#ai art debate

[batcavescolony]

I didn't think if have to explain this, Human mediocrity is hundreds of times better then ANYTHING an AI could come up with.

[xj4cks]

[viktoriamagrey]

Frustrating that few people talk about the fundamentally demoralizing and disrespectful aspect of AI "creations" for an individual person's identity. Voice actors have had to put up with their literal voice being stolen like some kind of horror story with no regard whatsoever for their personal autonomy. I can't even imagine how horrifying it must feel on a primal level, to hear your voice used without you being able to have a say in it. When AI discussion so often gets entangled with talk about laws and rationalizations about how "the process is very complex" (as if that changed anything about it ethically or mattered at all when technology is constantly changing anyway), it's important to remember the ways in which all these non-consenting people were abused and deprived of their rights as individuals, not a collective, theoretical group like some AI supporters like to see artists from all fields. These people have a unique voice, figuratively and literally, that feels special to them because it's theirs. It doesn't come just from training, or talent. It's a fundamental part of who they are as a human being because it is a result of their lived experiences. There is a reason making art is so important to so many people - it's an extension of who they are.

Having someone forcefully take something so personal to you to make a forgery of it as they see fit, and most of all, to hand out random people the ability to use what is rightfully yours, without your consent, is humilliating, dehumanizing, and vile. Going through entire databases of stolen art should make you sick. Hearing the voices of people saying things they didn't say should make you sick. Watching people make entire tools dedicated to copying someone's specific art style and themes like it's a sheet of paper you can pass around, should make you sick. You are not "copying" a mass of concepts, you're not "referencing" something, and what is just "harmless fun" to you shouldn't matter if it's a violation to the individuals involved. You're robbing the intent, and fingerprint of individuals to churn out what you want out of something you alone decided was fine for you to take. AI "art" is an ethical nightmare.

[dyspunktional-leviathan]

“AI art is not an accessibility tool, you know what actually makes art more accessible? Mobility aids! [& etc, not quoting it all]” you sound like my mother telling me that I shouldn’t want a wheelchair since I technically can get by with a cane

[jessiarts]

I once saw someone try to say that Ai art was anti-capitalist and I just-

Ai art is straight up capitalism!

Literally can't get more capitalistic than outsourcing the most basic form of human expression to a machine that is only able to produce anything because it devoured the work that human artists spent hours, days- months even- creating, all without their consent!! All just so the company behind the tool can rake in a ton of money from the users who pay to use the tool to generate their images!!!

The companies behind the Ai tools straight up profit off the labor of human artists to train their Ai, without consent of or compensation to those artists, for the company's own profit.

That's 100% capitalism. Profiting off of the labor of others is capitalism.

Hell world. We're in hell.

[cookies-super-secret-blog]

something something grow a pair and state thoughts on ai?

So, funny story, I made a post about this before, whenever the topic tag for it was trending. And like, I still stand by that, sans the part where I call the AI itself a form of art under my definition. A little bit after that, I saw a post, while definitely not in response to my own post, made the point that while we should hate AI art for the rampant theft of jobs and content, that its somehow bad to dislike it as Bad Art or Not Art because "gatekeeping art is baddd". Which like, in the context of someone drawing stick figures or painting giant blocks of color, is valid; we shouldn't gatekeep art from people. I still think AI doesn't deserve that privilege. Like, not to try and define art again, but, like hold on ket me grab something.

This is an ai generated adoptable from deiantart. Now, I have to ask, what's being expressed here- besides "cute girl in big hoodie (despite the one on the left not having a hoodie)"? Like it's easy to take these apart mechanically, but conceptually? It's somehow easier. Like, part of character design is visually communicating stuff about the character. There's nothing here besides anime girl in big outfit with minor armor details maybe? Like nothing else here is coherent! Like she looks sampled off of genshin and honkai characters but that's it. Like the cutains are just blue, and its dull and boring because of it. Why is the jacket neon green? The prompter wanted it that way. Why does she have the shoulder pieces and the case she's holding? Because the prompter likely put "battle girl" and/or "solarpunk" into the prompt. And it's not bad to have design elements for the sake of it, but the ai can't do anything but that, and the content it generates suffers because of it. There's no artistic value there, imo.

Now, not to toot my own horn, but here's my take on this design:

This is still a "cute girl in a big lime green jacket", but there's more to it. It's a high visibility jacket, with stripes reminiscent of construction vests. In the other doodles on the page, this high visibility theme is expanded to a theme of her being some kind of rescue personnel, and/or an angel (see; the halo in the bottom right). While it's fairly easy for me to point these themes out- it is what I intended- I'd still argue an obersever would be able to point out similar, or other themes and motifs that bring this character together.

No ammount of prompts and generation models can recreate that. Even if the prompter had the exact same intent I had when making the og ai content, that intent doesn't come across whatsoever. Because AI cannot replicate human intent and artistic processes.

These image generators register to me as the miserable end point of the sad, art-illiterate belief that art only is, and is only meant to "look pretty". Every time modern art is decried as "ugly and pointless", another prompter gets validated in their shameless attempts to assert their narrow-as-fuck vosion of what art is.

Art is human. Art is messy, art is intricate, art is sloppy, art is beautiful and art is ugly.

No machine on earth can comprehend or replicate that. And the ceasless attempts to commodify and capitalize on art have made some people forget that fact. The kinds of people who prompt really only see art as a gimmick product, pretty knickknacks that will make them rich quick.

For lack of better terms, the dehumanization of art itself is disgusting, and so like hell am I going to consider AI's mass-produced, slot machine-esque, drivel as art.

And I will not be guilted by other people on this hellsite who think its a moral failure to call mindless content what it is because its dressed up in distorted frills and anime girl boobs.

Art is human, and AI is not human. And what a sad world it is, that we're automating and strangling human creation, instead of letting it thrive.

Thank you for reminding me to share my thoughts.

[alvie-pines]

seeing AI covers of a character from a tv show on my dash so im gonna say it

if you want a character to say or sing something, pay their fucking VA to do it. these people make a living (well, often not because VA work already pays poorly) making that character say or sing things. dont use a machine to steal their voice and make the machine do it for free.

[demonic-shadowlucifer]

I wanna talk briefly about the AI debate because some of the takes I've seen are very much pissing me off, especially since most of those takes aren't helpful at all (and some are just straight up bullying). I already posted about this on my other blog (post in question has since been deleted since it was kinda harsh and ngl very dismissive of very valid concerns!), but the biggest issue I have with the Anti-AI crowd (And, to be honest, the AI debate in general) is that it feels like they're getting mad at the wrong things. No, AI itself is not the problem. No, someone calling themself an "AI artist" is not the problem. No, using AI for fun is not the problem. No, partaking in some AI trend is not the problem. No, someone simply generating AI images is not the problem. The actual problem is: -People feeding other people's art into AI generators and then claiming it as their own (Scraping basically) -People putting other people's writing into AI chatbots/AI text generators (ex. ChatGPT) to "finish" the fic (Again, scraping). -People using AI to make eerily realistic Not SFW deepfakes of either people they know or celebrities. -Corporations and companies screwing over artists, musicians and actors in favor of AI (such as replacing them). -People using AI to make racist/queerphobic/misogynistic/ otherwise bigoted stuff (Something that I've also been seeing unfortunately) -People not being honest about using AI (Transparency, people!) -People using AI to mimic other people's voices without those people's consent (not sure how to word this but i'm sure some of you know what I mean). -The fact that there's almost no regulations when it comes to AI. AI gets a lot of criticism, and it should! Until it becomes more ethical and there's regulations imposed, we should still be skeptical of it. However, I feel like we've gone very off track when it comes to criticizing AI. Personally, I don't think someone posting an AI-generated image of an elf with wings surrounded by mushrooms and rainbows makes them a thief by itself.. But if they made that image using someone else's art, then in that case yes they are a thief! And no, someone partaking in the Pixar AI trend is probably not going to cost you your job. You know what will cost you your job though? Companies favoring AI over actual living beings. So maybe instead of getting mad at someone using Character.AI or posting an AI-generated gothic phoenix, how about we get mad at corporations screwing artists/actors/musicians over and the people using AI with genuine malicious intent?

(Image ID: A banner that is blue with flowers framing it. The text reads "OP is a minor. Please respect my boundaries" End ID)

[letrune]

"ai"s, another rant

Consider: what is the product? Most of these "ais" (large language models) are "free", but you get only a few rounds for free. It's like a casino, you ask a thing, get images, and you can roll again if you liked it enough.

There are many of these LLMs that say in their TOS that they may save, sell and base their new generations on the images you produced. That they will access your computer data, save it, may even sell it. Some even proposed to use your own computing power, CPU and GPU for these.

But the money comes from somewhere - namely, bitcoin, nft sales and now, premium generation with ai, and lending them out for rent to companies. This is where the LLM companies get their money. The way they can replace artists, and get whatever they want, even if it breaks the law or worse.

Many articles rely on fake news dreamt up by a LLM textparser. Fake images circulate. Many dictators love to doctor images, and now thry got it even faster. Truth is being harder to find when it is easier to fake.

The product is you. Your gambling addiction. Your artistic efforts. Your truth. Everything the internet was meant for. All of it is now for rent, for sale, and to be reimagined by techbros who don't understand the systems they want to ruin as long as it makes them money.

Consider again: bitcoin ruin the economy of the little people and make a few rich. Nfts ruin online markets and videogames, and make a few rich. "Ai" ruin art and text and news, and make a few rich.

There is nothing to be gained in it. It is a toy for a bunch of gambling addicts in the 5% who want to be the 1%, and now, thanks to many big companies taking these, the tool for megacorps to get even richer by spending even less.

Imagine, Warner Brothers gets their own. They can start producing a movie, announce it, then can it, delete it and start anew. No spending beyond paying the energy and water bill and the server costs, but there are no people involved. They can produce for anyone, remove any piece, use any bodies, living and dead, for anything, from selling slop to playing the big bad. They have to spend less and you got to pay the same or more. Why would they even finish any movie? Just produce a slop, toss on a streaming service, then remove and make more, half of them go for tax refunds anyway.

It is a tool for instant gratification for you, and then more cash for the top? Yes. It is.

[feyresdaughter]

Feyre would judge y'all so hard for using AI art

[inhaledpie4]

Used Stable Diffusion for fun and uhhhh

[arthistory-memes]

Complex feelings on A.I. art

I admit as an analog artist my feelings on AI are mixed. I know AI will not replace fine art. AI could not make the Grapefruit Book, or Abramovic's Rythym 0, or The Fountain. In fact, if you're at all active in the art world, you've probably been seeing work that uses AI for a number of years now. I remember a kid in my graduating class did project using porn screenshots to make AI generated images of genitals and sex. The images were amorphous and fleshy, I found them interesting from gender neutral perspective (though that wasn't the artist's intended angle of exploration.) I had some friends who found them distasteful but it had nothing to do with use of AI. I say this because many arguments against AI art boil down to seeing it as a "perversion" of art, some unnatural advancement that will kill art. This is always bullshit and is the same argument non-artists have been using against modern art for over a century.*

That being said, I see a lot of prominent leftist bloggers on this site celebrating AI art, or at least fighting tooth and nail against any detractors, and they never once engage with the perspective of digital artists. I follow many digital artists across many platforms (and know a number in person) and not one of them is pro-AI that scraps and regurgitates their work for profit. I can't believe this needs to be said but most artists, even fine artists, are not wealthy from their work, regardless of whether they are popular or have "made it." This actually goes doubly for commercial artists, a category many digital artists fall into. Artists having rights to their own work and labor is a political and economic issue. Regardless of where to you fall on the spectrum I think this is worth discussing, and if your discussions don't include digital artists I think they're a bit, ahh, shit.

Onto the complexity. I find it difficult to throw my weight behind legal action as the proper response. I'm wary of copyright laws, because, like all laws, they will usually be used to screw over the least powerful person in the situation. This person is much more likely to be an independent digital artist that the mogul stealing from them. I'm also extremely averse to censorship and any censorship laws. Censorship is an enemy of art and allowing the government to regulate artistic subject matter is always bad. (I can imagine a situation in which AI companies are regulated, or perhaps their ability to profit from AI is restricted? But idk I'm rather iffy and unconvinced on the usefulness regulation one way or the other.)

*Art has been dead since the Dadaists killed it, and art isn't going anywhere. The panic over AI art replacing "real" art is strikingly similar to the panic in the early 1800's when photography was invented. People thought it was going to replace painting forever, after all, why would anybody make or purchase a painting when photorealism is at your finger tips? Well, turns out painting is fine. The indomitable need to connect with other human's though art isn't going anywhere, even if painting has been tired since the death of marat.

[trudemaethien]

no matter your views, this survey needs to be seen and distributed!

[thedevilandhisbride]

how will we ever get the spark to wonder, question, and think deeply about art when someone says a prompt or two into a generator, and out comes a painting that doesnt mean anything, because nobody took the time to tell a story within it? how can anybody do that if the art has no meaning like with ai art? when it isnt meticulously crafted by the complex mind of a creative human?

you cant tell an ai to convey the hurt and betrayal of a mortal against their own hubris as they fall off of the high horse they pitched themselves upon the way that a human would, because ai isnt human. it will never be human. and to compare ai art to human art and call them equals is dehumanization, and it strips art of every power it has ever had across the whole of human history.

[tippenfunkaport]

While I'm being salty on main, there's a HUGE difference between saying "I made this with an AI generator" and trying to pretend you drew the AI art, even if that lie is by omission and careful wording.

It's the lying and pretending that is the problem.

[patriciavetinari]

Aesthetic blogs that are full of art/photos/graphics posted without credit and who make moodboards and collages from art and never credit original artists are the ones yelling the loudest how much they hate AI art btw.