AI Military Art?

[AdamPHayes]

I thought I would share these as they are quite amusing. Either an AI getting confused or a deliberately provocative artist?


Are the tricornes all on backwards?


What is going on with the rider on the left? How is he sitting that way?!!!


Interesting mix of Austrian, British and fancy dress uniforms on these "Waterloo" soldiers...

[modelwarrior]

The rider is sitting backwards because he has just spotted a two headed horse behind him

Also the nearest figure in the bottom picture seems to be going Rambo with a weapon in each hand

[Cubs]

I honestly don't understand why anyone actually uses AI art for military history stuff, because it always has hilarious errors! Rule one of being a military history artist - be accurate with uniforms. Oh well.

[YPU]

I honestly don't understand why anyone actually uses AI art for military history stuff, because it always has hilarious errors! Rule one of being a military history artist - be accurate with uniforms. Oh well.

It can be useful for more abstract images intended to convey mood more than detail, if you are lucky, I suppose.

I doubt it will get much better soon either, the way AI is trained on datasets requires copious amounts of correctly labelled images for the system to "understand" the patterns in the images related to those labels.
This is the reason why most of the models are for example capable of creating a sort of convincing picture of a popular pop artist. There are many many pictures of them around with their names attached.
Equally, you can probably get a convincing picture of a M4 Sherman tank. The exact model and type will be muddled but overall there are enough pictures out there that a AI model would have gotten the gist of it.

For historical uniforms and equipment, I think you are much less likely to have a large enough dataset for it to work. There are fewer to no pictures of the real thing, and if there is they are displayed in museums so often that common elements from that might even slip into the model. And that isn't including any movies that may be set in the period. Those usually end in a lot of pictures still from the movie getting used, but the accuracy of their uniforms is far from guaranteed either.



And all that is aside from the ethical/moral concerns around the current datasets of the current wave of AI, which is probably a topic beyond the purview of this forum.

[Aethelflaeda was framed]

Using AI art is disrespectful to human artists. Even a journeyman artist needs an opportunity to develop skills, even if it’s a low paying gig.  Great artists need cultivation and nurturing.  Reducing art work to a cheap automotive process is the opposite.  when AI can handle doing the drudgery of cleaning my toilet or hauling out the rubbish to free my time for painting it might be okay…now it’s the opposite we are working at drudgery tasks to pay robots to paint.

For those who claim they haven’t any talent and don’t have the means to pay a human to do it for them , I say “bollocks”, go buy a copy of “Drawing with the Right Side of the Brain” and devote some time to it.  Everything else is laziness rationalized. The skill at being “adequate” artists exists with everyone, just like everyone can learn a second language. Artists are not born, they sweated and perspired to develop their skills.

[Tactalvanic]

Like anything its the parent's fault..

As mentioned here and all other the place - data is fed into it. soo. garbage in, garbage out.

Nurture it, same as you would an actual artist or whatever it is it wants to do or - in the case of AI - what you want it to do, and maybe it can do a good job, based on your training.

But.

Ask it to do something its had little to no training on, don't expect good work.

Either way eventually they will be in charge of us doing all the menial work like peddling the generators to power them to make bad art etc.

I see it as the next version of spot the difference puzzle books, they will be publishing games/e-books of dodgy AI pictures, and you have to spot the problems - two headed horses, two tailed dogs, granny 10 hands etc.

Meanwhile the publishers that don't really care will be using this crap for Romance/period drama book covers soon enough if not already and eventually everyone else not educated enough will decide they are historically accurate depictions..

Expect entire new industries to spring from it in 10. 9 .8.

[ced1106]

All AI will do is kick the human upstairs into management. Humans will still be the editors, directors, and photographers, as computers become the writers, actors. and models. And they will do it for pretty much *no pay*. That opens up a lot of projects, including hobby, that wouldn't otherwise exist.

I'm sure when the first image application was invented on a computer (that only had a monochrome monitor), the "real" artists said the same thing we're saying about AI art. These people are dead now.

> I doubt it will get much better soon either, the way AI is trained on datasets requires copious amounts of correctly labelled images for the system to "understand" the patterns in the images related to those labels.

Well, I'm sure we can use those newfangled video recorders (: in those old-fangled museums to take them there copious amounts of images. Creating datasets specifically for AI use, rather than relying on internet data, may be the next step in AI, to prevent GIGO.

If you only want to define art as high-fallutin' "arts for art's sake", you do that. But that buries your head in the sand that art's also used for entertainment value (especially "the kind men like" and any "yeah, that's good enough" need for art (especially around Christmas time and when producing mobile games

[Tactalvanic]

Its like any industry, invention or tool.

It takes time to mature and if it does not destroy/take over the world as we know it, becomes integral to our daily lives, and generations after:

a - wonder what the fuss was about
b - wonder how we managed without it.

So joking aside, we are at the start of a new thing, and like any new thing, its going to be crap in some ways, and no doubt still will be in some ways later, but mostly, not.

We just have to get through to the good/useful bit that comes after.

So joking aside, this stuff will happen with AI just as much as it would with inexperienced anything else, its funny, like bad photoshop, but to be expected.

We will probably get there, and there will be AI schooling and educational tools and structures no doubt, but we need to properly define and invent them first.

[carlos marighela]

The rider is sitting backwards because he has just spotted a two headed horse behind him

Also the nearest figure in the bottom picture seems to be going Rambo with a weapon in each hand

I shudder to think what it's doing to pornography, which, let's face it is always going to be the biggest market for this sort of er.. art. I wonder how it will react to the request 'paint me a male model that's hung like a horse and a woman with enormous Bristols!'

It would be nice to think that eventually folk will wake up and realise that the tech bros aren't pursuing AI for the betterment of humanity and the sorts of cunts who are it's most passionate advocates are exactly the kind of people you wouldn't want in charge of a cake raffle let alone something that will have a potentially calamitous impact on job security, cyber security, national security, basic human rights and the functioning of democracy.

Of course like the 'disruptive technologies'and surveillance capitalism that has preceded it, the momentary convenience will smother all concerns until its too late.

[modelwarrior]

I wonder how it will react to the request 'paint me a male model that's hung like a horse and a woman with enormous Bristols!'

In pain laughing at that

[modelwarrior]

Just a plus point to the many negatives to AI.

I have been following this AI Story creator(so a sort of cross over from film making using the latest AI software) and really like his stuff. Seems in the right hands and with the correct direction it can produce some stunning stuff.

https://fb.watch/ta16mFqKE1/

[ced1106]

I have been following this AI Story creator(so a sort of cross over from film making using the latest AI software) and really like his stuff. Seems in the right hands and with the correct direction it can produce some stunning stuff.

Yeah, heaven forbid we allow the unwashed masses a means to express their creativity!

Long tail theory. Back in my days, we in the USA only had the Big Three networks for entertainment. With technology lowering barriers to entry, cable tv provided alternate entertainment (though the niches cable tv was supposed to have wasn't as niche as predicted), increasing the selection of entertainment. Fast forward to today, and YouTube and other sites provide even *more* variety of content. And before television, the only mass entertainment were movies. Before then, I suppose, was silent film, and before film, live performances. At every step, the audience grew, not just those viewing, but those *creating*. AI is just another Skynet-level "anything new is evil" that should settle in in a few years, and I'm sure someone's grandpa thought even using a computer for illustrations was some sort of souless affront to art or something.

[YPU]

Ok, since we seem to be diving into this argument.

Within my bubble of people with creative occupations, the big problem with AI in general is not its potential as a tool but the origin of its current systems. There currently are no AI engines, text, image or video that are created from data purely harvested from sources that explicitly agreed to this. (or in the public domain etc). The vast majority of users don't mean any harm by using the software, obviously.

But in the bigger picture, the total user numbers are used directly by the creating companies to attract more investors. While the companies may not be actually profitable at the moment, running at a hefty loss in fact because they provide some use of the service for free, the owners and shareholders of those companies are making literal billions from it.

Which, for those of us whose names can be found in plain text on the lists of datasets that these programs were trained on, kinda stings as you may imagine. 


I'd love to have an AI generator where I can, say, plug in a description of an rpg character and get a portrait in any style I like made for it, that would be awesome. But as long as that set of leeches is making money of it, and can only do so by using, not crediting or compensating but still directly competing with artists, I'm not feeling it.

I'd like to be idealistic and think that legislation will catch up soon enough, but the realist in me knows that lobbying and money speak loudly in that realm, and we've just established where there is a lot of  that available currently in this debate. With the added wrinkle that the longer nothing is done, the more ingrained these systems will become in common use to a point where it may start to be argued "we didn't do it properly, but it's so wide used now by everyone that we cant stop now."

Yeah, heaven forbid we allow the unwashed masses a means to express their creativity!

Honestly I've yet to see much results that actually argue for this, truthfully.
Lets use a "low brow" example. There were a whole rash of "what if starwars was steampunk" images going round when AI images first started appearing. They all were flawed proportionally and anatomically but those are things the programs are quickly getting better at.
But what none of them were anything I'd describe as creative. Steampunk when generated means random pipes slapped willy nilly, and the same with gears. I thought human made steampunk was bad with that already, but there is no understanding or knowledge with AI. It will very rarely replace some part on r2d2 with an interesting mechanical doohicky from the Victorian era that makes sense in that location and makes you go "oh thats clever" and on the rare occasion that it does, the only reason that it does is because enough artists in its training data did the same thing.
Which makes me ask, is that creative? Or is it actually stopping people from sinking a couple of seconds into creative thinking and design? What is AI making that "the masses" could not with a pencil some free youtube tutorials and actual patience? Sure you'll be crap at the start, but you might develop a unique personal style and think of things nobody has done before, while AI is by definition regurgitating what already exists.


Mind, there is plenty of jobs in art and especially design that really just need a new but entirely unoriginal piece. A background to a drawing that needs a post-apocalyptic city for example. We've seen that a million times before, and if it's only the background chances are you don't even want it to be interesting or creative because that would distract from whatever is the object of the image this is a background for. But even then the point stands, there is some vile Musk wannabe leech somewhere in Silicone Valley who is making ludicrous amounts of money from you creating that background, while the artists who's work was used to constitute that background see absolutely no return on it and are now less likely to ever get a paid job making that again, even if their skills were required in training what is now replacing them.

So no, I don't think it's suppressing the masses to be opposed to the current generation of Ai, unless you mean a small but abhorrent mass of wriggling bloodsuckers.



To put it into a comparison suited to this forum:
A decade or more ago there was a chap posting his new miniature line and game on this Forum. They had this idea about toy soldiers fighting on your actual desk with whatever clutter there was on there as scenery. Not super original but sure. They were shipping in take-out container boxes which was fun and clever. The models they sold however were almost entirely constructed from parts taken from other figures. Including some GW bits which is an obvious path to doom as we all know. But let's expand that to match the current AI stuff.
Imagine GW brings out some amazingly large range of modular figures, really it lets you create whatever you want with them. But, and we know for a fact, everything on those sprues was taken from other sculptors who were neither asked permission nor paid for their sculpts. Sure, it's all so thoroughly kitbashed that you can only very rarely identify the specific bits, but the process used is well documented and known to 100% require those other sculpts in order for this product to exist. And there are lists of what sculpts were used, anything from big names like the perry's plastics to small studios like hasslefree or Fenris. In fact its so extensive we struggle to name a sculptor who isnt on the list of models used to kitbash this product.
When GW reports their profits have increased tenfold due to this product, while our favorite small studios start closing their doors one by one because sales are now dipping under their red lines, after all, you can just use those cheap GW plastics to make something in their specific style now.
Would we be ok with that, as a community?

[Tactalvanic]

This is the current part that saddens me the most, I have read about it in its forms across different industries, but have no direct experience yet to compare.

Thanks YPU for the in depth clarity.

[Cat]

And then there's the whole 'let's burn down the planet so we can maybe make a profit angle.'  The energy demands of AI data centers rivals that of crypto currency.  Meta says they only need two large nuclear reactors to power their AI and would like to build their own. 
 
While the tech companies brag of purchasing clean energy, old coal-fired plants that were scheduled to be shut down are being kept open to fill the total demand for all customers, including AI.