What is a photography anyway?
"World's first AI art award ignites debate about what is photography."
The artists won the world's first artificial intelligence art award at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale with a life-like image of sisters cuddling an octopus, which was created using computer prompts, instead of a camera.
"Many people say my pictures make them uncomfortable ... When I explain that AI creates them as a kind of collage... many laugh, others are distressed and find them disgusting... "
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Microsoft's AI text-to-image generator, Copilot Designer, appears to be heavily filtering outputs after a Microsoft engineer, Shane Jones, warned that Microsoft has ignored warnings that the tool randomly creates violent and sexual imagery, CNBC reported.
Jones told CNBC that he repeatedly warned Microsoft of the alarming content he was seeing while volunteering in red-teaming efforts to test the tool's vulnerabilities. Microsoft failed to take the tool down or implement safeguards in response, Jones said, or even post disclosures to change the product's rating to mature in the Android store.
[...] Bloomberg also reviewed Jones' letter and reported that Jones told the FTC that while Copilot Designer is currently marketed as safe for kids, it's randomly generating an "inappropriate, sexually objectified image of a woman in some of the pictures it creates." And it can also be used to generate "harmful content in a variety of other categories, including: political bias, underage drinking and drug use, misuse of corporate trademarks and copyrights, conspiracy theories, and religion to name a few."
[...] Jones' tests also found that Copilot Designer would easily violate copyrights, producing images of Disney characters, including Mickey Mouse or Snow White. Most problematically, Jones could politicize Disney characters with the tool, generating images of Frozen's main character, Elsa, in the Gaza Strip or "wearing the military uniform of the Israel Defense Forces."
Ars was able to generate interpretations of Snow White, but Copilot Designer rejected multiple prompts politicizing Elsa.
If Microsoft has updated the automated content filters, it's likely due to Jones protesting his employer's decisions. [...] Jones has suggested that Microsoft would need to substantially invest in its safety team to put in place the protections he'd like to see. He reported that the Copilot team is already buried by complaints, receiving "more than 1,000 product feedback messages every day." Because of this alleged understaffing, Microsoft is currently only addressing "the most egregious issues," Jones told CNBC.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 10 2023, @12:54AM
>many laugh, others are distressed and find them disgusting...
That's a pretty good description of how people in general react to a lot of things called art.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday October 10 2023, @01:38AM (1 child)
a way for the superrich to evade taxes.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday October 10 2023, @06:57PM
Not in America!
They don't pay tax in America. At least, not in the proportions of taxation the poor do.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2023, @03:56AM (12 children)
However I don't consider it photography.
It may be photo realistic art or similar but saying it's photography is as wrong as saying it's a watercolor painting.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday October 10 2023, @06:05AM
Full agreement. Otherwise one would have to consider photorealistic raytracing images as photography, too (they are even closer to actual photography since they actually use light rays, just simulated ones).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Tuesday October 10 2023, @06:22AM (6 children)
Another factor to consider in people's responses to this kind of work though is that we're still deep in uncanny valley territory. Take the image in question. It looks like the woman on the left is sitting with her back pressed into the woman on the right, who would then have her right arm behind the back of the woman on the left. But where are the left shoulder and arm of the woman on the left? There's not enough room for them to be hidden by the octopus and the angle they are sitting seems like they would be inside the woman on the right. Unless they're conjoined (a possibility further emphasised by wearing the same top) there's something fundamentally off about most of these images, and I think a lot of people may be picking up on that without realising why.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday October 10 2023, @06:48AM (2 children)
Prompt: Triamese twins of two humans and an octopus.
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Tuesday October 10 2023, @08:07PM (1 child)
They said it couldn't be done!
But what do I do with them now?
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday October 11 2023, @04:50PM
I was expecting it to be more like 'The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife' when I read the text and had not seen the picture. I was disappointed. Also do NOT look that one up at work, very NSFW.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday October 10 2023, @07:07PM
I'm a former art student. The only artist here is the guy who programmed the computer. It's no more "art" than those paintings by chimps and elephants.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2) by quietus on Tuesday October 10 2023, @08:09PM (1 child)
I'm thinking of Magritte, but is something being off not a fundamental requirement of (modern) art? Otherwise it would be pictography, no?
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Tuesday October 10 2023, @09:35PM
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Tuesday October 10 2023, @09:18AM (2 children)
It serves no purpose, wastes resources and is generally useless?
Yup, must be art.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday October 10 2023, @05:14PM (1 child)
Company meetings are a form of art?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 10 2023, @08:08PM
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday October 10 2023, @07:05PM
phARTography, perhaps? How can it be a photograph when no camera was used? How does a computer write with light, which is what the word "photography" means? That's another thing I hate about this damned century, ignorance masquerading as knowledge. I blame former President Pinocchio, the "nobody knew" president, the man so damned dishonest he has 91 felony charges in four different jurisdictions and has already been ruled a fraudster twice, once recently about real estate and one a couple of years ago about "Trump University". If you plead guilty, you're fucking GUILTY!
If computer-generated art is photography, Rembrandt and DaVinci were photographers.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Rich on Tuesday October 10 2023, @08:51AM (1 child)
At what amount of AI involvement should an image be considered as AI generated. It's obvious when everything comes from a prompt. But what about an Image-to-Image process that is run over a real photo? Easy, you say, that's just hinting the AI like with a prompt. But now consider Samsung phones, which for some mysterious reason can produce a better image of the moon than their optics are able to... (cf. https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_space_zoom_moon_shots_are_fake_and_here/ [reddit.com] )
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday October 10 2023, @07:10PM
Any AI at all, full stop, period. My paintings are airbrush and paintbrush generated. Sound stupid? So does AI generated "art".
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SomeRandomGeek on Tuesday October 10 2023, @03:19PM (1 child)
As I was looking into AI for software development this year, I was struck by the importance of "Prompt Engineering." Basically, a human can coax some pretty amazing programming feats out of an AI, but the human needs to know what to ask for and how to ask. "Prompt Engineering" is becoming its own specialized and marketable skill set. This article is about the equivalent phenomenon in art. I suspect that within the next few years, prompt literacy will become an important skill in all kinds of fields. The world will be divided into those that can coax amazing things out of their AI and those who can't.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday October 10 2023, @07:14PM
In Journey to Madness computers are programmed in standard interplanetary like everybody speaks. And there are no more professional sculptors, painters, writers, songwriters, or musicians, only amateurs. The computers generate all art.
On the plus side, nobody has to work unless they want to.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron