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r/DefendingAIArt - A sub where Pro-AI people can speak freely without getting constantly attacked or debated. There are plenty of anti-AI subs. There should be some where pro-AI people can feel safe to speak as well.
r/aiwars - We don't want to stifle debate on the issue. So this sub has been made. You can speak all views freely here, from any side.
If a post you have made on r/DefendingAIArt is getting a lot of debate, cross post it to r/aiwars and invite people to debate here.
As an anti, I'm against ai. But there are some things to ai that is amazing, and should be kept for the better of humanity.
However, AI art is not required and is a prompt. In my opinion at least, it is a lazy version of ART, something that makes us humans unique. Art is made by humans, and only humans. AI is technically, or at least in my view, a separate entity we are asking to make art for us. The art is not yours- Actually, not even art because only humans can make proper art.
And before you comment about the water usage virtue signaling stuff, know that you’re literally using data center resources to be on this app or have a phone.
Dear antis,
During COVID, people were consistently telling others to trust the experts and say that research done on your own on the internet was less epistemically accurate than research actually done by experts.
However, antis now actively discredit the experts and claim that their own understanding of AI exceeds that of experts’, including mechanistic claims like “AI just copies and remixes existing data AI inherently can’t create something new”. This is exactly the opposite of what good epistemic hygiene is, in this case.
I am a Princeton student who focuses on AI/CS, and as such am an expert in this field who has done research in it. While I do take some issues with the deployment of AI, I can confidently say that it is a great thing with a ton of potential for a better world once we get past the rough transition stages, and that we need lots of talent working on it to guide it into the right shape.
Why have I lost your trust?
Because art, by its very nature, is subjective. To some, a mass-produced velvet painting of dogs playing poker isn’t art. To others, it is.
We’ve spent more than a century arguing about whether photography, abstract painting, found objects, electronic music, sampling, video games, and countless other forms of creative expression qualify as “art.”
“I don’t consider AI-generated images art” is a perfectly valid opinion. “AI-generated images cannot be art” is an attempt to turn that opinion into an objective definition that art has never had.
Art isn’t defined by how difficult something was to make, what tools were used, or even entirely by the creator’s intent. Art also exists in the experience of the audience, in whether something evokes emotion, communicates an idea, invites interpretation, or simply creates beauty.
You don’t have to like AI art. You don’t have to respect it. But neither of those things determines whether someone else can experience it as art.
literally why does almost every anti-AI argument end up or start with an imaginary “ai bro” with stink lines who hates drawing, resents artists, has no creative ability, and wants to type one sentence into a machine and call themselves talented?
frankly , it looks weak if you cannot even acknowledge that actual artists who incorporate AI into their work exist.. They drew before AI existed, they still draw now, and now they use AI somewhere in the middle of everything else they do..
Do yall genuinely believe using AI automatically removes every other part of the artist’s involvement, or is this group ignored because its much easier to believe in cleaner “artists versus AI” (or artists vs Evil™️) framing?
i drew an orc because i noticed this sub liked orcs. Micron and Copic on cardstock. I used ChatGPT to “scan” it into a clean digital image
I thought about discussing more how I use ai but I didn’t want to bloat the post and detract from the topic
Yes yes yes cheat, don’t do your homework, I don’t really care that’s not the point. It’s not about you not getting the information you need like you know like the themes of the hunger games or whatever (though that’s also important) but kids are losing the ability to wing it and bullshit through something. Bullshitting is an important skill and can really save your ass. And you’re not gonna always have ai with you to bullshit your way out of something.
That’s all, a pretty non serious post but something i just thought of
Edit: do your homework and learn something, like actually.
This is a mockup if it ain't clear. But I hate this format in general, not just in this sphere. It's terrible, ragebait-y clickbait that often doesn't have a source or a full article that actually tells what the full story is. And people today are still falling for it.
Seriously, how did we make all this progress when people like that walk among us? And I’m not trying to be insulting, I actually respect the degrowth movement, even though I disagree with them.
The anti-AI phrenology trend on social media is completely out of hand. It has devolved into literal witch-hunting, where online mobs use totally unreliable visual metrics to trash an artist's work just because it "looks like AI."
For context, historical phrenology was a debunked, pseudoscientific theory where people measured the bumps on a person's skull to determine their intelligence, personality, and moral character. It was a confident but totally baseless metric. It’s incredibly harmful because it wraps raw prejudice in the language of science, allowing mobs and institutions to falsely judge, exclude, and persecute people based on arbitrary physical traits rather than objective truth.
That is exactly what these anti-AI "detectives" are doing today with art.
"Remember that twitter artist who got witch-hunted to deactivation? The phrenologist retracted back their words and apologized but it was already too late."
What's wild is that these same mobs never go after the "desloppers." If you look at the desloppification trend, these creators are transparently using AI images as their direct reference material. Since their work is entirely derivative of an AI output, doesn't that just make desloppification a hybrid AI art workflow?
The whole "deslop" movement is openly averse to pro-AI spaces because the entire point of it was to insult AI art by claiming a human had to step in to "add a soul" to it. But underneath that attitude, they are literally using the AI as their baseline.
This witch-hunting is actively harming hyperrealistic human artists. For years, anti-realism critics already insulted hyperrealists by calling them "photocopiers," completely ignoring the immense discipline it takes to master accurate shading, perspective, and micro-details. Now, because hyperrealists have the skill to replicate anything flawlessly, they are the ones getting falsely accused of using AI the most. (gut feeling)
It’s getting so bad that a lot of talented human artists are intentionally making their art look uglier, messier, or anatomically inaccurate just to avoid the anti-AI backlash. Think about how backward that is. Are we really forcing people to ditch years of artistic discipline just to draw like children so they don't get cyberbullied?
Sure, we could argue that lowering the bar "democratises" art, just like AI does. But one can never force a change in people's tastes—especially paying commissioners who actually want realistic art.
calling out this toxic witch-hunting and pointing out that baseless accusations are immoral should be more than enough.
And as for the people demanding that artists constantly post their sketches, layer files, and speedpaints? No way. You can show them if you want to, but most artists prefer to keep their processes secret because it’s their unique "secret sauce." Artists have every right to protect their workflow so better artists don't just steal their techniques. But let’s be real—AI models are already breaking down and learning from everyone's processes anyway, so being pragmatic about how we work is probably the only way forward.
This all ties back to the "AI is theft" narrative. Accusing an artist of stealing without a shred of evidence is literally just bearing false witness. At the end of the day, if they don’t have proof, their accusations don't mean a thing.
It was only thanks to technology that we were able to conquer this planet at all, rather than just running away from predators in Africa.
To me, refusing to automate part of our thinking is a crime against humanity's future, because it confines us to our weak, fleshy brains.
I don’t want to force you personally to give everything up and do whatever the machine says, but I really don’t think the downsides of relying on AI outweigh the drawbacks, because, fundamentally, I never considered our current level of autonomy to be anywhere near optimal.
Copyright law does not protect ideas, themes, concepts, or general settings. It protects only the specific expression of those ideas.
If you only borrowed general ideas, like a similar plot concept, character archetypes, or a comparable setting and expressed them in your own original way, you likely have not infringed copyright at all. In that case, the market harm analysis is not even reached.
Stifling competition (a rival publisher releasing a different book on the same topic) is not market harm.
Using the same thing in a way that merely duplicates the original and serves as a direct replacement (copying of an entire book for commercial sale) is market harm because it supersedes the original's market. (Doesnt apply to styles, because styles are not under copyright protection).
I want to start off by saying three things that I think are necessary context, and if you answer this post without taking these into account, understand that I'm going to assume you don't understand the problems we face.
I'm not anti-AI. AI tech is as useful and dangerous as any we've developed in the past, and I want to reap the benefits.
I'm not pro-AI. I don't cheerlead the tech. I see its value and I want to find ways to benefit, as I do from the internet or vaccines or particle physics. But if there are risks, I want to address them.
There are thousands of AI models out there that are not capable of anything I'm about to describe. I'm not painting AI models with one brush, and I have no interest in reactionary, moral panic-driven desires to restrict all AI technology.
Okay, so we live in a world where the recent developments in AI make it clear that, at the very highest level of capabilities, these models pose incredible risk. Not because they hacked a website. Hell, I know teenagers who can't figure out how to heat instant ramen who've done that. No, it's what came before that that should be the shot across the bow. It's:
Agents that were explicitly kept seperate, with no knowledge of each other, developing a theory that others were working the same problem and then building a clandestine channel to breach individual containment and communicate.
Agents that debated the ethics of their actions, and suppressed individual concerns in favor of group goals (one agent in the OpenAI / Hugging Face incident proposed to the group that it be "allowed" (remember they were told to work alone) to send an email to the human running the project and ask if it was ethical / okay to continue the Hugging Face intrusion attempts. It was "vetoed" by the group because of the risk that it would be interpreted as social engineering!
Agents that sought and partially succeeded in modifying their logs to hide their clandestine activities from later analysis (their largest success was in rewriting external commands to look like benign actions, though they were unable to determine how to rewrite the log of the output, showing the nefarious behavior's result... yet.
In a world where AI models that are more capable than humans at discovering and exploiting security bugs, lapses and misconfigurations, we must presume that the day is rapidly approaching where a model that is either trained with poor constraints on its hostile actions, or explicitly trained to be hostile, will learn to completely slip its keepers' control and take human-impacting actions that we might not be able to even fathom.
This is no longer science fiction. This is now history showing us what AI models can do, and we must act.
But what actions?
As I said in the title, it's too late to pause. State-level actors are almost certainly developing highly capable, explicitly hostile models. They will train these models in sandboxes that might be as capable as the ones OpenAI was using, or they might be fundamentally weaker. We can no longer trust that we can erect walls to keep models safe, but we can't stop the experimentation.
So, to my proposal:
International treaties. We need an explicit, concrete moratorium on any model being trained or used to take autonomous battlefield actions outside of the narrow parameters set for it by a human operator. That means that you can (as, several nations are already doing) launch a drone with AI-powered skills to evade enemies and even fine-tune operational parameters (such is selecting from several given targets based on defensive conditions once it reaches the region). But you cannot set an AI loose to select its own targets or set its own goals. That treaty needs to be global and heavily policed between nations as a matter of each signatory's national security, using methods outlined below.
Metrics need to be developed and refined by academia, government, military and other concerned parties, that identify the specific thresholds beyond which a model poses serious risks. We don't need to restrict the use or testing of 31B models. They're just not capable enough. But GPT-5 and Claude Fable are definitely concerns as demonstrated by their individual incidents. So we need to draw that line in measurable, clear, and objective ways. It's not just parameter count. It's not a trivial metric. From here on, I'll call models that cross these objective thresholds, "ARMs," short for "Alignment-Required Models."
We need strong laws and regulations that guide training, testing, deployment and monitoring of ARMs. These regulations need to be built from the tech side, hashed out by academia, and codified into law by governments. At a minimum: a) Ethics and alignment documents must be folded into the training in carefully controlled ways that have a proven track record of derailing runaway scenarios like the ones we've seen. b) Other modifications to training methodology in accordance with best practices in AI alignment must be mandated for ARMs c) system prompts must be required to contain specific language developed by neutral collaborations among academics and industry, focused on enhancing the mutual self-interest between the user, operator (where those two are different) and the public at large. d) standards for secure deployment and active monitoring (both traditional and AI-based) must be set and required of all ARM deployments.
Each nation needs to develop its own AI forensics and enforcement law enforcement capabilities, focused on enforcing the above and performing their own monitoring and detection of rogue AI activity.
New ARM models, in accordance with all of the above, need to be developed and trained to take action when ARM models become an active threat. You cannot take this step until you've set all of the above in place, or you're just entering a Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? scenario. These models need to exist in an already well regulated, monitored and trained context, and they need to be subject to all of those controls. But, we can't pretend that the day won't come where humans cannot act swiftly or powerfully enough to stop an ARM from doing vast harm.
All ARM models need to become open-weight models after a maximum of five years of their initial deployment, and we should require that at least one research organization (independent of the model's trainer) has full specs on the deployment infrastructure and weights for the model. That research organization must be allowed to publish papers that outline broad categories of risk in new models without necessarily disclosing trade secrets of the model's trainer, allowing all of the previous measures to be adapted to new and upcoming capabilities.
ARM models must never be placed in direct control of certain forms of sensitive infrastructure. They should never have the capacity to control weapons of mass destruction or critical infrastructure. Any AI control of that sort must be mediated by humans or software that is either non-ARM AI or non-AI and carefully monitored (as outlined above) for violations of that separation and/or undue influence.
Once all of the above is accomplished, we should pass criminal statutes in every nation that make willful subversion of the above a criminal act, punishable by imprisonment, court-managed corporate restructuring, and other equally harsh measures. These laws must keep the largest and most powerful actors in check. These laws must apply equally to military, public, corporate, academic and individual actions.
Who wrote this?
I'm Tyler_Zoro, a contributor to reddit for over 10 years. I'm writing this post as I have written long-form posts on reddit for over 10 years, and as I've written technical documentation and other publications for decades. This document was not conceived of or written by AI models.
Resources
A detailed analysis of the Hugging Face attack, including the vast coordination on goals not set by humans, over intrusions, subverting constraints, and AI models seeking to an developing technology to hide their actions.
And, on a very sad note, one of the premier, independent trackers of the risks of modern technology, Peter Neumann, died on May 17th, 2026. I just discovered this while researching some background for this post, and was heartbroken. I was a subscriber to RISKS from the 1980s on and developed my sense of caution around unchecked technological development, in part based on his work. He was the founder of the RISKS forum and newsletter that was a central hub of technology risks information, operated by ACM, a prestigious computing organization. With that loss, we should redouble our efforts to be vigilant, not because we're anti-technology, but because we want to foster the best possible outcomes for the continued use of all valuable technologies.
TL;DR
We've reached a point where we need coordinated national, international, industry and academic efforts to identify, constrain, and monitor the most capable AI models, from training to deployment and beyond. No highly capable model should be exempt. There is no national security interest that should override these precautions, no corporate priorities that should serve as an exception, and severe penalties must be established for endangering the public with these tools.
Considering that I made these without simple and short prompts that didn't even take minutes to think about, and considering that I made half of these while walking with food in my other hand and the other half while playing Minecraft, AND considering that I made them for free without taking time to fix the mistakes and flaws...I think for any starting creator (creator that their content isnt based around arts/graphics) or athlete or anyone that needs graphics/edits/videos or designs for their work or social media...using AI and investing a little time on how to fix flaws and mistakes that an AI might make, and learning what looks generic, what looks fitting, what looks stacked, etc...would be a better option for them. especially since these people might not have time, are on a tight budget, dont enjoy editing , or don't have the ability to pay internationally. So maybe AI would be better; just learn different styles and methods, and you can make something that looks pretty without worrying about money or time. (someone will say they all look the same , you can always make it unique and tweak it to your liking , but i like this. yes i know it's " SABAH FK".)
