About AI art theft...

Ciaran

Senior Moderator

友情は魔法だ

@CookieGalaxy
The quality of the tools or their output really isn’t a question for us.

Amazing screencaps from an amazing MLP game are still screencaps from a game.Tween frames auto generated in a movie aren’t treated separately from the whole.

AI generated art isn’t new. Pony Creators tools have been something we’ve dealt with for years. That the pony creator tools are getting better is expected. Someday there will be OC creators indistinguishable from hand made art, assuming that isn’t already true.

That doesn’t change how we deal with it.

We just ask that it is tagged properly, that it doesn’t otherwise break our rules, and when people spam it (as has happened, repeatedly) we deal with it on a case by case basis.

Regardless, we feel like artwork made by humans should be the forefront of the site.

however it’s clear that you believe this is a non-issue so I won’t worry about it.

It is an issue, we’ve been dealing with it for years.

I am just trying to understand what others here think we should be doing differently from what we are currently doing to handle it.

Posted 1 years ago Report
Edited 1 years ago

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Cocaine

Princess Coke

This Ai cringe needs to stop
I’m not sharing my work here so some nft bro could “train their bot” on it
If there is no rules about that then make it. It’s ur job

Posted 1 years ago Report

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Ciaran

Senior Moderator

友情は魔法だ

@Cocaine
What do you envision that rule looking like? How do you imagine it being enforced?

For example, today if you believed that an AI image was derivative of your work, or any kind of image, we would follow our existing policy for handling derivative works.

If the suspect image was determined to be derivative of your work, then your rights are reserved and you may ask to have the derivative work deleted.

Do you see that policy as being able to handle the situation you imagine? Or is there something missing?

And are there other online sites that you use that have what you consider better policies or rules? For example, if you use Twitter or DeviantArt, what do you see them doing that you would like to see us do, too?

Posted 1 years ago Report

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Ryhaal

@Ciaran
The issue that people have is that you’re pointing at existing rules and going “Look guys! We already have a system in place in the case X thing gets determined” but that is not enough since it’s a REACTIVE policy. You need to be PROACTIVE for this, because once something gets fed into the AI, it’s fed into the AI, the theft already happened and there is nothing you can do to reverse it!

Which is why, like I suggested before, a blanket ban of it it’s the only way to deter the theft to begin with and to send a clear message that you support artists but this keeps going in circles in here and get lost in nebulous details that do nothing but impede actual meaningful action. It’s not the job of the users to come up with policies, talk to your fellow mods and brainstorm a solution. It ain’t that difficult.

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Naughtypony2010

Hoofsies Rule

Creating rules to prevent feeding art from here into an AI would be very welcome. I too do not want my art to be used for that. For my own and all artists sake.

But that alone won’t make it stop which leads to the idea of stopping the flame at the source, the creators of these AI.

We can assume that they are the ones not respecting artists and their work by publishing their models and tools and generated images.

Perhaps it will do anything by going straight to them and ask if they could filter out specific artists work if they wish to not have their art used in the AI. When they say no, the artist is free to take down and paywall their stuff in the name of the AI creators, who do clearly not show any insight.

The AI creators should know they do not want the bad emotions from fans that now can’t see their favorite artists works anymore.

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Summersong

aka Summersong

The problem I see is how can you tell which artwork was created by a human or an AI?
Someone can simply say “I made this art by hand” and if the AI is good enough then you simply have to take their word or go through a artist verification process with pictures of their setup or something.
Maybe it’s just because I’m not an artist, but AI generated images from stable-diffusion are extremely convincing to me and it worries me how bad actors might use the generator.

Yeah you’re nowhere near there yet.

Looking through the recent AI-generated images, they can still readily be distinguished from natural artwork, so long as your artistic critique is beyond mindlessly drooling at pretty colors (which, unfortunately, many people’s isn’t.)

Most AI imagery suffers from the following recurring problems:

Artifacts: Errors in rendering the border between two different objects, causing bands of color or other obvious visual anomalies
Inconsistency: Multiple parts of an image that a human would draw, shade, etc. roughly the same such as both hands of the same person, but which the AI renders two or more different ways
Eldritch: A failure to get the overall shape of something correct, rather than creating an eldritch abomination out of recognized bits and pieces of it
Impermanence: A failure to keep track of something that disappears behind something else and reappears on the other side

Almost all the illustrations submitted so far are porn so that’s what I’ve got for examples. Sorry.

. . . . .
. . . . .
. . . . .

Applejack

Has three legs.

Has two scrunchies both on her left side; one of them melts into her neck (eldritch.)

Inconsistent rendering between scrunchies, bangs, and tail.

Inconsistent lighting between figure, hat, and background.

Artifacts around highlights of body and hair.

Eldritch hat.

Impermanence in tail (passes behind back leg.)

. . . . .
. . . . .
. . . . .

Apple Bloom’s butt (foalcon; no details)

Entire image is blurry except bottom-right corner. Possible misappropriation of source images’ depth of field?

Posed as though standing on ground, but is in midair (or that is the world’s shortest fence.)

Artifacts between red hair / tail and blue sky.

Eldritch left back hoof and ribbon.

. . . . .
. . . . .
. . . . .

Celestia’s butt (detailed)

Literally every part of this picture from the base of her neck back is eldritch.

Left cutie mark seems to grow her torso. No forelegs are clearly visible
Choker is more like a long chain
Her dock is visible, but the rest of her tail begins behind her neck
She has a hair stuck in her butthole that fuses with her raphe
Inside of her cooch is just random slices of meat

She also rather noticeably is not looking towards the viewer.

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CookieGalaxy

Title

Looking through the recent AI-generated images, they can still readily be distinguished from natural artwork

Yes, I agree much more with you now than I did 20 days ago. Previously I was generating thumbnail sized icons and also had no idea how to look for the artefacts.

Literally every part of this picture from the base of her neck back is eldritch.

Yep! Those are 1024x1024 tests. Since the model is not equivariant to scale and the model was trained on 512x512, it struggles a lot to fill in details correctly.
I’m still really happy with how it turned out given that model is not meant to be capable of 2x the resolution, but I can see this being offensive to artists, especially ones who think this is the AI people are hyping about.
I am creating mini-models for hobby/fun.

so long as your artistic critique is beyond mindlessly drooling at pretty colors (which, unfortunately, many people’s isn’t.)

Yeah, that’s actually been a pain in my ass. I’ve been looking for ways to rate the quality of an image, but upvotes / wilson score is plagued by porn, funny pics, and things that only look good from the thumbnail.

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Cocaine

Princess Coke

Ban ai generated crap and enforce it as every other rule. Look at the posted images and delete it if u see a generated one. Ask for the source file if u have doubts.

Ur existing rules aren’t applicable. AI stealing from the community as a whole and it’s hurts every single artist.

And I don’t see how other sites are relevant to this convo. It’s ur site and I’m talking about it, not about twitter or whatever

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Background Pony #2D64

You need to be PROACTIVE for this, because once something gets fed into the AI, it’s fed into the AI, the theft already happened and there is nothing you can do to reverse it!

Which is why, like I suggested before, a blanket ban of it it’s the only way to deter the theft to begin with

I’m tired of the AI postings myself, but I have to ask, how do you expect banning the posting of AI created pictures to prevent an artist’s work from being used in AI generation? It’s not like a sitewide ban will suddenly magically deny the people who make these things access to the images they’d use to train a computer. And that’s an issue that’s not even specific to this site, it’s true anywhere online where someone other that you can access and see the things you’ve made.

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Cocaine

Princess Coke

@Background Pony #2D64
U can’t prevent them from training AIs but u can prevent them from getting anything from it by banning pictures and assigning cringe label to them like internet collectively did with nfts

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Exedrus

Would the site devs be willing to add a “don’t use my art for AI training” into the site APIs? And maybe have it show a warning when looking up the artist’s tag. That seems like it’d be a fairly uncontroversial step. Then it’d be easy for image scrapers to avoid those images.

Ask for the source file if u have doubts.

A lot of artists have left the fandom and can no longer be contacted. Some publish anonymously. And I suspect many artists will delete these files after a while. If all it takes to probably get an image deleted is waiting a month or so and then reporting it as AI-generated, then I’d be surprised if people didn’t try to exploit that to remove images they didn’t like. That’s probably not going to be a big issue right now (AI is pretty easy to spot), but I doubt that’s going to be the case forever. If a ban does get setup, the mods need to make sure it doesn’t become an easy way for people to just ban whatever they want.

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Naughtypony2010

Hoofsies Rule

In my personal opinion, AI image generating tool creators should have the duty to give source of all artist’s works used to train the AI given the fact that without those artworks the AI would not work in the first place.

this has to be an essential consideration to go with handling AI generated work and the rights of all artists on this site.

will the art source used to train a certain AI generating tool not be mentioned and without any proof of the artists agreeing to their art being used for it, the AI tool should be banned from the site.

will the art used to train the ai with proof of the artists agreement be mentioned then the AI tool should be allowed on the site or, images that were generated by that tool.

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Cocaine

Princess Coke

@Exedrus
Niche improbable case of site policy abuse that relies on a bunch of assumptions. I guess nothing can be done then!
There is a non zero probability to get struck by the lighting when u going outside too.

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CookieGalaxy

Title

@Naughtypony2010

AI image generating tool creators should have the duty to give source of all artist’s works used to train the AI

That list would be 150331 items long. I don’t see the value in a list so long that no individual item is significant.

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Ryhaal

@Background Pony #2D64
What Cocaine said tbh.
Sending a clear message that this site and this community doesn’t want AI generated art would do a lot to dissuade people from further engaging with it or pouring effort into developing branches of these AIs specifically for MLP. Because it suddenly wouldn’t be warrant the reputational hit within that community.

I’ll be the first one to admit I’m not that smart and that I don’t have a 100% definitive way to stop the thefts from happening, but I think it’d be nice for morale if artists knew that one of the most popular sites of the fandom has my back on this. They might be unable to prevent it all from happening in the first place but at least they have taken a stance, they have said “AI arts are cringe bruv”.
I think Derpi owes artists at least that much, given that without the fanartists who’s work gets reposted in here, this place would be mostly just be a collection of screenshots and memes.

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Exedrus

@Cocaine
My point wasn’t that an AI-art ban should be off the table. For now, it’s easy to tell when something is AI-generated, so policy abuse is unlikely to succeed. My point was that it would need to be re-evaluated over time. There have been and continue to be people in the fandom who think all sorts of art shouldn’t be allowed on this site (clop, fetishes, etc). I wouldn’t be shocked if they started crawling out of the woodwork once they hear that there is a new and exciting way to kick things off this site.

Also, I guess it was a warning that artist may want to start archiving their files to make this sort of verification easier.

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Naughtypony2010

Hoofsies Rule

@CookieGalaxy
maybe my choice of words were not specific there, the artists who’s work are used should be mentioned with proof of their agreement.

and even if that list would be as long as all the images used, that is exactly where the disrespect of the AI creators starts feeding so much into it completely losing track of what is being put into it. shameful.
and that is also why it needs to be brought to light and if its impossible for them to give credit to the artist’s who’s art was used, why should their tool receive the right to have uploads here?

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CookieGalaxy

Title

@Naughtypony2010

the artists who’s work are used should be mentioned with proof of their agreement.

that is exactly where the disrespect of the AI creators starts feeding so much into it completely losing track of what is being put into it.

That would certainly slow dataset creators down, however I can’t think of anyone that would bother asking for permission or making sure every single creator is credited fully.

You don’t ask for permission to remember images every time you scroll through Derpibooru. What your proposing is effectively telling AI creators that they need to ask for permission to allow their AI’s to remember images they see.

I know the media is probably using weird language to describe the models, but all they’re doing is remembering what they’re shown, then trying to draw new artwork based off what they remember. With the exception of img2img, the AI is only using the memory in it’s “head” to produce the images you see.

I’d prefer to keep high quality AI generated images on the site, but I don’t have a strong opinion either way. Just know what you’re suggesting about asking for permission and crediting every single artist sounds ridiculous from a Machine Learning perspective.

PS:

There are “1,000 trillion synapses”[1] in the brain, but only 0.001 trillion synapses in stable-diffusion. If work produced from stable-diffusion’s memory is “art-theft” then I would expect the same to apply to a human, who has far greater ability to remember and recreate images than any current AI.

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Background Pony #A2CE

@CookieGalaxy
I have to wonder if artists that considers AI art “art theft” understand how it actually works, and if so, if they consider an artist using other artists’ work for reference (from how to do shading to perspective to creases to anatomy to how a specific character’s hair is drawn from different angles) are also committing art theft.

Is a person committing art theft when they take in what they’ve learned about Pinkie Pie’s smile from other artists and draw their smile in a similar way? I’ve drawn dozens of Pinkie Pies throughout the years, and I can’t say I never did so without looking at other people’s work for how to create my own, even if that work was simply the show itself.

I’m a writer, and coder, and also an artist. And throughout the years I’ve been positively chuffed when I’ve seen other people use my stuff to learn and improve, or just as a basis for their own work. I had thought this feeling of sharing and helping create new things was why most people “created” things outside of their professional work to start with. What other reason is there? Outside of seeking fame or lucre, I guess.

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Ryhaal

@Background Pony #A2CE
I won’t even waste my breath in explaining how wrong you are. As if people don’t put their own infinitely complex experiences, biases and ideas into their work and just straight up copy.
It just isn’t comparable.

Also “writer, coder, artist”, sure you are, hiding behind anonimity, lol

Posted 1 years ago Report

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Background Pony #A2CE

@Ryhaal
AI doesn’t just “straight up copy”, either. But since you brought it up… do you think photography is an art? Or should they also be banned from the site?

And yes, I am posting anonymous, because I can see how people are acting. I have enough troubles in my life as to have an enraged mob wanting to ruin me over a passing AI art fad. And you know that’s what you’d do, look up my links and socials, criticise my works, make people around me “aware” of how evil I am; that you even pointed out the anonymity is proof enough of it.

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Naughtypony2010

Hoofsies Rule

@Background Pony #A2CE
Lets look at it this way.. humans first. They have the higher priority to anything that has to do with rights and the natural interpretation that artists put in their art from memory looking at other works. I personally do not have anything against the principle of AI’s being used to generate art if the human artists are respected in any way it can. Just to get that out of the way in case it looked like i would.

The danger that many artists see here is that a tool, some code being preferred over commissioning some human artist. Thats my point here that is where a human is being put in the second row because an AI, no living individual is being preferred over them.
Of course not right yet but we all know that if nothing is done about it, the development of these tools will eventually outplay artists who live off of making art for others.
Thats why we need to find a rational solution for it on this site. To keep the priority with humans.

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Background Pony #A2CE

@Naughtypony2010
If fear of losing a source of revenue is what’s driving the reactions, then that should be stated clearly. As well as if it’s fear that “prompters” will invade the market and start charging commissions, or if it’s fear that commissioners will look towards using AI art tools rather than paying for commissions, because these are different things as well.

The first scenario is unlikely to take hold, even “real artists” get ostracised for running YCH auctions with the same pose more than once; people would notice fast.

The second is more likely… but I don’t see it as a great issue. For near every commodity, there is what’s factory produced, and what’s artisanal. Despite the likes of Ikea existing, people still buy hand-crafted furniture, either because of the maker or because of personal specifications. Hell, I would not be surprised if, in the unlikely scenario AI art isn’t just a passing fad, in won’t become standard that artists can charge ten times more than they do now for the “human touch”.

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Cocaine

Princess Coke

@Background Pony #A2CE
[Rule #0 redacted by staff]

AI crap generators are the exact same thing as art tracers. This is how it works. Stop this nft level of arguments. It’s a tool for stealing artwork without any effort, not “learning”. Everyone understands how it works.

There is a ton of reasons why every single artist don’t like it:

It’s art theft. Exact same as tracing but on a larger scale and with less effort. Nobody likes that’s and it’s shouldn’t be allowed
It’s not art, yet these techbros claiming to be artists. They don’t deserve it, everyone understands that
It’s ugly and deprived of any meaning. Why is this even exist? It’s like all this dead corporate massproduced copy-paste content that everyone hates but it comes from small number of techbros. It’s even worse somehow
It’s takes the spotlight from real artists on the internet. Art u worked ur butt off to make is getting pushed out of the first page and replaced by zero effort ai crap
It’s a loss of income. Yeah artists need to pay their bills, I know thats crazy. Less money to the artists means less artists able to do art for a living means less art made means fandom is dead. It’s that easy.
Why on the earth would u like to try automate one single thing all people want to do themselves? Making art and expressing urself is the most human thing ever.

All of this is the biggest middle finger towards artists. People who love the fandom and give everything to make it better and create nice things for people to enjoy. Yet u spit on our craft and doing everything to rob us, humiliate us and make our lives as hard as possible.

It’s a new “technically legal” scam and nothing more. Everyone is getting hurt by it.

Posted 1 years ago Report
Edited 1 years ago because: Rule #0

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Background Pony #A2CE

Such a victim doode
If u making a dumb take then own it, don’t hide.

Sorry, I’ve already had my work called for far minor “internet arguments”, so I’ll pass on making myself the target of an angry mob over a “dumb take”.

It’s art theft. Exact same as tracing but on a larger scale and with less effort. Nobody likes that’s and it’s shouldn’t be allowed

It’s not much different than a human referencing other artists. I’ve had my art wholesale copied onto other people’s work, not even referenced… and that gave me joy. Someone used something I made to make something new. How is that not a good thing?

It’s not art, yet these techbros claiming to be artists. They don’t deserve it, everyone understands that

Why don’t “they” deserve it? And are “they” really claiming to be “artists”, in the same sense? I’ve definitely not seen that.

It’s ugly and deprived of any meaning. Why is this even exist? It’s like all this dead corporate massproduced copy-paste content that everyone hates but it comes from small number of techbros. It’s even worse somehow

A lot of things are ugly and bad and deprived of meaning… going by that standard we should all just ban G5 entirely, no? Or just any image that doesn’t get 50 upvotes within a week?

It’s takes the spotlight from real artists on the internet. Art u worked ur butt off to make is getting pushed out of the first page and replaced by zero effort ai crap

It doesn’t? Nobody is looking down on real artists. AI art is a new toy that allows mere plebs to create pretty things, it’s not going to replace “real art” any more than cinema replaced theater, record players replaced concerts, or Windows Movie Maker replaced film editors.

It’s a loss of income. Yeah artists need to pay their bills, I know thats crazy. Less money to the artists means less artists able to do art for a living means less art made means fandom is dead. It’s that easy.

Now that’s a valid concern. But it’s a concern that’s affected every industry so far, and I honestly believe won’t affect artists as a whole as much considering commissioners and YCH buyers have long been paying hundreds of dollars without batting an eye, and, in the unlikely case AI art actually proliferates beyond being a fad or another corporate tool, will only further increase the value of “real art”.

Why on the earth would u like to try automate one single thing all people want to do themselves? Making art and expressing urself is the most human thing ever.

So keep doing it? Nobody is stopping you or anyone else. What you’re seeing is a virtually insignificant number of people playing around with a new tool that makes them happy for a bit. Someone that doesn’t have any skill in art, for whatever reason, is finally able to create something somewhat close to the image in their head that makes them happy.

Lastly, please enjoy:

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