Your Mentor is lying to you about AI Art.

Most of the public figures you trust have been misleading you. As artists and seekers, if you’re misled about AI, you risk pouring your life’s energy into the wrong paths : career, craft, even the spirit of your work.

I just submitted a paper to an AI conference that drew 29,000 submissions. That’s roughly 29,000 years of intense work from highly trained minds. In a field this chaotic, fast-moving, and young, taking your cues from casual mentors and pundits is mental suicide. Do that, and you’ll stumble from one mistake to the next in dealing with the AI beast.

My hope in this post is simple: to free you from the opportunistic voices that betray your trust with confident but careless claims, and to return your attention to truth, clarity, and the ground beneath your own feet.

Here’s a collection of the little daggers they’ve been poking your mind with, making you less aware of the reality of AI.

Art mentor, a respected coach for artists, has been claiming that AI Art will end within a few years, because of ramping costs and copyright issues. None of which is going to happen, sorry to break it to you. The copyright suers will get their money, but the models will keep prospering. AI research enables more and more models to improve quality and efficiency all the while costing less, and using fully licensed data. Firefly is a strong example, and MoonValley is an even stronger one.

Jiang xueqin (江学勤)’s recent claim that “all AI is supervised” is a face-palm-level statement.

Alex O'Connor, an otherwise respected intellectual, has claimed something along the lines of “AI looks at your prompt, it looks at all the images that match and kind of takes a guess from there” — which shows complete lack of understanding of even the basics of modern Deep Learning.

Noam Chomsky, of all people, has claimed AI to be “high tech plagiarism”, ignoring the fact that as a black box model, no one knows how it works. This displays a shocking lack of the ability to admit when an issue is undetermined, and wait until one can draw an actual conclusion.

Molly Crabapple in an LA Times op-ed, has characterized AI as “vampirical”, stating that it could not function without appropriating artists’ work. Of course, this is false, as I’ve stated above that models work perfectly fine on fully licensed data (Firefly, MoonValley, and more to come..).

Neil Gaiman has said in a tumblr comment : “AI art is plagiarism, full stop”. False. AI does not combine images, there’s no dataset required once the model is trained. Regurgitation of training data is an extremely rare exception. And we still don’t know what’s in the black box. But as I covered in a very old post, it would be IMPOSSIBLE for AI to learn the training dataset by heart.

…Need I go on ?

No one knows what they’re talking about. And yet they speak with such confidence that you will believe them. And as artists today, if you are misled about AI, you are bound to make wrong career choices, artistic choices, and focus your energy where it doesn’t belong.

These people are stepping outside of their field of expertise, but keeping their authoritative tone. But AI is a long-standing field with a lot of nuance. What’s more, it has become so complicated and active that no single person, even an AI researcher can ever hope to grasp the entirety of the field.

Whoever you are, wherever you are in life, and whatever your objectives, AI will affect you. And if you want to react properly to AI, your best bet is to get your information and inspiration from a reliable source.

I’m an AI Researcher, but my true passion is Art. I am about 60% of the way through the required 10,000 hours of mastery in art. My objective with this Substack is to truly educate my audience on this subject.

I am not here to mislead you. My tone is authoritative, but only because I know what I’m talking about. Prediction after prediction that I’ve made has been true.

The world of art is starved for actual info about AI. Share this post if you want to help others gain reliable information that will help them in their lives.

And I’ll talk to you next time :)

ArtPostAI.