Except that AI-generated images are not and will never be art. 

All the more hence the point... relatively speaking, some content will always attributively grade above others.

I thought I blocked you... As I said for the umpteenth time, leave me tf alone you creepy obsessed stalker. 

I didn't know that, my apologies. Maybe it's just due to being a part of a public resource, but the function to respond didn't inform me of this. Relevantly, not sure what brings about the last part.

Whoa, please be civil. Whatever the context may be is unclear to me, but if there's any place for drama, it's not here. That was a promise I myself made both when I signed up and at [https://side7.com/forums/thread/996](https://side7.com/forums/thread/996)

Something I'd like to know: What are the boundaries of what is considered AI?

Why should I be civil when they have been harassing me and sending people after me for years, and still to this very day continue to talk shit about me on their Tumblr blog? 

This situation is under staff review. All parties please desist from further escalation.

WOAH!

The forums are publicly open to all site members. Blocks do not extend to the forums because of that. If you're having an issue with someone in the forums harassing you, report it to either me or @Thorvald . I cannot do anything about what has allegedly happened on other sites between you two. But, I can do something about it here.

Both @EvieJulia and @chaseawaythedark , if there is a bigger issue going on beyond just the forums but still on this site, let me know about it so I can potentially do something about it.

-- BK

In any discussion about the pillars of what constitutes art, I guess it's not out of place to ask what defines AI.

I often find myself in discussions about AI art where I discover that people don't realize that AI long predates the art generators we've seen make their premier this year and last year. Not sure who knows about it, but one popular example used to be a service called something along the lines of "This Is Not A Real Face" (or something like that, can't remember if that was its name but it was something similar). It would produce a realistic looking face based on the ability to mix two or more random faces from different celebrities, and if I remember correctly (probably not), it would bypass FotoForensics and its predecessors and possibly successors, even though someone who knows what to look for will always know if something is genuine or not, which led to a discussion I see you've been floating around second-hand.

What I do know is AI comes in all forms and functions, neither that nor DreamUp and its contemporaries are unique by any means. The conventional (and possibly oversimplified) understanding is that an AI is anything that is considered a machine, but arguably that's where it gets vague. As has been asked before, a camera is a machine, so does the camera count as AI? If I take a photo of explicit AI art or had the AI art as a part of the larger whole somewhere in the art, does that make the whole thing AI art? If a robot or remote-controlled device is operating the camera, is it AI art? Would Sonny's drawing in I Robot be considered AI art since Sonny is the titular robot which makes him an AI? If so, is it AI art if someone posts an ultrasound picture (maybe we have pregnant mothers here) or if someone is using the artist's equivalent of a marathon runner with prosthetics? Are screenshots and/or animated images considered AI art? Is it considered AI art if you have a normal picture but then use Google Pixel's magic eraser? Is ASCII art considered AI art? Is it considered AI art if a program out there helps you create it? If you're an author and you ask ChatGPT to help come up with a story or story starter, is your story AI art (to all who work on ChatGPT and/or its contemporaries who are reading this, do us a favor and update the bots so they refuse to help people cheat in art and competitions)? If you're an author and you don't ask ChatGPT for direct help but have it give you random bits of physics knowledge which helps you understand how your sci-fi world works, is that then AI art? Are you doing AI art every time you post a selfie with a snapchat filter? Would any digital modification to a picture be considered AI art? Is conventionally printed art AI art? Is 3D printed art AI art? Is the movie Final Fantasy The Spirits Within an example of AI art since the studio's original plan was to have the virtual people "playing the characters" be sentient in the style of Gorillaz? Is Gorillaz an example of AI art? Is money itself an example of AI art, since they're mass-produced pieces of paper with some guy's face on it? You've said it yourself when you said it here last, such questions are probably important because AI is going to change and diversify over time.

I'm sorry, the only people I can imagine making this argument are AI evangelists trying to draw false equivalencies to normalize LLMs with established technology. As far as I know, "artificial intelligence", "machine learning" etc. are referring to computers that are capable of logical decision-making when presented with dynamic inputs. A traction engine is a machine, but I can't imagine anyone claiming straight-faced that it constitutes Victorian AI. A hand calculator is a computer, but it's following prescripted mathematical formulas and entirely beholden to the user's instructions; I don't think you'd call that intelligence.

The rest of the post wanders so far into the reeds that all I can think of is that Jordan Peterson interview where he's asked "Do you believe in God?" and he replies: "What do you mean by 'God'? What do you mean by 'believe'? What do you mean by 'do'?" When we're talking about "AI art", we're talking about partially- or wholly-LLM-outputted content. This Person Does Not Exist, Microsoft Tay, and heck, IBM's Watson predate the current mania, but that just means this was all prototyped earlier, not that "AI art" is some pre-existing medium only now earning a bad rap.

I'd beware anyone who's trying to argue a broader definition, for the reason stated in the first paragraph. Debates on film cameras vs SLRs, or pen-and-pencil vs PSP and a stylus, are incomparable to the ethical quagmire surrounding LLMs.

Yes, and there's a site that got so flooded with that crap it set up a dedicated containment board. I've yet to read a single one that's even half-decent.

^

I don't dismiss any spectrum-esque thinking but think of the matters in terms of artist connection as opposed to the otherwise stigmatized tools.

If a continuum were applied any ways, I'd categorize inventions (and yes I agree to the notion one can relate them) based on a skillset too vast to list, based on the different separated functions of the human mind. I could count at least two hundred ways that could branch out.

I almost forgot about Watson. I remember that was Jeopardy's first real controversy. "Oh no that machine is taking money from real contestants who didn't use some kind of calculator to solve their problems" people said, though he did have a defense. Watson (and game calculators in general) is perhaps the best analogy someone can give to the ethics of AI art, as one may say it's the human factor which is the very basis of the test of the game. But there are still that semblance to a spectrum that's going to expand (cue your old math teacher saying to show your work, maybe that is what we need, as may have been the other message above......... a specialized outlet for this, like a "show your work subforum" in these forums, would be nice).

Funnily enough, there was a Victorian AI, but it turned out to be a human in a box. Blurry lines gonna blur.

In an apt coincidence, they replayed a radio program recently talking about how a lot of so-called AI is still at heart Mechanical Turks. All those Google-sourced captchas are using people as unpaid labour for the gruntwork of coaching the pattern recognition that undergirds all these generators. The whole reason AI poison watermarkers work is because the LLMs still need people to input the data, and it's the human oeil that's being tromped.

As the saying goes, a computer is only as smart as the person who inputs the instructions. This stuff becomes a lot less miraculous once you understand how it works at the technical level.