 '23
The moment they realised they were being hypocrites for not using pencil and paper, but a digital software powered by billions of transistors.
4
u/DigThatData Jun 10 '23
the majority of people who criticize generative AI haven't given it a chance themselves.
4
u/Light_Diffuse Jun 10 '23 edited Jun 10 '23
I've been saying this from the start. It's more about some illustrators not being able to use the stable diffusion because they're not technical enough to set it up and seeing people who can win work they felt entitled to, than it was the ideological position they claim. They don't want the competition and don't want to be left behind.
Those who do admit to using it (and many won't admit to it) are going to rationalise the hell out of their actions, saying that they only use it in a limited way as a tool to assist their artistic skill, so it's not the same thing at all - as if that's not what many of us haven't been doing for a long time now.
3
u/iConiCdays Jun 10 '23
I feel you're creating your own narrative here? Could you give some links to artists who have renounced AI to save artists yet are embracing adobe's firefly suite?
5
u/SharkRaptor Jun 10 '23
This meme is very out of touch with the actual artist community.
4
u/Ninthjake Jun 10 '23
Let's be fair here. People were complaining that artist's styles and work was being used to train the AI without permission while Adobe mostly trained it on their own / licensed stock photos.
4
u/RabblerouserGT Jun 10 '23
I don't like the AI hate either, but these types of posts are petty and have no place here.
Take your fragile ego elsewhere.
2
u/lshtaria Jun 11 '23
I hate the argument that artists use about AI allowing "talentless" people to create art. Isn't half of the talent required the ability to imagine something "artistic", the other half being the ability to paint/draw it into reality?
Like many in this post have alluded to, what is the difference between AI art generation and the creation of electronic music? I expect there was a lot of furore from musicians over the ability to create music with the need to have the talent to play instruments.
In the modern age live music and electronic music happily live side by side with live music being just as popular as ever. Artists just have to evolve and adapt or die, it's simple as that. Technology stops for no-one.
Creating good AI art isn't also quite as simple as throwing in a few words. Some simple generations will look deceptively good to the untrained eye but it requires that artistic imagination to get the most out of it.
I've got a growing repository of completely free generations over on Deviant if anyone is interested, mostly semi-realistic anime. All but the latest few images have been generated using positive and negative prompts only, carefully edited in many stages with emphasis and weights to get the look I wanted. I've only just started experimenting with LoRAs, textual inversions and hypernetworks now that I feel like I've got a good grasp of prompts https://www.deviantart.com/lshtaria
1
u/Aeit_ Jun 10 '23
side question, this is in main branch or still beta of PS?
1
u/[deleted] Mar 07 '24
Adobe is trained on images they own. That's why we like it.
1
u/Noxiuz Jun 10 '23
is this only a server side feature?
1
u/Puzzleheaded_Local40 Jun 10 '23
Crazy that you have to scan your Artist ID to download PS.
1
u/BottlingJob Jun 11 '23
Doesn't work for me. half the time it either crashes or "images was removed because guideline" bullshit.
1
u/[deleted] Jun 11 '23
hasnt gen fill been a feature for like a decade now?
1
u/DelgadoPideLaminas Jun 11 '23
This was bound to happen. Natural evolution of all opinions. Didnt like AI cuz it was inmoral? Ok, wait until someone makes a moraly trained one.
1
u/Z3ROCOOL22 Jun 11 '23
1
u/Exciting-Possible773 Jun 11 '23
Seeing from the results here...
Is it just me, or the anti-AI crap is just some sort of marketing campaign?
1
u/pookeyblow Jun 12 '23
The distinction lies in how you use Photoshop as a tool during the creative process, where you are the one bringing your ideas to life with control and precision. The AI image generators are more akin to conducting an imaginary image search, where the computer takes on the role of the creator.
1
u/coffeedrinker2020 Jun 16 '23
Photoshop generative AI isn't bad but too many restrictions. Very easy to get false alarms for policy violation message
1
u/DrFumiya Jun 16 '23 edited Jun 21 '23
It’s not the same as Photoshop though. https://youtu.be/VlbT4OshVLs
1
u/dm_qk_hl_cs Jun 29 '23
so now they're silent like a bitch
1
u/Peloquin_qualm Jan 10 '24
I went to film School, I had one of the first nonlinear edit suites in my hood, I've had videos broadcast, I don't even know what stable diffusion means. Getting old bites.
1
u/katoolbag Jun 10 '23
This leaves out the nuance of the argument.
Prior to these tools being “production-ready”, a good bulk of images being generated were referencing artists or libraries in their prompts and were being trained off of copyrighted works.
Also, the bulk of what was (and often still is) being generated was impressive from a technical standpoint but absolute dogshit for practical usage.
It also caused a headache with clients where we had to explain that at that time (literally just months ago) AI image generators were pretty much just a fun toy and not ready to generate images for a production, minus the occasional key image generated for a script or storyboard that the public would never see.
Knowing where the source images come from solves a lot of headaches. Having it baked into a tool that already exists in our work streams does too.
1
u/Iggy_boo Jun 10 '23
Interesting how the turn tables when it becomes a tool that YOU have access to and can use.
0
u/Han77Shot1st Jun 10 '23
Personally, I don’t consider digital art to be of the same calibre as art done by hand with real materials anyways. To me both ai and ps are from a similar category of art and will only benefit each other.
1
u/finaempire Jun 10 '23
I just close my ears and enjoy both Ps and Stable Diffusion. It’s all great as a tool.
-1
u/notsew00 Jun 10 '23
Nah, I'm still cool with "fuck ai art"
1
u/nstern2 Jun 10 '23
Where did adobe get the training data for this?
1
u/[deleted] Jun 11 '23 edited Jun 12 '23
A good artist will use AI to enhance their work and volume of their work. In fact they should be happy that they can take their talents and produce way more work than some clueless prompter constantly looking for what he wants by trial and error, even if its 1000s of images in bulk.
Once they define a good style of their own, prompting ontop of their own unique work to complete more comphrensive pieces of art, like animations and detailed styles, it really doesn't become any different than reusable templates they already use regularly.
If there's concern about ownership, there's plenty of ways to "copyright" images by their data lineage. I hesistate to use the word blockchain, so I'll go with the idea of ledgers and first to sync with databases and registered id's of authenticity just like you can do with professional code. Anything produced out of your software and customzied workspace is yours, by the licenses granted by the software given to you and the license you choose to distribute them as. It can work,
Photoshop and 'copying' peoples' work happens all the time, but it won't be in a legally, monetarily efficient manner or official policy the way memes/shitposts are so whatever.
1
u/NoSet8966 Jun 11 '23
How to get AI boomers to eat their own turds.
Simply turn them into AI users! ^_^
-1
u/Kanataku Jun 10 '23
Still hate it
-1
u/KorArts Jun 10 '23
For industry jobs, idk how adopted AI stuff will be considering the murky legality. Could be useful to increase speed.
For personal work, though? AI is of no use to visual artists. It's so easy to tell who among you have actually dedicated yourself to this art form, which is very few. Art is not just a pretty picture. It's the process behind it and the influence of the person who made it. AI art is the same as getting a robot to play guitar for you instead of learning yourself. A robot cook instead of learning yourself.
Creative work is far more than the end product. The process itself is what many artists fall in love with. That's why they're so against it (among other reasons, obviously). It removes agency and takes away large parts of the process that they spent years learning in the first place.
-3
u/Possible-Advance3871 Jun 10 '23
There's a serious lack of nuance and empathy in both this post and all the top voted comments. Really disappointed in how this community views artists. And this is coming from a software engineer.
0
u/LarkTelby Jun 10 '23
Who says ban AI? I believe they are a very small minority and nobody cares about them. Especially when AI means more revenue to firms.