You give an LLM a virtual canvas and a set of “instructions” to control the pen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_graphics

You can generative AI to create an embedded web page of a voxel Mona Lisa head. And it will generate basically an image.

And I Hope you could ask it to sample that image and extract out of it. A binary that is well formed in the PNG data format...

I support this should comment.

Opining:

Musing about the ethics of generative AI art is becoming easier, certainly there's a lot more aggressive feedback in the wind, although I think it's clear, people still want people to grow and share themselves.

Don't fool yourself into thinking that we as technologists are not creating a mind. A viable mind with fewer rights than you or I. But potentially one that will be creative and feel and worry. I don't think we're there yet, in spite of openai claiming AGI 3 weeks ago with whatever that model's name was.

There's a pro-consumerism argument implicit with current culture's unsophisticated unthoughtful easy usage of generative AI.

Sticking to your ethics is becoming more challenging as an artist who uses AI. Copying the Great Masters has been commonplace for a long time, probably for as long as art has 'existed'. Yet with AI, if the individual human is meticulously driving the progression of their AI artwork creation, they are still leveraging technique, and control over technology, and presentation effort of other humans, cooked into a model that often times has not compensated those original human contributors. So it's unethical, even if not 'artistically'.

Q: Is it too absurd to claim that using a clawhammer, manually to do construction or destruction work IRL, is similarly unethical?

I've seen a few voxel-based benchmarks built around the same idea, with LLMs effectively constructing models using a discrete set of instructions.

https://minebench.ai