#if you're like ''i don't like AI but i don't like the arguments anti-AI people make so now i'm ok with AI''

[gender-euphowrya]

is there a more annoying species of cunt than the ones that go "well i think [opinion A] but people who also think [opinion A] make bad arguments sometimes so i'm gonna start thinking [opinion B] instead"

[sexhaver]

i guess i should preface im not anti ai but how is "everyone can make art it comes free with your humanity" ableist? i could see the argument for illustration and drawing and stuff as i agree with that the other statement is ableist ("oh this guy picked up paintbrushes with his mouth oough") but art is a lot more than that especially cause ive seen people make pretty interesting works of art using AI as a tool

in a vacuum it's not an objectionable statement but in context it's being said as a response to disabled people being like "hey, i like making visual art but can't move the pen/mouse too well, this new technology seems like it could help me make some cool art with minimal physical effort on my end". and in that context, "everyone can make art" stops meaning "humans have an inherent creative drive that manifests in a variety of ways" and starts meaning "okay, sure, you can't make visual art any more, but you can still do poetry or writing, right? like you can type the prompt for AIs, so you can type words, right? just do that instead, it still counts as art. what? you wanted to make a specific kind of art instead of just any random form of expression, and you don't particularly like writing, and also you're bad at it? well too bad, shouldve thought of that before you lost the ability to draw, because your only option to continue doing that without me yelling at you for using Ontologically Evil Technology is holding a brush in your mouth, and if you disagree with that then i'm going to call YOU ableist and post inspiration porn".

tl;dr it treats all different forms of art as fundamentally interchangeable and completely disregards the feelings and desires of disabled people

[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.

[read-marx-and-lenin]

i hate the anti-AI argument that's like "you could have hired someone to do that" because apart from employers and particularly wealthy individuals, no you couldn't?

like if you're making the argument that big companies are going to use AI to cut costs and lay off workers, then sure, but that goes for pretty much any technological innovation. the only thing that makes AI special in that regard is that it's specifically affecting the jobs of people who thought they weren't going to be automated anytime soon.

but this argument isn't even restricted to those situations. so often I see people say stuff like "you wasted all your time fiddling with an AI that doesn't understand what you want when you could have gotten a much better experience and end product commissioning a human artist". and that's true! but did you think maybe the person couldn't afford to commission someone?

if a broke indie writer uses AI image generation to create a cover or illustrations, then it's not a situation where someone lost a job, it's a situation where previously they would have either used free stock images, begged someone else to do it for free, or simply have gone without. like I don't see the reason to shame them as if they're putting someone out of a job when they never had the capacity to hire someone in the first place.

a person who uses home appliances isn't taking jobs away from maids and servants. an indie artist who uses AI isn't taking jobs away from other artists.

(i'm not mentioning other anti-AI arguments here because i've already talked about them previously. if you want to know what I think about unrelated argument X, you can either search my blog or send me an ask or DM. if you bring up unrelated arguments here I will know you didn't actually read my post and block you.)

[olderthannetfic]

Ok, wow, this is NOT the type of ask you seem to get usually, but this appears to be my best option...

I'm seeking out a post that is not particularly fandom-y in nature, but I was reminded of it after reading the earlier anon who was burned out from AI discourse - I totally feel the same way, and there was a really great lengthy textpost I reblogged a few months ago (read: "I read it any time from, like, April 2024 to almost a year ago......sorry") that I cannot find on my blog nor on tumblr in general - either because the post has been completely nuked from the internet OR because I'm just bad at SEO searches and remembering the keywords that were actually IN the post. I'm hoping it's a me issue or, if the post IS nuked, at the very least someone here remembers it and has an internet archive link or screenshot or something????

to get to the point, there was a post that was like (paraphrased, quote marks are not literal quotes):

"When it comes to the anti-AI crowd on tumblr, there's basically two schools of thought: people who completely hate AI and everything about it and are opposed to all forms of AI without even learning what AI really is. These people are stuck in their ways and generally can't be reasoned with.

Then there's a second group who are against AI for pretty good reasons - they really are worried that AI is gonna completely take over and steal artists' livelihoods, those who criticize it for environmental activist reasons, etc. These people generally can be reasoned with as they're truly misinformed, and in fact they would be - or already are - receptive to a less harmful AI."

The post then went on to compare AI to other forms of automation and made some really great parallels; such as bringing up the fact that stores that have both self checkout AND cashiers tend to be the best business models, because people who have their preferences can choose how they want to shop, AND we can utilize automated checkouts without completely getting rid of cashiers, which is obviously good for a lot of reasons.

It also debunked a lot of common fearmonger-y arguments against AI, i.e. explaining what "training AI" really entails, with some general copyright-critical philosophy in general. (I don't know the actual, like, political term, if one even exists, but basically they were talking about flaws with "intellectual property" as a concept - or at least how IP works today and why it works the way it does.)

There was also a really good addition to the OP's thoughts that I liked, with another user talking about: Essentially people who are gonna use AI would likely have done something else sketchy anyway, even if AI as it stands today didn't exist. For example, chatGPT isn't to blame for plagiarism. The people who use chatGPT to do their homework would, in an earlier time, likely go on Chegg / pay someone to write an essay / reuse their old work / etc. Likewise, the people who tell open AI to make artwork for them likely wouldn't make (or try to make) their own artwork anyway, nor would they even commission someone. They talked about how since fandom is so damn divided on the topic of AI, that the artists who DO feel as if their commissions are being taken away from them, or the writers who DO fear AI taking over fanfic.......well, to put it nicely, those people likely wouldn't really be losing many fans in the first place. You didn't lose a commission to AI - that person never would've commissioned you in the first place, and the people that do commission you hate AI as much as you do. You're not losing readers to AI - people who choose AI fics over yours are likely already the impatient type who can't handle waiting more than a week for an update, so they just make AI feed them 10k in one sitting! And the people who DO comment and read on your stuff, also hate AI!

I definitely did not agree with every single point made on the post (ie i dont think the self checkout metaphor was a great direct parallel logistically, but I def picked up what they were trying to put out and overall agreed with the general sentiment), overall it made a lot of really, really, really good points about the AI debate that I'd truly never considered before.

I know I've damn near rewritten the whole post myself now at this point but I also know there's a lot of stuff that I'm missing or that I just can't word and I'd love to know if anyone else has seen this post or has it on their blog in some capacity.

--

[zilodak]

i think the argument there was : "clothes-making is a deeply exploitative wasteful industry and yet you're getting new clothes all the time, why are you opposed to ai on the grounds of it being exploitative and wasteful? and while i think anti-ai rhetoric is all tied up in copyright intellectual property BS and the impact of ai power-wise (all data centers, not just ones used for ai models add up to about 1-1.5% of global power usage, using ai from your own computer can't really exceed the energy of using your computer normally) is fairly small relative to other non-essential activities (advertising alone uses about 1% of global power as well), people do need clothes?

I get that but personally I'm mostly thrifting and using pass-me-downs, giving my clothes to those who are in need or using some select few as rags when they tear up/can't be used anymore. I never throw them away into the garbage and I don't buy more than I need since I usually recycle.

I'm not saying that I'm an angel, you're right, occasionally I will buy clothes (the Nirvana one wasn't bought it was a gift from my cousin) from H&M like I said in my last post but those are far and between and mostly when I go shopping with my family in Turkey.

I don't understand how this got blown out of proportion? And again I wasn't attacking anyone just sharing how disappointed I was when I made those posts.

[kito-kat]

ABOUT ME / DNI

pt: about me/dni. end pt.

hiya!! im kito and very silly and i draw and animate and mostly only reblog on this account

nonbinary, xenogender + many other genders! sapphic , demiromantic , acespec

they/xe/kit/star , any neutral pronouns ok , he/him aux

stars by @buntress :]

im in a buncha fandoms!! inanimate insanity current hyperfix but I love pokemon as well

my fave color is #0000ff !

this acc is mostly reblogs , please scroll to the bottom for my other accounts !

im a MINOR.

am i a system? idk, idc. maybe. if i am, I'd like to be treated as a singlet in interaction.

strawpage / daily clicks

more info, byf and dnf / dni under cut!

pt: more info, byf and dnf/dni under cut! end pt.

scroll 2 bottom for other blogs & socials if u wanna skip the whole boring sad byf dni stuff

im very on and off and take a lot of hiatuses! please don't assume im no longer friends with u if i go offline 4 a bit

i dont really know how much is oversharing and I tend to be an attention seeker.... please lmk if im making you uncomfortable and if you do PLEASE say it nicely so I don't freak out /gen

please don't vent to me without permission, i get worried abt people really easily so my anxiety will act up (if you're in serious trouble though do not hesitate!! i'd rather be uncomfortable than smth happen 2 any of u)

i'm sometimes on at night if i send something offensive i might just be too tired to filter. lmk in the morning and ill fix it up

please do not cross boundaries and make me anxious. regardless of importance if a topic is affecting me please leave it alone 4 now

dni: basic dni (this is the short carrd dw) , exclusionists (anti mspec monos , anti lesboys , etc) anti furry, anti alterhuman, radqueer/transid/xenosatanist, proship/darkship/antianti, (pro)sh/ed blogs, nsfw blogs, excessively political, discoursey, or religious blogs*, ai 'bros'

*by excessively I mean .. 65% or more posts on the blog are about that? Not exactly tho

I am radinclus but NOT radqueer

I am anti proship, pro self-ship, and will reblog posts of any non-problematic ship if I like the content, even if I don't ship it myself. Note this may mean I reblog art of the same characters both in a ship and in a found family way (not at the same time ofc)

I block liberally. I will also block people for how they act towards my friends even if they don't bother me myself.

please don't involve me in any discourse. (sapphic discourse, syscourse, shipcourse, idc.) ill share my opinions but im not here for arguments.

I reblog from people of differing views because I don't have the time and energy to check every single person's profile before I reblog or like. Please be aware of that.

Adding this bit to try to minimise spam:

People who need donations. I'm a minor and can't donate. If you want me to share it still, (this part is specific to palestine fundraisers) make sure you have a verifier linked.

pt: People who need donations. I'm a minor and can't donate. If you want me to share it still, (this part is specific to palestine fundraisers) make sure you have a verifier linked.

DO NOT STEAL MY ART AND/OR USE FOR AI TRAINING

Therian/alterhuman sideblog: @kitotherianposting

Coining sideblog: @kito-coinhoard

Art sideblog: @kitokat-art

YouTube: @kitosanimations

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pinterest: kitokat_

Userbox spam:

[a-writers-blurbs]

A bit of a disclaimer ig...

Hi guys,

This is going to be a long post that sounds slightly rant-y & I'm going to apologize in advance for that. I am going to make exactly ONE post (this one) about this topic, and I will not be discussing it further or posting about it again. I will also not be responding to any negative comments but deleting them instead.

These are my personal opinions and [...not *trying* to sound rude, but there's no other way to say it...] a bunch of random people online aren't going to change my opinions.

My husband is an artist. He does canvas painting & draws comic books (think anti-hero dark horse). I paint furniture (kinda mini murals) & make chibi drawings. I've also been writing fanfiction since the late 90s.

That being said, this post is about AI art.

I get the controversy, I do. But I've heard this argument before, when fanfiction became more popularized. The whole "You're just stealing someone else's work & changing it up to call it your own" is (at its core) the same argument against AI. The only difference is that instead of you yourself changing it, you're allowing a machine to do it.

But I digress...

Over the last week, I have received several messages about my use of AI art. First & foremost, my stuff is appropriately tagged as AI.

Second, I don't sell or advertise these pictures in any way. In fact, none of them have been posted anywhere but here (as of 6/1/24).

Third, and probably most important, I DONT MAKE THEM FOR YALL. Fanfiction & fanart are a HOBBY. It is something that I do because I enjoy it and it destresses me. I DO NOT do it, hoping I'll get 1000s of followers, views, likes, etc. Every story I write, I print & bind for my library. I will now be doing the same with my AI pictures.

I have a condition that has a symptom called Maladaptive Daydreaming. Because of this, my head is full of an alarming amount of excruciatingly detailed & unrealistic scenarios and images. (To the point that it affects my everyday life).

I can't necessarily recreate the images in my mind without help & the only way to get rid of the random scenarios is to write them out. So I do write them. And now I use AI to help me get a BASE image. I do still go in myself and edit/redraw parts of each generated image to fit them to the characters I want them to represent. I do thus using digital art.

Granted, there's a whole other group of people that think digital art isn't real art... but that's a discussion for another day. Anyway...

TLDR:

I use AI art & will continue to despite some people's dislike. I will continue to delete any and all comments left publicly that are malicious, rude, or condescending. My stories & are are for me. If others enjoy it, great, that's freaking awesome. If not, there are literally thousands of other fanfic authors you can follow instead of me.

Again, I apologize, I know this sounds rude. But I need to be 100% transparent on this one. I am extremely grateful for every folllower & reader I have. I won't lie & say comments/positive interaction isn't a serotonin boost because it is. Yall also give me more motivation to actually complete a story vs. moving on to the next idea. But I'm not going to change the way I do things to appease someone I don't even know.

This is one of the few things I enjoy doing in my free time & have been doing it for 25 years now, and in the last 5 or so years ALL fandoms have gotten so toxic its hard to enjoy anything anymore. Last time it got like this, I simply stopped posting. I'd rather not do that again, but if people (who aren't even following me) don't leave me alone, I'll probably have to do it again, sadly.

But for now, hopefully this post will give people with different opinions to go ahead and block me from their feed. We're not going to agree so instead of wasting energy arguing, let's keep the peace & agree to stay off if each others feeds.

I won't judge you on your idea that you feel it's your duty to harass people over their choices & you won't judge me for enjoying something. 😉

Thank you for listening. Love yall & and I hope your day is blessed!

[damnfandomproblems]

I think one issue with the AI debate (which is apparent with this exchange) is that even if their heart is ultimately in the right place, some anti-AI folks would prefer to insult and scold rather than to educate.

I'm currently anti-AI myself, though about a year ago when it was just starting to blow up I was somewhere between pro and neutral to AI, because the way a lot of anti-AI arguments were presented just didn't make much sense to me at the time.

There was a lot of "its ugly!!" which is, for one thing, is EXTREMELY objective, and from my perspective, not always true. There was a lot that I found interesting or even beautiful. (One thing I still think even today, despite my disillusionment with AI is that it's the closest thing I've ever seen that accurately represents the real uncanniness of dreaming, although this is usually unintentional.)

I didn't like the "it's bad because it doesn't MEAN anything!" or some out-there woo-woo "it wasn't Created with the Divine and Blessed Soul of the Human Spirit" type stuff, because a part of what art is about is what meaning the viewer brings to it. Maybe the computer doesn't understand what symbolism is, but I could still find it whether it was meant to be there or not, and in this way, something that "no one made" is elevated to something a little bit higher.

And while I was more convinced by the argument of theft of individuals art, I still thought, "well, it's not like people are going to pass it off as their own creation! it's more of a starting off point, like an inspiration board! of course people are going to CHANGE it and actually make it their own, and that's a transformative work!" And this final point got proven wrong very, VERY quickly, because people WERE releasing clearly jacked-up images as "their own creations" with no regard to the artists whose work it came from. All it did was make people extremely lazy, because look at all the AI images with screwed-up text, the part that would be the EASIEST thing of all to fix, no artistic skill required, just ten seconds in any editing program and the ability to give half a shit. People either didn't even notice they were posting absolute nonsense, or didn't care, because they thought no one else would.

And not just people, but businesses, corporations. In such a short time, people's standards for quality control has dipped below zero. Quantity over quality, now half of any Google Image search is AI. When misinformation gets passed along faster than ever and no one ever thinks to question it, let's just create misinformation at an exponential rate! Now every website has its own AI feature it wants you to try, phones have AI generators built in, everyone is racing to capitalize off a technology we haven't even figured out ethically.

And then, most important of all, is the environmental impact. Like yeah, you might not feel like you're doing art theft with your character AI chats, since you keep it to yourself and don't profit from it. But if they have to cut down a tree every time you want to pretend to talk to your blorbos, isn't it just easier to open up your Notes app?

I don't think AI will never work, I think someday someone will be able to figure out a compromise that doesn't steal artists work and doesn't overheat the planet, where it actually can be a tool artists enjoy using instead of something to replacing artists entirely. But I don't believe that day will come very soon, when potential for quick profit reigns over all else.

Posting as a response to a previous problem.

[tim-official]

i am absolutely fascinated with the number of people on my post about chatGPT whose stance is: "you don't understand what people are angry about, it's not that they don't understand how chatGPT works [this is provably false, but besides the point], it's that it's inherently disrespectful and insulting to use chatGPT on someone's fanfiction." there is a significant amount of pushback against this thing that, once again, almost certainly is not happening on a large scale, because chatGPT is awful at narrative prose

^ a tasting platter of common responses. that last one is, whew, that's a lot. this is fanfic we're talking about: works that are explicitly based on someone else's original material. this is fiction written using someone else's setting or characters without the original author's consent, and sometimes explicitly when an author has said they do not like fanfic made of their work. note: this is fine. fanfiction is good and intellectual property is a bad concept. but as soon as we involve an autocomplete machine - not even to use something as training data, but just to see what the model outputs when given a fic, even if the results are not distributed - consent is important, and respecting the wishes of the author is important.

this one in particular tickles me. it's ours and not theirs... my friend, it is fanfic. in what possible sense is it solely yours? this one is an argument against fanfic in general!

anyway. please don't take me as pro-autocompleting fics with chatgpt. (again, it can't even do it well. it sucks at it.) there are plenty of reasons for being against this practice in concept that i wouldn't argue with. it's just fascinating that, of all the objections people have, by far the most common one invokes a kind of "ownership" over one's own fanfic that is not afforded to authors of the original words fanfic is based on, and a kind of "consent" that is not necessary when you're writing about real life minecraft youtubers fucking or whatever. this is why a lot of anti-ai backlash worries me, because it seems to be beelining towards people asking for tighter IP protections or something

[mcflymemes]

👋 hi, i'm CHUCKLES (she/her), and this is my sideblog for roleplay and dialogue prompts. i've been in the tumblr rp community since late 2012, and i love memes!! feel free to reblog as many posts as you'd like and send in requests for anything in particular you'd like to see... in the future ⚡️

please do not repost my memes or add anything to them. this blog does NOT use any form of AI to create or edit its prompt lists; this blog is aggressively anti-ai.

MEME REQUESTS ARE: CLOSED, INBOX IS CLOSED

popular memes linked below ↓

MOVIE PROMPTS:

most are linked in this post

ROMANTIC PROMPTS:

budding romance

new intimacy prompts

the romance of hands and touch

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the morning after

types of kisses

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post breakup makeups

will they, won't they

intimate pillow talk

"i accidentally told you i loved you"

playful affection

starry-eyed soulmates

lots and lots of yearning

intimacy under the covers

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things done while dancing

"there's something special about you"

playful affection

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oops, i have a crush on you

ordinary things that feel intimate

i need you close at all times

forced proximity trope

enemies to lovers

DRAMATIC PROMPTS:

lies, deceit, and villainy

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angsty conversations

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telling a big secret

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ACTION PROMPTS:

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5 love languages

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fantasy locations / settings

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send x and i'll recommend a blog

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[birbycakes]

saw some stuff I really didn't agree with and wanted to rant so yeah

basically it was someone trying to defend AI (this is the second time I've seen this) by saying if you hate AI you love copyright laws. Like... okay. IDK how to elaborate this clearly but my main point is: this is such black and white thinking

One of them brought up like, "So do you think Anne Rice had a right to ban people from making fanfiction" like fanfic is comparable to having your work reposted without credit or art traced/stolen/etc. I'd say a more comparable instance would be, in art terms, someone making fanart or fanfics of someone's OCs. Most people like that? You'd be hard-pressed to find people who'd be angry at getting fanart of their OCs. However if someone had their entire novel stolen, and the person who stole it claimed it as theirs, and then made money off it, far more than the person who actually made it did/the person who made it never made ANY money. Well. You Know. that's incredibly dickish of them. Like leave law out of it, that would be a morally reprehensible thing to do. So what, you just... let the thief run off and suffer no consequences, not even social ones? is this our Glorious Land of Communism we are hoping for? Fuck the petit bourgeois artists and creatives steal from them all you want you aren't allowed to feel like you've earned a level of ownership on the ideas you make anyone is allowed to take it and wipe their ass with it and profit off it and you can just sit there in the dirt and cry.

And I'm not even saying all this as a "make copyright stronger" standpoint I don't think copyright should be a thing! But I get the weird feeling the people I've seen arguing this are more like... getting mad that people dare to get mad at their work getting stolen or ripped off. Not even from a law standpoint just "well why would you be mad someone stole your art and profited of it, in either attention or money. What are you some capitalist bourgeois oppressor? The REAL enlightened people like us know that your work has no personal value and anyone should be able to chew it up and spit out and you should just sit there and smile because that's a Good Thing. Anyways please stop getting mad at us when we use AI we should be allowed to do whatever we want without getting any consequences."

Like sure in this ideal land where no one has to make money to survive, I guess Who Cares, but we don't live in a fantasy land where artists don't need to make money so who cares if their work gets stolen, by AI or otherwise. Unless you think people are bad people or the "petit bourgeois" if they dare to use a skill they've developed to make a living (the anti-working class bastards that they are). So yeah, in Reality where we are living, this is an issue and people are right to be upset about it. Like personally I think the lawsuit around it is gonna fuck shit over SO bad (and also I just hate the main mouthpiece for it, she shilled for nft shit too she's just money grubbing and out-for-herself and doesn't really care about helping other artists)

Like it feels like people are coming up with the most annoying ass-pulls for why Generative AI is Good and Fine and Okay, actually! You're ableist if you don't like it (an incredibly ableist statement in of itself), or you're a copyright-loving capitalist shill if you don't like it (just clearly a bad-faith argument).

OH AND ANOTHER THING. There is also an argument to be made about like... it's one thing for a person to say, make art (they drew it themselves or wrote it themselves and put in real human effort and creativity) that is transformative of someone's work, and profit off of it. It's another for someone to lift someone's work completely to make profit off of it (because usually if someone is doing that and is a full grown adult who should know better, it's for profit). There's no effort no creativity just a money grubbing asshole. Same can be said for people who use genai for profit (There are. SO MANY.) there is no effort no creativity just "hey robot make me a thing" *robot chews up a bunch of existing artwork and spits out some sub par garbage* "here is thing" "sweet thanks. anyways this is akin to me creating something and I deserve money for it and respect. treat me like a real artist." ITS JUST. HOW CAN YOU SEE THAT AND BE LIKE "Yeah that's fine people should be allowed to do that. it's okay who cares :)" that's just fucking stupid.

Anyways like I said I just wanted to rant and this is word vomit but whatever.

[audiovisualrecall]

I'm in a dragonriders of pern fan page on Facebook and recently there was someone basically spam-posting their Ai 'art', which spawned over a dozen arguments back and forth in the comments And then those spawned tons of new discussion posts which were pro or anti Ai, and the admin basically said ai is allowed but don't spam it and you have to mark it as ai. And to block instead of arguing. Anyway, a bunch of the pro-ai people keep insisting not everyone can make art, or draw at all, and the tool allows then to do so, an argument that was killed on here afaik, but others agreed with on there, but plenty of us that are artists in the group - many of us at least partly inspired by the books and cover art, actually, into art careers!- went 'no, anyone can make art, actually!' And the others went 'oh but you're talented, it's easy for you to say!' To which we went 'uhm, it's practice, not talent, actually.' Someone who is more on the fence about Ai went and posted their dragon art which they talked down, saying it's not that good and so they understand using ai instead. To which I went and commented that their art reminded me immediately of some of MY older works when I first started going 'hey, I want to draw dragons!' and basically impliedthat if they like what I draw and paint now (which I've shared on thr group semi recently) they shouldn't feel bad about their own drawing because I started out where they are, which means they are totally capable of getting to where I am, basically.

Anyway I got inspired and I went and dug through my art until I found some old stuff, and some in between works, and some new stuff, and I posted it together in order to show the growth. I'm getting a lot of compliments and likes on the art! But some of them I feel like don't understand what my intentions were. So I commented on one of my artworks that no one else commented on yet, and I sort of explained. Kind of wish I'd made a new post for it, but I don't want to restart the ai arguments which have kind of died down since we started posting art and book covers and discussion posts about the books in a big hurry to leave the topic mostly behind lol

[gentil-minou]

copyright is inherently anti-communist

is this supposed to be an argument in favor of letting people feed someone's work into an artificial generator because their intellectual property rights don't matter because if so yeah HARD disagree.

you're touching a topic that is far more complicated than i am able to speak on but if you want my opinion, i'm all for writers and creators to copyright their work if someone is going to take their hard earned ideas just to bang out a buck.

i think it's a different matter entirely when a creator tries to come after fans who are enjoying their work by making free fancontent or even just small merch, then what is going on with this AI lawsuit where it's literally a dumpster machine regurgitating novels to sell for a quick buck on amazon. they're already doing it and it's a disservice to all the people whose works were stolen to do that

the copyright thing is a whole different situation entirely and again im not well versed enough on the topic to really speak to it, but i think it's different when it's a conglomeration like disney coprighting something that should be public domain by now versus a living author who is still writing books about the series that's being plagerized by a word generator.

but yeah im not sure what kind of response you were looking for but this blog is firmly anti "AI" artificial word generators.

[triviallytrue]

You're clearly far more of a tech optimist than I am, and I hope I haven't been consigned to the bucket of 'stupid' anti-AI people. Like, it really just makes me feel constantly hopeless and suicidal in a way I can't quite elucidate, and I genuinely wonder how you avoid that.

Not saying it's your job to make me feel better or whatever, but I respect you and your intellect a lot and I wish you weren't so glib about this issue. People really are worried, and it's not just Disney sockpuppets.

Yeah I want to be clear that I'm not, like, bucketing people who disagree with me into a stupid category. I follow a lot of people specifically because I think they're smart and I disagree with them.

I think what makes me so glib about it is like... it's a discourse topic where most people I interact with are using canned responses that they haven't thought through at all. People talking about training an AI on publicly available art being "theft" mostly have not seriously considered what that would mean, and if they have, they are articulating an extremely reactionary view of intellectual property that I don't care to entertain.

I think people's economic concerns are real and serious, but I want people to be honest about it. If AI takes my job, I will be mad about that, because I won't have a job, and I will be upset and concerned by that. But like, be up front about it! Don't make a bunch of barely-related conservative arguments to sidestep that. To be clear, I don't see you doing this - using canned responses or being dishonest about why you believe what you believe.

I wouldn't describe myself as a tech optimist - if anything, some of my optimism stems from my belief that AI probably won't be as transformative as its most ardent proponents and opponents believe. I hope they develop into effective tools for human use, as opposed to autonomous intelligences that can function without human supervision. But, well, they might! And if that happens, a lot of very bad futures become possible.

I don't really understand the hopelessness and suicidality you're talking about. Maybe I will in ten years, we'll see.

[fishboneart]

Fishbone #005

They weren't kidding, that history can rhyme

Only 9 layers and 5 source images this time. Things don't always have to be a federal fucking issue.

With how much ai art wank discourse is rooted in purity politics, especially but not exclusively on tumblr, I was amused by the mental image of slipping into a hazmat suit before venturing into the dangerous and repulsive wasteland of ai art to retrieve alien salvage like the stalkers in Roadside Picnic. It doesn't feel like that, it feels like being a grabby little corvid in the shiny trinket factory, but I still enjoyed the concept.

The rest of the image is about art as alchemical process and I'm not going to explain it.

I've been observing for some time that the objections to ai art are indistinguishable from the objections to photoshop ~20-25 years ago (including the one about "it's different this time bro trust me") so I want to look at some of them a bit closer.

It's not real art

Stop getting your talking points from fascists.

But-

I don't care how you justify it, it's a fascist talking point. Stop.

It's stealing

At risk of resurrecting stupid bullshit I was already bored with 20 years ago, I honestly think there's a better case for this regarding PS than machine learning. PS artists actually do use elements from existing images, lots of them (ideally with permission/license). However, consensus opinion has long since concurred that PS artists substantially transform and recontextualise those elements and the result is an original creation, same as physical collage.

As I've come to understand it, ML doesn't use elements from existing images, just mathematical descriptions of image attributes. It doesn't incorporate images on any level, or even pieces of images, so I'm left wondering what's being stolen here? I'm not being shitty I genuinely can't see anymore what is stolen when ML simply does not use any part of any existing image to generate an image.

There's no skill/creativity involved

The first time I ever used adobe photoshop (I've long since switched to GIMP, change the name, FOSS 5evar, etc.) I spent about fifteen minutes excitedly stacking filters on a picture of a butterfly, before the person showing me how it worked dismissively explained that filters don't make art.

Elements and principles of design are learned skills. They're taught at art school because they're not innate and they're important as hell. I often feel like people are tacitly arguing all that stuff's just padding--and if you're staunchly anti-ai-art I promise that's not an argument you want to make, it will backfire spectacularly on you.

And yeah, I think everyone still agrees that just piling filters on a photo isn't very creative and takes no particular skill. I doubt anyone thinks instagram filters take a good photo for you. I think (or hope) that we all understand now that complex image editing and manipulation does in fact take skill and creativity.

I can't help but wonder how much of the vapid trash we're seeing in the explosion of ai art is the equivalent of the 2000s explosion of shitty filtered photos.

The computer does it for you

There's so much more to PS art than filters, and the computer emphatically does not do any of that stuff for you. It doesn't do composition or colour theory or concepts or art history for you. It just does what you tell it to, you still have to make the art good. Fishbone #001 involved manually isolating dozens of fucked up hands from ML images, and I complained about it the entire time and the computer didn't even get me a cup of tea.

A lot of people used to actually genuinely believe that photoshop was a magical plagiarism machine that you stuck stolen art in and it automatically made perfect composites for you. Probably some people still do, it's a big world. But it never was true, no matter how hard they believed it.

Is there more to ML image generation? Idk I'd have to try it to find out for sure and I'm very tired. But the more I learn about it the more I think there could be. The frequency with which I see very elaborate and specific prompts with garbled and all-but-irrelevant images does at least suggest that the magical ease of making ai art has been somewhat oversold.

Using it in any way is cheating/cheapens your art

I think the cheating idea mostly came from the photography community, who thought PS was a shortcut to better photos for undisciplined talentless hacks who couldn't be bothered to learn to take a good photo. The irony. But for me, since I wasn't using it to improve photos, this was such a weird take. Cheating at what? At photoshop art? I'm cheating at photoshop by... using photoshop?

And the idea that using PS at any stage in your process irredeemably sullies your art is just stupid on its face. It's not radioactive. It's not a PFAS. Sin isn't real. Santa isn't putting you on the naughty list for photoshopping. The Galactic Council of Artistic Integrity aren't checking for pixels.

Needless to say, since 100% of the source images I use in this project are ML generated, I also think it's a bit of a silly objection to ML image generation.

It has no soul

I am not and have never been christian. I do not and will never care what your imaginary friend thinks about art.

Also, this is a repackaged fascist talking point. I told you to stop that.

It sucks

Most of everything sucks, what's your point?

People are going to lose their jobs

Unfortunately this one had some connection to reality. By about 2010 there were almost no painted book covers, and painters who'd made their living from them were forced to adopt PS or find a different job. It wasn't just book covers of course, commercial artists across the board felt the pinch of automation. That's not exactly PS's fault, the parasitic owning class will simply take any opportunity to fuck over a worker for half a buck, and PS art is generally cheaper because it's generally faster to make.

I actually have some questions about how this will play out with ML though. Currently, yes, it's looking very much like in ten years there won't be any PS book covers any more, but I think the parasitic owning class are going to quickly remember they don't actually want art that they can't hold copyright over, and human artists will remain necessary. No one wants a logo they can't trademark. No one wants commercial art if they can't control the licensing. I don't even think it'll take a wholeass test case, just a few things like selfpub novels using the same cover image as a major release or folks using pure ML images from the big stock sellers without paying, and as soon as they realise they can't sue anyone about it they'll come crawling back, cap in hand, to hire you back as a contractor at an insultingly low rate.

People will lose their jobs or find their billable hours severely cut, but, unfortunately, as the brave Luddites showed us, you can't stop automation by fighting the machine, no matter how noble your motives. You need to actually change society somewhat.

But I think this should be enough of a concern without having to also make shit up. You can just object to ML on the basis of tangible harms it will be used to inflict on individuals and society. That's plenty to be mad about, you don't need to put lipstick on it.

It's different this time bro trust me bro

Plenty of people sincerely believed that rise of PS was fully automated skill-free art theft and the sky was falling, and pointing out that all the same things were said about the invention of everything from the photocopier to home video to the printing press to the camera didn't even slow them down because this time it's different, this time it really is that bad. It wasn't.

And I honestly don't know anymore if it is.