ITT: A.I. Generated Art

[LostintheCycle]

I'm not even against monetized fan art. Again, per my principle of art inherently being theft, monetized fan art is fair game. But I don't see that kind of logical consistency in the anti-AI art crowd. I only see hypocrisy.

I think you have good points and I definitely agree with your things on intellectual property. I do not personally recognize IP law because of how stupid the whole sham is, yet I still sensed something was off.
For one thing I'd just like to point out that when you said AI does exactly the same thing that humans do but more efficiently, well I'd say you are misguided. I think I'm reusing an analogy I've said either here or on some chan but anyway here it is...
Imagine there's a particular mountain which I have taken a thousand pictures of. I have a human and an AI artist. I first give the pictures to an AI, and all they can do is reproduce slight variations of the same looking picture of the mountain. If you were to go further and have the output train new AI, and you repeated that cycle, you would eventually receive AI that creates a visual slush with no meaningful representation of the mountain. But then I gave a human artist those mountain pictures, and he would draw the mountain over and over again and make intentional variations and thoughtful experiments, and then when the next generation receives the art of their predecessor, they make their own variations and thoughtful experiments but are also capable of retaining a genuine understanding of the source. I hope that the analogy made sense because I've had a bit to drink and am not thinking as clearly as I could be. What I am getting at is that AI as it is does not capture the creative force and critical thinking that artists can call upon. Of course this is not immediately visible.
The insulting thing ultimately is the different environments in which both live in. The artists or even those fanartists were at some point appreciators of their source material which they render, and many would probably make art regardless of the money. The AI is usually made solely for the sake of money though. It's hard enough for artists to get by, so I empathise that they feel this will make it near impossible. Personally my suggestion is that people should be content with artistic hobby than professional artistry, and that we should reduce our view of art to a communal and historical view instead of global, that way individuals have the opportunity to shine.
I dunno... I guess my point is that I mostly agree with you, but think some of your ideas are a bit off. Morally wrong, maybe or maybe not, on what grounds I'm not sure, but it's pretty obvious why AI art is an insulting, unnecessary development. Seriously, I dont give a shit about making the workflow of marvel disney game studio whatever faster, who the fuck does? But overall I think a lot of the impending doom is overblown and wont result in as much as people think, with AI art maybe receiving a limited real application I could be wrong idk

 

[Punp]

When fan art is monetized, it takes away money that could've gone to official work. Fan artists, whether they intend to or not, take money from intellectual property owners when they put their work on the market. This is an unavoidable fact of monetized fan art. And yet, I hear nary a peep from the anti-AI squad when Twitter artists make hundreds or even thousands of dollars per month doing fan art commissions, producing work that violates intellectual property rights and copyright law. Why can fan artists make money off other people's intellectual property, but AI developers can't?

I'm not even against monetized fan art. Again, per my principle of art inherently being theft, monetized fan art is fair game. But I don't see that kind of logical consistency in the anti-AI art crowd. I only see hypocrisy.

Fan art supports the original art. In cases like Warhammer 40k the franchise is soley held aloft by people who make the setting enjoyable, allowing Games Workshop to keep making profits on their minis. They are well known to buy up these fan projects and remove them entirely from the internet, much to their detriment - but I digress.

The difference here is the support of an existing franchise which feeds back into itself - vs AI art which snaps up other people's labour and presents it as the result of a "thinking program with rights equivalent to a human". It's none of these things. It's not "taking inspiration" from artwork, it's literally weighting its model based on the composition and colours someone else has put down. You might argue that this is what humans do, but it is not - there is thought, discussion and reference back to the original source.

If all art is theft, it's conscious human theft which reacts and adjusts to its surroundings and builds upon the experiences of the artist. The cave paintings had no experience of Renaissance art - they developed their unique styles as a culture over thousands of years.

AIart is inherently theft by:

a) not paying back into that system
b) not crediting the sources of the art

In moral and ethical terms: AI artists are secretive and keep their "magic prompts" to themselves. The dataset is secretive. Platforms are by default opt-out for data collection. There is nothing about this which is generous or sharing or passionate. They are, at the base of it, shady and selfish and entirely motivated by eradicating other people from their production pipeline, even though they're building directly on top of people who never wanted to be part of their process.

AIart falls into the same walled garden as NFTs and the privatisation of the internet.

 

[Punp]

AI art is an insulting, unnecessary development

This is essentially my gut feeling on the subject, and you put it down very eloquently. The people that think AIart is providing the same service but faster and cheaper do not have the artistic or human qualifications to be making that judgement.

 

[VHSMARONITE]

I think you have good points and I definitely agree with your things on intellectual property. I do not personally recognize IP law because of how stupid the whole sham is, yet I still sensed something was off.

Thank you for your consideration, I know it's very easy to get caught up in knee-jerk reactions with this topic. I also don't put any trust in the IP/copyright system, as I know how corrupt and warped it has become. It also goes against the principle of art being theft, as now pretentious IP holders can guard their precious ideas in perpetuity, as though said ideas were ever "theirs" to begin with. It's a sham system, and I see a lot of anti-AI art people adopting this militant, Disney-esque attitude towards their own work now. Everybody wants to be a little copyright holder now that AI is out-competing them. That really ticks me off, considering how different their stance was just a few years ago.

What I am getting at is that AI as it is does not capture the creative force and critical thinking that artists can call upon.

I really don't understand this almost religious language that people use when it comes to artist inspiration. You're talking about artists "calling down" this "creative force" from the heavens, as though it were the Holy Ghost or something. Let me tell you what this "creative force" actually is. It's called mimesis. That artist is just mimicking things that they have seen in real life, or in other art, in movements and choices so minuscule, that they are largely unnoticeable. Human beings don't pray to some sort of art god and get inspiration shot into their brain like lightning. Rather, they tap into their subconscious memory, picking through images that they've seen at some point in their life, and patching them together in a way that best communicates their idea. That process is what artists refer to as "inspiration".

Sure, AI art cannot do this by itself, as it has no method to be fully, truly imaginative- and it never will. That's why prompters exist. But, this idea that the human creative process is some supernaturally superior phenomenon, so far above a mere image mimicry system, is absurd and pretentious. All art is theft because all art is mimicry.

Sorry if I sounded a bit snippy in these responses, LostintheCycle! Nothing gets my blood boiled faster than discussion about artistic integrity and intellectual property, especially as an artist that dabbles with AI myself.

 

[Yabba]

Here's my two cents: While I still believe that AI art is fair use, AI art loses the whole point of art in the first place. Art has and always will be a form of communication, a way to share your view on something or a feeling you have on it. When AI creates art it's meaningless because it can't relate to us so we can't relate to the art. If we can't relate to the art all communication is lost making it meaningless in the first place.

 

[VHSMARONITE]

AIart falls into the same walled garden as NFTs and the privatisation of the internet.

Alright. I wanna be nice, because I don't come to Agora Road to engage in petty Internet arguments. I also think that your heart is in the right place. You want whats best for the online art community, and I can respect that. But seriously. I'm not saying that you're dumb, but this was a really smoothbrain response. You begin with a counter to my monetized fan art section. Notice how I emboldened the word "monetized". That is an important, distinguishing factor, and I thought I specified that in my original post.

Fan art supports the original art.

You may be right, if the work is not monetized. Again, if the work is monetized, its no longer supporting the original art. It is competing with it on the market. People can choose to buy official art, or fan art. Once fan art becomes monetized, it is no longer a solely supportive measure.

In cases like Warhammer 40k the franchise is soley held aloft by people who make the setting enjoyable, allowing Games Workshop to keep making profits on their minis.

This is just factually incorrect, and really naieve. Warhammer 40k is not "solely held aloft by people who make the setting enjoyable", it is solely held up by Games Workshop's profit margin. No matter how big the fan presence is, if Warhammer 40k doesn't make money, Games Workshop won't make Warhammer 40k. That is just basic supply and demand. Creatively, you could argue that fan presence has an impact on the franchise, but that doesn't matter when fan projects start to monetarily compete with official material. Fan projects don't magically put money into the IP holder's pocket, they take money away- which is why they are often shut down.

The difference here is the support of an existing franchise which feeds back into itself

I honestly don't know what this is supposed to mean. A lot of things in this response just seem like twitter artist word salad; things that sound pretty and nice, but have no actual meaning to them.

AI art which snaps up other people's labour and presents it as the result of a "thinking program with rights equivalent to a human".

I have never seen anyone claim that an AI art generation bot has total reserved rights over its generated images, much less rights equivalent to a human

What is this strawman??

It's not "taking inspiration" from artwork, it's literally weighting its model based on the composition and colours someone else has put down. You might argue that this is what humans do, but it is not - there is thought, discussion and reference back to the original source.

This was the big one. This was the one that gave me the biggest headache- its just so painfully braindead. "Literally weighing a model of images based on composition and colors" is exactly how human beings process their decisions in making a piece of art. I don't know how else to tell you this- inspiration is not special. It's an advanced form of mimicry. Animals can do the same thing, like monkeys that make art.

But lets get into the 3 things that apparently differentiate AI model-weighing with the blessing of supernatural artistic "inspiration":

1. Thought
2. Discussion
3. Reference back to the original source

#3 is completely irrelevant, as crediting an original source of inspiration is not inherently a part of the human artistic process. The vast majority of human artists in history, dare I say all, have not credited every individual source of inspiration, both conscious and subconscious, that contributed to their work. That would be impossible, as they would have to credit almost every image that their eyeballs registered since they were born. So, with #3 off the table, that leaves us with 2 factors.

1. Thought
2. Discussion

#2 is so vague as to what it actually means, that I honestly don't know whether to count it or not. What's being discussed? Who's discussing with whom? What does this have to do with the the process of human visual inspiration? Remember, we're talking about why human inspiration is "better" than AI visual modeling. This honestly reads like a filler entry into this 3 word list, which is really sad, considering how much human "inspiration" has been elevated by the anti-AI art crowd.

The last one is the only one with merit. Despite its vague, nearly irrelevant word choice, I think I understand what the writer means by "thought". Thought, in my interpretation, is supposed to mean intent, or imagination. That is a genuinely good point. Humans are imaginative creatures. We can make art based solely on emotions we feel, and ideas that we have. How we actually get this idea across is where visual inspiration (i.e. mimicry, simulacrum, "stealing", etc.) comes in, but the original "spark" is inherently within us all. That is a good observation.

However, there's just one problem. We're not talking about AI making art in a vacuum. You don't just turn on the AI machine and watch as it pops out art. The AI generator has no method with which to be truly creative, and therefore, prompters are required. This "thought" that human artists have, are substituted with the prompters for AI artists. Prompters give that AI artist the initial idea- that "spark" of imagination, in order to get the machine going. So, as a result, AI art is nothing more than the idea of a human being, produced by a machine, using the same system of visual mimicry and simulacrum that every being uses subconsciously. Therefore, in conclusion, it is the same thing.

TL;DR: Everything in that post was retarded, and prompters are essentially using AI as a tool to create art by using the same visual mimicry system that humans have used since the dawn of time, only automated. AI art is theft, just like all art is theft.

I'm sorry for de-railing the thread and writing a whole essay, but I really feel passionate about this.

 

[Andy Kaufman]

Holy shit, look at the comments on here.
Some artist drew some kind of bat creature.
Some random kid (probably a fan) generated two AI images for fun, using the initial drawing as a base to change the style and commented them on the original drawing. The artist screenshotted this and twitter artists are absolutely seething.

Honestly if you wanna troll some people, running twitter artists shit through AI and showing it to them is probably the easiest and most effective trolling you can do in late 2022.

View: https://mobile.twitter.com/gawkiart/status/1602500815142330368

 

[PizzaW0lf]

Holy shit, look at the comments on here.
Some artist drew some kind of bat creature.
Some random kid (probably a fan) generated two AI images for fun, using the initial drawing as a base to change the style and commented them on the original drawing. The artist screenshotted this and twitter artists are absolutely seething.

Honestly if you wanna troll some people, running twitter artists shit through AI and showing it to them is probably the easiest and most effective trolling you can do in late 2022.

View: https://mobile.twitter.com/gawkiart/status/1602500815142330368

TFW twitter artists experience firsthand what it's like to feel conquered, marginalized, and have something be stolen

 

[Novem_IX]

I like that when you put in ethics into the mix you get a response like this. First time you get told it's a softie human issue so it's not worth considering. Then you are told is is inevitable and whatever bad happens from it must happen. I wonder how we could ever make a good world if we have to be blind to human needs. I think the whole point of technology should be to improve people's lives. Not somehow be "autonomous and unstopable". It's as if paradoxically people are making a world for machines where machines control people instead of one where people control machines.

I like what Joseph Weizenbaum, the guy who made the Eliza chatbot decades ago, had to say about a more extreme form of this when it was presented as a question


So I would say in reality the idea that "this is how it must be" is just essentially telling someone he has to shut up when he says an uncomforable remark to someone who is in favor of AI, or any other current technology for that matter.

I for one don't know how anyone could be happy about use of AI. For one it's just essentially a somewhat more advanced correlation machine which needs human data to work. But every time you call this "AI" and not what it is, you remove people from the view. And that's not bad just as in not giving credit, but it is outright theft. It's theft in the same way that a social media service is theft, since all of it's value is in data people provide for it. So people are performing work for wealthiest companies in the world, but the work is unpaid, as it's done by the users.

If you move few decades into the future it's not hard to imagine everyone being worse off since the work they provide isn't seen as work that needs to get rewarded. It's AI doing the "work". You are essentially shrinking the opportunity for people to earn a living by agreeing with the myth of AI. I'm guessing the answer to that is something like UBI, but I don't think many people want to live in a class society where you have to ask for gibs every month to the extremely wealthy. And extremely wealthy there will be. You are able to sell AI services with massive profit if people have been told it's not their work but the work of AI.

Second thing I have to say though is that this just isn't progress. If we actually made progress we would have made some new way of making art with the computers that wasn't possible before. Not as in speed of producing art like existing one, but as in a whole new world to make art with. The only thing that comes to my mind like that would be VR painting. As AI being used for schoolwork was mentioned too few posts above. This again is bad because what happened is not that human potential got expanded, we just made something that was already being done get done faster to the detriment of students. If we actually wanted to make people better we would ask what can be done in education to make learning more effective. And I get that a kid might be happy about having his homework done by AI and handing it in quickly for more free time, but if we made changes to education we maybe could have the kid both learn so good that he wouldn't need to have any homework, while also enjoying more free time. A fun thing to note though is that schools in large part might be so ineffective because they follow the same philosophy of making people work for technology instead of technology for people. If you don't believe me, ask yourself why do we have young people sitting at desk with next to no physical movement in age where they most effectively learn by and enjoy movement. It's no wonder kids can be hell to deal with, since they are frustrated by denial to do human stuff.

You are talking about how things should be, I am talking about how things will be.
I actually hope I am dead wrong because I fully agree with your thoughts on "progress" and technology.

 

[Punp]

Alright. I wanna be nice, because I don't come to Agora Road to engage in petty Internet arguments. I also think that your heart is in the right place. You want whats best for the online art community, and I can respect that. But seriously. I'm not saying that you're dumb, but this was a really smoothbrain response. You begin with a counter to my monetized fan art section. Notice how I emboldened the word "monetized". That is an important, distinguishing factor, and I thought I specified that in my original post.

You may be right, if the work is not monetized. Again, if the work is monetized, its no longer supporting the original art. It is competing with it on the market. People can choose to buy official art, or fan art. Once fan art becomes monetized, it is no longer a solely supportive measure.

This is just factually incorrect, and really naieve. Warhammer 40k is not "solely held aloft by people who make the setting enjoyable", it is solely held up by Games Workshop's profit margin. No matter how big the fan presence is, if Warhammer 40k doesn't make money, Games Workshop won't make Warhammer 40k. That is just basic supply and demand. Creatively, you could argue that fan presence has an impact on the franchise, but that doesn't matter when fan projects start to monetarily compete with official material. Fan projects don't magically put money into the IP holder's pocket, they take money away- which is why they are often shut down.

I honestly don't know what this is supposed to mean. A lot of things in this response just seem like twitter artist word salad; things that sound pretty and nice, but have no actual meaning to them.

I have never seen anyone claim that an AI art generation bot has total reserved rights over its generated images, much less rights equivalent to a human

What is this strawman??

This was the big one. This was the one that gave me the biggest headache- its just so painfully braindead. "Literally weighing a model of images based on composition and colors" is exactly how human beings process their decisions in making a piece of art. I don't know how else to tell you this- inspiration is not special. It's an advanced form of mimicry. Animals can do the same thing, like monkeys that make art.

But lets get into the 3 things that apparently differentiate AI model-weighing with the blessing of supernatural artistic "inspiration":

1. Thought
2. Discussion
3. Reference back to the original source

#3 is completely irrelevant, as crediting an original source of inspiration is not inherently a part of the human artistic process. The vast majority of human artists in history, dare I say all, have not credited every individual source of inspiration, both conscious and subconscious, that contributed to their work. That would be impossible, as they would have to credit almost every image that their eyeballs registered since they were born. So, with #3 off the table, that leaves us with 2 factors.

1. Thought
2. Discussion

#2 is so vague as to what it actually means, that I honestly don't know whether to count it or not. What's being discussed? Who's discussing with whom? What does this have to do with the the process of human visual inspiration? Remember, we're talking about why human inspiration is "better" than AI visual modeling. This honestly reads like a filler entry into this 3 word list, which is really sad, considering how much human "inspiration" has been elevated by the anti-AI art crowd.

The last one is the only one with merit. Despite its vague, nearly irrelevant word choice, I think I understand what the writer means by "thought". Thought, in my interpretation, is supposed to mean intent, or imagination. That is a genuinely good point. Humans are imaginative creatures. We can make art based solely on emotions we feel, and ideas that we have. How we actually get this idea across is where visual inspiration (i.e. mimicry, simulacrum, "stealing", etc.) comes in, but the original "spark" is inherently within us all. That is a good observation.

However, there's just one problem. We're not talking about AI making art in a vacuum. You don't just turn on the AI machine and watch as it pops out art. The AI generator has no method with which to be truly creative, and therefore, prompters are required. This "thought" that human artists have, are substituted with the prompters for AI artists. Prompters give that AI artist the initial idea- that "spark" of imagination, in order to get the machine going. So, as a result, AI art is nothing more than the idea of a human being, produced by a machine, using the same system of visual mimicry and simulacrum that every being uses subconsciously. Therefore, in conclusion, it is the same thing.

TL;DR: Everything in that post was retarded, and prompters are essentially using AI as a tool to create art by using the same visual mimicry system that humans have used since the dawn of time, only automated. AI art is theft, just like all art is theft.

I'm sorry for de-railing the thread and writing a whole essay, but I really feel passionate about this.

Let's just agree that you don't have an imagination or artistic passion, that artists really are "image processing machines" and that I'm retarded and call it a day. We're both not enjoying this conversation and our world views are incompatible inside of it.

 

[Punp]

Holy shit, look at the comments on here.
Some artist drew some kind of bat creature.
Some random kid (probably a fan) generated two AI images for fun, using the initial drawing as a base to change the style and commented them on the original drawing. The artist screenshotted this and twitter artists are absolutely seething.

Honestly if you wanna troll some people, running twitter artists shit through AI and showing it to them is probably the easiest and most effective trolling you can do in late 2022.

View: https://mobile.twitter.com/gawkiart/status/1602500815142330368

mfw I'm an American black person in the 80s and the white media is stealing all my cool sayings.

 

[bnuungus]

Let's just agree that you don't have an imagination or artistic passion, that artists really are "image processing machines" and that I'm retarded and call it a day. We're both not enjoying this conversation and our world views are incompatible inside of it.

if it makes you feel any better your debate was actually really enjoyable to read through. both of you guys had really good arguments that made me want to agree with both of you lol. but i think you're right, it comes down to a difference in worldview and when that happens, it's just time to call the argument quits after a certain point

 

[bnuungus]

kagamine len CCP propaganda poster

 

[LostintheCycle]

I really don't understand this almost religious language that people use when it comes to artist inspiration. You're talking about artists "calling down" this "creative force" from the heavens, as though it were the Holy Ghost or something. Let me tell you what this "creative force" actually is. It's called mimesis. That artist is just mimicking things that they have seen in real life, or in other art, in movements and choices so minuscule, that they are largely unnoticeable. Human beings don't pray to some sort of art god and get inspiration shot into their brain like lightning. Rather, they tap into their subconscious memory, picking through images that they've seen at some point in their life, and patching them together in a way that best communicates their idea. That process is what artists refer to as "inspiration".

The point that you insist on is a good and interesting subject for discussion, and I actually ended up mulling this thought over for a while. I wrote up many paragraphs and tore them down out of dissatisfaction, and realize now why exactly I describe it in vague mystical terms. Describing exactly escapes me so I resort to not describing it at all and resorting to the hope the other person understands what I mean. Perhaps I am not a proper thinker, or artist, or whatever, to fail to untangle this fundamental question, but that is where all disagreements lie really.
All I will say is that I believe humans are capable of both truly conscious/deliberate thought as well as truly spontaneous/instinctual thought; you could generally say machines and animals respectively have a single type of this thought, but humans have both. A point you make in a later post is that because AI art feeds off the work of humans it is able to surpass this. I'd say it only does this in appearance, but I'm not interested in appearance. It's clear that AI art can look like it makes art, doing a good enough job to fool hard eyes of an art panel. But it does not genuinely perform this I think.
Of course some things are taken for granted which precede this view, which is that the world is not just material, and that man is significantly different from beast. I agree with these notions, but I am not averse to the ideas that disagree with these. Perhaps I uphold the former out of human ego and one day I could change my mind.
I don't think that this particular point is of much importance anymore. We can go back and forth and never get further because of how fundamental the disagreement is, and I'm fine with that. Moving on, the issue really is that AI art just doesn't seem particularly useful in the lens of art. Why would an artist want to use this machine? Why would a viewer want to see AI art (other than the novelty it currently brings which will surely run out someday)? A machine has nothing it wants to say. All we could ever glean from it is the same message that the wanderers of the Library Of Babel gleaned from the occasional sentence among the garbled noise of letters.
I'd like to ask you a favor: could you clarify your thoughts on AI art in a post? I have found your ideas and arguments very interesting but I can see how it can rub artists the wrong way. Punp was most certainly offended and I did not think he did well to resort to calling you 'uncreative', but I can see why, because phrases like 'art is theft' and 'AI art is a more efficient version of what artists do already' have a particular choice of words which at first seems to denigrate the work of artists -- the word 'theft' conjures up bad morals, and 'efficient' conjures up grotesquely industrial precision -- and it's only if you read them at face value that you see past that and understand what it means. I would appreciate if you could answer some of these questions, as well as throw in whatever is relevant in your view.
What is the purpose of art? What application do you believe AI art has? Does it effect human art, and if it does in what way? Is AI art by itself positive, negative, either, or neither? Do you think it could "replace" artists, and do you think that would be positive, negative, either, or neither?

 

[Punp]

I'd like to ask you a favor: could you clarify your thoughts on AI art in a post? I have found your ideas and arguments very interesting but I can see how it can rub artists the wrong way. Punp was most certainly offended and I did not think he did well to resort to calling you 'uncreative', but I can see why, because phrases like 'art is theft' and 'AI art is a more efficient version of what artists do already' have a particular choice of words which at first seems to denigrate the work of artists -- the word 'theft' conjures up bad morals, and 'efficient' conjures up grotesquely industrial precision -- and it's only if you read them at face value that you see past that and understand what it means. I would appreciate if you could answer some of these questions, as well as throw in whatever is relevant in your view.
What is the purpose of art? What application do you believe AI art has? Does it effect human art, and if it does in what way? Is AI art by itself positive, negative, either, or neither? Do you think it could "replace" artists, and do you think that would be positive, negative, either, or neither?

I've had a chance to recollect myself from yesterday. I must admit my comment was in bad faith spurred by an emotional/disgust reaction. I believe I've managed to get that in check now and can put this argument into terms which fit best within @VHSMARONITE 's perspective and approach the conversation kindly, coldly and logically.

---

This retort assumes these arguments:
* AI art is the same as human art because both rely on what has come before to remix and reconstitute to make a "new" product.
* There is nothing new under the sun and everything is built on what came before ("all art is theft").
* "Inspiration" is the gathering of data only and is not given by some external deus ex machina.

By this logic, and inversely, human art is superior to AIart because of the sheer amount of data a human gathers in their life experience. In the same way that a white woman from NYC will never have the cultural and life experience as a black man living in Atlanta, an AI will never have the same cultural and life "inspiration" as a human.

An AI will never experience prejudice, love, jealousy, war, hate, sex, hunger, thirst, headaches, papercuts or dust in the same way a human does. It will never go to the park and get cold. It may some day emulate these in ways that human writers do, but in much the same way these stories will be flawed and disingenuine. These nuanced parts of the human experience work to "inspire" human art in the same way that mental illness "inspired" the later works of Van Gogh, or the games of the Parisian social circle inspired surrealism, or the obsession with the vulva inspired Georgia O'Keeffe.

There is a void of self-understanding within AI models. Sam Altman, the creator of ChatGPT even tweeted "ChatGPT is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness". Text examples of AI like chat-GPT are specifically built on the statistical prediction of the next word, and fail significantly in producing content which is original, truthful or insightful [Stack Overflow]. This extends into artwork AI, which gives the illusion of art without any of the knowledge, citation or understanding of its own output.

Art does not occur in a vacuum - the effects of industrialisation and the design of machinery influenced the upwelling of cubism in the early 20th century, and the need for "diversity" in corporate art lead to the vibrant multi-coloured skin hues of the modern corporate Memphis [Wikipedia].

Flat art developed out of the rise of vector graphic programs, and a nostalgia for midcentury modern illustration. You can argue that Corporate Memphis has, since its appearance, been mimiced and reproduced in so many ways that is reflective of AI art in that it is unoriginal and uncreative, and this is the key part of why AI art is equally corporate, soulless and empty. Once the originality of need for development is gone, all that is left is remixing the existing content.

Thus I put to you that AI art is only a mimicry and remix of what has come before without any of the human experience or need for innovation or expression. It can only mimic what it has been fed, and cannot give to the artwork anything of itself. Any "meaning" within AI art is either introduced by the prompter and the output, or sampled from a previous work. AI would not develop anything new if its only input was its own output. Thus ensuring stagnancy within the art world without artists.

Your counter argument may be that the "human" aspect is given by the prompter - but this will only ever be expressed in ideas which have been fed into the training data of the AI. You could not tell the AI to draw a hippopotomus if it was not within its training data, and this extends to more complicated concepts like real human experience, locations and dreams. The real flaw in AI art is the illusion of creativity it gives. You cannot build a matchstick tower with oil paints.

The modern web and the need for artwork to produce a capital return has had a negative effect on innovation, resulting in reproduction, mimicry and theft in the rushed desire to maximise profit vs input. It is not profitable to be innovative. Minecraft is an example of an exception in its success coupled with innovation and creativity - as a hobby project, it took creative risks without needing to satisfy an investment. Soon after it was a proven success, we saw endless clones of Minecraft with slightly adjusted skins, and even unauthorised websites selling the game files. Aspects of minecraft (its crafting table, its open world, its digging and building) can be seen reused in modern games even to this day. I am sure @VHSMARONITE and I see monetised fan art in the same light - other people's proven successes being adjusted and manipulated to sell an artist's rendering ability. This is a reflection on the financial needs of artists interfering with their creative work. We only need to look as near as Hollywood to see the same themes and stagnant ideas constantly regurgitated in an effort to scrape the barrel dry.

Minecraft Alpha v 1.1.1

The fresh and innovative "Mineclone 3". Screenshot from this video by Boffy on youtube.

For the real innovation in art, we can cast our eyes to popular Twitter artists and game developers who output their ideas for free onto their social media in an effort to build a portfolio and following. I do this, and I'm sent DMs from people telling me how I inspired them to make a project that uses my raw ideas to make capital and it makes my blood boil. On one hand, I am pleased to be acknowledged for the inspiration I had given - on the other the claim carries the weight of accepting I did most of the heavy lifting for their work with no renumeration. To further drive this home, this month I was asked how I'd like to be credited in someone's game for "inspiration" for a job I was turned down for in favour of someone cheaper. This is my emotional stake in why I and other artists feel so strongly against AI art - it takes the concept of theft of ideas, increases its efficiency and removes even the scrap of acknowledgement.

---

My main points, if you wish to contest/reference them are:

* The human experience cannot be truly emulated by a machine that is not flesh.
* If a machine that is flesh existed, it could not accurately emulate a specific life experience (being an indiginous person on the 5th of January, 1506, Australia).
* Human art is more than recombinations of what has come before - they are reflections on the human experience, politic, history and thought.
* Art reacts to its environment and requirements, adapting in ways that are not possible from simply mimicing or recombining things that came before. Indeed, the requirements are themselves inspirational.
* Emulation, mimicry and remix are factors of art but not the entire process - the view that this is the entire process is a reflection of the stagnation and theft existent within the modern capital-driven online world.
* AI art is an extension of an unethical process created by the neccessity for capital - that an individual must make money with the least cost to their own capital and effort.

In summary, here's the "I made this" meme, which fits comfortably at the foot of this article, and provides further avenues of discussion to research.

 

[VHSMARONITE]

I've had a chance to recollect myself from yesterday. I must admit my comment was in bad faith spurred by an emotional/disgust reaction. I believe I've managed to get that in check now and can put this argument into terms which fit best within @VHSMARONITE 's perspective and approach the conversation kindly, coldly and logically.

I appreciate that. I was asleep when you sent that first post, so I didn't read it until after I read this post. No bad blood here.

This retort assumes these arguments:
* AI art is the same as human art because both rely on what has come before to remix and reconstitute to make a "new" product.
* There is nothing new under the sun and everything is built on what came before ("all art is theft").
* "Inspiration" is the gathering of data only and is not given by some external deus ex machina.

I already see a problem. I never said that AI art and human art were the same. I did say that the method in creating them is similar enough to the point where complaining about it would be hypocritical, but I never said that the final products of AI and humans are equivalent in value. That would be a subjective statement. The next bullet point is an accurate summation of what I said, as is the last one. 2/3 ain't bad.

By this logic, and inversely, human art is superior to AIart because of the sheer amount of data a human gathers in their life experience... This extends into artwork AI, which gives the illusion of art without any of the knowledge, citation or understanding of its own output.

I agree with this whole section, there's just one problem- I never said that AI art is inherently superior to human art. I said that AI art was out competing humans in term of monetary efficiency and raw production output, but I never implied that AI art was "better" overall. I was talking about how people who are against AI art are hypocrites for the reasons that I specified in previous posts. This entire section is irrelevant.

Art does not occur in a vacuum - the effects of industrialisation and the design of machinery influenced the upwelling of cubism in the early 20th century, and the need for "diversity" in corporate art lead to the vibrant multi-coloured skin hues of the modern corporate Memphis [Wikipedia].

Flat art developed out of the rise of vector graphic programs, and a nostalgia for midcentury modern illustration. You can argue that Corporate Memphis has, since its appearance, been mimiced and reproduced in so many ways that is reflective of AI art in that it is unoriginal and uncreative, and this is the key part of why AI art is equally corporate, soulless and empty. Once the originality of need for development is gone, all that is left is remixing the existing content.

I never said that art occurs in a vacuum, in fact, my entire argument is based on the principle that art doesn't occur in a vacuum! Art is mimicry, and that can never occur in a vacuum. I really think you've lost the plot. What are you even arguing here?

Thus I put to you that AI art is only a mimicry and remix of what has come before without any of the human experience or need for innovation or expression.

You contradict yourself 2 sentences after this.

Any "meaning" within AI art is either introduced by the prompter and the output, or sampled from a previous work.

That "human experience, need for innovation/expression etc." is the meaning that prompters introduce to the bot. Prompters are using this bot as a tool to express themselves visually. You can't say "art isn't created in a vacuum", and then pretend like the meaning that prompters imbue in AI art just "doesn't exist". You can't have your cake and eat it too.

AI would not develop anything new if its only input was its own output. Thus ensuring stagnancy within the art world without artists.

What does this have to do with the hypocrisy of the anti-AI art crowd? Are you ever going to contest that? What are we even arguing about here?

Your counter argument may be that the "human" aspect is given by the prompter - but this will only ever be expressed in ideas which have been fed into the training data of the AI. You could not tell the AI to draw a hippopotomus if it was not within its training data, and this extends to more complicated concepts like real human experience, locations and dreams. The real flaw in AI art is the illusion of creativity it gives. You cannot build a matchstick tower with oil paints.

This section is irrelevant on multiple levels. If I ignore my own argument for moment, and isolate what you've said just by itself, it makes no sense at all. What does the limitations of an AI model have to do with the merit of human input? I say that the "human spark of imagination" is given to the AI through the prompter, and you say that it isn't, because the AI has limits as to what it can imagine. How are these two things mutually exclusive? Let's take that no-hippo AI. If I tell that same AI to generate the tastiest looking apple in the world, would the fact that the bot cannot generate hippos suddenly mean that my input, my "human spark of imagination", ceases to exist? This is a nonsensical, desperate refutation.

And in either case, it's still irrelevant to the discussion we're having! I'm not pretending that AI art doesn't have limits, or that it's intrinsically superior to human art. My main point, again, was that people against AI art on moral or ethical grounds are hypocrites, because the mental processes that they use to gather visual/thematic inspiration for their art is nearly identical to what an AI uses, and that the "spark of human imagination" is provided by the prompter. You haven't countered this point, you've only knocked down a straw-man argument about the superiority of AI art- which I never said, and don't believe.

The modern web and the need for artwork to produce a capital return has had a negative effect on innovation, resulting in reproduction, mimicry and theft in the rushed desire to maximise profit vs input. It is not profitable to be innovative. Minecraft is an example of...

I feel like a broken record, but this whole section on Minecraft, capitalism, and the art world is completely irrelevant. My point about the similarity between AI model + prompter, and the inspirational process of the human artist have not been countered. This whole section is just ranting about capitalism, which I wasn't talking about to begin with. Sure, I see logical inconsistencies here, lots of over generalizations, and other issues with this section, but I'm not going to waste my time picking them all apart- because it's talking about capitalism. I'm not talking about capitalism.

For the real innovation in art, we can cast our eyes to popular Twitter artists

NO WAY LMAOOOOO

Are you serious? "Real" artistic innovation happens on Twitter? As opposed to what, fake innovation? Am I supposed to believe that the entire international art community waits with bated breath, as Twitter artists carry the torch into a bright new tomorrow? Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds? I know I'm being mean, but seriously man. Get out of your bubble. There is so much more to the art world than Twitter, or even the Internet. Maybe this wasn't your intention, but this statement comes off as pretentious and terminally online.

I do this, and I'm sent DMs from people telling me how I inspired them to make a project that uses my raw ideas to make capital and it makes my blood boil.

Why? Why does it make you so angry to see people who have been inspired by your work?

On one hand, I am pleased to be acknowledged for the inspiration I had given - on the other the claim carries the weight of accepting I did most of the heavy lifting for their work with no renumeration.

And what about the people who inspired your work? What about the people who did most of the "heavy lifting" for your work? Surely, you can't be pretentious enough to propose that you have taken no significant inspiration from other artists. Why have you not "renumerated" them? This is the exact type of hypocrisy that I was talking about in my original post.

This is my emotional stake in why I and other artists feel so strongly against AI art - it takes the concept of theft of ideas, increases its efficiency and removes even the scrap of acknowledgement.

Keyword on "emotional". The anti-AI art crowd can only bank on emotions for their arguments- there's no logical consistency or rationality within any of their claims. Art is theft. Human artists have done it since the dawn of time. You haven't disproven that, and you can't. So you rely on irrelevant anecdotes and flighty platitudes to hide the lack of substance in your arguments. If you think that AI art is theft, and that makes it unethical, you are a hypocrite. You've taken aspects of other people's work and integrated it into your own, consciously or not, without consent, compensation, or credit. There's no getting around that, and this entire post was nothing but side-stepping that issue.

My main points, if you wish to contest/reference them are:

* The human experience cannot be truly emulated by a machine that is not flesh.

That was never a part of the argument. The human experience was never something that I claimed could be automated.

* If a machine that is flesh existed, it could not accurately emulate a specific life experience (being an indiginous person on the 5th of January, 1506, Australia).

Also irrelevant.

* Human art is more than recombinations of what has come before - they are reflections on the human experience, politic, history and thought.

I think you've fundamentally misunderstood my point about inspiration and art. I claimed that artistic inspiration was nothing more than re-combinations of what has come before, not the finished product of art itself. Inspiration (mimesis, "stealing"), + imagination (experience, that "spark") = art. AI art only automates the first part. It cannot create art without the second part.

* Art reacts to its environment and requirements, adapting in ways that are not possible from simply mimicing or recombining things that came before. Indeed, the requirements are themselves inspirational.

Art reacting to its environment and existing as an advanced form of mimesis are not mutally exclusive. This is a false dichotomy.

* Emulation, mimicry and remix are factors of art but not the entire process - the view that this is the entire process is a reflection of the stagnation and theft existent within the modern capital-driven online world.

This proves nothing, you're basically just saying "Mimesis is only a thing because of capitalism!!". No, mimesis has been around since humans first created art. Art has never been 100% original. Mimesis isn't exclusive to capitalism, nor was it created by capitalism. I don't know why you keep bringing this up.

* AI art is an extension of an unethical process created by the neccessity for capital - that an individual must make money with the least cost to their own capital and effort.

This is just huge generalization, with nothing to back it up. You don't know why this technology was made, you're only assuming that it was made to make money. Also, again, you keep bringing this weirdly anti-capitalist charge to a discussion that has nothing to do with capitalism. We're talking about AI art generation systems and their similarities to human "inspiration" mimesis.

In summary, here's the "I made this" meme, which fits comfortably at the foot of this article, and provides further avenues of discussion to research.

What "avenues of discussion to research" did this meme provide? More word salad. That's all this is. Emotional, pretentious, Twitter artist word salad.

If after everything I've said, this meme is still an accurate depiction of the AI art situation to you, then we have nothing more to say to each other. There's nothing I could say that would change your mind.

TL;DR: Most of the stuff in above response was completely irrelevant, and my point from earlier still stands. This was a gigantic waste of time.

 

[VHSMARONITE]

I would appreciate if you could answer some of these questions, as well as throw in whatever is relevant in your view.

I'm more than happy to do so, thank you.

What is the purpose of art?

Art is simply the act of taking the ideas inside your mind, and putting them into the "real" world. It's a transfer of ideas from inside the brain to outside the brain.

What application do you believe AI art has?

Despite what some artist types would like to believe, everyone has that "spark" inside them. Everyone has ideas. However, not everyone has the time, money, or drive to hone a craft long enough to bring that idea into the real world, to the specificity and perfection that they expect. AI art helps these people bring their ideas into the world by automating the process of direct creation. Despite what anti-AI art people think, there is a creative spark of imagination in AI art- and it's from the prompters.

Does it effect human art, and if it does in what way?

Yes, like every other technological innovation, this will disrupt the established artistic market. Artists will now have to compete with AI art, which will shift the market significantly. Also, it will flood the market with people who have little technical skill, but advanced technological tools at their disposal. I believe that this will be a "great filter" event, wherein the cream of human art rises to the top, and the rest get out competed.

Is AI art by itself positive, negative, either, or neither?

Is a camera positive, negative, either, or neither? People once thought about cameras in the same way that people view AI art today. AI art is a tool, and without a prompter, it will never make anything of substance. I don't think there is any objective measure with which to rule AI art as any moral value.

Do you think it could "replace" artists, and do you think that would be positive, negative, either, or neither?

I don't think artists will ever be fully replaced, but there will certainly not be as many professional artists as there are today. This will be a sink-or-swim moment for many artists, who will either start to adopt this new technology and compete in this new market, or they will shift towards a niche hobbyist market. Whether this is good or bad, I cannot say. I can't hide the level of disdain that I feel towards your average Twitter artist, but I can't say that people losing their jobs is a favorable outcome. As I said before, there is a fine line between "this is economically affecting me" and "this is morally wrong".

Thank you for your consideration. Let me know what you think!

 

[Andy Kaufman]

Art is simply the act of taking the ideas inside your mind, and putting them into the "real" world. It's a transfer of ideas from inside the brain to outside the brain.

I like broad definitions of art but this one is too broad.
if I get the idea to drive to a pizza place I haven't been at but heard a lot about and then go there, the act of going there would be art by your definition because I transfered an idea into the real world.

 

[Punp]

You're probably right about this being a waste of time. The arguments I presented to you are directly relevant to this discussion at hand, and the fact you are dismissive of them makes it clear how little we have in common in general understanding - both of logic and of reality.

AI tools are direct theft in the same way that people have monetised the labour I've done (note also that you didn't ask for specifics of my particular "anecdotal evidence" but were quick to decide my issue trivial). Genuine, talented artists pick up inspiration from other work in small ways - the way to draw a nostril here, the way to indicate movement there. There is such a depth to artistic theory that it seems you are entirely ignorant of - colour theory, composition, weighting, line art, perspective - that you believe everything comes down to just smashing existing images together and hoping for the best outcome like a child might suggest "dinosaurs and cowboys are cool, lets see what happens when we combine them!!!111".

Your idea of "being an artist" comes down to little more than this same creative deficit. What you talk about as your own "artistic journey" is little more than curation and direction - you hire other people at the cheapest rates possible to do the creative labour that you can't be bothered to learn and aren't able to convey what you want in meaningful terms and expect them to keep coming back to you with new work so you can say yes or no to it, much how you've done in your previous response.

You've not even properly dismissed any of my points other than deciding to move some goalposts and declare it (unspecifically) irrelevant.

Essentially your viewpoint is selfish and self-applauding. You choose to overlook that this dataset is built on the real involuntary labour and study of real people because it is inconvenient to you. You ask why it's unethical, and when given reasons you declare them too emotionally-driven or simply cannot understand them.

Case in point, you suggest getting an AI that doesn't understand what a hippo is to draw the world's tastiest apple. My analogies have passed so far over your head that I'm genuinely concerned for your wellbeing.

In the smallest words, with simplest of terms:

* Inspiration is not stealing characters, poses, compositions.
* Mimicry is not art.
* Artists are not mimics just changing things slightly in the hopes of evolving into the next art movement.
* Styles are developed by observing real life and using different mediums (like paint, charcoal, or in your case, crayons).
* Writing a prompt is not art.
* Directing an artist does not make you an artist.
* Prompts do not imbue AI art with humanity.
* AI cannot draw a humpferbonder if nobody in the dataset has drawn one before.
* Seeing someone create something and then monetising that exact thing with minimal changes is theft.
* Capitalism is relevant because you see this as a "destabilising force" which will make artists more "competitive". You are an art consumer.
* Capitalism is relevant because it is responsible for your view of art being dumbed down, repetitive mimicry.

Yes, my world perspective is entirely online. I am a digital artist and I make money through original commissioned work - most of which comes to me through social media. I have a lot of experience in this field. I have had to face people exploiting myself and my colleagues at any opportunity for decades. I have spent a lot of my life working and refining my art techniques and I can tell you that I am not "just ignorant of how much I steal".
But by all means, feel free to masturbate smugly about how the concerns of the artists AI tools are building upon are irrelevant. I'm certain that a whole section of society just have their feelies hurt for no reason and they're just being emotional and that you alone fully understand just how simple art is to make.

Please, tell me again how my responses are irrelevant. I can't wait. In fact, before you do:

---

I never said that AI art and human art were the same. I did say that the method in creating them is similar enough to the point where complaining about it would be hypocritical

Needlessly splitting hairs on a technicality. This summation is enough for my argument that they're not similar or the same and that AI art reproduces merely a surface level fraction of the processes involved.

I said that AI art was out competing humans in term of monetary efficiency and raw production output

cApItAlIsM iS iRrElEvAnT

I never said that art occurs in a vacuum, in fact, my entire argument is based on the principle that art doesn't occur in a vacuum! Art is mimicry, and that can never occur in a vacuum. I really think you've lost the plot.

I really feel like I am losing the plot. Context matters, and the data in the AI dataset is contextless and without local social context. It is a greasy blur of a snapshot of the internet.

What does this have to do with the hypocrisy of the anti-AI art crowd? Are you ever going to contest that? What are we even arguing about here?

The AI is nothing without the involuntary labour of the dataset it's built on. It literally cannot place a brushstroke without first being able to copy it in concept. This data was taken, not given. When artists are "inspired by something" it is a fraction of what they bring to a new piece of art, not the entirety (unless it's literally a tracing of the art, which cannot be considered art).

because the AI has limits as to what it can imagine

The AI has limits on what it can render, and limits on what it can understand of the human experience. What the prompter provides is not relevant if it cannot be interpreted in a meaningful way.

the mental processes that they use to gather visual/thematic inspiration for their art is nearly identical to what an AI uses

It objectively isn't. You think it is because you understand art in terms of pretty pictures and not on a level of contextual awareness, statement and technique.

because it's talking about capitalism. I'm not talking about capitalism

The dumbing down of art to its most basic terms, the talking about reduction of time spent and people involved, the reduction of people to systems. You're talking about capitalism.

Are you serious? "Real" artistic innovation happens on Twitter?

Yes. The model for twitter used to be exposure = more work. That's no longer the case, but it used to be that making fresh ideas that caught the attention of the public were valuable for growth. Twitter isn't the source of new ideas, but its model awarded people who displayed innovative work in progress and talked openly about their innovation.

Why? Why does it make you so angry to see people who have been inspired by your work?

Not everyone I've inspired has taken my work wholesale and run with it. I have put effort into investigating and researching a niche area of art and taught these techniques to people via websites and documents. The things they created with those base principles by integrating it with their own methods were themselves beautiful and inspirational. The things that frustrated me were the ones where they took something I made and used it to inform a whole basis of work with nothing new or original given to the process - for example someone once took an asset pack I made, redrew it badly from the blurry thumbnail, and sold it at a lower price than mine in an attempt to undercut me. This was theft.

And what about the people who inspired your work?

I have spoken with them, developed ideas with them, studied them and built from it with my own experiences. I didn't just look at what they were doing, take their voice and interpretation of the world and say "yes this is my view of a cyberpunk city, viola." Contrary to popular belief it's possible to engage with a subject instead of just viewing it through a Pintrest account.

Keyword on "emotional". The anti-AI art crowd can only bank on emotions for their arguments- there's no logical consistency or rationality within any of their claims. Art is theft. Human artists have done it since the dawn of time. You haven't disproven that, and you can't.

When artists "take inspiration" they are obviously affected by their surrounding culture. The act of it being a biological process over a direct 1:1 tracing of actual images changes the outcome. Nobody volunteered to be in that dataset. A human artist has never accidentally drawn someone else's signature over the artwork like AI has - because their mimesis has been slight, interpreted and thoughtful.

I think you've fundamentally misunderstood my point about inspiration and art.

You've fundamentally misunderstood my entire post. You think mimicry is restricted only to images which were made before, but mimicry and application to the next image come from far more diverse sources like life experience, and more granular aspects of analysis.

Art reacting to its environment and existing as an advanced form of mimesis are not mutally exclusive. This is a false dichotomy.

Literally braindead. The requirements for adaption to task are what is missing from AI.

This is just huge generalization, with nothing to back it up. You don't know why this technology was made, you're only assuming that it was made to make money.

Driving research investment from speculative investors. Chat-GPT was brought to you by the same guy who made the WorldCoin crypto project. You'll be unsurprised to learn that the people who want to cut out artists from making art are the same ones who were widely rejected during the crypto/NFT era.

"Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI (and creator of the seemingly stalled-out WorldCoin crypto project that sought to scan eyeballs for crypto but went silent after multiple investigative reports uncovered a dysfunctional operation with numerous labor and privacy concerns) himself doubts that ChatGPT is actually worthy of the reaction it's eliciting right now."
-Vice article

Further, the users of these models are using them to circumnavigate paying artists so they can make (or at the very least save) money. From your own post:

So true. I do a lot of concept art prepwork before fully delving into my creative projects, but I am horrible at drawing. The things in my head are nearly impossible to place onto a page without fully devoting myself to honing the specific style, which is costly and time-consuming. It used to be that I would drop $20-30 to a Fiverr artist and wait weeks for EVERY PIECE just so I could have somewhat presentable concept art, but it never came out how I wanted it to anyway. Now with A.I., I can produce this work in minutes, for less than $1 per image, with better results than commision artists. For the full, final work, you can't replace a human (yet), but as for per-production, in my book, A.I. has already won.

This proves nothing, you're basically just saying "Mimesis is only a thing because of capitalism!!".

No I'm not. I'm saying that capitalism rewards a weighted bias of mimicing success over the myriad other avenues of innovation.

mimesis has been around since humans first created art. Art has never been 100% original.

Yes.

---

In the most condescending way possible, I genuinely think you just don't understand enough about the processes involved or the joy of creating artwork. Each of your responses seem mired in the frustration of not having an ability to create art because you have not invested the time in it, and that is understandable - but it seems disingenuous to misinterpret the clearly written posts I'm making for you as sloppy and emotional just because you can't interpret what I'm writing, nor ask the relevant questions to find out.

If I seem offended, it's because I am. Your view that artists are mere machines that just need to be exposed to pre-existing images is frankly belittling and insulting, both as an artist and as a human being.





.

 

[Punp]

More succinctly:

You ask an AI to generate "the tastiest looking apple in the world". The AI makes an apple which is:

* Big
* Red
* Dewy-skinned
* Displayed in a restaurant setting
* Sliced open to reveal the inside

Who has decided these properties?

* It's not the prompter. They just asked for the tastiest looking apple in the world.
* It's not the AI. The AI doesn't understand the concept of what makes an apple look tasty. It's certainly got no opinion on the subject.

That just leaves the training data from the artists. The artist's opinions of what makes an apple appear tasty are what makes the resulting image - and these opinions, research and development have come from a dataset they did not wish to be included in.

This extends beyond taste in apples. Obviously. To things like what a "sexy woman" looks like, what a "gangster" looks like, what "cool" is. This is the crux of the argument.