Just some general thoughts on AI 🤖 – paan

Hey yall! 🌟

I felt it was worthwhile to take a little time to share my personal views on AI, as I know its a technology that's entrenched in a lot of strong feelings, and I understand that artists using it in any form can be upsetting, particularly if you’re supporting those artists. I don't sit too far out from the general mood, but at the same time, I did study machine learning at university alongside physics (granted I haven't kept up with the field since transformer-based models became all the rage), and as such, it's a subject that I do approach from a few varying angles.

For one, like many of you, I absolutely despise the opportunistic greed and arms race that's been accelerated by big tech. In any case that I use AI, I try to constrain it to Claude, as I personally believe that Anthropic is a little more ethically concerned than other companies. That said I do minimise my footprint on its use. For playing around with visual generation though I have to turn to something like Zen Creator, which offers unrestricted versions of models such as Seedance. Ideally I would be running these tasks locally on my own machine so I'm not feeding these massive data centres, but locally run AI is still quite behind on being truly useful as a tool.

There's also the scientific side of myself that appreciates the humanity underneath machine learning, in the same way that the pen can be admired, or the computer. I know many won't see it that way, but It's a field that ultimately has its roots in the same curious nature of any scientific or philosophical exploration, and also has historical roots in Rosenblatt's Perceptron, dating back to the 50s, long before personal computing. If you wish to entertain a little more understanding for what AI really is (or specifically machine learning, since AI is a broader subject), I'd strongly recommend a youtube channel called Art of the Problem. Their series on information theory is stunning and deeply rooted in humanism, and likewise, how they present machine learning is humbling.

But most importantly, as an artist, I feel strongly that AI-use falls into two camps that must be separated.

In one case, it's utterly obscene when AI is used as a mere printing press for uninspired commercial slop, the result of which has been abstracted from millions of illustrations that artists have hand-made over the decades. This is awful, and I hate it as a general practice. If one or two people prompt their way to success it doesn't bother me, but the mass and scale of it is the upsetting part. That said, I'd argue that there is a promising use case that I want to expound on, especially for animation.

Animation is a wonderful medium, and I feel that its real creative potential has been constrained since the early days of Disney. Naturally it's incredibly patient work, and while patient work is admirable, it's a curse to creativity. I'd say that most animators with all love and respect aren't that creative, because the repetitive work either numbs creativity, or simply forces you to spend less time entertaining creative ideas. Animation is more of a craft than an art. But then you've got some incredible artists with strong expressive styles, such as Hayao Miyazaki, Yuasa Masaaki, or Yuri Norstein. Yuri Norstein and has wife have been making a film called the Overcoat for over 40 years. It looks absolutely stunning, but that time scale is a literal death sentence. Artists with a style and a vision don't typically want to bend that vision under forced collaboration, but unless your style is deliberately cost effective and minimalistic, such as the works of Don Hertzfeldt or Pen Ward, then you don't have much choice without the rare exception of having a studio of workers that support your every move.

I personally believe that AI-use, to facilitate (not to replace or dominate), a humanly made piece of work, will have the capacity to liberate independent digital artists, especially in the field of animation. It's worth recognising that independent artists are the ones who offer something new and heartfelt when we're up to our knees in profit-driven trash, and AI is opening the flood gates for even more trash to spill out, by making it cheaper and more accessible to develop stuff without any real inspiration or thought.

But at the same time, cunning artists can use this tool to their advantage. When photography came into the scene, there was a very similar backlash to what we're experiencing with AI today. Visual artists regarded the camera as degrading, inhuman and lazy. Rather than an artist painting a portrait of you sitting carefully, a soulless box with a mechanical lens does it instead. But while the jobs of portrait artists were being dried up, and while other artists were boycotting the camera, progressive painters such as Gauguin and Degas decided to take advantage of this new tool by capturing things they couldn't before, such as the candidness of a person caught in a brief moment, something too delicate for the eye to remember but something that the camera can reveal. Then of course, decades later, photography earned its place as a distinct art form.

I don't believe the same grace will unfold for AI, because photography isn't inherently deceptive, whereas the fact that we have to question whether or not something is AI is forever unsettling. But in the case of Gaugin and Degas, they were still very much painters, they didn't turn to photography, they simply used it as a tool to explore more expression and more creativity.

I think if an animator is cunning today, they won't rule out AI use. They can view it as an opportunity to steal back what had had been ultimately stolen from them and turned into training data. I absolutely adore hand-drawn animation. I always have since I was a kid, and it remains my core passion as a medium of choice. But it's sadly infeasible to do without a small studio of helpers to fill in for the remedial tasks. In fact, the only reason why I'm using Blender to create 2D-like animations is because of this constraint. With 3D animation, the computer does the inbetweens for you (kind of..). Blender is a shortcut. It's not an ideal shortcut, I personally don't like how unavoidably-3D the result still looks because everything deforms with absolute geometric precision. AI is arguably another shortcut, using a different method where it ideally does the job of a competent inbetweener. You still create the animation yourself by creating the key frames, you still supply all the core creative material that you've spent your time making, but you don't have to spend the remaining months, mindlessly joining the dots from one key to the next and turning that animation into a nice smooth motion. And although I don't like AI's uncanniness, nor its lack of user control, I do appreciate that it offers a facilitating potential for hand-drawn animation to become a more accessible reality - and to be completely honest, I do find its potential intriguing. I for example don't code - I learned a little bit of python years ago but couldn't afford the time to stick with it. But because of AI models like Claude, I'm actually able to create add-on's and programs that are of incredible use to me, and I have to concede that I'm really grateful that programming, and all its potential, is more open and accessible now.

These are all thoughts and feelings that obviously extend far beyond the smut I make here. But I do think about this stuff quite a bit, and although you'll never see me turn into a mindless prompter, I will continue to experiment with AI as a tool, particularly as it continues to develop over the years. And I think it's important for me to spell out that position more clearly, as I really do sympathise with the portion of you who feel deeply upset at the prospect of these tools and how it feels like it's inching us closer and closer to a world devoid of any real humanity. But rest assured that I'll never be approaching any tool without my creativity or humanity.

Also, very sorry guys. I diiiiid get a tiny bit distracted by that little side project over the weekend. Even though nmf-1 is on the final stretch, it's that similar kind of psychological exhaustion that sets in on the final mile of a marathon. So nmf-1 is still due very soon, but I have to get back to work on it today. Thanks for all the honest feedback in the previous post 😇