Alex Jones AI Cover YT Channel and thoughts on AI Covers in general

[Vitnira]

One of my close friends recently started up an Alex Jones AI Cover Youtube channel and I've been involved somewhat, mostly with song suggestions and helping pick what art to use. He's trying to keep it to just "Jones-themed songs" and has decided to give it a vibe of "being managed by a techno-alchemist DJ".

I'm shamelessly plugging the channel of course but it's been very interesting to observe the process. He played around with other voices at first, like Joakim from Sabaton and Dale Gribble, but ended up finding that Alex Jones worked with pretty much everything. I told him "lol do taylor swift" and it...worked? More "distinct" voices appear to do better. The creation of a cover is not zero effort as I would have thought, there are some songs that are plain out of Jones' range, and if the singer has an accent it shines through. Other songs need tweaking in software to soften out the roboticism. These difficulties have led to my friend deciding to learn how to sing, so he can record lyrics to songs that don't work and overlay Jones on them. Another friend has begun work on an original song they'll overlay Frogman on. My friend was NEVER interested in music before now. He pretty much only listened to meme songs.

AI is probably going to end up being our doom and all but it's still amazing to see someone have the fire of artistic interest sparked by something that's taking away creativity from humans. I wonder if it'll end up being like digital cameras, where it helps lower the barrier to get artists interested in the craft and sparks innovation in the field, instead of killing it entirely like older photographers thought.

Here's my current favorite cover of the channel, Alex Jones covering Alex Jones Rants as an Indie Folk Song:



Post recommendations for Jonesy songs not already covered, your favorite AI covers, or thoughts on AI and its place in music.

 

[alCannium27]

I remember telling my parents to not trust me calling them on the phone, they won't believe me when I told them it won't be long before it's indistinguishable from me by voice alone.
And of course I forgot to tell them that video calls won't help either.
This is such a wonderful time to be alive; I imagine it'd be "auteur-heaven" for a while as they won't need to work with pesky actors or perhaps even writers in a decade or two; CG artists? Crunch? What's that when they can just click on a screen and write their demands, and wait an hour or so for videos to generate?
Some of these filmakers/directors probably would still prefer to work with people, saying there's a certain feel about working on the set; ofc neglecting to mention they spend most of their shooting time in a studio looking at people twirling about in front of green screens these days. Than there are the reactionaries, who would go make film native style for the sake of "rejecting modernism", or something.
There's gonna be a lot of hacks, of course; there will always be hacks. The first decade of the proliferation of these tools will be full of them passing their mediocre shitfest under the veneer of beautifully generated AI images. But soon the market will be so saturated (probably sooner than imaginable, since it'd be considerably cheaper to produce such works if such tools can be run locally using rigs that cost only 10 kidneys), people will soon get over whatever fanciful styles AI brings about from the rapid iterations, and focus on the things beneath.
Look man, I don't know shit-about-shit what people will want beneath AI images, but I do know this -- people good at telling stories may no longer have to work with people who are good at acting, and choose simply to tell their stories. As far as I am concerned, that's a good thing.

 

[alCannium27]

Oh, all these talk about creating movies by pointing at a screen reminds me of the game simply titled "The Movies" (2005) by Lionshead -- I gotta find my discs somehow and see if that still runs on Windows 11 -- I had enjoyful memories of messing around in it.

Anyways, allow me to extrapolate upon the game a bit: in The Movies, the game, you play as the manager of a movie studio in not-Hollywood, tasked with hiring aspiring actors and/or existing janitors to keep the studio clean, construciton workers to build movie sets/trailers/food trucks/etc and doing maintainence, and placing buildings and movie sets on the studio lot. You gotta hire writers to write scripts for your directors to shoot -- or, IMO the most interesting pitch, "write" the script yourself

In The Movies you can use a sort of "Premier Amateur" editor to edit videos -- by selecting from a list of pre-implemented animations associated with a movie set, the player can drag-n-drop actors into specific roles, specifying their costumes, and in most scenarios dictate actor's emotions/posture/walk animation/etc. It was essentially a rudimentary machinima editor without the ability to use other game assets without mods (and I haven't found much in terms of visual/asset mods either). I could play with the camera angle a bit to increase the variety of each shot, but the character models aren't very varied and neither are the range of animations, so I get the common criticism that the resulting "movies" often look alike.

Image relevant

So what does this has to do with AI? Well, imagine if we can have a pipeline of AI-generated video editor, using animated controlnet or whatever fancy things you can have, like story-board to animation generation, or something, that allows a director to dictate the flow of motions in each shot; imagine if one was to be able to pose stick figures like one would in 3DMax, Maya, or Blender in a scene, allowing a director to painstakingly choreograph to their hearts' desires, and simply have the AI "paint" their desired actors on the stick figures; imagine if the director can just write down what a character ought to wear in a shot and get "concept arts" generated to be selected, and these concept arts can then be used for AI as references to generate actors in scenes?

The Movies had to use a "language" like the Silmlish because obviously it was not practical to re-record all possible voice lines in a video game (that had to fit on 4 DVDs, and not to mention, an average PC-owners 200-500GB HDD! Instead one can just generate line based on text input, even tweaking the voices using some kind of GUI perhaps, to their likings, with the ability to instruct these voice to have certain emotions, etc.

Oh yes, I wrote there will be hacks in my last post -- I am a hack and I know what I would do with such tech if I was to have it. I will have blueprints of shots that allow scene and actors swapping, and make them into a pipeline to generate huge amount of formulaic videos, which can come out faster than any tiktok sweatshop today. But to any self-respecting -- or massivelhy egotistic -- or both, scriptwriter/directors, I have to say it'd like a dream come true; the only drawback is that they will not have the same little guys to command around with anymore.

If I was to speculate -- which I am -- I'd say a director is not usually a script-writer himself/herself, and script-writers may still have a place, depending on how well AI can write new and exciting stories in a decade or so. I'd say a director's job is to put story-bits into scenes, design the motion of actors, director their expressions etc., which consists of too many movie parts for me to think AI video generators to master in half a century or so. Costume & set designers will probably be able to stick around because, the directors don't usually care about the background details of a shot, so these jobs will remain so they can draw up parts in a scene or manage outfits between shots -- you know, what's appropriate for a 19th century western small cottage, or what should a 50s New York gangster wear while hanging with his mistress in Malibu in the summer, etc. -- something a director might not have the eyes for.

Hell, maybe the film actors won't go the way of the dodo, either; what with the face swapping technology, even their looks won't be so important; afterall, imagine a Witcher show where the character looks basically the same as the Witcher 3 video game, or any IP franchise, for that matter. Now the only thing that matters would be their bodily and facial expression skills.

What if an artist can just draw the face of certain actor and get it rendered photorealistically using AI, and just use that to swap out an actor's face! Today we fight about the actor's rights to their likeness -- I say that's all fine a good, but why bother? We can maybe get a few of them back into films in the future, but who's really clamouring to see a young James Dean in a new movie today (I mean, there are probably some, but I won't say it'd be a draw for the masses). Some of the stars of today and in the pass will go down in history as archtypes in public imagine, like Clint Eastwood and El Paccino, yet I don't think future people will want to watch a film just because they are on the silver screen. Marilyn Monroe is often citing as a sex symbol but who's really talking about her right now?

The deceased will never return to life, and the AI imitation can at best approximate their on-screen persona, not their true identities, due to a lack of private data. Nor does that matter -- I watch a film with Leonardo Dicaprio or Robert diNero because how they act in those films, not who they are. Scanning their faces won't matter if the generated actors don't act like them. I honestly believe, future AI film-making will just have casting directors creating the characters using various tools, based on their preferences and understanding of each character, and not conciously based on any real human being.

P.S.: say what you will about Molyneux, but he's a hack, and heck, when he over-promises, at least he tries to meet half-way.

 

[Punp]

Oh yes, I wrote there will be hacks in my last post -- I am a hack and I know what I would do with such tech if I was to have it.

Yeah that's great and everything, but even with all the vast resources already available to you right this minute, like free video editing suites, a vast resource of film which you can chop and change together, portable movie-grade cameras on your phone and stock footage out the wazoo you're still not making anything - and this is where the problem really lies. There's all this grandstanding about what will be possible in the future and AI generated this and ML created that. If you have no vision and no story to tell it doesn't matter. Realistically you can probably emulate something that has already been done and sell it to norms who have never seen the source material, but you're not really creating anything worthwhile. You may as well just readvertise the source material.

Excellent case in point. OP (@Vitnira) is wowed that their friend managed to make this crazy good video about Alex Jones with original lyrics and "took all their footage suggestions". Which would be mind blowing if their friend didn't rip the video and lyrics from one posted four years prior and run an AI voice sim through autotune, arguably making it worse.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGAAhzreGWw


The success of anything AI is the result of an ignorant audience being starved for content they don't even know they're missing. AI "tools" that replace critical thinking and research result in bland repetition of things that came before. Just look to any product that takes effort. Movies with real stunts. Films like the lighthouse filmed on original film stock which results in surprising effects and lighting choices.

AI is soy paste for the wage cage fodder. Eat up.

 

[Vitnira]

Excellent case in point. OP (@Vitnira) is wowed that their friend managed to make this crazy good video about Alex Jones with original lyrics and "took all their footage suggestions". Which would be mind blowing if their friend didn't rip the video and lyrics from one posted four years prior and run an AI voice sim through autotune, arguably making it worse.

You're...really missing all of the points. Here's what I'm wowed by:
- There's an AI tool to separate the voice from the music in any song. I attempted this on one song years ago and it took a week and was a huge pain in the ass. Now it can be done in minutes with a pretty graphical interface.
- There's an AI tool to train a model based on a human's voice.
- There's an AI tool to take that human voice and apply it to vocals ripped by stage 1 (This is what you're confusing for autotune. There's no autotune, it's Alex AI applied to the singled-out singing)
- There's an AI tool to make photorealistic album art for any concept you can come up with
And here's the true wow factor and the point of my post:
- My friend, who up until a month ago couldn't give less of a shit about musical structure, is now learning music theory and collaborating with a friend to create a totally original song...because of AI.

You're saying "lol you can already make stuff but you aren't doing it! therefore nobody else will with this technology!"

Your poo-pooing frankly sounds like my boomer dad ranting about how the soul of photography was lost when digital came onto the scene. Yes, it's making art easier and more accessible. Like every other advance in art that has made things 'easier' there will be a ton of garbage produced. But there will be artists inspired by the new tools available to make something new and beautiful.

Edit:

Punp: on the topic of new posts, I'm owning normies tonight: <this thread>

wow I'm super owned you half-read my post and made a shit reply, good job. i'll go cry in my corner over how pwned ive been.

 

[Punp]

...

The difference between your boomer dad and his digital photography rant vs AI is that you still need to be creative for digital photography. The major use of AI that I've seen is tentamount to saying "I can't be bothered to be creative, learn my tools or spend longer than a day thinking about it, let something else do it for me". This should come as a surprise to nobody when the modern mindset for content creation is "faster, cheaper, more". Note the word content, i.e. filler.

All my points still stand. None of what you've said is the least bit impressive. Separating voice from backing tracks has been doable since before AI. Your friend is still a content recycler. The album art is still clearly AI generated (unless you're a coomsoomer normie). None of this could exist without someone actually taking effort to make all the stuff it was trained on in the first place (photography, music, Alex Jones' rants), meaning the only people using AI are bottom feeders.

I'm still to be wowed by anything AI. While I concede the voice training thing is surface-level neat, it's still veering into the realm of "I don't want to interact with other humans, get the machine to do it for me".

If there's two things I have in common with your dad it's that I'm trained enough in the discipline I'm talking about to critique a lesser mimicry of it, and that I'm disappointed in you.

 

[Punp]

If I seem needlessly hostile, consider:

I spend most of my life cultivating skills which I use to create.

I can both see and appreciate the skill of a well crafted thing.

AI generation takes a vast average of all the things produced, lumps them together into arbitrary content boxes and produces average content.

Average people go nuts for this because they don't see or appreciate the skill of the process. They just see content.

When you talk about how AI is liberating creative freedoms and making "excellent things" I just see watery shadows of things people have created. I see the erosion of quality and culture in favour of average people making average things to pour into the landfill of content at the lowest personal price possible.

This is why I come to forums and have left social media. Forums have a technical and effort barrier to entry which keeps out these kinds of people.

AI generated content is like when China became the target audience for film. Everything became dumbed-down explosion CGI circlejerks. This is why your enthusiasm for AI is so personally offensive to me, and why I'm being so hostile to your actions of promoting AI generated content as if it's God's own bread.

 

[Vitnira]

If I seem needlessly hostile, consider:

I spend most of my life cultivating skills which I use to create.

I can both see and appreciate the skill of a well crafted thing.

AI generation takes a vast average of all the things produced, lumps them together into arbitrary content boxes and produces average content.

Average people go nuts for this because they don't see or appreciate the skill of the process. They just see content.

When you talk about how AI is liberating creative freedoms and making "excellent things" I just see watery shadows of things people have created. I see the erosion of quality and culture in favour of average people making average things to pour into the landfill of content at the lowest personal price possible.

This is why I come to forums and have left social media. Forums have a technical and effort barrier to entry which keeps out these kinds of people.

AI generated content is like when China became the target audience for film. Everything became dumbed-down explosion CGI circlejerks. This is why your enthusiasm for AI is so personally offensive to me, and why I'm being so hostile to your actions of promoting AI generated content as if it's God's own bread.

I really appreciate this response. This is exactly the type of discussion I was hoping to incite with my post! (Up until here I thought you were just a creator who was salty that AI would be takin yer job. And you still might be )

This has given me a lot of thoughts I'm struggling to express well. Which is a great place for me to start.
I struggle to express my ideas outside of my head (this is going somewhere I swear). As a child, I excelled in math/science but did poorly in English (and it's my only language). I have finished ideas in my head, but when I go to put them on paper as either words, poems, or visual art - it comes out awful. I also have issues tying knots because I see the knot, but the steps to get there don't hold on in my brain. It took me until like 7th grade to stop using velcro shoes.
But I love creative pursuits. I just suck at them. I've realized over time that I personally need a scaffold to work off, a foundation to build on. Given a blank piece of paper I freeze, but I enjoy painting miniature figures and photography. I enjoy my day job at coding because I'm frequently given open-ended tasks that have a clear defined endpoint but allow me to implement it however I want. I need a point to focus around or I get distracted and can't create (this is probably an issue created from our dopamine-saturated world, but who knows, maybe I'm just inherently screwy).

I see AI as a tool to help me organize and express my thoughts. I see it that a person guides an AI to create art, but you see it that the AI is the sole creator of the work, and that it's not creating but ripping off what humans have done. But are human artists ever the sole creators of their work?

Every creator was inspired by the creators before them. Warhammer 40k gets called out for being a Dune ripoff, Dune gets called out for being a Lawrence of Arabia ripoff (in space). Star Wars consciously ripped the Hero's Journey and slapped some space fantasy on it. I don't think there is a such thing as a truly original thought, rather unique combination of thoughts that already exist. If I recall correctly you work on custom GB games. I doubt you purge the memory of all other video games you have ever experienced while doing your work. Did you get those creators permissions to be inspired? What is the difference between AI and human art? I wish the movie Yesterday (2018) had been better, I was hoping they'd explore ideas about who actually creates an art piece. That movie was clearly corrupted by what you're complaining about - it focused on the romantic relationship arc to the exclusion of anything interesting because People Like Romance Arcs.

You said it yourself that your complaint isn't even so much about AI as it is about the degradation of Quality in our society. But it's been obvious for quite a while that we've never needed AI to produce absolute crap. The book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance would not have been written in a society that values beauty and quality because we'd simply be producing beautiful things all the time. I'm not a commie but capitalism does not encourage the creation of Quality.

I think you see it that AI is the antithesis to Quality where I don't. I see it that monetary incentive is the antithesis of Quality.

For instance, I've looked at the other AI cover YouTubers and they're pouring out tons of content to see what sticks and will get them views, because to zoomers being a successful youtuber is more admirable than being an astronaut. My friend's goal with the channel (I cringe typing this) is to fight the culture war and redpill more people. He spends hours on prompts to get out something useful for the cover art (because the AIs that will allow you to create art of real people suck right now), hours in Audacity tweaking things, and more hours finding good Jones rants to fill the instrumental sections with. He is, as he puts it, "A high quality shitposter". AI cover channels are all shitposts in the truest sense of the word but there is still varying quality between them.

To avoid this being too long I'm going to make another post later: I feel that true Art isn't only about the end product but the process itself. That to create art there must be struggle. I think that's something you're also expressing with your posts, that AI art isn't art because there is no process. Anyway more later.

 

[Punp]

Hey, thanks for waiting - I've been AFK this weekend and unable to respond but I saw your post and I wrote something down for when I get back. Will do a writeup shortly.

 

[Vitnira]

Hey, thanks for waiting - I've been AFK this weekend and unable to respond but I saw your post and I wrote something down for when I get back. Will do a writeup shortly.

Lol, I've been too busy for my second ramble too. I enjoy forum's long-form slower nature.

 

[Punp]

Lol, I've been too busy for my second ramble too. I enjoy forum's long-form slower nature.

Thanks for the reminder - I wrote this in notes on my phone last weekend so apologies for the sloppy formatting.


Re: being replaced by AI. I was once concerned that would be the case, but current AI just isn't as advanced as people worried it would be. At the moment it's being sold as a cure-all for all jobs, but without significant adjustment and heavy oversight it just doesn't apply to the tasks.

The people who commission my work aren't looking for quick or cheap solutions to a problem, but for an insight into the process and my experience as well as the social aspect.

---

Re: as a scaffolding for creativity. What you're talking is the liberation of creativity through restriction of creativity i.e. the more you restrict something the easier it is to be creative within those restraints. This is why the restrictions inherent in pixelart, demoscene and ANSI art are important to creating creativity. You can just as easily provide inspiration for creativity by researching and observing the world and interpreting your feelings. This is a skill that must be learned, not replaced.

---

RE: humans as creators. AI is limited by its training data. Human creativity works to a similar model of "training data" (their life, other artists), but humans sense their inputs through the lens of the human body. They experience time, suffering, emotions, social consequence and hunger - they interpret their inputs. Individual humans who developed in the same time period, in the same location, to the same parents, will have vastly different opinions of the world. The same is not true of Machine Learning models which attempt to piece together a world view from the tertiary sources of the media produced by artists, and consistently put out the same garbled results.

When I am "inspired" by gameboy games which came before, it is not just a remix of what I've witnessed, but a response and development of the conversation of design. One must pick things that are done well, and things which are not, and improve upon them. The inspiration is not limited to the medium I'm working in. A PS1 game menu may be better served as an analogy to a phone switchboard, for example. This then opens questions of how that translates to the wider subjects of controller inputs, colour theory, screen restrictions etc. ML is specifically concerned with repeating and remixing existing things without offering truly creative or innovative developments because it cannot engage with the conversation of design (unless it is programmed to)

You note that the creation of mediocre content has existed before ML and I totally agree with you. People have been using the formula of remixing and repeating successes forever. See the spree of Western tv shows in the 50s, or detective tv shows in the 90s, or the Transformer movies, or Minecraft clones. This isn't creativity, it's pattern following, and it's why it's so appealing to replace this low tier work with ML.

---

On capitalism. When the bottom line of the game is to make the most profit with the least effort, we often see copycats finding a trend and monetising it. Inventors very rarely see the profit of their innovation. There are two kinds of people in the world: the inventors and the people who profit from marketing those inventions. See any Tiktok video where ideas for videos are stolen and repackaged on a daily basis.

This pattern recognition and reproduction is precisely what ML is for.

Take a famous voice like Alex Jones which has proven cultural interest, for example, and steal it away from the person who has worked hard to culture and develop that voice (Alex Jones). Use it for your own profit (views on youtube) and put it against a statistically popular song (Taylor Swift). Machines will eventually be trained to do this for you.

Well, I say "for you", I mean "for companies that are seeking to replace you", because it's dumb work and you're just another link in the chain they can do without. What value is your friend really providing?

Compare against what would happen if Taylor Swift stopped producing songs that can be parodied, or if Alex Jones retired. The whole basis of worth for the resulting machine generated content is lost.

This is an important basis for deciding the worth of a participant in the chain of production.

---

AI vs Quality.

There is a distinction to be made in using AI as a tool vs AI as a thinking replacement - for example: using the smart fill tool in photoshop vs using ChatGPT to write a film script.

The smart fill tool seems like an innocent use case, but compare to the very real example of George Lucas v StarWars.

The success of the first three films was down to the creativity and effort of a large, expert team working and refining the art and script. Once George Lucas was showered with praise as "the creator of StarWars" he saw his team as mere tools to make special effects happen the way he wanted them instead of relying on their experience. His scripts were written exactly as he wanted them and not explored through a process.

The same is true of the flood fill tool, and because the solutions come so quickly we do not have time to question or invent new methods for how we can approach the image.

---

The struggle of art

I think we fundamentally agree that there must be effort for art, but I would like to add that there must be ample time for exploration, to be wrong, to properly engage with the question of design.

To underscore all of the above - for how long would generative art still be fresh if all the artists just stopped?

 

[Punp]

Thread bump. Interested on your take now that we've got into the meat and potatoes.

 

[Vitnira]

AI vs Quality.

There is a distinction to be made in using AI as a tool vs AI as a thinking replacement - for example: using the smart fill tool in photoshop vs using ChatGPT to write a film script.

The smart fill tool seems like an innocent use case, but compare to the very real example of George Lucas v StarWars.

The success of the first three films was down to the creativity and effort of a large, expert team working and refining the art and script. Once George Lucas was showered with praise as "the creator of StarWars" he saw his team as mere tools to make special effects happen the way he wanted them instead of relying on their experience. His scripts were written exactly as he wanted them and not explored through a process.

The same is true of the flood fill tool, and because the solutions come so quickly we do not have time to question or invent new methods for how we can approach the image.

Somehow I didn't get alerts of your responses (???) and just checked the thread manually today. Apologies! Been busy with family and work and all the usual nonsense.

I think this snippet is a truly interesting point. The ease of creating art preventing the creation of other, probably better art because it removes either interaction or slow thought. I would say this ends up going into a similar bucket as "digital photography encourages you to take 8000 photos and pick the best one later", but even that example has you slowly looking through the photos to find the best one later. The analogy would better be stated as "and then you use AI to pick out the best of the 8000 photos". You may not actually end up with the best or most artistic version, and using that hypothetical AI, you won't want to take the time to find the truly best one. Hmm. Going to sit on this more.

"Take a famous voice like Alex Jones which has proven cultural interest, for example, and steal it away from the person who has worked hard to culture and develop that voice"
I emphasized "steal" since it's a fascinating insight into your mentality, I would have said "copy" or "use" myself. Since I made the original post Alex Jones has played THREE of the channel's covers on InfoWars (as of this post). Stealing is especially entertaining of a word because Jones played these on the channel without mentioning the YT channel's name. Is that stealing? (Friend is totally okay with it of course, he's doing this for lulz)
On top of it, the majority of the videos are auto-linked to the original copyrighted song and the copyright holder receives all monetization for the videos. On more obscure songs (the Keep Your Rifle By Your Side cover that removes the more jesusy elements) the creator is directly mentioned in the description. This isn't entirely a defense, more a question of: Is this stealing if the original creator receives money for someone else's AI garbage creation? Is it stealing if the attribution drives viewers to you that would never have seen it otherwise?

"Compare against what would happen if Taylor Swift stopped producing songs that can be parodied, or if Alex Jones retired. The whole basis of worth for the resulting machine generated content is lost."
With the AI cover generators that use cartoon characters and pop songs, you have a point. But 1) I think with Jones' court case that ruled he's done damage worth the GDP of France, Frogman will be relevant in the 4chan/alt-thinker type community for a while (especially when he's killed) and 2) The channel picks songs that are "Jonesy" in character (conspiracy, anti-authoritarian, etc.). With relevant Rush covers alone he'd have releases for months. We have so much - arguably too much art from previous improvements in ease in creating art, that can be used to make more art the easier it gets. It's so easy to publish now it's hard to find good books. It's so easy to make music now it's hard to find good music. AI is definitely going to make this problem worse, I hope we have a way of filtering out AI-generated content.

Mostly unrelated to any of the points you've made, but it seems Jones has started to mention songs by name more often... almost as if to prompt the channel to create them. Here's an example of him poorly singing a song followed by an AI cover of it. We're touching your point about creative interactivity here. In starting this thread I chose a truly bizarre AI cover channel because I haven't heard of any others have the 'singer' interact with the 'stealer'.


I swear I'm going to write about artistic effort later. The tl;dr is I've been reading a lot about Waldorf education since we plan on homeschooling our kids, and while there's a lot of batshit lunacy in Waldorf it's opened my eyes to how putting effort into art is as worth it to the artist as the creator, and even with AI generation we should still encourage humans to create for their own enlightenment and sanity.

 

[Punp]

I'm glad to hear your response, it's an interesting conversation to have.

Over Halloween members of my family were deciding what they wanted to create for their pumpkin and their first action was to take to Pinterest to find pictures of what they should make. At first I was deeply bothered by this - these people are some of the most creative I've ever known and to see them devolve to this outsourcing really bothered me. I brought it up with one of them later and they said it's like making a mood board and developing your ideas through conscious curation of existing ideas to make your own thing. One must first get inspiration. That said, while I appreciate visiting museums and walking in nature for getting ideas, the pumpkin they made was an exact 1:1 from a picture they saw. There was no invention or experimentation, just a copying.

>Alex jones Infowars mentions
Congratulations to your friend! Sempai noticed him.

Do you not see the irony in the way it's presented in that Infowars clip? Jones credits "The AI" with all the work, saying it's getting better and better. He doesn't mention your friend's effort in his unfiltered talk at all, because his opinion is that the AI did all the work. Your friend is just wetware for the AI to run on.

>Jones interacting with the AI covers
While this is a very satisfactory response to your friend, Jones is doing this because AI is trendy among his beta-alpha audience - an audience which is both a loyal fanbase, a meme community, and remixers, much like the AI community. It fits nicely into the Venn diagram. This is like when kids send in pictures to Blue Peter - it masks the one-sided nature of a celebrity relationship and encourages further interaction and embracing of the relationship. Interacting with the free content machine of your friend is valuable to reducing Jones' effort/output ratio.

>Is it stealing?
Is it ethical if I take someone you love without asking and prostitute them and bring them back? What if I paid you enough money that you felt okay about it? What if I didn't give you the money, would it still be ethical? Regardless of your choice of analogy, it's stealing other people's content if you take it and manipulate it without asking first, the compensation does not change the original act. This said, I like vaporwave for its theft and anti-commercial sentiment, but I like it because it's a comment on theft and remix, it's not under the illusion that it's doing anyone a favour or that it isn't stealing.

>if the source died
My point isn't "what if you run out of content to steal", it's an explanation that the value of the resulting content comes directly from the value demonstrated at its source. It offers little original value to the content. This is remixing in a nutshell.

>putting effort into art is as worth it to the artist as the creator, and even with AI generation we should still encourage humans to create for their own enlightenment and sanity.

I can't agree more. There is nothing more spiritually fulfilling than exploring your thoughts and opinions with your own developing skill.

 

[Some_porcupine]

then there are those (search for more)

View: https://youtu.be/y4IXQdQAplo

 

[Vitnira]

I simply avoid "AI" anything.

AIbros are very mean and cruel, the people who made the tech have bad intentions and are soulless drones themselves.

The stuff AI makes is just content, wish I had an AI so I will never have to look at it again because it's spam.

Ford, Edison, Gates, and Jobs were known for being very nice people and that's why we still use their inventions to this day! Oh, wait... no they weren't. They're amoral assholes and the modern lifestyle is based on their accomplishments (which include stealing). I'd wager most inventions are made by people too focused on achievement to think about morality.

I'm not saying that's a good thing either. It's simply the state of humanity. If you're too moral to do something, someone amoral will come in and invent it anyway.


What do you mean by "spam"? I'm curious where you guys are seeing this stuff, because in my travels I'm not encountering any AI content except for my friend's project and hearing coworkers mess around with ChatGPT and Bing.

 

[HammerKoopa]

Do you not see the irony in the way it's presented in that Infowars clip? Jones credits "The AI" with all the work, saying it's getting better and better. He doesn't mention your friend's effort in his unfiltered talk at all, because his opinion is that the AI did all the work. Your friend is just wetware for the AI to run on.

That is an interesting point. AI art seems to have a defacto detachment or some weird form of death of the author, a part of the artistic endeavor that everyone who walks the path eventually has to face is the search of your own style, what sets you apart and you can call your own despite homages and inspirations, since at the end of the day art returns to expression through a creativity and creation, and once established you can look at a piece of whatever and start to recognize who did it, either easily through heavy stylized art styles or through subtleties in the details, there is always an "Artist" behind it and that automatically attributes it a process of time, struggle and emotion.

With AI all of that is immediately negated, independent on how much time you do or do not spent tweaking prompts or post processing and beyond the topic of "who to credit?", it is just attributed to "done by an AI", not AI operator or prompt engineer or whatever madle up titles chatGPT returned. Vitnira's friend might not care, but i can see would artists depending on AI becoming disillusioned when reaching that treshhold,

That i feel is the true limitation of AI on the creative side, even when some are cool, trippy, or interesting to engage with, it still just looks and feels artificial and sort of the same after seeing enough of it to the point it removes the Artist from the "art" entirely.

I enjoy AI covers on a surface level for their shitpost potential and the one porcupine shared with Chris Chan is hilarious to me, that and the TF2 mercs singing bad apple. On a deeper level, it follows the same vein of the rest of the AI art chat, that of it just being another tool that can become a hindrance if exclusively or almost exclusively relied on, the creator, prompter, keyboard monkey, getting removed from the equation without a second thought just being another one

 

[HammerKoopa]

Amazing thread by the way on how an le funny Alex Jones cover devolved into a discussion of the nature of creativity in relation to AI 10/10 @Punp @Vitnira

 

[Some_porcupine]

but is there difference?
even half-cenutry ago or earlier, picasso iirc said "good artists copy, great artists steal"
talking about inspiration, then, ...

 

[HammerKoopa]

but is there difference?
even half-cenutry ago or earlier, picasso iirc said "good artists copy, great artists steal"
talking about inspiration, then, ...

I want to clarify first that i care jack and piss about picasso or what X said Y ago. With that out of the way, here is me interpretation of the quote.

Good Artists copy, copying is using references, is learning, is imitating the techniques is recreating what you are seeing or hearing from those before you to learn from them, could even be copying from nature itself from drawing your hand to the melody of a bird, you are seeing how someone else has done it and recreated it piece by piece and learning and implementing the exact techniques, effectively copying. Not necessarily tracing

Great artists steal, you appropriate, you grab something and make it your own, you copied enough of how X draws hands, so you apply it with your own view, twist, you mixed it with how Y did hands and you experiment with your own way on it effectively creating your own Z way. That is inspiration, that is stealing. Not necessarily theft.

With that interpretation from self proclaimed internet artist #2309842 and wagecuck programmer #32458; I would update it to "good artists copy, great artists steal, AI generates" because it is not copying to apply a technique, it is not stealing to make something inspired and new through its inspirations. It only generates through a set of rigid instructions

Punp gave a more detailed point to your same question earlier in the thread that i feel drives the point better than i can.

RE: humans as creators. AI is limited by its training data. Human creativity works to a similar model of "training data" (their life, other artists), but humans sense their inputs through the lens of the human body. They experience time, suffering, emotions, social consequence and hunger - they interpret their inputs. Individual humans who developed in the same time period, in the same location, to the same parents, will have vastly different opinions of the world. The same is not true of Machine Learning models which attempt to piece together a world view from the tertiary sources of the media produced by artists, and consistently put out the same garbled results.

When I am "inspired" by gameboy games which came before, it is not just a remix of what I've witnessed, but a response and development of the conversation of design. One must pick things that are done well, and things which are not, and improve upon them. The inspiration is not limited to the medium I'm working in. A PS1 game menu may be better served as an analogy to a phone switchboard, for example. This then opens questions of how that translates to the wider subjects of controller inputs, colour theory, screen restrictions etc. ML is specifically concerned with repeating and remixing existing things without offering truly creative or innovative developments because it cannot engage with the conversation of design (unless it is programmed to)

You note that the creation of mediocre content has existed before ML and I totally agree with you. People have been using the formula of remixing and repeating successes forever. See the spree of Western tv shows in the 50s, or detective tv shows in the 90s, or the Transformer movies, or Minecraft clones. This isn't creativity, it's pattern following, and it's why it's so appealing to replace this low tier work with ML.