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"prompter:" should change to "artist:"

Tagging Discussion » "prompter:" should change to "artist:" Search Posts
Started by IWTCIPP
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LemonDrop

@Admin
Well it sounds like you’re just trying to control what art can be. Bananas taped to walls are art and blaming contemporary artists and society in general for thinking so is not gonna work. It doesn’t mean you have to appreciate those types of art but I don’t see why you think other people cannot. You have some vision of what you want all art to to be like but it’s not going to align with everyone else’s and that’s probably not a good mindset for running an art site.
“Artist” is not a descriptor of status, rather one describing an activity. This is why everyone is an artist at some point essentially as everyone will perform this activity to some extent through their life to creatively express themselves. Most people will not claim to be an artist when talking about their career/hobby or whatever though because generally in that context you’re choosing which activity you practice the most or have the most skill in (even if you’ve say dabbled in art just like everyone else has). Tags are purely describing what is going on with a given work, not what someone’s occupation is, so person who created the art is an artist and it’s not trying to claim that’s their main career path. Simple as that.
I for instance have created some art pieces on Derpi as well as some photography as I do both things occasionally with my time, but I would not describe my main choice of hobby as either of those and only mention it if I was making a list to rank which ones I practice from most to least. I wouldn’t say that means I don’t deserve a tag though so people can’t find the things I’ve done as again it’s not an indicator of skill level or mastery, just a grouping of common things based on creator.
Admin

Administrator
@LemonDrop
I wouldn’t say that means I don’t deserve a tag
There’s nothing stopping you here (or there) from having an associated tag.
This is why everyone is an artist
Which makes the term meaningless, so why vie for having the tag called “artist” and not something more descriptive (ie. useful) of what the person actually did to create something?
If everyone is an artist for everything they create, then the term has no meaning at all. But this is an imageboard, a place where people fastidiously try to categorize things.
And for such purposes, there’s a distinction made between prompter (someone that enters a prompt and some settings into a generator to get an image), editor (someone that edits already existing work in minor ways), and artist (someone that creates something wholly new). Derpi also has photographer, which likely won’t apply here, and if either place hosted fics there’d also be a writer tag.
Wanting so much to be labelled “artist” comes off as either some sort of extreme pedantry about the term, or revanchism over twitter etc. having been so hostile against generative AI.
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LemonDrop

@Admin
So what about all the AI art that is more than just entering a prompt? Surely you know some people use inpainting or edit a photo manually in Photoshop. The only term which encapsulates what people are doing is artist, prompting is merely describing part of the toolchain. It’d be like calling all digital artists “Photoshop interactors” or “tablet scribblers” as that’s a more literal descriptor of what actions they are doing, but it fails to encapsulate why exactly they are using those tools (to create art), and is of course needlessly specific to the point of not being a consistent thing to tag stuff with. Info like what sort of prompt, model and other tools one uses and etc is just information you’d put in the description in this case. Being needlessly reductionist like that is just understandably insulting to people trying to practice an artform lol.
Admin

Administrator
@LemonDrop
Surely you know some people use inpainting or edit a photo manually in Photoshop.
Which is why the editor tag will be set to work with ai composition, at least for starters (and we may just move to artist in the long run).
I feel like you haven’t even bothered looking into how this is being handled here, or on derpi, and just want to complain. And yap.
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Annalee

Moderator
Adjutant
@SpikeyTum
Thank you for finding that! There’s so many little details in philomena that are baked into the code. Maybe because the idea that ‘other sites will have authors instead of artists’ is just so different than what it was originally created to do that making it ‘a thing that you decide and configure once’ seemed like a waste of work.
So, thanks to all of you for putting up the ‘still moving in’ gotchas here, and for letting us know when you find something weird or wrong.
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Clopxie

Personally I feel like “prompter” is the most fitting description. I definitely wouldn’t consider myself an artist, even though I often do some editing on my pics. Like removing extra fingers and adding missing ones, or removing extra legs wings or other issues like that. At least for me, that amount of drawing and editing isn’t enough to qualify myself as an artist.
Even “creator” sounds a bit odd to me, as I’m telling the computer to create something instead of creating it myself.
If I give the computer prompts and it does the work, I’m a prompter. If I were to draw a pony and generate the background, I’d consider myself an artist who creates AI assisted art, so I’d be happy with being called either an artist or a creator.
So at least in my mind the current tags make perfect sense and there’s no reason to start messing with them.
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LemonDrop

@Clopxie
That doesn’t make much sense, in any digital art the computer is doing all the generation of the information. The human simply provides input as all these things are tools. For digital art the tool is something like Photoshop and the inputs are a series of tablet motion inputs, for 3D art the tool is Blender and the inputs are bit more complex but similar, and for AI art the tool is some AI model and the inputs are a series of prompts and etc combined with potentially other digital art methods.
The computer is always the direct “creator” of digital art as far as what entity is actually putting the values into memory, but in terms of creator we mean which human artist was the one driving the process. As I said before, the purpose of an artist tag is to find more similar stuff to such work, the AI model should be listed too to find more art that was created with such a model in a similar fashion, but the creator or artist is referring to the human behind the process as that’s what people are interested in finding more of in that case.
This is why everyone here is an artist fwiw, you are driving a creative process so you are projecting your vision into what the AI is creating just like any other digital art process. It is not like these are just totally random outputs without any artistry behind them, even a single word prompt is enough to start guiding something in an artist direction. All these methods involve iterative refinement of ideas to reach some “goal” you have in your mind, they just use different methods of doing so. Acting like art needs to be “hard” to be valid is just nonsense, the true ideal of art would be to beam people’s thoughts directly into some sharable medium such that people can express themselves creatively without that being “locked” behind a difficult amount of mechanical skill or something that some do not have the time or ability to achieve. AI is just one step in getting closer to that ideal. Of course the most impressive art will always reflect what has the most effort put into it or is the most creatively inspired which is just something that will always vary, but yeah it’s certainly wrong to discount art just because it’s “bad” or because it’s “trivial” to create.
Delly

Administrator
Certified Blueberry
@LemonDrop
Cool.
Create your own platform with your own redefinitions and interpretation of terms. The project this site runs on is FOSS, so noone’s stopping you.
The rules will not be changing here.
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LemonDrop

@Delly
Sorry I thought I was using the definition the world uses:
An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating an art
Also there’s already alternatives like Twibooru, and people are already preferring them over this site. If you wanna kill the site though be my guest. I am just trying to give some advice.
Admin

Administrator
@LemonDrop
This is why everyone here is an artist
Then the term is meaningless and you only want it as a little badge.
As an imageboard, the site uses different things to better classify things. prompter for raw prompting, editor for people that edit prompted works, and artist for people that create a significant amount of the image outside of AI.
Stop being so emotional about the label.
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Clopxie

@LemonDrop
That doesn’t make much sense, in any digital art the computer is doing all the generation of the information. The human simply provides input as all these things are tools. For digital art the tool is something like Photoshop and the inputs are a series of tablet motion inputs, for 3D art the tool is Blender and the inputs are bit more complex but similar
That is such a weird argument. That’s like saying that a traditional artist isn’t actually an artist because the pencil does the work and the human only provides it with the inputs. What makes a 3D artist an artist is the fact that they use physical actions to move the mouse/pen to design or sculpt something.
If you make a humanoid robot that recognizes speech, and tell it to draw Mona Lisa, it doesn’t make you an artist. So why would it be any different with a web UI that understands text?
Whether it’s drawing, photoshopping, 3D modeling, or something else, I think getting to the final result by using your own brain and body to give the tools real-time input based on the progress is what makes someone an artist.
If you tell another person to draw something based on your inputs, that person is the artist.
If you put your hand on theirs and you’re the one controlling what goes on the paper, you’re the artist.
And if you let the other person finish the drawing, and then you remove the 7 extra fingers the other person drew, you’re not the artist of that drawing, you just edited art made by someone else.
Now, if you were to redo a significant chunk of the drawing, you could perhaps argue that you are the artist and the other person assisted you by giving you a rough idea to work with. Now that I think about it, I think there might be a tag for the AI version of that?
It is not like these are just totally random outputs without any artistry behind them, even a single word prompt is enough to start guiding something in an artist direction. All these methods involve iterative refinement of ideas to reach some “goal” you have in your mind, they just use different methods of doing so.
Sure, knowing how the prompts work does help, but it’s something you can learn in a day or two by scrolling through some guides and using a tiny bit of imagination when prompting. But you can also get some really good results with prompts that you put absolutely no thought or effort in.
A while ago I tried generating images with nothing but random verses of this song as the prompts. No quality prompts, negatives, poses, anything. Just random lyrics from that song. And it gave me some really good looking results that had next to nothing to do with the prompts.
As a bonus question, if I’m trying to prompt for a very specific image, but the AI interprets it wrong and comes up with something different, but way better than what I had in mind, does it make it make me a good artist for getting good looking results, or a bad artist for not getting the results I wanted?
Posted Report
Zealousmagician

@Clopxie
The mere act of selection based on criteria, of critique, is itself an art. If you generate many images and select a few because they are appealing to you in some way or inspire you, then when you share that, those images become a reflection of your judgement, of your personality- you have assigned them artistic value. Unless you are to say that they already had artistic value and that the machine is the artist, you must be the artist in this scenario because the only artistic meaning held in those images comes from you personally. An example of what exactly can qualify as art can be seen in the famous Duchamp’s Fountain and other readymades.
In your hypothetical, you aren’t an artist until you’ve applied judgement to the image generated and decided on if you now find it to have value.
I won’t argue for more than having significant edits be considered for the artist tag, because I know I would only be wasting my time. I only wished to add my thoughts on this part of the discussion.
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Clopxie

@Zealousmagician
I get what you’re saying, but that seems like a pretty vague definition for an artist.
I tend to generate a ton of images and then pick my favorites and post them, and I suppose whether someone else thinks that gives them more artistic value is up to them. But at least I don’t think that makes me any more or less of an artist.
Like if picking the favorite ones is what gives them artistic value or makes me the images’ artist, then what if I just generate 20 pics and dump them on a site without even looking at the results? Would they be less worthy of being called art, and would I even be considered as the artist?
Or if I send them to someone else and they pick their favorites and post them online, would they be considered as the artist, even if they had nothing to do with the actual image generation?
I’m sorry in case I’m just misinterpreting your point, but that just seems like a really vague way to define what is art and who’s an artist. Though I know those topics have been debated long before AI art was even a thing, so I’m not expecting you or anyone else to have a concrete answer to what counts as an artist/art.
I just think that the current prompter/artist/ai assisted artist labels are distinctive and descriptive enough for there to not be any need to start trying to redefine them.
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LemonDrop

@Clopxie
That’s like saying that a traditional artist isn’t actually an artist because the pencil does the work and the human only provides it with the inputs.
Yes that’s what you’re saying, just like it’s weird to say someone isn’t an artist just because the AI does the rendering and the human only provides the prompts. Obviously that is a silly thing to say which is why I pointed it out.
If you tell another person to draw something based on your inputs, that person is the artist.
Yes and no. Commissioners are artists as much as the people who draw the commission, but obviously the one drawing it is doing most the effort and that is usually what is more important. It’s a joint effort though, the final piece would not exist without both people’s input. Derpi does tag commissioners for this purpose as their specific desires and artistic vision is still something people may want to see more of, they just have a specific name like “commissioner”, but they are an artist in the general sense too.
As a bonus question, if I’m trying to prompt for a very specific image, but the AI interprets it wrong and comes up with something different, but way better than what I had in mind, does it make it make me a good artist for getting good looking results, or a bad artist for not getting the results I wanted?
That happens all the time in other art too, sometimes you make an incorrect brushstroke and you decide to go with it. More often, what is actually feasible is not the same as what you will envision, but you’ll likely discover something neat along the way that is a compromise with your desires. Very common in bigger things like game development, as what’s in your mind is often too complex in some regard to actually implement, so just gotta make compromises in your vision.
Zealousmagician

@Clopxie
You’re not misinterpreting my point don’t worry, I probably take a more radical mindset of how I see art and the artist.
Like if picking the favorite ones is what gives them artistic value or makes me the images’ artist, then what if I just generate 20 pics and dump them on a site without even looking at the results? Would they be less worthy of being called art, and would I even be considered as the artist?
I haven’t considered this idea so there might be a flaw in my thinking on this, but I think that they would be less worthy of being considered art, up until they’re perceived by someone else and that person considers them to have meaning. I don’t believe anyone would be considered the artist in this scenario without further action being taken. It might be equivalent to someone seeing a landscape in nature and seeing beauty in it.
I’m assuming in this scenario that the prompt or setup is random/disconnected enough from the images that you would not consider any intent or meaning on your behalf to have been present in the images generated, and that the act itself of generating them and uploading them without looking isn’t an intentional artistic choice of some sort. My answer would be more complicated if those assumptions are incorrect.
Or if I send them to someone else and they pick their favorites and post them online, would they be considered as the artist, even if they had nothing to do with the actual image generation?
If the aforementioned assumptions are in place, I think the person picking their favorites would be the artist, yes. Akin to someone viewing a naturally occurring element and taking a photograph of it to share with others.
I just think that the current prompter/artist/ai assisted artist labels are distinctive and descriptive enough for there to not be any need to start trying to redefine them.
I don’t like that the editor tag applies for AI composition works at the moment, but since there’s talks about changing that I’ve decided to hold off on my reasoning for my beliefs regarding that. For images with minor editing, I still think it should be artist and not editor, not only in the case of technically being correct but also in terms of tag usefulness and accuracy, but I again will refrain from giving my reasoning since I don’t think anyone will seriously consider that idea.
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Annalee

Moderator
Adjutant
I’m loving the respectful and engaging conversation here—so nice to see! 💕 Just a quick reminder: the word artist is special because it’s tied to the rules. While someone having that as a tag doesn’t grant magical powers or guarantee every request or report is acted on, in our rules under the EU Copyright Directive (and to some extent the DMCA), being an artist implies they have copyrightable works. So we have to handle their reports fairly and responsibly to protect the site, including the possibility of takedowns—which I’d really like to avoid. So, sorry for repeating myself, I’d really like to avoid us using that word in any way that doesn’t match how it’s used in the rules.
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Zealousmagician

@Annalee
Thank you so much for reminding us to keep the implications of the word “artist” in mind, specifically in reference to EU copyright. I’m delighted to say that you’ve inspired me to do some research on the matter, and the results were very surprising: https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/65585680/Hugenholtz_Quintais2021_Article_CopyrightAndArtificialCreation.pdf
In this paper, they actually agree with me completely; the mere act of selection in the process of creating AI art will by default make the image copyrightable as it becomes an expression of the person prompting and selecting the image! Our discussion here seems to be right on point for the issue at hand. I’ll highlight the most relevant bits here:
In some cases, the redaction role of the human user will be reduced to that of selecting or refusing ready-made output generated by the AI system. This raises an interesting question from a copyright perspective. Clearly, the mere act of selecting may be one of many factors contributing to a finding of originality. But what if selecting one AI output from several is the only choice left to the user? Like many other questions raised by AI, this is not a novel issue.
In the past, the emergence of non-traditional art forms such as the ready-mades created by conceptualist artists, have triggered similar questions. What is it that elevates a pre-existing artefact such as a prefabricated urinal or a bicycle wheel to a work of art – and, by implication, to a work of authorship? According to Swiss copyright scholar Kummer, the decisive creative act here is converting the (in itself unprotectable) idea of a ‘‘ready-made’’ into copyright protected expression by presenting the artefact (the objet trouve´) as a work of art. Kummer’s ‘‘presentation theory’’ implies that the mere act of selecting a pre-existing object suffices to convert the object into a work. While Kummer’s theory has been embraced by some copyright scholars, it remains controversial. In any case, personal selection undoubtedly contributes to a finding of originality in AI-assisted output.
and also:
Proving or enforcing authorship or copyright ownership of a work may sometimes be difficult in practice. For this reason, many Member States provide for rules that establish a (rebuttable) presumption of authorship or copyright ownership, in that the person indicated on or with the published work as the author is deemed to be the author, unless proven otherwise. The Berne Convention and the Enforcement Directive validate such legal presumptions and allow the person whose name ‘‘appear[s] on the work in the usual manner’’ to instigate infringement procedures.
It seems that by default, almost all AI works uploaded are copyrightable! Given the specifics of this paper, it seems that we truly did need reminding of what makes the artist tag special- and fortunately it legally applies to nearly everyone uploading AI works by default. I hope this helps 💕
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Admin

Administrator
@Zealousmagician
“Editors” and “artists” have always had the same takedown policies, here and on derpi.
As for pure prompting, under the current jurisdiction we’re in, the copyright belongs to, and the prompter should dully attribute to, every single artist whose work was used in the training of the model(s) they’re using, and any financial gain made from the image distributed among them, or to a neutral fund for unknown artists whose work the model was trained on.
Which is stupid.
The rules here, and on derpi, are what they are because they’re the rules the admins decided on to make the site usable. If we had a stick up our asses over what The Law strictly says about copyright then none of us would be here on the internet sharing pictures of the My Little Pony© franchise.
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Zealousmagician

@Admin
You seem to be saying that the rules are decided not based on the law but on what the admins find practical. @Annalee seemed to imply that the use of the word artist and the rule pertaining to it is based on EU law.
@Annalee
the word artist is special because it’s tied to the rules. […] in our rules under the EU Copyright Directive (and to some extent the DMCA), being an artist implies they have copyrightable works. So we have to handle their reports fairly and responsibly to protect the site, including the possibility of takedowns—which I’d really like to avoid. So, sorry for repeating myself, I’d really like to avoid us using that word in any way that doesn’t match how it’s used in the rules.
The only interpretation I can take from this moderator’s warning is that we shouldn’t equate prompters and editors to artists, with their justification being that it doesn’t work like that under EU copyright law. If that’s not what they were warning about, then I’m confused, because then no usage of the word “artist” in the discussion hasn’t matched how it’s used in the rules.
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