Wow! It's been forever since I last wrote a blog here. We'll just pretend there was no hiatus and just get into it...
This is a long document, and it's my most political. I'll have it separated into parts to make it easier to get a sense of. I even changed the font on my website so it'll be easier to read large bodies of text.
I have come to the conclusion that we as a culture have collectively failed to halt the expansion of exploitative generative AI, and that our culture is going to become irreversibly poisoned for decades to come. It could have been stopped, but most of everyone who's opposed this technology has misplaced their focus & energy on useless tactics. I'll explain this opinion, but first, we need to look at our circumstances.
Recently, there's been a lot of people using a new "Studio Ghibli" AI image generation model, which takes in photographs and turns them into illustrations in the acclaimed studio's art style. This "filter" has been frequently abused by the general public to a degree that is very concerning for lots of people, myself included. Since this phenomenon has started, I've been seeing lots of people expressing their distaste, but also a lot of fear.
It is completely justified in my view. There is absolutely zero ethics involved with the development of generative AI. Without any consideration of social or ethical ramifications, developers create these generative models just because they can. They're able to, so they just make them. I'll get back to that later.
Studio Ghibli's works are founded upon a strong philosophy of humanism & authenticity. Director Hayao Miyazaki famously called an AI 3D rig animation tool an "insult to life itself." That's commonly known. Despite all that, many people (MILLENIALS) are so unsalvageably entrenched in the consoomer mindset, that these concepts do not exist to them. They like the movies & their artstyle, so they're more than happy to paste it onto a photo of their dog, or their alcoholic uncle, or Joe Biden.
They're not maliciously against art or human authenticity, they're just willing to ignore them if it's comfortable to. It's easy and fun, sure, why not? In the case of Ghibli, people (MILLENIALS) have extensively brand-ified its image into a broad & shallow concept. Studio Ghibli to them is "yummy looking animated food" and "whimsical silly critters" they like to buy plushies of. The actual artistic meaning & value of these films do not really matter to them. It's just a quirky cute anime artstyle people easily recognize and universally love. I can easily see the appeal of using this tool, especially from an average layman's perspective.
As hard as it is to believe, these people are not where the problem is. These are just regular people who see a fun and easily accessible thing and decide to use it. If we want to put a stop to the mass usage of these tools, shaming individuals who use it definitely will not work. Even if they do know the moral questionability of generative AI, rent is too high and paychecks are too small for them to care. People want what they want, and there's no free alternatives to this AI stuff. Sadly, most people do not have the luxury to commission a real artist. That sucks, but it's reality. So, they're sticking with the AI stuff no matter what you say to them, because they like it, and because it's free. These tools have become too good and too accessible, and we all let it happen. It's too late to fix it.
I remember when the first publicly accessible AI image generator came out. It was called DALL-E mini. Its output was very murky and borderline abstract, but it certainly gave the vibe of whatever your prompt was. I personally generated quite a few images itself. It was fun! This was such a new and futuristic technology. You simply type something you want to see, and the computer creates an image of it, a new one that didn't exist until now.
Obviously it was really just a novelty. I imagined this could potentially be used to create moodboards, or be used as raw material for transformative types of creation. I couldn't picture it replacing artists. But that's the road we're on right now. Over time, AI started becoming controversial. Developers & users of AI started peddling grand ambitions that this new Cool Tech will replace human work, and that artists will become outdated in the Cool Future. These stated intentions raised concerns about the implications AI can have on creative jobs, on the culture which consumes art. The AI devs say they want to make human art obsolete, and are developing their tools towards that goal. I saw online, many artists dismissed these ambitions. They pointed out how fuzzy or swirly the rendering was, how it struggled with difficult shapes like fingers, how anatomically and spatially incorrect things looked. The early output was bad. Any AI image was incredibly easy to identify, it looked so obvious and generally inferior. Weird inexplicable shapes, too many fingers, weird swirly noise, mostly unintelligible text, all sorts of stuff. It was easy to simply point their finger and laugh at the ridiculous implication that this garbage could ever replace humanity. And they were right... For the moment.
See, the problem I have with this mentality is that is totally dismissed the very real and intentional harm AI tools openly aspired to accomplish. There was no call to arms on regulating this, every take was just "AI sucks" or a big Twitter ratio where an artist flexes on how much better human art is. It was entirely performative and didn't properly recognize these generative models as the threats to art they were. The output was bad at that time, so there's nothing to worry about! But these AI models kept improving.
With any new technology, it only improves with time & development. It was inevitable. Most hands have 5 fingers, art styles are being replicated more believably, anatomy & geometry is more accurate than ever, rendering artifacts are disappearing, and its design choices are getting better too. There have been many many drawings I saw online which I presumed to be real, only for the comments to reveal that it was in fact generated by an AI. The tools have gotten too good. They're good enough to fool me at times, especially if I'm not paying close attention.
Throughout this evolution, no matter the level of improvement, I have consistently seen the same response. An overwhelming sentiment of human superiority, followed by absolutely no action. Nobody was (or is) talking about solutions to stop AI besides simply ignoring it. I've only seen people say "Follow my account because I'm actually a real artist" and the like. The only solution I've heard is to give support to artists, and simply ignore AI. Supporting artists is great, but ignoring AI won't help anything. It will continue to develop, integrate into our industries, and most of the population doesn't care. AI is too convenient now.
Another idea I saw was using specialized tools to "poison" your art before putting it online. It was called "Glaze" or something. Basically, it applied some mostly invisible effect on your picture that would make it unusable for image training. In large quantities, it could severely damage the quality of AI's output, making it useless. I like this idea, a lot actually! A real actual solution! Unfortunately, it will never work. The pools of content which AI trains on are incomprehensibly vast, and continue to grow by unfathomable amounts every day. The amount of images being glazed to poison the algorithm is so small, they might as well not exist. The 0.00000000000001% of poisoned data will have absolutely no impact on the quality of big AI models. I think glazing is good for personal protection against AI data harvesting, but it will not stop AI. While I love this approach, it's simply not going to work.
Besides Glaze, there have been absolutely no efforts to combat AI besides people making callout posts towards individual AI users & other forms of moral grandstanding. Due to the lack of focused & tangible organization, we have allowed AI to grow into a huge problem. It's massive, threatening to displace creative jobs, and diminish their value. It actively aims to diminish the value of art itself. That's the purpose this was created for. We allowed it to grow by downplaying its ambitions and insisting on ignoring it. I've seen no calls for organized action to establish regulatory laws to restrict the abuse of generative AI. I personally haven't even seen a change.org petition get shared, and I see those things everywhere. Even if we started these measures now, it is too late. AI has become useful, convenient, & accessible to a point where most people will prefer to keep it around. There's now a massive base of people who have positive opinions about AI tools, because it's grown too convenient. It's convenient to make new models too, people make these tools simply because they can, and people use them simply because it works well, it's easy, and it's free. From a cultural point, AI is harder to regulate than ever, and we have failed to prevent this.
So, here we are! Everyone is using the studio Ghibli filter, even the White House's twitter. "AI artist" is showing up in movie credits and small local operations are not commissioning artists anymore, because their budget is tighter and AI is free. This is what the devs of image generation AI said they wanted, and it happened. Artists are struggling to get jobs even more, and our culture has been poisoned by its excessive presence on social media. Internet servers continue to bloat with AI content.
Capitalism is always on the hunt for free labor, whenever possible. They enslaved people to get free labor. After the civil war, they exploited children to get free labor. After child labor laws, they shifted to exploit immigrants to get the cheapest labor possible. Now, with our modern technology, humanity created a magical efficient super-servant who can do anything, and it works for free. It's perfect, it's free labor but without the guilt of human suffering, and its results are now comparable to the expensive human labor. Of course they're gonna choose the AI, it's just good business. There's a major active interest in keeping AI right where it is. So how do we stop it now at this point?
I'm not an expert on politics, or organization, the law or any of that stuff. But I do know doing an epic ratio on an AI art account won't fix any of our problems. A unified focused political campaign against AI would be very helpful. Demanding our representatives to take action to regulate AI will at least make the issue more relevant, even if they don't act. I feel like the best chance we have for change is a court case. I don't think there will be any regulation on AI in the US until there's a court case which sets a new law. Whatever the methods, the only way to stop generative AI's takeover now is the law. No law or regulations can completely wipe away AI or prevent its abuse, but it will certainly make it inconvenient to the degree that companies and normie average joes will not want to do it. Until that happens though, there should be organized campaigns to get our issues with generative AI more relevance in the political world.
I appreciate the efforts of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA unions. They made demands to ensure their job safety from being replaced by AI, which is great! This is genuinely the best effort against AI I have seen. I hope to see more action like this, but there's a few issues. These agreements are between certain companies and their unions, which won't affect the problems AI inflicts elsewhere. Furthermore, I do not place my trust in financially incentivized corporations to regulate themselves. But regardless, it's genuinely a major improvement for artists, actors and others and their livelihoods. I hope to see this happen in other industries too.
Twitter callouts and dunking/shaming AI users is not bad or anything. It's fun, and keeps AI from being accepted in the (relatively small) artist communities. But preaching to the choir solves nothing. The lack of actual efforts for change is the problem. We as a culture have failed to stop AI's growth, and it's a bigger monster to fight than before. It would've been a lot easier to campaign against before, but it's grown too good and too convenient. I'm just waiting on whatever AI court case comes out.
As a final note... AI does have a place in the world. We should be using it as a tool to make life easier in tangible ways. AI can help find cures for diseases. I'd like to see our most menial & dangerous jobs get replaced, not the ones people enjoy and put their passion into. Generating pictures with a computer isn't bad, but trying to replace people with them is. AI needs to be a tool, not a replacement for the human spirit. Using it that way, as Miyazaki said, is insulting to life. Art of all types is founded on our humanity. It's forged from our emotions, our memories, our struggles and experiences with other people. Attempting to replace those things with a product of calculated mimicry is insulting to the experience of being alive. It's such a shame we allowed it to do that anyway.