Remember how we were told that genAI learns “just like humans”, and how the law can’t say about fair use, and I guess now all art is owned by big tech companies?

Well, of course it’s not true. Exploiting a few of the ways in which genAI --is not-- like human learners, artists can filter their digital art in such a way that if a genAI tool consumes it, it actively reduces the quality of the model, undoing generalization and bleading into neighboring concepts.

Can an AI tool be used to undo this obfuscation? Yes. At scale, however, doing so requires increasing compute costs more and more. This also looks like an improvable method, not a dead end – adversarial input design is a growing field of machine learning with more and more techniques becoming highly available. Imagine this as sort of “cryptography for semantics” in the sense that it presents asymetrical work on AI consumers (while leaving the human eye much less effected).

Now we just need labor laws to catch up.

Wouldn’t it be funny if not only does generative AI not lead to a boring dystopia, but the proliferation and expansion of this and similar techniques to protect human meaning eventually put a lot of grifters out of business?

We must have faith in the dark times. Share this with your artist friends far and wide!

  • @bitofhope
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    910 months ago

    Ah yes, “real” musicians turned their nose up at digital music.

    Now let me tell you about how making music on a computer doesn’t involve years of practice to become proficient. Using a digital audio workstation is basically the same as typing “club banger in the style of Avicii, billboard hot 100, high quality, big boobs, crisp production, lots of bass, danceable” in a prompt box.