Jay O'Connell Skip to content Jay O'Connell Menu About Me Bibliography Fictional Futures Mailing List Contact Me If You Can’t Tell the Difference… Posted on October 11, 2022 by admin 2 Comments AI artists are getting death threats. I’m guessing most aren’t from actual creators. These are mostly the ‘ethics in game journalism / flute protector people. And of course AI artists are getting hate mail. Of course they are. But you know… I didn’t see it coming. It’s made up my mind about something, though. I’ve been ambivalent, about calling prompt crafters “Artists”, with a capital A. Now that they are braving death threats and hate mail to share their work? They’re artists now. If they want to identify that way. And, you know, as with pronouns and such… Why do you think your opinion about someone else’s identity is important? Who decides who is a real man, a real woman, a real artist? The core reality of being an Artist is that it sucks in significant ways. All fun and joy and humanity in the activity is balanced by various forms of social punishment, and ‘free-market’ abuse. If you spend too much time making art, to the exclusion of practical pursuits, many will think you’re childish, a narcissist, a parasite. When you DO make a living you are envied, critics point out you don’t DESERVE your money or attention… It sucks. Nobody questions whether you are a real accountant or not. A real brain surgeon. A real insurance adjuster. A real CEO. If you sell art commercially, you’re a hack and a whore. You’re always derivative, if you sell commercial art, because there is always some tradition you emerge from. (Is Boris Vallejo copying Frank Frazetta, are they both informed by a shared renaissance tradition?) If you sell into gallery spaces, you’re a social climber / poser / con-person laughing all the way to the bank, with your installations of piles of candy and defaced Mona-Lisas, wall mounted urinals and empty canvases, etc etc etc. So, at the moment, millions of AI artists spend millions of hours at this, don’t make a cent, and get death threats for sharing the work for free…. Sure sounds like art to me! Or these AI artists sell into the NFT speculative bubbles, and are hated for their financial successes in the same way people hate gallery artists for working that system of getting the world to barf up some cash so you can eat. Many of these NFT / Artist people are doing quite well. Humorously, the people who hate the AI artists are often super into blockchain and NFTs. Tautology time. Art is art. People make art in lots of ways. Prompts are one way. The hatred of AI art, as unearned riches, is fucking ridiculous. Nobody makes art only for the money. Nobody! People who are interested in making money go into the financial industry, because the financial industry is the best way to acquire money, without making anything at all. Fiddling with markets, tricking one group of rich people into giving money to other groups of rich people, pocketing a cut, makes far more money than actually working, making anything, does. Some artists who make art figure out how to make money doing it or being near it, but no kid draws a stick figure to get into MoMA. The written word didn’t destroy the oral tradition, photography didn’t destroy oil painting, digital painting didn’t destroy oils, machine looms didn’t destroy hand weaving and on and on and on and on AND ON. Everything you you think that technology did to anyone was capitalism doing things to people. Democratic governance letting those things happen. Capitalism never worked the vast majority of artists. And, very very soon now, capitalism isn’t going to work well for many, many, many people, who did the right things, went to the right schools, who learned how to do difficult things. To the individual, I say one thing. Learn the new tools, the new trade, use it to level up, as a quality and productivity booster; get so good they can’t fire you; AI art is good at some things, but at this point, it is never as good as a human in many, many ways. It’s your job to max out that dimension in your work to stay afloat. Stop complaining and get on with it. More broadly, what I am saying is we need a system that doesn’t discard one set of people as technology empowers another, using that disruption to lower wages. (Uber bypassed Taxi medallions, which are starting to look like the years it takes to learn how to do certain digital paintings.) The owners, the shareholders, pit these groups of workers against each other. Only so many seats in the free-market lifeboat, after all. Sure, half of you are going to drown, but that’s a good thing. For the shareholders. Don’t you deserve to drown, really? So someone somewhere can get much richer? Take two steps back, instead of one; capitalism never worked for the creative class. Ever. The fact that we have so much great work is a fucking accident. Orthogonal. The market never monetized Van Gogh in a way where he supported himself. The estate, the shareholders as the work became a product, did. We need the arts, the humanities, they literally make us better people, more humane, in studies I have linked to and can link to again, and the ‘free’ market is a shit way to pay for the humanities. If you find yourself hating AI art, support traditional artists for fuck’s sake. Buy a fucking painting, and if you have never bought a goddamn painting, shut the fuck up. Stop following people who share AI art or make it. Don’t have gay sex if you don’t want to, don’t get gay married if you don’t want to, don’t change your gender if you don’t want to, don’t cut your dick or tits off if you don’t want to, don’t smoke pot if you don’t want to, don’t get an abortion if you don’t want to… CHRIST this shit isn’t hard to figure out. How to be a good person, I mean. Posted in AI art2 Comments on If You Can’t Tell the Difference… First Midjourney AI art approved for US copyright! Posted on September 25, 2022 by admin Leave a comment So, the first piece of stable-diffusion generated artwork has received a US copyright. from Ars Technica: The registration, effective September 15, applies to a comic book called Zarya of the Dawn. Kashtanova created the artwork for Zarya using Midjourney, a commercial image synthesis service. In their post announcing the news from Tuesday, Kashtanova wrote: I got Copyright from the Copyright Office of the USA on my Ai-generated graphic novel. I was open how it was made and put Midjourney on the cover page. It wasn’t altered in any other way. Just the way you saw it here. I tried to make a case that we do own copyright when we make something using AI. I registered it as visual arts work. My certificate is in the mail and I got the number and a confirmation today that it was approved. My friend lawyer gave me this idea and I decided to make a precedent. The U. S Copyright Office’s last word in 2021 was that an AI couldn’t hold a copyright, as you know, AI’s aren’t human, and toaster’s don’t own copyrights. This case, as it turns out, was sort of… stupid, as it decided that ‘without a human hand,’ nothing made could be copyrighted, as the judge perhaps imagined the AI was spitting out art on a magical whim, rather than the art being generated by a human prompt. Of course, the AI could have made art with a random number (seed) generator, so the judge would have been confronted by an ‘autonomous’ AI. It’s a reasonable question; can an AI own something? The answer is no. But the judge had no need to talk about the ‘human hand’ at all, because people have been making artwork without ‘hands’ in various ways for over a century. Human hands aren’t necessary to create authorship of art. Warhol famously said his art contained as little of his handiwork as possible. Of course, humans made the prints, but, the artist’s name didn’t mean he actually printed that piece. He said this publicly. Because, as often is the case with fine artists, he wanted people to be confronted with the question… what is art? Warhol started his as an illustrator / graphic designer of course. So he was familiar with the question, from the ‘this is not art’ side of the equation. Illustrators make illustrations, not Art. But ‘what is art’, and ‘what can be copyrighted’ are two different questions. How did Andy Warhol create art in his factory. And yes, he called it a factory. He conversations with people, workers, he did not call them artists, and paid them as little as possible He gave them prompts. Of course, he made the originals by hand, at the beginning, all those soup cans were painted by a practicing craftsmen, boiling with artistic temperament, not as a snide commentary, but as Art for Art’s sake. Without any idea of where that might lead. Oh, And he was painting…. wait for it… someone else’s IP! Posted in AI art, UncategorizedLeave a Comment on First Midjourney AI art approved for US copyright! AI art, Midjourney, and the future of visual communication…. Posted on September 22, 2022 by admin 2 Comments Nothing has slapped the future in my face the way AI art has. With the personal computer, mobile computing, the internet, I was the frog cooked to death by degrees. An early adopter, a science fiction reader and writer, a futurist, I imagined these things before experiencing them, and was able to accept them pretty quickly. (Oh, you should know that in reality, the frog isn’t cooked to death by degrees, it jumps out, which calls into question the metaphor but never mind! Remember that, though. It’s important. The frog jumps out. It’s the only hope the human race has, by the way.) Synthesizing images with prompts with an AI GAN has been addictive, transformative, and has made it ever more obvious to me and to anyone paying attention that we will soon need UBI—base income, or something like it. The GAN that spit out the image above (which I massaged a bit in post production) is a generative adversarial network, a kind of neural net machine learning thingy. The way it makes stuff is hilariously similar to the human creative process. (this will make AI art hard to outlaw, but with humans of course, anything is possible.) The GAN, like any art student, looks at art and photos and images of all sorts (this is the training set. Made judiciously by a human respecting the property rights of others, OR by pointing at the web and saying, ‘devour everything we’ll get permission later’. Guess what happened? Hah hah. Heh. Oh.) Some hunk of code in the GAN, the G part, for Generative, makes a new image, boiling into visual atoms and then reforming the training set (to order, there’s a client, the prompter) and another bit of code, the adversary, the critic, decides whether or not the image matches the prompt word. Or _words_, which can be _any two words_. The adversary says, “you suck, do it again,” to the generator. (Very much like a client.) and the generator happily makes another. It may do this thousands of times. And you see what the issue is here. This is going to be hugely useful, because you can’t get humans to redo things thousands of times without them trying to kill you, also, with the GAN, it takes three minutes. Gelato robot? Sure. Make one of those. Hm. It’s a robot scooping gelato. Fiddles with prompts. It’s a robot covered in gelato. Screws with prompts for an hour. It’s a robot made out of gelato. Or maybe you can never get that. So you make a bot out of gummi bears instead, and it can do that. But not jello. Oh, but glass it can do glass. And on and on. Oh, and the GAN isn’t limited to nouns and adjectives. It will also render out intangibles, like The Meaning of Life, or The approaching Singularity. Big abstract things tend to turn into landscapes. When midjourney is very confused, they are teal and orange and have pretty skies, clouds, and sunsets. It’s as if the GAN is trying to ignore the fact that you gave it a bullshit input. Here you go, it says. Enjoy this pretty thing I made for you. Look at a sunset, meatbag. So, you need to get over this anthropomorphizing of the tech…. and you will, after 100 hours or so. ‘The meaning of Life’ is just something IT typed into a search engine, or rather, what the taggers and trainers did, and they found sunsets and inspirational posters, so, you know. That’s life. The GAN is obviously generating useable commercial art, valid visual communication, illustration, concept art. BUT is it REAL art? Uhh…. Christ. Look, dude, NOBODY cares about this question really, at least, not when it comes to most people making images, the whole ‘is it art’ thing. And if you are still angry that Jackson Pollock paintings remind you of your kids splatter paintings, your opinions about art have been an old man shaking a fist at the clouds for decades anyway, right? Many of those angriest at AI art haven’t been in a museum, or seen a real painting, for a decade. Oh, and they’re angry about the art there, too. What is art? Fine art is what fine artists sell to art buyers. Mostly big institutional collectors and galleries. Sometimes Joe who buys something for over his sofa. But there aren’t many Joes. Most people consume most art as a commercial product, which is what we are talking about with AI art. Commercial art is all the non-art imagery people get paid to make, used mostly as packaging and entertainment. And yeah, lots of those ‘artists’ craftsmen, production artists, imagineers… will be experiencing big shifts in their employment, rates, job titles, Real Soon Now. When the laws get worked out. Which could take years. Finally, Art is anything anyone makes for the sheer fun of it. If they want to call it art. Whether anyone buys it or not in their lifetime. Art is the human spirit making stuff, the way bees make honey, because they have to and, as with bees, the artist never has any leverage in the marketplace anyway, AI art or no, because, you know. Bees have no unions. Nobody does double entry accounting on a desert island. But they’ll make art there. So, now you know what art is. You’re welcome. Moving on. I have written about 20,000 words on AI art, commercial art vs fine art, and how new tech transforms visual communication over the last few months as I made images. I have a piece in the current issue of Future magazine, where I helped the editor with a cover made by Midjourney. So. I’ll be curating some stuff here soon, the stuff on Facebook and Twitter, which will get another pass, another polish, before showing up at this little frozen banana stand, for the five people a day that make that odd detour off the interstate to take a gander at The World’s Second Largest Rocking Chair. That would be this blog. Me. Maybe I’m the third largest, actually, as the second one is in Fanning, Missouri. At any rate. I’m making the illustrations now I wanted to make when I was 16 years old. It’s fun! And so, the profession I have been chasing for decades will soon be shrinking. Very, very quickly. Posted in AI art, Uncategorized2 Comments on AI art, Midjourney, and the future of visual communication…. Edision: the future in motion, EV car review Posted on September 6, 2022 by admin Leave a comment I wanted to talk about a new company, Edision, which is on track to release its first electric vehicles in about nine months. They’ll be available in Europe for at least a year before a model custom tailored for the US market is released. Its first products will target the luxury market–because that’s how all these things start out. Its mission statement claims profits from these models will be used to subsidize the rollout of barebones, low price / low cost models for the developing world. This is how the company claims its cars will reach double the carbon reductions of competing models. It’s a BOGO thing, where the ‘get one,’ is happening in another country. These kinds of charitable mission statements make me sad, as it’s generally a sign of a doomed effort. I don’t know if it’s because do-gooders can’t do capitalism, or if capitalism cheats and drives them out of businesses so the model doesn’t get a foothold. But I have high hopes for this effort. You can visit the Edision site for the specs. If you’re wondering about that featureless red dome, the Ladybug model features a wraparound video-feed display inside that allows a planetarium style viewing environment. (A traditional mode simulating a roof and side supports is provided as early testers found the virtual open cockpit nauseating at speed.) One advantage of this design for the uber wealthy, for whom it is targeted–a Kevlar layer lining for the interior of the dome; the whole vehicle gets a bulletproof layer, three actually, one around the passenger compartment, another around the vital control systems and electronics, and a third for the electric motor / wheel assemblies themselves. The tires are self-healing,. They say the ride gets bumpy, after you drive through a stream of machine gun fire, and the top speed drops from 140mph to something around 100, but that seems more than adequate. Third parties are providing aftermarket mods that support swiveling gun ports (there’s enough room in there, on top of the battery, which makes you wonder if this was planned all along…) and or a small rocket launcher (that hood ornament can iris open.) Anyway, this thing is priced to be competitive with TESLA models. There’s some yelping, from the ‘greener than thou’ crowd, about problematic sourcing for battery materials and manufacture, as the supposedly squeaky clean company is buying from workers being treated poorly by developing world manufactures. But you take the good with the bad. The cheap barebones models won’t be sold in the US, alas, though one wonders if there won’t be unauthorized imports… Oh, wait, I made this with Midjourney. And of course, the lifetime in the graphic arts, graphic design, UX design, web design, motion graphics, industrial design, photography, corporate Identity systems. Blah blah blah. I’m old. Oh, one on one tutoring sessions via the video conferencing platform of your choice in Midjourney are available in September. Reply here if you’re interested in learning how AI art can be of use in your career. Posted in AI art, UncategorizedLeave a Comment on Edision: the future in motion, EV car review The Outsider’s Slow Motion Success Story Posted on February 3, 2022 by admin 5 Comments As you read, and daydream about being a writer, you accumulate great expectations based on the experiences of a handful of heroes. But I’d be willing to bet there are more professional sport players than there are writers who make a living making making shit up. Many more. These unexamined assumptions bubble to the surface and pop and effervesce away as you start really writing, finishing, and submitting work. If you suffer from any kind of depression, unipolar, bipolar, or are the kind of person intimidated by the odds, every bursting bubble erodes your confidence, eats away at your focus. So, you know, best that you don’t have ADD either. Because the hard part about writing, for most, isn’t actually writing. It’s the expectations around having written. About how your work is received. It’s an on-going postponement of a dream, or the continuous cultivation of new ones as you find your place in the literary world. Which may remind you, a bit, of feelings you had in high-school. Hm. How many writers read that and said, “Welp. I’m done. Thanks asshole!” So, here’s the thing, when you are a late bloomer… you are gonna feel like an outsider. Probably. No matter what. Again, I am not trying to get you to quit. I have loved writing. I hope I keep writing. But I struggle with expectations almost every fucking time I write a goddamn word that isn’t social media. I know that I’m very lucky. I have a bunch of tick marks burned into my permanent record that will never cause me grief. I’m starting out, in everything, three yards ahead of a ton of people. But… in my writing? I’m still a godd… truncated (22,380 more characters in archive)