#and then what will AI bros do when there’s no more real art to feed their machines

[gayvampyr]

it is very frustrating to see AI art on instagram get tens, even hundreds of thousands of likes and shares and views meanwhile art made by actual people that took hours upon hours of labor gets no attention at all. very soul-crushing reality that makes me want to give up on sharing my art

[genericpuff]

completely off topic but regarding something that i saw pop up in my FB feed and i need to rant about

please do not fall for this shit

nintendo is NOT anti-AI.

it's really easy for them to say they're not going to use generative AI to create their games, because this statement has nothing to do with the very real issues with AI art such as the blatant theft of artists' work, environmental impact, replacement of humans in the industry, and just flat out unethical shit that AI has been designed around

it has EVERYTHING to do with their intellectual property rights, which Nintendo is NOTORIOUS for protecting with an iron fist even at their own expense. and i'm not talking the usual sensible argument shit like "ofc Nintendo wants to protect their IP's, they're a business!" i'm talking about the fact that this is the same company that just recently did a major takedown of the vast majority of Nintendo-licensed games on Vimm's Lair which aren't even being sold legitimately anywhere anymore-

i have so many fucking bones to pick with the flaccid bootlicking anti-piracy arguments out there but basically it comes down to this:

Nintendo is not a small indie company. They are literally one of the biggest, richest, most powerful gaming companies on the planet, rivalling Disney in just how many major franchises they own and profit off of. Many of their games are cultural classics, not just through the sentimentality and nostalgia of our childhoods, but also for all the innovations they made through games like Super Mario Bros, Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and many others that we, within the world of gaming, owe a lot to and should be able to access and play. It's not a matter of "wanting these games for free", it's a matter of wanting to be able to access these games, period, and Nintendo is deadset on making it as difficult as possible, even when it doesn't necessarily profit from them (need I remind you that many of the games that were taken down from Vimm's Lair are NOT available through their shitty, poorly-ported emulation subscription service - plus that subscription service can be altered and/or removed at any time, regardless of what you paid for, just like the Wii Virtual Console was, meaning you do not own any of the games you're paying to play on there.)

This isn't about being "cheap" or "not wanting to pay for games". This is about media preservation and the virtue of actually owning the things we pay for. If these games were resold at official outlets for reduced prices or made more accessible through e-shops that don't close down in between console generations or drip feed the odd legacy title every few months or release crappy ports on their outdated af tech for only a few months at a time for three times the price of their original value, people would gladly pay. It's the fact that people are having to put up with all of the hoops that Nintendo has put in place to prevent them from even handing them money to play their favorite titles that even drives them to piracy to begin with, and Nintendo will gladly shut those sites down to protect their IP even when it's an IP they're no longer profiting from and aren't making active efforts to sell.

Like, I would gladly hand over a reasonable amount of money (i.e. not the cost of a brand new triple A title in 2024 which is like $80-$100 here in Canada) for Diddy Kong Racing on the Switch, but ofc it's not on the fucking online play store and even if it was, I'd have to deal with paying an overpriced subscription fee for a port of the game that would undoubtedly run WORSE than it does on my PC, and that subscription service can be taken down at any time. But Nintendo wants me to not pirate the game that's not available on their shitty subscription service because... just don't do it, pretty please??

Nintendo is not anti-AI. They would gladly use AI in place of manual labor to scour the internet and dish out DMCA's to every emulation site, archived ROM hub, fan game, and artist alley creator if they could... oh wait, they already are.

Do not fall for the virtues of anti-AI when it comes to companies like Nintendo. They are not anti-AI. They're anti-ownership. They're anti-preservation.

[feral4daryl]

Ok so first of all. My main man you do understand you can’t claim you actually made the “art” you “made” right? It’s AI generated.

“If it's created by AI, nobody can claim ownership of it or copyright it”

That’s law dude. You didn’t make any of the “art” your showing off. Anyone can come post it anywhere and claim it with no repercussions because quite literally. NO ONE MADE IT. It was made by AI. A robot. Not even the company can claim it because it was their bot that made it. Not them.

Lastly 👀💦 and this is no like jab to you at all but. Why not just draw or write this stuff yourself? It’ll always come out 1000% better than AI no matter what level you’re starting at. I mean dude. Ai can hardly render hands or complexity 90% of the time. Not to say I can either but like 👀 bro. Plus it always looks… the same. Like you can pose things however you want but it’ll always have that ai sheen to it ya know. No real heart or soul to it. You’re literally feeding a bot when there are so many artists out there that can be benefiting from this that would be willing to put everything they had into it (shading, dynamic posing, lighting, backgrounds,) for a few dollars or experience if you know them and ask nicely enough.

hello, good evening! ^^

yes, you are totally right. it's wrong for someone to claim rights over something an AI did, specially if it's supposed to look like art or a drawing.

however, i never did that. you probably saw my pinned post or the watermarks i started adding to the images, and I suppose that's why you sent me this, but just to clarify things, i do not care at all if people repost those ai images. like, I really don't. I've seen them being reposted countless times, specially on pinterest and i don't claim to have "created" them. all i said I did was write a prompt and the ai generator did all on its own. I made that very clear more than once.

I had an issue with that one specific creator I talked about on my pinned post because they were doing exactly what you're saying, they were claiming to have spent HOURS working on those "edits". they even said that I STOLE them. and when I confronted them, I made it clear that those were made in seconds.

and that's exactly why I started adding the watermarks. I didn't wanna do it in first place as I've said before, but it really pisses me off, you know? when someone tries to get clout for something that they didn't do. the watermarks prevent that from happening again, since they make it clear that it's ai generated. I mean, it literally says "made by ai".

also, i understand the issue regarding all that ai art thing, i really do. but those images are not made off art tho... you can tell they are realistic, since (as long as I know) the ai used real images (of real people, taken by cameras) that are available on internet. I'm also very against those ai arts too, that's why I never post any art looking images (or even if they're slightly artsy) that the ai generates from time to time, because I'm very aware that they steal from artists. I mean, i'm an artist myself. I'm not "feeding" a bot because... it feeds itself.

when I started posting the images, i was just trying to have some fun and share it with the fandom, I don't benefit from this at all. i mean no harm, and honestly, it's not that serious. if you don't like how it looks, well, you can block the hashtag "ai" (I always tag my ai images posts with it) and you won't see it again. you can even block me if it's not the type of content you're interested in, no hard feelings at all. anyways here's a screenshot that shows that I never took any credit for any of the images:

well, I hope you have a great day, and thanks for addressing this issue. it's very important to talk about that. ❤️❤️❤️

[trickstarbrave]

most artists are not under the impression they are temporarily down on their luck rich people. art has always been underfunded, and artists have always struggled, ever since there was a monetary attachment to the service of producing art. we are told the entire time we grow up “you are wasting your life, you are not profitable, you cannot survive off of doing what you love”. most artists are smaller creatives and i find the comparison to general piracy pretty offensive. we already provide much of our artwork these AI programs use. you can look at them for free at any time. we provide tutorials, WIPs, advice, open communities, and more. the internet has lead to such a vast collection of artwork from anywhere in the world free and at your fingertips while most artists charge 0 commission to enjoy it and learn from it. PDFs and commercial music however is pretty much always behind a paywall. the copyright holders do not even give you permission to enjoy it as a medium without first paying for it. 

another issue with AI art generation is AI is not that advanced and cannot make intentional choices of subject matter, symbolism, and intent. AI is never going to make human art obsolete--at least not in the foreseeable future. it can spit out something vaguely coherent which is a marvel of human engineering, but it will never truly replace artists so i also don’t agree with the idea artists are petit-bourgeois afraid of being kicked out of our markets and replaced with robots and being denied profits, the fact is we can’t be replaced--but actual tech bros with no consideration for the concept of art sure would like us to be so they can cut down on commercial advertising and design costs

because that’s the real issue here: most AI art generation tools are not made to simply see how far human technology can do and how much it can benefit us as a species. it is not even concerned about how these tools can benefit living breathing artists (which they can! if they gave a shit about doing that) it’s about trying to remove artists as a working class. tech bros keep saying they will replace artists with it, that artists are too stupid to understand “the future”, and they want to commercialize and copyright this artwork itself made off the backbone of real human artists who share their artwork for free on the internet. tech bros looked at a massive collection of freely shared human expression and went “hm, how can i commodify this? how can i turn a profit off this?” 

if there wasn’t the pressures of capitalism most artists probably wouldn’t give a shit and these programs would only use opt in models of data collection. many artists are okay if these programs use their art for learning for the betterment of other artists and humanity--if you just fucking ask first, the bare minimum before you transform a piece of art made by someone. and sure some artists are shitheads who want expansion of copyright to protect their artwork, but that is such a minority of artists who actually have a problem with it. 

art is deeply personal to most people. it is hours upon hours of work that most people then just post for other people to enjoy for free. it is free labor for the benefit and enjoyment of the community. it has intention behind it. it is something we enjoy doing often to the detriment of our capital gains. and it is insulting to say “get over it crybabies you will never be rich you are not metallica”. and if you feel this way i don’t think you are actually paying attention to the conversations and instead buy into the idea artists are super wealthy assholes who lord their art over the heads of peasants when in reality we are the vast majority just people trying to get by as average workers or even hobbyists. the least you can do is ask us for our consent before feeding our hours of work into databases and not to do it with the goal of replacing us. because if you don’t many artists will simply give up and stop making art or stop posting it.

yea ive seen the posts of people saying AI art is "stealing" theirs and then showing pictures that have similar styles and color schemes but entirely different subject matter, and it literally looks like someone imitated your art style but then still went and made an original piece (not showing the particular art im referring to cause i don't have money to buy it, and i know yall HATE that). like I'm sorry but "looking at millions of pieces of art and taking in the techniques and style of all of them in order to adapt what you've learned to ur own creations" is just the factual description of how a human being learns how to make their own original art. the only difference here is that the artist is a machine that did it much more quickly.

I plan on continuing to commission human artists to design my tattoos and OCs, but hearing yall talk about AI art and how """art thieves"" ("thieves" in the sense that I am a thief when I pirate Metallica albums, not in the sense that I have actually taken anything away from anyone without permission) are the scum of the Earth and might as well be shooting human artists in the face for what they're doing, I'm unsure if I should. if by some fluke my book or TTRPG got big with that art in it (i usually can spend $50-$100 on any given piece), or if I made money with a photograph of someone's art showing on my skin, are they gonna want long-term royalties, or else claim I'm exploiting them? are all the fanartists and my fellow fanfiction writers "stealing" from the works whose images and styles we imitate? the way people are calling for protections for visual artists that imitate the draconian copyright laws of the music industry, i have a sinking suspicion that a lot of yall would like it to work that way....which would effectively make it so that any richer artist than you can just game the system and get your original creations taken down for copyright violations because your style and color schemes are too similar to theirs, and make transformative art of popular existing works nigh on impossible to share through mass media.

and yeah I'm well aware that pretty soon my art form, writing, will be even more obsolete than it is now, once the AI learns how to do that too, but it doesn't send me into a fit of rage because I don't consider myself as an artist to be a temporarily embarrassed Metallica, just waiting to hit it big and use the concept of intellectual property to get rich 🤷‍♂️ the issue here isn't AI art or art "thieves" it's our shitty exploitative economy that won't let you make art full time unless you can make enough money selling it. sure, we can't overthrow capitalism by the end of the week, but that doesnt mean we should all cheer on the simultaneous commodification of art and gentrification of the internet hoping that the people generating AI art will then turn and give a human artist money instead, if the AI weren't there (almost none of them will). middle class liberals go ahead and whine about it if you want but yeah actually it DOES suck that today's artists aren't bohemian or counter-culture in any way, but just aspiring petit-bourgeois under the mass delusion that each of us personally has a statistially significant chance of escaping wage labor and poverty through owning IPs lol

[ryo-maybe]

can u explain why AI art is bad without fearmongering, moralizing or bootlicking lol

I'm going to answer in good faith, even though the tone you're using sounds like you're harboring anything but. The issue with AI art isn't specifically inherent to the tools used to produce it, because, ultimately, a tool is merely that: something devoid of will which, in the hands of a human, can produce a specific outcome. It's the human element that taints what we could otherwise enjoy for the unquestioningly fascinating topic that is AI art and, by extension, AI software as a whole.

Now, the problem isn't people, period, but the kind of people that are responsible for giving AI the bad rep it's been getting, along with the intent that goes into both the development of AI tools and the things produced by dint of said tools. I'm talking about the tech bros happily rubbing their hands, waiting to provide business moguls with a brand new means to commodify and mass-produce what artists stake their entire livelihoods upon, because when you have enough zeroes lined up in your bank account, your eyes are utterly blinded to the soul and personality that human beings put into their handiwork, and which a machine won't ever be able to reproduce no matter how much stolen art you feed it. Oh yeah, by the way, that's how AI art tools have been making the rounds: by chewing on thousands upon thousands of stolen pictures made by actual people so that they may learn how to ape someone's style and spit out absolutely soulless derivatives, while the original authors don't see a lick of recognition or monetary retribution for any of it. Do I need to tell you why stealing and parading someone else's art as your own is a terrible, vile thing to do?

But sure, you did ask me to refrain from "fearmongering, moralizing or bootlicking", which I guess I've already done. So since you'd rather I skipped straight to the point in a concise manner, lemme offer some quick examples of why the culture surrounding AI art has already developed into one of the most abysmally disappointing displays of how greed and an utter lack of human decency can ruin something objectively brimming with possibilities:

Less than a week after the sudden death of Korean artist Kim Jung-gi, someone trained an AI model to mimic his artstyle, having the audacity of asking for credits if anyone wished to use it. I sincerely hope I don't have to explain to you why this is a ghoulish example of the kind of tone-deafness sported by tech bros who buy wholesale into the AI art craze.

A piece of AI art was submitted to an art contest and won. The "artist"'s work amounted to little more than picking a series of prompts and letting the machine do the work. It's as much art as googling a smattering of terms and making a collage of pictures taken from Pinterest (and even then, you would have put more work into it than this person did). That they won at all says a whole damn lot about how abysmal the respect given to artists - real artists - nowadays is.

There are a multitude of people out there already selling prints of AI-generated art. I could link some of them here, but honestly, type "ai art prints" on a search engine and you'll get inundated by them. I've seen and personally know artists who have had to undersell their works because commissions were the only thin, frayed string they could hang on in hopes of making it through the week without fucking starving themselves, but here we are: any random asshole can now yell "MASSIVE BREASTS, THIN WAIST, COCKTAIL DRESS, HUGE BADONGAS" at a computer, let it mash together a trillion of other people's hard work, and print it for easy bucks that the actual authors of the basic ingredients of their insipid soup will never, ever see a dime of.

It really bothers me that you mentioned "no bootlicking". Whose fucking boots is this side of the debate supposedly tasting? That of the artists who post every day about how angry, sad and terrified they are by the prospects of what the development of AI art will entail for their livelihood and passion? What kind of gall did your mother birth you with that you have the spiteful spunk to type that word, when you've got shit like an artist who had their sketch stolen while they were drawing it on stream, then fed to an AI and posted by someone passing it off as their own art? How does that not ignite your indignation? "Bootlicking". Like anyone's tongues have been tasting leather but those of the same tech bro chodes who kept trying oh so hard to convince us NFTs were the future while ruining the environment to make the absolute stupidest point ever made in the history of humanity.