site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

8
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Have you actually ever downloaded a model and tried making ai art beyond the basic stuff you get on the like chat gpt?

I think a lot of people don't actually understand that there is actually a lot of real decision an expression able to be done with ai art. I've downloaded A1111 and a few models, loras and tools. Typically to make anything interesting takes generating hundreds of images off of base prompts, often including technique like giving the model a wire frame for subject body positioning as well as painting the image to have different prompts populate different parts of the image. Then once I make a good base image I'll use inpainting to have it redraw some sections using a number of nobs and dials with new crafted prompts. Sometimes I'll even take an image into M$ paint and do some crude drawings because it can get stuck on colors.

It's certainly less time consuming and difficult that personally taking pen/pencil/brush to paper but I think a lot of people are under the impression that AI art generation is actually just entering a really specific prompt and are missing out on a genuine advancement putting creative tools in the hands of people who no longer need to spend hundreds or thousands of hours practicing things not really directly related to creativity.

I'm not against these tools. I think those are actually pretty cool and useful. However, whatever Adobe does with Photoshop and the examples you give are to me the motte. When it's used as a tool, I have no qualms with it. When it makes artist's life easier without compromising the artistic vision it's amazing, it's the best outcome. The bailey in the argument against AI art is twofold:

  • It is currently most commonly used to generate slop using a single prompt. It is already a huge problem, to a point where indie search engines add an option to filter it out. The OP is asking why is there outrage against the AI, and the reason for it are not the tools that you and I agree are impressive. The problem lies in the lazy one-prompt slop, which I had in mind when writing the post.
  • The future promise of the technology is generating full blown songs, pictures, videos just by using a prompt and without compromising on quality. This future, once again, is not an ideal outcome for me because even if the future GenAI doesn't compromise on quality, the one-promptness of it will still compromise the vision.