This is a hot topic with "No AI" trending on Artstation and pending court cases we spoke to Director, Filmmaker and Game Designer Alvaro García Martínezwho has been heavily engaged with this topic.
Alvaro worked as VFX Artist for 10 years at London's top studios before founding Mayhem Mirror, his own Game Design studio. So he has experience as an employee an independent creator and as an employer of artists.
As Alvaro says, "I am not against AI, but against the unethical use of AI". But what does that mean? Tune in and join the debate!
As always, if you liked this episode, please like, comment, subscribe and share!
Listen to all episodes on our website
https://www.thevfxartistspodcast.com/
#vfxpodcast #compositing #motioncapture
You can watch all our episodes on our YouTube channel.
Thank you for your support! We appreciate you!
This is a hot topic with "No AI" trending on Artstation and pending court cases we spoke to Director, Filmmaker and Game Designer Alvaro García Martínezwho has been heavily engaged with this topic.
Alvaro worked as VFX Artist for 10 years at London's top studios before founding Mayhem Mirror, his own Game Design studio. So he has experience as an employee an independent creator and as an employer of artists.
As Alvaro says, "I am not against AI, but against the unethical use of AI". But what does that mean? Tune in and join the debate!
As always, if you liked this episode, please like, comment, subscribe and share!
Listen to all episodes on our website
https://www.thevfxartistspodcast.com/
#vfxpodcast #compositing #motioncapture
You can watch all our episodes on our YouTube channel.
Thank you for your support! We appreciate you!
someone struggles about trying to find a definition of what is ethical and ethical my my recommendation is is something doesn't feel right the chances are is because it's not right it's a gray area which definitely needs regulation 100 and the loan is to be adapted to this new historical context so that's why these arguments about all but I know this is not the what did you see the copyright infringement here well yeah because you're longer in the pixels you are mixing a lot you know if you're still one pound from one million people it's gonna be really hard to catch you I feel fear even in young people about should I study art or not and there is a beautiful almost poetic contradiction of all this that is yes more than ever double up like really now is the moment where you have a voice like literally um art in the last uh 20 years um has been sadly quite driven even either by let's say postmodern art or by Massive Hollywood industry and video games industry which has already standards that this is your fans and you go outside the fence you are not gonna sell[Music] hi so a big Topic at the moment obviously is AI chat GTP air mid journey and all of these things including there's actually a recent uh lawsuit going on and I've got someone who's been very much involved in this issue Alvarado Martinez and um I wanted to get him involved we're going to ask do our usual discussion a little bit about his career and so forth but what we also really want to talk about is you know what is going on what is what is air and is it art is it is it just stealing what's going on well first of all um what do you do and how did you get into the industry uh I just started in the effects actually I started doing games as a kid like all my life I was modding games you know but at some point it's like oh maybe I can make some money doing something really that was really and then I just decided to study 3D animation in Madrid and then I went to London I started working in in medical animation actually a couple of years which is quite interesting field uh and then after two years it's like I want to make movies I think that's why I started my kind of tour for the classics London companies NPC ilm I've had enough time to do two rounds around them I think we all know what what we mean about this is sip it's simple at the same time it's the only way sometimes sadly you can progress uh yeah you can be in a company 10 years but I found the exciting the idea of jumping to know different environments and finally after their yeah a decade of working VFX I decided to with Kobe when cobit hit I just founded my my company and moved to more game development because I the last couple of years I was quite involved in Virtual production which is kind of the bridge right of prayer time to video games and then I founded my company making mirror Studios where we do both things filmmaking content but also video games in parallel just to summarize I've been always doing my own projects from again 10 years ago I started doing Sumer which is a 10 minutes pilot about climate change before climate change was you know to find the focus of media right now uh and then in 2020 I released a second one which is the city of Junior foreign[Music] foreign like coming back to the past which is as a kid doing little games some mods finally I'm trying to you know convert all together doing content and that's my story brilliant so so you began working with unreal actually in VFX was it were you working with unreal yeah I worked in the last two years I worked in military production with unreal the last movie I worked was actually Matrix Four and we were working quite actively in set and real engine uh we were building tools but in my opinion uh I wanted to go faster uh like I really wanted to experiment more and there was a lot of uh fear at that moment because of Kobe and obviously I was excited about using that time for r d but one thing is what you want another thing is the budget and how you look at the budget inside VFS company and RND is something that is very hard to sell internally so it was like done I want to do more real-time stuff I really believe we can deliver final pixel not just previous or post office I won't finally acceler and there was a lot of asepticism not all the people there is always you know in this company there is always it's a little bit of time consuming um you need to convince too much and that's why I'm starting to believe in small teams to create way more interesting content in this time which is interesting about AI because someone can argue like oh but AI can empower the small teams to do big things you know it's like one of the big topics I can already Bridge with that of the AI Defenders is is trying to use our arguments in the past in their favor but as a fallacy because there are many fallacies it's like not because now ai can make a video game let's say illustration a card game for example in two weeks means that is what we wanted before you know we want the other things we want tools you know so yeah I I think also I saw that one important aspect of your post is you talk about um being against the unethical use of AI so let's let's talk about ethical and unethical you actually um I don't know this is a very big subject and I did wonder when I was thinking the best way to to start in but I think there is let's let's look at ethical use so for example on this podcast I use resolve um sometimes we have noise um yeah people you know people talking in the background not everyone has the best microphone and recently a resolve 18 added this AI uh noise remove tool and I run that and it's absolutely brilliant I've removed like people tapping on the table um all kinds of things it's not perfect if if their microphone isn't very good and it's peaking you can't fix it but it's way better than any of the things any of the previous tools that I had so that's I presume a pretty ethical use I know that we've uh copycatting nuke a lot of the time we might do um I don't know a couple of frames where we paint something into the eye and then we replicate that across the sequence so we might do previous Roto where you know you go to a few frames and then you let the AI rotor the rest of it so lots of so you're not opposed to the technology let's get let's be clear here there will be a still bit on myself because I'm working with four five six systems they are related even the future models uh each day with an estate transfer for example in Houdini where you use web action collapse so basically I draw a little maze and then I can expand a little mess into millions of variations that is my Maze and I'm doing variations of my own input and I think that if someone struggles about trying to find a definition of what is ethical and ethical my my recommendation is is something doesn't feel right the chances are is because it's not right you know it's like we need to try to abstract a bit of the circle and maybe the law is not written maybe the terms of conditions are a bit abstract it's a matter of do you feel this is right um what happened with our community is that not all the people even myself is not completely ready in the legal field to to defend or to all the things but it's about the sense when you have millions of people and you have an Intel revolt on Earth station saying this is not right even if sorry I can't articulate I don't want to have a linguistic battle right now I just feel something is not right I think it's a it's important to have a bit of empathy or saying uh look I know you don't have the tools to articulate what you are thinking but I I heard you and I understand we should talk about this so that's that's my take on that it's like yeah I can I can put the line off I can put a red line in the middle this is ethical and unethical and start to just put different concepts but I do believe that when millions of people talk is because something is off and then we start to need to debate what is exactly what is off enough literally we start to see how lawyers are transpiring the reasons that ourselves by intuition noticed so first the intuition and later we just make the concrete standing of this is unethical so that's why in my case it's like I use me Germany the first months as I think many of us when this happened like well it's so cool and you enter into this kind of dopamine Loop of let's put prompts and it's like oh it's called a bit noisy but our school uh until one day uh talking with a developer about GPT I need I needed to wait to that moment to realize so uh no shame if you realize this later what is important is to know this at some point and this guy told me uh because I saw hey look I did a procedural maze using chat GDP in python or I can't remember and he told me that's great but I I don't want to use it because I don't know where this snippet is taken from I was like boom like wow that makes sense uh yeah we can argue but if it's a collage or it's not a collage it's not exactly the same but it is true that that has been extracted from from a place a coherence that has no permission and when that moment happened when this guy told me this about the Snippets and stuff in in this procedural text generated is what just completely changed my mindset and noticed that oh this works for image for music for text for cooking it doesn't matter it's extracting the work and identity passion years fears goals of others because that's another I can't divert in many topics like it's not just about the coherence between one pixel here another pixel here and a trace and what is a cat and what is a dog it is also about you are stealing Gears of choices that ended in a picture there that pixel there is not just like a RGB color that picture that is there because this guy lives 20 years on Art so you are stealing more than that if you think about it so that's that's the dangers of this the the cholesterol is important because obviously as we said the artists don't necessarily understand the legal ramifications but lawyers and judges and and juries don't necessarily understand how the art industry works and they don't necessarily understand how the technology works so what I thought was interesting and and you shared this link and we'll share a link in um in the description but you mentioned in the legal system they actually describe the diffusion model and they describe it as you said earlier as a digital collage so if I don't want to go too deeply into like neither of us are lawyers and I don't necessarily want to um essentially it might even affect the court case in in some way but my understanding is that the basis of their basic argument is this is a digital college and the way the way the the diffusion model works is it takes a complex image it breaks it down into noisier versions and then rebuilds it from the noise very much like jpeg compression or MP4 compression if you think about the temporal compression that you have between frames in an h264 file that we're all kind of familiar with I would think in this industry so um in a very similar way it's taking this image down obviously it may be using multiple sources and not just one image but all of those Source images are something that somebody created and distributed and freed and there is and as our understanding is that neither midnight the created submit Journey nor the creators of stable diffusion have actually been very um what would you say very specific in looking for images that are free to use I mean you I mean if I if you're creating a dnp I mean DMP artist yeah will be familiar with this you go on to Flicker and you you check the permissions and you find photos that have commercial use that the photographer has said you can take this you can cut it up and then you might take some pictures of mountains and you know just as that human artists could potentially that DMP could potentially be breaching copyright if you're just taking anyone's photos yeah um it's no different than if it's being done automatically and you're just typing in a prompt let's make Advocate uh for a second uh this kind of another father said it's not what the AI is not what humans do learning and then reproducing blah blah because obviously AI it doesn't learn basically just follow statistical patterns and then recognize this coherence and they repeat that we we have a ingestion of data and if maybe be that they you know we had a fight with our girlfriend boyfriend or we don't have breakfast we're a bit more angry and then our stroke is a bit more weak and you know there are many things when we are seeing information from the world we got a complex Machinery that we don't even understand how to start with you know we are close to send Rockets to the moon but we don't know anything about our brain I mean we know about our rainbow we really are start to transpire now for example there are many studies that say that the best way of learning and memorizing is through emotions that's why we remember things that they are related with drama or Joy than random book of History you know because our emotions are involved in the process of learning you don't need to cheer up the machine AI to say come on you are doing well to do better job or you don't need to kill another Computing in front of the machine AI to be sad and then make better jobs the AI is gonna work no matter what it's a process it's a statistical process so but that AI learns in the same way of humans law is always written in the historical context and the circumstances when copyright law was created AI existed but it was not something to consider at the moment it was some modifications in different countries per use case but nothing like really to consider in a bigger scale um take that example and let's imagine that uh as humans our Revolution brought us big clothes like knives that they can kill people I can tell you that in a modern society there will be laws about our big Nails because they can kill people like you need to cut your nails for example you know where I'm going so the reason of this argument is uh we need to understand that if air is a trouble now not because there is no law written it means like you can do whatever because law can have also retroactive actions um this means that now because AI has the potentiality of doing this in mass production that's the big difference of doing a Photoshop and doing a copyright infringement and copy pasting some images with copyright or doing this in a massive scale with also pixel laundering which makes the things more complicated because you are stealing from billions or millions or thousands so it's a gray area which definitely needs regulation 100 and the loan is to be adapted to this new historical context so that's why these argument is about all but I know this is not the what did you see the copyright infringement here well yeah because you're longer in the pixels you're mixing a lot you know if you're still one pound from one million people it's gonna be really hard to catch you because stealing a very small amount of money this is like when people Express 300 in in different accounts in Switzerland and it's very hard to catch them because they don't raise the bar this is the same you are spreading so much the infringement in so many parts that who who who what is the copyright infringement because in many in many places for example if you want to report a copyright infringement United Station Etc uh you need to be the owner of the copyright to report that but you see the contradiction here it's hard because there are thousands you need to create systems in like a action class like hey we all feel that our work is being used so there are many complexities and what I'm trying to say is like we need to adapt to the current circumstances and stop thinking about the past although there are specific cases where um someone has specifically used the prompt a living artist a working artist I would like some I've seen I really like this portfolio I want to I want to create a picture of a rabbit in the style of this artist and then of course it's generating that and clearly they've specified the name of the artist and so there are cases where this connection is much is much more direct yeah and just trying to to me that the debate is like orbit I mean if you are like it's like there is no even debate there's like you're being a for my excuse me that doesn't that that is like you know like stupid the I'm just trying even to to go into the corner cases like uh gray areas where people try to defend now with new every week There's a new fallacy about this and it's like dude you are you are falling not in the argument you're falling in the basic of logic logical of of uh Greek philosophy of if it's big it doesn't mean necessarily hey you know if it's in the street it's raining in the street is wet it doesn't mean because it's raining it could be because someone is cleaning the street so they are failing in the basic concept when they say oh but machine learning is is learning like you oh but this is like photography oh but what is the difference of this and you using a AI you know to do a new patch or something it's like hold a second and I think that's the important effort we should put in in not trying to debate in the in the higher standards but going to the bottom and see what is the logic of this argument you are trying to defend because it falls you know so I mean my wife always says that you know the the people in England for example don't study philosophy and that she sees that they they need to study logic and and that a lot of the failings are just logical fallacies but specifically in on this issue you actually um posted an article where you went through I think you chose 10 um I think I could bring it up if you want or if you if you have it to handle I remember we could go for it so you you posted 10 specific fallacies I wonder if we could go through those the most popular one you mentioned is it's like photography oh yeah they're photography one I mean that's like I'm surprised that they use this fallacy because I think they just saw that in another post and said oh I got now my winning argument I'm gonna put this everywhere and everyone is gonna love it but if you see first there was no like a real fight if you see historically seeing of painters going against machine against uh cameras and burning cameras and you know I'm gonna show everyone that didn't happen there was some friction like but an artistic friction more like this is hard or this is not r no one was saying you are stealing our art you use the camera to to portray the nature or the world or humans but you were not going with your camera to do picture of the Mona Lisa and saying this is this is my work this is the Mona Lisa now it's mine because I make a picture that's the first thing the second thing is like a camera is gonna work by its own yeah with its own mechanical pieces back in the days I know it's digital but same it's gonna work by its own maybe a bit of software that maybe a little bit of AI of on databases of Kodak or or Canon but all internally and you don't need to fit billions of images in a camera to make it work uh with no permission and no consent and no notification so the the to me the camera fallacy is like I could do better I can try better fallacies I don't want to give them the the the the tools but I I can't find way better policies not to speak about the horse versus cars it's like dude what the hell are you talking about that's even more hilarious like having said that having said that about the horse and the car I would say that you know that we have Motorcars but we have a lot of laws governing the use of Motorcars we have speed limits we have the requirement that you carry Insurance the point we have um you you know you can't you have limits on parking yeah you have limits on where you can put a road you have to pay Road tax um there are all these different laws there were also early laws for example at the beginning of uh cars in England they had this thing called the Red Flag act where you actually had to have someone walking in front of your car carrying two red flags and waving them so that you wouldn't run people over and since then we've added traffic lights uh you know double yellow lines uh box Junctions all kinds of things that that control and litigate the use of cars so there was a problem when cars were just zooming around with with the same laws as Horses but at a higher speed and that did require changes to the way Society was organized and possibly possibly not you know that's obviously different in Holland has a different set of priorities uh to the United States where the United States did everything to make the car the priority and in Holland they decided to make pedestrians a priority and the car is um is secondary so there are different different ways of approaching these these issues but every new technology has required some kind of legal framework Okay so we've talked about photography and the horse what's the next fallacy I guess they again I but they already mentioned this one how humans learn in the same way that AI I mean just don't repeat myself and to summarize uh no that's not true they want to make to look like that like hey this is ice cream but just way faster so what is the problem first is this way faster if you can learn to let the speed coming back to the idea of how low is contextual and historical if you can learn with a glimpse about the world and having that knowledge I can tell you already uh copyright will work different I can tell you that if you are a machine of learning you have for example uh augmented the bio or whatever tips in in your brain that they are extended that's going to be regulated because you saw the movie kataka I haven't actually seen it yet but I'm sure it talks about transhumanism and how technology separates Humanity because now uh basically you can choose your baby to be a smarter stronger and better in many things you know a bit of Nazi comparison there um and and the Dilemma of if you can learn to that speed maybe you you know the copyright law also works in the frame of what is fair for the entire Market if you have something that is able to break a market that has millions of jobs you mostly will have problems in the in the legal frame at some point um and I think need Journey know this already I was reading actually a couple of hours ago the tens of conditions of my journey like uh they are incredible and it looks like written not I looks written like a uh I don't know like the nieces of someone or like I I saw your I saw your post actually it's quite funny yes it says like someone else's intellectual property and that costs money we're gonna come find you and collect the money from you what kind of money to do other stuff yeah I should read it more in a sort of like uh like The Sopranos right like what kind of wording in a in a let's say Silicon Valley company is that what kind of wording is that and that tells you already that can transpire the kind of people is behind it I mean I welcome technology I welcome everything I work with technology every day with AI machine learning uh procedural tools uh but deal don't don't lose the touch don't lose the touch with the people and don't lose the touch with the artists you are using for your product don't lose uh the common sense because I think it's a dangerous path in the long term and we are in this the last three years has become the the the years of egocentric CEOs everywhere with big dreams about saving humanity and no one is asking for being safe here you want to save Humanity yes put the resources in other stuff no one asks you to to do this kind of generative or whatever that by the way another fallacy is oh this is for research purposes no this is not for research purposes anymore you work one year in research for research purposes to to be able to collect data with no legal implications but right now you are you are charging your users and you are adding even a business model that says that you own the digital assets well yeah it's like the same thing another fallacy and this is a fallacy made by with intention which is a scary by mid Journey saying if you pay the business fee or whatever is that you own the assets but owning the assets doesn't mean that you have the copyright of the asset well this this t-shirt is not a marble teacher but I could have perfectly here a marble to share and it's my t-shirt with a Marvel logo is my t-shirt but that doesn't mean now because I bought this Marvel t-shirt and I now can you know do marble products and say this is a Marvel original that's that's right and some people don't understand that ownership is not the same that copyright writes copyrights so I under and that's the beauty of the world like I I don't know how many people read this war is lonely copy rights yeah you know this is one of the good things about I guess we got from German you can just stick words together and make new words yeah yeah so yeah that was I I again I've been back and forth with fallacies every single time I see one of them is like and it's like a kind of shock like you you read that and it's like okay something is not right here and then you start to analyze and it's like okay this is this is stupid and the beauty of this is like uh the the community or the AI browser whatever you want to call it because again I use AI but I try to use the common sense they I think they are running out of fallacies at some point but I see the same like all fallacies in the last two months um and it's like this has been already talked we we need to move forward to the next state um we maybe want to welcome Ai and generative images at some point but we need to discuss how with you know the community that empowered this and to start with uh um yeah another another interesting thing I I think hiring for my company because we need modelers um um animator rigors and and the problem of many platforms like you can't filter AI so it's become really hard to find Talent right now link and then never it never works uh let's say uh a platform uh empowered to Showcase art let's say that I mean talking with LinkedIn people as well and they know that but it now it's it was extremely hard because uh there was a mix of AI topics which I appreciate but also AI Whisperers or artists or whatever they want to call themselves I because I was quite involved in the topic of AI I only got that fed in my in my world so I couldn't see the artists in the world there and it was really really hard to find to hire this time or to find this Talent so I end up in the last two weeks to literally it looks rude but every single thing I saw a AI generative pose with images I just needed to block that person um remove the connection because first I don't believe he's gonna bring me opportunities in my field and second is boring the real talent of artists they are looking for a job and they have the talent so I needed to do a proactive exercise of filtering myself all the eye in the platform so I just hope tools like again Facebook LinkedIn Twitter is able to filter or to um somehow categorize what is AI and what is not because you know Instagram also is a place where you can hire people and sometimes I'm wasting time in checking is this AI or not and you are zooming in and it's like okay this is AI next one if you pile up all these number of minutes you you waste a lot of time now finding talents and that is why the reward of artestation was not only about the no AI tag it was about dude if you like so much AI do a AI station and put all the AI there I'm trying to hire concert parties now don't waste my time on that you know what I mean don't don't don't let everything in because then it's not attestation anymore it's a tech station or it's an area or a mixer station yeah station and this actually brings um one of the other the one of the other fallacies that I I've heard which is the idea that artists are being elitist by um trying to exclude um they're trying to so there's almost like a form of discrimination uh that they compare it to uh you know discriminating against someone with disabilities that you're you're saying because you can do art you're excluding those people that don't have that artistic ability um I thought would be worth talking about that because it's clearly not the same thing I mean I I don't know a profession that has been less liked that let's put aside Banks is a modern art okay because that's a niche of the other and I can agree that kind of elitist but art usage history I mean I've heard anecdot in in uh in Augustine I was 12 years old in uh everybody back at the school and I was writing uh I did rap music and I was doing like a little poetry song ramsing in the book on the economic book and the teacher near near me and was like what are you doing it's like no I'm just writing you know obviously I was not paying attention to the class so she was pissed off and she told me I got this in my mind like artists end up starving you know that she told me that you know what what a teacher she told me that I was like why shocked like oh artists are very poor people so that's the image actually and that's the real thing on History like artists are not Elites are actually people who are passionate that they love to share is is respectfully uh I myself station your people are posting are for free I mean that that's what happens and it's not always to find a job sometimes it's because we feel excited yeah there's a bit of ego but I agree that if you are an artist there is a little bit of ego involved but ego a bit of figure or self-esteem doesn't mean that you are elitist I myself share my knowledge on a stream six hours streaming showing all the blueprints and all the work and answering all the questions what the hell are you talking about another thing is your laziness that's another story but that's not our problem man you know and then the the accessibility or disability in art clearly they don't know about history of art or Frida Kahlo or Van Gogh or Beethoven what the that's open working music almost deaf Goya got a sickness that was when he did the black painting was was dying there and he did art with suffering and pain people pain with feet if they need to Art is not about the result is about the the Journey of being able to do something are you talk are you telling me that now if someone can type a prompt trust me they will find ways of expressing even better than that even better than that I can feel more excitement on a kid drawing on a paper that typing realistic that they don't know you what that means you know what I mean so it's that's another that's a kind of insulting fallacy because they are trying to appeal to that we are heartless or we don't care about accessibility and and that's a kind of inferious one because it's like dude you are on the on the anti-position on the opposite of what we really are as a community and historically speaking you know could be some people if you do if you post a bad drawing you're you're gonna you're gonna critique it but you're gonna be supportive yeah critique or or but that's not a gatekeeper that's actually you know there are good feedback but feedback whatever but this kind of uh portraying uh artists Gatekeepers dude now technology has been a gatekeeper well known in the big tech companies you think the Google Google code is shared with Microsoft and Microsoft shares with meta they are Gatekeepers they are actually they get Keepers because they know there is a big portion of the market there and the one that kids with the best AI generative text or search engine it's going to take the entire Market it's all in so don't don't focus on us about gatekeeper because taking a grabbing a pencil is anyone can buy a one half a dollar pencil and everyone can take a paper and you know you can draw in the in the works of your in the works of their rooms I mean it's like it's just it's another it's a big one it's not a it's a big fallacy there is no even how to take that campers and so I get angry I guess sometimes it's like oh my God this is It's a passion I mean it's a passion has have you felt that sort of uh working on this issue has taken away time because obviously you're running a business you've started the business yeah yeah indeed my girlfriend already it was on Christmas I was a bit away from work so I got the tablet and I got and it's like oh and this is happening now uh but I also told my girlfriend like whatever we do now is going to Define many things in the future and this is not about fear about losing my job I draw like I drove I should be the last one worried about this I can't use AI to don't hide concept artists uh I could be the first one right now but to me uh it was like again like I always end up by in companies in the effects as well um I I maybe it's a Spaniard Legacy or something I can't I can't stop talking if I feel something is not right and I don't want to see myself as uh trying to defend it's just even maybe my ego like if I see something wrong it's like deal shut the f because this is not correct um and that's why I started to take a bit of my time um and because I knew I was going to end up in some debates with people I I talked with people from stability Fusion we perform a journey developers uh other programmers to understand better I knew I was going to have some debates so I not also spend time on social media about arguing but also about studying law and diffusion models basically a bit at least to have the basic knowledge of understanding until what point is stealing or not uh so yeah it took time but now that I got the picture now the things are rolling by its own it's like you do the first push of the car and now things are now like in a good page we need to keep fighting of course no one needs to relax right now but there are good news happening we saw the action suit the action classes already happening and we saw media like vert said the wired media is we are happy that milia is actually not in our favor or not it's more like it's involved that's enough being involved is all what we need later they can have their opinion or columnist but at least they are involved and we see our community quite United from every kind of uh tragedy or circus time but circumstances we can always find uh you know that kind of good thing that emanated from this circumstances and I I never seen our community maybe when the green uh chromas happened like years ago with the Life of Pi or uh the Ukraine war as well the our community just reacted very well but this one is crazy the AI the score now I think is no AI disco is over I don't know 15 000 or 10 000. last time one month ago was was 10K and it's growing it's quite United so it took time but now I feel like uh okay you can step away a bit you don't need to I just remove all the connections of AI so you know and it was a smile because I I checked today what they are doing they still with the same Loop so whatever and they will find the reality at some point in their life I hope so so okay so let's um let's go a bit about what um do you know who how do you feel the the no AI movement began because obviously people were angry and annoyed but there was this is clearly a yeah in some sense coordinated people have have actually began working together in it you know in a not completely disorganized way I believe if I need to record because I I think for everyone I started in a different moment but I think the trigger was to see uh one specific post this is my opinion or my perception one specific post that went to the main page ant station and was AI generated and each one I started to see this kind of no AI I can't remember the artists I'm going to be very bad with names but there was one artist I didn't know AI logo first time and then I started to see that after this uh AI in the community which is when you see sometimes and there was one big Ai No AI were there in a big frame proportion on Art station so I think that click that contradiction like it's like a slap in the face it has something maybe that happens in the smaller spaces here and there is like whatever but seeing this like boring like literally it's so humiliating you think about it the proportion of the scale of the different picture depending on how much engagement they create and this is a fallacy made by with intention which is a scary by mid Journey saying if you pay the business fee or whatever is that you own the assets but owning the assets doesn't mean that you have the copyright of the asset well this this t-shirt is not a marble teacher but I could have perfectly here a marble to share and it's my Edition with a Marvel or his mighty shirt but that doesn't mean now because I bought this Marvel t-shirt and I now can you know do marble products and say this is a Marvel original product that's that's and some people don't understand that ownership is not the same that copyright writes copy writes so I under and that's the beauty of the world like I I don't know how many people read this word is lonely copy writes you know yeah yeah so yeah that was I again I've been back and forth with fallacies every single time I see one of them is like and it's like a kind of shock like you you read that and it's like okay something is not right here and then you just have to analyze and it's like okay this is this is stupid um the beauty of this is like uh the the community or the AI Pros or whatever you want to call it because again I use AI but I try to use the common sense um they I think they are running out of fallacies at some point but I see the same like all fallacies in the last two months um and it's like this has been already talked we we need to move forward to the next stage um we maybe want to welcome Ai and generative images at some point but we need to discuss how with you know the community that Empower this and to start with it doesn't work we are more monkeys than uh altruists sadly I mean it's my it's not like a negative Vision but you're at sapiens or you see about the biology and and you see that we are still monkeys we just one day started to walk into legs put some clothes and within now we are smart but mom in bad circumstances what is other trust me people is gonna steal people is gonna harass uh people is gonna copy people is gonna try to copy manipulate to don't look like they copy it so when all this happened is when the things started to just go crazy like and now I think it's more stable because low finally a media finally is taking a more uh a slow and well-cooked and articulated uh Movement we also almost hit the 270k needed for the for loving in in USA the Europe go fund as well is about to reach the maximum so things are built and that's a good sign because I did politics back in the days um and one thing is dangerous about politics and your um arguments is if you look very angry all the time that's perfect because you look like an angry artist and they put you in the corner so the fight is solved I would not obey the the the motion should start to translate into actions little by little and we can start debate about if this is something that is you know like bad or or we can call out but we need just to maybe Reserve that energies into uh educating ourselves uh getting ready um prepare low action suits prepare uh talking with a lawyer prepare uh knowing about the how this technology works and I think that's already happening so that's in general good news I just did that kind of summary of what I felt in the last two months I think we already in Plateau but it's a good Plateau I think it's a good moment now the view is very much a kind of Lord of the Flies view of humanity which I don't necessarily agree with I mean even within animals you get some sort of altruistic action so even if we are monkeys I mean if chimpanzees and bonapo are closest relatives are quite nice actually like they're it's hard because there's chimpanzees and there's there's bonapose and bonapose tend to be a lot more passive a lot more uh collaborative and chimpanzees can be a lot more brutal so we you know we can have both of these aspects in our makeup well I think you are right is that you know you can't you do need some sort of social regulation yeah some kind of and and some of this is not just going to be legal because one thing I was thinking is that we do talk about using copyrighted images without permission the the unfortunate aspect is that we also produce a lot of work which um where we don't own the copyright I mean for example if you're a concept artist and you work for Disney or Marvel or any large company you are handing over the copyright of that concept art so in theory it's your choice a large but in very large company could then yeah use work from artists that they've employed in the past and generate new work in perpetuity yeah and this is you know an issue that previously did not exist because if they like your work and they've wanted more of it they would have to hire you again but in theory they they could they liked your work they generate an AI model based upon your work that you've done for hire for the past 10 years and they stop hiring you so there are some issues where there might be a moral argument against but the legal argument's gonna be much more difficult because in terms of copyright ownership we're talking about ownership buy a company and of course whenever we sign up for a service or a social media platform we click that button that says I agree to the terms and conditions but very rarely do people read all of them no of course um which also is is one thing like terms and conditions if you start to see how they are evolving the last five years uh there is always like a summary of the terms and conditions and then the extended terms and conditions which is a good practice for companies like hey you don't need to read this but at least know that we can use this we're gonna do this and we're gonna do that I agree with it okay yeah it's more reliable like in the in the last 20 years the terms and conditions were just a file of legal circumstances that no one right of course uh but I believe that that is Gonna Change um the the big difference even yeah companies now can can um produce your your content that you work on you work on these companies like Marvel Disney but um first I think law is gonna come at some point I don't see a big company risking so much on that a line of production is I think companies get a lot about public opinion because it's where money goes and back slash is a dangerous thing I not know how to position myself in the cancer culture or not but it is true that companies move you know with hip depending on how the public uh sees things in general even the higher Fire actors and actors depending on that I don't see and that's why I also insist not just in the legal but but also in the public opinion path about AI not trying to manipulate people about their eye but just giving them the facts of what is going on if people feel that something is not right I don't know if um that's gonna hold over time in big companies using AI for generative images companies you say for everything I keep them for a statistics and see what new Netflix series is going to be successful in the models and prediction and research resistant investment everyone everyone is used AI I'm talking more about the idea of doing a IP a new character a new Marvel hero based on a prompt where you are gonna put the style of someone there or you are gonna try to use prompts that they are somehow using already existing Heroes I don't see a company big one doing that otherwise you can't use you can't do a new superhero if you don't tell the AI where to look at you know what I mean it has a contradiction it's like in the moment you put a prompt you are telling the AI where should I look at should I look at the station should I look at Pinterest should I look a Canon camera or IMAX maybe or Marvel you need somehow always to go to this to this border there so yeah I mean some of the more interesting stuff I ever saw anyone do using mid Journey yeah it's actually fictional films I I I've gonna say something that I thought was actually kind of interesting that they took for example that Star Trek was based on a 1920s never produced German movie made by weird slang and so it had so this this fictional movie and they they clearly wrote an actual background story of this that fitzlang tried to produce something that was called Star Trek basically but in German and then uh uh Anthony was never able to finish it and that was the inspiration for Star Trek and they created this fictional story and then they had generated these images in the style of Fritz slang which were very much like Star Trek with a spaceship and and these German expressionist style actors and it was based on obviously metropolis and and uh oh yeah Star Trek itself so I you know there was this interesting that what it wasn't interesting use of of something but of course they're still taking images where I presume at that point the the plaintiff would be clearly Star Trek I mean if this is not if this is not commercial and it's a Facebook joke then it may have some use but it can't you've still got mid Journey has wider issues as we've been discussing where material is just coming from all over the place however uh that could be a use uh right now uh I I rather prefer to wait what uh law has to say internationally about all this but it is true that when the field settled down a bit I believe that inspiration is a good use of AI generative images hopefully with um a non-copyrighted material like I see this kind of mix of I don't know Debbie Fincher Meets World War Z3 and you mixed the Star Wars or whatever and then it spits out like this kind of Horror of all these are images but at least stimulates ideas like if I want to see patterns of again everyone puts Fibonacci some people I think discover what is Fibonacci in the last year or golden radio and things like some people is reading the dictionary of art finally uh okay that's that's a use of I can it's the same way that you go to Pinterest or third station and you put in your purif work of others and you check time to time no one in VFX I mean myself I try to download preferences to be honest just because I got my masters uh when I learn art and I like how they work they just take five minutes references and they close Google and they start working so you stimulate memory and your your own connections rather than AI hand connection but let's imagine some people my girlfriend itself like uses reference and had pure Rave with a lot of work of Riot game blizzard you know like copyright material uh can work very nicely at least to stimulate the first trigger like you saw this Monty Python sketch where they offer conversations rather than dinner so you go to dinner and they offer you want to talk about philosophy you will prefer about politics and they offer a menu of conversations I think it's a good trigger to oh yeah something like this and then you check that a couple of prompts and then just start working in your stuff but you don't you don't use that material you just put your take there the first and rough cut of Star Wars had footage from World War II so it actually had pilot footage so one of you know and the Trench Run was based on you know the Dam Busters so it had actual footage from World War II Pilots for the dog fights they had no VFX for the X-Wing they hadn't been produced yet so they did this first edit with this car and obviously that was limited when they were showing it to producers because a lot of producers didn't understand it someone like Spielberg in the audience was like I love this this is gonna this is gonna make a million dollars this can be actually made a lot more than a million dollars but this is meant to be you know a massive success um whereas a producer couldn't understand it now you could imagine but not for the final film but that that would might be a YouTube AI could I imagine My Starship fighting the way like in these uh these World War II dogfights maybe a kind of crappy image but then you can show to production you know if you've worked in VFX you know exactly how many iterations we show you know we know that that whole phase where they're like I know what I want when I see it and you know I I could imagine it would be great to to use something like AI for that stage of the process of like okay what like this I like that like this like that and then we'll do it properly yeah you're not still in you are pitching and basically you can even create jobs uh I think it's a smart way of using that that's why I always put in the headline no no it's not AI is no to the unethical use of AI because again going back to politics the way you can get things done in politics is not being against but being in favor of something but you define what exactly you mean by that in this case let's use AI in a way that doesn't affect artists doesn't steal from artists and doesn't break an entire economy in the in the in the art field animation and bfx video games card games you know um and that's that's the exercise I would say the exercise is not that and it's hard because I understand I always advocate of the idea of disrupt first um build later um otherwise people don't care um this is the sadness of social media sometimes you need to be a little sensationalist or a little bit you know like extreme to be heard and then okay now that you listen to me it's like hello I'm here you scream people shut up and then you start talking normal so I think now people hurt us now we got the voice now we can articulate better what we want and if we do this a little bit aside of emotions I think we are gonna get further and farther and farther because now the media eyes the legal eyes are the AI eyes are from us and our reactions and we need to look like we are gonna fight for this with all what we got and you are not gonna put us in an emotional corner like luditis or whatever they want to to tell because the fight is going to be long but the fight is fair and it will happen you know historically I think in the following years we will see changes in low um and that's my take that's why I'm slowing down the emotional part because in Christmas I was on fire I can't tell you that I would like I was seeing so many things I guess like man this is uh but now it's like you know I've been contacting Sherry dance I've been contacting uh different lawyers I was reading about different laws in different countries and also stable efficiency and this is my exercise and it's the exercise I recommend to every artist because I think it's quite important to understand the model so yeah so I hate to use a face we're not ladies because I studied history and I know that the luddites weren't anti-technology themselves they were Artisans who replaced by child labor unskilled labor in factories um they lived in a society where they didn't have to vote they didn't have any welfare so when they lost their jobs they actually starved many of them did stuff so they're violent reaction to factories there literal throwing spanner in the works was a was a case of them not having rights in this case we have rights we have but most of us uh depend obviously we have a worldwide audience the rights are going to vary as well but we have certain rights and we have certain protections um and therefore we can we can we can articulate our arguments and we can you know fight for things through various sort of legal channels um but again the aim is as we've I think we've been quite clear we're not opposed to what I'm we're not posted technology in fact we did a we did it very early on uh we did a live um podcast led by Sophie where we had a discussion about IO quite early on with artists and uh art teachers and and various people and some were quite in favor some were using it for pitches some were using it for all kinds of things but um you know once you start as you said once you've seen some of the the issues that come up people deliberately imitating somebody's style um you know and again this query of where did they get the data set and you know did they have the right to that data set then we we start to sort of see some of the sort of kind of the problems yeah and it's just about resolving those so that we can move forward like you know like we can we can drive a car but we can't just drive at 200 miles an hour through a residential area yeah having come full circle I guess I I would just like to let you articulate what you believe is an ethical use of AI ways in which artists could take advantage of this technology in ways in which the data sets could be created in a manner that does not infringe upon people's Artistic Endeavors yeah again AI I'm I'm first of all yeah even generative images Technologies not even AI it's more like machine learning because AI is intelligence and there is not a real intelligence there um so about ethical uses again is a matter of the line will be I think written it's going to happen in the following years because we are still trying to find our positions even big companies are trying to take the temperature of the people to see where they position themselves so I I do believe in the common sense I do believe in that strongly like you feel something is wrong it's most likely because it's wrong as simple as that and there is a bit of exercise there to be to abstract from your will and something that you like and AI can be pretty addictive to pretty addictive to the point that you can lose the control of your own opinion about the technology because you want the the pump the the hype of pressing against the front so my my point is um in the way you say for example is uh to to brainstorm uh to build a procedural Menses using my own um original pieces of little Mesa something I just do voice function collapse which is a kind of primitive AI so I can create more of that to do more of your own creation which I think is not quite exciting to be honest I rather enjoy more creating new business by my own I'm making all the millions of choices that are involved in a creative work but I really prefer um if I want to have a final say on that um because I'm pretty sure there are many students many people Juniors that they want to jump into the industry many fans of art that they are worried about what is going to be next and I feel fear even in young people about should I study art or not and there is a beautiful almost poetic contradiction of all this that is yes more than ever double up like really now is the moment where you have a voice like literally um art in the last uh 20 years has been sadly quite driven either either by let's say postmodern art or by Massive Hollywood industry and video games industry which has already standards but this is your fans and if you go outside the fence you are not gonna sell so we got already a style of superheroes we got already a style of formula movie that is gonna work and we need to put the exact amount of Darkness or joy in this movie in our heroes in our color palettes because this is how we are gonna sell merchandising everything so that is good I work on Marvel I work on Disney I work on these movies okay I can put a bit of my opinion on this but you are still uh more like a crafter sometimes we're all artists but we are crafting whatever we have from dailies or from the client or from someone who is fear from production that oh we need to put brighter because this is gonna need to be PG now there is a historical event that talks about us about our passion about our identity so now you have the tool now you can use the talent doesn't matter if you're through you draw good or bad if you do good or bad 3D you can now find who you are through ART more than ever it's a kind of identity seek more than job seeking artem economy never works so well okay but let's start with that from his I mean like even DaVinci needed to work from from a Christianity and he was a troll he was trolling you remember the in the I don't know that in English the painting and you can see that he did all God as a brain saying God is in the brain actually so he was a troll he used art as a way of fighting for his ideas and now you've had the opportunity I know this is a big take for someone who is 18 years old yeah wasn't it Michelangelo this capitalists you know okay now oh that is interesting yeah I don't know there's the translation in Chapel no sorry I think um DaVinci no Michelangelo yeah sorry uh do you want to say it again just to not say him again um I think it's a good point it sounds silly if you said the wrong artist no no this is uh but we can't see how art is historically uh use their talent not just to get the money from you know uh different institutions but also to put their ideas uh like Michelangelo in La Capilla 16 and you can see how the God is itself inside a brain with the perfect shape of our brain I mean the message is clear God is in the brain period so he was he was always fighting like that like goja uh he was always working for the royalty and he hated royalty he always painted all the royal family like really needed some extra time in school you know um now there is a historical event and you can just art obviously don't spend your honor just always put in no AI art in creative ways but at least to find who you are and even if it's not gonna make you money in the very beginning trust me in the long run your name is more important than your art and people don't buy art or don't consume art just because the vignette or the shot is because you and you are the voice so AI can't do that because I'm not gonna feel empathetic or I want to know the history of this microchip or this tensor core I want to know what is coming from and his past no but I can't feel empathy about you about you as an artist so now is the moment of doing more art than ever now is the moment to try to be a bit different to do less maybe you know monsters with four horns and big teeth or new superheroes and maybe trying to find who am I what I want to tell here so that's my little note about this because some people is afraid about studying or not studying art or dedicated to art or not and I would say Yeah more than ever right now let's stop this and next thing just do your show duacom do animation find your style find who you are and try to tell me why should I care about you more than Ai and trust me you are gonna win this fight and the long and right yes for sure we we need more artists creating uh we we you know I mean I think that's true very lots of talented people I mean our art station itself it would you know sort of Corral people into this kind of like you know manga cyberpunk girls with big boobs and in bikinis with with big guns and swords everything all over size and AI can do that but you know AI art station already was problematic and that it was correct it was corralling artists into this certain style you would see that the Arts that were getting views because they were not necessarily Innovative for or particularly in spot many of them were technically incredible but do you know do you know anyone that entered the industry yes to do the copy of do you know I I I don't maybe I'm wrong but I don't see I see always like a story when I was a kid I was playing this game when I watched this movie and I wanted to do that I don't see like yeah I want to do what artist Asian people do exactly that's more like a mark a market shaping but not the real inside artists but maybe this fact that we have been in a sense work being following me trying to follow the algorithms of social platforms are having a sense been behaving more like Ai and and a bit like how you know I mean I know it was a fallacy when we're talking about the copyright but when you talk about the photography and art you know after you had photography you had artists like Picasso who could draw realistically but yeah there was a certain there was a certain sudden realization Point there's I don't there's no point if I want something that looks like a tree I mean I can I can take a picture and it looks like a tree but I if I want to create something new I can create it and so suddenly you had this move away from you know necessarily the strict interpolation of realization and so why do I want a picture of a shoe what what do I feel when I look at a tree or what do I when I see a bull why why is that what what is it about a bull that is that is interesting or a chicken yeah I mean I don't know if the gomberg history of art there's a story of art there's a there's a brilliant side by side of Picasso's drawing of 13 of a chicken which is perfectly realistic looks like a beautiful looks like a chicken yeah and then he's pretty crazy um adult kind of interpretive chicken which looks file is realistic almost looks more childlike but it tells you like this chicken is angry and this chicken is gonna pick you and you're like oh whoa whoa look look watch out for that chicken yeah yeah either they always create six fingers hyper realistic faces with six fingers and wellness is less expressive Than The Simpsons that four fingers and they're hilarious and it's super easy to draw so I just worried that maybe we end up in another that icing our cubism uh thingy an artist like they want to fight the opposite would be like completely abstract which I don't care but it is to that we need somehow to find uh it's sad but it is true that Arc is also a weapon um sorry we are gonna leave now in a circumstances where we need a bit of extra effort let's accept that it's gonna happen uh but also with optimism because I believe in the long run I crave him for art I really want more and I'm super happy that I remove connections of AI prompters on link and in that now I start to see more animation tests more Concepts and oh wow this is cool I appreciate more art than before I think R is gonna raise the value um AI can create so much millions of images that you think about the offer on demand economic lows when you have of offer the demand just goes down down and the price is very low when you have something more unique the price diamonds gold the price Rises now so I do believe that if you put more effort into rather than doing a copycat of whatever you saw in the last 10 years of Artic station and think what I think about this or what IP what I want I want to create or what kind of Animation style is going to define a bit better myself then you will have a beautiful options to be recognized but chance to build a very important interesting career I would say brilliant and I think that's a great place to to stop the discussion I'd love to get you back and talk a bit about your company obviously we've been specific on on this on this debate but I would um as as more comes out I would love to talk about your entrepreneurism and how you got involved with that so yeah we'll definitely have you back at some point on the show yeah I think that was a fantastic point to end I'd love to thank you for your time thank you and um we'll speak to you soon thank you so much and and everyone posts your comments questions and demands in the in the uh in the comment section or if you're on an audio platform you can always head over to our website onto YouTube or you can contact us on LinkedIn or any of the social platforms because we're pretty much everywhere not really on Facebook but everywhere else and uh including Mastodon um have a great evening and speak to you soon foreign[Music]