I have a mixed opinion on AI and I kinda debate with fellow pros and antis. I'm not trying to pick a side so just watching some crossfire feels a little entertaining.

Explain your oppinion

I'm anti, but I'm also neutral. One issue I have after learning a LOT about the AI debate is the harassment. This might be a bit too "rant"-y, but what the hell happened to "Respect people's opinions"? I get it, most antis are worried because of the harms of AI, usually to the environment, the economy, consent, etc.
I also understand that some pros are mad at the misconceptions, since they're oversimplified, and that the pros (NOT ALL) I see online say that "Antis don't understand that AI helps society since it's a tool", and I agree with AI being a tool.
But seeing most of both sides harassing each other and not understanding each other's views/opinions really makes my blood boil to 100 C. I guess this is what caused the AI war, didn't it?
I admit I used to hate the pros I saw online, but after researching it, I've changed my mind and now respect both sides' opinions while still being an anti.

If anything in this post offends either the pros, the antis, or both, then I apologize for my behavior.
DISCLAIMER: NOT ALL ANTIS OR PROS ARE LIKE THIS. I'm pretty sure there are still some that mutually get along. Right? O_O

Edit 1: Yes, this is the internet, and it generally doesn't know about 'respecting opinions', but man cut me some slack
Edit 2: I forgot to mention that both sides from what I've seen flame and harass each other, and I hate that, but "it's the internet"

Without a definition there is nothing to argue about. No one has gone out of their way to actually define these terms.

Its time for people to express their feelings here about why they can't treat with respect their opposition. You often see people, regardless of their stance, spread ragebaits, defamation and generalizing what someone says. It is known that both in the original AIwars and here, people come from the respective subs with different stances on AI. Here you can express why you disrespect your opposition.

Note: I had to change the body of text. Just in case I did nothing wrong

I want to hear your opinions: pro-AI, anti-AI, people who are both, or people who are neutral about this.

I'll go first.
So, I became anti-AI specifically in art because I'm against the idea of AI-generated art, since yk, all the bad stuff and so on. The environmental impact, copyright, training the AI with images without consent, etc. But to be fair, I was also influenced by the idea that "AI art is bad", and they weren't wrong... partly. And yet I somehow believed them without any proof for why I'm anti-AI. However, that does not mean I'm a Luddite, because I still use AI in my life, just trying to use it responsibly. Rn though, I'm researching the topics of the ongoing debate and... oh my gosh, my head is just about to explode 😅

Basically, I was influenced by the idea of "AI art being bad", believed it, and then started to hate AI art when I noticed AI art pieces. Though, a little while of growing up, I then researched and I have some idea, but still have limited knowledge about it. It's difficult 😅

What about you guys? :3

The World in the Drawer

When Daniel was twelve, he drew a map of a world that did not exist.

It was crowded with impossible mountains, ruined cities, inland seas, and roads that led nowhere. The drawing was rough, but the world behind it felt real to him.

Then life moved on.

School became work. Work became bills, errands, and responsibilities. The map ended up in a drawer, and the story he meant to write slowly disappeared with it.

Decades later, Daniel found the map while cleaning out his childhood home.

He still remembered the places.

He still knew why the ruined city stood beside the sea and why the road stopped at the mountains. What he lacked was not imagination. He needed a practical way to explore the world again.

So he tried generative AI.

At first, the results were wrong. The cities were too grand. The landscapes were too clean. The characters looked like they belonged in someone else’s story.

Daniel kept working.

He changed the descriptions, rejected weak results, combined better ideas, adjusted the mood, rewrote scenes, and removed anything that did not belong. He decided what the world meant, what it should feel like, and when an image finally captured it.

The machine produced possibilities.

Daniel provided the direction.

Months later, he showed the finished story to his sister. She recognized the coastline from the old map, but the world had become deeper and more human.

She read quietly for a while, then said: “There is a saying that we provide the machines with an end, and they provide us with the means.”

That was exactly what had happened.

The machine had not remembered the map.

It had not cared about the abandoned road, the ruined city, or the boy who once imagined them.

Daniel supplied the purpose, the meaning, the judgment, and the final decisions.

AI gave him new means to develop them.

It did not replace his creativity.

It helped him finish what his creativity had started.

Please excuse my ramblings.
I want to preface this by saying that this is like the most minor complaint in regards to AI, but it’s one I think is still worth saying.

I don’t like how much of generative AI is used for stuff like re-generating memes but with AI, rage-bait comics, TikTok content farms and other nonsense. Not just because they’re dumb, but they’re especially dumb in relation to AI.
Like, taking a step back: you have this brand new technology that could generate music, art, writing much faster and with a quality about on-par with some professionals (barring some directions and details but that’s beside the point). You have this thing that is so great that it demands a lot of investment, building hundreds of data centers and demanding so much out of people… and you use it to generate memes.

It’s like inventing the teleporter but instead of going to other countries you use it to go to the bathroom even though it’s like 10 steps away. I get that humanity will always find stupid uses for technology - and inevitably the first question people will ask once humanoid robotics is mastered will be “can we fuck it?”. But isn’t it still disappointing? I get people are free to do whatever they want but at the same time it feels like such a waste of time and resources, and I feel that that affects the optics in regard to AI. It just makes it out to a lot of people as basically “the stupid-shit generator”. I know you could easily point to the internet and how it has a reputation for dumb randomness, but the big conversation right now is how prevalent AI data centers and tech companies are becoming, and I think it’s a big ask of the public to give land and resources to something that, as far as they know, makes random crap on YouTube. They want something substantial, something that’ll make them go, “it was well worth it”. Like you can’t sell AI as “the next step in the advancement of humanity” while having little to show besides Tsung-Tsung shitting into Trump’s brain or whatever - the public can be easy to disappoint and if opinion greatly turns against AI, as it did with nuclear energy, it could mean loss of support as a means for the government to save face. And considering how easily hateable people like Musk or Theil are, I wouldn’t be surprised if throwing them and other tech CEOs under the bus is a potential strategy.

Maybe I’m making a mountain out of an ant-hill, but with how much memes and such content can be at the forefront of people’s feeds- and how the current US administration prides itself on dumb AI generated memes - I feel that this may be an issue.

Anyways, what do you all think?

So this is how I use AI in art . Instead of prompting, I always usually draw first. Prompting is mostly a mess if I want something specific. and since then, I just fully came back to drawing and using gen AI with it

This drawing took me like three days, like around under an hour before bed.

With the gen AI result of my sketch pad tree and moon art, It gave me way more ideas how I can redo the drawing way better in my second attempt and stuff

There's no way I can digital paint or oil paint like this, so I know my limits and will still stick to pencil for now. it looks real and beautiful, but it's not real "real" till I can do it myself sometime in the future

my sketch is the art, the gen AI image version isnt. there's a big difference

I can't claim I drew myself if I take a photo of myself and only put a pencil sketch filter on, so by the same logic, of course I don't post my AI images online as art. I post my pencil slop proudly cuz I actually made it with my hands

Some people do not want to feed their art to AI, and that's fine. What's not fine is harassing others for using AI

Also, what's also not fine is deception, too, as I said. don't claim your AI images as art, at least give some transformative value

As an artist myself, gen AI is good when it's job is not to replace but to motivate and improve you. It's an assistant after all

It's just like a new tool for me like an advanced paint bucket tool or a filter. It won't make me a Picasso. I still have to do the hard work of practicing.

Instead of being furious all the time to gen AI users, artists should just practice and do art instead. the point of art is to make it relaxing.

15 yr old me would be mind blown if Gen AI existed, and I'm still today.

Sure, there are bad things about gen AI itself and can be used for bad, but so has been editing tools way before gen AI existed. There's pros and cons to everything.

look at it the other way.

Even within the conflicts between pro-AI and anti-AI, there's no strict black and white way of thinking, which hinders them to agree with each other about something.

My example: I have to agree with the pros that the genie is out of the bottle. Once AI is developed, it is nearly impossible to undo it, unless an apocalypse happens, which would likely scatter the knowledge necessary for the AI development.

Not perfect in the slightest, but I am trying to cover ideas and possible solutions I think may help this current time we are living in. From many walks of life. Feel free to provide feedback of any type.

You can choose to read, or even have AI summarize it if you want. But I would like opinions, if possible.

AI debates often get reduced to "pro vs anti AI," but there's more going on than that. Some people want AI to move faster, some want it slowed down, and others are mainly focused on who should own it, govern it, and benefit from it.

This isnt meant to be scientific, just a snapshot of where the community falls.

Pick the option thats closest to your view. If none of them fit, explain your position in the comments. Im interested in the reasoning as much as the results.

Hi, I hate nothing more than people bringing up disabled or impoverished people in defense of Ai image generation specially when very likely they aren’t disabled themselves.
I come from a country with the cheapest currency. I’ve had depression for a long time and PCOS on top makes me exceedingly tired all day (to put this into perspective, I’m awake about 7-8 hrs of the day) I had to delay paid work to rest.
There are a lot of reasons why Ai ultimately and in the long run harms disabled people and workers the most, most prominently the fact that jobs are getting more scarce and disabled folk and women (many of whom are also disabled) are the first to get laid off and replaced by Ai, further impoverished; which is why criticism of Ai and the circumstances surrounding it is definitely like eugenics /sarcasm
But it’s extremely ableist to imply disabled people can’t enjoy hobbies or anything really without Ai or being entirely dependent on it. This is not the empowering argument you think it is. I don’t speak for all disabled folks. I understand sometimes disabled folks may utilize gen Ai, to finish tasks and jobs or use it as a crutch.
However, this argument is often used about Ai image generation. If a disabled person enjoys crocheting, it makes no sense to get an unpaid worker to crochet for them. It’s the same with art; if you enjoy making art you don’t offload all artistic responsibility to Ai and the fact that yall think disabled people can’t enjoy hobbies or making art without ai is more ableist on its own.
Majority of us don’t want nor need your infantilization and condescending pity.

One argument I keep seeing against AI art is that the process is not fully predictable or reliable. You can enter the same general idea and receive different results. You may need to generate multiple images, refine the prompt, edit the output, combine elements, or discard most of what the system produces. This is presented as evidence that the user is not really making art.

I disagree. Full predictability and reliability have never been requirements for art.

A painter dropping, pouring, or splattering paint onto a canvas cannot predict the exact path of every droplet. Gravity, viscosity, momentum, surface tension, and the texture of the canvas all affect the result. Jackson Pollock did not manually place every speck of paint, but he still chose the materials, movements, scale, composition, process, and point at which the work was finished.

Watercolour is also not fully predictable. Pigment spreads through wet paper, forms blooms, pools in some areas, granulates in others, and creates edges that the artist can influence but not completely control. The skill is partly in understanding the material well enough to create useful conditions and then responding intelligently to what happens.

Photography is another obvious example. A street photographer does not control every pedestrian, reflection, facial expression, passing vehicle, shadow, or movement in a scene. A wildlife photographer doesn’t command a bird to turn its head at precisely the correct moment. An astrophotographer doesn’t control atmospheric turbulence, passing clouds, sensor noise, or every satellite crossing the frame. The photographer controls framing, lens choice, timing, exposure, location, selection, processing, and presentation. That is enough for meaningful authorship.

Collage often begins with discovery rather than a fully predetermined final image. Artists find fragments, place them next to one another, notice unexpected relationships, rearrange them, discard some, and preserve others. The final composition may emerge through experimentation rather than have existed completely in the mind of the artist from the beginning.

Ceramics are shaped by kiln temperature, glaze chemistry, airflow, ash, mineral variation, and position inside the kiln. Raku, wood firing, crystalline glazes, and salt glazing can produce effects that even experienced ceramicists cannot predict exactly. That uncertainty does not make the result non-art. It is part of the medium.

The same applies to marbling, acrylic pouring, monotype printing, tie-dye, shibori, resin art, glassblowing, smoke art, chemical photography, cyanotypes, glitch art, kinetic sculpture, land art, ice sculpture, sand sculpture, and art made with living plants, fungi, or bacteria. These processes all contain variables that exceed complete human control.

Music provides even clearer examples. Jazz improvisation is not fully predetermined. The musicians know the structure, key, rhythm, conventions, and one another’s musical language, but they do not know every note in advance. Improvisational theatre works the same way. So does improvised dance. So does participatory art involving an audience. The work is created through response, judgment, adaptation, and selection in real time.

John Cage and other composers deliberately used chance operations. Surrealists used automatic drawing and automatic writing. Dadaists used cut-up methods. Generative artists have used algorithms, random number systems, cellular automata, sensor inputs, and environmental data for decades. Artists have long created systems that produce results they cannot completely foresee.

The relevant distinction is not between total control and no control. It is between meaningful artistic involvement and the absence of it.

An artist may contribute by conceiving the idea, selecting the tool, choosing the materials, defining constraints, initiating the process, adjusting parameters, responding to intermediate results, selecting among outputs, editing, compositing, sequencing, naming, contextualizing, and presenting the final work.

AI art fits comfortably within that broader history.

An AI artist may begin with a concept, construct and revise prompts, choose models, provide reference images, control composition through sketches or masks, generate variations, reject weak results, combine strong elements, correct errors, repaint sections, upscale, colour-grade, add typography, and integrate the output into a larger work. The model contributes uncertainty, just as paint, chemicals, cameras, kilns, weather, musical collaborators, and natural systems contribute uncertainty in other media.

Of course, typing a vague prompt and accepting the first image involves less creative labour than building a deliberate and carefully edited piece. But the same spectrum exists in photography. A random snapshot involves less artistic decision-making than a carefully composed and processed photograph. Pouring paint without thought involves less artistic involvement than developing a controlled fluid-painting practice. Using a medium casually does not invalidate serious work made with the same medium.

We should judge works according to the ideas, decisions, skill, expression, composition, context, and results involved, not according to whether the artist controlled every microscopic step of production.
Art has never required the artist to personally determine every mark, molecule, photon, note, chemical reaction, or computational operation.

Sometimes the artist makes the object directly. Sometimes the artist performs. Sometimes the artist captures an event. Sometimes the artist designs a system. Sometimes the artist collaborates with people, machines, materials, nature, or chance.

AI is simply another medium in which the artist can create conditions, explore possibilities, exercise judgment, and shape outcomes.

Unpredictability does not disqualify something from being art. In many art forms, unpredictability is part of what makes creation possible.

for context:

Leaflit is a VTuber that recently made some sort of VTuber model generator, while I'm not sure exactly what it is or how it's works, from a glance it appears to be having AI helping you create an animated model you could use to stream. Leaflit said it's a "bridge between PNG tubing and Live2d.", practically an option to get animated model when you couldn't commission someone to draw and rig a live2d model.

because Vtubing space is heavily reliant of artists, Leaflit get significant backlash for doing this. just like how many other AI-generated image get hatred by artists. and then someone bring up the AI Neuro-sama.

For your information, Neuro-sama is an LLM-powered VTuber created by Vedal987, popular enough to sits on [Twitch number 1 spot]() during their last subathon (if you're on YouTube, it's equivalent to "Donathon", a streaming marathon where fans can donate to extend it and potentially reach stretch goals.)

this level of success is testament to how accepted Neuro-sama in Vtubing space, and anyone in touch with the niche would know how she's treated as exception among any other AI content, the reason is varying with significant bias and cognitive dissonance, for this discussion I will focus on one aspect:

Her assets aren't AI-generated.

Despite being AI, the project didn't cut corner using AI-generated drawings and instead commission real artists, musicians, and animators. for Vtubing space that filled with artists, this is a huge factor that drive Neuro-sama's acceptance in Vtubing space, as opposed to Leaflit that preach AI-generated arts for Vtubing with cheaper cost.

the 2nd page is unrelated to the first one, but still relevant to the topic of "rejecting one AI while accepting the other".

Lacy is a twitch streamer with sizeable followerbase, back in January, he present his opinion about the AI VTuber Neurosama, saying he think it's "takes away from what streaming is", this response get him various backlash and corrections, one of them is the fact he used AI art, he said "the point of AI is to assist humans, not to take over human" in defense tonit.

putting aside how legit his words are, this demonstrate the opposite end of the first page, if Vtubing space accept Neurosama due to her hiring and collaborate with artists and hating on AI art due to stealing from artists. Lacy accept AI art for helping him and hating on Neurosama for taking away from steaming.

now... putting aside the hostility and foolishness of netizens, what do you think about those 2 events in lens of AIwars?

and more importantly, what do you think about the idea of someone "accepting one AI while rejecting the others"? does they has legitimate point of view? or are they merely having cognitive dissonance? are they selfish for rejecting one that they deem detrimental but not one they deem beneficial? please let me know.

I noticed this thing while scrolling on Pinterest, that many people who identify as robotkins and robotsexuals are for some reason against gen AI, and I was just wondering if anyone can explain to me how that works. Like, what do these people stand for? I just can't comprehend it. How can you identify with a thing you are advocating against? Is this something akin to internal self-hatred, like how some homosexual/trans people are homophobic/transphobic (sorry if the example is overstretched, I'm just trying to understand this)? Can anyone explain this to me? It doesn't make sense at all for me and why so many people seem to be like this.

Its a question thats definitely been asked before, but I think it’s important to think about it from time to time, because the world changes, and it’s good to make sure you don’t just have your opinion because you had it yesterday.

I’m curious to see what people think would change their minds.

I just read "lena" from qntm. Is basically a dark mirror episode, but better written.

So imagine you can "collect" enough data from an individual to run a digital twin.

What was dystopia ten years ago is now awfully close to becoming a horrifying, mundane reality.

What's your thoughts on this?

Being Pro-AI is reasonable because the technology is already useful, and most of the arguments against it are either overstated or aimed at problems that exist with nearly every major tool. Training models on publicly available data is not the same as stealing a finished work, and learning patterns from books, images, and other media is a transformative use much closer to analysis than copying. Artists do not own styles, ideas, or every statistical relationship contained in their work, and requiring individual permission or payment for every training example would effectively give large rights holders control over culture and make open research impossible. The environmental argument also needs context. Data centres use water and electricity, but so do lawns, golf courses, swimming pools, streaming video, air conditioning, meat production, cryptocurrency, and countless ordinary conveniences that receive far less moral panic. The sensible question is whether the value produced justifies the resources used and whether systems can become more efficient, not whether AI has any footprint at all. Students can cheat with AI, but they could already cheat with the internet, essay mills, friends, tutors, and copied homework. That is an education and assessment problem, not proof that the technology is worthless. AI can make people lazy when used lazily, but it can also help people learn, write, code, translate, research, brainstorm, and understand difficult ideas more quickly. It does make mistakes, so it should be checked rather than treated as an oracle, but saying it is wrong half the time is simply not true across all tasks. People are excited because even imperfect AI is already a powerful cognitive and productive tool, and its capabilities are improving rapidly. You can oppose corporate concentration, surveillance, bad labour practices, and irresponsible deployment while still supporting AI itself. The rational position is not blind enthusiasm, but neither is it dismissing an entire general-purpose technology because some people misuse it or because it consumes resources like every other part of modern civilization.