#and then i made a gumroad but i didn't like the idea of managing a Whole New Website

[aurosoulart]

I have hi-res print files available on my website now! for FREEEEEEEEE 🎊🎊🎊

I'm tired of monetizing and advertising and capitalizing and.... everything, honestly. you can still buy gallery-quality giclée prints of my work on INPRNT if you want those - but now you can also just download these and print them someplace local!

there's only a couple Celestial artworks available for now, but I'll be adding more later... and potentially some VR art files in the future as well ✌

[demigirlboss2girlrotboogaloo]

Point 1: "Modern art is superior to AI art because it takes time and effort, and is an expression of the artist's soul, no matter how simple it may be, and anyone can make it, which is good." I'm attempting to honestly summarize the meat and potatoes of it here, not to strawman, so please do correct me if I do that.

The first part of it does fall into the same fascist rhetoric I just criticized, but I'll give an actual example. What effort does it take to take a piss? Literally nothing. It is *negative* effort to take a piss, as opposed to the effort of holding it in. And yet Piss Christ is considered art. What soul is bared in Piss Christ? What secret sauce of humanity is contained therein that cannot be contained in me typing "A Jesus Figurine In A Jar of Urine"? The latter would of course take more time and effort, but that's a dogshit way of measuring the validity of art. "What matters is you made it" how do you define if I made it? Is the work less mine because I did not grind my own pigments, did not stitch my own canvas, did not pluck the hairs of my brush by my own hand? Of course not. That would be ridiculous. Are digital artists not artists because they don't compile Krita from source every time? No, and saying such would be seen as bad parody. So when does my work stop being my own? When do I cease to have ownership? "When you steal the work of others to make it," you say. So my work is not my own because I traced a reference? Or perhaps it ceases to be my own because I followed a tutorial on making a material, instead of buying the asset off the artist's Gumroad (shoutout Ryan King Art). But no one's ever told me that my work isn't my own for doing those things. People didn't even say it when I used materials off of Polyhaven, blatantly taking someone else's work and using it without accreditation of any sort. So why is AI different, when it's far more original than I or realistically most artists are? It remixes its training data far more than I remix my references and free assets, so why am I not called a thief and a plagiarist?

Point 2: "AI art is stitching together indistinct images from the work of people who actually cared and never consented to having their work used in this way. To make AI art and call yourself an artist is like ordering takeout and calling yourself a Michelin Star chef. "

Why must art be distinct to be real? You said yourself that a single dot on a canvas can be art if placed there by a human hand, but if a hundred humans place a dot on a canvas and I ask you to pick out a specific one, would they be distinct enough for you to be able to find it? Would you be able to see one and immediately go, "Ah, that's the hand of Pat, my manager at the Best Buy where I worked part time for a summer!" Would the precise, weighed, thought out touch of Ayesha, an obsessive anxiety-ridden compliance officer from Idaho be uniquely distinguishable to you from the casual, thoughtless hand of Damian, a floor manager for an electronics store in Maryland, if in both cases all they drew was a singular dot, pigments of black on the canvas of white, with nothing else to convey their voice there?

Shakespeare never consented to Hamlet having a movie adaptation. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never consented to BBC Sherlock. Rick Riordan never consented to the vast and terrible quantities of mediocre Percy Jackson smut scattered across the Internet. We don't care about artists' consent except when it comes to AI. In fact, in the vast majority of cases, we are actively *hostile* to the idea that an artist must consent in order for their work to be remixed, to be transformed, to be made into something new and different by someone else, even if the new thing, no, *especially* if the new thing is bad and low quality and a dime a dozen. The idea that an artist must consent to the fair use of their work is applied as a foregone conclusion to AI, but would you give the same license to authors to sue against or restrict fanfiction authors? Cosplayers? Fan artists? Most people who apply this standard to AI would revolt at the very suggestion, and yet that is exactly what they are so loudly clamouring for, and there is no restriction which can be made in such a way upon generative AI that will not be used to target independent creators tenfold.

Finally, people aren't saying that the art made by AI is perfectly amazing in every way. That is the most exciting part about generative AI. It fills the niche of soulless garbage or low effort content mill cruft that nonetheless is necessary for the current cultural ecosystem. Or, to put it another way, no one is ordering Chinese takeout and calling themselves Gordon Ramsay. But to act like cheap greasy noodles in sticky sauce with stale vegetables and enough MSG to make your heart explode has no place in this world, that real food only uses San Marzano tomatoes and guanchale and parmeggiano reggiano is verbatim Italian neo-fascist rhetoric.

Point 3: "People are mad because people are using AI to generate large quantities of images and then claiming them as being amazing art using stolen images."

A *microscopic* minority is claiming that AI is superior to conventional art. And they are annoying shits, I know, mindblowing. But they're not the vast majority of the people using this tech. The vast majority of people understand the limitations of the tech, and don't want it to replace conventional art, they just wanna do stupid shit with a fun new thing that exists now. People aren't mad cause folks are churning out mediocre Gay Sex cats shitposts en masse instead of supporting the artisanal Gay Sex cats artist, people are mad because we're hot off the heels of NFTs and crypto and people are responding to this in the same way because it *is* a bubble, and it *will* burst, and the trained response to this particular call is "call bullshit and make fun of it for being a scam". But unlike crypto and NFTs, AI is a legitimately useful tool that could actually be used for good if people would take the time to interact with it. Instead we get kneejerking about how it's evil and soulless, as though there is oh so much soul in a fucking Prime ad.

As for the point about it being stolen, this blog post by the Electronic Frontier Foundation puts it a thousand times better than I could ever hope to, especially in terms of the legal theory and practice surrounding the question. But to summarize, by common definitions, Stable Diffusion and similar generative AI models cannot be considered to be infringing because the ways in which they use the images in question qualify, for a number of reasons, as being fair use, and disqualifying them would also not only disqualify search engines from indexing your work but also potentially put conventional artists in legal jeopardy for copying the style of their favourite artist.

i fucking hate ai ""art"" literally fuck off if ur pro ai ""art"" of any kind. why should i care abt it if u dont care enough to make it