#And the Ai machine that is made to not pay artists and use their work without crediting them and act as if they definitely made the pieces

[the-moon-pal]

Imma rant rlly quickly just to get it out of my system but the fact people use the Duchamp piece to defend AI art is so dumb imo

[scyphan790]

I don't blame people for not knowing, partly because the tumblr account doesn't display it, but this account posts genAI

This post, directly sourcing from their own link, is genAI

They've gone from sharing other artists' work, to sharing other genAI and NFTs, to now flat out using genAI themselves for posts

So for anyoe who cares, now you know and now you can unfollow them and leave them to disappear into obscurity

GenAI is a blatant disrespect to the craft, you are not making art

>> Rhubarbes lab  - Rhubarbes_lab << 

[ms-demeanor]

Why reblog machine-generated art?

When I was ten years old I took a photography class where we developed black and white photos by projecting light on papers bathed in chemicals. If we wanted to change something in the image, we had to go through a gradual, arduous process called dodging and burning.

When I was fifteen years old I used photoshop for the first time, and I remember clicking on the clone tool or the blur tool and feeling like I was cheating.

When I was twenty eight I got my first smartphone. The phone could edit photos. A few taps with my thumb were enough to apply filters and change contrast and even spot correct. I was holding in my hand something more powerful than the huge light machines I'd first used to edit images.

When I was thirty six, just a few weeks ago, I took a photo class that used Lightroom Classic and again, it felt like cheating. It made me really understand how much the color profiles of popular web images I'd been seeing for years had been pumped and tweaked and layered with local edits to make something that, to my eyes, didn't much resemble photography. To me, photography is light on paper. It's what you capture in the lens. It's not automatic skin smoothing and a local filter to boost the sky. This reminded me a lot more of the photomanipulations my friend used to make on deviantart; layered things with unnatural colors that put wings on buildings or turned an eye into a swimming pool. It didn't remake the images to that extent, obviously, but it tipped into the uncanny valley. More real than real, more saturated more sharp and more present than the actual world my lens saw. And that was before I found the AI assisted filters and the tool that would identify the whole sky for you, picking pieces of it out from between leaves.

You know, it's funny, when people talk about artists who might lose their jobs to AI they don't talk about the people who have already had to move on from their photo editing work because of technology. You used to be able to get paid for basic photo manipulation, you know? If you were quick with a lasso or skilled with masks you could get a pretty decent chunk of change by pulling subjects out of backgrounds for family holiday cards or isolating the pies on the menu for a mom and pop. Not a lot, but enough to help. But, of course, you can just do that on your phone now. There's no need to pay a human for it, even if they might do a better job or be more considerate toward the aesthetic of an image.

And they certainly don't talk about all the development labs that went away, or the way that you could have trained to be a studio photographer if you wanted to take good photos of your family to hang on the walls and that digital photography allowed in a parade of amateurs who can make dozens of iterations of the same bad photo until they hit on a good one by sheer volume and luck; if you want to be a good photographer everyone can do that why didn't you train for it and spend a long time taking photos on film and being okay with bad photography don't you know that digital photography drove thousands of people out of their jobs.

My dad told me that he plays with AI the other day. He hosts a movie podcast and he puts up thumbnails for the downloads. In the past, he'd just take a screengrab from the film. Now he tells the Bing AI to make him little vignettes. A cowboy running away from a rhino, a dragon arm-wrestling a teddy bear. That kind of thing. Usually based on a joke that was made on the show, or about the subject of the film and an interest of the guest.

People talk about "well AI art doesn't allow people to create things, people were already able to create things, if they wanted to create things they should learn to create things." Not everyone wants to make good art that's creative. Even fewer people want to put the effort into making bad art for something that they aren't passionate about. Some people want filler to go on the cover of their youtube video. My dad isn't going to learn to draw, and as the person who he used to ask to photoshop him as Ant-Man because he certainly couldn't pay anyone for that kind of thing, I think this is a great use case for AI art. This senior citizen isn't going to start cartooning and at two recordings a week with a one-day editing turnaround he doesn't even really have the time for something like a Fiverr commission. This is a great use of AI art, actually.

I also know an artist who is going Hog Fucking Wild creating AI art of their blorbos. They're genuinely an incredibly talented artist who happens to want to see their niche interest represented visually without having to draw it all themself. They're posting the funny and good results to a small circle of mutuals on socials with clear information about the source of the images; they aren't trying to sell any of the images, they're basically using them as inserts for custom memes. Who is harmed by this person saying "i would like to see my blorbo lasciviously eating an ice cream cone in the is this a pigeon meme"?

The way I use machine-generated art, as an artist, is to proof things. Can I get an explosion to look like this. What would a wall of dead computer monitors look like. Would a ballerina leaping over the grand canyon look cool? Sometimes I use AI art to generate copyright free objects that I can snip for a collage. A lot of the time I use it to generate ideas. I start naming random things and seeing what it shows me and I start getting inspired. I can ask CrAIon for pose reference, I can ask it to show me the interior of spaces from a specific angle.

I profoundly dislike the antipathy that tumblr has for AI art. I understand if people don't want their art used in training pools. I understand if people don't want AI trained on their art to mimic their style. You should absolutely use those tools that poison datasets if you don't want your art included in AI training. I think that's an incredibly appropriate action to take as an artist who doesn't want AI learning from your work.

However I'm pretty fucking aggressively opposed to copyright and most of the "solid" arguments against AI art come down to "the AIs viewed and learned from people's copyrighted artwork and therefore AI is theft rather than fair use" and that's a losing argument for me. In. Like. A lot of ways. Primarily because it is saying that not only is copying someone's art theft, it is saying that looking at and learning from someone's art can be defined as theft rather than fair use.

Also because it's just patently untrue.

But that doesn't really answer your question. Why reblog machine-generated art? Because I liked that piece of art.

It was made by a machine that had looked at billions of images - some copyrighted, some not, some new, some old, some interesting, many boring - and guided by a human and I liked it. It was pretty. It communicated something to me. I looked at an image a machine made - an artificial picture, a total construct, something with no intrinsic meaning - and I felt a sense of quiet and loss and nostalgia. I looked at a collection of automatically arranged pixels and tasted salt and smelled the humidity in the air.

I liked it.

I don't think that all AI art is ugly. I don't think that AI art is all soulless (i actually think that 'having soul' is a bizarre descriptor for art and that lacking soul is an equally bizarre criticism). I don't think that AI art is bad for artists. I think the problem that people have with AI art is capitalism and I don't think that's a problem that can really be laid at the feet of people curating an aesthetic AI art blog on tumblr.

Machine learning isn't the fucking problem the problem is massive corporations have been trying hard not to pay artists for as long as massive corporations have existed (isn't that a b-plot in the shape of water? the neighbor who draws ads gets pushed out of his job by product photography? did you know that as recently as ten years ago NewEgg had in-house photographers who would take pictures of the products so users wouldn't have to rely on the manufacturer photos? I want you to guess what killed that job and I'll give you a hint: it wasn't AI)

Am I putting a human out of a job because I reblogged an AI-generated "photo" of curtains waving in the pale green waters of an imaginary beach? Who would have taken this photo of a place that doesn't exist? Who would have painted this hypersurrealistic image? What meaning would it have had if they had painted it or would it have just been for the aesthetic? Would someone have paid for it or would it be like so many of the things that artists on this site have spent dozens of hours on only to get no attention or value for their work?

My worst ratio of hours to notes is an 8-page hand-drawn detailed ink comic about getting assaulted at a concert and the complicated feelings that evoked that took me weeks of daily drawing after work with something like 54 notes after 8 years; should I be offended if something generated from a prompt has more notes than me? What does that actually get the blogger? Clout? I believe someone said that popularity on tumblr gets you one thing and that is yelled at.

What do you get out of this? Are you helping artists right now? You're helping me, and I'm an artist. I've wanted to unload this opinion for a while because I'm sick of the argument that all Real Artists think AI is bullshit. I'm a Real Artist. I've been paid for Real Art. I've been commissioned as an artist.

And I find a hell of a lot of AI art a lot more interesting than I find human-generated corporate art or Thomas Kincaid (but then, I repeat myself).

There are plenty of people who don't like AI art and don't want to interact with it. I am not one of those people. I thought the gay sex cats were funny and looked good and that shitposting is the ideal use of a machine image generation: to make uncopyrightable images to laugh at.

I think that tumblr has decided to take a principled stand against something that most people making the argument don't understand. I think tumblr's loathing for AI has, generally speaking, thrown weight behind a bunch of ideas that I think are going to be incredibly harmful *to artists specifically* in the long run.

Anyway. If you hate AI art and you don't want to interact with people who interact with it, block me.

[euqinim0dart]

Some positivity in these turbulent AI times

*This does not minimize the crisis at hand, but is aimed at easing any anxieties.

With every social media selling our data to AI companies now, there is very little way to avoid being scraped. The sad thing is many of us still NEED social media to advertise ourselves and get seen by clients. I can't help but feeling that we as artists are not at risk of losing our livelihoods, here is why:

Just because your data is available does not mean that AI companies will/want to use it. Your work may never end up being scraped at all.

The possibility of someone who uses AI art prompts can replace you (if your work is scraped) is very unlikely. Art Directors and clients HAVE to work with people, the person using AI art cannot back up what a machine made. Their final product for a client will never be substantial since AI prompts cannot be consistent with use and edits requested will be impossible.

AI creators will NEVER be able to make a move unless us artists make a move first. They will always be behind in the industry.

AI creators lack the fundamental skills of art and therefore cannot detect when something looks off in a composition. Many professional artists like me get hired repeatedly for a reason! WE as artists know what we're doing.

The art community is close-knit and can fund itself. Look at furry commissions, Patreon, art conventions, Hollywood. Real art will always be able to make money and find an audience because it's how we communicate as a species.

AI creators lack the passion and ambition to make a career out of AI prompts. Not that they couldn't start drawing at any time, but these tend to be the people who don't enjoy creating art to begin with.

There is no story or personal experience that can be shared about AI prompts so paying customers will lose interest quickly.

Art is needed to help advance society along, history says so. To do that, companies will need to hire artists (music, architecture, photography, design, etc). The best way for us artists to keep fighting for our voice to be heard right now is staying visible. Do not hide or give in! That is what they want. Continue posting online and/or in person and sharing your art with the world. It takes a community and we need you!

[scarlettgauthor]

I first posted this in a thread over on BlueSky, but I decided to port (a slightly edited version of) it over here, too.

Entirely aside from the absurd and deeply incorrect idea [NaNoWriMo has posited] that machine-generated text and images are somehow "leveling the playing field" for marginalized groups, I think we need to interrogate the base assumption that acknowledging how people have different abilities is ableist/discriminatory. Everyone SHOULD have access to an equal playing field when it comes to housing, healthcare, the ability to exist in public spaces, participating in general public life, employment, etc.

That doesn't mean every person gets to achieve every dream no matter what.

I am 39 years old and I have scoliosis and genetically tight hamstrings, both of which deeply impact my mobility. I will never be a professional contortionist. If I found a robot made out of tentacles and made it do contortion and then demanded everyone call me a contortionist, I would be rightly laughed out of any contortion community. Also, to make it equivalent, the tentacle robot would be provided for "free" by a huge corporation based on stolen unpaid routines from actual contortionists, and using it would boil drinking water in the Southwest into nothingness every time I asked it to do anything, and the whole point would be to avoid paying actual contortionists.

If you cannot - fully CAN NOT - do something, even with accommodations, that does not make you worth less as a person, and it doesn't mean the accommodations shouldn't exist, but it does mean that maybe that thing is not for you.

But who CAN NOT do things are not who uses "AI." It's people who WILL NOT do things.

"AI art means disabled people can be artists who wouldn't be able to otherwise!" There are armless artists drawing with their feet. There are paralyzed artists drawing with their mouths, or with special tracking software that translates their eye movements into lines. There are deeply dyslexic authors writing via text-to-speech. There are deaf musicians. If you actually want to do a thing and care about doing the thing, you can almost always find a way to do the thing.

Telling a machine to do it for you isn't equalizing access for the marginalized. It's cheating. It's anti-labor. It makes it easier for corporations not to pay creative workers, AND THAT'S IS WHY THEY'RE PUSHING IT EVERYWHERE.

I can't wait for the bubble to burst on machine-generated everything, just like it did for NFTs. When it does some people are going to discover they didn't actually learn anything or develop any transferable skills or make anything they can be proud of.

I hope a few of those people pick up a pencil.

It's never too late to start creating. It's never too late to actually learn something. It's never too late to realize that the work is the point.

[bi-writes]

whats wrong with ai?? genuinely curious <3

okay let's break it down. i'm an engineer, so i'm going to come at you from a perspective that may be different than someone else's.

i don't hate ai in every aspect. in theory, there are a lot of instances where, in fact, ai can help us do things a lot better without. here's a few examples:

ai detecting cancer

ai sorting recycling

some practical housekeeping that gemini (google ai) can do

all of the above examples are ways in which ai works with humans to do things in parallel with us. it's not overstepping--it's sorting, using pixels at a micro-level to detect abnormalities that we as humans can not, fixing a list. these are all really small, helpful ways that ai can work with us.

everything else about ai works against us. in general, ai is a huge consumer of natural resources. every prompt that you put into character.ai, chatgpt? this wastes water + energy. it's not free. a machine somewhere in the world has to swallow your prompt, call on a model to feed data into it and process more data, and then has to generate an answer for you all in a relatively short amount of time.

that is crazy expensive. someone is paying for that, and if it isn't you with your own money, it's the strain on the power grid, the water that cools the computers, the A/C that cools the data centers. and you aren't the only person using ai. chatgpt alone gets millions of users every single day, with probably thousands of prompts per second, so multiply your personal consumption by millions, and you can start to see how the picture is becoming overwhelming.

that is energy consumption alone. we haven't even talked about how problematic ai is ethically. there is currently no regulation in the united states about how ai should be developed, deployed, or used.

what does this mean for you?

it means that anything you post online is subject to data mining by an ai model (because why would they need to ask if there's no laws to stop them? wtf does it matter what it means to you to some idiot software engineer in the back room of an office making 3x your salary?). oh, that little fic you posted to wattpad that got a lot of attention? well now it's being used to teach ai how to write. oh, that sketch you made using adobe that you want to sell? adobe didn't tell you that anything you save to the cloud is now subject to being used for their ai models, so now your art is being replicated to generate ai images in photoshop, without crediting you (they have since said they don't do this...but privacy policies were never made to be human-readable, and i can't imagine they are the only company to sneakily try this). oh, your apartment just installed a new system that will use facial recognition to let their residents inside? oh, they didn't train their model with anyone but white people, so now all the black people living in that apartment building can't get into their homes. oh, you want to apply for a new job? the ai model that scans resumes learned from historical data that more men work that role than women (so the model basically thinks men are better than women), so now your resume is getting thrown out because you're a woman.

ai learns from data. and data is flawed. data is human. and as humans, we are racist, homophobic, misogynistic, transphobic, divided. so the ai models we train will learn from this. ai learns from people's creative works--their personal and artistic property. and now it's scrambling them all up to spit out generated images and written works that no one would ever want to read (because it's no longer a labor of love), and they're using that to make money. they're profiting off of people, and there's no one to stop them. they're also using generated images as marketing tools, to trick idiots on facebook, to make it so hard to be media literate that we have to question every single thing we see because now we don't know what's real and what's not.

the problem with ai is that it's doing more harm than good. and we as a society aren't doing our due diligence to understand the unintended consequences of it all. we aren't angry enough. we're too scared of stifling innovation that we're letting it regulate itself (aka letting companies decide), which has never been a good idea. we see it do one cool thing, and somehow that makes up for all the rest of the bullshit?

[novella-november]

See, here's the thing about generative AI:

I will always, always prefer to read the beginner works of a young writer that could use some editing advice, over anything a predictive text generator can spit out no matter how high of a "quality" it spits out.

I will always be more interested in reading a fanfiction or original story written by a kid who doesn't know you're meant to separate different dialogues into their own paragraphs, over anything a generative ai creates.

I will happily read a story where dialogue isn't always capitalized and has some grammar mistakes that was written by a person over anything a computer compiles.

Why?

Because *why should I care about something someone didn't even care enough to write themselves?*

Humans have been storytellers since the dawn of humankind, and while it presents itself in different ways, almost everyone has stories they want to tell, and it takes effort and care and a desire to create to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard or speech to text to actually start writing that story out, let alone share it for others to read!

If a kid writes a story where all the dialogue is crammed in the same paragraph and missing some punctuation, it's because they're still learning the ropes and are eager to share their imagination with the world even if its not perfect.

If someone gets generative AI to make an entire novel for them, copying and pasting chunks of text into a document as it generates them, then markets that "novel" as being written by a real human person and recruits a bunch of people to leave fake good reviews on the work praising the quality of the book to trick real humans into thinking they're getting a legitimate novel.... Tell me, why on earth would anyone actually want to read that "novel" outside of morbid curiosity?

There's a few people you'll see in the anti-ai tags complaining about "people being dangerously close to saying art is a unique characteristic of the divine human soul" and like...

... Super dramatic wording there to make people sound ridiculous, but yeah, actually, people enjoy art made by humans because humans who make art are sharing their passion with others.

People enjoy art made by animals because it is fascinating and fun to find patterns in the paint left by paw prints or the movements of an elephants trunk.

Before Generative AI became the officially sanctioned "Plagiarism Machine for Billionaires to Avoid Paying Artists while Literally Stealing all those artists works" people enjoyed random computer-generated art because, like animals, it is fascinating and fun to see something so different and alien create something that we can find meaning in.

But now, when Generative AI spits out a work that at first appears to be a veritable masterpiece of art depicting a winged Valkyrie plunging from the skies with a spear held aloft, you know that anything you find beautiful or agreeable in this visual media has been copied from an actual human artist who did not consent or doesn't even know that their art has been fed into the Plagiarism Machine.

Now, when Generative AI spits out a written work featuring fandom-made tropes and concepts like Alpha Beta Omega dyanamics, you know that you favorite fanfiction website(s) have probably all been scraped and that the unpaid labours of passion by millions of people, including minors, have been scraped by the Plagiarism Machine and can now be used to make money for anyone with the time and patience to sit and have the Plagarism Machine generate stories a chunk at a time and then go on to sell those stories to anyone unfortunate enough to fall for the scam,

all while you have no way to remove your works from the existing training data and no way to stop any future works you post be put in, either.

Generative AI wouldn't be a problem if it was exclusively trained on Public Domain works for each country and if it was freely available to anyone in that country (since different countries have different copyright laws)

But its not.

Because Generative AI is made by billionaires who are going around saying "if you posted it on the Internet at any point, it is fair game for us to take and profit off," and anyone looking to make a quick buck can start churning out stolen slop and marketing it online on trusted retailers, including generating extremely dangerous books like foraging guides or how to combine cleaning chemicals for a spotless home, etc.

Generative AI is nothing but the works of actual humans stolen by giant corporations looking for profit, even works that the original creators can't even make money off of themselves, like fanfiction or fanart.

And I will always, always prefer to read "fanfiction written by a 13 year old" over "stolen and mashed together works from Predictive Text with a scifi name slapped on it", because at least the fanfiction by a kid actually has *passion and drive* behind its creation.

[txttletale]

it is ultimately v. interesting to me that the most ardent anti-AI guys are actually doing a lot of work towards reifying the preferred stance of both the AI companies themselves and the large media production companies seeking to replace, minimize and cheapen human labour -- that AI art is 'the computer doing it for you'.

this is the very stance that studios were taking in contrast to the WGA, that if any part of a story or script was AI-generated then the LLM should be credited and any human who touched it up or contributed part of it had no authorship because 'the computer made it'. the WGA rightly fought this because it was in practice a ploy to avoiding crediting (and therefore fairly paying) writers by claiming that 'the AI came up with it'.

& it is interesting that in rushing to protect the social prestige of being An Artist, people who are apparently so concerned with labour rights are taking the exact stance that the people most invested in selling this technology are, that AI is a magic machine that can do anything, and that the person using it doesn't have to do anything at all to get high-quality artwork. i think as soon as this shit becomes integrated into industry pipelines, this position is going to backfire v. v. quickly as is in fact obvious to anyone who thinks about artists as proletarians and not as aspiring petty-bourgeois entrepeneurs. sad!

[leidensygdom]

Hasbro's CEO is, once again, expressing interest in using AI at WOTC

Not surprising, but I think his own chit-chat about it (directed at shareholders, of course) is quite the read (derogatory):

"Inside of development, we've already been using AI. It's mostly machine-learning-based AI or proprietary AI as opposed to a ChatGPT approach. We will deploy it significantly and liberally internally as both a knowledge worker aid and as a development aid. I'm probably more excited though about the playful elements of AI. If you look at a typical D&D player....I play with probably 30 or 40 people regularly. There's not a single person who doesn't use AI somehow for either campaign development or character development or story ideas. That's a clear signal that we need to be embracing it. We need to do it carefully, we need to do it responsibly, we need to make sure we pay creators for their work, and we need to make sure we're clear when something is AI-generated. But the themes around using AI to enable user-generated content, using AI to streamline new player introduction, using AI for emergent storytelling, I think you're going to see that not just our hardcore brands like D&D but also multiple of our brands."

This directly fights against WOTC's already very weak claims about not wanting to use AI (after massive backslash from players anytime they had tried to get away with it), and does paint quite the bleak future for DnD and Magic the Gathering. AI usage doesn't really benefit the consumer in any way- It's like a company known for nice homemade cakes trying to tell you that factory made cakes are actually also good and you should be buying them too. The cakes aren't better. You can get those cakes elsewhere. The only person benefiting from factory made cakes is the one selling them, because they're the one saving time and money by making them that way.

But short-term benefits (through firing large portions of their artists and replacing them with AI made slop) outweighs any attempt to maybe get some trust from their already alienated consumers back. I also find it kind of incredibly funny and pathetic how this man claims to play DnD with about 30 to 40 people and "how every single one of them uses AI". I'm not entirely sure this guy is even aware of how DnD groups are usually sized, and how you would not have any physical time to do anything if you somehow played with 40 players on the regular (that'd be about 10 games!)

Anyways, as always, there's nice TTRPGs out there that don't absolutely despise their customer base nor are obsessed with cutting any remains of humanity out of their product to save a few cents. Play Lancer, play Blades in the Dark, play Pathfinder or Starfinder 2e if you want the DnD experience without the bullshit. Plenty of options out there that deserve your money far more than DnD.

[teaboot]

Your post about art vs content got me thinking about the differences between the two. To me there is no difference besides the mindsets. One is of creator and the enjoyer, the other is content and consumer it removes the personhood, the joy/emotion, from the equation. Like a writer or video creator may not see their work as art so content creator maybe a way to refer to themselves comfortably but it sounds so machine, emotionless and lifeless, like a cookie cutter recipe mass producing something verses people lovingly crafting something...then again Disney uses a cookie cutter recipe for the most part and it brings out bangers cause people lovingly make it their own so maybe I'm thinking too hard on this

Does my long-winded rant make sense?

see, I get what you mean, but I still feel like the willingness to entertain calling art of any kind "content" reduces it to the facet of consumption where in reality, the experience of consuming art is not the sole defining trait of it.

Reducing arts like music, writing, painting, dance, voice acting, theater, etc. to the role of "content"- a thing created to be consumed, measured and valued by how pleasant or easy it is to digest- I feel that it was our biggest red flag to herald the incoming tide of AI "art".

Because if art is "content", if arts are nothing but consumable matter, then obviously the key to success is to produce as much soft, tasty, edible paste as we possibly can at the lowest possible expense.

It's the same issue I have with "meal replacements", diet culture, nutrient slurries, twenty-step skincare routines, 24/7 body padding and shapewear and laxative teas and "grind culture". It's not a cause, but a symptom, of the disease that is late-stage capitalism.

Things must be produced at low cost and remain in high demand forever. Things must be perfect and palatable and the new hit trend forever. People must pay hand over fist to consume without asking anything in return, and if they start dropping like flies at the unending unrewarded thankless demand of it all, then that must be treated as a weakness. We should all take pride in how much we can spend, pay, give, produce, and think as little as possible about what we ask for ourselves.

So, who cares if, of two identical paintings, one was made by a person and one was made by a computer program? It's the same work, so what does it matter? What does it matter?

I am an artist. I make art. I ask a question, make a statement, declare something horrific or challenging or upsetting or wrong or grotesque, and when you respond, we are together experiencing a conversation. We are existing, two people living one life and reaching out and touching across time and space. No matter the work, you're at the barest minimum saying, "I'm alive, and you're alive, and at one time or another we shared this same world, and at the end of the day we aren't too terribly different. My heart is worth sharing, and your heart is worth the struggle of understanding."

An AI-generated piece, a computer-generated voice, a CGI puppet of someone long since dead and gone, they cannot speak. They have no voice. Ay best, they are the most chewable, consumable, landlord-beige common denominator possible that you can sit and listen to like the lone survivor of a shipwreck listening to the same three songs on a broken record, and at worst, they're the uncaring vomit of an empty, unloving, value-addled hack wearing the skin of someone I know over their own.

When you abandon art to say that you make content, that should not be a point of pride. That's an embarrassment. That's not sitting down for an intelligent discussion with an equal, that's kneeling at the feet of the crowd and saying, "what do you want to see me do? I can be anyone you've ever loved. I can be them, I can be anyone, as long as you love me."

I can make content. I can be consumed. What do you want to consume? I'll make myself consumable. I'll make myself just like anything you like. And I'll make so much of it that you'll never have to go anywhere else, because it'll all be right here, and under all the cut-and-paste schlock you've seen before I will sit alone in the dark and the silence and I will know that I am safe, because I am valued, because I am desired, and I need to be desired or else I am worthless like a factory that no longer churns out steel or a hen that no longer lays eggs or a cow that is too old to make milk.

Content, the most literal meaning, is something which is contained inside a container. What it is doesn't really matter, and the best it can hope to be is something worthy of being scooped out and used.

Art is an experience that transcends value. Art is something you can eat without paying for. You can make it out of anything and anyone can do it. It can be crude and vulgar and bad, and that's a strength because it means something. It always, always means something, and it doesn't matter if you like it or not. It's not content because it doesn't fill anything. It's a living, breathing thing, and whether you want to birth it or eat it, then you're going to have to be willing to put the fucking work in

[femenaces]

I do a lot of puzzles with my grandmother. Lately it’s becoming harder and harder to find any that aren’t using AI generated art. It’s almost completely taken over the industry. No more whimsical hand painted artwork done by some eccentric older woman. Only smoother-than-airbrush ai mermaids sitting like a doll in a hyper realistic sea full of not-quite-right fish. No more incredible hi-def photography of insects and butterflies. Only bouquets made of not-quite-right roses that meld into each other. No more anything with human touch and care and skill. Only safe digestible machine vomit. People will buy it anyway after all, and unlike real artwork, where you have to pay an artist to use their work, the computer vomit is free. And so colorful! perfect for children and the elderly.

[betterbemeta]

I think AI Art exploits and degrades not just artists, but every single person who looks at it in some ways because 'how we look at art' is part of art itself.

This principle is super easy to experience as an artist. All you have to do is practice and reach a plateau where things you did before seem worse to you, that felt great at the time you made them. Your ability to see art changes as you make art, and as you view art.

It's not snobby to say that there is a low average level of 'seeing' art. There's also a low average level of seeing technical design, or seeing weather patterns, or seeing copy editing mistakes and that's why we have architects and engineers, meteorologists, and professional editors. I think a lot about this bit by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics:

Like the point here is not that 'most people are superficial', but that the surface of art is what most people are familiar with. And it is this basic familiarity that I believe AI Art exploits to fake integrity, something that even the most well-known laughably 'bad art' still technically has.

Like, laugh all you want but effort went into the surface of this art such that it appeared 'okay' to the one who made it, and to those who maybe aren't paying attention or see that its colored and shaded first, the anatomy last. It relies sort of on your familiarity with 'what art looks like' to accept it, but not completely. Someone did work to try and earn your acceptance even if, uh, it's not very good in some ways.

But AI Art relies fully on how unfamiliar you are with art. Let's call this principle 'glamour'.

At first 'the glamour' is unconvincing: this is during the AI's training. But the first 'pass' is the threshold where information builds up about how to reproduce a minimally acceptable image. This is where the glamour is set: the minimum accuracy to convince a human being to fill in its gaps. To basically capture their imagination. From there, front-end use of the machine learning model is released for general users, and it is those users who then select out of many outputs which glamour fools them most. As the other half of this system, the hidden decision-maker, humans are also 'learning' familiarity with the glamour: comparing it to not just our surface knowledge but to itself. We have left reality.

A good example of this can be seen in AI-generated pictures of fiber crafts. It's possible that traditional or digital artist might not be perfect with their drawing or perspective or coloring etc. or may stylistically push the boundaries of perspective or form on purpose. But for a knit, crocheted, or sewn piece a final product often can't exist without its craft having physical integrity:

Aside from the issues that are obvious (fake tilt shift photography with no consistent field of blur, a spaghetti yarn ball, unknown stitch on the vest, no comprehensible seam between the arm and the body, etc.) here are some things that stick out to me to knowing even a little about knitting,

The fake stockinette on the helmet is confused about whether it is completed horizontally or vertically: vertical on the headband (many hats terminate this way, so there are plenty of images to sample) but indecisive when it has to become a round hat shape.

The number of rows on the arms is inconsistent, decreasing strangely where a k2tog would never be.

There is no consistent way the hands make sense, if they are 'mittens' or if the stockinette ridges become 'fingers'.

We can't see how the bottom of the foot was finished: the left foot either began or was decreased to meet at a central point but it doesn't match the right foot and it's not clear how either foot keeps it shape.

Beyond the plagiarism of the images that went into generating AI outputs, your diminishing time to learn about/be exposed to 'things' (beyond just 'art,' anything that isn't essential to your survival) will become increasingly exploited in the future. If left unchecked, images like these will represent not only novelties or etsy scams but a large amount of people's exposure to 'things' in general. Which then leads to something like AI inbreeding (AI generating based on AI), except like... with you.

When people are more familiar with a glamour than 'the real thing', even superficially.

Exploitation of this type isn't even a new thing. It's just that AI can speed it up or extend it to new spheres. Anyone can see a physical table and think 'this table is crap' if it's poor quality because of how much we use tables and our knowledge of what tables are and should do. But I think the blog McMansion Hell actually illustrates a real, practical situation where the familiarity level with a craft (architecture) is low and standards lower to meet it. These hulks were certainly built to invoke 'glamour', but when closely inspected, they have the design equivalent of 12 fingers or bra straps bleeding into someone's skin.

Another easy example might be the excessive 'glamour' that surrounds selling cars in the USA. Very few people will buy enough cars to become more than superficially familiar with them and the amount of people who are car-related professionals is negligible next to the number of people who require a car.

Both cars and houses are expensive purchases that are made relatively infrequently, which is why their brokers and dealers can bet against a customer's average level of knowledge. But soon, many more things may become like buying houses or cars: obscured by glamour.

AI Art relies on you to be a sucker, just like how a sketchy sales rep depends on you to be a sucker. Except even worse than the sales rep, your brain is expected to not just be dumb and inexperienced, but also to get actively dumber over time from doing all the work too.

[my-castles-crumbling]

Hello Cas I've wanted to ask this for a while and I didn't know who to ask and I'm hoping you can help, I see a lot of posts about how we shouldn't allow AI to study fanary and fanfiction and I wanted to k ow why I'm just curious and want to understand I see its a boundary for a lot of people and I don't really get why. I mean nothing hurtful or offensive and I'm sure there is a good reason I just don't know it. Also I wanted to tell you that I think it's soo cool how you do ballroom dancing as a hobby and how much I love your microfics I look forward to them everyday much love ❤️

Hi! No problem at all! There's a few reasons.

First, AI creating fanart and fanfiction is super harmful because it reduces the demand for human-created works. Which is horrible, because humans spend so much time and effort writing and drawing, while AI can do the same in minutes. AI works always have flaws, and by increasing the supply of works, it gives human creators less credit for the amazing and superior work they do, that they spend a lot more time on.

Think of it like fast fashion- people want clothes so bad they'll take the cheap, factory-made stuff, but they don't realize that this causes poorly-made clothes to be the norm, and it takes money (credit) away from designers, workers and everyone else in the industry. (It's also horrible for the planet.)

Creators deserve so much love and credit for what they do, because it isn't easy, and to be replaced in minutes by a machine that creates work that isn't as good is upsetting and insulting, you know? AI gives the illusion that with a few clicks of a button, anyone can instantly create something akin to the work I spent 10 months on, and that's just not true.

Second, using fanfiction to train AI isn't okay because, simply put, it's stealing. If someone uses my writing to train AI, they didn't ask me, and I essentially did labor for them by writing the work they're using- I deserve pay (though I wouldn't want it, I would rather them just not use my work, because of reason three).

Third, it's also important to know the reason why people are so touchy about a lot of fanfiction issues is copyright laws. When we start sell fanfiction, bind and sell fanfiction, etc (which sometimes AI users do) it could bring up issues with copyright infringement, because we're making money from creating work from a copywritten work. This might allow fanfiction to be censored and policed, which would basically ruin the entire thing.

Last, it just takes the humanity from it. Fandom is supposed to be a community. Writers, artists, and readers all work together on so many different forums to create works and discuss their favorite fandoms. To me, it just feels icky that people want to take away that community (intentionally or not) by computerizing the process.

I hope this all makes sense, and feel free to add things, guys!

[vcendent]

art vs industry

Sometimes I'm having a good day, but then sometimes I think about how industry is actively killing creative fields and that goes away. People no longer go to woodworkers for tables and chairs and cabinets, but instead pick from one of hundreds of mass-produced designs made out of cheap particle board instead of paying a carpenter for furniture that is both made to last generations and leaves room for customization. With the growth of population and international trade, the convenience and low production costs are beneficial in some aspects, but how many local craftsmen across the world were put out of business? How many people witnessed their craft die before their eyes? There is no heart or identity put into mass produced items; be it furniture, ceramics, metalwork, or home decor; and at the end of the day everybody ends up with the same, carbon copy stuff in their homes.

I'm a big fan of animated movies, and I see this same thing happening too. When was the last time western audiences saw a new 2D animated movie hit theatres? I can't speak for other countries, but, at least in America, I believe The Princess and the Frog was the last major 2D movie released and that was back in 2009. Major studios nowadays are unwilling to spend the time and money that it would take to pay traditional animators who have spent years honing their craft to go frame by frame, and to pay painters to create scene backgrounds. We talk a lot about machines replacing jobs, but when the machines come, artistry professions are some of the first to be axed (in part because industry does not see artistry as "valuable" professions). Art, music, and writing are no longer seen as "real" jobs because they belong to the creative field and there's this inane idea that anyone who goes into those fields will be unsuccessful and starving. I'm not saying that 3D animation is bad, it has its own merits and required skills and can be just as impressive as anything 2D, but it has smothered 2D animation and reduced it largely to studios that cannot afford the tech to animate 3D.

And now we have this whole AI thing to deal with, stealing existing artists' work to "train" it to take over those few professions that, until now, required actual people to do them. Internet artists have already been dealing with people complaining about the price of art for years and now have to face their work being stolen to train AI. With AI technology, anyone who undervalues the work of the artist can now get something generated at little or no cost to them, all at the expense of the artists themselves. Why would studios pay script writers when they could just get an algorithm to do it without pay? Why pay actors to bring characters to life or pay models to pose for ads when CGI has progressed enough we could digitally render humans and cut out having to pay people entirely? Why use practical effects or film on location when green screens and adding in-post is faster and so much cheaper? It's no wonder we had the SAG-AFTRA strike. AI has already been trained to write children's books and produce music, continuing down this road will replace authors and musicians too at the convenience of cost. How much longer until the actual, real-life people behind all forms of artistry become completely obsolete?

Industry is just driving the cost of people-made crafts up and up with every mass produced product and every streamlined shortcut to reduce costs, which only makes it harder and harder for artists of all kinds to make a living, as very few people want to pay for the time and skill of artists when they could just pick something off a shelf or feed AI a prompt and get something satisfactory enough, yet not what they actually wanted, for so much cheaper.

[vorthosjay]

Do you have any personal opinions you can share about the use of AI art generation for magic? I personally think it's really cool but I'm also concerned about what it could do to the artists.

I think 'AI' art is shit (this goes for AI 'writing' too). It's bad on every possible axis. Sure, it's novel, but that doesn't mean good.

The only reason the technology is even possible is through at best dubiously scraped data and at worst outright theft of intellectual property. It is, in effect, one giant plagiarism machine, even if it does so broadly enough that it's not always noticeable. A human being inspired by or even imitating something is not the same thing as an algorithm averaging values of stolen work and spitting something back out. You can tell there's a different because a human being looking at their own work enough doesn't suddenly stop being able to produce art. And that's what happens with 'AI', you feed it enough AI derived work and you get model collapse, like a xerox of a xerox of a xerox, the output quality degenerates.

From a business perspective, you'd certainly save money in the short term, which is probably all most care about, but in the long run you're producing art you don't actually own. And eventually, model collapse will happen and you're left with a useless tool, because you've flooded the inputs into the system with AI garbage. The only reason these AI models work right now is because all the data they're scraping are made by humans, but widespread AI usage would kill that quality input and replace it, again, with AI generated garbage.

As for artists, they're being stolen from, and at best the companies producing AI art will want to pay them a pittance to 'fix' the art AI produces. Same goes for writing. But of course, it wouldn't be obvious (to business folks) that widespread usage of these tools will ruin entire industries until it's too late, in the same way 'pivoting to video' decimated journalism.

[andmaybegayer]

Do you just really enjoy the idea that all art-making by humans will cease to exist (except for the very rich)? Do you and the people like you have some other pathological need to jump to the defense of the moustache-twirling capitalists (and their useful idiots) behind AI design? Do you realize you *are* such a useful idiot? I'm curious.

I'm going to mostly focus on your point that "art-making by humans will cease to exist" because it's. Confusing.

Art, famously a thing that is only made when it's profitable.

It's important to point out that (in a non-pejorative way) that this is the Luddite situation. The Luddites were 100% correct that mechanisation would take their jobs and fuck up their lives. At the same time, it would be patently ridiculous to solve the issue by mandating that you can't mechanize factories, and it is missing the point to say that AI will destroy the concept of art from human culture.

Art has never been like, a stupendously profitable enterprise that you get into because it pays well. It sucks! It sucks that being commercially successful as an artist has basically for centuries meant working odd jobs doing whatever while you try to scrape enough together to turn a living on your passion and most of the time failing. The Starving Artist is a character archetype going back centuries.

At the same time, it's hard to argue that there's something unique about the artist's desire to make a living from their craft. Many people will not get to do their passion for a living. Artists aren't in a unique situation here, there's no doubt thousands of people working boring desk jobs who really want to be field biologists, or journalists, or video producers. I would love to make my living building specialist sensing hardware for postgrads all year round, but that's basically a nonexistent job. Most people are just working to get paid.

Photography absolutely killed the shit out of the professional advert painter. Digital music production shrunk the music studio crew by a huge factor. CNC machining eliminated machinist jobs in factories. This always sucks for the people who are put out of work but it's not unique or special. Much ink has been spilled on the topic of automation, it's just hitting a group of people who we all thought wouldn't have to contend with automation.

It's frustrating that already not everyone can make a living doing the thing they believe is their calling, but I find it hard to believe that art itself will be killed by AI. It's very easy to feel like doing art is the highest moral calling for all people and so we should reward it, but it's just a thing you do.

As for being a useful idiot, I must once again stress that if you think there are mustache twirling villains secretly directing the flow of the economy with the goal of hurting specific people then you believe things that are wrong because you have a fundamentally dysfunctional way of understanding the world that will lead you to incorrect conclusions. There's no head you can cut off the snake.