scoobdog

Repeat for emphasis. There’s a special hell for disingenuous pieces of shit who complain about dishonest debates while not honestly debating.

Everyone who expressed those “contrary medical opinions” deserves to be silenced permanently.

Not in its current form. We may have to go back to the days of leather helmets and only basic pads.

My current plan is to correct scores to the expected points for all starting Bills and Bengals, including defense. Is everyone cool with that?

Everybody: Read this please: https://sports.yahoo.com/week-17-18-fantasy-football-status-updates-011003705.html I’d like everyone’s opinions before I figure out what to do after the horrific injury to Damar Hamlin.

You had to be there to see it. Never have seen such a slow running back gain so many yards.

I can’t be displeased with khaki dad getting rolled but damn that thing turned into a shootout quick. Day looks like he just moved his brother-in-law’s dumbbells into the garage even when he’s winning. Overall, not a banner day for the future home of the Trojans.

Happy New Year. Some chick at the party I was at dislocated her knee while dancing.

Doesn't answer the question, though. If neither is the artist... who is?

No joke, man. Even had the fire pit going. Nearly melted my face off.

Cool. I won't.

It is a skewed metaphor and that's problematic because, unlike coitus, you're not working in tandem with the computer (or you shouldn't be). Both sexual partners have a visceral emotional response to the act and, while it's not likely to be the same for both, both responses are valid and collectively define the act of intimacy. If we're going to be crude about it, a marginally better comparison would be you and an inflatable sex doll: Maybe you can't have an orgasm without the doll, but having sex with it isn't going to make it feel anything. Stupid examples aside, the point here is that this isn't an equation. The emotional intent of your parent images aren't going to be passed on to the AI: it's going to guess at what you are feeling and project it on to the image with generic results. An image created by an AI is going to be different than one created by you even with the exact same source material as influence, and it's necessarily going to be deficient. How, then, can the AI be considered an artist if it can't full generate the image you tell it to?

Cool. I'm glad I didn't have to look it up.

Indeed, but can any of that truly make it feel an emotion?

The question isn’t whether it knows how to portray an emotion or even elicit that emotion. The question is whether it can have its own emotional interpretation of what you provide it. You’ve already pointed out that the person giving the prompts isn’t an artist, but if not, who is? Art still has to created by an artist. Can the AI be considered an artist if it’s perspective is incomplete?

How do you do that? Let's assume that you're not just providing the AI with prompts, you're also limiting its sources by only allowing it to use photographs you took yourself as primary inspiration (for POV, base colors, and peripheral landscape elements) and curating related images that can only be used as indirect secondary inspiration (color juxtapositions and degree of focus). How are the choices it makes to interpret your vision also conveying emotional elements you can't express in prompt form?

That's an obvious case of artistic dishonesty. That also leads to the question of "How can AI generated images become art?" Sponges has, to this point, not really touched on the actual definition of art. For most people the Potter Stewart definition is sufficient, but AI forces us to reckon with art as a social implement, both as a means of conveyance and as a form of currency. How much investment the artist puts into the art directly correlates to how much value it has as a conveyance but only partially correlates to its value as currency. That brings us to our second point of divergence: how much does the AI generated image's value as a conveyance determine its status as art? If Shexyo is selling retouched AI work, the theft isn't so much in the fact he used AI, it's in the fact that he failed to disclose his use of AI. The fundamental disconnect here is between those who purchase art and the artists themselves, namely how each defines art. If it's a commodity, then provenance is part of how an image is appraised along with its aesthetic qualities and the difficulty with which it can be duplicated (as a genre piece, that is). Yet, art isn't pursued as commodity explicitly. If you trace the career paths of some of the artists that were most successful in their own lifetime, you notice that nominal value for their work doesn't correlate to the actual value. A lot of them succeed through ancillary factors, like a patronage with a wealthy client, lucrative speaking engagements, or other fame related benefits, meaning there's a distinct difference between the cost of replacement for the art and the cost of replacement for the artist. Such a distinction is important because it suggests that you can't use the art's value as a unique piece, an element of currency, to define it as art because the cost of replacement varies throughout the lifetime of the artwork and art itself is a static definition. In this respect, Sponges is also right. However, if it still holds true that investment correlates into value as a conveyance, then it stands to reason that its value as standalone art also correlates with that investment. We don't just define art by its final product, we also include the various elements that comprise the completed work as having value. In traditional art that might include the brushstrokes and peculiar pigment choices of the artist, but in digital art, that means more of how component elements are juxtapostioned and then "built upon" to create the final image. (A familiar artistic trope is that no piece of art is ever truly complete, in part because each piece reflects not just on it's predecessors but provides a blueprint to future evolutions in the artist's techniques.) With AI, the investment is mostly on the part of the computer because (as mentioned in a previous post) the only thing it can't perform itself is to "see" what needs to be reinterpreted into the new unique image. Just as with a human artist, the AI "artist" is using past images not just to inspire its work but also to develop its technique and, also like a human, it can't create a final product and still learn from the process. It's hard to overstate how contentious this point is, though: by failing to see and emotionally interpret the inputs that are used to create the image, it's missing a very large piece of investment. AI might be able to manipulate how the image is received by learning how to adjust perspective or how to use color that elicits an emotional response, but it's not sentient... it has no reaction to the images it uses. At the very least, that suggests its worth as a language is limited by what it can't provide.

I think it's about Sponges himself. He likes to make things even more complicated.

There is room for nuance, but the AI isn’t critiquing your work, it’s providing an alternate vision to yours. That’s fine when you’re using human artists as a gauge and inspiration. An AI, however, is devoid of emotion, leaving just its (limited) technique as a source of collaboration. How much you can derive from its product remains to be seen in such a limited scope.

You can't script a result based solely on prompts, though. At least in that respect, Sponges is right - there is a learning curve involved in these programs that is greater than the sum of just the inputs and the results. I would also argue that it isn't a valuable learning tool because of the fact it has the ability to learn.

I assure you it's not a gotcha. I'm really trying to identify point of divergence in this argument because this is more complicated an argument than just theft versus coopting. Let's start with this: So, you're out for a drive along the Lake Michigan coast and you see a duck floating along as you drive. The duck isn't uniquely native to the lake, nor is it out of place. Let's say it's a fairly common Mallard. Now, after you get back home, you decide to paint the duck you just saw, so you get out canvas and start drawing a basic sketch you can will use as an outline for your painting. You don't much think of it while you're drawing but, as soon as you're done, you think for a moment.... "Is this the duck I saw or did I copy it from something else I've seen?" The simple answer is, of course, that it can't be a copy... you saw the duck on the lake; it's a common duck that a lot of people have seen; and there are only so many ways to interpret a duck that are unique. There is commonality in our view of the world that we share with all humans, so what is or isn't a copy is almost always determined by whether or not you have an identifiable source. Supposing another artist comes up, looks at your paining and says "that looks almost exactly like mine," they would have to prove that you not only have seen their painting but that it's more likely that your painting could only be produced through seeing that painting and not by a common experience like taking a drive along the lake coast. But, assuming you've seen that other painting, it’s also true that it had some kind of influence on your work, regardless of whether or not you thought about it when you were painting yours. This, then is the first point: you process other people's images like the AI does, but you also have the ability to see it yourself. Can the AI, likewise "see" an image not produced by someone else and posted in the internet?

To put this disagreement to bed. You obviously are talking about something far different than everyone else is talking about. If you can generate an AI piece, then you can use it to illustrate the process that you’ve been describing.

You had to see it. MTU intercepted the Aztecs on SDSU’s 25, then they proceeded to give up four straight sacks and ended up giving the Aztecs the ball back on downs on the Raider’s 45.

Alright dude. Create some AI work for us and post its here.

It’s piecing together this “shit that’s all fucked up” from other people’s work. The AI didn’t take draw an original image of Donald Trump from a photo, it found drawings of Trump and incorporated them.