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Artist banned, told to “find a different style”- AI-made art

164 points| kamban | 3 years ago |thetechdeviant.com

331 comments

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benjaminbachman|3 years ago

The only real news here is that Reddit mods are power mad tyrants, which is nothing new at all. AI generated art has just given them newer, funnier ways to be in the wrong.

richbell|3 years ago

"Power" moderators, that is people who moderate a large number of subreddits, are untenable. It is not possible to effectively or fairly moderate dozens of communities, even if you were to spend all your waking moments doing so. This is, in part, why it's so common for popular submissions to be locked or deleted because "y'all can't behave".

The people that do so are largely doing it for their own self-gain (e.g., self-promotion) or because it makes them feel important. I had a very low stress job for a few years and ended up as a moderator for over a dozen large subreddits, including a few defaults. Socializing with Reddit's prominent moderators was enlightening.

jasonkolb|3 years ago

Reddit is a worse echo chamber than Twitter ever was.

I gave up on it when I got banned from certain subreddits for posting quotes from congressional testimony. If you post anything that deviates in the slightest from the moderator's viewpoint, you get banned.

The end result is an echo chamber that's getting tighter and smaller, excluding any diversity of opinion. It's no way to run a business.

seattle_spring|3 years ago

Fun fact: there's a popular car sub that will ban you for mentioning dealer markups in a disparaging way. That's right: if you say that Joe's Toyota tried to upcharge you $15k for a Camry, you'll be banned for life!

spacemadness|3 years ago

Reddit mods are ineffective or harmful a lot of the time, but so is Reddit itself in how it incentivizes thankless moderation and oversized and noisy communities for the purpose of ads and their upcoming IPO. Most non-niche subreddits could be replaced by ChatGPT at this point.

crazygringo|3 years ago

For real. From the headline I thought this was going to be a "ban" from an art department or marketplace or something of actual value, which would actually be news. Being banned from a subreddit for an arbitrary/idiotic reason is just reddit as usual.

Sebb767|3 years ago

HN is really lucky to have dang. Although he is a payed mod, so it's not 100% comparable.

hbn|3 years ago

The amount of great discussions I've seen shut down because a moderator removed the post on some stupid minor infraction is infuriating.

smsm42|3 years ago

It is still surprising - at least for me, I've been using Reddit for years but mostly niche subs, nothing popular - how such a petty power warps people's minds. I dread to think what a real power does then.

jtbayly|3 years ago

But in this case, the mods can't win. If they let AI art take over, HN will be condemning them for putting artists out of business. If they refuse to allow AI art, HN condemns them anyway.

generalizations|3 years ago

I wonder if the simple solution is to prevent mod accounts from interacting on the subreddits they moderate.

ilyt|3 years ago

That's not news and applies to pretty much any moderators, especially the non-paid kind.

jdc0589|3 years ago

proof: I was a mod of a small hobby subreddit for a while, and I'm an idiot.

tibanne|3 years ago

Came here to say this.

flumpcakes|3 years ago

Speaking on the topic of Reddit and mods and it's power structure:

In the UK Reddit has pushed a new subreddit called "HeyUK". It has turned up in the subscription feeds for some (all?) UK users automatically without the user asking for it or adding it. If you remove it from your list of subreddits the posts will still show up in your feed as "sponsored". As far as I can see this new subreddit is seeded with just cross posts from other UK subreddits and is created/pushed by Reddit itself.

The big issue I have is that this is just another subreddit with 15-odd random people who are the mods. These people have the unilateral power to shape discourse and be the arbiter of what is "UK" and what isn't.

Reddit is getting a bit too big, this feels very strange. On the swing-back we then have Reddit not banning the "jailbait" subreddit until it made major US news.

I have no idea what's going on with social media anymore, I'm just left with the overwhelming feeling that the people with the voice and the power are not the best of us.

xeromal|3 years ago

Reddit has definitely started a massive push in an authoritarian direction.

I actually was permanently banned from reddit last night for saying "I didn't know shooting a guy in the nuts would kill him" for spreading hatred/violence in a video game subreddit. It kind of caught me off guard.

purpleblue|3 years ago

The beauty of reddit is that you can create your own subreddit with your own mods and have the discourse that you want. You're not held to just sticking with the subreddits that are given to you.

vips7L|3 years ago

Looking at one of the mods there, they've only had an account for 3 months. 0 comments, 1 post karma.

tazjin|3 years ago

Reddit's weird setup where essentially random people who were first "own" entire categories (= subreddits) of discussion is totally absurd.

ilaksh|3 years ago

I was a moderator for r/robots for awhile. I even spent a few hundred dollars hiring an artist to create a theme.

I begged them to help me pin down what the subreddit was about since the submissions were all over the place, and some people seemed to think it was for a certain type of robot content and others a different type. Most ignored the question.

I tried to share articles and videos of actual leading edge robots that I though t were awesome. Generally these were ignored, along with most such things. Occasionally a video of a real robot would randomly become popular for some reason. The worst most repeated robot sketches would often receive many votes. Anything even remotely erotic went straight to the top.

They seemed to like art quite a bit, but often the voting was the opposite of what it should have been. Like artwork that was clearly derivative or low quality was top billing for the day, and amazing work was ignored.

Then there was someone who really wanted to use it for some channel that was obviously kind of a stealth marketing system. I repeatedly warned everyone about it and tried to discourage it, but the only feedback from anyone was that they liked the content and I was overreacting.

Due to the incredibly poor judgement of the people voting in the sub, I got fed up and left.

andsoitis|3 years ago

What do you think would be a better model? I have a hard time imagining one.

It doesn't seem all that different to me than whoever is first to claim a company name, a domain name, or when we go back further in time, land.

root_axis|3 years ago

It's not absurd, it's reddit's killer feature and the primary reason that reddit is as big as it is.

im3w1l|3 years ago

If someone founds a company they get to own it. Why shouldn't someone get to own a community they found?

sva_|3 years ago

Nah, it's pretty amazing getting those people to work for free.

s3000|3 years ago

The weirder thing is that redditors make it possible to own categories.

The name of the subreddit shouldn't matter much at all. For each category there are several subreddits but people don't actively move to the subreddits with the best moderators.

For aggregators as a whole, it's the same. Places like https://tildes.net/ don't have many visitors even though Reddit's flaws should incentivize significant amounts of users to try other aggregators.

teekert|3 years ago

What does it even matter how art is created?

It's the same with banning ChatGPT from StackOverflow: Who cares and who notices? Art is either evoking some feeling or not and it's different for everybody. An answer on SO is either helpful or not. Who cares how it was written? ChatGPT can easily say something more helpful than me, stable diffusion can easily make something I'd rather have on my wall than Da Vinci's Mona Lisa (or anything more along my preferences). Why do we care so much? What's "real art" anyway?

I always like a colleague's mousepad, it said: "Is this art or can we throw this out?" Always makes me smile.

Beltalowda|3 years ago

> It's the same with banning ChatGPT from StackOverflow: Who cares and who notices?

People were posting low-quality rambling bullshit, sometimes completely off-base, without even bothering with the most basic of smell-tests. People occasionally post low-quality rambling bullshit too, or things that are off-base, but with ChatGPT you can post 100 answers in an hour.

It's a matter of scale. The ban wasn't pre-emptive, it was reactive in response to a real observed problem with people lazily Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V spamming poor quality nonsense from ChatGPT.

While technically not allowed, you can still use ChatGPT on Stack Overflow: just make sure it's correct, copy-edit things a bit to remove some of the waffling and repetition that ChatGPT tends to generate, and no one will even notice.

I'm less involved in the art community, but I would imagine that most communities are at least in part about people who create things for the joy of creating things, and then share that in the community for the joy of sharing. I don't have anything against AI art, but if lots of people start lazily spamming that kind of stuff then you've kind of lost your community. It's not so much about what is or isn't art, it's about having a community.

That said, this mod is clearly being an ass about it.

Sharlin|3 years ago

Well, the temporary ban at SO is entirely justified. They already saw the influx of massive amounts of new answers, generated by ChatGPT, that are essentially spam and make everybody worse off. Even if 90% of the answers are perfectly correct, that leaves the 10% that are wrong, sometimes in subtle ways. And because the submitter of those answers is only parroting what ChatGPT wrote, they probably won't be available for further discourse, or to amend the answer they submitted.

The biggest problem with ChatGPT is that when it's wrong, it's confidently wrong and cannot quantify its uncertainty in any way (maybe it's too human-like in that respect...) Furthermore, the whole idea of a reputation economy collapses if reputation becomes "too cheap to meter".

onion2k|3 years ago

If the goal of a community is to share work, critique each others efforts, and enjoy a hobby together, then someone coming along and pretending that they're doing it while they're not is obviously going to annoy people who are genuine.

I see AI-generated art as being similar to taking performance enhancing drugs in sport or using something that's against the rules in motorsports. Outsiders don't really care because they just see someone performing at the same level of the others by using clever tech, but if you're part of the group then you will care much more.

unshavedyak|3 years ago

Well in this case, it's the artists who care. Ie the person at risk being "replaced". Yes, ML is not there yet to actually replace artists, but we all see the writing on the wall.

I'm a software dev attempting to learn art. I recently joined Mastodon related to this purpose and it's quite the hot topic there. Many, many artists pissed about how their work is being used to train corporate profits as well as potentially undermining their living/passion/etc. I've actually seen some cool art in protest of "AI"... usually involving malformed hands which the artist community have gravitated towards being the representation of current AI capabilities.

I think it matters how it is created, personally. Not because the author of an individual piece of art is important to me, but rather because once AI moves into a problem space and can effectively and accurately "solve" that problem space the displacement of humans will be surreal. How it affects people is the important thing to me. I'll be interested to see how we manage to recognize this reality as AI improves.

sfpotter|3 years ago

Seriously? Shouldn’t the SO example be very obvious?

If you submit an answer yourself and it’s wrong, if someone begins the process of critiquing it or editing it, they can engage in a dialogue with you in order to make this happen. You can explain how you came up with your answer, and they can help you debug your thinking. Seeing this process unfold over a couple comments is often one of the most enlightening things on SO.

How is this supposed to happen if you submit a ChatGPT answer which you have just accepted on blind faith and maybe don’t even understand?

polio|3 years ago

It matters to me because, to me, art is a reflection of emotional processes specific to human beings. There is meaning conveyed by the difficulty of technique, refined over hundreds of hours at great opportunity cost. It says to me that the human being has sacrificed a lot to produce this piece, and so I should give it my attention. For human-made work, complexity is something like proof of work which is itself proof of conviction. None of this applies to generated work. While I am impressed at the analogous sacrifices of the human inventors of AI, the work produced by the AI itself has not yet surpassed the level of significance of a party trick, even though I would be impressed if a human had produced the work .

Sebb767|3 years ago

> An answer on SO is either helpful or not. Who cares how it was written?

"Who cares if the diagnosis is done by a medical expert or someone pulling out random drugs they tried before? As long as I feel better immediately after taking them, who cares how they were prescribed?"

The case on SO is clearly different, as ChatGPT might answer incorrectly or answer with something containing subtle bugs. There's also a good chance that you won't be immediately able to spot those bugs, as, if you were sufficiently knowledgeable in the topic yourself, you would have most likely not asked that question.

The case for art is a bit different, as there is no technically correct way to do it, but there is still a value to the way it is created. Would you think the first picture drawn by your child is worth the same as any other bad painting? Would you agree that a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa has equal value to the actual object? If no, it should be pretty easy to see why a painting generated by an AI is different from one created by a human.

jaywalk|3 years ago

It shouldn't matter how it's created. But some artists are pissed off that AI can generate art that people like, so they want to ban it.

I don't think the average person cares at all.

unethical_ban|3 years ago

We should at least have transparency in the origin of the work. I care about the human experience, not the AI experience.

tjpnz|3 years ago

This is /r/art by the way and based on the blurb and about section it seems less about art and more about fulfilling the deranged power fantasies of its moderators. What an unfriendly place.

Nice to hear the artist has gotten a more positive response in /r/drawing.

kitsunesoba|3 years ago

I'm not too surprised, /r/art has been famous for completely arbitrary rules for years by now.

oigursh|3 years ago

/r/art mods are swivel-eyed loons

lifefeed|3 years ago

Those hands have the right number of fingers.

So either 1) It's not AI-generated art, or 2) It is AI-generated art and the artist is a master at prompting.

Either way they should be celebrated.

buffington|3 years ago

I've been keeping up with Stable Diffusion and all the tools around that for months now and it wasn't until a few weeks ago that I learned that you can just tell it to draw things accurately if you want to avoid weirdness.

For example, if I include "anatomically correct fingers" it significantly decreases the number of images with wildly creative ideas for how human fingers should be drawn.

Negative prompting works too. "deformed fingers" or "inaccurately drawn anatomy" can go a long way.

lgreiv|3 years ago

This person knows what they are talking about. Although I have been pretty successful in obtaining realistic hands by prompting photographs and including make of a camera, lens and film [1][2]. Somehow this seems to narrow down the model to mostly produce realistic output. Still, some variants will occasionally feature Chernobyl-levels of fingers.

[1] https://cdn.midjourney.com/6f52a6e9-b3f2-4830-81b1-84c8f8ca4...

[2] https://cdn.midjourney.com/361e143f-5121-4bff-ada9-069c2e400...

bufferoverflow|3 years ago

And that's the argument I've been making. Once you can't tell the difference between AI-made art and human-made art, the demand for human-made art will dramatically decrease, especially in the commercial areas.

If it takes a human a month to paint something beautiful, and 1 minute for AI, it's really hard to compete with AI.

The best we have is Midjourney V4, and it's getting quite close.

splatzone|3 years ago

This is why I believe we’ll soon see a huge increase in the popularity of ‘physical’ art. Theatre, sculpture, dance… in a world overflowing with computer made images and sounds, things which can only be human-made will be all the more special.

kazinator|3 years ago

I'm not saying I agree with the actions of the mods, but there is a grain of truth in the "way of the world" remark.

Human artists who are just highly skilled executors of bad taste are going to be decimated by AI.

Adraghast|3 years ago

Which is why, despite my distaste for DALL-E and its ilk, I’m not at all moved by the anguish over it rendering artists obsolete.

Stuff like this never had any artistic value in the first place, so it makes perfect sense to me that a bot would create it rather than a person.

geraldwhen|3 years ago

The hilarious irony is that the AI is quite possibly copying the authors older work if it was published on an image sharing site like Reddit or deviant art.

Lawsuits need to destroy these models stolen from the public.

CuriouslyC|3 years ago

While we're at it we should publicly flog anyone who's ever done any art in the style of anyone else before them, because they also stole ideas from the public.

DethNinja|3 years ago

This is a common misconception. AI is not copying anything. It is studying the images in a similar way that humans do. Entire size of the stable diffusion model is around 6gb, with pruning it goes down to 3gb. Training set is in terabytes. So it is common sense that no copying is done.

I think artists need to be fair about AI, is there any artist that created their style without ever studying other artists? That is high improbable because humans need to observe to create art. There is even a saying that "Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal".

cyborgx7|3 years ago

Once again, artists trying to stake a claim of personal ownership of a section of human expression standing in the way of technological and cultural progress.

humanizersequel|3 years ago

Lots of people in here making arguments about the fact that the way these image models learn is roughly analogous to how people learn, the fact that these relatively tiny models simply don't have enough bits to grok anything except the most popular (and therefore recurrent in the training data) images, etc.

What about the fact that these models aren't just randomly spitting out and taking credit for random images? This seems the most salient point to me — if I used a paintbrush to create a copyright-violating clone of some notable artwork or IP and tried to pass it off as my own, I'd be breaking the law. We wouldn't try to ban paint and canvas and the human arm because it has the potential to create something that infringes on copyright, we'd enforce the actual act.

If these models make this kind of infringement easy, then they are bad products and their users will run the risk of going to court. The whole thing seems like a non-issue.

jcq3|3 years ago

"A good artist copy, a better artist steal". AI is influenced by artists work like artists are influenced by artists.

MrNeon|3 years ago

Nothing is being stolen, get a grip.

alar44|3 years ago

Nothing is being copied. If you understand how AI models work you'd realize that's impossible considering the model is a few GB. How could every piece of artwork be in there? It's not a database lookup.

Overtonwindow|3 years ago

That's just Reddit.. I don't think we should take any Reddit community. Seriously because it is run by Reddit mods who have proven countless times to be absolutely terrible at their job.

Turing_Machine|3 years ago

The problem with Reddit, SO, and pretty much any system with moderators is that a heavy-handed moderator can claim that he's "doing something", while a lenient moderator who only deletes genuinely egregious content looks like he's "not doing anything".

The same is true of other institutions, such as congresses and parliaments. Note that politicians run on the basis of what new laws they've gotten passed far more often than what laws they've blocked.

There's something to be said for the idea of a branch of government whose function is limited to repealing laws.

possiblydrunk|3 years ago

Wow, that's like banning a photorealist because their work looks too much like a photograph.

tedunangst|3 years ago

Too much effort for the article to mention r/art was the subreddit in question?

happyopossum|3 years ago

Err, banned from a subreddit by a mod who didn’t believe him.

Pretty sure that happens to about 10% of Reddit users every year.

cat_plus_plus|3 years ago

Even if true, AI is just another tool and combined work of artists and AI can produce greater art than the artist alone. For example, natural world has a lot of repeated elements and hand painting each one detracts from time that could be spent on more expressive aspects of the work. Airplanes let us fly further and faster than birds, should that be avoided / considered not to be real flight just because we are getting technological assistance?

deely3|3 years ago

> AI can produce greater art than the artist alone..

Citation needed.

> natural world has a lot of repeated elements and hand painting each one detracts from time that could be spent on more expressive aspects of the work.

Can't agree. Using these repeated elements artist can add additional level of impression for a viewer. While AI probably will use random distribution in this situation.

Adraghast|3 years ago

Fundamental misunderstanding of what art is.

pcrh|3 years ago

On the topic of AI vs "real" art, I visited /r/artcommissions. I was surprised at how little people are asking, many in the range of $5-$50 for original work.

layer8|3 years ago

Supply and demand.

nilslindemann|3 years ago

Notice how this is an unmanaged misuse of power. The artist has no legal tools to defend against the actions of this moderator.

An internet court is needed for these cases, like courts in the real world, and supported by them. And an internet police, which makes sure the court rulings are obeyed. Also supported by real world police, if necessary.

afavour|3 years ago

Safari telling me the SSL cert for this site is not trusted. Perhaps only appropriate for "the tech deviant dot com".

bragr|3 years ago

Seems like a normal let's encrypt cert to me.

rvz|3 years ago

All digital artists need to do to prove that their art is not AI-generated is to record their screen and show a start to finish recording of themselves painting the digital image from scratch as proof.

This is not new and it is similar to speed painting, and all these prompters using Stable Diffusion cannot do such a thing.

Problem solved and job done.

ryandrake|3 years ago

The artist in question offered to show the raw Photoshop files and the progression of work done on the piece to prove it was not AI generated, but the mod did not take him up on that offer, and simply banned him.

yegle|3 years ago

Wait until AI can generate such a video in 1min?

cobertos|3 years ago

If AI content is already this indistinguishable from normal content, how much normal content is "real content" anymore?

We have no metric or insight into this. The percentage will keep increasing as it's cheap and very economically beneficial for companies to use.

jack_the_dev|3 years ago

Surprised no one is talking about how this is terrible art and derivative of GoT and LoTR.

tester457|3 years ago

Because the art is actually good and better than most hobbyists in terms of technical skill in digital art.

xwdv|3 years ago

I’m glad. If your “art” can be mistaken for AI art, it’s likely just content, not art. The example picture is meaningless, just technical work. Makes no sense upon scrutiny.

True art is something that can’t be replicated by AI. You will have no doubt once you see it. It still exists even with the proliferation of AI art.

It’s like the difference between a random picture and a meme. The meme looks like a picture, but it captures an emotion or essential human truth that you connect with upon looking at it, where as a picture is just a random picture that could look like a meme but has no real meaning to it. You will know what I’m talking about.

MrNeon|3 years ago

I looked at the image and it feels like art in the terms that you put it.

What now. Is my inner experience of art not valid? How do we reconcile this?

buffington|3 years ago

> True art is something that can’t be replicated by AI. You will have no doubt once you see it.

Ignoring your assertion about what art is, I have to ask: what happens when you can't tell the difference?

c3534l|3 years ago

It does look like AI generated art, tbh.

layer8|3 years ago

Only at first glance. It doesn’t have any dodgy area or incongruence like you pretty much always find in AI pictures.

lofaszvanitt|3 years ago

Reddit = brainwash center

deely3|3 years ago

Thats truly interesting thing to learn on such site as HN.

RutgerHauer|3 years ago

They aren’t wrong. It looks like AI art because it’s meaningless, derivative bullshit.

darepublic|3 years ago

I think this may be overreach by the moderator but I basically agree with their points. This looks just like a midjourney output. It is a hodge podge of different cultural influences -- asian character, with green eyes, with grecoroman garb, and eye of sauron orbs floating around her. It would have once been technically impressive, and now is just a kind of culture diarrhea.

kzrdude|3 years ago

So what. I guess the artist in question hasn't even been playing with AI art or even seen that much, so they don't have that context. And why do we need to look at AI art to know what is right for ourselves to paint?

vitno|3 years ago

I have a passing familiarity with the webfiction "Beneath dragon eye moons", that this artwork was designed for. All of the things you are complaining about makes sense in the context of that writing.

jollyllama|3 years ago

You've got a point, but I feel like I've seen more egregious examples of what you're describing. The Sauron eyes are unnecessary, but without that, it could be an interesting "Muse in the Warzone" piece. The character doesn't really look Asian to me though, or drawn in an anime style, but the expression could stand to be more subtle. We're all critics.

jcq3|3 years ago

I agree with the moderator, AI will push artists to their limits and force them to become creative which is the most important skill of an artist. Technicality isn't enough nowadays, doesn't matter if you can paint like Raphael, you need to be creative like Picasso or Dali.

capableweb|3 years ago

> Technicality isn't enough nowadays

When was it ever like that for artists? Most complex music to perform doesn't mean it's the "best", neither is it like that for art.

As an example from visual art, abstract art is sometimes very simple, yet have a profound impact on people, and it was never about being "technical", "complex" or "hard to reproduce".

kzrdude|3 years ago

What is creative? How many artworks like this with something like sauron's eye flying in the coulds have you seen, is that too unorginal?

I don't think it's possible to judge these questions you present at a glance anyway.

tester457|3 years ago

Just like how AI is forcing coders to make better design decision and focus on the bigger picture since eventually it will be able to write any program. The implementation will be up to us.