Fur Affinity bans artworks generated by artificial intelligence programs
On September 5th, Fur Affinity announced it will not be accepting art works that are generated by artificial intelligence programs. Recently computer algorithm generated artwork has come under much discussion as machine learning applications such as DALL-E have shown the ability to take obscure prompts and create art pieces based on them.
Content created by artificial intelligence is not allowed on Fur Affinity.
AI and machine learning applications (DALL-E, Craiyon) sample other artists' work to create content. That content generated can reference hundreds, even thousands of pieces of work from other artists to create derivative images.
Our goal is to support artists and their content. We don’t believe it’s in our community’s best interests to allow AI generated content on the site.
Dragoneer indicated in a Twitter statement on how blatant these programs are in assimilating the pieces of other artists as their own. He pointed to an example of a signature placed on a piece giving evidence of those that the program sampled from.
We made the decision to ban AI generated content on FA. I know a lot of people are asking, "but what about..."
Look, the AI-generated "art" is openly copying the signatures of the artists and teams it's sampling from. Maybe even from somebody you know. It's too much. - Dragoneer
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Comments
Good for them. The current level of so-called AI art isn't art.
And there was never any bad art on Fur Affinity again!
(I'm all for this rule, too, but you did walk right into that one.)
The deeper issue is no level of AI art will ever be free of how this kind of AI art functions, as it is simply melding together existing images.
There's a reason why actual copyright officials have been refusing to touch the many eager AI image submissions which have already been submitted. It is an intractable problem.
I don't know. This decision doesn't sit entirely well with me. I agree that a flood of AI generated images are not necessarily good for anyone but AI algorithms are just tools. In a sense it feels like the same sort of snobbishness that might lead someone to say that digital art isn't real art because there's an undo button and tools like blurs and filters which function automatically. That's all true, it's not the same as hand-drawn art but it takes skills to use those tools effectively. When it comes to using AI art, I imagine the better artists will be those that can envision more interesting scenes and write better prompts to generate those images.
As for the algorithms analysing thousands (I'd guess it's closer to millions) of artworks, so? That's what artists do too. You're supposed to look at art from different artists and learn from it. Sometimes that means studying how the poses work, how to lay out the individual aspects of a piece or even copying a style or technique. That's how art movements are born; people liking and copying a particular way of drawing or painting. Whether that's pointillism or chibi or so on. It's how the way we do things changes. Look at the dolly zoom from Vertigo or the circling camera around a frozen scene from The Matrix. Those have been copied, adapted and reused over and over. The AI is not doing anything that humans haven't been doing already.
The fact that some AI art includes a signature is not evidence that it's somehow evil, just that it doesn't understand what it's doing. It has no concept of a signature or fox or anything else. It knows there are words associated with certain features and it tries to figure out what your new words will look like based on the examples it's seen before. People do the same thing; they will copy the behaviour of others around them, even if they don't understand the reason why people are doing that behaviour. If anything this makes the AI a little less artificial and a little more human.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
Now if an AI is smart enough to know to obfuscate its inspirations of its own pieces, or grasp the concept of copy rights, then we'll know that Skynet is not too far behind.
If Skynet were Disney...
Or it could be right under our noses... https://www.skynet.net/
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
I would rather not make an account just to rebuttal this. But the problem with AI-Generated content is that it's not the same as a human practicing for years, studying their favorite artists from how they start the process; from how they sketch to how they draw anatomically and to the end result. Keep "end result" and "the process" in mind as you're reading this.
For this, we're going to create two people. One is a Japanese artist, let's say he goes by the name Kojiro on the internet; and the other is an American artist called FluffyFoxLover. Both are entirely fictional and my bad if I accidentally just named two popular artists. (But I mean, come on. FluffyFoxLover? That's a really obvious name to go by.) Kojiro has been practicing art for several years now, and is quite popular on Twitter. FluffyFoxLover likes the kind of work Kojiro makes, and decides to study his art for a day to get an idea of how he draws furries. They take a bunch of Kojiro's works, and uses basic shapes to understand any patterns on how a character is drawn in his art style. This is how I, and a lot of other artists learn to draw a certain way.
Now let's create another fictional character, let's call him DogeCryptoBro1337, Doge/Crypt for short. And let's say he paid a lot of money to get access to some of these high-quality image generators that aren't Craiyon. Crypt sees Kojiro's work, and thinks, "Hey, I want my fursona drawn in that art style. Maybe the AI that I paid early access to will be able to make something out of it." And so he punches in a few descriptive words that will end up creating said image. This time, it took the AI about 5 minutes or less to produce images that fit the description. All it did was look at images, found patterns, copied those patterns, and did none of the hours of work that FluffyFoxLover had to do.
There's a stark difference between the two. FluffyFoxLover took time out of their day to understand how Kojiro drew, and all DogeCryptoBro1337 did was tell a computer to do something. I was a bit offended by how you said it would lead to the same snobbishness that traditional people said digital art isn't real art; but is it really the same as two people fighting over what medium they use to make art compared to someone asking an AI to take thousands of artworks (likely sampling from artists that did the same thing that FluffyFoxLover and Kojiro did) and copy only the patterns it sees to fit the criteria of (what can only be assumed as) an essay to describe an image that Crypt wanted?
Art is not about the destination, it's about the journey to get there. I don't follow the idea of separating an artist from their art, because there is barely any distinction from the two. There is a lot of work that goes into Kojiro's work, and he too studies his favorite artists, or even what is taught in schools, the same way FluffyFoxLover has to.
Yes, technically and fundamentally the idea of artists looking at what other artists do and learn is close to an AI being trained to draw based on different images. But it's only if said AI will also: start with a sketch, understand anatomy and can draw different body types, species, hair styles, etc. Then it proceeds with either inking and then flat colors, or for digital painting proceed with the coloring and then rendering for both. Then yes, it's fundamentally the same. But taking shapes, patterns, and taking the images as well so they can be stitched together into something else is not the same as the process that non-AI-Generated art goes through. Their end result is the same, but ultimately the art being made by an artist will always have more substance to it because there was more effort put into it. (If you want to argue that there was also effort put into programming the AI, remember that in programming your best friends are CTRL + C and CTRL + V. The only effort put into training the AI to create images was keeping the electricity up in the server room. That's it.)
I do not put my faith into AI-Generated Content as being revered by artists, because it really is taking away their jobs. Their whole life's work even. I'm sure you would be offended too if say you've been working as an artist, doing commissions to survive for years. And then all of a sudden some stuck-up nerd in America creates an AI that's perfected your art style and can create images that you would need hours upon hours of work to even make.
Interesting debate, though I want to say a few things.
My main issue with some of that one moral debate is that I feel like one is behaving that if something innovative happened and it effected certain traditional jobs in a negative way, then that's considered a problem because a lot more people uses a lot of certain innovations instead. It's like with cars becoming a thing, effecting a lot of older traditional jobs related to horses. The issue is that nobody was ever morally obligated to pay for artists in the first place alone just as much as nobody was morally obligated to pay for horses for main travel, which is why I scratch my head over this issue.
Another thing I scratch my head over is the artist's "style" debate. Nobody could ever own it in the first place if I'm assuming right, and if so, to bring up art style now (as if it's an artist's "right" when it never was) due to the effects of a machine is essentially the same as trying to argue that we can't copy ideas of certain foods (e.g. off-brand coke like soda) because some people buy those instead of the main brand's version.
If traditional artist A copied another traditional artist B's style and such traditional artist somehow negativity effected the original artist, did traditional artist A did something wrong by copying the style, even though I heard you can't copyright an art style? The effects of certain AI generating art with copying certain art styles has the same logic other than it being a machine instead of a person.
Don't get me wrong, I do hope many good artists will keep their job. it's just hard to bring morality sake in it due to some issues, even though I can understand where some are coming from. Though there might be some Copyright risks and/or some other risks. Maybe there are already ways law can block certain AI machine usages. As for the idea that some are losing jobs already because of AI, I am not too sure if there is evidence of that at the moment and I feel like there are some artists who actually wants to use good AI art results, but not always.
Yeah, it's still just a conservative, anti-innovation argument. It's no different than some arguments you could have had against electric lights (Taking away the jobs of those that used to light the lamps) or the arguments we see about moving away from coal (The miners will lose their jobs). Those are real problems with a transition but they are just an argument against progress.
If one wanted to make an argument against AI, or more accurately for artists, then it should be along the lines of "here's something artists offer than AI does not." If the AI can do exactly what artist's do but for cheaper, then we should move on like we have with every advance in history. If artists can offer something that AI can't then there's no problem for artists as they can focus on that unique aspect. Perhaps that unique aspect will be physical artwork which still needs a person to create it. Perhaps it will just be the prestige; like you can buy manufactured furniture from IKEA or you can get unique furniture from a carpenter.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
Yeah, but no lamp lighter/coal miner was arguing that what they were doing for a job was art. The thing artists offer that an AI does not is art. Like, the unique perspective of the artist is what makes art art.
I am literally having to explain why you should protect people's unique creative voices to the fucking free speech advocate. Again.
The AI is not making these things all on its own. It's following the input from a person. The AI product is the AI assisting a person to express their own unique creative voice. It's not only people that have the skills to draw and paint and model that have creative ideas. Many people have those and if AI offers them the opportunity to make those ideas into images that can be enjoyed, what's wrong with that?
This does not stop artists from doing what they do. And if they are offering a unique perspective that AI can not, then they will still be needed for that unique perspective.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
Well, I think you've run the opposite direction and are severely overestimating the ability of AI to actually create something approximating an artist's visions. I mean, people are not using this to finally provide the visuals for their comic strip they didn't have the ability to draw; it's basically just meme like jokes of the "hey, AI, make SpongeBob, but directed by Zach Snyder" which is fun like for five minutes then it gets boring. I mean, your definition of what constitutes "speech" worthy of protection oscillates wildly, so maybe that is what you're defending, but, I don't really know.
I mean, I'm going to e621, which has been kind of the last bastion of shit banned everywhere else, and ... I'm getting nothing. People aren't using AI to make art because it's just not that useful. It's kind of like NFTs; non-furries could tell it wasn't actually very useful when furries didn't adopt them because we're like the last group on the planet that has an actual art economy going on, so if we weren't using NFTs, they weren't actually useful to working artists. Likewise, if the website that doesn't and probably won't ever ban them wasn't crap flooded by them when they were banned elsewhere, it probably means nobody was seriously using them to begin with.
The images created just aren't, ironically, manipulable enough to be really useful. I mean, going back to the "finally drawing my comic strip" example, something as simple as a character staying on model from panel to panel is nearly impossible. Maybe this is a question that will become relevant as the technology advances, but right now it's just not really at a point where's its anything other than a gimmick.
I've got to be honest, I don't quite follow most of what you're trying to say here.
Can you explain where you think the potential free speech issue is? I can see someone arguing that banning AI art is a violation of someone's free speech but I can't see how you think allowing it is somehow a free speech issue. It's not stopping anyone from saying anything or posting whatever art they want.
I'm also not sure what you think AI art is capable of. In your first comment, I thought you were worried that people would use AI art because it was maybe faster, cheaper or easier and that would be a risk to artists' jobs. But in this post you denigrate AI art to such an extent that I'm not sure how you think it could be a threat. If "nobody [is] seriously using them" then the fuss over AI art is a little silly, no?
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
Well, partly, I mean, a way to create "speech" has been banned; that no one is apparently actually interested in using this mode of "speech" should not, in theory, deter a "free speech" advocate such as yourself from, well, advocating for it. But, you know, wild oscillations, so I have no idea if you actually care.
But mostly, this conversation started because your comparison of the completely utilitarian, non-speech activities such as coal mining and lamp lighting to the creation of art is just, what we like to call in technical terms, just fucking awful. What I'm saying is, you don't seem to, historically, actually put much value on speech, especially given your otherwise hardline in general (though wishy-washy in specific) stance on free speech. You don't really seem to respect speech much, for all your whinging about it. And comparing making art to fucking coal mining is, frankly, insulting. Double insulting since you like to lecture everybody about "free speech," which makes it seem like your advocacy is not based on actual appreciation of speech, but an awareness that your own speech is so awful that "you have to let me say it because free speech!" is all you got. So, I had to tweak your nose on this.
Of course, in hindsight, I did barge into a conversation otherwise already in progress, and so on one hand there is some context within the post you were replying to that I may have ignored, but, on the other hand, as I said, the comment was not entirely out of nowhere, either.
As far as AI is concerned, it isn't very interesting as art; it may become more insidious with time, however, so I'm okay with nipping that in the bud.
Okay, that makes sense. But it also tells me that the arguments you are most upset about are not ones that I am making.
You brought up free speech in the comments, not me. While I see a potential to make a free speech argument in favour of AI art, it's not a point I particularly care about nor does any of this seem particularly relevant to free speech. For me, free speech is about the exchange of ideas (including art) and none of this is about banning any particular ideas or content. The exact same picture would be allowed on FA if drawn by a human but banned from FA if generated by an AI, that means that content is not the important part. As I said before, I see the AI as a tool. Banning art that is generated by AI (with some human input in telling the AI what to do) seems equivalent to restricting whether you allow stories that were written by hand versus a typewriter versus a word processor. It's a discussion about the steps in between the idea and the end product.
You are also very much misinterpreting my comparison. I am in no way intend to compare coal mining or lamp lighting to creating art. My comparison was on jobs that were taken away by the progress of technology. If you would prefer, there are jobs that are related to the exchange of ideas which have gone away. For example, jobs involved in the production of physical newspapers and magazines have disappeared as journalism transitioned to digital. Or other creative industries like carpentry. Most people get mass-produced furniture nowadays rather than individually-made pieces by a skilled carpenter. It hasn't completely died but now only the very rich have hand-made furniture by a master craftsman. Same with tailored clothes. I'm sure that those who still make clothes and furniture by hand and to request will tell you that there is art and expression in those crafts too.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
Perhaps more relevant is whether AI methods are like tracing. That is a method of working which is not considered acceptable in most furry art communities without explicit permission. The content might be fine by itself, but the means of production are not kosher. There is also the same underlying motivation of unfairness - that someone is benefitting from work that is not theirs, to the detriment of the original author who sees their work duplicated by others, rather than getting the commissions themselves.
As for cabinets, it is clear that AI can deliver them, but far less clear that it can deliver the ones people want, if they have something specific in mind. In that light, it may be most successful in taking away the business of those who don't know what they want.
I as a self taught artist do not care as much per se about money so much as i care about my lifetime and hours of effort getting views. Getting seen, people knowing and liking what I do. If AI can generate for anyone what they want to see then there is no need for them to go look at others work. Hunt around galleries to find stuff they want. Ever since this was introduced i noticed about a 50% drop in views of my work. Now im aware that I cant earn commissions anymore to help support my finances, So now all i have left for my art i create is just simply trying to get someone to look at it and like it. AI also eats into that.
My lifetime of work is now irrelevant and i cant sleep at night anymore
To be fair, I find this decision based off what might be considered a 'moral outrage' and that's what actually bothers me about this ban. If this was more about the fear of potential Copyright infringement and/or other trouble involving law, then I would understand more.
Why ban good pictures that were heavily more creative through generation just because what, it copies an artist's style? Or a bunch of multiple pictures to be used for what might be ruled as transformative? What's the difference between that and what thousands of furry artists has always been doing? Just a machine. But again, if this ban was out of uncertainty of potential legal issues, then I would not be as much bothered.
We seriously need to expand the public domain with new good arts, assuming a lot of these AI arts can be public domain of course. There is the fact that AI-generation programs can sometimes help create new good shapes to be inspired for good works. Does the owner of FA have problems with many arts inspired by a result of one too?
In the US AI generated art can't be copyrighted so it's all in the public domain.
I think I've heard of something related, however some pictures might end up being way less transformative. If for example, one took an image of Micky Mouse and another one with glasses and all it did was add glasses on it with the majority of the picture obviously looking like it just merged two Copyrighted images together, then we might have an issue involving Copyright.
Though less related to your comment and more of an added take to my original comment here:
There is also a risk of being less transformative with traditional art too.
In the UK, however, copyright is assigned to whoever arranged for the work to be created by a program:
There have been consultations on changing this, but as it stands ‘computer-generated work’ is protected for 50 years from the date on which it was made - shorter than the normal 70 years, but still essentially the same form of protection. The owner is the arranger, or their employer, not the AI.
The UK has also permitted text data mining - if you can legally access it, you can make a model based on it; the licensor cannot carve out an exception for this purpose. It'd be logical, though not automatic, that this approach might be applied to images as well
Nerdy Diamond Guy, if there was an AI that generated artificial porn from real pictures of naked children, would you use it?
This is probably the most succinct and funny question in this wasteland of a comment section.
Is Nerdy afraid of answering?
The BBC did a piece about this. It's an active item of discussion among Inkbunny staff. I'm not sure we'll come to the same conclusion as FA.
I see an opportunity to democratize artistic expression - at least in the area of conceptual art, as opposed to detailed commissions. Imagine all those stories that might be enjoyed as comics, or animations, but realistically will never even get a unique cover image without such tools.
There will always be room for artists to use the tools available to create artwork of a higher order; just as synthesizers and drum machines did not end the music business, but transformed it, opening up new possibilities. But I can foresee a time where there is less need for cookie-cutter digital art, and that may impact some artists, until they adapt.
If nothing else, this may promote a resurgence in traditional art, which I feel has been undervalued within fandom in recent years. Certainly, you can get a machine to duplicate that, too, but it may be more time-consuming and expensive, such that it cannot scale.
It should probably be possible for people to identify and, if desired, avoid such content. Credit is important, too - and yes, it is likely going to be contentious if a system has been trained on a large number of images, but that is far preferable to one which uses a small set of work and clearly duplicates the output of a specific group or person.
From a sheer resources standpoint, there may also be capacity issues with the number or uniqueness of such images generated, but this is already something sites have to deal with when hosting 3D art or photography. Nevertheless, with the tools that exist today, getting what you want beyond the initial prompt can still take a significant amount of time - and this indicates there is a level of artistic discernment going into the process.
Is this a crisis or an opportunity? Or both? It'll be interesting to see the results.
Inkbunny now has a provisional policy for AI-generated and AI-assisted art, which forbids the use of closed-garden services or soliciting compensation for fully-generated art, prohibits the use of artists' names in prompts, and requires keywords and descriptions documenting the software, models, prompts and seeds used.
Meanwhile, e621 has opened e6ai.net, which allows only AI/neural network art and prohibits spammy variation sets.
It has one but it's not a great one.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
Inkbunny's rules are more or less unenforceable because nobody will have time to check the validity of the presets claimed to have been used. Further, there's a very gray area when it comes to plugins for software like Photoshop or Gimp. When does it become automatic enough to qualify as 'AI Assisted'? There's that site that can add lighting effects for instance. It does an amazingly good job, but the artist still needs to place the light sources and give them any tinting desired. Is that a plugin, artist tool or 'AI Assisted'? There are terrain and background generators that don't just use presets but take input directly from the artist. I guarantee there are a lot of images using those where there's basically no way to go back and tell everyone how to generate the 'same' background. All I can say is good luck to the staff for however long they are willing to bother with this.
You are undoubtedly right that staff won't have the time to verify every image, but that's not really the point. They don't automatically verify that everyone is the owner of every piece of an art or story that they post, either. However, if it seems unlikely that they are, staff can spend the time to investigate. Likewise, if someone says "hey, that art looks like NovelAI's proprietary furry model, not regular Stable Diffusion with that model", or start making a lot of comments along the lines of "I couldn't duplicate that myself", they could check that. And it offers a reason to remove obviously generated AI art for which no prompt has been posted at all, which probably means they neglected to follow other policies.
More general "AI tools" based on neural nets are not expected to have highly detailed reporting, just a reasonable effort put into saying what tools in were used and roughly how/what components they were used on. Once they become "common to a person skilled in the art" this rule will likely become obsolete.
This is interesting, but I am curious as to why, in case you know or are in control? Is this to appeal to some of the recent backlash against some of AI art? Or is there another reasoning (complicated grey area?)? I won't expect this to change, but I am a little worried about making certain rules to appeal to popular emotional backlash alone though, especially since owning an art style was never moral and therefor never had any real moral ground against copying certain art styles.
Even if having to accept such policy as finalized, the last part feels kinda weird. Wouldn't it make sense if the character thing apply aligned with the age too? What about characters (regardless of profit) that are beyond the death of an author and not recent? What about certain public domain characters? I have a feeling it was intended to be with the age too, but just wanted to say in case.
Basically we don't want people making copies of other people's art styles by focusing on their own art in a larger set. Because that makes it clear that you are essentially using their own art to create an art machine to replace them; a direct threat to their individuality as an artist and their commercial interests (why commission X or get one of their adopts if you can just generate an X instead? OK, there are intangibles, but if you just want the art, let's say you could get it), as well as feeling kinda creepy if they're dead (people recently used artwork of a deceased fan's character to illustrate a story and it didn't go over well). We may tweak the age limits, but 25 years is perhaps not too long if you knew someone personally.
It's not clear what you mean by "certain public domain characters" but the intent was primarily to protect fursonas and other characters used in personal work (including after death); as opposed to, say, World Cup mascots, or Paddington Bear. Fan-but-commercial works like Lackadaisy characters might be tricky. We will probably tweak the specifics as cases came up, but we felt we needed to make a first stab at it now before we had a lot of work with no regulation or guidelines.
The depth of feeling against AI is very strong with some people. If we can defuse their ill-will with specific concessions, while avoiding a complete ban, I think that is a good deal. The alternative was either banning AI outright, or saying "we don't care about your views", which would likely have led to the departure of several valued members and probably some staff.
Hey, sorry for not responding for a while. Kept forgetting I commented here!
I mainly asked because of I often see ethics on two sides (culture of copying and artists) of this whole AI war thing and I often seen a few arguments on the anti-AI art side that felt conflicting with the rights of copying involving specific culture practices, such as copying a 'manga' style.
For your first part, I'm assuming the issue is that such machine is using the Copyrighted works, correct? Because if so then I can fully understand and would probably use a similar rule if not more strict. Though the moral reasoning is something I'm still fuzzy on since it's possible an artist can manually copy a style (a practice that often happens in many genre culture) and have new creative arts too. I think that's why I was worried about relying on backlash at times. Though one thing that can break this is due to how fast AI might be. With this said, I'm not saying you need to get rid of the rule, by the way.
For the second part, I think I was asking because there already are certain culture practices that already uses some characters far after death, and I wasn't sure if the rule was banning AI usage of the non-profit characters infinitely or within the limited years. Like I'm not sure if the rule prohibits someone from using a free average character as a prompt that fell into public domain (say 100 years after death), without permission.
For the last part, I think I understand.
Interestingly I think this is less of a threat to furry artists then general artists in a way.
Furry art is usually character centric in focus, and not really scene focused.
A.I. can't create a new fursona out of thin air, it would have to be derived from those it can pull off line.
A.I. can't give the characters, character. It can only make images.
From what I can see, its ability to do nuances of characters is a bit rough, it's a bit better at landscaping and general works that are not front and center.
An example here by Rick Griffen shows him putting his own character on a background generated by an AI. Of course it has a cyberpunk theme.
In a way I see that the artists are now facing the same problem as comedians. Comedies go around claiming that comedy is 'dying' but it's more a issue that the delivery of comedy has fundamentally shifted. Stand up can't survive in the internet world where a great bit is basically shared around the world before the comedian can even get on the bus to get to the next city on their tour. The only thing that can survive is the improv style, being able to make up bits in the moment. The days of toiling over a typewriter for a set that you can use for a whole year are over.
In the art side, making single art pieces may erode in favor of highlighting character and content beyond stills. An AI can make a nice 'picture' but it cannot world build off the picture. It can't make a graphic novel. It can't create character or lore. Even if AI masters the ability to make a piece, it cannot create a puzzle.
Now if you like making single pieces, your defense would be similar to those in stand up comedy circuits. Kill the internet. Smartphones are taken at the door. Don't put your single pieces online and starve the AI from the ability to access your content. Go analog.
Furry artists will be fine. It's the ones who are doing still-life or landscape that should truly be more concerned.
1) So i looked at new version of FA upload Policy and
my main complaint is it is not obvious if a background created by an AI is ok.
Example: "Ronin" (https://www.furaffinity.net/view/48423989/ , "posted Aug 5, 2022")
was made by Rick Griffin
who used "MidJourney" AI (to some extent) for the background.
2) related article at Ars Technica:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/flooded-with-ai-generated...
Given this is FA we're talking about, the popularity of the artist does have some metric in rule enforcement.
Looks like they pulled the trigger on the Griffen piece: https://twitter.com/RicksWriting/status/1580379477317591040?s=20&t=il_zRbCHKXaMr...
In a flip of the premise, Hard-Drive proposes that AI isn't the same as a real artist because it hasn't been forced to draw a bunch of furry porn before the art it wants to make to make ends meet.
This whole thing is nonsense in my opinion. As technology advances, things change in every medium. From the news paper and books, to radio, from radio, to the T.V, from the T,V to the internet and computing technology, so forth and so on. From manual labor, to factory automation, our world is constantly heading towards a society that has a lot more automatization, where manpower will be replaced with robotic counterparts more capable of the tasks, freeing up human society as a whole to progress towards other things.
This AI situation right now is but one small piece trying to teach it, to make it learn, etc. It's detriment towards the progress we need AI to gain to be better functional when it comes to the areas of world building, character creation, and story telling especially when we start using those trained AI data-sets in a pooled collective to teach even more AI that will be creating full interactive VR worlds, so forth and so on. There will always be pushback with new technology, this isn't anything new. But trying to forcefully limit it, or ban it has never gone well. Many have tried in the past, and it all backfired horribly.
I have been using Stable Diffusion for a while and I can tell anyone that it certainly requires some skill to get picture which you want. Making models for the AI software is even harder. Anyway, do people want to ban Google for sharing their images? If humans can copy images they saw on the internet, it doesn’t make any sense why software could not. If the pictures are too similar with the original work, then the same rules should apply for both AI and non AI. What I believe is on a thin line, is using authors name in the prompt (either while training model or generating images). Thats similar like stealing recipes or blueprints in my opinion. But mixing thousands of works together is like mixing tons of ingredients. You are basically just telling the AI how much of each ingredient it should add, making your own (or its) recipe.
I don’t consider myself artist. I think the artists are those who trained the models for the AI and not those who are actually using them.
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