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This is going to be a major issue in courts, legislatures, and the organizations overseeing international IP conventions. It may take fifteen years to get this sorted out. Maybe more. Consider the current inconsistencies:
1. A generative AI text prompt, no matter how short, simple, and banal, i.e. "Elf girl with big boobs," could have copyright protection, but the finished image might not be protected. Completely inconsistent with the laws governing screenplays and motion pictures. Both the screenplay (produced or unproduced) and the finished motion picture would be protected under current law.
2. If I stand behind a painter or photographer and make suggestions about what their pictures should be, my suggestions are almost certainly not protected IP any more than any other conversation/speech, and the resulting painting is the IP of the painter or photographer (unless it's a comissioned work or the artist is an employee). Yet a text prompt for generative AI could have a completely different status.
3. At what point is a mechanical device responsible for the creation of an image? Obviously, a computer running a generative AI program is a much more complex device than a crayon, but aren't all created physical images (even digital images on a screen) dependent upon some use of artificial mechanisms? Is the distinction between crayon-on-paper (a human-created image) and Generative AI digital image prompted by typed words arbitrary and bogus? Aren't both conceptual creativity and technical execution both absolutely necessary to create an image?
4. Despite some claims and fears, "artificial intelligence" programs aren't generating art without essential human contributions, from either their original programmers or prompters (and usually both). These generative AI programs are really 'Chinese rooms' (if unfamiliar with the term, head to Wikipedia) which simulate intelligent actions, without exercising any real creativity or artistry. Such programs aren't creating autonomously and, to my way of thinking, aren't artists/authors/creators in their own right, so arguments that human creativity isn't involved with generative AI images are invalid.
The whole problem is about the human creativity being used without consent of those humans whose creativity was used in creating the resulting image/text/whatever.
The AI works I saw on DeviantArt were mostly pretty cheesy. There were some really interesting, outstanding things, but not too many. The rest is mass-produced stuff that you quickly get sick of because it's basically always the same. The circle of artists (if you can call them that) will increase because now even the neighbour's dachshund can make AI 'art', but I don't see much danger of AI displacing 3D art. Combinations of both are certainly appealing.
I have no plans to even play with AI generated "art". For me, creative work is a way to distract me from my chronic pain issues. It also keeps my brain active through learning new techniques and software. So I'll stick with my traditonal and digital art methods. After all..where's the fun, relaxtion and therepeutic benefit of just doing a few mouse clicks to create an image?
AI generated art is going to have a direct impact to Daz's ecosystem and their bottom line. What Daz the company seems to have no understanding of is the network effect and importance of building a community. As you have observed, artists on DA are seeing interest in their 3D art drop. These artists are not only a source of income for Daz and its PAs, they are also acting as free marketing. Before, users who would see a cool picture would ask, "How did you make that!?" or see that the artist said "genesis blah blah rendered with Iray" and then learn about Daz, potentially becoming new users and a new source of revenue for Daz. This is how I became a Daz Studio user, through seeing art made for a game on a forum and saw how it was being made with Genesis figures. If these artists stop posting on DA, there goes the free marketing.
If Daz knew what was good for them, they would be full on deep community building right now to weather the upcoming storm, reaching out to key community members, engaging the community and trying to build excitement and awareness, asking users what are the pain points in using Daz Studio and spending resources to address the gaps and pain points of Daz Studio. Happy users who can make art with less friction are going to be more excited about buying new assets and showing off their art for others to see. Instead we get... monkey business.
well AI art has NOT stopped me buying and rendering 3D content
however some 3D content creators with their attitude towards me for just using AI by blocking me, putting me on ignore etc on various forums and platforms
has stopped me buying their products
it's a self fullfilling prophecy
I still do buy content for my 3D renders from many PAs who don't like AI as they are allowed their own opinions
but block me and I won't insult you with my money and the irony is I am not actually pro AI just not against it. I agree many of the concerns are valid
Think about the range of people who buy content. There are fresh, new users who are just starting out to content whales that buy everything to hobbyists to people that do commission work and in between. The lower end of the market is going to slowly disappear. The users who just want to do quick, low effort, load and apply pose pinups will slowly fade away as the AI tools are so much easier and cheaper to do this. If there's no new users entering the Daz ecosystem, over time the ability for a PA to turn a profit is going to diminish. When PAs can't get a return on their time invested in making products, there will be fewer and fewer PAs to buy from.
well fortunately I have Zbrush, Carrara and am getting better at Blender
for creating my own crap which I rig in various platforms too
losing DAZ would upset me, I won't lie but it won't stop me using 3D or buying premade content elsewhere because I use other platforms besides DAZ studio
I fully agree many will and already do use AI because it's easy
good luck trying to gatekeep them
but why FFS alienate the people still interested in using 3D just because they happen to enjoy playing with all the toys?
I think AI has a limited place in the market, but dear (insert Deity/Ancestor/other thing you swear by of your choice here)... so much of it is beyond cringeworthy. More to the point, are you an artist is you enter in some parameters and the computer spits out an image cobbled together from the works of other creators? Of course you're not, no more than if you'd gone to an artist and said "I want a picture of an elf with big boobs sitting on a hippopotomus." I'd place it on the same level as adults who paint by numbers or color in coloring books. For years the mantra has always been "there is no 'Make Art' button." I would argue that what exists now is a 'Fake Art' button."
As to that limited place in the market... there's definitely a use for it, provided the data that it's built on is legitimately sourced and the application is basic things like adding foliage, noise removal, creating basic shapes... things that serve as aids rather than an end-all and be-all. However, what I imagine what we're going to see over the next dozen years is the same thing that has happened in the music industry where people are constantly suing for use of similar note progressions. And that means that all it will take is one big artist (or entertainment company, more likely, and I'm betting it will be Disney) looking at something that a button pusher "created" and saying "No, that's our intellectual property, and you owe us a million dollars in royalties." At that point the button pusher's defense will most likely be "but I didn't realize it was similar"... an argument that has already failed to stand up in court repeatedly with music. And then, inevitably, the personal injury lawyers will discover that there's a new market to move into and people who posted a sketch on DeviantArt will be suing anything that vaguely looks like their work, ultimately leading to the AI companies being forced to provide a legal list of the source of every element used in every image created just to cover their own rear ends. Sigh. In the meantime, starting postning a copyright notice on all of your art from this point forward.
Here's the thing. AI should've never been this large of a discussion if it was in fact its own medium. Instead those who use it continually hijack other places of art, like illustration groups and pages, 3D modeling, 3D rendering always and continually trying to impose how much "better" their output is.
In truth it's not even the same medium, photographers don't go to illustrators to tell them their result is more realistic. The only thing I've ever seen is the constant trying to get some kind of a reaction to get noticed. The other thing is deep misunderstanding of any existing kind of art and medium, or of learning in itself. Your mind learns the same as machine? Good for you, you go with that.
After all, if AI generated art is so high and mighty and superior, why doesn't it even have its own platform, its own place, gallery where those like-minded can be together in their never-ending awesomeness? Because it's always trying to be something it's not in order to "replace", it's so powerful but fails to be it's own thing.
"AI will replace this and that" sure, and what then? Will all of internet just look like warped out copy-paste of everything we've ever seen before? With art come artists, names, styles, experiences. AI will never top that, a stickman with an attitude signed by a real person will be more interesting than something "perfect" coming out of AI with no identity behind it. Perfection is boring. You can still go on the beach and put some stones and shells in a nice shape and people will think it's very nice and inspired and artistic. AI doesn't change that.
I don't care if I had to remove people who continually talk about it from my life to get some peace of mind or remove myself from circles where I felt uncofortable all the time. When you buy someone's products, you don't own them as a person, trade's a done deal at the place it happens. Nobody owes you the curtesy, people have lives and priorities of their own and you just may not be it. And you don't need to know what they might have going on in the first place.
Place laws where they need to be placed. Protect those who need protection and do the right thing. And just try and be a good person, we're all going to be forgotten some day. I've abandoned and lost jobs so many times and not once thought that is the end of the world, things change all the time in all the lives.
Sites like CGSociety and ZBrush Central have a similar contempt for DS users, saying what we do is not real art because we just buy content that some else has made and don't make it ourselves. Art prejudice and snobbery is ancient and certainly nothing new to the scene and I try to keep out of that way of thinking.
Yep, just like if you don't make your own paints, paintbrushes and canvas, you're not really an artist.
I get that if you buy a thing at the Daz store, load it and render it with default settings, that's not really art. But as soon as you combine things, retexture things, pick your lights, atmospheres, cameras, etc., you make it yours - and you've arguably made art. The ability to do these things is why I'm not interested at this time in backtracking to static 2D images, even if some of them are pretty. I want the power of picking exactly where the camera is, where the lights and shadows fall, microexpressions and those tiny variations on a pose that make all the difference in the what the figure is saying. I want to choose the colors, the garments, the objects. That's not to say that everything I render or post in the gallery is perfection, because obviously it's not - after 2+ years, I'm still learning about all of these things. But if I want to get what is in my imagination into a physical form where I can see it or share it, that's how I can do it today, by using a tool like Daz which - potentially at least - gives me the power over all of these things.
Not with today's AI.
As a Graphic Artist. I have felt the pinch of Ai . what would take me weeks to design & deploy a website now can be done in hours with Microsoft Azure Ai
I do not make as much animation & animated presets anymore. I do it only for fun mostly now. what would take me weeks or even months to create a animation with daz studio. Ai can do the whole project in hours including the rendering in a faction of what any 3d app can render animation. so why bother other than doing it for the fun of it.
I do believe there should be some protection to artist from Ai and deep fakes that can be created using Ai.
Protection from Ai is one of the contributing factors of the witters strike going on in Hollywood right now.
weather you think Ai is Good /Bad/ Ugly/ Agree /Disagree with it., Ai is here to stay you can't put that cat back in the bag now. So how you adapt so you can survive the coming changes Ai is bringing will be the challenge all artist will face.
I agree paulawp, but the same would apply to Stable Diffusion in that if you have a specific image in mind it will take a ton of tweaking and multiple attemps to get what you want. "If you have a specific image in mind" is the clincher as I don't think many AI/SD users do that..... just churn out whatever happens to look pretty.... hence the inane blandness of most AI images. As for the claims of AI "one click" laziness, it ain't. A typical image I produce usually involves 150-200 renders each with refined prompts, then out to PS for postwork and back into SD until I'm satisfied. In fact as a Poser/DS user since 2001 I've found Stable Diffusion more challenging (and frustrating) than DS/Poser. The pay-off is that SD can do things that DS finds difficult or impossible to do, like realistic hair, realistically drapped clothing, realistic human faces. But it's useless for the VNs I make because it's so mercurial you can't hope to produce consistent scenes, but it's very good at what it does do.
...when I was in oil painting class in college, I was asked during a meeting why I never did any modern abstract work. I replied "if I did I'd probably turn out a half dozen paintings a week," and added that I'd probably go broke for all the canvas and wood for the stretcher fames needed..
[edited to addthe post this was supposed to follow]
I agree, you should not care what others think about your art period. It is art!!! There is no good or bad art, it just is! If AI gets people into creating stuff great but people are fickle and they will eventually just loose interest. Just do what you like and do it for yourself.
Great views and opinions here. Thanks particularly to fred9803 and Ivy for sharing practical experiences using AI. It's certainly a good counterpoint to the polemical arguments against AI that range from soulful musings to the quick-and-dirty "it's boring!" dismissal. At the rate this topic pops up, the Daz mods may want to consolidate it all in one thread. Unlike NFTs, I wager AI isn't a flash in the pan phenomenon. Having a discussion thread for reference would come in handy for the next fellow who has the case of AI existential shock!
One or two observations ...
A few years ago, during the height of the CV-19 pandemic, one fellow remarked in these forums about the value he found in his Daz hobby. As a means of creating art, it helped him cope with the death and despair surrounding him. This was before the vaccines came out, and he spoke of the joy in figuring out the technical as well as the artistic aspects of rendering 3D art. Will AI serve that same purpose some day? Beyond the gee-whiz or the economic value, will AI art meet our emotional needs? As with any form of visual art, I think that's the measuring stick we should hold generative art against.
About AI prompts, it reminds me of computer programming. After all, what is coding if not human readable instructions translated into byte instruction for the computer to carry out? But you don't have to be a jaded code jock to appreciate the gulf that separates programming from the visual arts. What I've discovered shifting my waking hours from coding to look-dev is that true value lies in the basics: line art, lighting and shading, color, form, visual depth, etc. When we work with Daz -- or in my case, mostly Blender -- we translate these concepts into the technical language of 3D: hue-saturation-value, UV and texture maps, normals, light temperature, camera aperture, Z-depth, etc.
Crafting AI prompts, evolving as they are, is just another process of translation. It's still us communicating with a machine. Perhaps what's off-putting to the pen-and-paper crowd about Daz is the same that turns us off from generative art. 3D technology and AI prompts are clunky and convoluted, clumsy ways to instruct the computer in the basics of art that make up our artistic vision. It lacks the organic way our mind and our hands work together to actualize that vision. Just as Daz isn't bespoke, AI art lacks the personal touch too.
What do I think? As someone who grew up speaking a handful of languages at home, it doesn't matter. At the end of the day, it's just how we translate our vision into tangible medium. If there's something about languages, they evolve, they adapt, and they borrow from one another. So I don't have a Manichean view of AI art; in stark, black and white terms; or that the new will kill-off the old. Instead I see it as another phase in the cycle of change. We just have to learn how to live with it, that's all.
Cheers!
AI 'art' is big at the moment, because it gives the neighbour's dachshund the ability to create 'artistic' pictures of his favorite celebrities with beachballs on their chest, once he has 600 thousand such pictures, what then?
All 4 of those points really revolve around one concept: how much of the human element is present in the work.
1- The big elf girl was written by a person, that's why it copyrightable. The image 100% created by a machine is not. A screenplay or movie is a performance by humans, which has been acted by humans, edited by humans, and so on. If by chance we are talking about nature footage, that footage is still captured by a human, the human is framing the image on screen, and the footage is edited and post worked by people.
2- A text prompt is not a suggestion, it is the input for an equation. That is the difference. The artist can choose whether or not to take your suggestion, the AI cannot choose. Your suggestion to a person may not have much influence, or maybe it does. The artist might take into account other suggestions by other people. They are human. However a prompt is more like writing a code or equation. There is some debate about whether prompts can even be copyrighted as well. But for now they can be.
Why is a prompt like an equation? Because you can use the same prompt on a different computer, with the same settings in the AI on the same AI data and get the exact same image. AI generated images are NOT random, and this is also why they are not human. The noise seed patterns they use for images can be randomized by the software, but if you use the same seed, you will get the same result. It is all an equation produced by your prompt. And that is why some believe that even prompts should not be copyrighted. The US Office stance on this is that there are so many possible prompts (and thus equations) that this is not really an issue. So they are allowing the copyright at this time.
3- This is the big question. Go back to point number 1. If you start to manipulate the image yourself, then you begin to crest into copyright territory. The US Copywrite Office discusses this, and that is why I use the words I wrote carefully. Remember I wrote that it doesn't take much to earn the copyright, this is reference to that. It is possible to take a generated image and turn it into a copyrighted work. Like I said, it takes more than just words, you need to do something to the image. The question is how much, and the answer is ever changing.
This debate doesn't just concern how much input a human needs, it is very similar to the debate for how much input an artist needs to be granted copyright in the first place, AI or not. A great example is the lawsuit over Andy Warhol's prints of Prince in the 80s. The image that Andy used was actually a photo he did not have full permission to use. So the question became how much different does Andy's work need to be in order to pass as fair use. The court ruled against the Warhol Foundation. This lawsuit could have implications for the current lawsuits against AI companies for their data sets.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/18/1176881182/supreme-court-sides-against-andy-warhol-foundation-in-copyright-infringement-cas
Going further, you have the case where a photographer had a bunch of monkeys take pictures with his camera. Because the monkeys took the pictures, the courts did not grant the photographer a copyright. This goes back to the requirement of human authorship. In this situation, the photographer did a lot of things to make these pictures happen. He gave the monkeys the camera in the first place, and I believe he tried to show them how to use it. But ultimately he did not take the photos himself, and that was all that mattered. This case set the precedent for human authorship, and this case is going to be a big influence on the lawsuits against AI companies data set collections.
This also means that no, your trained parrot cannot make a copywrited prompt with text to speech into an AI generator, no matter how funny it might be to watch. But...you might be able to copyright the video recording of your parrot in action. So at least you have that.
4- This is pretty much covered by earlier, as the prompts themselves are comparable to equations. These are nothing but very fancy math, using the base of data that it is trained on. There is no randomized element, nor any human element to what gets generated by AI. The only random or human element is, well, the human putting in the prompt. I don't think anybody is actually claiming this tech to be true artificial intelligence, but they are using it as a buzz word.
RobotHeadArt I think your assessment is quite convincing and the powers that be do well to heed your advice. The recent 'headline' series of sales with a hefty discount when owning 30 items of such and such were almost too good to be true, it is tempting to surmise that this too has something to do with AI starting to affect the bottom line. Having said that, this particular sales/marketing campaign was quite successful in stirring up a purchase frenzy in yours truly, but for me this agitated shopping activity was permeated by a last days of Pompei feeling of unease (but it could be my guilt spending so much money...) .
The novelty might wear off, but compared to the run of the mill cutie pie 3d renders I have seen here and on DA, a word like "worship" in the Stable Diffusion prompts search engine
https://stablediffusionweb.com/prompts
produces many examples that tickle my funny bone (and in some cases earn my admiration). Perhaps it is not a fair comparison because the 3d renders on these platforms have to meet certain 'etiquette' standards or risk being removed, which would explain the somewhat milquetoasty quality of many; AI platforms also tend to have decency requirements but effectively in those environments that is merely an envelope demanding to get pushed.
I personally think AI won't replace DAZ studio because it requires so much computer power that you have to go to 'the cloud". And those cloud people restrict their output to be so safe and non-sexual that you can't do what many people do with DAZ figures. Maybe when it gets to the point that everybody can run one of those things locally, it will be a big deal. Or maybe everybody except me has figured out how to do this.
@NylonGirl, this is not the case. I have a GeForce 3060 and I can generate (in my own computer, offline) a 512x512 pixels image in Stable Diffusion (using a 1.5-based checkpoint) in 5 seconds. SD can upscale the image also in a few seconds to 1024 or even 2048 pixels... If I use the newer SDXL checkpoint, it takes maybe 40 to 50 seconds at most for a 1024x1024 pixels image - and you can hardly distinguish them from a photography. In Daz, apart from the (long) time it takes to create a scene, a similar image can take anywhere from 5 minutes to even hours, depending on the light sources, clothing material, skins, etc. So, I could generate literally hundreds or even thousands of images in Stable Diffusion in the same time it would take to generate a single one in Daz.
Today, the real advantages of Daz are previsibility (no prompt can give you the EXACT same thing you have in mind, even using techniques like ControlNet, but Daz can) and continuity (you can't generate five different angles of the exact same room in Stable Diffusion, for example; in Daz, any beginner can do it). But SD is advancing fast, and I believe these gaps will also be closing fast. A few months ago ControlNet wasn't even imaginable; today, is part of a normal day.
I believe there IS a place for Daz in the future, but only if they embrace at least some of the advantages of AI. For example, a new IA-based render that could give you a real skin look in a minute instead of the 3D look we get today after an hour, or some integrated AI generation capabilities (like background generation), would help. The question is: how can Daz integrate these with its business model? If you can generate things out of a prompt, why buy assets? It's a hard conundrum to solve.
In my particular case, I'm using Daz less and less. I'm a Daz+ member (and have been for some time), and I have a few thousand dollars in assets that I've been buying throughout the years. But if I can't even use SD to post-edit my Daz renders and post here (I had a few taken down as soon as SD came around, even BEFORE the new rules Daz have imposed concerning AI), I really don't see how I can continue to spend money in Daz, unfortunately.
And no, I'm not a "Daz is bad, AI is perfect" fanboy. AI is still a long way from perfection (hands, anyone?) and Daz is a FANTASTIC software. But if you look around, EVERYONE is integrating AI into their products. Adobe (Photoshop), Microsoft (the Office suite, Outlook, etc), and so on. This IS the future, and denying it will not be feasible in the (not so) long run.
Excellent points alaltacc and nice to read a POV from the maker of the "girl with the mirror"! The posts in this discussion reflect that some 3d render (let's call them) artists are (A) fiercely opposed to, or highly indifferent toward, AI, (B) some 3d render artists see a great potential of integrating AI and (C) some embrace AI to an extent that conventional 3d renders disappear in their rear-view mirror. There seems to be a near consensus that AI will have a tangible impact on the market side of 3d render like DAZ as we know it. Personally, at this point, 3d rendering gives me an instrument to 'materialize' into a digital picture a vision relatively close, or close enough to a vision in my head, while AI for now seems unable to execute my vision without gross aberrations from the original prompts or without introducing random elements that are hard to control. Being keen to get some simple animation going perhaps that sort of rendering is still dependant on some sort of physical modelling that is not yet provided by consumer level AI (but I don't think I am au fait with the current possibilities so who knows).
It's not the AI. It's the spam issue. To a degree it was also happening with quickly made ugly renders and handmade art, but the AI made it more visible.
Places like DA don't separate it from everything else and because it takes so much less time to generate image from a prompt, AI posts flood everything by their sheer volume. This is going to eventually kill those galleries because bulk of the users will simply leave.
Picture it like an online forum overrun by spambots. If no moderation action is taken, the message board eventually dies out.
This is why for 3d renders galleries like Daz and Renderhub become the only practical option because they stick to 3d renders.
Similar policies often are employed on smaller image posting boards focused on non-3d art where often you might run into moderation against anything the gallery is not made for (including 3d renders).
tldr: Image posting spaces need moderation like any other posting spaces. If moderation doesn't work, the place dies out.
I found this post especially interesting, as the writer discusses the possibilities for integrating DAZ with AI. Even if DAZ doesn't do that specifically, the attached early tests demonstrate the potential for reinvigorating even older figure and asset platforms into a workflow. Here, V4-based Roxanne models a dress and heels from that era, while boasting quite convincingly realistic skin, facial features, and anatomical characteristics after having been run through an SD model and then composited in postwork to preserve the integrity of hands and feet. These are simple examples, but they still allow the artist to retain essentially full control over image composition.
There is a thread for AI discussion and images, surprised this hasn't been moved yet
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/591121/remixing-your-art-with-ai/p1
No, for heaven's sake, no; please do not merge these threads!
The Remixing Your Art With AI is to showcase people's handiwork. It's not to opine or judge generative art in general. Discussions like this one in the Commons is for letting out steam ... that often devolve into picayune bloviation and verbal eye gouging. Heh. After all, it's the "Commons", right? The forum Art Studio hums along on a different vibe.
Cheers!
Yes, the remixing thread is different from this thread. Unfortunately there wasn't an open thread on this topic with which it could be merged.
regardless of peoples feelings on the topic
that is a thread for renders using our content as well as AI
no discussions on AI itself