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(I wrote this a few weeks ago when it was more relevant. . .)

NFTs

The NFT "market" crashed to no one's surprise. Ninety-five percent of NFTs are now worthless. I thought at the beginning 95% were worthless regardless, but now buyers who invested thousands of dollars have lost it all. It's satisfying because those thousands, even just hundreds of dollars could have been spent buying real, physical art that only gains value over time. But I said in the beginning, this was a way for people already within the crypto space to profit off of stolen work and pixels on a screen.

A few other fun facts from this (seemingly pro-NFT) article:

"Currently, Bitcoin is worth $27,223, and Ethereum is $1,630.99, a far cry from their all-time high values of more than $65,000 and $4,700, respectively. As for NFT, the news is dire."

"It is not just that NFTs are generally worth nothing, people are not especially interested in buying new NFT assets, leaving artists in the lurch." ("Artist" is a bold term here.)

". . .only 21% of the collections that dappGambl has identified have full ownership, meaning that the collections are spoken for by investors and NFT collectors. Put another way, four of every five NFT collections collect dust."

So real art is back in! Well, hopefully.

AI ART

I really believe AI "art" is heading this way as well. And by extension, things like AI-written work (ChatGPT.)

I think humans are incredibly good at recognizing what is not human. As an artist I can also spot strange artistic choices that easily give away AI generated work. Artists explain through this article a few different ways they spot AI work:

People often joke online that you can’t look too closely at the hands in AI art, or you’ll discover bizarre finger configurations. “The eyes can be a little bit funky as well,” says Logan Preshaw, a concept artist who denounces the use of current AI tools. He says, “Maybe they're just kind of dead and staring out into nowhere, or they have strange structures.”

Dan Eder, a 3D character artist, thinks viewers should consider the overall design of a piece when trying to spot an AI image. “Let’s say it was a ‘fantasy warrior armor’ type of situation. At a glance, the artwork looks beautiful and highly detailed, but a lot of the time there’s no logic behind it,” he says. “When a concept artist creates armor for a character, there are things you have to take into account: functionality, limb placement, how much is that going to stretch.”

John Ramsey, an artist who creates cute animal illustrations, points out the lack of intentionality in AI images. “AI doesn't have any experiential basis to understand what people are, what trees are, or what hands are,” he says. “All that stuff is just being thrown in, because it was able to associate the words of your prompt with data points within the latent space that corresponds to them. This was the closest stuff that it could bring. It doesn't know why.” Savvy viewers might be able to spot the difference by identifying a clear, visual narrative.

I also think the fascination with and novelty of AI-generated work is quickly evaporating. AI is incredibly limited and will never understand forms and light in a way that isn't just pixel-relation. They are trained on stolen, pre-existing work on the internet and will never capture specific styles perfectly, nor any one artist's style. (Nor create art that is truly unique.) Especially those who exist exclusively off the internet.

There will always be this want to have a certain artist's work or a certain style that can not be achieved through machines. And there is certainly a "style" of AI work that is quickly becoming uninteresting as we're definitely seeing a limit of its capabilities.

And most importantly, AI can't draw hats correctly!

But if my fellow artists did fear for their jobs, fret not. You can now "poison" AI art generators!

"A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways.

"The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission. Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models. . .

"Nightshade exploits a security vulnerability in generative AI models, one arising from the fact that they are trained on vast amounts of data—in this case, images that have been hoovered from the internet. Nightshade messes with those images."

These are just a few thoughts and updates about NFTs and AI art. I'd like to hear what everyone else thinks and feels.

Remember, support your local, human artists!

Oh and there was a conference held by NFT bros who reported burning their eyes due to spending hours staring at those NFT apes on a screen. Which is performance art for sure.

Depending on the conference, the real eye strain was probably because they bought the same kind of UV Lamps used to mass-disinfect surfaces during COVID rather than actual normal blacklights meant to be absorbed by human eyeballs during a rave or something- No performance art here, just banal finance-bro cost-cutting.

Hooray for human-made art!

Personally, I think AI stuff is at its best when it's used to generate memes and chaos. The complex stuff can be kind of cool to look at, but I don't consider it a substitute for real art.

You brought up some great points about AI art, and it was insightful to read quotes from different sources. I agree that interest may die as the market is oversaturated with AI art.

Just like with other tools, I believe it’s about how you use it. To me, AI art can never replace human-made art as it lacks creativity and humanity. A piece can reflect the artist’s experience, life events, and the emotions present during creation, which the AI fails to capture. For the AI, there is no intention but to replicate.  

In addition, AI art serves as a shortcut to the final product. However, it skips through the crucial process of art creation, some of which includes skill building, experimenting with styles, and self-discovery. As you improve, your art grows with you, shifting like a living creature. It’s part of why I find art so charming.    

However, I feel AI can become a decent tool for experimenting with art composition and subjects - perhaps for a brainstorming session. Just not as a complete replacement.

 

Yeah it's cool you guys have an AI art poisoner now. I'd heard about it in passing before.

And the NFTs of course have always been retarded, no surprise about their recent UV lighting incident that half blinded them all.

A few things. . . I feel like a historian for these kinds of things now.

Researchers at the University of Chicago developed Nightshade. A program that "glazes" your art and poisons AI generators that would use your art in their training. It is free to download and use and edits your art in such a way only computers can see it.

Bad news. . .

I was looking up historical paintings involving couples as reference for my own art, only to find half of the image search results are AI-generated. Even from websites such as Adobe Stock, although Adobe has been eager to implement AI into their applications and have done so for awhile now. But most based digital artists pirate the programs anyway or use alternatives.

I had to add a specific "-AI" into my search and it definitely makes me feel like the end grows nearer. I really feel like in just the last few months AI-generated everything has exploded everywhere. It makes me wonder what the state of AI will be at the end of this year.

Also, my friends and family have been buying me these adorable Pudgy Penguin figures and plushes. So I go to their website to redeem my neat code only to discover that they're NFTs. That's right, they even got to the penguins!

They're still finding new ways to profit off NFTs.

Nooo, not the penguins. :(

I hope tools like Nightshade eventually becoming ubiquitous will also lead to ways to test whether an image is legit or generated too.

Yeah, I also hate that AI art has poisoned google images and almost every other image search site. It's harder to get good photo reference images nowadays. 

So I posted this thread just three months ago and the advancements AI has had in just that time is absolutely insane and is at least for me, incredibly disconcerting. I've been watching my YouTube ads turn into advertisements for just about every program incorporating AI into itself in some capacity. Now you no longer have to write emails, or proofread your writing. In fact, the program I'm using to write my contest entry even has a "ghost-writing" feature. So just about every company has eagerly accepted AI.

I remember watching Airheads' intentionally uncomfortable AI-generated Halloween ad four months ago and wondering what in the world it was. When I learned it was AI I figured AI would never become as powerful or uncanny as it is now. . .

Like Sora AI, which I'm sure you have heard about by now. The AI trained to create lifelike videos. The video that shocked me the most was this one with a woman taking a video out a train window.

I think I hold mendolajames' view on the program in this post on OpenAI's forum about the matter.

"I work at Laika as a stop motion animator. As a professional animator, I am blown away by the capabilities that Sora seems to demonstrate. I’m intrigued, but also terrified. For the longest time, stop motion animators have feared that CG animators are coming for our jobs. Instead, it now seems that AI is coming for all of the CG jobs, and that it’ll likely come to conquer all of the stop motion jobs shortly after that. I’m interested in lending my unique perspective to OpenAI however I can. I also want to warn OpenAI that Sora really seems to have the potential to put a huge number of people in film and animation out of work. Perhaps that comes as no surprise."

I just wonder about the public's perception of AI and if people will also eagerly accept AI to create their animations and entertainment for them, or if there will be pushback. Obviously, Sora is already controversial. We will see in the near future if any big box films will use AI.

But, in good news, there is a definite desire for practical effects in film again. I've noticed quite a few movies I've seen lately incorporate practical effects in some capacity. Let's hope AI will never have the capability to build real life sets.

I'm sure your field isn't going to be obsolete in your lifetime.

And always know we always appreciate you.

I think the thing about AI is that it's wildly expensive but the costs are so distributed as to be more or less completely hidden to those currently profiting off of it. Most of what we mistake for human-like intuition and ability is just mechanical guessing based on pennies-a-day labor from third worlders and elderly people who basically solve capchas for a living, and most of the art it generates is based on shit that already exists and is stolen-- And is so diluted at this point that in a lot of engines you have to specify that you want photographs, specific artists, or add "artstation" to the booleans if you want it to look good.

Will it put people out of work? Absolutely, but I don't think that's because of supply and demand at all. AI is capable of appealing to executives in a way that artists simply don't. AI works 24-hours a day and produces on demand, it has no will of its own to create its own things, and will do whatever it is commissioned to do, often for a price that's borderline free to the end user even if it relies on the refined end products of so many different industries (including the ones it's trying to replace) in order to exist. Will it create art that we want? No. But it does what the people in charge want it to do very well. People get so mad at marvel movies and shit for not being any good, but the things they complain about are practically AI prompts by any other name with human work put into them. Stories that have already been written, in the style of an established artist, written by tested and pre-approved committees, with characters that are already known. At that point? You could make any movie you want and the only reason to hire people would be to get celebrity names that draw people in, which is increasingly dying in the business anyhow.

Will it be bad? Also absolutely, but so will everything about the tech industry. I think of it less as a thing that's going to destroy artists and art itself- That's a human need and something people will always be making- And more the sign of the death throes of art as an industry. We live in an age increasingly disaffected by "big name" artists. It's practically a recreational activity to hate big shows and movies and shit that comes out now. People get mad about shit like the Marvel movies pandering to China, but like, we're also so collectively sick of Marvel that they're probably a lot more excited about Marvel in China than we are in this country, discounting the population of gormless redditors. Taylor Swift is like the only music name that people like like, everyone else most people know has either been famous for more than 20 years now or they've been isolated enough within their own fanbase that they still seem like microcelebrities to everyone else. I don't know who the hell Dojacat is and I don't know what her music sounds like. I still don't know how famous she is, only that she's been mentioned on TV which is also a medium in decline in and of itself.

Does that mean art itself is dying? I don't think that either. But I do think it's less of, like, a job with a salary now. It's not going to be like Hollywood where you can go to get hired as an artist and work as one in a system of production. It's far more likely that people are going to be using their resources to fund artists that they are personally fans of, and form communities based on shared culture, which has evolved pretty naturally from the internet. Does AI have a place in that? Kind of, but I really don't think they compete with people who have the chutzpah to build up that kind of community themselves, whatever they're doing, whether they're using AI or not.

Personally I find it sad that the advent of AI might mean that there's no longer really a predictable map to success for many artists, but tbh, that map has always contained so many abhorrent compromises and exploitative conditions anyway that I can't say part of me isn't also glad to see it go as long as alternative paths to success can be found. Down with Hollywood, down with the old media empires. I long for the age where technology reaches such a point that putting on your own TV show is not a pipedream achievable by a lucky few, but thought of as something like radio where it is absolutely doable for dedicated people on a local hobbyist scale and capable of growing to wider audiences. Streaming is the new Cable and will suffer the same business cycles, AI will do human jobs with mediocre success and create terabytes of bland filler content few people will watch as most people are just gonna go down their own rabbitholes based on their tastes and preferences. Spongebob is gonna be one of the last shows everyone in the world has seen, no human is ever gonna be famous as Michael Jackson, and frankly, I think that's all for the best.

This is a pretty accurate summary of my own thoughts on the subject. People will always be making art, seeking art created by other humans, forming communities around shared art, and funding artists whose work they know and like. But we're probably not going to see artists getting employed by multi-million dollar companies or becoming world famous, or not nearly as much.

I have a lot of friends who make hats and bags and whatnot in their spare time as gifts for their loved ones. I know of others who do this and make money off of it, despite the centuries-old development of clothes-making machines. There's a huge tight-knit (sorry) community among people who like making and buying these crafts. Even if AI does take over most paid opportunities--and considering the priorities of today's CEOs it unfortunately probably will--there will always be people making art, and there will always be people who prioritize the time and effort a human put into it over cost and ease of access.

Even prior to AI, I think things were headed this way, thanks to how much easier art creation has gotten in general. It used to be that everyone would listen to the same big artists on the radio, and as Sent says, watch the same mainstream shows. But in recent years with the internet, people have been much more able to find sub-communities that appeal to their personal tastes, and many people spend most of their time engaging with anonymous small-time creators who post their creations for free. Even if AI never existed, this process probably would have happened anyways, at least to some extent.