I agree. Fascinating and sometimes beautiful as it all is, I feel it leaves me in the depths of the uncanny Valley. There are other communities which will surely be more suited to this content.
I vote most of my Hivepower in this community and will usually shy away from computer-created work entirely because I am not sure of the human-to-machine ratio of its creation. So I am fully behind this move. As it will help the computer artists that use the machine as a tool and not those who are just good with prompts.
I get your point that it is trained on the images and styles of artists without their will and although that may be difficult to stomach it is what all artists are trained to do until they can find their own true voice. Once you put your work out there it becomes part of the collective unconscious and there is no getting away from that. 'We are only as original as the reference to our source is obscured' Someone said that once and I believe there is great truth in it.
With all that said this technology really is magic.
So here's the thing. We're all humans and without even thinking about it we anthropomorphize things, especially AI partially because of the marketing and the name, but contrary to the name, it's not an intelligence. It's not referencing and it's not being inspired. These are all human things that humans do. It's just a piece of software. It is closer to an insanely sophisticated Photoshop filter than it is to any actual intelligence that exists.
Machine learning might be better called machine processing, or machine neural analysis or something like that because it's nothing like what a human is doing when they learn something. Even when a human can't draw well and has no training, they can still draw and communicate ideas with symbols. This software literally can't do anything without first processing artists artwork or photos or whatever. It has exactly zero value without the artists work adding all the value. The data is everything.
The worst skilled artist, while their work might not be aesthetically pleasing, it's still an expression of that person. These diffusion models are just a laundering system for IP infringement.
Very succinctly put indeed!
Here is news for you - I train my own AI with my own art (something new, which you are not up to speed on yet) but the examples you post are run of the mill Midjourney stuff and indeed boring, as are 90% of the 'housewife art', which is also a large percentage of the so called 'art' that finds its way onto this platform as analog art. Do more research, be more creative with writing prompts and don't rely on the pre-chewed models (I recognise them a mile away - it's what those use too lazy to actually create something unique). AI is for me a sketching tool to work out ideas. Yes, I post some of it, particularly those that have a large component of my own work, such as variations of my art generated with my trained Loras. Whatever turns out good might make it onto my analog canvas. I trained Loras with my drawings and also with my own portrait photos. I am going to train some on my paintings, but that is secondary, since what results I get from my drawings I can translate into analog paintings better than a finished AI painting.
I seen and watched art students in seminars with a photo tucked up on their canvas which they painstakingly copy, and also look over their shoulder at what everyone else is doing, so by the time they are done, it all looks alike - alike, just like the rest of the average 'housewife' art you find on AI and on here as well.
I taught art classes for quite some time, and been asked: how do you paint XXX, to which I reply, there is no formula, you have to look and observe. And that is what is lacking. If you cannot describe and transcribe a detail of a thing, you will not succeed, be that on canvas, or in writing a prompt.
AI is a tool that should be seen as such. How you use it makes the difference between an amateur and an artist.
The one thing I would criticize the various AI platforms are their 'forbidden' words, excessive censorship and restrictive rules.
Lastly, check out my blog here: https://peakd.com/ai/@thermoplastic/new-data-poisoning-tool-lets-artists-fight-back-against-ai-is-this-a-good-idea