Remember how we were told that genAI learns “just like humans”, and how the law can’t say about fair use, and I guess now all art is owned by big tech companies?
Well, of course it’s not true. Exploiting a few of the ways in which genAI --is not-- like human learners, artists can filter their digital art in such a way that if a genAI tool consumes it, it actively reduces the quality of the model, undoing generalization and bleading into neighboring concepts.
Can an AI tool be used to undo this obfuscation? Yes. At scale, however, doing so requires increasing compute costs more and more. This also looks like an improvable method, not a dead end – adversarial input design is a growing field of machine learning with more and more techniques becoming highly available. Imagine this as sort of “cryptography for semantics” in the sense that it presents asymetrical work on AI consumers (while leaving the human eye much less effected).
Now we just need labor laws to catch up.
Wouldn’t it be funny if not only does generative AI not lead to a boring dystopia, but the proliferation and expansion of this and similar techniques to protect human meaning eventually put a lot of grifters out of business?
We must have faith in the dark times. Share this with your artist friends far and wide!
Oh, that sucks. That brings to mind an episode of the “mystery show” podcast where someone had a lunchbox with art based on the old sitcom “Welcome back, Kotter” that depicted some scene that seemed incongruous. The episode then went into a deep dive about the show, the show’s creator, the lunchbox company, associates of the now/then-deceased artist that designed the lunchbox, and many others, all to try and justify the existence of that seemingly incorrect design.
While I doubt that any significant number of people would ever investigate the design of merchandising like the above, it is nice to think about the stories behind objects. In the quest to make things cheaper to create, we lose stories like this, and the world gets a bit darker.