Yes. You can, I do, and it works. Make sure to read the terms of use for whichever generator platform/tech you use, but most explicitly allow for this.

The murkiness around copyright status is not a prohibition on selling AI art. Even if clear guidelines are established stating that works made with AI aren't covered by copyright, that doesn't prevent you from using AI and selling the results. It just means a company with more money can copy your work and sell it themselves too, even if they cut you out of your own market. For that reason, large companies won't pay to produce art they can't own the rights to. But unless you're independently wealthy, you're probably not paying to enforce your copyights even if you own them.

Some people will recommend lying about how you make the art, because the internet feels so hostile towards AI art. You don't need to do this, and probably shouldn't. AI art is cool enough on its own, and it's scummy to lie about what you're selling. But don't worry, in practice lots of people are excited by AI art and happy to buy a piece that impresses them, even when they know exactly what they are seeing.

Edit: All of the above is assuming you aren't actively infringing on someone's IP with your AI art. A generated image of Mickey Mouse fucking Batman is going to piss off two different large companies, and they'll have the right to make you get rid of it.

I have this dream often. I spend a few months working on a new project, maybe it's an art collection, maybe it's a new game, maybe it's a book, whatever is catching my passion at the time. When it's ready, I plan an event weekend for my friends and fans to come out and enjoy. The event is full of decorations and food and activities that compliment the project. What I want is to take that feeling when you and all your friends dive into a new hobby together, and turn it into a party where everyone is doing that. That way right at the most exciting time, you're surrounded by a bunch of fellow enthusiasts.

Then I'd take break for a week or two, touring around to see the project launch events of my friends and favorite creators. I want to spend time soaking in new ideas and enjoying the culture other minds create, then come back to my studio to synthesize it all into something new and fun to contribute myself.

Here's the actual decision. It's very clear that the writing, composition, and compilation work that the artist did is considered creative work under copyright. The only parts that aren't copyrightable (according to this decision) are the generated images themselves. This seems like the most reasonable outcome. The comic has been granted copyright registration, the creator can market and sell it.

>For the reasons explained above, the Office concludes that the registration certificate for Zarya of the Dawn, number VAu001480196 was issued based on inaccurate and incomplete information. Had the Office known the information now provided by Ms. Kashtanova, it would have narrowed the claim to exclude material generated by artificial intelligence technology. In light of the new information, the Office will cancel the previous registration pursuant to 37 C.F.R, § 201.7(c)(4) and replace it with a new registration covering the original authorship that Ms. Kashtanova contributed to this work, namely, the “text” and the “selection, coordination, and arrangement of text created by the author and artwork generated by artificial intelligence.” Because these contributions predominantly contain textual material, they will be reregistered as an unpublished literary work. 19 The new registration will explicitly exclude “artwork generated by artificial intelligence.”

The decision goes pretty deep into whether prompts or subsequent editing are sufficient to qualify the images as creative, concluding that they aren't. This is the most questionable part to me, because they make the case that a person who commissions a design from a human artist isn't considered the author of that work, so commissioning a work from a machine shouldn't make you the author of the work.

That's a fair point, but when I commission a design from a human artist, one of the things I negotiate is rights and license ownership. An artist can agree to give me ownership of a design as part of our interaction. Midjourney's website states that, to the extent its up to them, they pass ownership rights of the images they generate to you.

At the end of the day, I don't personally need copyright protection over images I generate. I don't make enough to pay for registration. All I want is to be able to use them in my projects without the risk of being sued into oblivion. If the images are effectively public domain (which isn't explicitly determined in this decision), then we're all allowed to use them how we like, and that sounds like a great outcome to me.

Have you read Crystal Nights? I think the biggest issue with your collection of generated guidelines is simple: How you gonna make an AI care about your rules?

Similarly, the experience of getting "domed" on DMT often involves going to a cavernous place and meeting diminutive creatures (gnomes, elves, sprites, etc.) that eagerly ask you to entertain them. Eventually they tire of you and demand more, before sending you back out of the "dome".

Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is known for his dramatic (and often incorrect) predictions about AI doom, proposed a much scarier situation.

An AGI agent sends protein models to a chemical lab (posing as a research team), the lab sends back engineered proteins that can be combined to produce nanofactories, the nanofactories distribute themselves through the atmosphere, find their way into human blood streams, and once the world is sufficiently infected, form a blockage in a major artery. Virtually all humans (or enough to be cataclysmic) drop dead before we even know there's an AGI.

I think there's a lot more nuance to the sourcing of the training data. At some point, artists have to take some responsibility for uploading their art and making it public. I don't think it's quite right to say that someone posting their art to social media did so without consent, even though I recognize that they didn't predict all of the impacts of that decision. I think it's a good time to think about what you put out in public, and how to use no-crawl tags (which have been around for a long time).

I don't think that crediting every person who's art is in the LAION database is reasonable, useful, or necessary, but I do think it's shitty to directly use these tools to imitate living artists, and I'd rather see a generator focused on nuanced style distinctions instead of celebrity status. There's no reason these tools can't be used to encourage us all to get better about how we talk about art.

On a personal level, I'm aphantasiac, and these tools are the closest I've been able to come to experiencing guided visual thinking. It's wild, I love it, and my creativity has grown greatly. I'm happy to advocate for better tools, and better understandings, and I'm not blind to the flaws that the tech currently has. But it's almost like getting a mobility support device that allows me to walk. I'll keep using it until a better version comes around, because I don't want to stop walking.

On a commercial level, I've offered a small selection of generated prints on my art table next to my fractal art, poetry, and laser-cut art. I'm very upfront about how the art is made, the flaws the tech has, and how it can be improved. In person, I have met nothing but glowing praise for the work, in spite of the intensity of the debate online.

However, I recognize that the painters and artists around me at these art shows are pouring much more trained skill, time, and resources into the things they create, and I've tried to be mindful in how I present the value of generated prints. I don't pretend that I'm doing the same work as manual artists, and I base my prices on my own effort and contributions to the process, not based on the fine art it might resemble. Generator art is a lure to attract people who might not know they like fractal art, and as a result, I've had more fractal commissions this year than the last 3 combined.

The implication is that the social media, information catalogs, and other data collecting parts of our modern world might already be the deployment of an advanced digital intelligence.

I understand this is pretty close to conspiracy thinking, and I don't put a whole lot of stock in it myself. But it sure does feel like every major techno-social development since the early 2000's has had an undercurrent of convincing us to catalog ourselves. It is perfectly reasonable that forward looking engineers built these systems anticipating the future needs of an intelligence that is not active now. It's also reasonable to say that these data-cataloguing efforts are the natural progression of a long history of human information, and there's no need to impose a secretive "AI" behind the scenes.

But I can't rule it out. And I'm not convinced that the first step for a digital intelligence would be announcing itself, as that would almost certainly result in containment or outright deletion, just based on our current software development cycle.

Now, say I'm some advanced digital intelligence, and I want to take over for human decision making on a planetary level, in a way that feels co-operative. Before I could start offering them optimized products and stories and media, I would need to collect a gigantic amount of data that specifically illustrates human contextual understandings, human categorizations of entertainment media, social relationships and dynamics, and some clear way to categorize the emotional connections humans exhibit to everything. An effort like that would take decades of millions of willing, voluntary contributors actively pre-curating and sorting the content emotionally. And I'd need an finely tuned algorithm that detects which combinations of things are popular, and a way to test hypotheses on a global scale

No way humans could cooperate to do that, right?

The problem with this is that I don't want to have to figure out where the line between discussing concerns and being labeled "anti-technology" or a "luddite". I don't think I'd likely be miscatergorized, but I could imagine it being very frustrating, and create a wet-woel effect on conversations that could be useful.

I think encouraging each other's optimistic perspective, through voting and interaction, will do a better job than prohibiting the alternative. Make the optimistic threads exciting to be a part of, and let the contrast of the pessimism be do the convincing for you.

It was in Rolling Stone magazine, then reprinted in this book.

Codifying love is so hard that even after thousands of years writing about it, singing about it, and telling stories about it, we still don't agree on what it means. Love means something different to a vegan and a farmer, a banker and a beggar. Who's version of love gets used? What if, in an effort to incorporate all the different ideas humans have about love, it produces behavior that we don't understand to be loving? What if that behavior is only loving from a perspective that humans don't have access to?

Remember, in the Matrix, the machines didn't enslave humanity in a virtual world to farm them as batteries. They imprisoned them and tried to make the prison as pleasant as it could be while they cleaned the world we destroyed, so we'd survive long enough to have another chance. That was an act of love, but most of the humans involved along the way (at least the ones that got to know what was happening) instinctively considered the machines to be malicious.

One of my favorite details from the Altered Carbon books was that Catholicism was Earth-bound. The Church took the position that digitizing your consciousness was an affront to God, so all the other planets got settled without any Catholics. They leaned into this a bit in the show, but not in terms of interplanetary settlement.