Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:chuappgame, author: Peng Chuwei

The war will not end until there is an answer.

At 15:22 on February 15, painter "Boer Q" posted his Valentine's Day picture for the game "White Night Aurora" on Weibo. At 15:51, someone pointed out in the comments section that the soles of the feet of the characters in the picture were in the opposite direction. Then, a painter pointed out that this kind of painting error seems to be caused by AI painting. Over the next two hours, hundreds of skeptical and angry comments poured into the Weibo.

After thousands of retweets, a self-examination campaign within the painter group began.

It is suspected that Boor Q used AI painting to act so quickly. At 23:06 that day, Rain from another World, a painter who also contributed to the White Night Aurora, released his drawing process from draft to drawing on Weibo because one of his slightly flawed paintings was also thought to have been painted in AI. At the same time, a "tomorrow's Ark"skin" has also become a suspect-angry painters because of the "Boer Q incident" look at each other suspiciously, trying to find out the "traitors" in the circle.

The artists' anger comes from their long struggle with AI painting.

AI painting is one of several application scenarios for artificial intelligence to generate content. The main principle is to collect a large number of paintings by existing human artists, classify and reorganize their content and style features through algorithms, and use them to generate new works.

In the past 10 months, painting using artificial intelligence has ushered in a rapid development. Under the impact of AI painting, domestic painters have experienced numerous disputes in just a few months, tasting the taste of surprise, unwillingness and disillusionment. On February 21, Zhihu user "broken Sunny" wrote a long article "tell passers-by why I refused AI painting". At the beginning of the article, he said: "after the story of Boer Q came out."... I was depressed for three days. "

"I clearly pointed out the powerful impact of AI painting in April last year, and there was no formed image at that time, but the warning of go has made it clear to me that this thing will soon completely impact the entire industry."

As mentioned in the long article, AI painting first attracted the attention of painters in China in April last year. On April 7 last year, Arvin, a technology blogger on Weibo, posted a series of pictures generated by Disco Diffusion. According to the official website, Disco Diffusion is an AI that can generate concept maps in natural language. The steps to use this AI are quite cumbersome, and the image generation speed is calculated on a daily basis. But this is enough to arouse some people's sense of crisis.

The images generated by Disco Diffusion look rough now, but the stunning Arvin's Weibo at the time was forwarded tens of thousands of times, sparking heated discussion among painters, with most of the comments coming from beginners. "A new era is coming, and I don't know what to do." A user named "Huatuan" said anxiously. On the other hand, the painter "the choking vegetables of painting" is not so afraid. In a Weibo post on April 30, he concluded: "after watching so many AI drawings recently, AI will never be able to do rigorous and exquisite depictions. If you master these stories and sexual addictions, you will not be afraid of losing your job."

The attitude of choking flowers in painting was also the attitude of painters who paid attention to AI painting at that time. They were surprised, but more of them did not take it seriously. Like many influential painters, choking vegetables call on young painters to raise their level and distance themselves from AI.

At this time, there are still nine months to go before the disillusioned Sunny hopelessly wrote in his article, "what is unexpected is not how powerful AI is, but how strange and fickle people are."

April-August: after his first contact with Disco Diffusion in April and received enthusiastic response, Arvin began to pay close attention to the news related to AI painting. In the following months, his Weibo has become the forefront for most painters in China to understand AI painting.

On April 22 last year, Arvin released a series of robot-themed pictures drawn by DALL E 2, a new AI drawing tool. At the beginning of these pictures, he wrote down his view: "although AI is powerful, it still needs human intervention." In May, while sharing the results of another AI drawing tool, Midjourney, he began to sigh: "it took a day to train the picture that Disco Diffusion drew, and it only took Midjourney five minutes to get the same result." At the end of Weibo, A Wen said to people in the comment area who admired AI's paintings: "good luck."

Unlike the public who are experimenting with new technologies for the first time, painters don't think it's good luck. Arvin carried a lot of news related to the results of AI paintings between May and July, during which time the works produced by AI painting tools became more and more elaborate, and a group of young painters began to express their views. Their voices, though weak, are enough to support a small-scale debate. These debates are carried out on various social and subscription platforms, often with young beginners on one side and a blurred public on the other.

"in June or July last year, many people who could not draw at all came into my circle, which was a declaration of war." A Fire said in bilibili dynamic. A Huo, a painter who has just entered the profession for a year and a half, calls these laymen "AI enthusiasts". "these fans made rude comments under my manuscript, saying that they were not as good as theirs, but as a result, they used AI painting."

The painter "A Dolphin" expressed similar feelings. As usual, Ahu sorted out 50 manuscripts she had painted over the past few months, and made them into a video released by bilibili. The video was supposed to be called "50 manuscripts of squatting paintings at home", but finally became "will I be replaced by AI? the bottom painter talks about his feelings." For A Dolphin, there are some words that have to be said: "there are some people who know nothing about painting and art and know nothing about the field of art, with these unearned products painted by AI, to laugh at and despise people who have spent a lot of energy and time learning to draw, and to negate the fruits of other people's labor." through AI painting, I found that so many people are hostile to us. "

Under Ah Du's video, there is a highly praised comment that represents the attitude of the public: "look at other craftsmen, some people have learned all their lives, and their crafts have been eliminated by machines for generations, so take it easy." This phrase will be repeated in various forms in the coming months: craftsmen and machines, coachmen and cars, painters and AI paintings. The public tried to understand the painters' feelings with this analogy, but in the end it became the fuse of one new debate after another.

"when the coachman and car painter" Yinuo "recalled to me the scene at that time, they showed me a message he sent to Qzone at that time:" you can't deny the meaning of our painting, nor can you ask us to remain silent when we are hurt by AI painting. " Eno could not describe to me exactly who "you" meant. "they are everywhere." Eno said.

If the debate before August was only focused on people like Ino who called themselves "bottom painters", whose voices could be ignored or even laughed at by most people, then the dispute after August has expanded to such an extent that no painter can ignore it.

In order to summarize more and more news related to AI painting, Arvin posted a Weibo post entitled "everything I know about AI painting". For five months from April to September, he continued to add new AI drawing tools to the Weibo post, noting his experiences and feelings.

July 22 last year was a special day for Arvin's followers. On that day, Arvin retweeted "everything I know about AI painting" again, commenting: "it's really too sad, after a month, I almost rewrote this Weibo... it feels like AI painting is fast entering the battle of the gods."

Arvin is right that AI's painting skills evolved decisively between late July and mid-August. On July 15th, Midjourney opened a public trial, which means that anyone can use it to produce pictures quickly. On August 17, another AI painting tool, Stable Diffusion, was opened up, causing a big earthquake in the field of AI painting. Soon, someone on Weibo successfully ran Stable Diffusion locally, generating a lot of AI pictures in 30 seconds.

Stable Diffusion's chart shows that the detail accuracy has improved significantly just a few days later, and on August 22, the drawing time was reduced from 30 seconds to 6 seconds.

On that day, Weibo painter "Zuobi Ono" expressed his views on AI painting-just as there was the first huge discussion among painters on Weibo about the significance of AI painting. "We know that the value of creativity is inestimable, and copyright is also used to stimulate and protect ideas, but AI painting turns a blind eye to the value of the artist's labor," he said. "if you take the work that other people have painted for tens of thousands of hours and finish a painting in a few seconds, I really have nothing to say. I really have nothing to say."

The Weibo post received more than 3000 retweets and tens of thousands of endorsements, and Zuo's statement resonated with many painters at that time, who felt powerless because of the lack of respect for creativity and artists by the technicians who developed the AI painting tool.

At the same time, Zuobi Ono also mentioned a key part-which will provide justice to painters in the war against AI painting-the copyright issue of AI painting.

Asa, an outsourced painter from a large factory, told me that in this discussion, he found that a sad tone that had spread before had finally been described, especially when the left pen Ono mentioned the following paragraph: "AI painting fueled by the artist's creativity may stimulate a temporary art bubble, but when the artist realizes that his creativity is not protected." Or which artist would like to put his work online for people to enjoy when he sees that his thinking will be plundered by fishing-like algorithms in the next second? "

"our way is not to cooperate." Asa said.

With pessimistic rejection, it has become a weapon for painters since then, and this mood reached its climax in the war in December.

August to November: war of Public opinion at this point in August 2022, domestic painters are still pondering what AI painting and the forces behind it will bring to them. Many foreign painters have established their own war zones.

At the end of August, a large number of Japanese painters issued statements on social platforms banning AI from learning his own painting style. Mimic is an AI painting platform featuring two-dimensional avatars, on which anyone can generate paintings that resemble the artist himself by entering the label of a particular painter. This has caused strong dissatisfaction among painters, who have to take measures on their own due to the lack of legal protection, such as putting watermarks in a prominent position, reducing the release of their own public works, or even deleting their published works. However, despite all the measures they have taken, these platforms like Mimic maintain an ambiguous attitude, and it is difficult to satisfy the painter.

In the same month, a set of pictures generated by AI was awarded a gold medal by unwitting judges at the annual state fair in Colorado. This triggered a unanimous protest among painters on social networks, and in the end, the organizers promised to add an award related to AI painting in the selection, but did not reaward the award to a human painter. A few days later, Pacific monthly used AI pictures in an article with pictures, which was discovered by readers and issued a brief apology.

Through these disputes, domestic painters ushered in more thinking. They have too much to think about and too much to say. Mr Zuobi Ono is a striking example. As he said at the beginning of Weibo: "I just want to talk."

Time goes by in these thoughts and speeches. Between August and September, painters' resistance to AI painting was relatively weak and made little progress. Some people are looking for a way out, others are overwhelmed by powerlessness in the confrontation-since it is impossible to completely deny the value of AI painting from the legal or artistic level, blocking developers and users, then it can only show the harm of AI painting to themselves. This war will not stop.

Arvin's summary of AI painting tools stayed at the end of September. From being in high spirits in April to stopping updating, Arvin's attitude towards AI painting is also changing. In a Weibo post in early October, he mentioned why he had stopped moving the latest AI drawing tool, Novel AI: "this model is so controversial that it starts to eat back at other good AI tools."

A Wen explains why Novel AI is controversial and different from the AI drawing tools mentioned earlier. As developers use an atlas containing the works of famous Japanese painters to train Novel AI, users can easily draw pictures with a strongly specialized style through Novel AI, which is undoubtedly the most violent blow to the group of painters dominated by two-dimensional painting style.

Artists like Arvin, who boycotted Novel AI, finally raised the flag that had been sewn up as early as August-the atlas developers used to train AI were unauthorized and infringing.

The "infringement" of AI painting has gradually become the consensus of painters in this period.

On October 3 last year, painter Rosta Ripple Warrior called on Weibo that "all painters should unite to boycott AI to learn their own paintings." "if you think about AI's progress in just a few months, I'm sure everyone thinks that AI painting will develop to a very scary level in a few years," he said. First of all, we should know that AI painting is not simply a simple combination of existing painting resources to make it look like a new painting, but to analyze the logic and characteristics of painting and reproduce it. To take a simple example, feed all the fruits painted by Rembrandt to AI, and AI can draw all the fruits in Rembrandt style, even if Rembrandt himself has never seen it. "

Novel AI can use a single artist's atlas to train and produce pictures. Although hundreds of thousands of people have seen the appeal of the ripple warrior Rosta, not so many people support it, and many painters have been overwhelmed by their previous powerlessness. To them, the boycott seemed too late, too weak, and the result seemed to be just as they thought-attacks from AI paintings and their users had begun, and the painter was powerless to fight back.

On October 17, Weibo painter "FKEY-" issued a statement boycotting AI, adding noise and watermarks to his work. Before long, Novel AI users "vertical and horizontal" openly trained AI with their works and painted a lot of works of similar style. Beneath these works, AI users proudly commented: "thus it can be seen that the people who retweeted (boycott the statement) and believed that the real painter knew nothing about machine learning." In response, FKEY- said on Weibo: "I'm not ashamed that I don't understand AI, but they should be ashamed of me. Well, what about you people who are doing shameful things?"

Similar events are taking place simultaneously all over the world. On October 12, when a South Korean painter was broadcasting a painting live, a viewer imported his draft from the live broadcast into the AI drawing tool, got the complete painting first, and then published the painting on the social platform as evidence of the painter's "plagiarism".

In these conflicts, both sides have their own purposes and positions, but there are already some self-evident premises in the belligerent environment-the unauthorized use of AI painting seems to be tacitly regarded as "shameful" and "shameful", and most of the conflicts of the same period are on this "hidden rule". When we look back at those discussions in August, we will find that such a premise does not yet exist.

Qidong, the painter, said to me, "it is wrong to paint with AI. At that time, I have been trying to let everyone know this, and everyone who paints has an obligation to spread these views." Qidong's words mean that after October 2022, many painters began to break away from the reflection within the group and strive for the superiority of public opinion.

During this period, young painters began to use "corpse" to refer to AI's work, trying to arouse people's intuitive disgust. In their context, AI paintings kill works painted by live-action painters and piece together new works with their "corpses". "do you really like breaking the children of other painters into 'corpses' and then spelling them into husbands and wives?" Shan Wan, who is learning to paint, left a message in the super talk of AI painting, which was supported by many people.

November-January: the best part: at the end of October, painter Sunderland waiting said on Weibo: "people who can't paint should resist AI, because it directly kills the possibility of your self-expression, you may have wild imagination, but AI will beat your ideas to the end with techniques and ideas that you 'learn' from other painters." don't think that painters don't understand AI, we already have an industry consensus. "

This passage confirms an impression given to the painter "Maoa" during that period. Mao told me that in October, there were a lot of introductions about AI paintings on Weibo, not by technology bloggers, but by painters. On the one hand, they emphasize the possibility of infringement to the public through the principle of AI painting; on the other hand, through these introductions, like pre-war mobilization, a consensus can be established within the painter community.

However, as Arvin said: "the moment Stable Diffusion open source, Pandora's box opened, Novel AI is definitely not the worst product." On November 23, Niji Journey, a new AI drawing tool, began internal testing. It is known as the strongest two-dimensional image generation software, which is the work of the development team of the famous two-dimensional profile picture generation software "Wifu". The team says the AI can mimic the artist's tag entered by the user in more detail than the Novel AI.

Niji Journey is better at drawing two-dimensional-style pictures than Novel AI. The emergence of Niji Journey symbolizes the end of the battle of the gods within AI painting. Painters are facing the ultimate enemy in the field of AI painting, which also has the accuracy beyond ordinary painters and undeniable threat of infringement. It can be said that the war between the painter and AI painting finally came to the most exciting part.

From late November to December, many painters have come out to show their boycott attitude, and any criticism or popular science related to AI painting can get a lot of attention and spread. Even Hua Yucai, who thought that AI painting "will not cost a painter his job" in April, also changed his attitude, emphasizing on Weibo on December 15: "… but I will still boycott AI in my own way, that is, I will never use AI to assist my creation, and will prove with practical actions that human creativity is higher than AI and will never be replaced by AI."

The Weibo message comes a day after hundreds of painters on ArtStation, a well-known integrated art website, launched a campaign to say "no" to AI images. On ArtStation, the name of Polish concept artist Greg Rutkowski has been quoted more than 300,000 times as a tag for AI paintings. When someone searches for his works on the site, the results are mostly AI paintings that look like his own style. ArtStaion's inaction to this behavior led Greg Rutkowski to become a representative of the movement, just as his experience is a microcosm of other painters on the website, this influential movement is just one of a series of boycotts of AI painting in the North American art world.

In these movements, painters protested in a massive verbal protest and a self-destructive charge. At first, they stopped publishing their works, and at the same time, the pictures of "AI ban" as a symbol of the event were uploaded to the website, and after rounds of invalid protests, painters began to delete their works and leave the social networking site forever.

The campaign ended with a few simple promises from ArtStation (for example, on-line AI painting area). From the painters' point of view, this is far from enough. "Today, station A painters failed to boycott AI, which is so frustrating that painters can't even keep a community they use." The painting flower choking dish said with regret.

The "AI banned" images used by painters who boycotted AI on ArtStation have been unstoppable since then, and it was one of the few facts that painters could agree on AI painting at the end of 2022. After a wave of pessimism swept through social platforms large and small, painters on Weibo began to discuss the meaning of painting and human value-the war seemed to be coming to an end, and the former groups disappeared, leaving disintegrated individuals. It seems that all individuals can do is mourn, reflect and find their own way out. The anger of painters over Carl Q's use of AI painting on February 15 this year may be the final outbreak.

When more people commented on the matter, they just asked with skepticism, "can AI paintings accept commercial drafts?" More and more people are looking for ways to coexist with AI, and in the process, they get a taste of sadness, the source of which is what the disillusioned Sunny wrote at the end of the article: "the image we once thought of as a baby has become ownerless, and its value begins to decline."

2 months later: confused in the past 10 months, the domestic painter community seems to have been fighting the obscured "enemy", the proponent of AI painting, the painter who uses AI painting, the developer of AI painting, the painting platform of inaction, the vague copyright law and the anxiety that the sum of the above has been magnified by social platforms.

They have experienced many defeats in the war, from the ridicule of AI painting users, to the "betrayal" of senior painters and big manufacturers who first used AI painting, and then to the copyright issue-so far, the digital copyright of AI painting is still a vague and controversial area. In past reports of Toule, it was mentioned the views of a lawyer:

"this area is still a gray area of the law," Xing said. "one or two big lawsuits may be needed in the future to promote awareness and change."

At present, it seems that these lawsuits are coming soon. On January 16 this year, foreign artists filed a lawsuit against some developers of AI paintings. the results of these lawsuits are not yet known, but at least it shows that there will be clear precedents abroad for reference in the near future.

During this period of time, painters have also made some achievements. After a month-long protest by North American painters, Epic Games, the owner of ArtStation, announced on January 23 that it would modify the terms of service to allow artists to label their works as "NoAI" so that their works would not be used for AI painting study. In Japan, Skeb, an intermediary platform commissioned by painters, also announced that it would ban uploading AI-generated works to the "illustration" category for people to choose from-all these are victories for painters.

The war between painters and AI painting will continue for a long time, and as individuals, we will finally have to implement the question of "how to find the meaning of creation". AI painting does screen out a group of painters who do not love painting so much, but people who are passionate about painting can survive after all, they may become colleagues with AI, or they may never come into contact with AI, and no matter how they survive, the first and last thing they will have to face is their own heart-can they draw without all distractions? Can you balance the fun you get from painting with the blow you get from reality?

The war will not end until these questions are answered.

(the characters in the article are all aliases. )

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