talk linked it's back with the number
one co-host uh as voted by you the
viewers of America I feel like I haven't been on talking in like two and a half years well that's because we haven't
done it in like two and a half years all right let's get into it but then we started doing it and guess what we're
talking about today James uh AI generated art see this is why I love you
on talk linked you just want to cut right to the point yeah don't waste the beer's time
information density let's go I
just want to know how you're doing
the reason we're here is because a news
story just came out today about a synthetic media artist Jason Allen I
think that actually came out yesterday but he won the Colorado State Fair Fine
Arts competition in the Digital Arts category and good for him you know
those judges got to catch up yeah uh wait why what do you mean
because an AI generated his entry oh well that was the key that was the key
detail that I hadn't gotten to yet yes the reason he won was because he isn't
actually an artist at all arguably
he used an AI called mid-journey and
used a special prompt that he will be publishing quote unquote at a later date
that's this whole process his uh 11 herbs of spices is that secret prompt
right exactly what combination of text yielded this art piece yeah so so the
whole story came about firstly because of this tweet that I'll click into
um that someone was very upset about this
but apparently um he goes by sincarnate on on Discord
or whatever and he talked about his his
win here and uh he's like hey that's so great look at this I I used a a personal
project he's made using mid-journey and uh yeah people are upset about it
James is AI art art
first of all is it art and then we'll talk about whether you know you can take
credit for it oh that's let's just start
with the most philosophical and Abstract question like I guess the Crux of any
anyone who squeamish to answer that with anything but a fast yes or no uh the
that person was probably grappling with the question of does art need to be
generated by humans really what it comes down to is it art uh
in order to answer that question you have to you have to ask what is art well
I think the thing with art is the fuzziness of it and when you're talking
about a computer generating it it seems more like a computation this is an
output it's deterministic the machine will create this output every single
time because it's a computer but that's actually not true because these art
generators they output multiple different iterations every time you hit
enter right so even with the same text prompt you probably won't get this exact
piece ever again so in that sense it still has that ephemeral quality of it
and that fuzziness that making it art see I would argue
that's a good point thank you but I would argue that art has to have
some sort of intentionality behind it
because if it wasn't intended to be produced in a certain way then
it may evoke feelings in it in the viewer or in in the ex person
experiencing it you know whether it's whether it's an image or music or
whatever it may evoke certain feelings
but you go and watch it you go and look at a beautiful mountain and you feel
something that doesn't make the mountain art so you're saying that uh so there's
an intentionality of the person creating the prompt this is a collaborative collaborative effort between the person
at the keyboard and the AI yes and the person at the keyboard has an intention
of what they want that's why they they create the string that they do in the
way that they create it however there is a distance there where I just have to
roll the dice and see what the AI is going to Output right it just gives you
a random like uh here's a few things yeah and so I don't I don't control that
I can try to approximate it with my words but but then with the so then the
the thing actually doing the generation of the art the AI it doesn't have
intentionality well it's intention is to try to closely you know produce
something that matches what you've said but it doesn't have a it's not trying to make a statement you know it doesn't so
this collaborative effort the intentionality is kind of severed so exactly that's why I think it's not art
yeah I feel like you need to have well so I I think the the thing that just
popped in my head was like I Choose Your Own Adventure story
or like a multiple choice test let's go let's Choose Your Own Adventure uh an
author has written out a number of possible branching paths for a story to
take and as you're reading this choose your own I'm thinking about the books
but like that's not really a thing anymore maybe it is let's say it's a Netflix it's a Netflix uh just keep it
as books sure it's one of these books that used to exist
um and if you you by reading through the book and then being like hmm these are
the options presented to me by this person that actually generated something
and I'm gonna choose this one and
okay now you're going along this path but that doesn't mean that you generated
that story you just put in an input
you're putting in some inputs to some system the system is generating right
but so this system just has Myriad just in just infinitely more inputs and even
more problematically uh the system is
based on work that was actually originally created by real human artists
well this is a really interesting part of it yeah so it's like
I you know I don't want to say like I'm not trying to be here being like this
new technology that is you know uh I'm
not trying to hate on like new technology just because it's new but I
think that like while it is exciting and while it is a
very interesting technology that we should explore I think that right now
it's kind of like the wild west where there isn't any regulation people are
still asking these questions we're having a talk like right now talking
about it uh so we need to have these conversations and then like break it
down into what does this mean for copyright what does this mean for the
future of artistry as like a career or even competitions or even competitions
like do you have to film yourself for creating the art now and submit that as
well as your competition which is what package which is what one person on a on
a Reddit thread suggested in in response
to this fact that this guy like won this
art competition using AI art and the key detail is that he did not
it's the the details seem a little murky right now but at least
some of the judges have said that they didn't know it was AI art and he has
said himself that he's like oh what I needed to let them know that was in the
vice article I believe at the at the bottom
um I mean I don't know anything about this person's intentions but it's pretty obvious that there wasn't the spirit of
the competition exactly exactly I mean I can understand
this is almost like a form of performance art like it's a stunt exactly exactly I can understand him
saying you know okay I'm gonna I'm gonna I want to bring attention to this yeah I
want to show what this tool mid-journey can do so I'm going to stealthily enter
uh with my AI art and then when I win I'm gonna be like haha look at this I
this is actually a i I are now I've started a conversation and now we're
talking about this but then I think what he should have done is
be like okay but I didn't actually win your surprise money yeah yeah because
now you have these people who actually created Art losing and they're like
I think that makes it way crappier that makes it way stinkier of a situation
because it's a stinky stinky because there are people who are outraged and
they're and they're disappointed that the world's going this way and they're
worried about the future and what this means for artists around the world and the volume of art that will be created
by humans going forward and it's kind of dystopian but it that that dystopian
Viewpoint is greatly enhanced by people being crappy like this exactly what do
you mean this is valid just like everyone else like yeah no dude I think
that like they're they're it happened there's
always this pushback against hard backlash right when something cool
happens like say blockchain technology and people are like okay cool we're
building this technology in the early days it's like oh this enter the scammers enter the scammers and the pump
and dumpers and now the whole they're you know there's all these scams out
there and there's a huge backlash of being like cryptocurrency is evil and
bad and it should never be used and it can only be used for as it's pump enough
stuff and then you have people being like okay wait but remember in the early
days there was this promise and we could use it for that still but the well is
poisoned yeah and I think that's happening a little bit with air right
it's going to be a way different outcome though because the AI art is just it's
much it's simpler it's more straightforward the future is here now
deal with it now you know what I mean like uh all graphic artists
you're in trouble right within the next two years uh stock imagery sites you're
in trouble yeah this is going to upend Industries and change laws for sure you
know and and it's and it's moving super rapidly like this technology at the
beginning of this year was super super rudimentary and it wasn't available and
then open AI released Dolly too uh
Google released their thing that I forget what it's called think Imogen I
think it's called and now you go and there's lists of like the 10 coolest uh
era well it's getting even crazier because Dolly had some built-in kind of
filters where you couldn't do you can't do a human's face right you can't you
can't do pornography right uh whereas stability AI yeah stable diffusion yeah
it is release open source it has some filters
that are enabled by default to that's
just so you don't type something in and get a result that's pornographic and
you're like oh I didn't want that right but you can disable this filter
and you can you can create celebrity likenesses you can make like I've seen a
bunch of pictures of Charlize Theron's face I knew it was her there was no
label saying it was Charlize Theron yeah I could tell it's her in multiple Styles and angles right uh and so it's
what does this mean yeah exactly this is you can run this on your desktop GPU
it's only supports NVIDIA gpus right now but I don't have to rely on a cloud
service for this yeah I mean like when deep fakes first came out people were
like oh my gosh people are using their gpus to like run these computations and
do it at home and that was one thing because if you didn't really have access
to the hardware to like run those simulations over and over uh or run
those computations then you wouldn't be able to make deep fakes but now all of
these air generators are on the web you can just go to a URL and put in a prompt
and get images and so this is a TechCrunch article talking about what we
were the the generator we were just mentioning stable diffusion
um I think it's it's in a program called
dream AI or something I forget what it's
called Uh but you know people are using it to make porn of existing people and
upload it to 4chan lovely site it's and it's just images
for Now what's the difference with defects this is just images for now not
video but it'll be video within two or three for sure for sure I mean yeah like
there's there's deep fake videos and yeah that I'm sure there will be
generators uh quite soon like have you watched like that really low quality
animated children's content on YouTube like not to throw a little baby bum
under the bus but little baby bum is just it's nursery rhyme songs with just
like pretty bad animation a lot of 3D animation along with it and kids love it
my kid watched it for a year and a half straight every day all day like just
love it um in the future you could potentially just play the song and just have the
animation generated and just put that onto your YouTube channel even less work
and you can monetize that YouTube channel and get rich very easily yeah I
don't doubt that that that is the future I mean uh that's video stuff uh and we
have to watch out for that coming but I mean yeah the still images are being
used right now this is an Atlantic article from earlier this month I love
the Atlantic I I do as well you subscribe no no you should uh but I when
people send a link and it's an Atlantic link I'm like okay I'm out of taste
anyway what's in the article um this uh you know it's a it's a regular article
no AI was uh involved in the creation of the words but that's a that's a
mid-journey created image uh it says the prompt was Alex Jones inside an American
office under fluorescent lights that's the perfect use for that yeah and there
goes the graphic designer's job right so that is something that would be
traditionally I mean yeah this is like a perfect example like it's real world
this is a lost gig I think graphic
designers will continue to exist and I think they will use these tools you know
when you're specking out a job you're probably going to go all right well
here's five different things that I created in the last 10 minutes
um using one of these tools right uh which one of you like right you like
this one okay now I'll go and make a better version of that exactly because a
lot of these things when you zoom in they're actually not that nice so you
might not use it for like your corporate logo or something like that although there are Services which use AI to
generate logos you put in like your company name some details about you your
industry uh style them you maybe want and they will create AI created logo for
you and I'm sure like there are options and then I'm sure you can yeah depending
on that AI like who has the copyright because with Dali Dali retains the
copyright to the images that you generate right which is weird kind of
dolly dolly retains yeah it does yeah
not you see but that's the thing is that like
should they have copyright at all because what is Dolly trained on they're trained on all of these other artists
that initially created the work the whole internet like it's just a general web scrape of paid content like
shutterstocking you need to have a subscription and then they just take
those billions of things and monetize it while putting Shutterstock out of
business oh my God that's totally not fair I think in the future it could be
possible that anyone who wants to uh create one of these models using a
corpus of imagery will have to license all that imagery to feed the model but
like how do you enforce that yeah I mean we need regulation which is
it which is kind of it's funny because this is like on The
Cutting Edge of what's going on right now and to even think about
to even think about how long it'll be before a bunch of old people in you know
the US Congress or senate or elsewhere uh start to like become familiar with
this as a phenomenon and then craft legislation around it it's gonna be a
while yeah it's not gonna happen and well it could happen it'll just be a
couple years yeah it's gonna be a rocky road there's other legal aspects as well
like you can create a artwork of a
celebrity space you could sell a painting of Morgan Freeman and could I
yes but it's kind of like fair use it's a gray you have to make like an argument
for it a little bit so for example if you if you created a work where the the
work was completely just like like a photo like look like a photo of Morgan
Freeman then uh you probably have to get the permission to sell that but if you
created a work like an Andy Warhol style where you've the work isn't just that
it's his photo it's not just his likeness that makes the work cool it's that you stylized it right and it came
from raw materials like paint uh then you don't even need to get this person's
permission especially if it's just a one-off like you're you're making
caricatures or something on the street on Vegas like rather than making this
one RP so I'm gonna make a bazillion up and sell them all right if you if you
were doing that with a picture of Morgan Freeman's face you'd probably run into
some sort of yeah it's similar to fair use in that one of the pillars of it is
does it materially impact that person's ability to monetize their likeness right
right right right if you make one painting of Morgan Freeman and sell it
to one person I mean depending on how expensive it is
maybe Morgan Freeman would want would be like hey wait it's a question because
now you've got this thing that can
create many thousands of images of Morgan Freeman right but it's only
creating them you made one and sold it
and that it was inconsequential yeah because Riley just sold one so Morgan
Freeman's not gonna sell no one's no Morgan Freeman's not gonna sue you yeah no one's paying millions of dollars of
art for my art but what if millions of individuals each make their own Morgan
Freeman thing so it does materially impact his ability to monetize his
likeness right but there's no individual to attack as each individual only sold
at once so do you attack the open source
well honestly that's kind of the question we're we're faced with here because because these AI generators are
mass producing now now that a million people millions of people have access to
these online they sign up for the wait list there's there's not even like the
like the big ones the really good ones you have to sign up like Dolly you had
to register for and wait until you get access stable diffusion well same thing
but they publicly released it now stable yeah it's publicly released there are
there's there's tens of these dozens of these more uh online that you can just
go to a URL and put it in you don't need to wait at all so now there are millions
of people potentially using these are art generators to generate
countless works of art based on whatever
yeah original art pieces by human people yeah that's the other thing because
they're not coming from raw material yeah it's not like your paint on the canvas the materials are coming from
these other presumably copyrighted oftentimes I just had a I just I just
had a conversation with with David uh prior to this about
uh you know whether this is like plagiarism or not and I'm like well okay
so it's not plagiarism because you're using these people's art as sort of like
a training tool for AI to generate
something new right so like that's if that's if plagiarism is just copying it
you know that's on one end of the spectrum and on the other side maybe is
you know looking at it from the frame of when you paint you're using materials
that you didn't make from scratch you know you're buying these this existing
pigment and uh you know making something
completely new from it but you didn't make it completely from scratch there's
other people's work going into that as well so like that's on the other end of
the spectrum and AI art is kind of somewhere in the middle but
I'm inclined to put it a little bit more towards plagiarism it's not plagiarism
well it's all arbitrary it all comes down to the abilities of the entity you
know it's not plagiarism if I do a perfect replica of a um uh starry night
because yeah obviously I was influenced by the original work and then I had to
do all this analog very high skill work to like mix the paint correctly right
and years of skill for me to actually render it yeah yeah but all that stuff
is as trivial to a machine right so it's just it's only because the
entity in question the machine is better at doing it than you are but that's but
like I guess that's the
that's the question is there value in a
machine learning to do this skill should
we like because it's not an agent it's not a conscious agent I mean according
to not according to boys when you use
mid mid Journey you're interacting with a bot it's not like you're on a Google
local page with a search bar you're in Discord and you're interacting with the
bot you type the prompt you want it returns an image and then you can say
make more of them or change it in this way and it's like
you're having a conversation with an artist in a way and you're collaborating you're kind of collaborating but that's
just an artifice that's not the bot is just a a a a window into using the
service available on yeah for sure for now soon it'll be Scarlett Johansson
soon they'll add actual like AI chat bot
functionality in there and then you're talking to it'll be very weird through
the AI yes and they're like okay so when you say a bird flying over a ship do you
mean like a big ship or like a little ship like this is the AI talking to you
about it yeah and then make that by voice if we like
combine these Technologies yes because that's even scarier like it's one thing
to say all right I work in a I work in an auto Factory a car factory and
they're replacing my you know job screwing in these rivets with a with a
robot robotic ARM that's one thing another thing is saying okay you have
this creative career you thought you were safe from the AI for a while but
now literally your entire job like consultation uh sample work for for
inspiration or whatever uh you know any other type of parameters that you would
discuss with a person ahead of time you can do with AI because we have this
language AIS and then we also have these art generating AIS yeah so even if me
even if AI doesn't achieve this like General sentience that we're that that
is like far in the future with Singularity et cetera Etc even if we
don't achieve that it's like we're functionally going to achieve
something very similar to it because of all these other systems that are coming
together yeah scary well it begs the question like what happens to artists so
does it mean that you've got it I think
it look it'll stratify it like it'll make uh it'll make it more disparate
like you'll have billionaires and impoverished people uh so to speak
you'll you'll have the artists or graphic designers who are only using
these tools and you'll have the like the very high level highly skilled artists
um but the I mean this I guess it's good to be one
of them but they'll be few they'll be so
few of them right yeah well uh you know as this uh this is was a reply in the
original tweet where someone kind of like whistled blue on this guy uh
bragging about his his achievement uh
Omni Morpho on Twitter says we're watching the death of artistry unfold
right before our eyes um even high skilled jobs you know
you're saying oh there will be some high skilled artists but like even those guys I mean maybe they'll be like a handful
you know like literally the thing you have to think about though is the
convergence or the homogenization of of
art because right now all of these
generators are using a data set that is Virgin that is created by humans all the
all the info that's feeding them was photographs taken by humans art pieces
drawn by humans but now that millions of pieces are coming out as output from
these generators that means the internet at large is is growing in its proportion
of stuff that was made by robots right and so if that continues to expand to
the point where like half the stuff of the internet was made by robots yeah then when the next the next AI is
programmed and fed into it is outputs from robots it'll become more and more
like it's self-referential yeah this is this was Horst I was talking to him
before as well and he specifically asked me to bring this up like he he likened
it to re-encoding videos the more that you re-encode the same video file the
more the quality to grades so it's like eventually are these AI art generators
just going to be you know feeding off themselves again and again and again until it's just like a blurry mess uh so
I guess I don't think that I think I mean like stylistically like to me I
liken it as um I this is a pet Theory I guess it won't it won't exactly sorry it
won't like yeah it won't be the same as like the resolution is worse but maybe
it would be like um Hollywood taking over the world and all film is just like
every movie has to be like an MCU movie or everyone has to do their makeup like
Kim Kardashian because we all now we all use Instagram and we all look at that
one celebrity and we all want that face yeah so then all the dado will just make
this kind of art so therefore maybe the
last remaining highly skilled artists will be the wackiest artists who are
making the most original kind of stuff because it just looks so different from
what is generated from the AI you know what it might actually happen is uh
carsonization car Carson as I answer
nope carsonization
what is it it's the phenomenon of uh the the phenomenon wherein uh organisms
multiple branches of organisms on evolutionary Pathways uh all
become crabs
like we're going back to crab animals
keep evolving into crabs and scientists well this one says scientists don't know
why but they do know why it's because it's like a advantageous that's the word
in some way um so maybe like you know we'll have the
equivalent of uh of everything going back to crab all AIS
eventually all AI music generators eventually create crab raid
oh speaking of which we didn't even I mean real quick uh this isn't like
entirely a new phenomenon they've been doing this with with music for some time
now uh in that they feed in music to an
AI it generates like Melodies and rhythms and stuff and in some cases it
generates the audio directly but most of the time it doesn't sound very good so
what they'll do instead is they'll feed music into like they'll say we want a
Jimi Hendrix Style song they'll feed a million Jimi Hendrix songs to an AI and
it'll make midi data or like sheet music and then the humans will recreate it
with like and in some cases they make like it right writes lyrics and
everything as well but then humans will do other people share my opinion that
I'm less bothered by this I think this is less bothersome and the reason is
popular music can't get any worse exactly I I think that I think that
music is I mean that's a whole nother discussion I feel like we probably
shouldn't get into it no it doesn't bother me that much but I will say that
like you know it seems like with music
human generated art will human generated music will always be more important to
people I don't think like I think because I think part of that is like
sort of the personality the cult of personality around like an artist if you
like like their music you're gonna be like wow I kind of want to listen to
more of their music if it's an AI ai's gonna have to generate some very
personal histories in the lyrics yeah like are people gonna go to
a concert no because the music live music is already differentiated from
recorded music you go to see live music you go you go to see the phenomenon of
this well but then in in the in the age of ADM
people that you don't go there to see that you're not going there to do
performance sure but but I mean like you know more people are going to a show by
I don't even know what the big EDM guy is now but like a few years ago maybe it
was dead mouse like people go to the show because it's oh it's it's that guy
that I like and not because the music is particularly really good it's because
you liked a few of their music their tracks and so now like you have this
idea in their head in your head yeah we're not gonna do that for AI no no
one's dreaming for art like no one's going or maybe it will I mean V tubers
are a thing uh Miku Miku from uh
Vocaloid or whatever there's these like you know virtual Idols in Japan and
whatnot they go on stage as a hologram they're dancing people are like I'm I'm
a fan of this Idol person oh and if
there was just an AI but at the same but at the end of the day if you really
wanted like a distinct sound there would have to be some sort of human input but
that's not even true I'd take it back well actually because far in the future
maybe there is like an AI that was like tuned with specific parameters and
people were like I'm a fan or you just around us you randomize the parameters
like they're part of uh stability diffusion is you can you can make
derivative products with it yeah as long as the license gets passed down you can
make derivative products and you can tune some parameters such that the art
that it creates is more of a certain style for sure and there's there's
Commercial Services that do that like sound full I just found this like right
before we card reader yeah yeah there's a bunch of services like this but like
sound full you know you start in there you you uh you know you you choose a
genre you customize it you like choose a beat you choose some instruments they're
all pre-recorded pre-done and then you can like you know put it together and
make something like quote unquote new you could make like a Nine Inch Nails AI
you're like you really loves this mode and this interval use these instruments
yeah whatever it puts out will sound nailsy exactly exactly and the same
thing can happen with visual art too oh man and if that's just randomized people
could become fans of certain certain AIS that they really like their style right
okay so last question and then we're done
I know you really really hate this James you want to go I gotta get out of here
um what do you think should be the situation what should we head
towards as a society when it comes to like AI generated art should should we
respect AI generated art as like you know on a somewhat equal playing
field or should it be like it should it
be as as um denormalized or de-specialized as you
know I don't know some some some some commodity that you can like Mass produce
no problem I generally think uh like the
technology is here so deal with it kind of approach like there's no we shouldn't
be trying to stop this or slow it down we have to just adapt the toothpaste is
out of the tube for a lot of this stuff in terms of they already made this AI
they already scraped these copyrighted images sorry Getty
um but in terms of how we conceptualize it how we think of
it um I think that it is similar to VFX
you watch a movie has great VFX you're like wow that was very enjoyable to
watch or and then you watch another movie and you go yeah that wasn't that crazy but
you know they did all the stunts that's real that was all practical they
actually climbed that building he actually jumped from that train when you
know that a human did it you give it this extra level like it gets it earns
your respects in this other layer I think we're just gonna have to do with art hey that's a nice painting and wow a
human did that from scratch that's amazing I don't see that that often oh
you're gonna you think the the norm is going to be like AI art is ubiquitous
and it's it's everything but then when there's something extra special yeah
because this just this is like anything else this is democratizes Art more you
know I I suck at drawing but now I can make this so I can it's like making
music on your laptop so it's going to be everywhere it's going to take over I
don't think it's like making music on your laptop because when because for
that it's like okay somebody else recorded an instrument and gave you all
this data that you can then manipulate using MIDI files everywhere you see
stock photos today you're gonna see AI generated art when I make a Squarespace
website I'm going to use original as original as a descriptive reality yes
that's that's going to be true but I think I'm saying that uh you know from a
normative framework it's not this is not the same as using
like uh it's been a while since I did since I
meddled in uh electronic music making I forget what the actual files are called
but like the digital sounds you're using a digital sound of a trombone and you
press a key and it makes the sound the trombone sound for that note
that's completely different because you're still generating the data you're
still doing it by hand right I think that with AI art it should be
the case that if you are an artist and you want your
art to be included in these models you can
submit them to the database and there should be a requirement that they
uh you know pay you royalties and I know that the copy like our
copyright system has lots of problems it is not perfect and that like this is
gonna go along with a much needed you know reform of how we deal with
copyright in general in the west we might just get rid of it just go more
China style it's like it's irrelevant now the pace of innovation is just so
fast that it well I think that it's going to be it's going to be that way
for a while as we're in the wild west here but I think that in a few years as
this becomes more and more normalized there's going to be people asking for
you know to save artists in some way because they don't make money already if
this is going if this continues with no regulation
artists are out of a job they're dead
rip rip and rip to this episode because
James I just like to give you your last word
you're good you want the last word that's the last word it's rip
you took it actually so that's your word my last word is thanks for watching talk
link we'll we'll be back we can have these go too long rip Riley subscribe to
techlinked subscribe to they're just movies
see you later thank you for having me