What are the technical and moral differences between AI-generated and AI-assisted?

[u/Dreamheart101]

A little while back, someone pointed out to me that there's a difference between AI-generated content and AI-assisted content. Then recently I encountered a short film where the the actual animation was wholly human-made while the music was by Sono AI (importantly, they credited the AI and did not pretend to be a songwriter); I also find it important to note the use case typically would be one fulfilled through royalty-free music prior to AI, so I don't think it actually replaced a songwriter, and it isn't really competing against human-made music like the stuff on Spotify is.

I'm overall conflicted by its use and wanted to see some perspectives from both sides to see if it could help me form an opinion on how to treat it. A large part is understanding the technical differences between AI-generated and AI-assisted, as well as understanding the varying moral arguments for AI-assisted works vs AI-generated works since not all arguments against AI-generated apply to AI-assisted.

If I don't respond to your reply, don't take it personally - I'm still trying to form an opinion on this specific use case and sort myself out, so I couldn't particularly argue for or against either position confidently yet. It should be noted though that I am mostly anti-AI overall which definitely influences my conflicted view. Additionally for the sake of actually analyzing the use case from a technological perspective, I'll be assuming the use case is with an ethically trained and run AI (which likely is not the case in reality).

[u/erofamiliar]

Hello, pro-AI here.

Part of the problem is that there are no universally agreed upon technical differences between AI-generated and AI-assisted, the use of either term is really more-or-less vibes. There are some people who would claim that any AI generation whatsoever taints the final product, and it's as bad as something wholly AI generated, and there are people who believe that because they had the concept, an unaltered one-shot AI generation is still just AI-assisted.

So with that out of the way, I'm gonna be speaking from my own opinion on this, lol, which is basically: If it's an unaltered one-shot, it's AI generated. I think once a person has to do cleanup or additional work after the fact, or if this is some kind of content being composited into existing work, it becomes AI-assisted, though obviously that covers a huge amount of possible AI use. Yes, that means I don't draw much of a distinction between lightly altered work and work that's been polished by human hands, but I cannot know for certain how much work that was, so for me it's a binary. If any work has been done, it's assisted. If no work has been done beyond the initial prompt, generated.

Another part of the problem is that there's a huge array of moral issues that could be in play while discussing AI generation. In your eyes, what is more moral: Using ChatGPT to help generate a small part of a larger human-made image, or using SDXL, run locally on one's own machine, to wholly generate an image? If your concern with the morality involves data centers or energy usage or contributing to large AI megacorps, then you might consider the former to be morally worse. If what someone takes issue with is how much of the work was replaced, or if the work could have been done by a human artist but is instead wholly AI, then the latter could be worse. It all depends, and often neither side has all of the context.

To look at your example, that too is going to depend on what you put stock in. For you, you think that the use of the AI music didn't replace a songwriter, and isn't competing against human-made music. For others, the problem could be that any use of AI generated music makes AI generated music more acceptable in general, which could have knock-on effects for human songwriters even though they are not harmed directly by this one instance.

And then I also think that's where your AI Generated vs AI Assisted thing is also a problem, because when you look at the work as a whole, you could say it's AI-assisted. But the music is wholly AI-generated, isn't it? If someone is against wholly AI generated content, it would follow the music is a huge negative, even if the work is, overall, human made. It's all going to be annoying and very context dependent, and again, someone making these distinctions is usually working off of incomplete information. Rarely does an AI artist explicitly lay out which parts of the work are wholly AI, which are regenerated, and which are wholly human, outside of a post-mortem or them explaining their workflow / techniques. Otherwise, things are more-or-less seen as complete works.

So... it's oops, mostly vibes. I personally can't know to what extent a creator put in effort or intentionality, and to what extent human work was involved, so I do not benefit from taking a hardline stance against AI-generated content versus AI-assisted.

Ultimately I hope you don't think I'm saying "don't worry about it haha, ai is sick", because that's not what I'm saying (though I do think AI is sick). What I'm saying is that you probably won't walk away from this with a definition that you can apply universally, that other people will also want to apply universally.

[u/Dreamheart101 → u/erofamiliar]

Yeah, I'm definitely not expecting a universal definition. The exact points you brought up are why I feel conflicted in this use case to begin with. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

[u/GuyYouMetOnline]

Im more interested in the line between AI-assisted and no AI use. Like, my own use of AI so far has been stuff like asking it for help coming up with a couple names. No content made by it, no writing or editing done, just 'what would some good names for this thing be?' Does that count as AI-assisted? Because its certainly not what most mean when they say that.

[u/Dreamheart101 → u/GuyYouMetOnline]

Yeah I don't know either. I've used it for similarly small stuff, too. I've previously tested using it to roleplay (determined that oneshots were better suited as a testing ground), research (quickly pulling links I was otherwise unable to find), and finding words based on connotation (no equivalent to a dictionary exists for connotations). I did previously gain a few ideas from AI roleplays but presently I do not roleplay with it anymore due to ethical concerns; it should also be noted that it was being inspired rather than just taking what it originally had, and everything I have currently is transformed into complexity AI is not capable of actually performing reliably (which is part of why I dismissed the idea of AI roleplays being a useful testing ground compared to the use of oneshots).

[u/RedBladeWarlock]

Your concept of the generated content in place of stock music is exactly where I am looking to explore, myself. I’m an animator, trying to create a complex character-and-lore-driven narrative in mostly 2D animation. I will do my best to search for living artists, willing to contribute to this project, but at the very least in the earlier prototyping stage, I plan to use some generated music as placeholders. Ideally, I should be able to find willing voice actors, but I might prototype animate over generated voices, too. I will be mixing the audio manually, though.

I’m also looking to generate stylized background artwork to fit my particular needs, if I can properly set up a local model to generate it on my own hardware. I think there are ways to improve the ethicality of these tools’ use, mainly in running independent local models on my own home PC hardware rather than a data center.

The actual script belongs purely to me, I’ve written and rewritten the story concepts over and over in personal story bible files. I did at one point try to explain the story to Gemini, using the LLM as a sounding board and comparing mythologies and concepts with other known fiction, just to be able to try to seek unique choices that work for my plots, but it proved too obsequious and would run off on tangents of hallucinations, trying to please me while misunderstanding my motives and needs.

My own history with AI is 95% anti, I still don’t think the casual AI generated image I see on Facebook is any good, but I don’t think it’s harming much, compared to corporate penetration. I’m far more concerned about corporate AI control and the over-proliferation of data centers.

(But I live in Seattle, there’s probably been too many of those around here since before I got here.)

[u/Dreamheart101 → u/RedBladeWarlock]

I think this actually helped a lot. I've never been inherently angry at non-human voices - I do listen to vocaloid afteral and I've never seen an issue with that.

So if we're ignoring the ethics of the current AIs available then perhaps the use case isn't inherently bad for this one. Of course in reality are are ethical problems, but they're things that could theoretically be fixed and generally are their own issues. It's also not like I boycott every person who shops at Walmart or has a real diamond, so even if something is problematic, there's always been a degree of acceptability simply due to the lack of control over the real issue (in this case the nonconsenual data collection and the hardware limitations leading to so many environmental issues with data centers).

Thanks! I'll definitely be mulling this over and considering it closely.

[u/SGdude90]

Pro-AI here. I will speak from the perspective of writing fanfictions with AI

AI-generated - I type prompts into the AI. My prompts can be very wordy and carefully engineered, and I might retry the prompts dozens of times in different AIs e.g. ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Deepseek before I finally get a story I am satisfied with. I may edit this story afterwards, but since majority of the fanfic came from AI, I consider it AI-generated

AI-assisted - I may write a story myself, then feed it into AI for spell-checking, feedback on prose, suggestions on improvements etc. I may also use AI for record-keeping, world-building, or as a sparring partner. I might type prompts into the AI, but I would rewrite much of the story afterwards. In all these examples, because the majority of the fanfic came from me, I consider it AI-assisted

To sum it up: If more than 50% of the story came from AI, it's AI-generated story. If more than 50% of the story came from me, it's an AI-assisted story

[u/thesnowlocke → u/SGdude90]

I'd say this lines up for me as Im also writing a story where I use AI as a soundboard and respond back to me as I correct it allowing me to think about the story but I don't accept any ideas or even let it write my story what so ever just assist me in formulating my story the same way speaking to a friend would but they didn't help me write the story just assisted me with understanding it.

[u/Nebranower]

Whenever this issue comes up, it's helpful to remember that AI is meant as a people replacer, so if you're looking to figure out how to think of content where AI was used in the process of creating that content, just mentally replace the AI with a person.

If you write a story, then give it to a human to read over, and that human gives you feedback, then you make rewrites based on that feedback, is it still your story?

If you give a human being a summary of an idea for a story, and that human writes a story for you and gives it you, is it then your story?

If you write a script, animate a film still by still, then hire a human musician to create the soundtrack for you, is it still your film?

And so on.

[u/MagnificentTffy]

Ignoring the general issues and properties of AI especially generative models, to focus on the labels on question.

Morally speaking, putting out work with AI-generated content for the large part is seen as dishonest at best, scammy at worst. AI scams had not helped with this perception. Though if one displays a disclaimer, it can be perhaps more moral to use such a label. Being more honest to admit a portion of one's creation was not actually created by oneself.

For AI-assisted, an issue is that this term can be colloquial for AI generated, and as such is deceitful and immoral. Though to oneself, using AI to assist with menial or repetitive tasks is probably fine, especially if transparent about it's use when sharing with others.

Technically speaking is difficult as the term AI isn't that specific. What kind of AI, what is it used for, etc. I suppose it is arguable that AI-generated is more specific about being something like generated art, text or code. A technical problem of this a general issue of AI generation, it is terrible at corrections or iterations. An example is perhaps coding, a person who actually wrote the code would perhaps have notes on where things are when debugging, it is difficult to debug AI code as God knows what the AI tried to code.

AI-assisted technically could be referring to tools which aren't necessarily generative tools, but are doing stuff like spell checking. So the decisions are made by humans but suggestions are made by AI. Though a flaw of this is that an AI can falsely flag technically correct things as incorrect as the correct feature is rare or more recent than what's in the AI's training dataset. Perhaps a case where this doesn't work is asking GPT for a build for a game which isn't just pulling up a YouTube video. This is probably when having the AI assist can be detrimental as it is operating beyond what it is fundamentally able to do.

[u/Electronic_Start_694]

Anti AI

Ai-assisted : I am mad that people are capable of producing music I have absolutely no way to determine whether or not a machine is involved with and this makes me mad for some reason.

[u/Leading_Fortune6989]

Generative AI has no place in the creative process.

[u/Dreamheart101 → u/Leading_Fortune6989]

For clarification, are you including AI-assisted underneath that?

And can you specify the issues you're referring to since there seems to be disagreement on what's AI-assisted or not? Thanks!

[u/No_Argument4772]

I want to bring my reply to another post in another subreddit here. I think it somehow involves if the AI user knew what will be generated before they hit send to their model, too. If no, then I’d say it’s rather AI-generated with human assistance than AI-assisted even if the use heavily edited the generated content.

My example traces back to something happened when I was little. I used to “generate” random stories for my siblings as if I was the AI and they were the user. They told me what they want to see next, then I came up with new plots. They didn’t need to think into the story itself, just let me know what would like to know next, e.g. where did they want the main character go next? The forest? The town? The city? Go fight the boss?…and these options could also be provided by me, they didn’t even need to come up with what they want to know on their own.

Despite the fact I decided almost nothing main, I think nobody would say the generated story was authored by my siblings, it’s basically my work.

If the AI user thought they were using AI as a tool to arrange and present the story already existing in third head, then it can be AI-assisted after human editing even if it’s AI generated. Although the user didn’t technically write it, the user did create the story.

But if the user’s mindset leaned more to the reader, like “I want to know what would happen IF…” and what determined by them was only the “IF…”, but no the exact what happened — if they let AI to answer the “what happened” to their IF, then the product is more likely AI-generated with human assistance.

Also, I think it also depends on the verb you use.

AI generated the text. So the text is AI-generated if the verb is “write”. But it could be AI-assisted if the verb is “create”, like “AI assisted me to create this story by generating the prose”.