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You write, "This is a piece from an artist about how AI art just isn't very good."

Cultural leaders across the board will do everything they can to maintain their positions within the status quo, but in the end most of them are doomed to fail. Like it or not, change is coming, faster and faster.

Amazon killed our local mall. Like that. Lots more of that kind of thing coming. More and more disruption, faster and faster.

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I think what midjourney does is stealing.

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You're wrong. It's algorithmic content creation using a mathematical formula derived from observation of large data sets.

It doesn't steal anything.

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Copying is just the identity function; the question is *which* formula

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Did the authors of the content consent to being included in the "large data sets"? Have they been contacted, assuming they are alive, of course, and given the opportunity to opt out instead of being automatically opted in? I just read an article that midjourney supports prompts as "draw me in the style of this or that artist" who's alive, and the author hasn't been asked the permission to be included in the dataset. So, yes, it is a form of stealing. But to me, the art generated by AI is soulless, and at some subconscious level, the brain can perceive it.

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Yep, exactly. Shoutout to Roland Meyer (@bildoperationen@tldr.nettime.org) for his work on highlighting this.

Just think humans with no freckles or moles - you can tell they're not real but they are still the very definition of an average depiction because no two freckles are identical (or identically distributed!) and hence are not encrypted in the data set.

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The future you're envisioning isn't very good. In fact, it's really awful.

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