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Here's a way to turn anti-AI rage into action: Normalize crediting. I can't tell you how many times an invite, email, blog post, random bit of social media content goes out with some kind of unattributed lovely art. CREDIT ARTISTS. ON EVERYTHING. It's easy. And if we normalized crediting enough, the generated images would stand out on their own for absence of credit. 69 comments
@Teskariel I would like to normalize your thoughtful friction! I try to ask nicely, enthusiasm helps ("wow that's so cool, do you know who the artist is?") but I empathize hard with the anxiety of being "that person" all the time. :)  @edk you will be pleased to know my instance actually made this one of their rules, so we're helping! @jhwgh1968 That's awesome! Part of why I figured I'd put this thought in the fediverse is how feasible that is and how open communities can be to practices like this. @edk I blame certain social networks for denormalizing attribution on the web. Flickr got it right; the rest, not so much. It was already, and still is, normal among artists to credit each other. Attribution should be built into all our tools imho! @otherthings 1000%. I do think there's a natural shift happening in the maturation of the internet that relates to this. The internet started with this open sharing culture where putting anything online felt like contributing to a commons. But then capitalism entered the chat. And now we have it sharpening to a point where it's doing precise kinds of harm. Artists have been online for ages and ages, but rarely are they the builders, or close to them. Flickr's culture was and remains legendary. @edk @otherthings My sense is that Pinterest's culture and Tumblr to an extent was where I saw the most resharing out of context (not that Insta or Twitter didn't contribute). But definitely both of the former were kind of collage-y, mood board-y and fandom heavy in ways that promoted "these are part of my identity". I think attribution was always more popular where doing so was seen as building a social network (and trying to promote friends and admired sources). Age plays a role too... @edk @otherthings Older folks *should* know better but I think younger folks come in and they adopt whatever rules help them fit it with their desired group (I did it too and the folks I knew in the forum days typically attributed because bookmarks were a big deal). I think the expectation of free and w/o attribution has come from younger/newer users seeing that it's not expected or necessary.  @edk and also shun posts that don't give credit. Don't repost things that don't have attribution, whether photos, illustrations, or screenshotted text.  @edk @jmac I moderate a custom magic-the-gathering cards subreddit and our biggest labor is BY FAR removing cards that use art without credit. I bring this up because some users will make up false credit (it’s a ban-worth offense). I worry that, even if we normalize attribution, people will make up BS credit for their AI art. Certainly not all of them, so I think this idea will still be effective, but it is a caveat (shortcoming?) to be aware of, imo @edk @jmac @gemini6ice This is why I think it’s necessary to build attribution into the tools themselves. The flow I had in mind was: if you upload an image, you are asserting that *you personally* created it. Then, anyone can repost (or quote-post) your image, and it’s automatically attributed to you. Maybe that doesn’t quite work for your use case— but I’d like to hope that it could! @gemini6ice @edk @jmac @edk @joe I've encountered a number of situations already where AI generated content is being credited with some fake name. For example, some news sites at the very beginning of this stupid craze basically invented a byline for their AI content. I sadly forget which ones because this came in a flurry of such slop reports. But the point is, I don't think this will solve the issue. Should still do it anyway, of course. Like, who doesn't already do this and why?  @ztj interesting point. it does seem like a lot more work overall though to make up a name and actually back it up with evidence of a real person behind it like social media accounts etc. so just seeing a byline might not be evidence in its own, but does provide more material to verify the source @joe I think part of the reason it was so quickly identified is because all they did was come up with a fake name and put no other effort to make it seem like a real person. At any rate, I'd happily take the L on this prediction of efficacy if it meant more people properly credited works as they really should be doing anyway, so, everyone inspired by this feel free to prove me wrong 😎 @hipsterelectron @edk @joe May have been. The one I was able to remember was CNET though they used a group name not a person's name https://futurism.com/the-byte/cnet-publishing-articles-by-ai and also they've owned up to it and followed up on it etc., wasn't quite as sleazy in practice as some of the other examples. Still sufficiently deceptive to influence this thought exercise, imo.  @edk I sent out my very first newsletter for my game project some days ago, and I actually went out of my way to reach out to folks about being credited. It felt like the right thing to do, and I even heard back from someone I haven’t spoken with in a while. It was honestly really nice!  @edk Yes. I think the use of gen AI has been a culmination of taking artists for granted that started early in web culture. I'd add that this should hold for writing as well. Many popular accounts here and elsewhere plagiarize and sadly people follow them and boost. If an account is prolific and all hits all the time, they're likely cherry picking from multiple people's work. #Attribution @edk i agree & have also experienced the ugly side. I was looking for a specific movie still & i found one that another poster had captured from the film. The poster and several others became angry that I didn’t credit the person who took the image from the film. This person had nothing to do with the creation of the 1954 film but still felt that i owed them credit. No alteration nothing but a movie still. I understand crediting creators. It was bizarre.  @coolandnormal Wow, I hadn't thought about this. Thank you for flagging! I've been uneasy about models in images for a long time and this makes a lot of sense. @edk unfortunately it's getting increasingly easy to create fake imagery featuring real models. Like a lot of fake imagery, it often shows people who are trusted in a community supporting/marketing things they don't support. @edk I don't know if this is helpful, but I've been adding CC-BY-SA in the alt tag of my photos that I post here. (For example: https://mastodon.social/@kzeta/113188396127145310 .) @kzeta I'm sure that does help, though I wish it was built into the image format metadata! Such that any kind of replication without deliberate alteration would retain it... I like your practice, though! @edk Oh! Good idea! I think editing the caption of my photo might actually update the metadata?? @edk curses, it doesn't seem to come through the metadata when I download the image – or at least, I don't know how to make it work on Android @kzeta yeah, not a specialist, but I think these things operate on the markup layer around the image, and can't actually modify the image itself, which is on your computer or someone else's (cloud). @edk I've made it a point to do this in the games that I make that use open source assets.  Eventually, the time will come when everyone just hangs up their phones to escape AI. :mastodon:  @edk how about watermarking all your digital art with the attribution? And if it's visual, actually sign it! I'd think there is almost no chance genAI will (so far) regurgitate a valid digital watermark. @Slash909uk @edk are there tools for this kind of thing that are accessible to non-experts? Interesting. You can add IPTC info to your iOS photos but its not easy to see without 3rd party apps. https://smartframe.io/blog/what-is-iptc-metadata-everything-you-need-to-know/ https://medium.com/@Tovkal/edit-iptc-metadata-faster-on-ios-with-iptc-templates-7c4800bf944d And please don't forget that respecting artists starts even before that when you make sure you have the right or explicit permission to use the picture in the first place. @edk And if you're a coder, use real art for your test images, etc. and credit the authors in the README. There's *lots* of great Creative Commons licensed material online. Takes but a few minutes and is so much better for everything than using AI slop.  @edk @edk @edk Thanks for this reminder. As a life coach I often use art that is creative commons and doesn't require crediting but just because it isn't required doesn't mean it isn't the right thing to do. Your post has challenged me to do better and support the artists that make their work freely available.  @edk In circles where crediting is normalized, I already see a bunch of credits that are just "FizBuzz AI". I mean at least being able to identify that it's AI-generated is a good thing. And crediting artists on everything is a good thing on its own. But I'm not sure this feels like it's releasing the rage.   Yeah, so true, for art certainly, but for other work too. Sources must be identified. Crediting sources, validating sources, creating channels of curated information streams that contain information unpolluted by AI inventions. @edk hoping that this initiative may also help. Of course some of the main players are the ones contributing to the problem, but attribution and a chain of custody on content should be expected and easy to discern  @edk @mynameistillian Tangential, but I listen to audiobooks a lot. And in the series I usually stick to there's ambient-techno-y background music that actually really slaps but it's usually uncredited. Sometimes the comments have the source but often not, and often the music is so obscure that Shazam doesn't help. I love the kind of music that goes in as audiobook BGM (as it's great for focusing ime), I wish it was just easier to find :x @edk not only should credits be given to human-generated work, but 'credit' should always be included for Generative AI output too. At this stage not to hold AI work up as something as 'creative' or 'beautiful' as human efforts, but simply to ensure it's appropriately tagged and can be identified, just like we don't sell products in the stores without a serial number. For me a key control which should be applied to AI output is a watermark or tag. @edk Or people will get suspicious when works are attributed to MIIBNIP Seriously, crediting artists is a very good idea anyway, regardless of "AI," @edk Also, when i see music albums on bandcamp or other sites that are obviously using AI cover art, i pass. There are plenty of other fish in the sea. @edk how do you think should I handle this as a content creator? It feels absurdly redundant ending all my toots in something like "pics by me", especially when it's more than obvious, because most of my toots consist of myself showing off some newly built thing. Sure would I attribute media from others, but IIRC this never happend once at this account ^^ Or should I just drop the line into my bio? @edk agree but doesn't ai train search engines to curb child porn ? |
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@edk So much this! I think I might be getting on some people's nerves by now just asking in a Discord's art channel "Who is this from?"