You'll be pleasantly surprised by the huge range of options

May 25, 2024 1:30 AM

Wrapped up in the thrill of discovering this new, delightful art and securing versions of it to gaze at while stirring tea in the morning, my dark, skeptical, spidey-senses failed to engage. High on consumer dopamine and browsing picture frames, I forgot, for an important moment, that we recently crossed over into a different sort of world. The sort of world where it is trivial to prompt a neural network to create an image that pulls on the traditional patterns, subject matter, and motifs of William Morris, but layered with the hyper-realistic, high-definition, pixel-perfect asethetics of the modern web; dramatic lighting and sweeping landscapes ripped from ArtStation, meticulously art-directed details from Wes Anderson film stills, the two-tone color overlays and soft glow effects popularised on Instagram and Pinterest. A system trained on everything we've clicked like on, priming us to like what it makes. from Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History
posted by chavenet (34 comments total)

May Morris is often missed
posted by HearHere at 1:50 AM on May 25 [6 favorites]

Oof these images are disturbing to me.
Difficult to judge my reaction because I'm very familiar with the originals, so the "uncanny valley" is powerful for me.

I don't find them attractive, especially not the William Morris fakes, because the thing that attracts me to the original work is how cleverly he used the limits of the printing medium to create his images. Those limitations are, of course, completely absent from the fakes.

But I can also see what might be attractive about the fakes, for someone who's maybe not so familiar with the originals. They are very pretty, if you don't notice the weird artifacts.
posted by Zumbador at 1:55 AM on May 25 [6 favorites]

Surely this is illegal already?
posted by Phanx at 4:02 AM on May 25 [2 favorites]

"Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization. What shall I say of it now, when the words are put into my mouth, my hope of its destruction..."
- William Morris (really)
posted by Joan Rivers of Babylon at 4:09 AM on May 25 [23 favorites]

This probably is a big contributor to the crash in sales of mid tier original art. Those AI pieces are fine wall decor. Their only cost is two minutes of CPU and the print fulfilment company’s cut. Anything you want on your wall, wholesale.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:27 AM on May 25 [3 favorites]

I'm 56, and have been using computers since I was 14 (or 12, if you count video games); did a degree in the late 1980s in computer science, including courses on computer graphics and artificial intelligence; have been working on and around the internet since the mid-1990s, and directly since 1998; have basically spent my entire career thinking about its educational, social and political impact and possibilities, and my free time exploring its artistic ones.

I hate this, and everything it represents. It's the opposite of what I've loved about the flourishing of IT and the internet: their possibilities for creativity, connection and the sharing of knowledge. This is the destruction of knowledge, of what it really means to know and understand our collective past. It's the cooption, dilution and distortion of human creativity. It's the rupturing of deep, long-term connections between past, present and future; of how art can speak to us from the past and carry our voices into the future.

This isn't just about the impact on the work and works of writers, artists and musicians. It's inimical to everything good about the technologies we've known and loved since they made their way into ordinary people's hands in the 1970s and 1980s.
posted by rory at 5:34 AM on May 25 [33 favorites]

The copyright of William Morris wallpaper designs has run out. Not sure about the other artists work though.
posted by Czjewel at 5:56 AM on May 25 [1 favorite]

I have to admit that I'm impressed that this can be done. But reducing the order made out of chaos that art is to mere calculations and statistics, however impressive a technical feat, is ugly. I don't like it. Maybe if we ever manage to develop a proper general AI that is truly indistinguishable from the human mind we'll be able to believe it can create something out of nothing, but I'm not holding my breath. As it is I say "gee whiz" and not much else at this point.
posted by somebodystrousers at 6:06 AM on May 25 [3 favorites]

Copyright infringement isn't really the issue here, is it? They're presenting these images as if they've been created by Morris, Klimt, and Manet.

I don't know if it's fraud, exactly, but it's something dishonest.
posted by Zumbador at 6:10 AM on May 25 [7 favorites]

It's fraud and forgery. It's also really bad art. There wasn't a single fake piece that looked at all like it was made by the original authors, and they certainly weren't "improvements".
posted by signal at 6:18 AM on May 25 [8 favorites]

Morris predicted in 1884 that there would be 'a great development of machinery' for labour-saving purposes, until one day, people would look around and 'find that there is not so much work to do as they expected'. Then, he believed, people would take up art and handicraft for pleasure, and 'get rid of their machinery, because it will be possible for them to do so. It isn't possible now; we are not at liberty to do so; we are slaves to the monsters which we have created.'

'We are slaves to the monsters which we have created.' I could weep when I read those words and imagine what Morris would think of these hideous machine-made caricatures of his designs.
posted by verstegan at 6:19 AM on May 25 [18 favorites]

Not shocked that the art world abounds in scammers,hoaxes, con men, film flam men and the like. It's an old story and been going on for centuries.
posted by Czjewel at 6:55 AM on May 25 [2 favorites]

While the AI-generated horse is out of the barn and galloping toward a HDR 8k sunset, there's still a 'report to Etsy' link for this sort of thing, and you can press it! Do your small part!

It's so ugly, this whole process. I wondered how easy it would be to find these fake prints on Etsy, and the answer was it took like 30 seconds, then I followed one of the...ah...creators out to Instagram, where, if you scroll for a while, you eventually see that they 'offer' AI-generated art. It's kept sort of separate from these art prints and the sort of live-laugh-love Inspirational Wall Word art.

It's doubly ironic, I think, because the tools to create tiled artwork have never been more readily available. You should try it! It's easy, and maybe you're not William Morris, but it's sort of hypnotic and satisfying, even if you're bad at it, to create the patterns of repetition. And real artists who are actually good, are also out there, selling their wares (I'm waiting for a print to arrive today from Etsy, for a birthday gift...god, I hope they don't shove it in the mailbox). But the act of creation--even doodling-on-your-computer creation--is so separate from the generate-gigaspam market forces that website commerce have forced on us.

I don't know if I believe in epistemological collapse, so much as I believe in disappointment and frustration. People spending millions developing their AI models are already concerned about model collapse, as we've heard over the course of dozens of threads here--someone is thinking hard about whether their image generator will learn off these weird two-stalked mushrooms from the William Morris forgeries. But to have entered a time when the entire world's art is at your fingertips, and then to shift to where the entire world's art is hidden by trash, and you really have to dig to find the real thing! Where are the curators, the editors!

(But seriously, report this stuff when you see it. You can't make much noise on your own, but you can make a little noise.)
posted by mittens at 7:00 AM on May 25 [8 favorites]

What bothers me most about this is the Etsy-ness of it. The company has long since lost its status as a B-Corp helping sell interesting handmade items. Now it's just tweebay. But because it is on Etsy it has a certain vibe, like maybe it's a place you would find an interesting woodblock print of an actual William Morris? Or no, just an AI generated cheap printout. With a forged name.

The other annoying thing is that something adjacent to this could be interesting. Why not label it "William Morris inspired"? Why not use the AI to do something interesting, like if William Morris drew Machine Elves? Or industrial hydraulic systems? Maybe a William Morris / Lisa Frank mashup? Someone with some aesthetic taste playing with AI could do so many more interesting things. Instead this is just a cheap and deceptive forgery.
posted by Nelson at 8:04 AM on May 25 [10 favorites]

Maybe a William Morris / Lisa Frank mashup?

So this I actually am curious to see
posted by Zumbador at 8:15 AM on May 25 [3 favorites]

This bothers me a lot. First, I hate seeing forgeries. Then I hate seeing my friends fall for forgeries. Then I hate when I tell a friend something they posted was a forgery and they shrug and say it was pretty.

But what is really horrifying is history sites posting AI imagery. Like, fake Sumerian sculptures and fake "ancient astronaut" artifacts. If we live in a world where nothing is real and nothing can be disproved, what can we do for the next generation?
posted by acrasis at 8:29 AM on May 25 [7 favorites]

fuck this (quite literal) noise.
posted by lalochezia at 8:33 AM on May 25 [3 favorites]

Yes, I wish they had at least said W. Morris inspired. I get that most people won't appreciate Monets subtleness, and wispyness for last of a better word. They want sharp image clarity....Happy I took sry history courses.
posted by Czjewel at 9:04 AM on May 25 [1 favorite]

Now I want to generate some Picassos that look like actual nude women and not some weird distorted version.
posted by Nelson at 9:20 AM on May 25 [2 favorites]

William Morris v Lisa Frank. I generated these two images on my Mac Studio M1 Max with 64G of ram using a drawing-centric Stable Diffusion XL model, just 20 steps. Each image took about 20 seconds ish? I generated 8 images and pulled the two I liked the best.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:20 AM on May 25 [10 favorites]

That unicorn looks great. I expect my fair share of the revenue when you set up your shop on Etsy.
posted by Nelson at 9:24 AM on May 25 [1 favorite]

"Holly Golightly? She's a phony! But she's a real phony!"

Not going to give a defense of the current wave of AI-driven productions, some of which are just attractive lies, but the problem space is not new at all. Who really wrote this gospel? Is this really a sonnet by Shakespeare? Did Constantine really make that Donation?

The 1800s was itself a playground of the fake-medieval, a portion of which had little resemblance to actual history. People with money and resources who lived at the same time as Morris built places like Neuschwanstein, or the Palacio da Pena, which have been lovingly restored to this day to maintain their ahistorical hallucinations in their own "authentic" styles.
posted by gimonca at 9:31 AM on May 25 [6 favorites]

I propose we call anyone selling this crap an "aintrepreneur".
posted by rory at 9:39 AM on May 25 [3 favorites]

Now I want someone with more skill than me to generate a painting that's a cross between Fragonard and Keith Haring.Go on, you know you want to.
posted by Czjewel at 9:44 AM on May 25 [2 favorites]

Eh, just type "Can you show me a picture that's a cross between the styles of Keith Haring and Fraganard? Let's say the subject is a unicorn." into Bing / Copilot and be mildly amused at the car crash that ensues. (I added the unicorn because Lisa Frank gdit)
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:53 AM on May 25 [3 favorites]

This happened before AI-generated art. I was at the Getty museum in L.A. and noticed several people taking photos of van Gogh's Irises, which at the time I thought was silly because it's one of the most famous paintings in the world: you can look it up on the internet any time you want.

But when I actually do look it up on the internet, it's hard to tell which is the real one and which is a tweaked one, a reproduction, or even one that is a horizontally flipped image. The same goes for the Mona Lisa and others. I bought a jigsaw puzzle of Starry Night and found I couldn't use online images as a reference because the puzzle was actually a reproduction that was just different enough in the details.

The difference is that with AI-generated art we can do this at internet scale, crowding out the original work with a wave of (some good, some awful) imitations.

AI-generated cultural appropriation.
posted by AlSweigart at 10:10 AM on May 25 [6 favorites]

I'm reading this while sitting in my Morris chair which, being 24 years old, is almost certainly not computer-generated.

I learned about Morris chairs from Esquire magazine (or possibly GQ) in the 1980s. Its supposed advantage is that its wide, flat arms are sufficient to hold a glass of milk AND a sandwich.
posted by neuron at 10:20 AM on May 25 [2 favorites]

This discussion of art fakery is reminding me of John McPhee's marvelous 1967 New Yorker essay A Roomful of Hovings which is collected in the book of the same name. It's a profile of Metropolitan Museum director Thomas Hoving and goes into his eye for detecting fakes.

[Also in the book is McPhee's delightful piece on naturalist Euell Gibbons. (For you kids, Gibbons was seen seemingly daily on TV in the early 1970s.) McPhee and Gibbons take a week-long canoe trip in which all their food is wild plants harvested by Gibbons (they brought some oil for cooking, and salt and pepper). McPhee gained weight on the trip.]

This book is in your local library and is often in used book stores. If you've never read McPhee, it's a good place to start.
posted by neuron at 10:32 AM on May 25 [4 favorites]

naturalist Euell Gibbons

Some men are born to Grape Nuts, some men have Grape Nuts thrust upon them
posted by chavenet at 10:36 AM on May 25 [2 favorites]

Here's a thought. What if you generate an image using AI, then copy it by painting it by hand onto a canvas. Is it now "original"? You did put in the work, and it took time and skill to put pigment on canvas. But you didn't 'create' anything, only copied.
posted by The otter lady at 11:00 AM on May 25 [2 favorites]

What if you generate an image using AI, then copy it by painting it by hand onto a canvas. Is it now "original"?

It's only "original" if it was created in the Silicon Valley region of California. Otherwise it's just "sparkling camera obscura."
posted by AlSweigart at 11:35 AM on May 25 [9 favorites]

One of the reasons I stopped selling on Etsy is that they won't do anything about stuff like this. They have oodles and oodles of money and probably could employ a team of mods to actually yeet AI work, but they won't. Same as they wouldn't deal with people claiming to have handmade storebought Halloween costumes, same as they bungle copyright claims (basically, they assume the first person to complain is right, instead of doing basic investigating like... who opened their shop first). It's also, honestly, pretty hard to get stuff removed if it's downright offensive, racist, etc.
Etsy leaves this stuff up because it makes them money. I have reported dozens of Etsy listings in my time and none of them have ever been removed except for the ones that were super adult.
posted by Nibbly Fang at 3:09 PM on May 25 [4 favorites]

a cross between the styles of Keith Haring and Fragonard

I spent a very unfruitful afternoon a few months ago trying to force Midjourney to give me a Fragonard in which a young aristocrat rising from his bed has a vision of an angelic sea-anemone hovering over him, and I can tell you, the results were not Etsy-worthy.
posted by mittens at 3:11 PM on May 25 [1 favorite]

I have reported dozens of Etsy listings in my time and none of them have ever been removed except for the ones that were super adult.

I went on a rampage a month or so ago reporting all the fake plant seeds I could find on Etsy. Etsy does not care because gullible people buying fake crap generates fees for them.
posted by oneirodynia at 8:28 PM on May 25 [5 favorites]