Blood on my hands?

 All I wanted to do was leave Facebook, so I decided to create a goodbye profile picture using a text-to-image AI art algorithm. Really puzzled why I ended up with blood on my hands? 

However, I did make the mistake of making my goodbye message public instead of just to my friends warning them not to click on any request from me, this started a flood of uninformed comments not to be so angry (which I wasn’t just frustrated) and each with convenient links to go somewhere else. If you see those please don’t click on them either. 

So my facebook account should be gone (well in 30days)

When "good enough" isn't really.

The general vibes I am getting back from my fairly intermittent and probably very personalized investigation of the massive deluge of commentary on "text to image" AIart is that of two extremes. Those vehemently against it (with the argument that it will be the end of artists, whatever that means) and those who see it as a wonderful new technology (bringing artistic creation to everyone). I don't agree with either. Like all technology there are pluses and minuses.

Created with Google
Deep Dream Generator

Let's begin by discussing a small personal project of my own. Can AIart tools be used to inspire my creativity? Specifically help me create a new cartoon character, I'm just using a simple prompt.

"cartoon of a watercolour artist painting with red hat"

I submitted this to a number of the more popular AIart tools. I definitely didn't expect similar results as I have been following most of the technical issues how each system has been created. The biggest difference is the data selected to train the neural networks, and remember there are usually two neural nets, one to review images (usually scrapped fairly randomly from the broader web, and the second to analyse associated text (usually within the websites or social media posts as an alternate text caption). Finally, it is very important to recognize that these systems are not copying the original images or even parts of those images. In the case of the image-based network it is just using "abstracted" dimensions (descriptors) that allow it to differentiate or group parts of the image. A previous post includes a video that explains these steps clearly. These could be shape, colour, texts, line ... I'll call them patches of style ... or perhaps how marks are shown might be a better description. Well, the results are a lot different.

Created in Nightcafe using a variety of methods but the same prompt.

First all these differences must make everyone realize that the common generic argument that these are copies or "rip offs" of an artist work, are largely uninformed ("fake new" in social media speak). Clearly, they are different because the neural nets were trained on different & very large datasets. In fact even submitting the same prompts can produce differences within a given tool. They are less copies and more just appropriation of some machine recognizable aspects of the style. You can quickly get into very muddy waters if you try to label this plagiarism, but even so I suspect5 legally this is a grey area.

The second myth to debunk is that because some of these systems are open source and free they are not promoted by greedy profit oriented vested interests (aka wannabe venture capitalist silicon valley types). Despite all this, yes all systems, restrict the number of free prompts you can submit and then offer ways to "buy" more "credits". To make it more game like you can "earn" credits sometimes by continuing to stay on the websites or use a specific part of their services. The really big costs in these systems are not really generating the work (although it might require more power/performance than the average PC or tablet today) it is the collating of the data and neural network training with millions of images and thousands on dimensions for characterization. These big projects requiring many people and seriously massive computer resources. Conveniently, a lot of this data is based on research projects, usually at universities and made available to the community relatively free of restrictions. I don't understand what is going on here, I do suspect some vested interests are deeply involved in academia, but I will restrain my suspicion until I know the work is noble and working towards a better future..

My final consideration for now is, are the photographers, illustrators and artists, whose work has been used in the training of these massive neural networks, happy about their work being included. I doubt they have even been consulted at all. Ok could they opt out? so that their style, characteristic mark making, colouring or composition doesn't keep turning up. I suspect not. The cat is already out of bag?

So, is AIart good enough (in terms of artistic quality)? Of course the quality of art is a very subject matter, and more relevant is the common perception that what is popular must be good. AIart has become very impressive in a short time but it doesn't live up to my expectations at the moment. There is always something a bit off (eg cropping, missing body parts, straying from the brief). Sure, you can refine the prompt, use the magic "words/modifiers", paint in or out, evolve and upscale, if you don't mind being kept using up your credits and buying more. Perhaps it is the public who have become more tolerant of lower resolution imagery and spend a lot less time actually looking at it. Instead, they are keen to scroll onto the next image, looking for that flashy colourful and more often moving picture. Well for a few seconds at least. The "good enough" threshold has perhaps become lower.

Autodraw, another AI assisted drawing tool

I am late discovering this experimental tool from google labs, called autodraw.com. It dates back to mid 2017 and uses the same technology to guess an object as google's quickdraw. Only this time it lets you sketch out the object you want and "It pairs machine learning with drawings from talented artists to help everyone create anything visual, fast." 

Its as simple as that. The graphics are good (created by graphic artists), with Creative Commons Licensing, so free for non-commercial use, easy to download and use. Its also a bit of fun  although you may find it quickly reaches its limits of what it might recognize.

The impulse buy, that wasn't really

 Finally biting the bullet, I had undertaken a little review of what backup/archive space would cost at the moment, specifically on devices I owned. Using USB expansion style hard drives started at around AUD$ 32 to AUD$35 per TB (terabyte=1,000,000 megabytes) or 3.2 to 3.5 cents per GB (gigabyte=1000 megabytes), this was still way cheaper than SSD offering or even old fashion magnetic tape.

A driving force is that I will get close to a digital photo collection (including some movies) approaching 5 TB (terabytes) within the near future. However, my free storage capacity across a lot of hard drives was rapidly reducing below 2TB, and that made it difficult to maintain a 3-2-1 style archive/backup (three copies, on two different devices and one off-site). It has already slipped into a 2-1-1 method (2 copies, on one and a bit devices, one often off-site). I’ve got a couple of 2TB drives already in the backup cycle, so I reasoned two more 3 or 4TB drive would allow me to get back on track. Suddenly I started to see the same ads, from the same seller for such a USB hard drive embedded beside YouTube videos & on between photos on Instagram, damn you targeted marketing! 

But I'm sure I mostly ingored these ads. Until in a different electronic store by chance I saw the 4TB drives again but for a higher price.  I casually mentioned I had seen them cheaper and got an instant price match and even a little extra discount, damn again targeted advertising and slick salemanship. I decided quickly I bought two. 

Now to catch up on the important archiving and backing up that was sliping behind. No more excuses.

Prices have come down a little, as capacities have increased but things are relatively similar to my article back in 2018 The Myth that Digital Photography is free.

Creativity in name, not so much in practice

Whilst I have long since stopped using Lightroom and other Adobe products, I do still take a keen interest in what is going on at Adobe and more particularly what they are working on. So I have been attending the virtual aspects of adobe’s big MAX conference for the last few years.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen described how the company is determined to develop "AI for social good” in his keynote address. They are certainly using AI within many of their tools. Creating a wealth of “one-click”, “fix-it”, “make it better” tools within their existing suites of applications. For sure it will take a lot of tedious hack work out of making visual images and video, but I don’t think this is going to re-assure the real creatives worried about the rise of AI art.

One really obvious theme is everything is moving to video (or at least animated images) and the general idea of creativity is all about building a social media space, going viral, capturing the hearts and mind in a few second, possible in a 2D becoming meta 3D style, design assets and brand kit consistency, again with that “single click” aspect dominating. Sounds like a lot of the sameness, everyone clicking on the same few links and expecting originally and creativity may actually result with more and more of the same!

The hyped “new” tool Adobe Express has a lot of the look and feel of Canva, perhaps with nicer integration with other adobe tools (so you need to pay more rent), The photographic enhancements in lightroom and photoshop are mainly not new and exciting, being offered in a number of other pieces of software, just not integrated so again you have to spend more renting it all. The sneaks segment usually my favourite to see what new technology might be coming up was a disappointment. Perhaps with the exception of project blink (for AI-powered video editing on the web)

I did like the short presentation by Relu Ou on "the myths and realities about Artifical Intelligence", Particularly his closing remark “Please let your imagination direct how you use these tools.”

Second Generation selfportrait

 A lot of people on the Internet express the opinion that artist will go extinct because of #AIart. I am not one of them.

AIart Selfportarit of Artist on the Beach
(Style tranfer of a photo using a stable diffusion reference)

The current crop of text to image neural networks can be quite amazing, very good at capturing style, colouring and texture aspects of artistic mark making. Not so good at expressing an artist intent, specifically originality. Unfortunately, most of the current neural networks I’ve been trained up on rather depressing and dystopian art and images. I’m not sure that this is really the direction of art, more to do with the wasteland of trends on social media, where most images are found these days. Further so much depends on how you express yourself in the text prompt and modifiers. Will poets become the new visual artists?  Further it’s become common practice to keep refining the image and prompt. This is a lot like building up glazes or over-painting, creating layers of added texture and form and more eye appeal.

Already I can see that the simple first attempt text string output on social media from any of the AIart systems around at the moment, looks much the same, not quite right, unusually cropped and frequently scarily dystopian. Hopefully those jumping on the “one-click” filter style of social media influencer posts will soon become bored with the method. Leaving those interested in the potential for artistic expression time to experiment and refine methods. Thereby expanding the range of tools and media they have to hand. I for one look forward to this time.

Inktober-ing to relieve the pain of trying to upload videos from a PC into Reels

I do realize that Instagram's reels are just meta/facebook's copy of Tik/Tok BUT why are they so tediously phone oriented. I have a good little project going where I was submitting the prompt "Am I an Artit Now?" to a variety of common AIart tools and felt it would make an interesting video. Which I still think it will.

However after a week of frustration trying to load & edit a decent reel from my PC, I've realise why should I even bother with such un-socialable media. So sorry folks if you are on instragram, you'll have to put up with my Inktober etchings for a while.

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A post shared by Norm Hanson (@normhansonart)

Backtober

I recently listened to a one of Brooks Jensen's "Here's a Thought" short daily podcasts called backtober  Its about how he uses October each year to thoroughly review his digital back up and archives. He might be a bit obsessive, replacing any spinning hard drive older than 3 years, never less it has made me realize I need to totally re-evaluate my situation.

I have not found a good solution to replacing my little NAS unit. So automatic daily backups are not being made anymore!

1. Most of my archiving is now on external (spinning disk) hard drives, and unfortunately, I have experienced 4 of these drives crashing in the past decade. There were duplicates of these so I didn't actually lose anything, Duplicates were on another hard drive (ie same format/technology)
2. I do have archives up to 2010 on CD & DVD, They take up lots of space and I haven't touched them in years.
3. I have a fairly complete "extra" archive on a larger old hard disk that I can connect into my "air gapped" linux archive. When recently accessed one of these older disks started reporting errors (and will have to be replaced, but I'm out of old computer drives!)
4. I haven't evaluated the FreeNAS software yet!

It's October so I need to get onto these now, I like the idea of a full review yearly rather than my irregular monthly attentions (which has been overlooked a few times this year anyway).

Unnatural Crops Explained

The developments in Text to Image AIart generated images are amazing. Things are changing, and largely improving in image quality almost weekly. However one thing I had noticed that was staying fairly constant was unnatural looking crops, the weird truncating of the subjects, particularly people. Surely this was not a new artistic trend I had no knowledge of, or perhaps the artist who's work is being used to train these systems had an aversion to conventional composition.

Example of a headless figure based on stable diffusion prompt

Am I an artist now? John Singer Sargent

Turns out there is a simpler explanation (see quote from a NovelAI blog post below). The unnatural crops are a result of the training set being converted to a square format (so the images are the same ratio) and just arbitrarily using the center of the image.

 Aspect Ratio Bucketing

One common issue of existing image generation models is that they are very prone to producing images with unnatural crops. This is due to the fact that these models are trained to produce square images. However, most photos and artworks are not square. However, the model can only work on images of the same size at the same time, and during training, it is common practice to operate on multiple training samples at once to optimize the efficiency of the GPUs used. As a compromise, square images are chosen, and during training, only the center of each image is cropped out and then shown to the image generation model as a training example.

Are we having fun yet?

It hasn't taken long for my AIart works to fall foul of the censors. Ok not the real censors, the perceived NFW (not for work, standards of the USA based morals on the internet) Whilst I can only see blur in one of the images generated, I expect that it was being interpreted as NUDITY. Which isn't surprising for anything Salvador Dali inspired

I also believe the warning is probably coming from Stable Diffusion itself. That might be a very good thing, indicating they are concerned with the ethics (aka complying with social norms) of the types of images they are being asked to generate. I do know that certain words are not allowed in the text submitted. Again, a bit restrictive but overall, a good thing.

Back to what I was playing with, just having fun. Which I learnt from a Catherine Price in a recent Ted Talk, involves Play, Connection & the Flow State. I like self-referential (meta) subject so I have submitted the phrase "Are we having fun yet?" Firstly the phrase just by itself and the results were totally underwhelming. Perhaps AI doesn't know what fun is yet?

Then by 3 well known artists  / cartoonists / photographers each as modifiers. The results are more encouraging. I've picked the most appropriate in each group of four thumbnails.

Moral: Be careful what you ask for!

The Is it Art? Questioning AIart

The question everyone seems to be asking is AIart really Art?

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A post shared by Norm Hanson (@normhansonart)

My view is that it is just a different form of expression and it does have many of the characteristics of Art. It certainly will give more people the ability to create things. Something they probably lost as teenagers when they decided they couldn't draw. (Some of us continued to draw and maybe never grow up as suggested by Picasso) However, it is already being exploited by copycat and wannabe influencer types that are on that constant production of "content" treadmill for social media. When you first see an image created by DALL-E or Midjourney it's quite amazing but once you have seen a few the novelty does wear off, and with so many similar dystopian examples now being shown it's becoming a little disturbing.

Yet I see AIart in its many forms as a powerful tool in the hands of creatives. Something that is very clear in the above video, which is also worth watching as a simple explanation of what text prompted image generations actually is and the basics of how it works. So I'm keenly following the developments. On the upside, this technology can save a lot of time getting inspired and just fooling around with concepts. On the downside I do worry that the copycats will exploit true artists' ideas and styles, monetizing such works and thereby ripping off the less-discerning public. I can also see that many artists will not wish to have their works included any publicly available neural network, which inevitably means not having any of their art published on the net!. I don't have an answer to this. 

Such is (modern) life.

Rescheduled Photowalk

 Due to the miserable weather last Saturday the "Birds in Flight" Photowalk has been rescheduled to Saturday 1st October. If your were already registered from previous Saturday no need to register. Otherwise, you can still book through Eventbrite. Fingers crossed for nicer weather.

Next Photowalk is Approaching :: Birds in Flight

 

 

Register now through mga Booking Essential.

The birds are flying in, building nest, feeding, roosting and some even have young already. If you haven't photographed birds before its a fun challenge. If you have there will be plenty to see and photograph.  Bring your long lens if you have one.

I can't make promises about the weather, but if its overcast and drizzly the birds will still be flying, so come and bring a raincoat and/or umbrella.

Sandwiched between Ads

 I was trying to read an article in a well-recognized photographic website. However, it had become somewhat tedious, I could really only read a sentence of two at a time and it was being squeezed out by Ads some of which were flashing and cycling through different screens and our show a thumbnail of a video.

I decided to do a couple of screen captures and colour in the article itself (in light blue) versus the areas of Ads (in red). It quickly became very depressing. Its not just that website its pretty much most popular site now, The saddish part for the advertisers is all the ads are for place or things I might already use or vist regulkarly enough, ok except for adobe.

Are you surprised it's pretty much its 50% ads wrapped around just 50% for the article's content?

Amazing but ... ... ...

It seems like only yesterday that I wandered in Mid Journey while looking to get an invite to DALL-E. It was actually almost a month ago but a lot has happened in the field of AIart, especially using artificially intelligent processes to create an image from a text prompt. (I prefer to consider these tools large scale and targeted neural networks, not intelligences)

Vermeer's  "Girl with a Pearl Earring" extended by DALL-E Outpainting

This illustration is from a PetaPixel article about a technique called outpainting,  were an image can be extended seamlessly, The approach uses shadows, reflections, and textures to extend the created background that is designed to blend perfectly with the original image, and uses its ability to pull in details from the millions of images run through its reference neural network. Not by finding actual object but shapes we see as real objects.

These technology advanced are truly amazing and wonderful tools for the creatives and original thinkers. Yet I am willing to bet that the technology will be dragged down on social to just create very dystopian, offensive, distastefully, look at me and wanna-bee influencer copycatism. They are already filling my Instagram feed. One bright outcome could be, it will probably lead to a big popularity to post AIart  as static images back on Instagram, making it largely a photo and interactive place again (#makeinstagramgreatagain) and not just a place to be force feed with ads, reels and the misguided opinions of the haters.

So what is my opinion, have we created ART?

No! The generation of this image by computer is amazing but it has taken a compellingly beautiful and intriguing work of art and made a mundane domestic scene with lots of clutter, you are unlikely to stop and wonder what she is looking at and just swipe past!

Out with the Old

 And nothing New.

I haven't actually touched the Air-Gapped Archive in over 2 years. It seemed a good idea at the time, but I am very cautious about computer viruses and malware, also I see hardware failures as a much bigger issue. No point having a theoretically nice archive but finding the hardware is out of date, not working and/or unfixable just when you need it.

So I've dusted off the little netbook, and its still running Linux fine. It has no trouble recovering everything from the Stora. Getting it set up on my Microsoft based LAN was easy but not exactly transparent.

Looking around there are plenty of options to create a new NAS, but I will start with the Open Source TrueNAS.  Most folk will recognize that it used to be FreeNAS, which seems to be well considered and still widely used. It seems to have a nice simple UI and hopefully will run just like my Stora, only now I will not be mirroring by working directories. Instead storing my complete photo archive on larger external USB drives attached to this NAS. I do expect the performance accessing the archive to be a lot slower. However I hope to make up for this with better organization.

That Didn't Last Long

My Linux/Mint Fileserver has already died three times in the past few weeks, The last time terminally, well I'd already swapped out two hard discs, which both crashed, didn't fancy wasting a third. So the much-altered old HP, aka Obsidan, has been consigned to the hard waste collection. 

Graveyard of Hardware killed by Window10 Updates

Ok back to the Stora, but that's a hard luck story as well. It works but none of my current PCs, and other devices can run the software (incomnpatible drivers stop installation) or even access it via a browser, because Adobe flash is required, which even Adobe no longer support and have removed it from downloads. I had to use my Linux netbook to reconnect (it had old version of the stora software) and "recover" the data from the stora onto already overloaded external USB drives.

Rather than panic I'm going to limp along with a monthly backup based on two copies of data but an old fashion SON - FATHER - GRANDFATHER set of Archives of keepers (files & photos I believe are worth archiving. This involves serious CULLING.

Visiting the Night Cafe

Returning to the #handrawphoto project

This isn't hand drawn but was once a self-portrait photo, inspired by MC Escher. It is now however a construct using VQGAN+Clip Artifical Intelligence algorithm via the website Night Cafe. Rather than Building a random "white noise" Canvas, I started with my own photo, and using a cubitist style

Wandering into Midjourney on the way to Dall-E 2

I'm not sure how I managed to wander into the beta of Midjourney in a search to find Dall-E 2 (an AI based graphic tool that uses text to create an image, well so the claim goes!) I've registered an interest but not got into Dalle-E yet.

Ok what does midjourney make of the phrase "wandering in the light"?

These are just four alternatives  and I haven't, figured out how to refine one of them, yet. They do look like wandering, but out of the shadows rather than in the light. Amazing but still a little uncanny valley.

And here is a nice summary of how this form of AIart (text to Image) has been developing.

Will AIart replace artists any day soon? 

No I don't think so. 

Yet all the developments are occurring rapidly and amazing, and I'm guessing social media will soon be flooded with these unique-ish but not quiet original creations and like fake news how will we be able to tell the authentic,

Next Photowalk :: Birds in Flight

The theme of the next Photowlk in Jells Park is Birds in Flight (details and registration on Eventbrite)