[dtn]

> But I have very little sympathy for those perpetuating this tiresome moral panic (a small amount of actual artists, whatever the word "artist" means)

> A small amount of actual artists

It's extremely funny that you say this, because taking a look at the Trending on Artstation page tells a different story.

https://www.artstation.com/?sort_by=trending

[orbital-decay]

That's what the b) was about, yes.

And ironically, the overwhelming majority of knowledge used by these models to produce pictures that superficially look like their work (usually not at all), is not coming from any artworks at all. It's as simple as that. They are mostly trained on photos which constitute the bulk of models' knowledge about the real world. They are the main source of coherency. Artist names and keywords like "trending on artstation" are just easily discoverable and very rough handles for pieces of the memory of the models.

[dtn]

I don't think the fact that photos are making up the vast majority of the training set is of any particular significance.

Can SD create artistic renderings without actual art being incorporated? Just from photos alone? I don't believe so, unless someone shows me evidence to the contrary.

Hence, SD necessitates having artwork in it's training corpus in order to emulate style, no matter how little it's represented in the training data.