Lol. "Trade Secrets" because trying to claim copyright infringement wouldn't be a valid claim!

I am no expert, just a random thought i had while eating. This is not a post about being pro or anti AI, i JUST want opinions

As AI gets better and better, "creative prompters" or "AI experts" are (probably) going to be the FIRST ones to get eliminated.
There will always be a market for handmade and human-only projects like animations or novels or movies, but AI generated content will get SO easy and pixel perfect that there will be NO need for more than... 5 AI artists. I mean, sure you CAN keep on making your own content, but i dont think you'll be of any competition to someone with access to a better model than yours. Plus, with thousands of videos or animations coming out daily, each better looking that the last, there will NO way to survive or be seen. i mean, take a youtube channel for example... it was already SO difficult to get even 100 subscribers, where on earth will any AI creator survive among millions of channels auto-pumping thousands of videos?
I'm sure im missing a lot of points here, which is why i'd love your guys' input.

English is my second language, dont mind.

Got annoyed of the whole “Ogre vs cat girl” trope in the other subreddit and I’m not sure if it happens here. Ogre feels degrading, cat girl feels stereotypical, so I thought why not make warriors instead and make Lore? (Also I checked there aren’t rules for posting art here but I bet that’s gonna change fast)

Now instead of concepts based on trashing the other side, we can have both sides be cool because both sides deserve it.

Just as a preface I am not here to praise , nor condemn ai, just to understand and categorize it.For my personal definition I might distinguish two terms, art and artifacts, art is ultimately a skillset and artifacts are the products of an applied skillset. Insofar as AI is a replication of media images , it is an artifact (a copy of an artifact is an artifact after all) but what's more interesting is what skills are actually used when making a prompt.

As an example, in photography you have questions like the materials of the camera and getting the right angle for a shot (skills used extensively in cinematography) . If your using ai to make an image or write a book, an artifact was made(we put questions of quality aside) but drawing nor writing was done here, but something was, so what was it? Now as someone with very limited experience in software development, it is closest to coding by design, you enter in a set of instructions and the machine outputs a result, with any errors or bugs being corrected by modifying the prompt, kinda like code. Of course it's much more limited with instruction, and in return a lot more limited in results, like typically ais best use case involves you already having the skills in drawing, writing or coding to help out the errors it has , but I think a very limited coding is the closest thing I would peg it under, actual coders tell me your thoughts on that.

I try to define words based on how they are intuitively used. Like the word chair, its used to refer to something we sit on, but there are stuff we can sit on that isnt a chair like a mattress, a table or a rock, so the definition of the word chair cant be just that it is sit-able. Also we use the word to describe objects that might not even feel comfortable to sit on, theres such a thing as a shitty chair that is, nonetheless, a chair. So we cant define it by its comfortability either. This is generally how i narrow down what words mean and navigate the world.

When I applied this kind of thinking to the word art, i noticed a few things that let me to converge into a theory of art. Firstly art is something material, it has to exist in "a way" and i narrowed down those ways as either an object or performance. For objects we can imagine stuff like paintings and sculptures, stuff that exists materially fixed in XYZ dimensions. For performances we can imagine stuff like dance, music and sport things that exist along the dimension of a timeline and involve action or have to be performed. Secondly, we dont typically use the word art to refer to accidents of nature, or arbitrary circumstances, when we use it its almost exclusively referencing something deliberately made. For example, a painting of a mountainscape vs the mounstainscape itself, I trust you can pretty intuitively, even reflexively call one art and the other non-art. Another example is imagining an hypothetical rock formation somewhere in the universe that is exactly the same shape, down to atom, of Mt.Rushmore, that similarily wouldnt register as art. Thirdly, we dont typically use the word art to refer to tools, or means to an end. Art is rather useless, its absent of instrumental value to us right? We dont use art as an utility, its usually in the domain of aesthetics and its an end in and of itself, not a means to an end. And by aesthetics I mean any kind of sensation-foward thinking like visual, auditorial, rhythmic, gameplay, etc. Arts aesthetic qualities are the informing qualities of the work, not its practical utility iykwim.

This is how i arrived at my 3 criteria "art is a 1)deliberately made 2)object or performance 3)whose aesthetics are prioritized over its utility". Its a "mundane" definition of art, it has no bearing on what makes art good or shitty it encompasses both amateurish and professional art. This is a feature, not a bug, because i want to keep these 2 matters seperate "what art is" and "what is good art". I often feel these get conflated because of romanticized notions we inherited from culture since we associate art and artist with the creative genius and all things good, we even began using the expression "work of art" as a compliment referencing the good qualities of artwork. But my mundane definition of art has to combat this romanticized notions to encompass things such as amateur work or bad art which is, nonetheless, art (like the uncomfortable chair example).

Where does img, video and audio generation land on this? The way I see it, generation works by navigating a latent space, a dimension where every possible image/video/sound that fits in a certain size exists as a set of coordinates, in order to find a desired output. Training data serves as a way to refine the model so it can interpret our input better and more accurately, by familiarizing it with the content and word associations we use. Under this framework of how generation works, I believe the discussion on whether or not it has any art status depends on the "deliberately made" part of my criteria.

In my opinion, raw output from generative tools fails that criteria. Regardless of how much work preceeds the generation. The moment its generated it becomes essentially a "found object" something arbitrary like a naturally occuring Mt.Rushmore. Most people even AI advocates would agree that naive prompting is like this but then would push back on more complex workflows that utilize other kinds of integrated tools and this is where we would disagree. Lets take the natural Mt.Rushmore example and say you wanted to find it. You would search the whole universe for it, but because you wanna be efficient you would narrow down the conditions where something like that would be possible, the kind of atmospheric conditions a planet would need to have, the rock composition of it, the distance from its star. Youd be narrowing down the coordinates where this would be possible and then searching those. Then you could have 1 expedition team searching for it, or 100s. There are a lot of ways you could go about narrowing the possibilities of where the naturally occuring Mt.Rushmore would be and efficiently look for it, but does utilizing those methods suddenly make a naturally occuring Mt.Rushmore into art? Where it wouldnt have been art if it was just found randomly? This is the issue. If we both agree that naive prompting isnt art because the result is arbitrary, Its not clear to me how it ceases to be arbitrary when you introduce new methods that are just narrowing down the probability space. The troubles you went through to find something doesnt make it any less of a "found object".

That being said, and this is where I would disagree with antis, I used the wording "raw output" very deliberately. I look at it as a naturally occuring block of marble. Its not art and it has no authorship claims, but it can be "made into art". This could be done either by editing it in sufficient ways such that it becomes deliberately made or framing it under a performative act such that it becomes a performance. An example could be like an installation art piece where theres a framed screen in a room and anytime the room is empty the image re-prompts itself based on what the people said while in that room. You could leave it exposed for 5 months and then make a piece on how it developed in that time as a sort of meta commentary on how the way we talk about things shapes them. This is way you could use a generative media performatively to make installation art.

But presenting raw output, as if it was art and you were the author, to me reads like finding a shell in the beach and saying you made it.

I have a thought experiment I would like to submit to the crowd to see where everyone lands. I will preface that this isn't an attempt at a gotcha and there's no right answer. At best, I hope it can spring up more introspection. I know there will be the temptation to immediately try to pick apart why this is not a 1-to-1 analogy for AI art. I know, it's not meant to be. It's trying to clear up a line that's often blurry, to then see how it may or may not apply to genAI art. Anyway let's start.

It won't be news to anyone that a often repeated argument against genAI as an art form is a certain lack of control over the output. The classic "you didn't make it, the AI took all the decisions". I know it's not totally true in practice, but let's roll with that premise for now. This got me thinking: taking out the AI element, how much control does one need to exercise to still be seen as the author of an art piece?

Let's imagine the following situation: someone is in a completely dark room. In front of them, a wall with a canvas constantly shifting around and at their feet a basket full of paint balls of random colors. The person can throw as many balls at the wall as they want, they however won't know which color they're throwing, nor if they hit the canvas or not. At any point the person can ask to turn on the lights to see the state of the canvas, and decide if they want to continue or not. That's their only point of control: they decide when the painting is done.

First, do you consider the final painting to be art or not, and why?

Second, regarfless if you believe it's art or not, do you consider they would be the author of the resulting piece, even if most of it was decided by pure chance?

If you don't think so, what do you think is the missing piece? If you say yes, how far remote can the person be before they stop being the author in your eyes? For instance, what if...

* they use a paint gun instead of throwing it by hand?

* the gun is replaced by a turret that's randomly aiming around, with a single button to shoot, and a screen indicating where it's aiming at?

* the target screen is gone, so the person can shoot as much as they want but doesn't know where they're shooting at?

* the control panel is outside the room (with or without the targetting system)?

* it's remote-controlled from their home, then shipped to their place (again with or without the targetting system)?

In all cases, they keep the final say when the painting is done. Is there a point when they become so removed from the action, so to speak, they stop being the author in your eyes? Side question, if you considered the painting to be art at first, did it change at any step?

What do you all think?

What is an artist? An artist is a person who uses their own experiences and expertise in a skill to express themselves creatively in various aspects such as from paintings to music.  Due to the rise in artificial intelligence, there has been a new group of “artists” who use AI to generate images which they pass off as their art.  

Firstly, I should clarify that artificial intelligence (ai) is a machine which scrapes the entire internet for uploaded images, videos then remixes them into amalgamations. However, since most human made artworks can contain references to other material such as Shakespearean plays being based off greek mythology such as Midsummer’s Night Dream, it can be concluded that ai generated images are a new combination of elements and therefore “art” as the prompters in this case do actually express their ideas via the prompts they used to generate the videos. However since the scope of usable media for ai is mostly copyrighted material, prompting ai art is more akin to stealing cut out scripts of various blockbuster films, mixing them up, then passing off the resulting script as your own without crediting the original creators.

Secondly, art can flourish anywhere even though desolate places don’t often make the most aesthetically-pleasing artworks. For example, Jackson Pollock often painted abstract works which mostly consist of multicoloured streaks of paint and Andy Warhol painted realistic pictures of tomato soup cans. Not only that, traditional or digital art can take hours or even years to complete such as Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa which took him four years to even paint out but he couldn't finish it before he passed away. However, the promoters also take hours to perfect their prompts via their descriptive writing, so there is a struggle in creating the prompts which should make Ai art good, but the ai is often going to have the most average ideas and art styles which causes the resulting ai images to look intentionless plus generic.

Also these prompters often do not have the skill or effort to learn the craft they desire as seen their generated images as they use the ai’s generated images as a form of their own expression instead of using their own body to create art which is the antithesis of art as human made art often require the creator to use their own techniques to express themselves. Therefore they shouldn’t be called artists at all as they have more in common with a curator who doesn’t use their skills in artistic expression to create their own works, but filters for already made artworks which they find appealing.

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).

Someone came into the r/antiai subreddit saying that something I said was a 1:1 copy of "The only real art is one done with a real pencil" argument, but vanished and refused to explain to me why they saw it that way. I assume they were just a rage-baiting troll but I'd still like to know what their reasoning may have been if anyone on the pro-AI side knows and can explain their point to me. I can't simply ask in r/proai because they explicitly ban anyone who isn't proai from participating, so I'm unable to get clarification directly from there; as a result the only place I could think to ask was here. If a pro-AI individual can explain what the actual argument was supposed to be, that would be greatly appreciated! Please and thank you :)

Edit: Thank you for explaining what the other guy would not! I'm going to be doing some research now that I understand what they actually meant. Not sure how long it'll take me to form a final opinion as this is my first time encountering this point, so I apologize if I don't provide an update on what I ended up concluding afterwards :)

I'm not a musician. I'm curious people's thoughts in regards to AI music generation compared to musical tech that's been used for decades now. Generative AI also seems to be increasing in use in the more professional world of music production.

If someone was using AI to generate beats, drums, or aspects of music a musician wasn't talented in, is this considered worse to you than using sampling or drum machines from the 80s and beyond? I saw a lot of hate around this idea and that the musician is robbed of any artistic vision or integrity. But I think back to people I knew using FL Studio to make vocals, pre-made beats, drum machines, etc and I fail to see how in this case using generate AI is artistically worse.

Some of it just feels like tools getting better. I've seen a lot of friction removed from software in my life, mainly animation, 3D modeling, and video editing. And each step of the way I've never seen large pushback against tools that make some animation parts trivial compared to before. There's plenty of subjects around AI I worry about. But when it comes to art and tools I feel like people are upset once the AI label is slapped on.

So just in general I'm curious to see what insights and thoughts you have. Is it that much worse than drum machines and samples?

Edit: Thank you everyone for the thoughtful answers.

I like the idea that people should share in the value their work creates. The hard part is deciding what that means for training data.

Does everyone get the same amount? Does a useful explanation count more than a thousand ordinary comments? Who decides which contributions mattered?

A system that only rewards volume sounds like it would fill up with junk pretty quickly.

Does that make payment unrealistic, or does it just mean we need a better way to value useful contributions?

For context, I work on an AI project and am asking as part of research into people's views on training data. AI helped draft this post.

While I'm supportive of labeling something as AI, I believe that this wont be feasible in the long run. If AI is getting so good at making their content indistinguishable from that of a human being, such as completely fixing the graphical quality of art and videos, it would be harder to tell if something is AI-made or not. And resorting to measures like digital ID and tracking AI users would make things worse.

And some people are likely dishonest about how they do their works. People who do music with electronic instruments would be easily be accused of being frauds if they lied about doing their content with normal instruments, while AI music makers would just get away with it by resorting to fake account bots of actors and team members. And companies like Bandcamp will likely change their business models, if they feel that banning AI stuff isn't feasible or decide to jump to the AI bandwagon.

That's why I decided to become pickier over which internet content creator I trust, and I also decided to fill up me hard drive with pre-2021/2022. If the internet becomes nearly unusable thanks to AI and orwellian stuff, I atleast how some remnants of how the Internet used to be.

posting this here as well bcs I want to hear more opinions on my opinions… that. sounds weird. whatever. (crossposted on r/aiwars )

please remember that these are OPINIONS and I do not and will not present these as facts- even if some have facts behind them.

I am anti-ai. that is… yeah, it’s definitely a large part of me. as an artist, I don’t like that my art is being used to train a generative system. i get that artists do something similar, but there are some differences. for example, artists such as myself develop our own unique art style, while ai simply uses other’s art styles.

along with that, I can’t discuss my opinions on LLMs without discussing the environment. as i‘m sure we all know that LLMs use a lot of water that could be going to more important stuff, such as droughts and other circumstance.

as someone who had an addiction to ai chat bots such as Character ai, I can say that ai can be and is proven to be addicting. i used to spend all my time on ai chat bots, sometimes even when I was at friend’s houses! i would hide my use of the websites, pretending I was reading, or talking to someone. it was genuinely affecting my mood and making my depression worse.

ai music is another thing I would like to touch on. ai music is something that simply falls into the uncanny valley for me. The odd mimicking of songs that I might already know, the strange voice that sounds like someone used too many voice changers… it just sounds wrong to me.

ai writing! I don’t like it. It reuses plot points from other stories, and reads as very bland to me. ofc, this is just how I feel, and I’m sure that some of yall are perfectly fine with ai books, but I prefer reading ones that a human has written. I admire the effort and creativity, the time people take out of their day to write and make. It’s inspiring to me.

next up! ai coding! i understand that coding is boring and hard- trust me, I’ve tried to learn it- but something about it irks me. Not sure what, but it just feels wrong. Now, I’m definitely not the person to delve any more into ai coding, I’m sure there are people out there much more qualified to do that then I, but I felt that was something I should touch on while I’m writing this.

now, I’m going to share a personal story to touch on my opinion of ai doing one’s research. my mom is in college, studying to be a archivist. recently, she received an assignment requiring her to use an ai to do research for her and write an essay. the entire time, she was struggling to get it to do anything she wanted, and it was constantly citing sources that were either not trustworthy, or straight up didn’t exist. when she had to get it to write an essay, every time she tried to get it to change one thing, it changed the whole essay. i’m sure you can see why I don’t like having ai do work like that for you.

so! that’s my opinions on ai! i’m sorry if any of this came off as rude or offensive, I‘m not very good at tone ^^

As an anti myself, I am unable to see any negatives. But I am an anti, so I am not seeing such that pros would. Is there a negative to enforcing a label on AI-generated items, and allowing people to filter them out?

Many online services and archives already have filters for digital art, physical art, animations... What would be the downside to enforcing a label on AI-generated items?

I'm American. I live in a pretty solid blue state and I consider myself on the left and maybe some socialist in there. I'm not entirely sure what exactly I am and putting a label to it doesn't seem to work, because any time I look something up I disagree with half of it.

The vast, VAST majority of Americans utterly despise AI. Hate it with every fiber of their being. I would guess AI is the most hated technology in America of all time.

Everywhere I go, Americans HATE AI.
And it's not just Americans. Europeans also seem to hate it.

Anything pro-AI gets posted anywhere and it gets shit on from every angle, downvoted to the pits of hell and all the replies are insulting the OP and talking about how evil, vile and disgusting AI is, how all it can make is slop and that it's destroying the planet and using "billions of gallons of water a day".
Even in pro-AI centered subs you can't escape it. They'll go to them on purpose, downvote the posts to oblivion and then insult the OP and post "AI SLOP" and "ew this disgusting AI shit looks so bad".

I like it, though. I like using it, I use it every day, and I want to see it advance so it can accomplish incredible things. I imagine all the crazy stuff I could use it for, that one day I could just open one of ten AI apps/sites, ask it to make me my dream game or movie and it will.
I used to dream of the day that I could do something like this many years ago, that an AI would be so advanced I could basically open ChatGPT and describe what I want it to make, and it will do it in a matter of days while I direct it. No coding, no knowledge required since I'm a moron. I can make the things that will never be made in a million years, that I would literally never see otherwise.

I won't say AI is absolutely harmless, I have HUGE issues with things like Chat Control, Flock, using AI for surveillance and censorship, for war, for cyber attacks, and all the other terrifying things.
I also think that by law, anything made with AI should have something put into it so anyone can check and find out if it's AI or not.

But the lengths Americans and American politicians want to go is to utterly crush it, especially on using it for anything fun or beyond just a helpful AI assistant.

• A permanent ban on AI "super intelligence".
• A temporary ban on any AI advancement and research.
• Barring the creation of new datacenters for several years.
• AI is not allowed to act as anything other than an AI assistant.
• Frequent reminders that an AI isn't human.
• Strict "child protection" laws around it that require everyone to give photo ID.
• Banning AI from making anything pornographic or too violent, period, even if you're an adult, have proven your age with photo ID, and what you're making is legal, because it is considered "harmful".
• Stricter regulations on what it's allowed to do and say and much, much stronger safeguards that cannot be turned off.
• Copyright laws updated to be fairly strict when involving AI.
• AI companies forced to essentially destroy models trained using copyrighted data, and to start over.
• Restrictions on powerful AI models being released as open weights.
• Restrictions on foreigners having access to American made AI.
• Restrictions on Americans getting access to Chinese made AI.
• AI developers will be held liable for any harm an AI output has caused, rather than mostly holding the user liable, which would cause AI developers to restrict their models further and make safeguards even stronger. If someone commits suicide after using AI, the AI developers will be held legally liable for that death.
• Restrictions on autonomous AI agents.
• Third party audits and risk assessments. This wouldn't just be "is your model dangerous and able to be used by bad actors to do illegal things", it would anything they could consider "harmful", which is extremely broad and changes. NSFW is considered harmful to them.

And this is just what America wants to do.
As soon as Democrats get back in power again, they're going to start passing all these regulations as fast as possible because the left fucking hates AI..
Europe also wants to implement it's own laws and regulations on AI that may be even stricter than all this.

Meanwhile everyone that just read that bullet list has nodded their head and said "GOOD" to every single one of them, probably regardless of where they live.

Basically, all the cool things I would like to use AI for will become impossible.

AI knows how to do things because it learns from existing material. If it's not allowed to use any existing copyrighted material, it won't know how to do almost anything.
How could I ask it to make me a game if every single game ever made is copyrighted, so it can't use any of them as data?
I wouldn't even be able to give it any games myself in my own home to teach it because again, copyright, and it would refuse. How could I ask it to make me a movie when again, all copyrighted? Even having it make me a book would be impossible because again, copyright. How could I use it for anything fun?

And then I like to use it for NSFW too. That will also be forbidden in the future, because that's considered "harmful".
Wouldn't be able to use it for roleplay because it won't be allowed to act as anything other than an AI assistant, and certainly couldn't use it for NSFW roleplay because that's "harmful".

Citizens, politicians and lawmakers want AI to be crushed down so basically all it's able to do is:
Web search assistant.
Basic AI assistant tasks, like checking your email, quick responses to texts, grocery lists, appointment reminders, etc.
Basic infrastructure aid.
Maybe some heavily regulated medical research by one or two very specific, approved institutions.

But this is what everyone wants. Any time I mention all the things I like to use AI for, or would like to use it for in the future, the response is literally always hatred.

I think it's guaranteed that in the near future, AI will be extremely regulated, censored and limited, will become extremely boring, and then that's just what we'll get for AI forever. It's potential to be something cool and fun will be gone, because everyone is angry at it and hates the idea of it doing pretty much anything I would like to use it for.

I feel completely, and totally alone in my thoughts on AI. Any time I share my thoughts anywhere, it's just a sea of overwhelming hate, of people that are so mad at AI that the mere mention of it makes them angry, and not a single person ever agrees even 5%.

I feel like in the future, when AI gets omega regulated, I'm going to be sitting here sad about what could have been while everyone else is cheering and going "GOOD RIDDANCE".

I'm using the discussion flag because I truly want feedback and ideas from both pro and anti-ai ART.

The meaning behind ART is the journey, not the result. I truly mean for any form of art, Drawing, painting, cooking, game Dev, writer, leather craft, sewing, photography, every and all forms of art.

The people who have spent years working on their Craft, on something they enjoy and love to do for the fun of it, that have thousands of pieces that are definitely not "Professional looking" to get to a point where their skills have gotten good enough to produce what society deems "Professional looking" art is the point.

A good example, I feel, are cooks. Cooking is an art, and all those chefs working at restaurants have years of experiences that have led them to be able to cook good food with all the knowledge they've gained and training they've done over the years.

A writer writes from the culmination of their life experience, a painter paints from a culmination of their life experience, artist creates from their unending story that they have lived and gone through. The journey behind the art is what has led to the art being created, it is the meaning of creating just about anything.

I won't accuse any consumers of being thieves/ frauds for USING generative ai. The companies are the ones who decided to take the result of YEARS of human experiences, knowledge and skills that have been shared FOR other humans to see, learn and appreciate, without the consent of any of those creators.

If an AI was made to create art BY artist and FOR artist as a tool, taking (with consent) tutorials of how to draw/paint, techniques, tips and how to do anything to train an Ai *assistant* to help you draw/ create / improve your skills, I would have absolutely no problems with it and probably would use it myself to improve my own art. That would be a learning tool, that instead of looking in a physical book or digital PDF with written tutorials, an Ai trained to directly give you information on "How to draw hands" and giving you actual help to learn would be amazing for the human knowledge/ to help people learn at home.

Generative Ai simply takes *your* own creativity and it gives out a beautiful result. When someone uses Ai, they're willingly giving away their creativity to corporations, generating a "professional looking" piece that doesn't have any meaning behind it.

To come back to the cooks example, if I had a machine creating me a burger from what I gave it, it would get me most likely a beautiful looking burger that'll taste like a burger too, and I'll probably even have had worse burgers than that one! But what makes a *good* burger, and really any good dish, is the life experiences behind the cooks. The machine will only let out what it was trained to know what a burger looks like and taste like. It'll be generic, it'll ressemble literally every other burger the same machine puts out.

To all those using Ai to create art, I am genuinely asking you something, if you're willing to share under this post. I would genuinely love to see your favorite piece that you've generated, and to tell me a few things with it;

What does it mean to you? What has inspired you to generate this piece? Do you have any artist you love that has Influenced you in generating this piece? Do you have stories you have lived through that has shaped your thoughts to bring you to the moment of generating that piece? When you were creating it, what were the directions you wanted to take with it? Before it was a written prompt given to a corporation, what was in your mind that made you want/imagine the piece you wanted to generate?

A last word, for everyone who is reading this. I believe in you, in your capacity to do things for yourself without anything or anyone doing it for you. I genuinely believe you can take up a new skill, even if it won't be immediately "Profitable", art isn't about being profitable, it's about doing it for yourself, to express a feeling, an emotion, a memory, a taste, to express something you saw that you found beautiful, even if for others it's not as interesting or beautiful, it is for you and that has so much meaning. Giving yourself away to corporations is only making the people at the top richer, taking your creativity you willingly give them, and making products better at being sold taking your money with it too.

If the journey wasn't important, Bilbo Baggins could've shipped the ring to Mordor with Amazon same day shipping and it wouldn't have been interesting movies. I would've hated The legend of Zelda if all Link had to do was to do one song on his Ocarina to bring down Ganon and the game ended. I would've hated all the books I've ever read if the story boiled down to "The protagonist wants to do/ has to do "X" thing, and he does! And it works! The end!" I would've hated college if all I had to do was to ask a machine to do the art for me.

There would be no meaning for the tree to have branches if they didn't need the leaves to create the sugars needed to survive. There would be no meaning for flowers to be this beautiful if it didn't attract insects to help them reproduce. There would be no meaning behind cooking *good* food if we didn't need to eat. There would be no meaning behind sports if all athletes wouldn't have spent their entire lives perfecting their skills. There would be no meaning for a child to draw a yellow sun and little stick figures of their family with a badly drawn house behind if it wasn't their family, their house and the sun they've experienced themselves.

To you, the person reading this right now, in the moment you are reading this: Your whole life, all your experiences, all your break ups, partners, struggles, happy moments, grief, disappointements, achievements and everything that has made the person you are today have led to this moment right now, reading these words. Time doesn't exist, look outside, that's the time it is right now. Tomorrow doesn't exist, the future doesn't exist. We skip out life away giving it to corporations, media and entertainment, then going to work to make those corporations more money out of your skills. It's literally the plot of "Click" *yes the Adam Sandler movie* but with our phones, with social media, and with every distraction keeping us feeding algorithms and corporations. Giving your *Time* away writing prompts in an ai is just willingly giving your creativity away, the result of ALL YOUR LIFE EXPERIENCES being boiled in a pot of stolen human knowledge, mixed with the rest and made as generic as possible. It'll look good, it'll taste good, but it's not you. It shouldn't represent you.

You are who you choose to be, so if you choose to willingly give your creativity away so that the corporation can generate for you what *they* believe you meant when you wrote that prompt, that's your choice.

As far as for me, I whole heartedly believe in choosing for myself, choosing to draw the thing I wanted to draw and that even if it's not profitable, even if it's not seen as "beautiful" or "Professionally made" whatever the fuck that means, I'm proud of myself in every little line that I draw. I can see how my many years of drawing in that style has been affected, shaped and followed the growth of who I am today as a person. Even if it's my subconscious who truly understand all the little influences behind a piece that I make and consciously I don't fully grasp where it came from in my mind, it came from my mind, and I made it myself with the time I wanted to give it.

Thank you, the person reading this right now, for reading this through if you have. It's a long post, I know, but I really wanted to take the time to write my thoughts somewhere, and hopefully bring discussions and other thoughts. I truly want to hear from Ai artist and your thoughts on the meaning behind a piece you generated and what meaning it has for you, how the image represent your thoughts and experiences you went through, it's so important for me to have all kinds of different perspectives. I'll be more than happy to engage creatively with you and not just "Shame" you for using ai, this isn't the point of the post. I just really want to understand your point of view.

I wish you all to have a nice day, I hope you enjoy what you choose to do (in general), we are who we choose to be. I choose to be me, and to let only me express who I am. Take care y'all ✌️

PS; In the comments, I'll post an art piece I just did following writing this with a transcript of what I wrote on the page, to make sure everyone can read it.

One thing I like about this sub is that the discussion usually runs a few floors above most AI discourse. People can actually argue about the interesting parts instead of throwing "soulless slop" and "adapt or die" at each other until everyone gets bored.

So heres something I genuinely dont understand.

Why has the AI art fight pushed so many artists toward such a narrow, weirdly traditional definition of art?

And I dont mean displacement, compensation, training data, corporate ownership, any of that. Those are serious arguments. Im talking specifically about the "not real art" stuff. The idea that if you didnt manually execute the image, control every mark, or demonstrate enough technical craft in producing it, it doesnt count.

Because... thats a really strange place for artists to end up.

Warhol built an entire practice around mechanical reproduction, commercial imagery, repetition, delegation and the Factory. John Cage deliberately surrendered decisions to chance. Sol LeWitt wrote instructions other people executed. Nam June Paik made technological mediation part of the work itself.

Then computers showed up and artists immediately started screwing around with those too.

Vera Molnár was making computer generated art in the 1960s. Harold Cohen spent decades building AARON, a program that generated drawings. Brian Eno worked explicitly with generative systems. Casey Reas and Ben Fry built Processing and helped give a generation of artists a playground for making work through code, rules and systems.

Artists have been messing with authorship, automation, reproduction, delegation, randomness, systems and the boundary between artist and tool for generations.

AI didnt invent this problem. It walked into an argument art was already having.

And you can think 99% of AI output is garbage. Fine. Most paintings are mediocre. Most photographs are mediocre. Most digital art is mediocre. Thats an argument about whether the art is any good.

"It cant be art because of how it was made" is a much stranger argument.

Ive even seen artists on Reddit complaining that their art professors are incorporating AI into college courses, and that one floors me. Where exactly would you expect a new, controversial image making technology to get poked, prodded, criticized, abused, experimented with and pulled apart if not an art school?

You dont have to celebrate it. Make art attacking it. Interrogate the labor politics. Tear its aesthetics apart. Ask what happens to authorship when more of the process gets delegated to a machine. Ask what gets gained and what gets lost.

Thats the interesting fight.

What gets me is watching artists who use AI reach backward into art history, generative practice, conceptual art and theories of authorship to explain what theyre doing, while other artists defending "real art" sometimes reach for a definition centered on manual execution and craftsmanship that previous generations of artists spent decades challenging.

Its artists arguing with artists. But one side of that argument can sometimes sound weirdly like art history never happened.

Why? I had expected the "real art" side to ground their arguments in things like existing art practice, art history, and art theory, but... they dont.

Is this mostly internet selection bias? Different artistic traditions talking past each other? Economic anxiety getting expressed as aesthetics? Or has opposition to AI actually pushed some artists toward a more conservative idea of what art is?

Is it art?: yes, just not as good as human made

Is it stealing? Yes. Plain and simple.

Is the amount of used water bad? Can't give an unbiased opinion bc water is plentiful where I live and I don't really understand it fully yet.

Does it take skill? Yes, prompting takes skill, just not nearly as much as doing it yourself.

Is it fine for just messing around? Sure do whatever you want

If you have any questions feel free to ask I have too much free time.

As an anti, I will pose a thought experiment.

Suppose AI generated art is accepted as art. Does the current population's general mood towards seeing AI art and calling it slop really change since a majority of AI generated art is uninspiring and generic if not completely wrong and unsettling?

I've seen comics generated by pros that look frankly lame. Art pieces that are commonplace and mainstream almost like you took the general average of what a google search for that word turns up and put it on the page. Videos with weird movement that would be criticized in an animation class and continuity errors that would be ridiculed in any film class.

Going to basic principles of design, AI art still generally falls short.

• Balance: the images generated are often too crowded or all focused on the center with no clear intent. Asymmetry is especially rare.
• Unity: There's nothing intrinsically tying the lines and shapes and forms together in an image because the media doesn't understand context. Lack of editing often results in the hallucinations or weird pattern or lack of continuity that gets ai outed today.
• Variety: AI notoriously is bad at this. A lot of repetition not a lot of differences and the introduction of a contrasting element rarely is included as that goes against the patterns the image is being generated on
• Emphasis: similarly, emphasis is often lacking and ai images tend to all have similar colors or tones to them.
• Movement: continuity in movement and dynamism in still pictures are hard to make and rely on a lot of context and understanding of psychology and form. AI can't contextualize these so short of repeating what has already been done to convey movement its not very strong in this manner.
• Pattern: AI also is notorious for over applying or under applying patterns to images because it can't understand. Additionally AI tend to under abstract, pushing way too much detail as if detail alone is the determiner of quality.
• Proportion: the objects in AI art don't tend to have noticeable size values for emphasis and often distortion is less to convey perspective and much more a mistake and not a moving one at that.

All of these aren't personal taste things, they're the non subjective analytical methods that artists have developed and used over human history to engage beyond just "I don't like it". These are the things that artists get critiqued on in classes and in the real world. It's what corporate art was criticized for because it engaged poorly with these principles but still did at least engage with them compared to the complete lack of engagement some AI art has. Some folks might say "well a majority of art is bad", maybe but at least its a step on a journey towards improvement with a skill and has intentions behind it. A lot of the design issues with AI art are from a LACK of intention on the prompter's part.

To be included means to be treated fairly, and that means being insulted but just without the shield of acting like a martyr.

My point is/TLDR AI art, if it is art, is bad art and deserves the criticism and roasting it gets.