I don’t really have anything against AI art, MidJourney, StableDiffusion etc

But it’s pissing me off more than a little bit how so many people post AI art claiming it’s art photography.

I see a ton of it on Flickr. Average and mediocre photographers suddenly from 2022 onward start posting these wonderful images with flawless colorwork and super cool black and whites. Labeled as photography. But then you zoom in and realize… oh right. It’s AI. And this guy is a fraud. Damn.

Again, I have nothing against the thing in itself. But claiming it’s photography is fraudulent. And it’s super scifi nightmarish to have to constantly be on the lookout for what might be real photos and what’s AI. And worst of all, very shortly we won’t be able to tell at all.

What if I really just want to admire photography? Why don’t these platforms do something about this shit?

Anyway… would love to hear your thoughts about that. Cheers.

  • QuerulousPanda@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Honestly I don’t see any value in getting angry about it. The cat is out of the bag, so being mad is just a waste of energy. Are portrait painters still mad that photography got invented? Hopefully not, for their sake.

    Yeah it’s bullshit when someone generates an image and tries to pass it off as a photograph, but that’s their problem. Sure they can churn out images that look cool but if someone interviews them, commissions them to do something specific, or looks closely at their work, they’re gonna get found out. Random people posting on Flickr don’t matter, so if they somehow get enough recognition that people start paying attention, their days are numbered.

    And, given that ai is best used as a tool in the process rather than the process itself, if someone gets good enough with it that they can reliably produce art with a distinct vision and with realism that can’t be clocked as partially generated, then they’re clearly doing something right.

    In the end though, if people are gonna lie about how they made stuff, they’re just digging their own hole. Don’t let it get you down. There’s already enough shitty stuff and negative energy in the world, don’t give up more of your energy getting mad that some losers are lying about their art.

    • manjamanga@alien.topOPBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      I agree with a lot of what you’re saying here.

      Let me clarify that I’m not mad at the existence of generative AI. It’s fascinating and a lot of fun and I encourage everyone to play around with it. I would never publish the result of a MidJourney prompt as “my” work, but that’s my own personal choice.
      But I’m not even denying there are forms of creating genuinely original and meritorious art with recourse to AI tech. That’s all well and good.

      Random people posting on Flickr don’t matter

      I agree that the individuals doing that don’t matter. They’re frauds, but ultimately irrelevant.
      But platforms like Flickr do matter, or at least I would like for them to matter - if nothing else, as communities where artists can share their work and appreciate the work of others. It’s just a nice feature of the internet to be able to have this kind of communities.

      But they have absolutely no mechanism to identify these AI works. I worry because it profoundly degrades the usability and usefulness of those platforms. If I need to comb through thousands of fake photos, Flickr becomes unusable.

      I would argue we need more AI, developed with the purpose of identifying the products of AI for us. So that we can look at an image online and know if it was made that way.

      Of course this is important, not only for online art communities, but even more to prevent the onslaught of serious problems that fake photos and videos will certainly bring in the near future.