The worst receiving end of all of this anyone who has continued working "by hand" in their own unique style and are wrongly accused of integrating or replacing their entire process with AI. I cannot imagine how someone who has spent their entire lives building up a traditional drawing or illustration skillset would feel in this situation.
learning skills made obsolete by new technology happens all through history. not unique to art at all. though previously, art was presumed to be the last thing to be automated. but it turned out that art contains a lot of repetitive and stylized elements that are easily learnable by AI. true innovation and creativity only happens infrequently, especially in popular art, be it drawings or music.
@@haomingli6175 soooo what's your point? That all of these traditional artists in question should just embrace AI as a medium because it was inevitable that their skillsets would be replaced? Just because it CAN be replaced by technology doesn't mean it SHOULD. I have experience with both AI and traditional media, and frankly AI feels more like a gambling addiction than actual art-making. It's miserable to me. Am I doing any "innovating" with my traditional art? Probably not. But it's genuine and fulfilling in a way that asking a computer to make something for you will never be.
At this point, people would be better off if they stopped discriminating against AI users. It's harmful to both AI users and artists who do not use AI. #stopAIWitchHunt
I think a lot of people commenting here either don't want to hear a nuanced take or didn't watch the full video. As an artist myself who is against AI I think this response was mature and reasonable. Thank you for addressing it honestly.
the comments I am reading don't seem to fit with what you must have seen when you wrote this. Actually, just now I scrolled all the way down to the end and none of the comments come off as that. The opposite seems to be true.
@@tusharjamwal I've seen plenty of people being quick to disregard the points Andrew is making here because of how passionately they feel against AI art, and to be honest I don't think it's completely unwarranted behavior, but I disagree with not hearing Andrew out because their response does not 100% align with their view... and especially going as far as trashing them or the artist they hired. To me that kind of flippant approach is not conducive to a discussion worth having.
I mean it's no different from using the generative fills and the image sprayer in Corel Photo Paint (a tool Adobe still doesn't have), it's just a far more advanced version of it... difference being if you want realistic tree bark you don't have to play with seed number settings and Shadow and highlight colors. as great as those tools are I used to avoid using them because you spend so much time tweaking them trying to get them to match what I needed, that it was easier to do it by hand, or just take a photo to get a real-world texture and paste it in. it's too bad that Corel got too caught up focusing on the money instead of adding value to the product, rushing the next version out trying to soak their clients for everything they have. their user interface is the best (still) their creative tools are the best. the customer experience is terrible, but then Adobe isn't too far behind them in that regard either.
I’m not an artist, I’m a musician. But my main takeaway from this video is that Andrew is a really insanely nice guy. What a good dude. He described the situation, presented what evidence he had, defended his decision in choosing an artist, apologized for how it offended some people, and turned this small instance into a deeper discussion about how the world interacts with art and media in general. Most people would have put up an obligatory twitlonger and moved on. This wasn’t even on my radar and yet Andrew did a 20+ min video about it. Kudos man. I like you even more now
Your comment hit the nail on the head, except for one point: "apologized for how it offended some people" He did not do that. Saying "I apologize that what I did offended you" is not a true apology. But here, he did not apologize for offending people, he actually apologized for his actions and how it may have impacted artists (if it did at all, but we cannot prove if it did or not). The way he handled the situation was remarkable to be honest.
Can I teach you something? If you're just going to disagree and argue; don't read. I am in no way saying anything negative about Andrew, you guys are just completely in the dark here getting fooled. "This wasn’t even on my radar and yet Andrew did a 20+ min video about it" - Exactly. The job of the face of a project is to promote it. Anything that happens, you milk. I work with content creators, this is exactly how you do it. Negative attention? Save the day and be the nice guy. You literally didn't know about this, he brought attention to it and you watched a 20m video selling a product. You fell for this. It's not on Andrew, he is doing the right thing; it's on you. I timed out how many times and at what duration he said the full title "Book Of Chances". It follow industry standard to 100%.
i think the Artist he hired might as well the victim of the massive AI Theft scheme his art used to train the AI, to the point that now his Signature art is considered as AI Art. not to mention people became less empathetic because he did use AI Art. meaning that he lose immunity against AI Case, he got labeled as AI Artist and it stuck forever. people will either hire real Artists and avoid AI Artists just because the negative connotation alone. AI Art really done some Heavy Reputation damage, it tells you that you're lazy, greedy, brainless, cheap, and incompetent. you're an Impostor, so insecure that you even took credit from AI Generator and said that the illustration was done by you. and for Artists who didn't use AI Art, if their Art look slightly like AI Art, they will get the Penalty and reputation damage as well.
@@notreally-sf3df you have a good point and we should be vigilant about this kind of promotion. But with that being said, I think most people here are not planning to buy the product he promotes. And even if we do, in this case it will fund a good cause
I appreciate you making this video and I respect the nuance in "two things can be true at the same time" and wanting to be optimistic about the future of tech, but I think where the conversation (and some of your points) get muddy is in the nebulous terminology of the word "AI" - which is a fault of both internet debates and aggressive corporate branding. I think the productivity tools you mentioned for work like rotoscoping & subtitling can assist editors without taking control or agency away, and it's always exciting to see new software speed up a mundane task or assist with the process, but despite these tools sometimes needing to be "trained," they are in a vastly different realm from the "generative AI" that people take issue with in the Book of Chances (and in general). As you mentioned with current court cases, it is a moral issue at the moment rather than a legal one, but when the core value of these tools in the eyes of their developers and corporate users is to train off of other peoples' works to eventually replace the human effort and touch, they are not tools that many artists are interested in engaging with or supporting. You're right that we've never seen anything like this before, but that's also why the conversation is so heated - many technological advancements you mentioned in music either aren't related to the actual "creation" (digital streaming services) or have made creativity more accessible... they don't cut artists out of the process. As a video editor, rotoscoping helps me make a cool scene in After Effects, but I have little interest in loading a script into one of the new "online AI editors" and having it spit out a finished product with an AI voice and amalgamated motion graphics. This isn't to say generative AI has zero possible positive uses, but with the way it is currently being implemented, it's hard to give it the benefit of the doubt. "No ethical consumption under capitalism" also doesn't feel like a fair way to dismiss concerns about these tools. Just because products that have become integral to our daily lives are entangled with unethical practices doesn't mean concerns about new technologies should be ignored. And none of this has even delved into the environmental cost, which is... a separate can of worms.
So glad you mentioned the difference between rotoscoping tools vs generative AI. Generative AI will just generate the entire "artpiece" for you, cutting you out of the whole process entirely. Rotoscoping is simply a small part of the final result that requires a lot of manual labor and little creativity compared to other aspects of video-editing.
Agree with you big time on the way "AI" gets used in language to describe things that aren't nearly as ethically questionable as image/music generators. I think the economic frenzy around AI right now is really really bad, and the legality stuff needs to be resolved sooner rather than later. That being said, I think there is a possible world where creative people can use generative AI in a way that doesn't infringe upon the rights of fellow creatives. No one is beholden to that right now, but some people can use what we currently have ethically, I believe.
As an artist (a photographer to be more specific), I am pro-AI tools, but anti-AI generation. What I mean by this is for AI tool I include things such as AI sharpening, enlarging, denoising. I also include AI tools such as auto masking and object removal. This also includes AI text generation in the form of Alt-Text, which is a massive time sync to do. Or tools that can help cut down time when editing a multi-cut What I am against is the creation of AI art. I am against using a text prompt to generate in a whale or a new sky or a clock, etc.
Exactly, the former augments human creation, the latter replaces it. I don't think Generative AI should be called a tool. I liken it to commissioning a work of art. If you commission a complete work of art from an artist, the artist is not your 'tool', but rather an active and intelligent agent operating under your instruction. In fact, it could even be argued that Generating with AI requires even LESS involvement than commissioning a work of art from an artist. People who compare the creation of Gen AI to the creation of the camera seem to be missing this point. Generative AI is less like the camera, and more like the photographer.
As a specialist in the accessibility space, AI generated alt-text is often more confusing than helpful, outside of very simple contexts. "An apple" is fine, but compare "two smiling people" to "me and my best friend from highschool, delighted to see each other at the reunion". Most of the benefit of alt text comes from the context, not just the content. I'm not going to say it's worse than nothing, because for a fully blind user that's obviously not the case. But it's giving a false sense of security that will lead to overall lower quality alt text on average, and for partially sighted users - which is most of the people using alt text - it's probably only telling them what they can already see. If we're going to use AI for assistive tech, it's probably better to have it in the assistive tech itself, so that individual users can make the call on what's helpful for them, rather than people producing content washing their hands of responsibility for the mark-up that they should be providing.
@@alechaidamus9554 Fun fact: you can mathematically turn any classifier into "generative AI", so, technically, arguing about "pro-tools but anti-generative-AI" is pretty much meaningless. I get it that "from 0 to art with a single/multiple mindless clicks" is way less art than people having full agency over their work, but that ultimately boils down to how people use the technology, not that the technology itself is somehow "problematic". And that argument also excludes the fact that you can also use generative AI to partially fill in the details, in a somewhat collaborative way. It requires more work than click a button, but it exists.
Hey Andrew, longtime viewer here! I honestly don't know if you'll ever see this comment, but as someone who is pretty familiar with these machine learning/AI tools (I am a grad student studying robotics so these pop up a lot in my field of work), and is also starting to dip my toes into music production, I think I might be able to bring a unique perspective to things here. I have massive respect for the way you have handled the situation, and honestly I'm really writing this comment to excise these thoughts from my brain as I have been thinking about this issue a LOT. There are a few key points that I think are being missed when it comes to ethical creation and usage of these tools: 1) With regards to copyright protection, saying that no images are actually stored within these models is really only "technically" correct; it's sort of analogous to the wine bricks that were being produced during the American Prohibition era (for context, during the period of time in US history where alcohol was completely banned, manufacturers would produce these bricks made out of dehydrated grapes, and include instructions that said "whatever you do, DON'T put this in a tub of water and allow it to ferment *wink* *wink*", thereby bypassing that restriction). Sure, there isn't any raw copyrighted material that is directly stored in these models, but it's almost trivial to get these models to produce such a thing. Like you said, if someone uses it to replicate something that is protected, that is almost certainly infringement, but historically, who has the power to actually seek justice in these situations? Established people or those with studio backing may be fine, but anyone who is independent now has orders of magnitude more trouble making sure their work is safe. Not to mention, that's just from people who are doing it on purpose; there have been instances where a model spat out a more-or-less carbon copy of a still from a film despite only being given a generic description. So not only do creators now have to be 2-3x more vigilant in protecting their work, anyone using these tools has to be 100% SURE that the thing the model created is safe, which if it is trained on copyrighted material, is nigh impossible to guarantee; the tools are literally trained to emulate this material! 2) One point in particular that you mention is "if the artist couldn't find what he was looking for, he wouldn't have hired another artist, he would've changed his idea". I think that's a little reductive; they could have also licensed a stock image or used any of the massive free clipart libraries that artists have put together. Yes, they wouldn't have directly hired another artist, but the human beings who created the assets they're working with would still be properly compensated, whether directly or indirectly. The point is accessibility to creative tools and works for the purpose of transforming them IS IMPORTANT, and there are people who are working to make that happen while making sure the people keeping that creativity alive are not pushed out of the process! AI completely ignores that second part. Heck, the sample library Splice (which is a platform you yourself have endorsed) literally works off of this principle by compensating producers for the samples they create and then making them accessible to users! 3) You mention other tools that you yourself have used in the music creation process that indeed would have been "trained" on expert material, but the fundamental difference there is that those tools were created IN COOPERATION with producers whose end goal was to actually use these tools to make their jobs easier, while also still giving them control over the finer details if they wanted to make changes. Currently popular Generative AI tools were not designed with this in mind. Painters don't want a canvas that they can talk to and have it paint everything for them, they want to paint because that's the part where their creativity comes to life! And I'm not discounting the artist you hired either, they clearly are also very creative in their own right and they happen to work with the kind of medium (photobashing) that these tools can assist with. However, I don't think that justifies the existence of these tools; one, because the artist again has multiple other avenues to achieve that result (see point 2), and two, because the pushback against generative AI is due to a more holistic view of the technology. There absolutely can exist cases where the tools are created ethically and used in a creative manner, but given the way these tools have largely been used by people to pump out low-effort content (see any content farm page on any social media) to straight up disinformation (remember that whole picture of the Pope in a puffy jacket?) and by corporations to not pay artists (see Nicki Minaj promoting her album with unmodified AI art), the concern is that the technology as a whole will lead to more negatives than positives given the way it is currently being developed. Hence, the pushback against these tools as a whole; sure, some people can play nice with it, but most people (especially those in power) probably won't. It's sort of like saying, "hey, it turns out nukes will be really good at terraforming Mars for construction!" Like, sure maybe, but everyone knows they weren't created for that reason. Ultimately, the way I see it, AI tools as they are now disproportionately hurt smaller creators and while it would be nice to live in a world where these tools are ethically created and used, we don't live in that world and it's dangerous to push for acceptance of these tools when they aren't in a state to be acceptable. Anyway, apologies for the long read. I hope I was at least able to contribute to the discussion and provide some points that maybe aren't thought about as much. Wish you all the best moving forward!
Artist here. I'm not inherently against AI and I agree that it creates a lot of potential for significant quality of life improvements. AI that can color frames of a 2D animation or draw in between frames could be extremely beneficial and allow single individuals to undertake large scale animation projects. The issue I have with AI is it's current implementation and intention behind it. Currently, AI image generation is designed to completely replace the artistic process. It's not about giving artists tools to empower them, it's about big businesses literally stealing billions of copyrighted images so they can sell their product that acts as a replacement to the artists that created said copyrighted images. The reason i believe that it is indeed copyright infringement is because it's copyright infringement to use samples of copyrighted music, even if you're not making money from it. You can take a sample and modify it and cut it up so it appears different, but it's still copyright infringement. Even if the original image isn't needed after the AI has 'learned' from it, comparing machine learning to how humans learn isn't a good analogy. When a human artist learns from another artist, there is essentially a 0% chance they would recreate a copy unless they copied the same thing many many times, at which point they'd essentially be training to create a copy and even so, if they did create a copy, it would be intentional. AI has no intention and has been known to overfit (create a replication of it's training data). The way AI learns is very different than the way humans learn. In my opinion, what's happening right now is art theft on an massive scale. I do agree that there are good things about AI and I acknowledge that AI image generation will become very good eventually even with ethically sourced training data, but even so, it is my assumption that most artists will not use AI image generation. Simply because, painters want to paint. Writers want to write. Voice actors want to voice act. Even if AI can do these things for us, we do these things because we enjoy the process. I still often paint with physical paints even tho I can create higher quality illustrations with digital art programs, because I enjoy the experience of using the physical paints. I don't want someone to paint for me, I want to paint, myself. Current AI image generation is not like generating samples to use for your music production, it's like pressing a button and having the computer write a song for you. Wouldn't it always be better to make it yourself or just listen to music from your favorite artists, where every aspect of the song is intentional, rather than it just being an amalgamation of all the popular songs? The only use case i can think of for an artist to use AI image generation is to act as a sort of random image generator to find inspiration, or for photobashing like the artist you shared in the video.
time will tell ai will either become a tool to help artists or will destroy ai in the same way photography was going to "destroy art" but didnt though also how the luddites feared for their jobs and in the end they were right.
Well i think it's a bit bold to generalize that "AI generally has been known to overfit", where it heavily depends on the model and the intentions of the end user. Notice how i am not calling them Artist? Because that again heavily depends on the use case and the process. For example if you take an off the shelf synthesizer, reset everything and let it play an existing popular melody with the default synth sound, yeah most people wouldn't consider this as an artistic process. (analogue to generating an image just by prompting an AI). Now if we take this same popular melody as an input, chain together multiple synthesizers, fine tune all of the parameters, and create a new unique melody or rythm, no one would question that to be art, because it requires skill and is quite the process to get right. Same goes for more advanced AI image generation using Comfy UI. Just look at the amount of knowledge you need if you want some artistic control over the end result. And it's still a very young field. I am sure in a few years (maybe even now already) you'd need an entire degree to even understand what's going on. And even then it's currently still required to have basic Photoshop skills to get a desirable end result. TL;DR: questioning if generating an image just by prompt is totally valid, but imho comparable to someone just dumping a bucket of paint on a canvas. But questioning that something like this www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1dkk3aw/single_prompt_to_3d_to_vid2vid_generation_all_in/ is an artistic process is just unfair to the hundreds of hours it takes to learn.
"it's copyright infringement to use samples of copyrighted music, even if you're not making money from it. You can take a sample and modify it and cut it up so it appears different, but it's still copyright infringement" .I don't agree with the presumably "ethical" reasoning of this statement, and technically, legally speaking too it is untrue. There are limitations to sampling usage of course but copyright allows for freedoms when it comes to sampling/borrowing melodic elements etc as long as it is different enough to be derivative. Also, copyright infringement isn't a cut-and-dry affair, you have to prove in court the intentions of the plagiarism, the damages it may have caused to the original artist, and also definitely prove that there is substantial overlap in the first place, Most people sampling are smart enough to modify the samples enough that there's plausible deniability.
Deep respect. In the face of inflammatory heated comments you took the time to create a video that put forward your thoughts and response with amazing grace and sensitivity. The fact of the matter though is that you hired and paid an actual artist and let him do his thing. You have nothing to apologize for in my mind. I actually like the art work. The fact that you are donating the proceeds to charity says a lot about your character. Thanks for being who you are Andrew. I appreciate you very much.
I agree! Despite my worry about AI taking away future jobs in my field of illustration and concept art, this was a very well thought out explanation, respectful of both sides. Great job, Andrew.
@@SethCrowderMusic Seriously, if you are going to comment then at least make a point. Even though Andrew was flamed he went on to make an informative and engaging video that was not only educational but also enjoyable to watch. He made thought provoking valid points. Something that maybe you should learn to do?
This is a very mature response. Out of all of the ways this could go, I think this is the most surprising and also the most positive one. 10/10 confidence restored :D
very mature but short sighted... Dall-E image generator was available when he first contacted this artist, there's a good chance the artists he hired was always using AI.. "the style they use is now associated with AI these days" like man.....c'mon... your artist was just ALWAYS using it..
@@willybe6427 Maybe, admittedly I wasn't as keyed in on the AI scene back in 1/2021, but looking at historical stuff people saved off it doesn't look like that flavor of AI was nearly as impressive as what we've had access to over the past couple of years. That might have been a lot harder to just pass off as professional artwork.
@@willybe6427 This attitude is shows the ignorance of the haters. In 2021 the tools were nowhere near this good. The tools have improved substantially in the last 36 months and anyone who doesn't know that demonstrates their lazy knee-jerk reaction is just that. If you think that making these large models illegal would solve the problem, think again. People can just use their downloaded "now illegal" Stable Diffusion models and hide that fact. So instead of being open about the use of AI, people would have to be secretive about it. But it would never eliminate the use of the tools.
Andrew, we appreciate you. You're always so level-headed and can discuss difficult topics with nuance. You know how to listen, how to be respectful, and how to communicate your own point of view clearly and eloquently. Thank you for everything you do. We need more of your qualities in our society.
I'm very sympathetic to the issue of art being trained on without the artist's consent. However I think the thing the copyright discussion always misses is that the real reason copyright exists is so artists can make a living under capitalism by not having someone else profit off their creation. If we had our basic needs met and opportunity for a comfortable life as an artist, we wouldn't actually need copyright anymore. Then we could treat art within the economy the same way we treat art in our minds: as expression and inspiration of the human experience to build upon, not some hoarded property to be withheld for a fee. Either way, I agree that artists should be able to opt out of training algorithms whether as things are now or in that idealized future
Yeah and a world where we had european social programs or people could pursue their interests or live like the post ww2. when the populice was armed and known to spend 4 years on corrupt politicians exhausting all legal means before shrugging and clearing the corrupted is off. Does anyone find it paradoxial that the best times were in a war shattered economy, where a barbershop ged could buy 3x now 1 million dollar houses, feed a family of 5, on half the gdp as we have today? Im still going to work in the system. It's faster for a rock to roll up the mountain than dismantle it, and i honestly have questions on my fellow men after seeing intensive jobless mooching and the 'successes' (mass starvation of removing land from successful farmers in africa. And giving it to people who didn't know how to grow crops, but grew tobacco instead during a mass starvation.) But it seems like we need a contributing part of society, and there is definitely excess wealth. A system twice as much grain was produced under a system 1 monkey had 200,000 pounds of grain and the other 1000 monkeys starved vs a system each 1001 monkeys had 100 lbs and their needs met sounds better right? But what if there was a system the 1 monkey had still more grain than it could ever eat, and the other 1001 monkeys had 150 lbs of grain? I think the system could be better distributed, right now many common joes pay like 25-50% of their income as tax while the other 1% pays 9%. Biden's crazy promise is saying he'd charge them 25%. But unlike norway, very little of tax revenue seems to go into supporting the person, vs money laundering back into politicans. Wasn't the ukraine war more expensive than us healthcare for all? There's a soft conspiracy that us prioritizes what is profitable for the 1% making decisions and paying 'donations' over healthy for our 90% of people. Even in a complete system, you'd have to make sure th at instead of working to death for nothing, or just walking off, that all the maximums would still be produced. But ww2 was ironically one of the best times for worker rights, when 1 ged could feed 5 and buy a house at 18 in 3 years, vs 3-5 degrees to do the same in 10 years now. We produce twice the gdp. It's just a case of 1 monkey producing 200,000 lbs of grain while the other 1000 starve with 0 when the 1000 had 100 lbs of grain before.
TBH between ending capitalism and reforming copyright the latter seems more practicable. Or you could have a basic income for the arts like Ireland is trialing, so we can enjoy tech bros screeching about how they should be included because they prompt a whole lot.
The real reason copyright exists is for big multi million dollar companies to milk every last bit of money they can from anyone who uses "their" art, for as long as they can. Small creators won't have the money to pursue a lawsuit. So many video games are forever shut down because the companies behind it refuse to release the copyright on their assets. Just sitting there collecting dust, instead of having creative individuals make something worth playing of it. And that goes for many different forms of art.
I recently posted a link to an art piece of a girl with a bike and ppl started to throw accusations of using AI to draw a bike since the bike design was very unconventional. Thing is, bike was 100% drawn by hand, in some parts rather lazy hand) and if you have even basic understanding how a CG painting works you'd see that this was done by hand, yet ppl see what they perceive as an unconventional and somewhat artificial - and they think of AI and start this recreational outrage. I had by fair share of fun posting photo of a real bike of this design and explaining how painting strokes work, yet i felt somewhat sad that ppl cant even understand what is AI and what is just mistake, art style or even just an weird design.
The Silicon Valley philosophy of "It's easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission" is quite horrendous when it's companies with billions in capital taking from people living hand to mouth from their own art. It's not so much the art itself that bothers me (it all looks very same-y and uninspired), but rather the fact that these companies stole from small artists and re-sell their art now with zero royalties or other compensation. Even when artists explicitly say "You are not allowed to use my art to train AI models", companies don't care either. Why? Because artists can't prove that it happened.
For all the philosophical possibilities in the future of AI, for creativity and as a tool.... Its simply not worth the people who watch this channel not being ableto pay bills for the next couple of years.
The sad part is: I know artists who unironically would not mind AI-generated images at all _if they were compensated for it_ And you know the fuckest part? _THERE'S A PRECEDENT FOR THIS_ Yeah! Look up "Ireland artist UBI" They _actually_ give artists a basic income so they can create their own artwork with some safety net to not have to worry about expenses. The AI companies very well could earn _extraordinary_ amounts of goodwill back if they just committed to this. But no, nothing. And it's frustrating as someone who was once very interested in synthetic media watch capitalist greed obliterate the optics of a fascinating technology in real time.
What bothers me personally about AI "art" is the anti-intellectualism surrounding it. What I mean is that a lot of AI users essentially despise artists and see them as elites and gate keepers who can finally be rendered obsolete by AI. It feeds into the general anti-art sentiment of a certain part of the political spectrum.
This was a very insightful and open video Andrew, you've clearly done a tremendous amount of research on the subject and I really appreciate that you made this. I love this, thank you! : )
Copyright in general needs major reform, and AI is part of that mess. Copyright was originally just 14 years -- long enough for the creator to get reasonable compensation for their work, but short enough for the work to enter public domain while it's still relevant enough to do some good for society as a whole. I think we should go back to that, and maybe even make it shorter. Maybe I'm biased since I've spent my life making open-source software, but derivative works are not a bad thing. Rather, standing on the shoulders of giants is how almost all progress is made. Our copyright system is holding everyone back.
Thanks for taking the time to put this video together. I think you did fantastically at addressing concerns and taking meaningful action. I trust that you'll continue to do amazing things for various creative communities and I'm excited to see these cards in person as well as the next set.
For those who still didn't want to watch: 1) he will refund those who ordered and want it 2) the art of the next batch will be completely remade without any use of AI 3) the benefits will be entirely donated to a charity for young artists and marginalized people in Toronto Indeed a class act.
Unnecessary. He should not be emotionally coerced into this action just because AI was used to create his product and his flakey so-called followers are acting outraged. They need to seriously grow up and get over themselves. They have no idea how out of line they are.
That's really nice and understanding of him but I'm sorry, this is not the right decision. Here, AI was purely used as a tool and by taking side with outraged anti AI people he certainly degrade the validity of the artist he hired. That's a real shame, real good one. It literally says to this artist that he made a mistake by adaptating with his age and that if he wants to continue it's better to not use today's tools because it will enrage clearly blind people.. AI is here and it's here to stay and only the fools will not get on-board. It is just our responsibility to use this tool with wisdom but not simply burst when we even hear the term.. Please, be wise and have some reflection. Not just jumping on the first "good" reason to get mad to feel you are important.. You'll just fade into the masses by doing so.
@@Liace159 He didn't side with the outraged anti-AI people, and that's not what I mean to commend him for. I'm not on the anti-AI side either. His words: "but if you were coming to this video hoping I'd take a hard stance on the ethics one way or another, I'm sorry to disappoint you and I don't just want to tell you something that I think you want to hear." "That's also why I'm not ready to condemn or tear down any artist who might choose to use them." Presumably, any one who doesn't cancel their order wouldn't care that AI was used and wouldn't care if he profits from it. If he was just trying to save face, he could have just given the option for a refund. Donating his profits could be an extra step of 'saving face', and we'll never know his true intentions, but it just feels unnecessary to me if that were the case. I'm leaning towards the idea that he's deciding to donate his profits to Sketch because he feels that it's the moral thing to do (the charity seems to be for a good cause), despite the fact that it feels unnecessary (my assumption) and that he'll lose out financially. The decision doesn't necessarily come from a feeling of guilt; it could be out of his own recognition that he wants to help Sketch out during this volatile, transitional period. That being said, I very much disagree with people who paired their criticisms with overt negativity towards him personally, as I don't see legitimate reason to think that he didn't have the best intentions overall.
You spent a lot of time explaining how you see no nuance in the situation. And then proceed to back up your point by calling everyone but you stupid. Don't get me wrong. You said it in a much more eloquent way than that. But your ultimate point is just that. What's the point putting forth an argument when you decry any attempt to talk back to it?
@MrPipol-nm3cd "AI requires databases..." What are you smoking? You clearly have no clue of how Diffusion Models, GANs or other generative AI models work. Please keep it shut.
@MrPipol-nm3cd Your answer is so convoluted, neither a specific framework nor databases are relevant here. The different deep learning model architectures do not just generate output based on some retrieved context from a database. The models typically learn some form of latent representation of data, when querying them you dont get the same picture that was used to train the model. The process is a lot closer (still not comparable though) to how humans learn abstract representations of data, than you seem to think.
@@iFilmLiveMusicUS Personally I think that AI and the Internet are two completely separate things, but that's not important. AI is just a tool and every tool can be improved. To some extent at least. Saws improved a lot and we eventually ended up with a chainsaw. Hammers on the other hand were improved by just making different hammers for different things; they barely changed. Any further development of these tools would be completely useless as they've already reached their final potential. The same goes with AI, it can only improve to a certain point before it peaks. The problem is that we don't know and we are unable to predict how far this peak really is
@@tapeexperiments they literally do it, but not everyone is interested in working solely on these problems, some people want to make generative AI and it's their right to pursue their own projects. Also advances in generative AI bring new techniques and research that can be built upon to make "more useful" AI in the future.
Great video Andrew - and a refreshingly candid discussion on the topic. I’m a visual designer by day (“my job”) and musician (“my passion”) and while I appreciate these complex questions, I feel like I did in the late 90’s starting my career in digital. I find the ability to work more efficiently, test, discard, and adapt ideas more quickly a remarkably empowering opportunity. BTW, I, just pre-ordered the cards - would have done so but I think supporting one of our local Toronto organizations is great. Good stuff - hope you have a great weekend.
AI or not, I think the cards are still a really engaging and creative tool! Even if Scott used entirely stock images in the design, his art style would probably still been called out. I really appreciate the transparency and your thoughts around AI ethics. It's definitely not an easy topic, AI is so new and it's certainly a powerful tool capable of good and bad. Well done 👏
This is the proper attitude. The creativity comes from the human mind, not the tools that actualized it. The end result matters most and that's how the average art consumer views art.
Recently got a gig from a big NGO who are working on educational programs. They ordered a video to motivate high schoolers to go become teachers from a very popular production company. The company decided to make a music video and write a song for it so they addressed me for music production and mixing. They gave me a reference so I can create an instrumental similar to that. Okay I done it a hundred times so no problem. Then they started looking for an artist to perform the vocals. A dozen recording sessions. We tried a few but the client wasn’t happy. So the project was on hold for a month. Then the production company generated a dozen of different versions of the track in Udio. And the client finally loved one version. I was asked to only edit the generated mp3. They even left the ai generated voice in the final version. And everyone was happy with the result. I don’t like the future.
@@paulsmallmusic sounds like the customer got what they wanted in the end because you couldn’t provide it. what point are you trying to make? that you’re bad at your job?
@@supermot34 it solved the problem in the eyes of the “people in suits” who couldn’t communicate correctly what they wanted. I did every version exactly the way they asked me but after hearing it they came up with absolutely different concepts every time. Yes I am happy to recommend generative AI to clients like this, when it can give them a hundred of versions with little to no expenses. No I am not happy with the result. Music and art is a way of interpersonal communication. And when on one end there is no person, who are you communicating with?
@@wavehellhole I am not bad at my job :) Imagine you get a task from the client with a clear reference and invest hours of your work to fulfill it. You send them over the result, they do a meeting and a manager comes back to you saying we decided that it doesn’t really fit the vibe can you change it *insert nonsensical metaphorical explanation what to change*. You do your best to interpret this, spend more hours working and come up with second version. They do a meeting again and some executive didn’t like it and shows the team a completely different reference. They come back to say that you need to redo everything to be similar to the new reference… and it drags for weeks. Then someone generates a few dozen versions using an AI and the client finally seems happy for the first time. In my opinion the public won’t connect to aomething fully generated. But the “people in suits” are happy with it. So we just populate our media space and culture with bland and empty content this way. And of course the professionals like me are going to suffer. Because ROI of working with AI in such projects is higher.
Yea. You can hear the shortcomings that they can not (and maybe we will as a society learn to do so over time too). And the result is certainly not a reflection of you as an artist that things just didn't come together this time. They came to you for a reason in the first place. The frustration is so understandable. At least let you re-record it better. But.. people are allowed to like the art that they like, even for dumb reasons. If they loved it, then they loved it. And it seems you didn't lose out financially per se either. I do, however, worry about the next time. Where they may not give humans a chance at all. Not because of the result, because I think they'll do what they have to do. But because of the financial stability of the industry. But. That's really too big picture to extrapolate from just one example. And doom mongering helps no one.
Thank you for posting this discussion. I feel that you have done a great job; illuminating the complexity of the situation, and presented a realistic path to approach it with positivity!!!! Love your channel … now even more ❤
Touching on your description of the AI Copyright Infringement: My personal grief on the matter is that most big AI models use or have derived from Laion 5B, which was made using the "For Research Purposes" exemption in most copyright laws globally (it allows non-profits to side step all copyright protections for research). Then this ready made model was released for free (as is tradition on most research projects) and picked up as-is by a bunch of for-profit companies that used the model to generate profits (sell access to the model to generate images from prompts). What used to be straight up R&D corporate innovation was just suddenly "hey, here's this ready made product they cant sell, lets make money with it". Nowadays the companies have made R&D on their own models, but in the first waves of AI hype, it was super sleazy practice.
Fun fact, in December of 2023 Stanford University found Laion 5B was trained on anywhere from one to three thousand images of CSAM. (DOI 10.25740/kh752sm9123 for anyone wondering)
Good point. Now if everybody also realises that ALL big corporations make tons of money on, for example, public funding and education we can have a real discussion and make some changes.
It was true with Laion and is is still true now. Whether it’s “art” transformers, or text transformers, companies are unilaterally scanning the internet for training data whether the scanned sites consent to it or not (with the robots.txt file)
Seeing you work online and off, it is so clear how much you value art and artists. It oozes from your pores. It is also extremely obvious how seriously you take into consideration so many aspects of this work, this video and these cards being no exception
I think this is a sane take. There's good things and bad things and it's okay to acknowledge that. So many people seem to be either 100% for or 100% against something, leaving out any nuance. I think what you said about cutting out the boring parts makes a lot of sense. I can see AI being used to generate things like samples, drum hits etc. Someone might adore doing the sound design, making their own drum sounds from scratch. Another person might find that boring and instantly want a sample. But then of course, having a sample generating AI might take the job of sample pack creators. But so could a non-AI plugin that generates drum sounds. It's complicated, and it's too hard to just say AI is "good" or "bad". Although I do think using work without people's permission to train an AI is definitely wrong, and something should be done to prevent that.
@@BlazertronGames If someone used your spoon or toilet I would agree, but if it's digital content that is freely available online and can be infinitely copied without any effect on the original, then I disagree. The only way it would be wrong for them to train AI is if they broke into your home and took your hard drive with your content. If you published it online, you had basically gave away all say if it can be used for training or not. The only thing copyright protects is if your content can be used commercially by others in a non-fair use context, and training AI is completely transformative process that is 120% fair use. And even if someone can use AI to substantially mimic your work it's only copyright infringement if they use it commercially and it's the person who does that is the one liable not the AI itself.
I think it's wishy washy & ignores reality. It's a new tool, it will upset the old order, I do feel for the people hurt but it is impossible to regulate on what an AI has been trained. Models can be run locally on a single computer that were trained on copyrighted stuff. It is totally unenforceable to regulate that. It's here to stay.
@@_marlene I'm sure it can be regulated for big companies, the ones that are making the most money off of it. Charging for a service where they've used copyrighted stuff without permission is wrong in my opinion, and it's not comparable to denoising software, or AI upscaling, because even if those used copyrighted material to change them, they don't generate an entire creative work from scratch, they just modify a currently existing thing, unlike generative art AI. Might not be possible to stop individuals from doing it, just like how it's not easy to stop piracy, but that doesn't mean regulation is useless. There should be laws, even if they're easy to get away with in my opinion. Just because it's easy to pirate a game or film without getting in trouble, should that make it totally legal?
Ai only benefit one entity really and that is the company behind the ai. This sentence from Jurassic Park comes to mind: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should". Ai will disrupt the world economically and socially on such a large scale, the consequences will be dire. Even in so called first world countries many people are already basically living in the gutter, can't afford houses, living paycheck by paycheck, always struggling etc. The gap between the poor and the rich is already quite extreme. The middle class pretty much doesn't exist anymore. The more jobs are being replaced on a large scale, which ai will be doing, the wider and more extreme this gap will become. Giving companies so much power has never been a good idea or beneficial. Right now we are only at the very beginning of this so it might feel "empowering" to use it. But give it a little time and it will simply put people out of work and that's it. Yes, jobs come and go, but never before it happened on such a large scale all at once and for sure it won't create that many new jobs. And at this point we're not even talking about the quality of said jobs. What do you think will come out of that? Think about the end of the structures we have in place now. For sure even more people than now will suffer and live lifes at the bottom, because there is no work for them to even afford the basic necessities of life. Again, remember the Jurassic Park scientists. All the people pro ai are exactly like those scientists. They fail to see the larger picture or they simply don't care, because they think they will belong to the the few percent of rich people (they won't). This whole situation isn't about if art is going to be replaced, or artists etc.. It's about a lot more than that. Think about the worst dystopian future you can imagine. Then make it 40% less scary than that and that will probably the end result. Sounds good? No, we don't have to worry about art, because in the not so close ai future there is simply no room to even care about something unimportant like that. For now, ai as a tool for arts can be helpful, but if you know people you know damn well the vast majority of people has absolute no moral compass for wrong or right. So it will simply flood the market with content and just by sheer volume will drown out a lot of good and honest art. I seriously wonder why nobody ever thinks about the actual consequences....
I work both in the animations and music industry. The issue I see with AI is that it doesn't hurt professionals who have made a big name of themselves as much as the anonymous beginner artists with big dreams who is struggling to make into the industry because of AI. I think the debate about weather it is stolen data is VERY much Irrelevant (unfortunatly) its just what ligal protest we artists have to grab onto. Even if it wasn't stolen data, I have no doubt that it could achieve the same level of looks and sounds. I think it's easy for a big names who has made it in the industry not to worry as much about AI. But I wish to live in a world, where children of the future can grow up and aspire to become artists. No matter how we look at it, AI will become 99% of the internet with the only intent to chase quick clicks and farm likes. There won't be room for Artists, musicians, writers, cinematographers, photographers, coders....etc.. Spotify is already saturating their platform with AI music to keep 100% revenue. For me it is not about how AI was created, it is the use of it.
what will hurt more artists than AI is to try to go against AI, as AI will not be stopped, there is no way to stop the evolution of AI, so artist should adapt before is too late and they are behind the rest that has good workflow with AI. In the past, painters had to do their own pigments, that was part of the art, but after the industrial revolution that disappeared, do that means the painters that uses premade pigments are not artists? Imagine that a painter from that time that would be against the industrialization of the pigments, and don't buy them... that painter would be in disadvantage because all other painters will be painting in less time or focusing on other things of theirs paintings. The same thing will happen, if there is no signs of the AI to stop, then those that are against it will be in disadvantages. Why a small artist could be struggling? if they got writers blocking just tell AI to help you and modify it as you like, generate some music to get inspiration or to steal some phrases that you like... The ones that are more beneficial are the small artists that embrace AI. We are becoming directors, real artists now, We are important because we have the eye and the ear to know what looks and sound good, how to guide the AI, what parts from the AI generations to get and what parts not to. The end user don't need to know how the art was made, what inspiration or what tools where used, they just want good art, if you where really lucky and got a good art generation and doesn't require any touching is also fine, as you where the one with the eye to know that it don't require any touching and that it is good as is.
You can't train an AI without stolen data simply because most all of it is stolen. There is no way to stop it. To even exist online is to have your data stolen.
What about the artists who will learn to use AI to make something incredible that has never before been seen by human eyes? Is that not worth seeing? We can go back to a historic period of art whenever we wish. We could all swear off computers, or canvases, or brushes. We could say the only art should be made with the MOST basic of tools. That's REAL human art. Truth is, we've been doing this dance over and over and over again, to the point where it seems like every generation has their version of it. They come up with NEW art, and hte old artists get offended, angry and defensive. New artists will emerge. The part people are missing is that NO amount of 'tool' even machine learning, will ever change the fact that an ARTIST is someone who has honed their craft WITH the tool... and the rest of us plebs will make stick paintings and think we made the Mona Lisa. I'm excited to see what art will come in the future BECAUSE of AI... But people out here crying about their jobs. Jobs change all the time... some go extinct. There's not a LOT of call for an oil portrait artist these days, for example... but we still make art. Everyone on the 'AI is bad' side i've talked to has absolutely NO desire to talk about any kind of benefit.. because they want SO BADLY for everyone in the world to immediately see the evil in it, and demand governments ban the use of AI before 'it gets out of hand.' It's already out of hand, you lost that war already. Seeing people who disagree with you only makes you feel like you're losing the opportunity to fight back. And you're right. That's exactly what's happening.
@@K3dev I want to clarify some things. OP says "But I wish to live in a world, where children of the future can grow up and aspire to become artists." Your reply is about what the nature of an artist is (a painter that uses premade pigments vs their own) and how AI could help an artist produce more work (using AI to help with writer's block). Neither of these things are relevant to the thing OP is talking about. OP is talking about careers - the lifelong pursuit of art. We can only undertake such lifelong endeavours if there is some assurance that our efforts will be worthwhile in the future. Otherwise, one might be better off taking a better bet career-wise. I want people to be able to be artists in a MEANINGFUL way, where they can use a thing that they have a monopoly on - their own skill and ability - to produce works that have value to others. In a world where no human has skill or ability that is greater than that of a universally available genAI system, no human has any creative monopoly over anything of worth. What OP is lamenting is the death of a world where an artist's work can speak for itself - where that work represents something about the person that made it, be it knowledge, skill, ability, etc. The reason people describe AI use as an act of plagiarism *should* be because it grants the user superhuman creativity that the user can then pretend was produced by their own mind. It is creatively dishonest and will significantly change the nature of which art is valuable and which art is not. This is why I choose not to use it, because I know that it will erase the value of my own work.
This is correct but the problem existed before AI. The only people who can sue for IP violations are people who have the money to afford it. It already existed to benefit wealthy people. I always fall back in on the problems with AI will be those who pretend they made art by hand and that we live in a society in which we use art to make money to live. Bc of how AI works, I have not been convinced that it is actually immoral or stealing if one is honest about the use of AI, it's mostly a legal debate.
16:12 this is pretty different in the modern context of generative AI, since one other reason an artist might express that opinion is if they don't want to "feed the beast" / aren't okay with having their work used in that situation (to be part of a dataset and to improve a model). imagine you simply do not want to contribute to the betterment of gen AI, you're of the belief that it's harmful and don't want your art to be meddled with, then learning that your work has been taken for that specific purpose without asking. the artist in this hypothetical wouldn't accept/be satisfied by compensation, they would just not want their art to be involved altogether, but are put in a position where they're forced to opt-out, unless it's already too late. they're less concerned with the products/results and more about the process altogether and their un-permissed hand in it. people have their reasons as to why they wouldn't want derivatives of their works, but this is a specific reason that is very, very new-so new, that even if you gave people the choice, it would take a lot of reflection and thinking on behalf of any artist to weigh the pros and cons like you have these past months and make a decision. there's a very clear 'winner' in this situation: whoever is feeding that beast ∨ using that material without any ethical or moral qualms. (hope that didn't come off as combative, i just feel very strongly and i don't think that perspective is considered quite as much as it should be by people who are neutral on this issue.) a very important subject here is the terms of service and license agreements for websites that host user-generated content like youtube, soundcloud, bandcamp, etc. they of course explain what the platform can do with your material after you've submitted and uploaded it, but as this new tech emerges to wreak havoc, platforms and companies (youtube & google especially) are pushing the envelope with what it means to "reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works, display and perform" something when it comes to building datasets and AI-generating material. many artists would probably opt-in to this if they had the choice, as well as many artists would definitely op-out, but they don't have the choice; it's entirely at the discretion of the platform and it's already happening. there is a feeling of disease when this big company with lots of user data & ugc starts to competitively compile and assemble something previously unheard-of that is just barely, vaguely covered by a clause that was written before this situation was even possible… and what they *haven't* done is bother adding a simple checkbox or reaching out to consenting participants first
hank green did a video on the vlogbrothers channel going into detail about google's very dubious, recent usage of gen AI if you're curious about that. i think it's a great video (and so is this one)
It's a funny coincidence, timing-wise, that many points made here can be heard in the same context as Rick Beato's recent videos, almost as a response. Makes me wish music RUclipsrs ccould have interesting and even direct discussions along these lines, I think that would be interesting.
Rick's take is more of an L to me TBH. I like him as a creator but, oh man, telling me that he's part of the metaphorical "big label" without telling me exactly that. Especially when he's in general very open about idea sharing and reusing, but when there's a different coat of paint on top of that? Nuh-uh, terminator mode activated.
Here's one perspective I have on generative models and intellectual property that I don't see talked about as much. Rather than being concerned with a generative model making a product that looks like a copyrighted work, my concern is that the model is already a product, and it took non-consenting people's IP to make that product - to perform the training process and build the model. OpenAI gets a ton of money from VCs and charges for some forms of its product. I consider the existence of OpenAI et al.'s models as a commercial product to *already* be an unacceptable use of artists' and writers' IP, even before someone uses those models to mimic existing IP.
Exactly. Those models are being monetized (through credits), and the people profiting off of that input are not the people who created that input. The product being sold is not inspired by the appropriated art, the product being sold IS the appropriated art.
I disagree. The programming uses people's work to learn how to generate images, and it's output, when not trying to imitate a specific style, looks nothing like what people make bc it's not a copy and/or a product that was copied.
@@SLYKMIt's not necessariy "trying to", but that's what it does- literally what it does is generate images statistically similar to the images it was trained on. It's not learning how to generate images, it's doing math.
that's just not how copyright works. it doesn't care how something was produced, it just cares about the end result and how similar it is to other work. since in this case the end result is a computer program and the other works in question are drawings there's really no comparison.
The only place where I think you fell short a bit here was in your description of the copyright question and the issue of creators not wanting to opt into the AI algorithms. You mentioned that you understand that it feels unfair and scary that a computer should be able to easily do things that humans work so hard at. But I don't think this is the problem. The idea that machine learning would get better and better over time doesn't bother me at all. The problem is that it's not computers arbitrarily getting better at a thing. It's powerful corporations scraping the web for content and then having full say over what is done with it. The problem is that it's anti-democratic, which feels not just anti-artist but also anti-worker. The companies creating these pieces of software are owned by capitalists, controlled by CEOs, and funded by VCs who want a return on their investment. The problem is that, as artists, we don't trust those people to have anything other than primarily their own interests at heart. They want to OWN as much as they can... and then they want to tell us that we're overreacting by saying we want to OWN our creations and get to decide what is done with them. Many of us do not see why CEOs and VCs and owners should get to have their cake and eat it too, seemingly without ever having to beg or scrape or ask permission, while artists neither get to have their cake nor eat it. It begins to feel like "heads they win, tails you lose." The technology isn't just "scary" or "unfair" for no reason. This is about whether a tiny corporate elite who thinks it should get to own everything should get to dictate how the future will work for everyone else. In my view, this is a form of de facto governance, and these people should not get to rule without any consent from the governed. All that said, overall this video was interesting and very productive, and I'm convinced you're approaching this from a good place. Cheers.
I greatly appreciate the discussion you give and your transparency with everything here. I think there are three main issues (to me) with current AI usage: climate impact; theft of likeness; and local vs global usage (which I'll explain in turn). The climate impact of generative AI, such as photo or text generation, is significant: even if none of the original data is stored, everything it's learnt takes up substantial server space, and recall of that information takes great processing power. This can be avoided by avoiding the use of generative AI, especially anything cloud-based on large external servers, but smaller models learning from personal servers or computers may well be okay in this regard. (I haven't researched this in depth; this is speculative but feels like a reasonable estimation given what I know.) Your discussions on copyright infringement remind me of similar issues with taking one's likeness via deepfakes. Use of deepfakes to impersonate someone's voice can have severe consequences depending on how it's used; using someone's exact art style feels like a similar issue. I'm aware that AI doesn't simply take one person's style and copy it if it's trained of a lot of data, but it can tend towards doing so if it finds favourable results in doing so. This can result (and has resulted) in the original artists being accused of using AI art, and may also result in someone generating art that appeals to morals against those of the original artist (in a similar vein to deepfakes of someone's voice being used to say something horrific that gets pinned back on the person whose voice was impersonated). As for local vs global usage - I should clarify "local" as being small-scale, either in task or in server-size (so things that could run on your personal computer like automated rotoscoping or pitch correction in Logic), and "global" as being large-scale things that need an external server like text, music, or image generation. Aside from climate impacts, the tasks these tackle differ greatly; local-scale AI takes care of those mundane tasks like rotoscoping while global-scale AI "creates" its own media. These are two very different uses of AI and I much prefer to see them discussed differently; I feel that local AI usage can be incredibly helpful and productive; it ultimately doe what machines were intended to do - make our lives easier, not replace them. Global-scale AI flips that on its head. I hope what I've said makes sense, and I'll try to respond to questions if anyone has them. Ultimately, AI does have some good uses, but generative AI is much more of a destructive force than a constructive one in my eyes. Thank you for acknowledging the concerns of your many viewers.
You do realize that most of the image models are local and literally none of them are on server farms? You can run SD3 , SDXL on a single 4090 with 16gb of VRAM no problem. You people are literally so clueless as to how it works. It's not "learning" while generating, it's distilled during training to a single 5-10gb file which is used LOCALLY to generate the images, it's not storing terabytes of artists images and doing a collage, it is not "recalling that information" , the whole climate aspect of AI sounds so asinine to me.
@@funkahontasYeah it's a bit of a weak argument when it comes to climate. The internet has a huge climate impact also - when it's plugged into fossil fuels. This shit is electric, it can be green. We should be blocking coal mines and pushing for no new oil, not getting mad at someone for generating an AI image because the web server is maybe powered by fossil fuels. Let's go for the root cause.
@@funkahontas I wouldn't go that far to say none are on server farms. MidJourney, Firefly, and DALL-E 3 are some of the most used image generators out there and are purely available through APIs.
I think the power and local vs large scale will be more of an issue with the LLMs and video models going forward. You can easily run Stable Diffusion 1.5 on an iPhone 14 Pro and even SDXL works, though a little slow. I'm sure MidJourney and DALL-E use more power, but still I don't think it is that crazy compared to things like video games. And the algorithms get more efficient over time. But obviously video models will take much more power and LLMs seem to keep getting larger. Power is definitely an issue in the big scheme of things...
Anything has "severe climate impact" if you really want to argue, and human don't depend on most of them to live. At this point, using "climate" as an argument for anything in particular instead of the entire humanity definitely feels like a convenient excuse to me. Art style is not a biometric, unlike the physical likeness rights, and there are many styles that are very similar or sometimes even blatant ripoff of each other. Nobody took a serious look at this until they need something to argue that "AI is bad". My stance on this is pretty straightforward: If there's actual measurable economical impact instead of people whining about how their "livelihood has been stolen" due to (I'd argue imperfect because not a lot of models can actually achieve a 1:1 copy of style) style mimicry, then I won't be against doing something against it. Because, hot take: you can't trust people whining about issues without compelling evidences to back them up. I also like local AI usage and more control over the AI. People should remember that tools are inherently made for human, and human needs more control over their tools so they can show off their creativity.
My problem with "AI" isn't that "it's taking artists' jobs" or that "it makes the work too easy," but that it's a way for people to profit off of artists' work without their consent. I feel like your point that people can train their own models to do anything they want is absolutely on point and the main thing that gets overlooked by people making broad claims about "AI" just being some "new technology" or "new tool." When people say "AI" they're usually not using it as a shorthand for "generative machine learning models," but specifically for "publicly available generative machine learning models trained on billions of pieces of data, some of which are copyrighted." The problem isn't when people learn they can use math to do work in an interesting or simpler way, the problem is when multi-billion dollar tech companies get richer by edging artists out of the market through using their own art against them by effectively trying to launder its copyright. As a game developer, I have no problem if someone takes inspiration from a game I make and sells something similar, but I *do* have a problem with someone swapping out the art assets and trying to claim it's somehow not my copyrighted work anymore.
As a person who has been an artist and musician for over 30yrs, AI has become basically another tool i use to assist in the creative process. Do i miss the days of hand masking print media? No. Do i miss the days of lugging a hammond b3, or full stack marshall into a studio for a session? hell no.
I may not have known that this was the case with the book of chances and even further that it was getting backlash due to it but I feel that you tackled this in the best way possible. I hope that any backlash you were getting due to this stops as you posed very valid arguments on both sides. I wish you the best of luck for the future.
You made some extremely strong statements. Thank you for that. You have my utmost respect for trying to start a civilized conversation about the topic. Keep up the good work.
reminds me of when i learned an artist i was listening to (macroblank) makes plunderphonics, which I didn't realize meant they took existing music and just made small changes to it like slowing it down, putting reverb, adding a line or two, and then releasing it. I looked into the samples they used on whosampled for some of the tracks and found that some were from really small unknown artists who wouldn't get any attention because of that. I think the idea of plunderphonics is cool if it was treated more as sampling; taking small parts of multiple tracks to make something completely new, or if it was made entirely with your own music, but the way it is mostly used just made me sad
That sounds like _vaporwave,_ which I'd never thought of as plunderphonics. 🤔 I've always had a similar uneasiness with how the credited "artists" in the vaporwave genre are more like "curators," once you learn how little transformation is being done. Yet the "lost media" aesthetic demands that the original context remains obscure. I'm still unpacking those feelings, and understanding whether there is any artistic or moral difference between the "plunderphonics" of hip-hop vs vaporwave.
@@crnkmnky Indeed, and to circle that idea back around to AI; what AI does is a lot more like Ben Levin's fakerwave, where you make vaporwave music but without sampling anything, trying to get the same feel as sampling but creating the sounds from the ground up. In other words, it SOUNDS like multiple things stitched together, but is really just a high-level recreation of that idea.
Agree with many of your views on AI and really any technology. It’s how we choose to use it and for what purpose. This was a very thoughtful response just as with your other videos I’ve watched. I’m new to songwriting and music production at 61 years old and appreciate your content, examples, recommendations and background. I had not heard of your Book of Chance cards until this video and just rushed to make an order. I believe they will be a fun addition to my creative process. Thank you for creating them and for sharing your views here.
He is not a painter or photographer just because he photoshopped a few AI-generated images together. He is an art thief first, photoshopper second. GET THE REFUND.
Copyright essentially exists to prevent creators from having to compete against *themselves* in the market. It encourages sharing, because you still retain control over how your work is used, and you don't have to compete with yourself, even if someone decided they wanted to use your work for profit. They are not allowed to use your work for profit, they must license. This is the purest expression of what Copyright is supposed to do. This is also the backbone of the entire internet. With it, we are still dealing with grifters and scammers, but at the very least its illegal and there is legal mechanisms and recourse. Without copyright, it would be literally impossible to do any creative business AI turns this on its head by punishing people for sharing, by companies scraping artwork, forcing you to compete with yourself in the market. All of a sudden those assurances and norms we've had for 2 decades don't apply to AI because it's a new and magical technology. Licensing? pft, never heard of it. This is different from previous technological shifts because its built on the backs of labourers and workers, using their work without compensating them. Mainly for the profit of businesses (Nvidia, Stability AI, OpenAI, Adobe, Microsoft). These firms want to reduce the cost of creative labour by continuing to train machines on our work, to become better at replacing us. It does not compare to the synthesizer or the studio, you do not need to use a music producer's blood, sweat and tears to make a better microphone. You did not literally use her labour to build a tool to make her redundant. The example you mentioned at 11:35 is wrong. Those platforms are always built on Stable Diffusion, which is built on scraping art and photography from the internet. You can't train a generative AI image model on your own work, your 20 to 1000 images are not going to be able to compete against the literal billions of images already used to train that model. Your work becomes an insignifcant fraction of a fraction of the model. Its not accurate to say you "trained your own model". You should not confidently claim what is NOT illegal. There are legal uncertainties that very well might turn out to be illegal after all. Stealing is wrong even if I have invented a new theft device, it does not matter that I am doing it in a novel way and the laws don't expressly mention my particular theft device.
What people don't realize is that copyright is fundamentally the wrong tool to regulate AI, due to how these algorithms were both designed and observed to separate copyrighted expressions and general ideas. Sure it's not perfect and some could won their lawsuits over technicality, but this route would only get harder considering how much money is there for those companies to make and they have every incentive to reduce the chance of those overfitting lawsuits happening, if it gets proven to be viable. Besides that, "compensation" for every single image went to AI training largely don't make sense as well, because aside from the fact that they are public, and that charging for readily available and uncurated public information is generally morally wrong, each of those "billions of images" contribute almost nothing to the model itself, and the model doesn't rely on any particular images either. This makes it impossible to build a fair compensation model, since everyone sort of worked on it but they sort of don't. My take is actually pretty simple: Remember "the list" from Midjourney in which they used to finetune their model? I think it's fair to ask companies to pay for high quality **finetune** datasets and properly credit those artists who made the dataset. It makes the developers' life easier because they no longer need to use potentially faulty automation to select what's good and what's not, and less chance of running into "forgery" claims. It makes the artists' life easier because they knew for sure that their work was playing a significant and measurable role in model development (potentially even higher than the billions went into it because finetuning is, to some extent, what gives the models their "accent" or "style"), and they get the pay.
@@voidmain7902 I agree with most of what you said, but I think the interpretation that because each individual artist's work doesn't affect the model much they don't deserve compensation is a bit deconstructionist. The problem isn't that an individual artist was hurt by the training and subsequent release of a model, it's that the model wouldn't even be possible without exploiting the _entire artist community._ No one received compensation, and their work was directly used to create something that threatens their livelihood. Also, I think the morality definitely changes when we're talking about charging CORPORATIONS for public information. I like to think of it like we live in a world where 40-story giants walk among us. When a giant shows up to a restaurant they eat the entire stock, their footsteps crush our roads and farms, etc. So considering we share the same resources and they are far more powerful than us, it seems morally _right_ that we should charge them a little to enjoy the fruits of our labor. They can definitely afford it after all. I should also mention I think people's semantics are mixed up in this whole mess of a debate, where some people are defending artists' ongoing post-AI livelihood, while others are focusing on the original "big art heist" that resulted in all the models we have today. Your solution is a good offering to the former crowd, but I don't think it'll satisfy the other crowd who feel that something is owed to all artists whose art was used and won't back down until a debt is paid or the models are taken down and/or banned.
Amazing video. As someone from the educational sectore it's important to show that it can be a helpful tool though it should never take all (!!!) the heavy lifting of the work. Also nice to see people like you not going fully on one side or the other, because as you mentioned, it is way deeper than just pure black and white. Keep it up my dude.
If I were you I would just be annoyed that AI art has made the style I used for this project so prevalent and of such middling quality that it's now associated with scams and generic RUclips thumbnails. Whatever AI art can produce will become so cheap and oversaturated that it isn't cool anymore. Its whole ethos is quantity over quality. It's a societable bad to me because its consequence is inevitably to ruin styles. People will see that a style is popular, they will replicate it everywhere, and it will become boring. Over and over. It spreads joylessness, maybe not by itself but in tandem with social media. Everything must become boring.
Separately I want to add, the model of some countries who provide stipends to artists to create on a societal level would be a wonderful aid for up and coming new artists who haven't made their names yet. Or just a UBI, so those who wish to feed AI can afford to do so...I mean create their own artwork.
@@PureJadeKidexactly what I was thinking. The problem with AI is not some deep human-level creativity extinction like some seem to think. No. It's financial. It's the fact that there will be industries where it's no longer financially viable to spend so much time training when a machine can do it. UBI, especially if driven by the savings realized by using AI (and perhaps that will incentivize some companies to retain human labor), can change that equation.
Seriously, this is probably the first time I've seen an apology video that comes across as wholly sincere. I mean, it's Andrew, so I fully expect anything he was doing to have been done in good faith, and when the honest truth is the "apology", then it's easier to be sincere. But man, so many apology videos just make whatever situation so much worse, lol.
People smarter than I would be able to word this better, but I think this is less nuanced than you're making it out to be. Training a model on someone's work without their consent is unethical. Full stop. OpenAI, Adobe, any other company generating content with models trained on another person's work is not selling a new product. They are selling someone else's work. You make the argument about the MP3 encoder being based of of a model listening to audio and learning how to compress based off of that but that is still an entirely different situation. The encoder itself is not being used to reproduce music meant to imitate the training data. A compression algorithm is not a song.
Agree. Only because i put it online doesn't mean you can train your AI on it. I think that's theft. And so paying for these models is supporting theft.
You've basically stripped and apologetic who is eager to learn man of any nuance, typical twitter keyboard warrior response and honestly pathetic 😂. AI is very new and Andrew started working on this a while back, you can't expect him to share the same opinions as the rest of the world at a given time and space.
"Training a model on someone's work without their consent is unethical." How do artists themselves train or improve? Do they not look at other people's art and analyse it? I don't need anyone's consent to look at anything and do whatever analysis I want on it. Full stop.
What a calming video. It's so great to see someone speaking about those things in respectful but optymistic way. Adressing your points. 1. It was always interesting for me that people find using AI in creative process cheating but in the same time they watch videos about programming sequences with these new random features, arpeggiator settings and chord / scale modes, after skipping an advertisement of a midi chord pack or something. Like you said, everyone can use loops or different bits and pieces made by someone else and if someone consider it cheating just may not do that. Basically AI can be used as an other happy accidents mashine or as a way of selling something I didn't create, it's my choice to do it right way. 2. Some companies already got complaints saying if they don't put their effort and time to write something, readers don't feel obliged to read it. People still appreciate human creativity and, like you said, photography didn't kill painting. It's always bad if someone doesn't get a job because an employer choosed to use AI instead but I think such employer underestimates a need of human thinking. If someone thinks it's so easy to replace creative human with an AI either haven't tried to use AI at all or can do it much better than I do. I know there are prompts how to write better prompts, special shortcuts and hashtags making AI come up with better results, but I wouldn't say it's always as good in creating a whole pieces of music or text, especially in languages other than English. Generating ideas or plans, yes, but not a whole thing. Some photos or melodies can be very pretty indeed but when I tried to create a piece of music in certain genre with my own lyrics, I had to spend a lot of time before I got something similar to the result I was thinking of. It's not so easy and it's always worth it to have someone paying attention to it, fixing AI mistakes etc. 3. Human learning comparison is my favourite one. Everyone tried to emulate someone else one way of an other, or one day or an other they will try. If nothing else it's a form of learning, sometimes very useful one. I understand people who'd like to decide if they agree to AI learning on their material but I'm not sure it's always even possible. If people want to get your style into AI, they might as well try to remake some of your stuff using something else than AI, then load it into AI model and avoid consequences. It's sad but it's true.
Been watching Andrew for many years as both a musician and an artist, and personally cant believe how fast some people turned. If anyone thinks that he hasn't thought about this problem thoroughly or done his due diligence, they don't know Andrew. Great video, loved the nuanced take.
The thing you said about copying work isn’t exactly accurate. There have been multiple cases of A.I. already doing copyright infringement in a way that is provable and dangerous to large companies. A.I images that contain Mario or Mike Wazowski after using prompts like monster or plumber come up often.
As an author, I want write original manuscripts and support people who do the same with their own originality in books and art…. If a computer is gonna do it for you then it’s not YOUR work… it’s the programs. Anyone can type words into a box.😝
52 of your most artist-musical friends could each draw an image. AI has created a huge amount of room for collaboration now that EVERYONE'S art is at stake.
Really great video Andrew, I hope everyone can watch the full video and understand the nuance of your perspective, both around AI in general, and in relation to the Book of Chances specifically. I am in general anti-AI, but everything you, your team and Scott seem to have done demonstrates (to me) a best-case scenario of how to incorporate AI into contemporary artistic practice. the steps that you've outlined going forward also show your commitment to honesty and creativity and I really respect it. I hope others can too, or at the very least consider your stance holistically.
this is gunna sound weird...but im a mycologist and ive been accused of using AI generated images more than once. whats weird is it was all photographs of growing things (and often times the disputed photos were part of a series showing the whole growth process)...none of them were meant or presented as art either (AI or otherwise). i dont really have a horse in this race, im jus shocked that its effecting ppl far outside this world
There's so much i want to say about this but ill try to narrow it down to the top 3: 1. It's not a given that AI isn't going away. Like, sure it's inevitable in a very long time scale but the current iteration is on its last legs; it's not a commercially viable product in its current state and they're literally running out if data (in the world) to train it to be better. 2. These generative AI models consume too much energy to train and run. It's horrible for the environment and not worth using, given how poorly it works. 3. The term "AI" is purposely conflating many different technologies. Most people don't take issue with using AI classifiers, denoisers, upscalers, etc. it's these end-product-generating monstrosities we should be taking issue with.
I am a composer, artist and an author so hear me out. I use virtual singers in my songs whose vocals were sampled and trained on real human singers' voices. But here's the thing: they consented for it. They get credited when they want to be credited. They get paid. They get royalties when someone purchases a voicebank created with their voice. They have the option to include their own therms of services. This is something this current AI generative bs doesn't do. and THAT''s the biggest issue with it. It's unethical. As long as they don't have the consent from the original owner of the data they feed AI machines with, it will remain problematic and any further discussion is invalid. I don't think we should even be discussing about the death of creativity or whatever because all these discussions only distract people from the glaring issue that is theft. It DOESN'T MATTER even if those stolen art works "don't really end up" in the generated images. Because how the machine was able to create anything similar at all was because of those stolen images. It's not even just artwork that they steal. Private medical records, personal information, pictures of kids to name a few. And it doesn't stop at AI generated images. Think about AI generated literature and whole ass songs as well. Just think about all the data needed to make those things so "realistic" . How were they really obtained? Another very big issue is just how much energy these machines use and in this current day and age, do we really need more eco problems for something that's just so unnecessary? I want AI to do my chores so that I'd have time to do art. Not have AI do my art for me while I end up at another underpaid 12hour shift corporate job.
Hair dryers consumes much more energy... But maybe if the AI police is so worried about energy, they could stop using cars, pc's, or any piece of technology at all...
I got harassed by some dude online the other day who was accusing me of using AI to write one of my songs, this guy was hurling insults at me in my comment section and sending super offensive private messages...
I got accused of using ChatGPT. I don't even have ChatGPT. The harassing that's the scary thing! No issue with disagreeing, and different perspectives on things, but witch hunts are so scary and divisive.
This reminds me of a Reddit post I saw a while ago (Post was by user u/rjln109) They showed their dad Porter Robinson's latest single 'Russian Roulette', but because of the influx of AI (and the very basic chord progression used in the song), he thought it was AI It's just really sad that people accuse each other of using AI without actually doing any research
@@Querez8504 Doesn't matter, let people use whatever tools they want. No one should be harassed over something like that. Discussion is good, but if people are so insecure about their own music making that they project these types of fears onto others, then maybe they should think about why they are making music/art in the first place, and perhaps also get a bit real with their believes in their own creativity and their ability to grow and develop new skills in a changing landscape. There's no putting the genie back in the bottle.
I couldn't agree with you more, is like when Sampling came along , everybody said it was going to destroy creativity , and it produced new music genres , one of them was Hip Hop so... another story when the wind and brass instruments got keys or valves they also said i was going to thread creativity, tell that to Miles Davis, Again so... The important thing here is not to copyright infringe others art or be correct and pay for it. Now the automation is going to affect works and that is inevitable it has happened before and will happen again.
Wow, really solid response. Honestly I think this level of rigorous thoughtfulness outpaces what would be required of you here, but you are never one to half ass anything, so it makes complete sense. Donating the money to an arts organization is the cherry on top. You are truly a class act, and I admire the nuance you're bringing to this conversation, even in the midst of a very charged and emotional conversation. This is hard stuff that all of us artists are struggling with, and I admire your desire to engage with all of that messiness in good faith.
Thanks for being so up-front :) FWIW I don't have a problem with AI as a concept, my concern is entirely with the training process and with the lack of legislation around how AI is used going forward. Everything from generated images and audio using unconsenting artists' work as training data to abusers generating revenge porn. Some of it is legislated at the endpoint like it's illegal to use copyrighted material and to make revenge porn, but AI generation makes all these things happen much, much faster and easier. It will be impossible for legislators to keep up, and that's very concerning. Generative AI isn't inherently evil, it's a tool. Like the majority of technological innovations, it vastly outpaces any attempt to control it and people are already being harmed by it and that's why I choose to keep myself and my art as far from it as possible. The dangers strongly outweigh the benefits of allowing decent people to make easy art.
You are a beacon of goodness and humanity Andrew and I respect and appreciate you so much. This video is the most down to earth and heartfelt take on AI I have ever seen from an artist. I think AI will have a resounding effect on music because it is incredibly easy to make mediocre music with AI and some artists will not be able to compete.
I was very fearfull seeing the intro (didn't knew about the whole debacle goin' on about the cards, nor the cards mere existence and still have trauma from Shadiversity's fall into alt right ai bro buisness) but that's was a very respectfull video that really show research was done to be as educated as possible Altho, just to be a little nickpicky about the argument that "AI can be compared to how human learn", it is an argument I often see come-up in defense of AI and I specifically disagree with this one very deeply As you said, AI work mostly by recognising patterns in thing, most things we are currently calling "AI" currently work with that single principle of, "take a bunch of stuff, see what are the probability of them, and then use those probability to generate new stuff" So, 1) *That is very much not how we work*, I mean, when we actually learn art Of course, there do be people that will "learn" to draw things by seeing something, watching a tutorial that say step by step how to exactly draw it, learn the step and then do that again and again Yeah, that, is indeed exactly what AI is doing in concept. We see the pattern, we do them, and boom we did the thing But; also, that's just how very new people learn, not 'actual' artists. I am not saying the exercice is pointless, it builds mechanical skills, confidence (wether in your linework or in yourself) by allowing you to quickly get results on something specific But; artist who do that run into exactly the same issues as AI do ; They can only draw exactly what they learned, and, maybe they can kinda mix and match different patterns and learn a huge lot of patterns to get a wider and wider array of things they can draw, but, in the end they are constrained to the thing they did learn and cannot break into their own style or into uncharted territory without their skill dropping back to square one. On the other hand, what artist actually do to learn, is to learn to learn basically. You learn how to decompose objects into shapes, how to rocognise and balance values, use colors into palettes and give composition and perspective to drawings and so on and so forth, and so now, if I want to draw something, I am engaging with learning what that thing is actually, or make it up when the thing don't yet exist and am able to create it without learning it's pattern. So, basically artist are the people actually able to make the tutorial from scratch while ai would just be equivalent to someone following multiple tutorials to do every single things in a drawing, and being stumped as soon as what they need to draw something that don't already have a tutorial. (also here I mostly use visual art as an exemple since it is what I am good at, but this is absolutly applicable to music where you'd learn music theory instead of learning to play a bunch of song by heart and switching between a bunch of songs when playing a piano to "compose" or any other art form like writing and stuff) 2) So, if I could make you agree that AI's way of 'learning' is not comparable to how humans do, here is why I do think it matter : *That difference in learning is directly making art generation intrisingly incapable of creativity* Worse even in the case of AI, since it is copying every single piece of art possible to make the most likely art to be satisfactory... It is inherently making the absolutely most average one. A saying often said in art circle that is considered an importent lesson to learn is "Art for everyone is art for no one" If you are trying to please every person on the planet you will not really please a single soul, put representation of every type of people in some show and right-wing people will cry that it's gone woke, put no representation in your show and left-wing people would decry a lack of representation and diversity... Make a show scary and some people will find it too unsettling, make it not scary and some may find it boring. go to the middle ground on every slider and everyone is a little annoyed. AI is basically corporate style on crack, and will follow the lazyest most likely path possible to any solution and thus a direction that anyone could come up with, very good to get expected results but very bad for interesting art worse still, that mean that as ai will become increasingly common it will slowly risk accidently scraping itself as training data, learning it's own biases and mistakes as patterns to follow, intensifying them and spreading them before repeating the cycle even more next time, making ai devolve the same way living species start to have deficiencies when mixing with other members of their species with genomes too similar to theirs. More generally, as someone who care very deeply about our ability as a society to make culture continue to evolve and grow AI is therefore not in the slightest able to do any of that, just putting the average of what is done instead of challenging the work that "inspire" it. We need a plurality of voices in art, and we need art to evolve out of the bounds of what was made to avoid it getting stale and dying out, and so called "AI" as it is currently made will not give us that in a fundamental way, no matter how advanced the technology can get.
As a quick side note, I am therefore specifically adressing the one and only argument of "Ai learning kinda equal human learning" That do not mean "AI have no use", just not the same use as human intelligence, stuff we are good at is better done by us humans AI is great at pattern recognition, so yeah, make it pattern recognise. Google probably is using this technology to make google photo automatically tag your photo, allowing you to find them in your gallery by putting a keyword about it, or with google lens to recognise what flower you are looking at. It is used in healthcare to help detect cancers, archeology to restore lost texts... As you said, even in artstic fields it can do things like tracking in videos and that's defenetly a wonderfull use of it, as an artist I would love some small tools like an AI bucket tool that actually fills a drawing with the color in a zone without getting caught-up in some semi-transparent pixels in a stupid ways for exemples. AI is a wonderfull tool. Just, it is also a tool used very wrongly in places it is absolutely not a good fit at, because right now the monetary incentive is to use it everywhere no matter how dumbly because it entice investors. Most of the uses, especially in art, are not pertinent and unethical. We just invented the hammer, and that's great. But man I wish we'd stop using it as a screwdriver because that is wasting everyone's time
Andrew, thanks for this! Reality isn't as easy as many people wish it to be. You did a great job showing the pros and cons that you know of andthe honesty to say that you're not fully agreeing on either of the 'hard' stances is pretty impressive. I think we are often trained to take a side, especially when discussing online. To say 'I don't know' takes a lot, but I think it's the point that most of us are at if we try to look at a topic like AI in a comprehensive manner.
This is a really thoughtful and considered response, Andrew - thank you. I think one thing some people seem to forget is that there are two separate issues here: there's "making art" (which is always a human process) and there's "making an art product", which is about money. It's true that the two are often intertwined, but forgetting the difference seems to be a frequent cause of confusion. Because I don't get my income from my music I have the luxury of making it in a way that I find rewarding (which means not knowingly using AI, though these days it's hard not to use it indirectly). But there are many people who do make a living from art, and who are justifiably worried or angry about what's happening. I agree with you that art perseveres, and human artistic endeavour will be with us as long as we remain human. Frankly... if it weren't for Capitalism, this issue would simply melt away because people would just carry on being human and doing what humans do. The need for money distorts these issues and makes them harder to navigate.
I see a lot of people trying to say this vídeo is perfect and just not criticizing you at all, and i don't think this is honest. As a fellow artist whos has followed your stuff and the channel for years now, I'm still disappointed. I'm not outraged, i can see you're upset with the same things i am, but i don't appreciate the centrism on the subject at hand. In the same video you said "it's not like anything we've ever seen!" And also "It's exactly like cameras!", aknowledging that Genetative AI being used instead of human ACTUAL artists being a bad thing makes you Anti AI, the reason is simple, when people say they're "Anti AI" they don't mean they're against any and all use of AI ever, they're against how this type of "art-imitating" Generative AI is currently being used to cut corners and not hire artists. It's like saying "Hey I'm on the fence here! I'm not Black Lives Matter, I'm not an activist, but I'm also not racist!" Well, it's the same thing. I don't think this video is horrible or has any ill, but i also don't think it approached tge subject with proper empathy, I'm not just scared AI will eventually take my job, it genuinely already has (well not for me personally yet thankfully, but a few close friends weren't as lucky, especially ones in the gaming industry.) If you come across this comment (or if anyone else is reading it) i want you to take it as a "Hey Andrew, being on the fence on this isn't really cool, cause there isn't really anything to be on the fence about, since what people are against is what you already don't like anyways, so it just comes across as confusing" I also wanted to point out that AI isn't like "something we've never seen before!" Artificial Intelligence has been around for AGES now, heck, it's been used on marvelous artistic projects even, such as the Spider verse movies. The thing about the AI then and now is how its being used, and that it wasn't Generative, AI used to do a specific task, but it didn't make something out of someone else's work, if anything it was based on the program used or in general computer generated imagery. I wish you really understand what people (me included) mean, and don't just read all theses comments that don't hold you accountable where it's reasonable to. But sure, the video wasn't all that bad, you did great with the donation and with not using (Generative) AI going forward, but i just think your genuine view wasn't clearly stated, or sounded concisive to me. All in all, love your stuff, good luck with your projects 💜
Yep. The ‘not trying to get anyone angry’ about something so vital and threatening to him and his audience is gross. Who’s gonna need a tutorial from this guy on how to make music in a year or two when he basically just said ‘typing in a prompt to get some art is okay I guess’. Empowering the prompt bro’s who would’ve been watching his content trying to figure out making beats a few years ago
I'm on the fence. I'm not BLM, I'm not an activist, but I'm also not racist. Does that make me a bad person or something? Not everyone has room, energy, or sufficient impetus in their lives for activism. I agree with everything else you said.
@@flubnub266 you don't actually have to go out to the streets to be pro BLM, if you think Black Lives Matter, you are pro BLM, it's why I used it as an example for my argument, if you're genuinely not racist, you're pro BLM, if you don't get that maybe you should look more into what BLM even means and what it genuinely stands for dud
@@Lobo.mp4 Well, I think a lot of people would disagree that thinking black lives matter automatically means you're specifically in favor of the organization BLM. But I'm just saying that if you're not going out and picketing/lobbying/advocating, you're not really an "activist". And that's perfectly fine; just treating people right in your local community or making donations is worth so much, since you're one more person on the planet who _could_ be evil but chooses not to.
@@flubnub266 it really doesn't get any simpler than this You don't have to be an activist to be pro activist movements, if BLM is Anti-Racism, and I am pro Anti-Racism, I'm pro BLM, cause... We stand for the same thing I'm sensing some pretty weird vibes from your rhetoric so I'm not responding anymore dud, also I can't explain it any simpler so idk, realize maybe you can rethink it?
Hi Andrew! You are asking the correct questions regarding the use of AI. The general discussion in academic circles seem to be finding the best way to explore and explode the development. Or how to halt its development and refocus it until new laws can be written for it. The problem at the root of it it (as you mentioned) is the fact that AI and the way that they use property, are not coherent with copyright laws. But it is also important to recognize that copyright laws are not universal, and have not been updated in a long time which for all intends and purposes, make them obsolete in the face of new emerging technologies. The main reason to be hesitant of AI (specially in its use for creative art development) is that without proper regulation and consideration, it is tech companies are allowed and encouraged to keep developing the technology for the exploitation of artists. A truly "not because you can it means you should" type of thing. From a conceptual level, AI should be a tool like the ones you mention (and in many ways it is) a series of algorithms that allow us to reduce hours of work from usually mundane processes. Cleaning audio, gathering specific images, developing base subtitles. etc. are all things that make worker's life easier. And in smaller contexts this is fantastic, but it's necessary to advocate for its development transparency and regulation. The cards look great, and Scott's art, and its use of AI seem like a very smart and logical use of the tool. Hopefully a better tool with a similar use of the technology can be developed in the near future.
Not yet mentioned regarding ethics: The most sophisticated LLMs (nothing about this statistical brute forcing is intelligent) are highly inefficient. They use up a lot more resources than would be necessary for the task. And the copilot thing is kind of whataboutism. There are companies that strictly ban it due to being trained on and reproducing copyrighted material as well as sending data back. No serious business that intents to stick around can afford that. And I would argue most companies that do, do so because the ones in charge do not understand what's going on / haven't even heard of copilot yet.
@@shelinmusic if you consider the energy (computing and training) that goes into that compared to an artist doing the same and not just the time it takes you to click and get a result - most likely, yes that said I haven't heard of Udio in particular and if it would fall under "most sophisticated LLM" - so I don't know
As a high level example for that general trend: Google intended to go carbon neutral. Their AI endeavors have them going in the opposite direction. This will apply to all companies competing in that space, because this LLM approach is brute force statistics. It takes a lot of energy by design.
This is a very nuanced and polite take, and we need more of that on the internet, so I commend you for openly talking about it and admitting that it's still a confusing and scary situation. I also think your process for informing every buyer about how the art was made is stellar, and I'm glad whatever profit will go to an important cause. I agree with most of what you said, but when you're talking about whether or not it's actually copyright infringement - I feel like it doesn't matter if it's recognizing patterns instead of clipping pieces of different art when ultimately, AI tools are mostly for-profit products and are being developed on top of people's art to then potentially be used to replace those same artists. If it does not currently fit our term for infringement, then we need to update our terms! And while it is very messy to argue about ethical use of technology when those same products are made through exploitation of labor among other shitty things, I don't think it's a valid argument to make against discussion of limiting generative AI (not only with visual art, but for writing, coding, and whatever else it can do). It's still in its infancy, and a lot could be done to protect artists so that this could be a boon for us and for creativity as a whole. If we don't talk about it, if people don't get upset about it, then it'll just run free and I do believe it will be a net negative for you and me. It might happen anyway even with discussion, but at least we're pushing back and ensuring it's as good for us as a whole as it can be. Once again, I'm glad you're being cautious about it without radicalizing your own opinions for acceptance or views. It means the most extremist of viewers might get angry, but it invites good discussion and eventually leads to better outcomes.
Honest, insightful, thoughtful, and not pandering. This is how it's done, and to donate the money and redo the art, while offering refunds too, is really a class act. It's hard to imagine anyone still angry after seeing this, except for people who have simply run out of things to be angry about. Respect!
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
We are very lucky to have Andrew Huang everybody.
And even luckier to have you and him in sonic boom ❤
He will too be replaced soon by Ai musicians.
The dude is one of the most talented artist I know
We love both of you. More Sonic Boom soon I hope
You and Andrew have taught me so much!
I miss when AI in graphics just meant Adobe Illustrator.
Hehe
I don't
i actually wanted to see some ai art, it is called vector art now (that's sad) when i typed ai art and clicked search i was shock
The worst receiving end of all of this anyone who has continued working "by hand" in their own unique style and are wrongly accused of integrating or replacing their entire process with AI. I cannot imagine how someone who has spent their entire lives building up a traditional drawing or illustration skillset would feel in this situation.
learning skills made obsolete by new technology happens all through history. not unique to art at all. though previously, art was presumed to be the last thing to be automated. but it turned out that art contains a lot of repetitive and stylized elements that are easily learnable by AI. true innovation and creativity only happens infrequently, especially in popular art, be it drawings or music.
@@haomingli6175 I think the question is, should we? even thought we know it will fuck over alot of people
@@haomingli6175 soooo what's your point? That all of these traditional artists in question should just embrace AI as a medium because it was inevitable that their skillsets would be replaced?
Just because it CAN be replaced by technology doesn't mean it SHOULD. I have experience with both AI and traditional media, and frankly AI feels more like a gambling addiction than actual art-making. It's miserable to me. Am I doing any "innovating" with my traditional art? Probably not. But it's genuine and fulfilling in a way that asking a computer to make something for you will never be.
@@haomingli6175obsolete is a bit of an overstatement. But otherwise mostly agree with the sentiment
At this point, people would be better off if they stopped discriminating against AI users. It's harmful to both AI users and artists who do not use AI. #stopAIWitchHunt
I think a lot of people commenting here either don't want to hear a nuanced take or didn't watch the full video. As an artist myself who is against AI I think this response was mature and reasonable. Thank you for addressing it honestly.
the comments I am reading don't seem to fit with what you must have seen when you wrote this.
Actually, just now I scrolled all the way down to the end and none of the comments come off as that. The opposite seems to be true.
@@tusharjamwal Try sorting by Newest, and see if any different comments show up.
I guess I'll look for myself…
_edit:_ oh, it's over 400 already? 😬
@@tusharjamwal I've seen plenty of people being quick to disregard the points Andrew is making here because of how passionately they feel against AI art, and to be honest I don't think it's completely unwarranted behavior, but I disagree with not hearing Andrew out because their response does not 100% align with their view... and especially going as far as trashing them or the artist they hired. To me that kind of flippant approach is not conducive to a discussion worth having.
@@crnkmnky even then sorting by newest seems to mostly give levelheaded responses and critiques
I mean it's no different from using the generative fills and the image sprayer in Corel Photo Paint (a tool Adobe still doesn't have), it's just a far more advanced version of it... difference being if you want realistic tree bark you don't have to play with seed number settings and Shadow and highlight colors. as great as those tools are I used to avoid using them because you spend so much time tweaking them trying to get them to match what I needed, that it was easier to do it by hand, or just take a photo to get a real-world texture and paste it in. it's too bad that Corel got too caught up focusing on the money instead of adding value to the product, rushing the next version out trying to soak their clients for everything they have. their user interface is the best (still) their creative tools are the best. the customer experience is terrible, but then Adobe isn't too far behind them in that regard either.
I’m not an artist, I’m a musician. But my main takeaway from this video is that Andrew is a really insanely nice guy. What a good dude. He described the situation, presented what evidence he had, defended his decision in choosing an artist, apologized for how it offended some people, and turned this small instance into a deeper discussion about how the world interacts with art and media in general. Most people would have put up an obligatory twitlonger and moved on. This wasn’t even on my radar and yet Andrew did a 20+ min video about it. Kudos man. I like you even more now
Your comment hit the nail on the head, except for one point:
"apologized for how it offended some people"
He did not do that. Saying "I apologize that what I did offended you" is not a true apology.
But here, he did not apologize for offending people, he actually apologized for his actions and how it may have impacted artists (if it did at all, but we cannot prove if it did or not).
The way he handled the situation was remarkable to be honest.
Can I teach you something? If you're just going to disagree and argue; don't read.
I am in no way saying anything negative about Andrew, you guys are just completely in the dark here getting fooled.
"This wasn’t even on my radar and yet Andrew did a 20+ min video about it" - Exactly. The job of the face of a project is to promote it. Anything that happens, you milk.
I work with content creators, this is exactly how you do it. Negative attention? Save the day and be the nice guy. You literally didn't know about this, he brought attention to it and you watched a 20m video selling a product.
You fell for this. It's not on Andrew, he is doing the right thing; it's on you.
I timed out how many times and at what duration he said the full title "Book Of Chances". It follow industry standard to 100%.
i think the Artist he hired might as well the victim of the massive AI Theft scheme his art used to train the AI,
to the point that now his Signature art is considered as AI Art.
not to mention people became less empathetic because he did use AI Art.
meaning that he lose immunity against AI Case, he got labeled as AI Artist and it stuck forever.
people will either hire real Artists and avoid AI Artists just because the negative connotation alone.
AI Art really done some Heavy Reputation damage,
it tells you that you're lazy, greedy, brainless, cheap, and incompetent.
you're an Impostor, so insecure that you even took credit from AI Generator
and said that the illustration was done by you.
and for Artists who didn't use AI Art, if their Art look slightly like AI Art,
they will get the Penalty and reputation damage as well.
@@notreally-sf3df you have a good point and we should be vigilant about this kind of promotion. But with that being said, I think most people here are not planning to buy the product he promotes.
And even if we do, in this case it will fund a good cause
That's exactly how a damage control video is designed to make you feel!
honestly super refreshing to hear a mature response to conflict on the internet. Its oddly soothing.
I appreciate you making this video and I respect the nuance in "two things can be true at the same time" and wanting to be optimistic about the future of tech, but I think where the conversation (and some of your points) get muddy is in the nebulous terminology of the word "AI" - which is a fault of both internet debates and aggressive corporate branding.
I think the productivity tools you mentioned for work like rotoscoping & subtitling can assist editors without taking control or agency away, and it's always exciting to see new software speed up a mundane task or assist with the process, but despite these tools sometimes needing to be "trained," they are in a vastly different realm from the "generative AI" that people take issue with in the Book of Chances (and in general). As you mentioned with current court cases, it is a moral issue at the moment rather than a legal one, but when the core value of these tools in the eyes of their developers and corporate users is to train off of other peoples' works to eventually replace the human effort and touch, they are not tools that many artists are interested in engaging with or supporting. You're right that we've never seen anything like this before, but that's also why the conversation is so heated - many technological advancements you mentioned in music either aren't related to the actual "creation" (digital streaming services) or have made creativity more accessible... they don't cut artists out of the process. As a video editor, rotoscoping helps me make a cool scene in After Effects, but I have little interest in loading a script into one of the new "online AI editors" and having it spit out a finished product with an AI voice and amalgamated motion graphics. This isn't to say generative AI has zero possible positive uses, but with the way it is currently being implemented, it's hard to give it the benefit of the doubt.
"No ethical consumption under capitalism" also doesn't feel like a fair way to dismiss concerns about these tools. Just because products that have become integral to our daily lives are entangled with unethical practices doesn't mean concerns about new technologies should be ignored. And none of this has even delved into the environmental cost, which is... a separate can of worms.
So glad you mentioned the difference between rotoscoping tools vs generative AI. Generative AI will just generate the entire "artpiece" for you, cutting you out of the whole process entirely. Rotoscoping is simply a small part of the final result that requires a lot of manual labor and little creativity compared to other aspects of video-editing.
Agree with you big time on the way "AI" gets used in language to describe things that aren't nearly as ethically questionable as image/music generators. I think the economic frenzy around AI right now is really really bad, and the legality stuff needs to be resolved sooner rather than later. That being said, I think there is a possible world where creative people can use generative AI in a way that doesn't infringe upon the rights of fellow creatives. No one is beholden to that right now, but some people can use what we currently have ethically, I believe.
Fully agree
Fully agree, except that the environmental cost can not be a separate can of worms, it HAS to be in the same really big can of worms
good to see you on this yakko :)
As an artist (a photographer to be more specific), I am pro-AI tools, but anti-AI generation.
What I mean by this is for AI tool I include things such as AI sharpening, enlarging, denoising. I also include AI tools such as auto masking and object removal. This also includes AI text generation in the form of Alt-Text, which is a massive time sync to do. Or tools that can help cut down time when editing a multi-cut
What I am against is the creation of AI art. I am against using a text prompt to generate in a whale or a new sky or a clock, etc.
Exactly, the former augments human creation, the latter replaces it.
I don't think Generative AI should be called a tool. I liken it to commissioning a work of art. If you commission a complete work of art from an artist, the artist is not your 'tool', but rather an active and intelligent agent operating under your instruction.
In fact, it could even be argued that Generating with AI requires even LESS involvement than commissioning a work of art from an artist.
People who compare the creation of Gen AI to the creation of the camera seem to be missing this point.
Generative AI is less like the camera, and more like the photographer.
@@alechaidamus9554 If generative AI is a "tool" then a Ferrari is an "exercise machine". It gets your feet moving after all!
As a specialist in the accessibility space, AI generated alt-text is often more confusing than helpful, outside of very simple contexts. "An apple" is fine, but compare "two smiling people" to "me and my best friend from highschool, delighted to see each other at the reunion". Most of the benefit of alt text comes from the context, not just the content. I'm not going to say it's worse than nothing, because for a fully blind user that's obviously not the case. But it's giving a false sense of security that will lead to overall lower quality alt text on average, and for partially sighted users - which is most of the people using alt text - it's probably only telling them what they can already see.
If we're going to use AI for assistive tech, it's probably better to have it in the assistive tech itself, so that individual users can make the call on what's helpful for them, rather than people producing content washing their hands of responsibility for the mark-up that they should be providing.
@@alechaidamus9554 Fun fact: you can mathematically turn any classifier into "generative AI", so, technically, arguing about "pro-tools but anti-generative-AI" is pretty much meaningless.
I get it that "from 0 to art with a single/multiple mindless clicks" is way less art than people having full agency over their work, but that ultimately boils down to how people use the technology, not that the technology itself is somehow "problematic".
And that argument also excludes the fact that you can also use generative AI to partially fill in the details, in a somewhat collaborative way. It requires more work than click a button, but it exists.
@@CheshireSwift That's a pretty good reminder on why people should always proof-read and never expect the AI to do their jobs for them.
Hey Andrew, longtime viewer here! I honestly don't know if you'll ever see this comment, but as someone who is pretty familiar with these machine learning/AI tools (I am a grad student studying robotics so these pop up a lot in my field of work), and is also starting to dip my toes into music production, I think I might be able to bring a unique perspective to things here. I have massive respect for the way you have handled the situation, and honestly I'm really writing this comment to excise these thoughts from my brain as I have been thinking about this issue a LOT.
There are a few key points that I think are being missed when it comes to ethical creation and usage of these tools:
1) With regards to copyright protection, saying that no images are actually stored within these models is really only "technically" correct; it's sort of analogous to the wine bricks that were being produced during the American Prohibition era (for context, during the period of time in US history where alcohol was completely banned, manufacturers would produce these bricks made out of dehydrated grapes, and include instructions that said "whatever you do, DON'T put this in a tub of water and allow it to ferment *wink* *wink*", thereby bypassing that restriction). Sure, there isn't any raw copyrighted material that is directly stored in these models, but it's almost trivial to get these models to produce such a thing.
Like you said, if someone uses it to replicate something that is protected, that is almost certainly infringement, but historically, who has the power to actually seek justice in these situations? Established people or those with studio backing may be fine, but anyone who is independent now has orders of magnitude more trouble making sure their work is safe. Not to mention, that's just from people who are doing it on purpose; there have been instances where a model spat out a more-or-less carbon copy of a still from a film despite only being given a generic description. So not only do creators now have to be 2-3x more vigilant in protecting their work, anyone using these tools has to be 100% SURE that the thing the model created is safe, which if it is trained on copyrighted material, is nigh impossible to guarantee; the tools are literally trained to emulate this material!
2) One point in particular that you mention is "if the artist couldn't find what he was looking for, he wouldn't have hired another artist, he would've changed his idea". I think that's a little reductive; they could have also licensed a stock image or used any of the massive free clipart libraries that artists have put together. Yes, they wouldn't have directly hired another artist, but the human beings who created the assets they're working with would still be properly compensated, whether directly or indirectly. The point is accessibility to creative tools and works for the purpose of transforming them IS IMPORTANT, and there are people who are working to make that happen while making sure the people keeping that creativity alive are not pushed out of the process! AI completely ignores that second part. Heck, the sample library Splice (which is a platform you yourself have endorsed) literally works off of this principle by compensating producers for the samples they create and then making them accessible to users!
3) You mention other tools that you yourself have used in the music creation process that indeed would have been "trained" on expert material, but the fundamental difference there is that those tools were created IN COOPERATION with producers whose end goal was to actually use these tools to make their jobs easier, while also still giving them control over the finer details if they wanted to make changes. Currently popular Generative AI tools were not designed with this in mind. Painters don't want a canvas that they can talk to and have it paint everything for them, they want to paint because that's the part where their creativity comes to life! And I'm not discounting the artist you hired either, they clearly are also very creative in their own right and they happen to work with the kind of medium (photobashing) that these tools can assist with. However, I don't think that justifies the existence of these tools; one, because the artist again has multiple other avenues to achieve that result (see point 2), and two, because the pushback against generative AI is due to a more holistic view of the technology.
There absolutely can exist cases where the tools are created ethically and used in a creative manner, but given the way these tools have largely been used by people to pump out low-effort content (see any content farm page on any social media) to straight up disinformation (remember that whole picture of the Pope in a puffy jacket?) and by corporations to not pay artists (see Nicki Minaj promoting her album with unmodified AI art), the concern is that the technology as a whole will lead to more negatives than positives given the way it is currently being developed. Hence, the pushback against these tools as a whole; sure, some people can play nice with it, but most people (especially those in power) probably won't. It's sort of like saying, "hey, it turns out nukes will be really good at terraforming Mars for construction!" Like, sure maybe, but everyone knows they weren't created for that reason.
Ultimately, the way I see it, AI tools as they are now disproportionately hurt smaller creators and while it would be nice to live in a world where these tools are ethically created and used, we don't live in that world and it's dangerous to push for acceptance of these tools when they aren't in a state to be acceptable.
Anyway, apologies for the long read. I hope I was at least able to contribute to the discussion and provide some points that maybe aren't thought about as much. Wish you all the best moving forward!
Artist here. I'm not inherently against AI and I agree that it creates a lot of potential for significant quality of life improvements. AI that can color frames of a 2D animation or draw in between frames could be extremely beneficial and allow single individuals to undertake large scale animation projects.
The issue I have with AI is it's current implementation and intention behind it. Currently, AI image generation is designed to completely replace the artistic process. It's not about giving artists tools to empower them, it's about big businesses literally stealing billions of copyrighted images so they can sell their product that acts as a replacement to the artists that created said copyrighted images. The reason i believe that it is indeed copyright infringement is because it's copyright infringement to use samples of copyrighted music, even if you're not making money from it. You can take a sample and modify it and cut it up so it appears different, but it's still copyright infringement. Even if the original image isn't needed after the AI has 'learned' from it, comparing machine learning to how humans learn isn't a good analogy. When a human artist learns from another artist, there is essentially a 0% chance they would recreate a copy unless they copied the same thing many many times, at which point they'd essentially be training to create a copy and even so, if they did create a copy, it would be intentional. AI has no intention and has been known to overfit (create a replication of it's training data). The way AI learns is very different than the way humans learn. In my opinion, what's happening right now is art theft on an massive scale.
I do agree that there are good things about AI and I acknowledge that AI image generation will become very good eventually even with ethically sourced training data, but even so, it is my assumption that most artists will not use AI image generation. Simply because, painters want to paint. Writers want to write. Voice actors want to voice act. Even if AI can do these things for us, we do these things because we enjoy the process. I still often paint with physical paints even tho I can create higher quality illustrations with digital art programs, because I enjoy the experience of using the physical paints. I don't want someone to paint for me, I want to paint, myself. Current AI image generation is not like generating samples to use for your music production, it's like pressing a button and having the computer write a song for you. Wouldn't it always be better to make it yourself or just listen to music from your favorite artists, where every aspect of the song is intentional, rather than it just being an amalgamation of all the popular songs? The only use case i can think of for an artist to use AI image generation is to act as a sort of random image generator to find inspiration, or for photobashing like the artist you shared in the video.
time will tell
ai will either become a tool to help artists or will destroy ai
in the same way photography was going to "destroy art" but didnt though also how the luddites feared for their jobs and in the end they were right.
@@EnigmaticEsoteric okay, you didnt read a single word this guy typed. Grow up.
Well i think it's a bit bold to generalize that "AI generally has been known to overfit", where it heavily depends on the model and the intentions of the end user. Notice how i am not calling them Artist? Because that again heavily depends on the use case and the process. For example if you take an off the shelf synthesizer, reset everything and let it play an existing popular melody with the default synth sound, yeah most people wouldn't consider this as an artistic process. (analogue to generating an image just by prompting an AI). Now if we take this same popular melody as an input, chain together multiple synthesizers, fine tune all of the parameters, and create a new unique melody or rythm, no one would question that to be art, because it requires skill and is quite the process to get right. Same goes for more advanced AI image generation using Comfy UI. Just look at the amount of knowledge you need if you want some artistic control over the end result. And it's still a very young field. I am sure in a few years (maybe even now already) you'd need an entire degree to even understand what's going on. And even then it's currently still required to have basic Photoshop skills to get a desirable end result.
TL;DR: questioning if generating an image just by prompt is totally valid, but imho comparable to someone just dumping a bucket of paint on a canvas. But questioning that something like this www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1dkk3aw/single_prompt_to_3d_to_vid2vid_generation_all_in/ is an artistic process is just unfair to the hundreds of hours it takes to learn.
@@ChaotikDawg You first.
"it's copyright infringement to use samples of copyrighted music, even if you're not making money from it. You can take a sample and modify it and cut it up so it appears different, but it's still copyright infringement" .I don't agree with the presumably "ethical" reasoning of this statement, and technically, legally speaking too it is untrue. There are limitations to sampling usage of course but copyright allows for freedoms when it comes to sampling/borrowing melodic elements etc as long as it is different enough to be derivative. Also, copyright infringement isn't a cut-and-dry affair, you have to prove in court the intentions of the plagiarism, the damages it may have caused to the original artist, and also definitely prove that there is substantial overlap in the first place, Most people sampling are smart enough to modify the samples enough that there's plausible deniability.
Deep respect. In the face of inflammatory heated comments you took the time to create a video that put forward your thoughts and response with amazing grace and sensitivity. The fact of the matter though is that you hired and paid an actual artist and let him do his thing. You have nothing to apologize for in my mind. I actually like the art work. The fact that you are donating the proceeds to charity says a lot about your character. Thanks for being who you are Andrew. I appreciate you very much.
I agree! Despite my worry about AI taking away future jobs in my field of illustration and concept art, this was a very well thought out explanation, respectful of both sides. Great job, Andrew.
Seriously though
@@SethCrowderMusic Seriously, if you are going to comment then at least make a point. Even though Andrew was flamed he went on to make an informative and engaging video that was not only educational but also enjoyable to watch. He made thought provoking valid points. Something that maybe you should learn to do?
I don't think anyone should ever have to apologize for using AI. That's utterly ridiculous.
@@avalerionbassAgreed. You’re obviously missing my point or you posted your comment in the wrong place 🤣
I just realized he sounds like the boss from smiling friends
Wait you're so right! lol
This is a very mature response. Out of all of the ways this could go, I think this is the most surprising and also the most positive one. 10/10 confidence restored :D
The commenters yelling insults are the immature ones
ngl I would've been much more surprised if Andrew had turned out to be a stalwart defender of generative AI
very mature but short sighted... Dall-E image generator was available when he first contacted this artist, there's a good chance the artists he hired was always using AI..
"the style they use is now associated with AI these days" like man.....c'mon... your artist was just ALWAYS using it..
@@willybe6427 Maybe, admittedly I wasn't as keyed in on the AI scene back in 1/2021, but looking at historical stuff people saved off it doesn't look like that flavor of AI was nearly as impressive as what we've had access to over the past couple of years. That might have been a lot harder to just pass off as professional artwork.
@@willybe6427 This attitude is shows the ignorance of the haters. In 2021 the tools were nowhere near this good. The tools have improved substantially in the last 36 months and anyone who doesn't know that demonstrates their lazy knee-jerk reaction is just that. If you think that making these large models illegal would solve the problem, think again. People can just use their downloaded "now illegal" Stable Diffusion models and hide that fact. So instead of being open about the use of AI, people would have to be secretive about it. But it would never eliminate the use of the tools.
Andrew, we appreciate you. You're always so level-headed and can discuss difficult topics with nuance. You know how to listen, how to be respectful, and how to communicate your own point of view clearly and eloquently. Thank you for everything you do. We need more of your qualities in our society.
I'm very sympathetic to the issue of art being trained on without the artist's consent. However I think the thing the copyright discussion always misses is that the real reason copyright exists is so artists can make a living under capitalism by not having someone else profit off their creation. If we had our basic needs met and opportunity for a comfortable life as an artist, we wouldn't actually need copyright anymore. Then we could treat art within the economy the same way we treat art in our minds: as expression and inspiration of the human experience to build upon, not some hoarded property to be withheld for a fee. Either way, I agree that artists should be able to opt out of training algorithms whether as things are now or in that idealized future
Yeah and a world where we had european social programs or people could pursue their interests or live like the post ww2. when the populice was armed and known to spend 4 years on corrupt politicians exhausting all legal means before shrugging and clearing the corrupted is off.
Does anyone find it paradoxial that the best times were in a war shattered economy, where a barbershop ged could buy 3x now 1 million dollar houses, feed a family of 5, on half the gdp as we have today? Im still going to work in the system.
It's faster for a rock to roll up the mountain than dismantle it, and i honestly have questions on my fellow men after seeing intensive jobless mooching and the 'successes' (mass starvation of removing land from successful farmers in africa. And giving it to people who didn't know how to grow crops, but grew tobacco instead during a mass starvation.)
But it seems like we need a contributing part of society, and there is definitely excess wealth. A system twice as much grain was produced under a system 1 monkey had 200,000 pounds of grain and the other 1000 monkeys starved vs a system each 1001 monkeys had 100 lbs and their needs met sounds better right? But what if there was a system the 1 monkey had still more grain than it could ever eat, and the other 1001 monkeys had 150 lbs of grain?
I think the system could be better distributed, right now many common joes pay like 25-50% of their income as tax while the other 1% pays 9%. Biden's crazy promise is saying he'd charge them 25%. But unlike norway, very little of tax revenue seems to go into supporting the person, vs money laundering back into politicans. Wasn't the ukraine war more expensive than us healthcare for all? There's a soft conspiracy that us prioritizes what is profitable for the 1% making decisions and paying 'donations' over healthy for our 90% of people.
Even in a complete system, you'd have to make sure th at instead of working to death for nothing, or just walking off, that all the maximums would still be produced. But ww2 was ironically one of the best times for worker rights, when 1 ged could feed 5 and buy a house at 18 in 3 years, vs 3-5 degrees to do the same in 10 years now.
We produce twice the gdp. It's just a case of 1 monkey producing 200,000 lbs of grain while the other 1000 starve with 0 when the 1000 had 100 lbs of grain before.
TBH between ending capitalism and reforming copyright the latter seems more practicable.
Or you could have a basic income for the arts like Ireland is trialing, so we can enjoy tech bros screeching about how they should be included because they prompt a whole lot.
The real reason copyright exists is for big multi million dollar companies to milk every last bit of money they can from anyone who uses "their" art, for as long as they can. Small creators won't have the money to pursue a lawsuit. So many video games are forever shut down because the companies behind it refuse to release the copyright on their assets. Just sitting there collecting dust, instead of having creative individuals make something worth playing of it. And that goes for many different forms of art.
@Blaze6108 What Is Ireland triving If I may ask?
I recently posted a link to an art piece of a girl with a bike and ppl started to throw accusations of using AI to draw a bike since the bike design was very unconventional. Thing is, bike was 100% drawn by hand, in some parts rather lazy hand) and if you have even basic understanding how a CG painting works you'd see that this was done by hand, yet ppl see what they perceive as an unconventional and somewhat artificial - and they think of AI and start this recreational outrage. I had by fair share of fun posting photo of a real bike of this design and explaining how painting strokes work, yet i felt somewhat sad that ppl cant even understand what is AI and what is just mistake, art style or even just an weird design.
I think Hieronomus Bosh and Pablo Picasso used AI alot.
@@SotonyaAcckaya 😂😂😂 recreational outrage.. see so much of it nowadays.
Ha, interestingly, a good AI would draw a very conventional bike, since that's what is trained on. Unless you give it a very creative prompt
Bike nerd here. What sort of bike was it?
Recreational outrage is such a good term. You are so right
Can't believe Andrew Huang just started a video with "Hey everyone" instead of the usual "Hey it's Andrew Huang *hwpshh*"
because he knows he might be in trouble for using AI
@@grindedfranz Why should he? There is no chance that users of AI models are getting sued for that. Especially if the result is highly modified.
When he doesn't do the slap, then it is a very serious topic.
@@grindedfranz in trouble with who? the internet AI police? he's doing the people who are whining about AI a favor by respecting their perspective.
@@hologram.444 Lame show of respect.
The Silicon Valley philosophy of "It's easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission" is quite horrendous when it's companies with billions in capital taking from people living hand to mouth from their own art. It's not so much the art itself that bothers me (it all looks very same-y and uninspired), but rather the fact that these companies stole from small artists and re-sell their art now with zero royalties or other compensation. Even when artists explicitly say "You are not allowed to use my art to train AI models", companies don't care either. Why? Because artists can't prove that it happened.
For all the philosophical possibilities in the future of AI, for creativity and as a tool.... Its simply not worth the people who watch this channel not being ableto pay bills for the next couple of years.
The sad part is: I know artists who unironically would not mind AI-generated images at all _if they were compensated for it_
And you know the fuckest part? _THERE'S A PRECEDENT FOR THIS_
Yeah! Look up "Ireland artist UBI" They _actually_ give artists a basic income so they can create their own artwork with some safety net to not have to worry about expenses.
The AI companies very well could earn _extraordinary_ amounts of goodwill back if they just committed to this. But no, nothing. And it's frustrating as someone who was once very interested in synthetic media watch capitalist greed obliterate the optics of a fascinating technology in real time.
What bothers me personally about AI "art" is the anti-intellectualism surrounding it. What I mean is that a lot of AI users essentially despise artists and see them as elites and gate keepers who can finally be rendered obsolete by AI. It feeds into the general anti-art sentiment of a certain part of the political spectrum.
This was a very insightful and open video Andrew, you've clearly done a tremendous amount of research on the subject and I really appreciate that you made this. I love this, thank you! : )
AI relationship status: It's complicated.
Yup 😴
It's really not though. People just on that recreational outrage.
Copyright in general needs major reform, and AI is part of that mess. Copyright was originally just 14 years -- long enough for the creator to get reasonable compensation for their work, but short enough for the work to enter public domain while it's still relevant enough to do some good for society as a whole. I think we should go back to that, and maybe even make it shorter. Maybe I'm biased since I've spent my life making open-source software, but derivative works are not a bad thing. Rather, standing on the shoulders of giants is how almost all progress is made. Our copyright system is holding everyone back.
@@ToyKeeper Agreed our copyright system in the US is terrible. And hypocritical if you look at things like disney.
@@ToyKeeper Right, the rise of the patent trolls has made it so that only companies with large armies of lawyers can make it.
Thanks for taking the time to put this video together. I think you did fantastically at addressing concerns and taking meaningful action. I trust that you'll continue to do amazing things for various creative communities and I'm excited to see these cards in person as well as the next set.
Really missing the clap today.
The cream really cleared it up.
You can go sit on a truckstop toilet seat and roll the dice
An 808 clap or a real clap?
mfs with syphilis be like
time to use A.I to make Andrew clap at the beginning of this video.
I hope everyone sees the end bit at 19:54 before commenting. It's a genuinely virtuous action Andrew, very class, and it means a lot.
For those who still didn't want to watch:
1) he will refund those who ordered and want it
2) the art of the next batch will be completely remade without any use of AI
3) the benefits will be entirely donated to a charity for young artists and marginalized people in Toronto
Indeed a class act.
Unnecessary. He should not be emotionally coerced into this action just because AI was used to create his product and his flakey so-called followers are acting outraged.
They need to seriously grow up and get over themselves. They have no idea how out of line they are.
@@rhythmguild4333 how can someone be so stupid
That's really nice and understanding of him but I'm sorry, this is not the right decision.
Here, AI was purely used as a tool and by taking side with outraged anti AI people he certainly degrade the validity of the artist he hired.
That's a real shame, real good one.
It literally says to this artist that he made a mistake by adaptating with his age and that if he wants to continue it's better to not use today's tools because it will enrage clearly blind people..
AI is here and it's here to stay and only the fools will not get on-board. It is just our responsibility to use this tool with wisdom but not simply burst when we even hear the term..
Please, be wise and have some reflection.
Not just jumping on the first "good" reason to get mad to feel you are important.. You'll just fade into the masses by doing so.
@@Liace159 He didn't side with the outraged anti-AI people, and that's not what I mean to commend him for. I'm not on the anti-AI side either. His words: "but if you were coming to this video hoping I'd take a hard stance on the ethics one way or another, I'm sorry to disappoint you and I don't just want to tell you something that I think you want to hear." "That's also why I'm not ready to condemn or tear down any artist who might choose to use them."
Presumably, any one who doesn't cancel their order wouldn't care that AI was used and wouldn't care if he profits from it. If he was just trying to save face, he could have just given the option for a refund. Donating his profits could be an extra step of 'saving face', and we'll never know his true intentions, but it just feels unnecessary to me if that were the case. I'm leaning towards the idea that he's deciding to donate his profits to Sketch because he feels that it's the moral thing to do (the charity seems to be for a good cause), despite the fact that it feels unnecessary (my assumption) and that he'll lose out financially. The decision doesn't necessarily come from a feeling of guilt; it could be out of his own recognition that he wants to help Sketch out during this volatile, transitional period.
That being said, I very much disagree with people who paired their criticisms with overt negativity towards him personally, as I don't see legitimate reason to think that he didn't have the best intentions overall.
7:08 a generative patch doing melodies out of a modular synth is not the same as an AI generated song.
The artist's process was actually pretty cool to see, despite my own worries about AI as an illustrator and Product design student.
You spent a lot of time explaining how you see no nuance in the situation. And then proceed to back up your point by calling everyone but you stupid. Don't get me wrong. You said it in a much more eloquent way than that. But your ultimate point is just that. What's the point putting forth an argument when you decry any attempt to talk back to it?
@MrPipol-nm3cd "AI requires databases..." What are you smoking? You clearly have no clue of how Diffusion Models, GANs or other generative AI models work. Please keep it shut.
@MrPipol-nm3cd Your answer is so convoluted, neither a specific framework nor databases are relevant here. The different deep learning model architectures do not just generate output based on some retrieved context from a database. The models typically learn some form of latent representation of data, when querying them you dont get the same picture that was used to train the model. The process is a lot closer (still not comparable though) to how humans learn abstract representations of data, than you seem to think.
If I can add to the discussion. I want ai to do my dishes not my art
You don't have a dishwasher in the XXI century? Wth
and it will eventually, we are in the early days. remember the early days of the internet? or are you too young??
@@iFilmLiveMusicUS Personally I think that AI and the Internet are two completely separate things, but that's not important. AI is just a tool and every tool can be improved. To some extent at least. Saws improved a lot and we eventually ended up with a chainsaw. Hammers on the other hand were improved by just making different hammers for different things; they barely changed. Any further development of these tools would be completely useless as they've already reached their final potential. The same goes with AI, it can only improve to a certain point before it peaks. The problem is that we don't know and we are unable to predict how far this peak really is
Yeah, I'm saying the same thing: Put AI on World Hunger, Cancer, Etc.
@@tapeexperiments they literally do it, but not everyone is interested in working solely on these problems, some people want to make generative AI and it's their right to pursue their own projects. Also advances in generative AI bring new techniques and research that can be built upon to make "more useful" AI in the future.
Great video Andrew - and a refreshingly candid discussion on the topic. I’m a visual designer by day (“my job”) and musician (“my passion”) and while I appreciate these complex questions, I feel like I did in the late 90’s starting my career in digital. I find the ability to work more efficiently, test, discard, and adapt ideas more quickly a remarkably empowering opportunity. BTW, I, just pre-ordered the cards - would have done so but I think supporting one of our local Toronto organizations is great. Good stuff - hope you have a great weekend.
AI or not, I think the cards are still a really engaging and creative tool! Even if Scott used entirely stock images in the design, his art style would probably still been called out.
I really appreciate the transparency and your thoughts around AI ethics. It's definitely not an easy topic, AI is so new and it's certainly a powerful tool capable of good and bad. Well done 👏
This is the proper attitude. The creativity comes from the human mind, not the tools that actualized it. The end result matters most and that's how the average art consumer views art.
Recently got a gig from a big NGO who are working on educational programs. They ordered a video to motivate high schoolers to go become teachers from a very popular production company. The company decided to make a music video and write a song for it so they addressed me for music production and mixing. They gave me a reference so I can create an instrumental similar to that. Okay I done it a hundred times so no problem. Then they started looking for an artist to perform the vocals. A dozen recording sessions. We tried a few but the client wasn’t happy. So the project was on hold for a month. Then the production company generated a dozen of different versions of the track in Udio. And the client finally loved one version. I was asked to only edit the generated mp3. They even left the ai generated voice in the final version. And everyone was happy with the result.
I don’t like the future.
Seemed like a positive story to me. Solution was not forthcoming until AI was used which solved the problem
@@paulsmallmusic sounds like the customer got what they wanted in the end because you couldn’t provide it. what point are you trying to make? that you’re bad at your job?
@@supermot34 it solved the problem in the eyes of the “people in suits” who couldn’t communicate correctly what they wanted. I did every version exactly the way they asked me but after hearing it they came up with absolutely different concepts every time.
Yes I am happy to recommend generative AI to clients like this, when it can give them a hundred of versions with little to no expenses.
No I am not happy with the result.
Music and art is a way of interpersonal communication. And when on one end there is no person, who are you communicating with?
@@wavehellhole I am not bad at my job :) Imagine you get a task from the client with a clear reference and invest hours of your work to fulfill it. You send them over the result, they do a meeting and a manager comes back to you saying we decided that it doesn’t really fit the vibe can you change it *insert nonsensical metaphorical explanation what to change*. You do your best to interpret this, spend more hours working and come up with second version. They do a meeting again and some executive didn’t like it and shows the team a completely different reference. They come back to say that you need to redo everything to be similar to the new reference… and it drags for weeks. Then someone generates a few dozen versions using an AI and the client finally seems happy for the first time.
In my opinion the public won’t connect to aomething fully generated. But the “people in suits” are happy with it. So we just populate our media space and culture with bland and empty content this way. And of course the professionals like me are going to suffer. Because ROI of working with AI in such projects is higher.
Yea. You can hear the shortcomings that they can not (and maybe we will as a society learn to do so over time too). And the result is certainly not a reflection of you as an artist that things just didn't come together this time. They came to you for a reason in the first place.
The frustration is so understandable. At least let you re-record it better. But.. people are allowed to like the art that they like, even for dumb reasons. If they loved it, then they loved it. And it seems you didn't lose out financially per se either.
I do, however, worry about the next time. Where they may not give humans a chance at all. Not because of the result, because I think they'll do what they have to do. But because of the financial stability of the industry.
But. That's really too big picture to extrapolate from just one example. And doom mongering helps no one.
Thank you for posting this discussion. I feel that you have done a great job; illuminating the complexity of the situation, and presented a realistic path to approach it with positivity!!!! Love your channel … now even more ❤
Touching on your description of the AI Copyright Infringement: My personal grief on the matter is that most big AI models use or have derived from Laion 5B, which was made using the "For Research Purposes" exemption in most copyright laws globally (it allows non-profits to side step all copyright protections for research). Then this ready made model was released for free (as is tradition on most research projects) and picked up as-is by a bunch of for-profit companies that used the model to generate profits (sell access to the model to generate images from prompts). What used to be straight up R&D corporate innovation was just suddenly "hey, here's this ready made product they cant sell, lets make money with it". Nowadays the companies have made R&D on their own models, but in the first waves of AI hype, it was super sleazy practice.
THIS! Even the fckin AI itself is stolen work most of the time!
Fun fact, in December of 2023 Stanford University found Laion 5B was trained on anywhere from one to three thousand images of CSAM. (DOI 10.25740/kh752sm9123 for anyone wondering)
Good point. Now if everybody also realises that ALL big corporations make tons of money on, for example, public funding and education we can have a real discussion and make some changes.
No, the vast majority of AI models still use stolen art, even today. AI is just a grift all the way down
It was true with Laion and is is still true now. Whether it’s “art” transformers, or text transformers, companies are unilaterally scanning the internet for training data whether the scanned sites consent to it or not (with the robots.txt file)
Seeing you work online and off, it is so clear how much you value art and artists. It oozes from your pores. It is also extremely obvious how seriously you take into consideration so many aspects of this work, this video and these cards being no exception
Also your hair looks gooooooooooood in this video
This is nuts! You're the best for sharing this Andrew so informative on AI right now x
Great video. I'm glad the art will be changed for the next batch because honestly it's an awesome product idea and I want a pack!!
I think this is a sane take. There's good things and bad things and it's okay to acknowledge that. So many people seem to be either 100% for or 100% against something, leaving out any nuance.
I think what you said about cutting out the boring parts makes a lot of sense. I can see AI being used to generate things like samples, drum hits etc. Someone might adore doing the sound design, making their own drum sounds from scratch. Another person might find that boring and instantly want a sample. But then of course, having a sample generating AI might take the job of sample pack creators. But so could a non-AI plugin that generates drum sounds. It's complicated, and it's too hard to just say AI is "good" or "bad".
Although I do think using work without people's permission to train an AI is definitely wrong, and something should be done to prevent that.
What about using work without people's permission for non-AI art?
@@MyNameIsNeutron I think using something without someone's permission is wrong whether or not it's AI.
@@BlazertronGames If someone used your spoon or toilet I would agree, but if it's digital content that is freely available online and can be infinitely copied without any effect on the original, then I disagree. The only way it would be wrong for them to train AI is if they broke into your home and took your hard drive with your content. If you published it online, you had basically gave away all say if it can be used for training or not. The only thing copyright protects is if your content can be used commercially by others in a non-fair use context, and training AI is completely transformative process that is 120% fair use. And even if someone can use AI to substantially mimic your work it's only copyright infringement if they use it commercially and it's the person who does that is the one liable not the AI itself.
I think it's wishy washy & ignores reality. It's a new tool, it will upset the old order, I do feel for the people hurt but it is impossible to regulate on what an AI has been trained. Models can be run locally on a single computer that were trained on copyrighted stuff. It is totally unenforceable to regulate that. It's here to stay.
@@_marlene I'm sure it can be regulated for big companies, the ones that are making the most money off of it. Charging for a service where they've used copyrighted stuff without permission is wrong in my opinion, and it's not comparable to denoising software, or AI upscaling, because even if those used copyrighted material to change them, they don't generate an entire creative work from scratch, they just modify a currently existing thing, unlike generative art AI.
Might not be possible to stop individuals from doing it, just like how it's not easy to stop piracy, but that doesn't mean regulation is useless. There should be laws, even if they're easy to get away with in my opinion. Just because it's easy to pirate a game or film without getting in trouble, should that make it totally legal?
You are such a genuine and kind person. Well done.
Ai only benefit one entity really and that is the company behind the ai. This sentence from Jurassic Park comes to mind: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should". Ai will disrupt the world economically and socially on such a large scale, the consequences will be dire. Even in so called first world countries many people are already basically living in the gutter, can't afford houses, living paycheck by paycheck, always struggling etc. The gap between the poor and the rich is already quite extreme. The middle class pretty much doesn't exist anymore. The more jobs are being replaced on a large scale, which ai will be doing, the wider and more extreme this gap will become. Giving companies so much power has never been a good idea or beneficial. Right now we are only at the very beginning of this so it might feel "empowering" to use it. But give it a little time and it will simply put people out of work and that's it. Yes, jobs come and go, but never before it happened on such a large scale all at once and for sure it won't create that many new jobs. And at this point we're not even talking about the quality of said jobs. What do you think will come out of that? Think about the end of the structures we have in place now. For sure even more people than now will suffer and live lifes at the bottom, because there is no work for them to even afford the basic necessities of life. Again, remember the Jurassic Park scientists. All the people pro ai are exactly like those scientists. They fail to see the larger picture or they simply don't care, because they think they will belong to the the few percent of rich people (they won't). This whole situation isn't about if art is going to be replaced, or artists etc.. It's about a lot more than that. Think about the worst dystopian future you can imagine. Then make it 40% less scary than that and that will probably the end result. Sounds good? No, we don't have to worry about art, because in the not so close ai future there is simply no room to even care about something unimportant like that. For now, ai as a tool for arts can be helpful, but if you know people you know damn well the vast majority of people has absolute no moral compass for wrong or right. So it will simply flood the market with content and just by sheer volume will drown out a lot of good and honest art. I seriously wonder why nobody ever thinks about the actual consequences....
I work both in the animations and music industry. The issue I see with AI is that it doesn't hurt professionals who have made a big name of themselves as much as the anonymous beginner artists with big dreams who is struggling to make into the industry because of AI. I think the debate about weather it is stolen data is VERY much Irrelevant (unfortunatly) its just what ligal protest we artists have to grab onto. Even if it wasn't stolen data, I have no doubt that it could achieve the same level of looks and sounds. I think it's easy for a big names who has made it in the industry not to worry as much about AI. But I wish to live in a world, where children of the future can grow up and aspire to become artists. No matter how we look at it, AI will become 99% of the internet with the only intent to chase quick clicks and farm likes. There won't be room for Artists, musicians, writers, cinematographers, photographers, coders....etc.. Spotify is already saturating their platform with AI music to keep 100% revenue. For me it is not about how AI was created, it is the use of it.
what will hurt more artists than AI is to try to go against AI, as AI will not be stopped, there is no way to stop the evolution of AI, so artist should adapt before is too late and they are behind the rest that has good workflow with AI.
In the past, painters had to do their own pigments, that was part of the art, but after the industrial revolution that disappeared, do that means the painters that uses premade pigments are not artists? Imagine that a painter from that time that would be against the industrialization of the pigments, and don't buy them... that painter would be in disadvantage because all other painters will be painting in less time or focusing on other things of theirs paintings. The same thing will happen, if there is no signs of the AI to stop, then those that are against it will be in disadvantages.
Why a small artist could be struggling? if they got writers blocking just tell AI to help you and modify it as you like, generate some music to get inspiration or to steal some phrases that you like... The ones that are more beneficial are the small artists that embrace AI.
We are becoming directors, real artists now, We are important because we have the eye and the ear to know what looks and sound good, how to guide the AI, what parts from the AI generations to get and what parts not to. The end user don't need to know how the art was made, what inspiration or what tools where used, they just want good art, if you where really lucky and got a good art generation and doesn't require any touching is also fine, as you where the one with the eye to know that it don't require any touching and that it is good as is.
You can't train an AI without stolen data simply because most all of it is stolen. There is no way to stop it. To even exist online is to have your data stolen.
What about the artists who will learn to use AI to make something incredible that has never before been seen by human eyes? Is that not worth seeing? We can go back to a historic period of art whenever we wish. We could all swear off computers, or canvases, or brushes. We could say the only art should be made with the MOST basic of tools. That's REAL human art.
Truth is, we've been doing this dance over and over and over again, to the point where it seems like every generation has their version of it. They come up with NEW art, and hte old artists get offended, angry and defensive. New artists will emerge. The part people are missing is that NO amount of 'tool' even machine learning, will ever change the fact that an ARTIST is someone who has honed their craft WITH the tool... and the rest of us plebs will make stick paintings and think we made the Mona Lisa.
I'm excited to see what art will come in the future BECAUSE of AI... But people out here crying about their jobs. Jobs change all the time... some go extinct. There's not a LOT of call for an oil portrait artist these days, for example... but we still make art.
Everyone on the 'AI is bad' side i've talked to has absolutely NO desire to talk about any kind of benefit.. because they want SO BADLY for everyone in the world to immediately see the evil in it, and demand governments ban the use of AI before 'it gets out of hand.'
It's already out of hand, you lost that war already. Seeing people who disagree with you only makes you feel like you're losing the opportunity to fight back. And you're right. That's exactly what's happening.
@@K3dev I want to clarify some things. OP says "But I wish to live in a world, where children of the future can grow up and aspire to become artists." Your reply is about what the nature of an artist is (a painter that uses premade pigments vs their own) and how AI could help an artist produce more work (using AI to help with writer's block). Neither of these things are relevant to the thing OP is talking about.
OP is talking about careers - the lifelong pursuit of art. We can only undertake such lifelong endeavours if there is some assurance that our efforts will be worthwhile in the future. Otherwise, one might be better off taking a better bet career-wise. I want people to be able to be artists in a MEANINGFUL way, where they can use a thing that they have a monopoly on - their own skill and ability - to produce works that have value to others. In a world where no human has skill or ability that is greater than that of a universally available genAI system, no human has any creative monopoly over anything of worth.
What OP is lamenting is the death of a world where an artist's work can speak for itself - where that work represents something about the person that made it, be it knowledge, skill, ability, etc. The reason people describe AI use as an act of plagiarism *should* be because it grants the user superhuman creativity that the user can then pretend was produced by their own mind. It is creatively dishonest and will significantly change the nature of which art is valuable and which art is not. This is why I choose not to use it, because I know that it will erase the value of my own work.
This is correct but the problem existed before AI. The only people who can sue for IP violations are people who have the money to afford it. It already existed to benefit wealthy people.
I always fall back in on the problems with AI will be those who pretend they made art by hand and that we live in a society in which we use art to make money to live.
Bc of how AI works, I have not been convinced that it is actually immoral or stealing if one is honest about the use of AI, it's mostly a legal debate.
Really remarkable video. Thanks for taking the time to really walk through this and really bring nuance to the situation.
i think it’s great how you responded with openness to this and i love that your funnelling the money made from this project into a local art org ❤
People can be such babies. AI for art/music is dope and I wish I had these tools when I was a kid making my own music, it would have been really fun.
16:12 this is pretty different in the modern context of generative AI, since one other reason an artist might express that opinion is if they don't want to "feed the beast" / aren't okay with having their work used in that situation (to be part of a dataset and to improve a model). imagine you simply do not want to contribute to the betterment of gen AI, you're of the belief that it's harmful and don't want your art to be meddled with, then learning that your work has been taken for that specific purpose without asking. the artist in this hypothetical wouldn't accept/be satisfied by compensation, they would just not want their art to be involved altogether, but are put in a position where they're forced to opt-out, unless it's already too late. they're less concerned with the products/results and more about the process altogether and their un-permissed hand in it. people have their reasons as to why they wouldn't want derivatives of their works, but this is a specific reason that is very, very new-so new, that even if you gave people the choice, it would take a lot of reflection and thinking on behalf of any artist to weigh the pros and cons like you have these past months and make a decision. there's a very clear 'winner' in this situation: whoever is feeding that beast ∨ using that material without any ethical or moral qualms. (hope that didn't come off as combative, i just feel very strongly and i don't think that perspective is considered quite as much as it should be by people who are neutral on this issue.)
a very important subject here is the terms of service and license agreements for websites that host user-generated content like youtube, soundcloud, bandcamp, etc. they of course explain what the platform can do with your material after you've submitted and uploaded it, but as this new tech emerges to wreak havoc, platforms and companies (youtube & google especially) are pushing the envelope with what it means to "reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works, display and perform" something when it comes to building datasets and AI-generating material. many artists would probably opt-in to this if they had the choice, as well as many artists would definitely op-out, but they don't have the choice; it's entirely at the discretion of the platform and it's already happening. there is a feeling of disease when this big company with lots of user data & ugc starts to competitively compile and assemble something previously unheard-of that is just barely, vaguely covered by a clause that was written before this situation was even possible… and what they *haven't* done is bother adding a simple checkbox or reaching out to consenting participants first
hank green did a video on the vlogbrothers channel going into detail about google's very dubious, recent usage of gen AI if you're curious about that. i think it's a great video (and so is this one)
It's a funny coincidence, timing-wise, that many points made here can be heard in the same context as Rick Beato's recent videos, almost as a response. Makes me wish music RUclipsrs ccould have interesting and even direct discussions along these lines, I think that would be interesting.
There's a few crossovers that happen like that, but I agree we need more!
Yeah, except Andrew has more nuance and maturity regarding technology that he is uncomfortable with, or new to
Rick's take is more of an L to me TBH. I like him as a creator but, oh man, telling me that he's part of the metaphorical "big label" without telling me exactly that.
Especially when he's in general very open about idea sharing and reusing, but when there's a different coat of paint on top of that? Nuh-uh, terminator mode activated.
Here's one perspective I have on generative models and intellectual property that I don't see talked about as much. Rather than being concerned with a generative model making a product that looks like a copyrighted work, my concern is that the model is already a product, and it took non-consenting people's IP to make that product - to perform the training process and build the model. OpenAI gets a ton of money from VCs and charges for some forms of its product. I consider the existence of OpenAI et al.'s models as a commercial product to *already* be an unacceptable use of artists' and writers' IP, even before someone uses those models to mimic existing IP.
Exactly. Those models are being monetized (through credits), and the people profiting off of that input are not the people who created that input. The product being sold is not inspired by the appropriated art, the product being sold IS the appropriated art.
Well said!!
I disagree. The programming uses people's work to learn how to generate images, and it's output, when not trying to imitate a specific style, looks nothing like what people make bc it's not a copy and/or a product that was copied.
@@SLYKMIt's not necessariy "trying to", but that's what it does- literally what it does is generate images statistically similar to the images it was trained on. It's not learning how to generate images, it's doing math.
that's just not how copyright works. it doesn't care how something was produced, it just cares about the end result and how similar it is to other work. since in this case the end result is a computer program and the other works in question are drawings there's really no comparison.
Andrew this is one of the best, most nuanced takes on AI that I've seen yet. Really appreciate your sharing this.
First video I’ve seen of yours..Absolutely nailed it…. Amazing that you’re donating the proceeds to a great cause too!
AI has already gotten to the point were if I know its AI generated I automatically associate the product with being cheap
This is probably the most sane and even handed discourse on AI art & music I've encountered. Thank you Mr. Huang & team. Well done!
The only place where I think you fell short a bit here was in your description of the copyright question and the issue of creators not wanting to opt into the AI algorithms. You mentioned that you understand that it feels unfair and scary that a computer should be able to easily do things that humans work so hard at.
But I don't think this is the problem. The idea that machine learning would get better and better over time doesn't bother me at all. The problem is that it's not computers arbitrarily getting better at a thing. It's powerful corporations scraping the web for content and then having full say over what is done with it. The problem is that it's anti-democratic, which feels not just anti-artist but also anti-worker.
The companies creating these pieces of software are owned by capitalists, controlled by CEOs, and funded by VCs who want a return on their investment. The problem is that, as artists, we don't trust those people to have anything other than primarily their own interests at heart. They want to OWN as much as they can... and then they want to tell us that we're overreacting by saying we want to OWN our creations and get to decide what is done with them. Many of us do not see why CEOs and VCs and owners should get to have their cake and eat it too, seemingly without ever having to beg or scrape or ask permission, while artists neither get to have their cake nor eat it. It begins to feel like "heads they win, tails you lose."
The technology isn't just "scary" or "unfair" for no reason. This is about whether a tiny corporate elite who thinks it should get to own everything should get to dictate how the future will work for everyone else. In my view, this is a form of de facto governance, and these people should not get to rule without any consent from the governed.
All that said, overall this video was interesting and very productive, and I'm convinced you're approaching this from a good place. Cheers.
I greatly appreciate the discussion you give and your transparency with everything here. I think there are three main issues (to me) with current AI usage: climate impact; theft of likeness; and local vs global usage (which I'll explain in turn).
The climate impact of generative AI, such as photo or text generation, is significant: even if none of the original data is stored, everything it's learnt takes up substantial server space, and recall of that information takes great processing power. This can be avoided by avoiding the use of generative AI, especially anything cloud-based on large external servers, but smaller models learning from personal servers or computers may well be okay in this regard. (I haven't researched this in depth; this is speculative but feels like a reasonable estimation given what I know.)
Your discussions on copyright infringement remind me of similar issues with taking one's likeness via deepfakes. Use of deepfakes to impersonate someone's voice can have severe consequences depending on how it's used; using someone's exact art style feels like a similar issue. I'm aware that AI doesn't simply take one person's style and copy it if it's trained of a lot of data, but it can tend towards doing so if it finds favourable results in doing so. This can result (and has resulted) in the original artists being accused of using AI art, and may also result in someone generating art that appeals to morals against those of the original artist (in a similar vein to deepfakes of someone's voice being used to say something horrific that gets pinned back on the person whose voice was impersonated).
As for local vs global usage - I should clarify "local" as being small-scale, either in task or in server-size (so things that could run on your personal computer like automated rotoscoping or pitch correction in Logic), and "global" as being large-scale things that need an external server like text, music, or image generation. Aside from climate impacts, the tasks these tackle differ greatly; local-scale AI takes care of those mundane tasks like rotoscoping while global-scale AI "creates" its own media. These are two very different uses of AI and I much prefer to see them discussed differently; I feel that local AI usage can be incredibly helpful and productive; it ultimately doe what machines were intended to do - make our lives easier, not replace them. Global-scale AI flips that on its head.
I hope what I've said makes sense, and I'll try to respond to questions if anyone has them. Ultimately, AI does have some good uses, but generative AI is much more of a destructive force than a constructive one in my eyes. Thank you for acknowledging the concerns of your many viewers.
You do realize that most of the image models are local and literally none of them are on server farms? You can run SD3 , SDXL on a single 4090 with 16gb of VRAM no problem. You people are literally so clueless as to how it works. It's not "learning" while generating, it's distilled during training to a single 5-10gb file which is used LOCALLY to generate the images, it's not storing terabytes of artists images and doing a collage, it is not "recalling that information" , the whole climate aspect of AI sounds so asinine to me.
@@funkahontasYeah it's a bit of a weak argument when it comes to climate. The internet has a huge climate impact also - when it's plugged into fossil fuels. This shit is electric, it can be green. We should be blocking coal mines and pushing for no new oil, not getting mad at someone for generating an AI image because the web server is maybe powered by fossil fuels. Let's go for the root cause.
@@funkahontas I wouldn't go that far to say none are on server farms. MidJourney, Firefly, and DALL-E 3 are some of the most used image generators out there and are purely available through APIs.
I think the power and local vs large scale will be more of an issue with the LLMs and video models going forward. You can easily run Stable Diffusion 1.5 on an iPhone 14 Pro and even SDXL works, though a little slow. I'm sure MidJourney and DALL-E use more power, but still I don't think it is that crazy compared to things like video games. And the algorithms get more efficient over time. But obviously video models will take much more power and LLMs seem to keep getting larger. Power is definitely an issue in the big scheme of things...
Anything has "severe climate impact" if you really want to argue, and human don't depend on most of them to live. At this point, using "climate" as an argument for anything in particular instead of the entire humanity definitely feels like a convenient excuse to me.
Art style is not a biometric, unlike the physical likeness rights, and there are many styles that are very similar or sometimes even blatant ripoff of each other. Nobody took a serious look at this until they need something to argue that "AI is bad". My stance on this is pretty straightforward: If there's actual measurable economical impact instead of people whining about how their "livelihood has been stolen" due to (I'd argue imperfect because not a lot of models can actually achieve a 1:1 copy of style) style mimicry, then I won't be against doing something against it. Because, hot take: you can't trust people whining about issues without compelling evidences to back them up.
I also like local AI usage and more control over the AI. People should remember that tools are inherently made for human, and human needs more control over their tools so they can show off their creativity.
My problem with "AI" isn't that "it's taking artists' jobs" or that "it makes the work too easy," but that it's a way for people to profit off of artists' work without their consent.
I feel like your point that people can train their own models to do anything they want is absolutely on point and the main thing that gets overlooked by people making broad claims about "AI" just being some "new technology" or "new tool." When people say "AI" they're usually not using it as a shorthand for "generative machine learning models," but specifically for "publicly available generative machine learning models trained on billions of pieces of data, some of which are copyrighted."
The problem isn't when people learn they can use math to do work in an interesting or simpler way, the problem is when multi-billion dollar tech companies get richer by edging artists out of the market through using their own art against them by effectively trying to launder its copyright. As a game developer, I have no problem if someone takes inspiration from a game I make and sells something similar, but I *do* have a problem with someone swapping out the art assets and trying to claim it's somehow not my copyrighted work anymore.
As a person who has been an artist and musician for over 30yrs, AI has become basically another tool i use to assist in the creative process. Do i miss the days of hand masking print media? No. Do i miss the days of lugging a hammond b3, or full stack marshall into a studio for a session? hell no.
I may not have known that this was the case with the book of chances and even further that it was getting backlash due to it but I feel that you tackled this in the best way possible. I hope that any backlash you were getting due to this stops as you posed very valid arguments on both sides. I wish you the best of luck for the future.
thanks for the video, andrew. the transparency is extremely valuable!
You made some extremely strong statements. Thank you for that. You have my utmost respect for trying to start a civilized conversation about the topic. Keep up the good work.
reminds me of when i learned an artist i was listening to (macroblank) makes plunderphonics, which I didn't realize meant they took existing music and just made small changes to it like slowing it down, putting reverb, adding a line or two, and then releasing it. I looked into the samples they used on whosampled for some of the tracks and found that some were from really small unknown artists who wouldn't get any attention because of that. I think the idea of plunderphonics is cool if it was treated more as sampling; taking small parts of multiple tracks to make something completely new, or if it was made entirely with your own music, but the way it is mostly used just made me sad
That sounds like _vaporwave,_ which I'd never thought of as plunderphonics. 🤔
I've always had a similar uneasiness with how the credited "artists" in the vaporwave genre are more like "curators," once you learn how little transformation is being done. Yet the "lost media" aesthetic demands that the original context remains obscure.
I'm still unpacking those feelings, and understanding whether there is any artistic or moral difference between the "plunderphonics" of hip-hop vs vaporwave.
the description of macro blanks channel says "I take no credit. Everything is plundered. This channel is non-profit."
@@crnkmnky Indeed, and to circle that idea back around to AI; what AI does is a lot more like Ben Levin's fakerwave, where you make vaporwave music but without sampling anything, trying to get the same feel as sampling but creating the sounds from the ground up.
In other words, it SOUNDS like multiple things stitched together, but is really just a high-level recreation of that idea.
@@praticle yeah i didn't know what that meant for a while 😭
@@praticle ...........man. i didn't realize that's what it meant but now it seems so obvious lol
Agree with many of your views on AI and really any technology. It’s how we choose to use it and for what purpose. This was a very thoughtful response just as with your other videos I’ve watched. I’m new to songwriting and music production at 61 years old and appreciate your content, examples, recommendations and background. I had not heard of your Book of Chance cards until this video and just rushed to make an order. I believe they will be a fun addition to my creative process. Thank you for creating them and for sharing your views here.
He is not a painter or photographer just because he photoshopped a few AI-generated images together. He is an art thief first, photoshopper second. GET THE REFUND.
Copyright essentially exists to prevent creators from having to compete against *themselves* in the market. It encourages sharing, because you still retain control over how your work is used, and you don't have to compete with yourself, even if someone decided they wanted to use your work for profit. They are not allowed to use your work for profit, they must license. This is the purest expression of what Copyright is supposed to do. This is also the backbone of the entire internet. With it, we are still dealing with grifters and scammers, but at the very least its illegal and there is legal mechanisms and recourse. Without copyright, it would be literally impossible to do any creative business
AI turns this on its head by punishing people for sharing, by companies scraping artwork, forcing you to compete with yourself in the market. All of a sudden those assurances and norms we've had for 2 decades don't apply to AI because it's a new and magical technology. Licensing? pft, never heard of it.
This is different from previous technological shifts because its built on the backs of labourers and workers, using their work without compensating them. Mainly for the profit of businesses (Nvidia, Stability AI, OpenAI, Adobe, Microsoft). These firms want to reduce the cost of creative labour by continuing to train machines on our work, to become better at replacing us.
It does not compare to the synthesizer or the studio, you do not need to use a music producer's blood, sweat and tears to make a better microphone. You did not literally use her labour to build a tool to make her redundant.
The example you mentioned at 11:35 is wrong. Those platforms are always built on Stable Diffusion, which is built on scraping art and photography from the internet. You can't train a generative AI image model on your own work, your 20 to 1000 images are not going to be able to compete against the literal billions of images already used to train that model. Your work becomes an insignifcant fraction of a fraction of the model. Its not accurate to say you "trained your own model".
You should not confidently claim what is NOT illegal. There are legal uncertainties that very well might turn out to be illegal after all.
Stealing is wrong even if I have invented a new theft device, it does not matter that I am doing it in a novel way and the laws don't expressly mention my particular theft device.
Finally someone who gets it. It's not about what IS illegal, it's about what SHOULD BE illegal.
What people don't realize is that copyright is fundamentally the wrong tool to regulate AI, due to how these algorithms were both designed and observed to separate copyrighted expressions and general ideas. Sure it's not perfect and some could won their lawsuits over technicality, but this route would only get harder considering how much money is there for those companies to make and they have every incentive to reduce the chance of those overfitting lawsuits happening, if it gets proven to be viable.
Besides that, "compensation" for every single image went to AI training largely don't make sense as well, because aside from the fact that they are public, and that charging for readily available and uncurated public information is generally morally wrong, each of those "billions of images" contribute almost nothing to the model itself, and the model doesn't rely on any particular images either. This makes it impossible to build a fair compensation model, since everyone sort of worked on it but they sort of don't.
My take is actually pretty simple: Remember "the list" from Midjourney in which they used to finetune their model? I think it's fair to ask companies to pay for high quality **finetune** datasets and properly credit those artists who made the dataset. It makes the developers' life easier because they no longer need to use potentially faulty automation to select what's good and what's not, and less chance of running into "forgery" claims. It makes the artists' life easier because they knew for sure that their work was playing a significant and measurable role in model development (potentially even higher than the billions went into it because finetuning is, to some extent, what gives the models their "accent" or "style"), and they get the pay.
@@voidmain7902 I agree with most of what you said, but I think the interpretation that because each individual artist's work doesn't affect the model much they don't deserve compensation is a bit deconstructionist.
The problem isn't that an individual artist was hurt by the training and subsequent release of a model, it's that the model wouldn't even be possible without exploiting the _entire artist community._ No one received compensation, and their work was directly used to create something that threatens their livelihood.
Also, I think the morality definitely changes when we're talking about charging CORPORATIONS for public information. I like to think of it like we live in a world where 40-story giants walk among us. When a giant shows up to a restaurant they eat the entire stock, their footsteps crush our roads and farms, etc. So considering we share the same resources and they are far more powerful than us, it seems morally _right_ that we should charge them a little to enjoy the fruits of our labor. They can definitely afford it after all.
I should also mention I think people's semantics are mixed up in this whole mess of a debate, where some people are defending artists' ongoing post-AI livelihood, while others are focusing on the original "big art heist" that resulted in all the models we have today. Your solution is a good offering to the former crowd, but I don't think it'll satisfy the other crowd who feel that something is owed to all artists whose art was used and won't back down until a debt is paid or the models are taken down and/or banned.
Amazing video. As someone from the educational sectore it's important to show that it can be a helpful tool though it should never take all (!!!) the heavy lifting of the work. Also nice to see people like you not going fully on one side or the other, because as you mentioned, it is way deeper than just pure black and white. Keep it up my dude.
If I were you I would just be annoyed that AI art has made the style I used for this project so prevalent and of such middling quality that it's now associated with scams and generic RUclips thumbnails. Whatever AI art can produce will become so cheap and oversaturated that it isn't cool anymore. Its whole ethos is quantity over quality. It's a societable bad to me because its consequence is inevitably to ruin styles. People will see that a style is popular, they will replicate it everywhere, and it will become boring. Over and over. It spreads joylessness, maybe not by itself but in tandem with social media. Everything must become boring.
It is really beautiful to see so many people mocking AI art
Yes you are right
Much Respect Andrew, you are one of my favorite RUclipsrs. I will be working hard to fundraise and bring you to my school!
Separately I want to add, the model of some countries who provide stipends to artists to create on a societal level would be a wonderful aid for up and coming new artists who haven't made their names yet. Or just a UBI, so those who wish to feed AI can afford to do so...I mean create their own artwork.
UBI would help with a ton of these issues.
@@PureJadeKidexactly what I was thinking. The problem with AI is not some deep human-level creativity extinction like some seem to think. No. It's financial. It's the fact that there will be industries where it's no longer financially viable to spend so much time training when a machine can do it.
UBI, especially if driven by the savings realized by using AI (and perhaps that will incentivize some companies to retain human labor), can change that equation.
Canadians sure do know how to do apology videos.
Where's the apology?
@@ranitbose9609 exactly
Seriously, this is probably the first time I've seen an apology video that comes across as wholly sincere. I mean, it's Andrew, so I fully expect anything he was doing to have been done in good faith, and when the honest truth is the "apology", then it's easier to be sincere. But man, so many apology videos just make whatever situation so much worse, lol.
There's nothing to apologize for.
Im sorry but there's nothing to apologize for
thank you for providing as much information and clarification as you could. it really opened my mind to lots of ideas i previously had judged before.
Wait, your hair is like, awesome, woah
People smarter than I would be able to word this better, but I think this is less nuanced than you're making it out to be. Training a model on someone's work without their consent is unethical. Full stop. OpenAI, Adobe, any other company generating content with models trained on another person's work is not selling a new product. They are selling someone else's work. You make the argument about the MP3 encoder being based of of a model listening to audio and learning how to compress based off of that but that is still an entirely different situation. The encoder itself is not being used to reproduce music meant to imitate the training data. A compression algorithm is not a song.
Agree. Only because i put it online doesn't mean you can train your AI on it. I think that's theft. And so paying for these models is supporting theft.
You've basically stripped and apologetic who is eager to learn man of any nuance, typical twitter keyboard warrior response and honestly pathetic 😂. AI is very new and Andrew started working on this a while back, you can't expect him to share the same opinions as the rest of the world at a given time and space.
"Training a model on someone's work without their consent is unethical."
How do artists themselves train or improve? Do they not look at other people's art and analyse it? I don't need anyone's consent to look at anything and do whatever analysis I want on it. Full stop.
What a calming video. It's so great to see someone speaking about those things in respectful but optymistic way. Adressing your points.
1. It was always interesting for me that people find using AI in creative process cheating but in the same time they watch videos about programming sequences with these new random features, arpeggiator settings and chord / scale modes, after skipping an advertisement of a midi chord pack or something. Like you said, everyone can use loops or different bits and pieces made by someone else and if someone consider it cheating just may not do that. Basically AI can be used as an other happy accidents mashine or as a way of selling something I didn't create, it's my choice to do it right way.
2. Some companies already got complaints saying if they don't put their effort and time to write something, readers don't feel obliged to read it. People still appreciate human creativity and, like you said, photography didn't kill painting. It's always bad if someone doesn't get a job because an employer choosed to use AI instead but I think such employer underestimates a need of human thinking. If someone thinks it's so easy to replace creative human with an AI either haven't tried to use AI at all or can do it much better than I do. I know there are prompts how to write better prompts, special shortcuts and hashtags making AI come up with better results, but I wouldn't say it's always as good in creating a whole pieces of music or text, especially in languages other than English. Generating ideas or plans, yes, but not a whole thing. Some photos or melodies can be very pretty indeed but when I tried to create a piece of music in certain genre with my own lyrics, I had to spend a lot of time before I got something similar to the result I was thinking of. It's not so easy and it's always worth it to have someone paying attention to it, fixing AI mistakes etc.
3. Human learning comparison is my favourite one. Everyone tried to emulate someone else one way of an other, or one day or an other they will try. If nothing else it's a form of learning, sometimes very useful one. I understand people who'd like to decide if they agree to AI learning on their material but I'm not sure it's always even possible. If people want to get your style into AI, they might as well try to remake some of your stuff using something else than AI, then load it into AI model and avoid consequences. It's sad but it's true.
Been watching Andrew for many years as both a musician and an artist, and personally cant believe how fast some people turned. If anyone thinks that he hasn't thought about this problem thoroughly or done his due diligence, they don't know Andrew. Great video, loved the nuanced take.
The thing you said about copying work isn’t exactly accurate. There have been multiple cases of A.I. already doing copyright infringement in a way that is provable and dangerous to large companies. A.I images that contain Mario or Mike Wazowski after using prompts like monster or plumber come up often.
I watched until the end, and much respect to you Andrew!
im more offended by people accusing real artists of being ai
As an author, I want write original manuscripts and support people who do the same with their own originality in books and art….
If a computer is gonna do it for you then it’s not YOUR work… it’s the programs. Anyone can type words into a box.😝
52 of your most artist-musical friends could each draw an image. AI has created a huge amount of room for collaboration now that EVERYONE'S art is at stake.
Really great video Andrew, I hope everyone can watch the full video and understand the nuance of your perspective, both around AI in general, and in relation to the Book of Chances specifically. I am in general anti-AI, but everything you, your team and Scott seem to have done demonstrates (to me) a best-case scenario of how to incorporate AI into contemporary artistic practice. the steps that you've outlined going forward also show your commitment to honesty and creativity and I really respect it. I hope others can too, or at the very least consider your stance holistically.
Damn, SUCH a good video
this is gunna sound weird...but im a mycologist and ive been accused of using AI generated images more than once. whats weird is it was all photographs of growing things (and often times the disputed photos were part of a series showing the whole growth process)...none of them were meant or presented as art either (AI or otherwise). i dont really have a horse in this race, im jus shocked that its effecting ppl far outside this world
There's so much i want to say about this but ill try to narrow it down to the top 3:
1. It's not a given that AI isn't going away. Like, sure it's inevitable in a very long time scale but the current iteration is on its last legs; it's not a commercially viable product in its current state and they're literally running out if data (in the world) to train it to be better.
2. These generative AI models consume too much energy to train and run. It's horrible for the environment and not worth using, given how poorly it works.
3. The term "AI" is purposely conflating many different technologies. Most people don't take issue with using AI classifiers, denoisers, upscalers, etc. it's these end-product-generating monstrosities we should be taking issue with.
I am a composer, artist and an author so hear me out. I use virtual singers in my songs whose vocals were sampled and trained on real human singers' voices. But here's the thing: they consented for it. They get credited when they want to be credited. They get paid. They get royalties when someone purchases a voicebank created with their voice. They have the option to include their own therms of services.
This is something this current AI generative bs doesn't do. and THAT''s the biggest issue with it.
It's unethical. As long as they don't have the consent from the original owner of the data they feed AI machines with, it will remain problematic and any further discussion is invalid. I don't think we should even be discussing about the death of creativity or whatever because all these discussions only distract people from the glaring issue that is theft. It DOESN'T MATTER even if those stolen art works "don't really end up" in the generated images. Because how the machine was able to create anything similar at all was because of those stolen images. It's not even just artwork that they steal. Private medical records, personal information, pictures of kids to name a few.
And it doesn't stop at AI generated images. Think about AI generated literature and whole ass songs as well. Just think about all the data needed to make those things so "realistic" . How were they really obtained?
Another very big issue is just how much energy these machines use and in this current day and age, do we really need more eco problems for something that's just so unnecessary?
I want AI to do my chores so that I'd have time to do art. Not have AI do my art for me while I end up at another underpaid 12hour shift corporate job.
Hair dryers consumes much more energy... But maybe if the AI police is so worried about energy, they could stop using cars, pc's, or any piece of technology at all...
best video by an artist in relation to ai ive seen
I got harassed by some dude online the other day who was accusing me of using AI to write one of my songs, this guy was hurling insults at me in my comment section and sending super offensive private messages...
I got accused of using ChatGPT. I don't even have ChatGPT. The harassing that's the scary thing! No issue with disagreeing, and different perspectives on things, but witch hunts are so scary and divisive.
This reminds me of a Reddit post I saw a while ago (Post was by user u/rjln109)
They showed their dad Porter Robinson's latest single 'Russian Roulette', but because of the influx of AI (and the very basic chord progression used in the song), he thought it was AI
It's just really sad that people accuse each other of using AI without actually doing any research
Well, did you?
@@Querez8504 Doesn't matter, let people use whatever tools they want. No one should be harassed over something like that. Discussion is good, but if people are so insecure about their own music making that they project these types of fears onto others, then maybe they should think about why they are making music/art in the first place, and perhaps also get a bit real with their believes in their own creativity and their ability to grow and develop new skills in a changing landscape. There's no putting the genie back in the bottle.
pea-brained online person probably
I couldn't agree with you more, is like when Sampling came along , everybody said it was going to destroy creativity , and it produced new music genres , one of them was Hip Hop so... another story when the wind and brass instruments got keys or valves they also said i was going to thread creativity, tell that to Miles Davis, Again so... The important thing here is not to copyright infringe others art or be correct and pay for it. Now the automation is going to affect works and that is inevitable it has happened before and will happen again.
Wow, really solid response. Honestly I think this level of rigorous thoughtfulness outpaces what would be required of you here, but you are never one to half ass anything, so it makes complete sense. Donating the money to an arts organization is the cherry on top. You are truly a class act, and I admire the nuance you're bringing to this conversation, even in the midst of a very charged and emotional conversation. This is hard stuff that all of us artists are struggling with, and I admire your desire to engage with all of that messiness in good faith.
Thanks for being so up-front :) FWIW I don't have a problem with AI as a concept, my concern is entirely with the training process and with the lack of legislation around how AI is used going forward. Everything from generated images and audio using unconsenting artists' work as training data to abusers generating revenge porn. Some of it is legislated at the endpoint like it's illegal to use copyrighted material and to make revenge porn, but AI generation makes all these things happen much, much faster and easier. It will be impossible for legislators to keep up, and that's very concerning.
Generative AI isn't inherently evil, it's a tool. Like the majority of technological innovations, it vastly outpaces any attempt to control it and people are already being harmed by it and that's why I choose to keep myself and my art as far from it as possible. The dangers strongly outweigh the benefits of allowing decent people to make easy art.
As someone who still doesn't agree with you on this, I must say you did a great job of explaining your perspective on the matter. thank you for that
You are a beacon of goodness and humanity Andrew and I respect and appreciate you so much. This video is the most down to earth and heartfelt take on AI I have ever seen from an artist. I think AI will have a resounding effect on music because it is incredibly easy to make mediocre music with AI and some artists will not be able to compete.
I was very fearfull seeing the intro (didn't knew about the whole debacle goin' on about the cards, nor the cards mere existence and still have trauma from Shadiversity's fall into alt right ai bro buisness) but that's was a very respectfull video that really show research was done to be as educated as possible
Altho, just to be a little nickpicky about the argument that "AI can be compared to how human learn", it is an argument I often see come-up in defense of AI and I specifically disagree with this one very deeply
As you said, AI work mostly by recognising patterns in thing, most things we are currently calling "AI" currently work with that single principle of, "take a bunch of stuff, see what are the probability of them, and then use those probability to generate new stuff"
So,
1) *That is very much not how we work*, I mean, when we actually learn art
Of course, there do be people that will "learn" to draw things by seeing something, watching a tutorial that say step by step how to exactly draw it, learn the step and then do that again and again
Yeah, that, is indeed exactly what AI is doing in concept. We see the pattern, we do them, and boom we did the thing
But; also, that's just how very new people learn, not 'actual' artists.
I am not saying the exercice is pointless, it builds mechanical skills, confidence (wether in your linework or in yourself) by allowing you to quickly get results on something specific
But; artist who do that run into exactly the same issues as AI do ; They can only draw exactly what they learned, and, maybe they can kinda mix and match different patterns and learn a huge lot of patterns to get a wider and wider array of things they can draw, but, in the end they are constrained to the thing they did learn and cannot break into their own style or into uncharted territory without their skill dropping back to square one.
On the other hand, what artist actually do to learn, is to learn to learn basically.
You learn how to decompose objects into shapes, how to rocognise and balance values, use colors into palettes and give composition and perspective to drawings and so on and so forth, and so now, if I want to draw something, I am engaging with learning what that thing is actually, or make it up when the thing don't yet exist and am able to create it without learning it's pattern. So, basically artist are the people actually able to make the tutorial from scratch while ai would just be equivalent to someone following multiple tutorials to do every single things in a drawing, and being stumped as soon as what they need to draw something that don't already have a tutorial.
(also here I mostly use visual art as an exemple since it is what I am good at, but this is absolutly applicable to music where you'd learn music theory instead of learning to play a bunch of song by heart and switching between a bunch of songs when playing a piano to "compose" or any other art form like writing and stuff)
2) So, if I could make you agree that AI's way of 'learning' is not comparable to how humans do, here is why I do think it matter : *That difference in learning is directly making art generation intrisingly incapable of creativity*
Worse even in the case of AI, since it is copying every single piece of art possible to make the most likely art to be satisfactory... It is inherently making the absolutely most average one.
A saying often said in art circle that is considered an importent lesson to learn is "Art for everyone is art for no one"
If you are trying to please every person on the planet you will not really please a single soul, put representation of every type of people in some show and right-wing people will cry that it's gone woke, put no representation in your show and left-wing people would decry a lack of representation and diversity... Make a show scary and some people will find it too unsettling, make it not scary and some may find it boring. go to the middle ground on every slider and everyone is a little annoyed.
AI is basically corporate style on crack, and will follow the lazyest most likely path possible to any solution and thus a direction that anyone could come up with, very good to get expected results but very bad for interesting art
worse still, that mean that as ai will become increasingly common it will slowly risk accidently scraping itself as training data, learning it's own biases and mistakes as patterns to follow, intensifying them and spreading them before repeating the cycle even more next time, making ai devolve the same way living species start to have deficiencies when mixing with other members of their species with genomes too similar to theirs.
More generally, as someone who care very deeply about our ability as a society to make culture continue to evolve and grow AI is therefore not in the slightest able to do any of that, just putting the average of what is done instead of challenging the work that "inspire" it.
We need a plurality of voices in art, and we need art to evolve out of the bounds of what was made to avoid it getting stale and dying out, and so called "AI" as it is currently made will not give us that in a fundamental way, no matter how advanced the technology can get.
As a quick side note, I am therefore specifically adressing the one and only argument of "Ai learning kinda equal human learning"
That do not mean "AI have no use", just not the same use as human intelligence, stuff we are good at is better done by us humans
AI is great at pattern recognition, so yeah, make it pattern recognise. Google probably is using this technology to make google photo automatically tag your photo, allowing you to find them in your gallery by putting a keyword about it, or with google lens to recognise what flower you are looking at. It is used in healthcare to help detect cancers, archeology to restore lost texts... As you said, even in artstic fields it can do things like tracking in videos and that's defenetly a wonderfull use of it, as an artist I would love some small tools like an AI bucket tool that actually fills a drawing with the color in a zone without getting caught-up in some semi-transparent pixels in a stupid ways for exemples.
AI is a wonderfull tool.
Just, it is also a tool used very wrongly in places it is absolutely not a good fit at, because right now the monetary incentive is to use it everywhere no matter how dumbly because it entice investors. Most of the uses, especially in art, are not pertinent and unethical.
We just invented the hammer, and that's great. But man I wish we'd stop using it as a screwdriver because that is wasting everyone's time
Andrew, thanks for this! Reality isn't as easy as many people wish it to be. You did a great job showing the pros and cons that you know of andthe honesty to say that you're not fully agreeing on either of the 'hard' stances is pretty impressive. I think we are often trained to take a side, especially when discussing online. To say 'I don't know' takes a lot, but I think it's the point that most of us are at if we try to look at a topic like AI in a comprehensive manner.
Very very reasonable and well-researched take. I especially love your mp3 encoder example that I wasn't aware of previously.
This is a really thoughtful and considered response, Andrew - thank you. I think one thing some people seem to forget is that there are two separate issues here: there's "making art" (which is always a human process) and there's "making an art product", which is about money. It's true that the two are often intertwined, but forgetting the difference seems to be a frequent cause of confusion. Because I don't get my income from my music I have the luxury of making it in a way that I find rewarding (which means not knowingly using AI, though these days it's hard not to use it indirectly). But there are many people who do make a living from art, and who are justifiably worried or angry about what's happening. I agree with you that art perseveres, and human artistic endeavour will be with us as long as we remain human. Frankly... if it weren't for Capitalism, this issue would simply melt away because people would just carry on being human and doing what humans do. The need for money distorts these issues and makes them harder to navigate.
I appreciate the honesty.
thank you for this thorough video Andrew - you're a class act 💗
And my head was singing "video killed the radio star..." 😅
I see a lot of people trying to say this vídeo is perfect and just not criticizing you at all, and i don't think this is honest.
As a fellow artist whos has followed your stuff and the channel for years now, I'm still disappointed.
I'm not outraged, i can see you're upset with the same things i am, but i don't appreciate the centrism on the subject at hand.
In the same video you said "it's not like anything we've ever seen!" And also "It's exactly like cameras!", aknowledging that Genetative AI being used instead of human ACTUAL artists being a bad thing makes you Anti AI, the reason is simple, when people say they're "Anti AI" they don't mean they're against any and all use of AI ever, they're against how this type of "art-imitating" Generative AI is currently being used to cut corners and not hire artists.
It's like saying "Hey I'm on the fence here! I'm not Black Lives Matter, I'm not an activist, but I'm also not racist!" Well, it's the same thing.
I don't think this video is horrible or has any ill, but i also don't think it approached tge subject with proper empathy, I'm not just scared AI will eventually take my job, it genuinely already has (well not for me personally yet thankfully, but a few close friends weren't as lucky, especially ones in the gaming industry.)
If you come across this comment (or if anyone else is reading it) i want you to take it as a "Hey Andrew, being on the fence on this isn't really cool, cause there isn't really anything to be on the fence about, since what people are against is what you already don't like anyways, so it just comes across as confusing"
I also wanted to point out that AI isn't like "something we've never seen before!" Artificial Intelligence has been around for AGES now, heck, it's been used on marvelous artistic projects even, such as the Spider verse movies. The thing about the AI then and now is how its being used, and that it wasn't Generative, AI used to do a specific task, but it didn't make something out of someone else's work, if anything it was based on the program used or in general computer generated imagery.
I wish you really understand what people (me included) mean, and don't just read all theses comments that don't hold you accountable where it's reasonable to.
But sure, the video wasn't all that bad, you did great with the donation and with not using (Generative) AI going forward, but i just think your genuine view wasn't clearly stated, or sounded concisive to me.
All in all, love your stuff, good luck with your projects 💜
Yep. The ‘not trying to get anyone angry’ about something so vital and threatening to him and his audience is gross. Who’s gonna need a tutorial from this guy on how to make music in a year or two when he basically just said ‘typing in a prompt to get some art is okay I guess’. Empowering the prompt bro’s who would’ve been watching his content trying to figure out making beats a few years ago
I'm on the fence. I'm not BLM, I'm not an activist, but I'm also not racist. Does that make me a bad person or something? Not everyone has room, energy, or sufficient impetus in their lives for activism. I agree with everything else you said.
@@flubnub266 you don't actually have to go out to the streets to be pro BLM, if you think Black Lives Matter, you are pro BLM, it's why I used it as an example for my argument, if you're genuinely not racist, you're pro BLM, if you don't get that maybe you should look more into what BLM even means and what it genuinely stands for dud
@@Lobo.mp4 Well, I think a lot of people would disagree that thinking black lives matter automatically means you're specifically in favor of the organization BLM.
But I'm just saying that if you're not going out and picketing/lobbying/advocating, you're not really an "activist". And that's perfectly fine; just treating people right in your local community or making donations is worth so much, since you're one more person on the planet who _could_ be evil but chooses not to.
@@flubnub266 it really doesn't get any simpler than this
You don't have to be an activist to be pro activist movements, if BLM is Anti-Racism, and I am pro Anti-Racism, I'm pro BLM, cause... We stand for the same thing
I'm sensing some pretty weird vibes from your rhetoric so I'm not responding anymore dud, also I can't explain it any simpler so idk, realize maybe you can rethink it?
Hi Andrew!
You are asking the correct questions regarding the use of AI. The general discussion in academic circles seem to be finding the best way to explore and explode the development. Or how to halt its development and refocus it until new laws can be written for it. The problem at the root of it it (as you mentioned) is the fact that AI and the way that they use property, are not coherent with copyright laws.
But it is also important to recognize that copyright laws are not universal, and have not been updated in a long time which for all intends and purposes, make them obsolete in the face of new emerging technologies. The main reason to be hesitant of AI (specially in its use for creative art development) is that without proper regulation and consideration, it is tech companies are allowed and encouraged to keep developing the technology for the exploitation of artists. A truly "not because you can it means you should" type of thing.
From a conceptual level, AI should be a tool like the ones you mention (and in many ways it is) a series of algorithms that allow us to reduce hours of work from usually mundane processes. Cleaning audio, gathering specific images, developing base subtitles. etc. are all things that make worker's life easier. And in smaller contexts this is fantastic, but it's necessary to advocate for its development transparency and regulation.
The cards look great, and Scott's art, and its use of AI seem like a very smart and logical use of the tool. Hopefully a better tool with a similar use of the technology can be developed in the near future.
MOAR 4 PRODUCERS.
Not yet mentioned regarding ethics:
The most sophisticated LLMs (nothing about this statistical brute forcing is intelligent) are highly inefficient. They use up a lot more resources than would be necessary for the task.
And the copilot thing is kind of whataboutism. There are companies that strictly ban it due to being trained on and reproducing copyrighted material as well as sending data back. No serious business that intents to stick around can afford that. And I would argue most companies that do, do so because the ones in charge do not understand what's going on / haven't even heard of copilot yet.
So engines like Udio capable of generating an original song in 10 secs are inefficient ? 🤨
@@shelinmusic if you consider the energy (computing and training) that goes into that compared to an artist doing the same and not just the time it takes you to click and get a result - most likely, yes
that said I haven't heard of Udio in particular and if it would fall under "most sophisticated LLM" - so I don't know
As a high level example for that general trend: Google intended to go carbon neutral. Their AI endeavors have them going in the opposite direction. This will apply to all companies competing in that space, because this LLM approach is brute force statistics. It takes a lot of energy by design.
This is a very nuanced and polite take, and we need more of that on the internet, so I commend you for openly talking about it and admitting that it's still a confusing and scary situation. I also think your process for informing every buyer about how the art was made is stellar, and I'm glad whatever profit will go to an important cause.
I agree with most of what you said, but when you're talking about whether or not it's actually copyright infringement - I feel like it doesn't matter if it's recognizing patterns instead of clipping pieces of different art when ultimately, AI tools are mostly for-profit products and are being developed on top of people's art to then potentially be used to replace those same artists. If it does not currently fit our term for infringement, then we need to update our terms!
And while it is very messy to argue about ethical use of technology when those same products are made through exploitation of labor among other shitty things, I don't think it's a valid argument to make against discussion of limiting generative AI (not only with visual art, but for writing, coding, and whatever else it can do). It's still in its infancy, and a lot could be done to protect artists so that this could be a boon for us and for creativity as a whole. If we don't talk about it, if people don't get upset about it, then it'll just run free and I do believe it will be a net negative for you and me. It might happen anyway even with discussion, but at least we're pushing back and ensuring it's as good for us as a whole as it can be.
Once again, I'm glad you're being cautious about it without radicalizing your own opinions for acceptance or views. It means the most extremist of viewers might get angry, but it invites good discussion and eventually leads to better outcomes.
Honest, insightful, thoughtful, and not pandering. This is how it's done, and to donate the money and redo the art, while offering refunds too, is really a class act. It's hard to imagine anyone still angry after seeing this, except for people who have simply run out of things to be angry about.
Respect!