Firefly was found to use suspect training data too though… It’s the best of them in that it’s actually making an effort to ethically source the training data, but also almost no one uses it because programs from professional adobe suite are expensive as hell.
https://martech.org/legal-risks-loom-for-firefly-users-after-adobes-ai-image-tool-training-exposed/
Before the ship it was an old scottish folkstory about a guy going home on a stormy night, encountering a coven of witches, calling out out to one that had a really small shirt (cutty sark) and never being seen again Ichabod Crane style. The figurehead on the ship is what gave the ship it’s name, because it was based on that story.
I can only post a classic in response.
https://salticid.tumblr.com/post/143699141224/a-girl-talk-to-me
Stephen King is absolutely the next person I think is going to have some heinous shit come out about him, like happened with Gaiman. Too many years writing in a cocaine haze, on record defenses of Woody Allen marrying the step daughter he raised, the whole thing with the ending of IT.
Not commenting on the Epstein List, tbh it’s political football and I don’t know if we’ll ever have anything confirmed until well after anyone who could be impacted by it is gone. King’s just one of those people who if you look close enough there’s reasons to be suspicious, but who is such an industry giant that I think no one wants to say anything.
I’m going to try a different tactic here, in that I don’t expect I can convince you of anything on the other side of the argument that you’re engaging with, but something that might be useful to learn from is some constructive criticism of the works that the AI produces. In doing so I’m going to try to avoid what I think a lot of proponents of your style consider gatekeeping.
The piece that won this competition is technically sound, it has an aesthetic presence, we can agree here. If anything AI is kinda good at doing this because it’s trained to recognize the patterns that lead to this in the data and other artwork that was used to train this.
I’ll also even say that if someone spent 80 hours cumulatively taking 900 photographs of a particular scene to try to select just one that’s of particular quality, that we might even say they put in artistic effort into it. It’s just that that alone, the time and effort spent on curating a work, is not all there is that defines it as artistic. In this other case you keep posting about found art, a urinal that someone spent maybe 5 seconds on is also considered art.
It’s also true though that when that guy described the urinal and why he thought it deserved to be considered art, that he put thought into that. He made the selections he did for a reason.
So lets go back to our award winner. It’s competent, we agree, enough that a judge didn’t even realize it might be AI (I’ll get to that in a second). I’ll even say that the fact that the winner could add in an entire head on one of the characters in the pieces and have it blend well enough with the shading and lighting of the work suggests the guy who won with this piece probably knows at least some degree of traditional art concepts.
We can also see that it’s a blend of styles, the composition looks even renaissance a bit, and clearly also the person who submitted this knew enough about other art forms to recognize that. There remains one major question though: what story is this picture telling? The renaissance images that it’s an homage to are generally based on the moment in some story. A picture of Napoleon on a horse isn’t just Napoleon on a horse, there’s usually indications that he’s maybe returning from some battle. Images of Samson and Delilah focus on the moment she attempts the assassination.
That’s what people are trying to get at here. The artist says that his prompt was to make a mashup of styles (victorian and space themes, which does not seem even remotely like what he ended up with), and then refined it further with the lighting and shading, positioning and elements. I can agree this takes effort, it’s just also this is like saying the movie Wild Wild West should have won critically acclaimed awards for the cinematography. Even where he had intent, it seems like it was overwritten by the very tool he used, and it seems like he didn’t believe enough in his own original vision that he noticed that it wasn’t actually what he asked for.
So lets get to the judge then. I think there would be very real outcry if say, a judge for a oil painting competition was unable to tell the difference between an the works made in the requested medium and a photograph that was submitted for it. I could see an argument, much like for how photography was separated out from other artforms in competition, that the same should be done for AI. In addition, I think that the effort to make the AI emulate existing styles and convince people it was made with previously existing tools actually limits the possibility of what the style can create. Almost a decade ago, people were fascinated by google deep dreams because it was a machine creating a rendition of how the machine “thinks,” and showing all the strange symbolism and logical connections that were programmed into it and how they had developed, in a way very different than anything a human artist might think or do. I think that’s the envelope people and AI should be pushing here, I think it should be a completely different category, I think it should have it’s completely own style.
I also think the current AI programs suck for a variety of ethical reasons I won’t get into, but I don’t rule out that there couldn’t be versions made that lack those problems and aren’t just an gimme to corporations looking to streamline every process on the cheap. But if you want AI to be taken seriously, if you want anything you try to make with it to be taken seriously, these are all thoughts you should probably consider.