Get educated and involved in the ethics of AI

The art world should never be a stranger to controversy, and I think a lot of artists have forgotten that fact.

Even for those who do understand one of the grand purposes of art is to provoke, many right now have a "No, not like that!" mindset borne out of knee-jerk reactions to massive changes within the art world.

Of course, I'm talking about AI.

Let me reiterate my position here, in case you haven't read it on the homepage yet:

I am advocating for ETHICALLY TRAINED AI MODELS.

This means no scraping the web for images of every artists' work; ideally this would be entirely opt-in, but I realize that's going to be a tall hurdle to jump now that the cat is well out of the bag. The same goes for LLMs (Large Language Models).

Of course, that's not my only key position here, but it IS one of the most important ones facing a lot of artists right now.

That's why I used Adobe Firefly as a tool to generate the AI artwork used in this design, and am focusing on it as my primary means of generating AI imagery.

Adobe Firefly utilizes their own stock image repository, public domain images, and other licensed images for training.

While this does mean that some images generated using less than ethical models (such as Midjourney) end up being used to train their AI (because Adobe Stock accepts AI-generated imagery), this is far-and-away the best (and most technically functional/affordable) image AI model out there right now when it comes to ethical use (although Tess gets a serious nod in the ethics department).

Of course, Adobe is currently under a lot of heat from folks who are knee-jerk reacting to their latest licensing/terms updates, but for those of you who are upset.. Have you checked Apple/Google/etc's terms lately?

"Human Cent-iPad" - a South Park episode spoofing insanely unreadable EULAs and the film Human Centipede - comes to mind here.

Adobe's latest terms suck, like most do.

What it doesn't do is what most people are saying it does.

Adobe's terms are honestly fairly boilerplate for any cloud-based computing service; They need the rights to process your work on their servers, and also want to be able to use what you process through their cloud services to diagnose issues.

They AREN'T using your content - except for what you license out through Adobe Stock yourself - to train their AI models. They aren't claiming ownership of your content at all.

They have to use shitty language in order to protect themselves legally.

Now, don't get me wrong: Adobe is a money-hungry corporation, and a great example of capitalism run amok, but they aren't any more evil now than they were when they switched to a service model for Adobe Creative Suite (which in my case has actually worked out well and keeps me up on the latest versions of Photoshop and Lightroom).

Folks' reactions to Adobe's latest license changes are just another example of media rage-baiting in order to drive engagement.

I'm not saying you shouldn't hold Adobe - and other corporations - accountable.

I'm also not saying you shouldn't care about AI and get involved in guiding it's development and usage.

Getting filled with indignant - and ignorant - rage doesn't help.

Get informed first, and THEN get involved.

Contact your representatives NOW and get them interested in ethical AI model training, for example.

Support and get involved with ethical AI models like Tess.

And, if you're willing, support training AI models with your own artwork.

AI is out. It exists. There is no removing it.

All we can do is try to make sure it's put together and used ethically.