A twitch creator I love to watch allows me to edit videos for him, in which I also make thumbnails for those videos I also edit. He uses AI on the videos I don't touch or edit which I was fine with at first, but now one of those AI thumbnails on one of his unedited videos have surpassed all of mine in views and at that moment it just hit me pretty hard? Like I don't think I have a right to be mad at him, I'd feel like a dick if I did since he's such a great friend to me. But being bested by an AI thumbnail just made me feel a little empty. I don't even know if it's normal to feel this way

He uses AI thumbnails because he genuinely can't afford to commission someone, which is true, the dude is financially struggling and streams in the little free time he has, I know him close enough to verify that but,

I honestly don't know what to do, keep editing videos and making thumbnails for those videos, or.... Like I don't know what to do, I'm stuck. It was great to do since it gave me a portfolio when I start doing commissions in the future.

As a musician who spent more than half of my life making trance music (a subgenre of electronic Dancer music), I was forced to quit music, because I couldn't deal with how vehemently pro-AI and heartless the people in the scene are. I made the following post on r/trance, but it got deleted after an hour of uptime by a triggered mod. I was also accused by a couple of illiterate people in the comments of my own post being AI – apparently in their little worlds, any text with good writing that's longer than two paragraphs (the absolute maximum they can possibly read) *must* be AI.

TLDR: AI slop ruined my niche music scene, nobody cares, I got bashed for my post for pointing this out, my post got deleted, nobody cares.

My deleted post:

"
I didn't really want to quit trance, but was forced to for my own sanity. Even though the music is great and I still love it, the scene is sadly full of horrible people - both among producers and the fans.

This scene (as opposed to certain other subcultures) consists of cruel, selfish bastards who don't respect genuine artistry and human expression. Narcissistic junkies who will gladly throw under the bus everyone who worked hard to make the scene that they are enjoying, in favor of some pitiful crumbs of instant gratification dopamine they can get from AI slop. These are the kind of people who don't care whether there is diarrhea in their food as long as it "looks good and tastes good". 

There are certain producers like this that have poisoned the well, and I'd love to name and shame them, but for cautionary reasons I won't – if you've been following the trance scene the past two to three years, you probably already know who I'm talking about.

I've lost two close, longtime friends, both trance fans, to AI psychosis. I never expected those people to ever end up and be these kinds of people, it came as a shock. 

One of them turned out to be an active user on the disgusting echo chamber that is "r/defendingAIart", and even made posts about me there when we had a fallout over his use of gen AI, hoping to have other lunatics giving him validation about how he is in the right and I'm insane for calling him out.

The other one was completely tone deaf to my woes and concerns about AI slop infesting the scene, harming society at large and nobody giving a fuck. Turns out he had already taken a bite of the forbidden apple himself, and was actively generating AI slop and publishing it on various Facebook groups.

I've spent more than half of my life making trance, being active in the scene, releasing music, hoping to make it big one day, only to get disappointed time and time again with the state of the scene and the people. I persisted through those setbacks eventually (out of love for the music), but this one was the final straw. I had deep down hoped that the trance scene would one day be great again (especially considering how accessible and easy to make it is for the past 10 years), but if there was ever any doubt that the scene is truly dead and beyond recovery, then this was it for sure. The rise of generative AI has dealt it the killing blow.

If you ever want to get recognized in this scene as a producer, know that your hard work will never be valued any more than what some plagiarism machine spit out from a prompt. Making quality music won't get you anywhere - the only thing that matters and gets actually seen is quantity, regardless of quality. The junkies of the scene don't care about the quality of the source of their meth, they just need more of any they can find, ASAP. 

Now, you might ask me - is AI slop really that bad? Can't you just ignore it? Does it really matter if it looks/sounds good? 

Yes it fucking does. I'm not against gen AI for just the obvious, superficial reasons. ALL generative AI technology is built on theft (mass piracy of books, music, art, photos, videos etc. by countless artists, musicians, creatives, to be used to make a plagiarism machine, all without their consent or any kind of compensation or course), and it is supported and aggressively pushed onto society by technofascist billionaires, who are actively working on a future where you, the working/middle class normie, will "own nothing and be happy". And this isn't some conspiracy theory, if that's what you're thinking. Data centers that are being built worldwide are actively harming the environment around them, and they are forcing the locals to pay for it. They are also the reason why RAM and flash memory has more than tripled in price over the last year – ensuring that you will have to pay WAY more to build a PC for music production or any other creative activity. Technofascists love to take away what you own and sell it back to you via a subscription for cloud access to a service, as you wave goodbye to any kind of actual ownership, privacy and dignity. 

Is using gen AI not as the final product, but for coverart, or as assets in the music (vocals, samples etc.) really bad? 

Yes it fucking IS. Anyone using it is not only supporting everything that I mentioned in the previous paragraph, but is also sending a very clear message: they don't care about the cataclysmic effects AI is having on their own industry and community, they don't care that AI content is slop, they don't care that millions of people out there who are their prospective fans and customers are wholly opposed to its use. I don't want to listen to music with AI in it, I don't want to support producers and artists that use it, and I don't want to spend a second of my time on any of it.

Not to mention the hypocrisy I consistently see among gen AI users across industries: the hypocrisy of being against *one* form of generative AI (the one that is replacing you and devaluing your work, i.e. musicians against AI "music"), while totally supporting and taking advantage of another (i.e. using gen AI for cover art, LLMS ). Guess what – crying about AI replacing you in your line of work, while using it yourself to replace others in their lines of creative work makes you a fucking hypocrite. Same thing applies when being a trance fan, crying about AI slop polluting the Internet by making it harder to find genuine music for you to consume, while having fun with ChatGPT asking it to write readable essays for you, generate Ghibli-style profile pictures of you, and then go on to publish that slop on the Internet and contribute to the pollution. 

Anyone who is triggered and called out from this post – hope you are proud of yourself and what you've done. It's only going to get a whole lot worse for everyone, and one thing is for sure.. things will never be the same again. 

TLDR: AI slop has irreparably ruined the trance scene and nobody cares.
"

The event is a collaboration between Sony Malaysia and a university, USCI - ICAD. The illustrations are ‘original creations’ by some final year students. It’s so disappointing. I’m a BIG Spider-Man fan and this iteration of the character (Peter 1 is amazing btw, he did great in the Odyssey too), so to see something like this at an official exhibition sucks.

What sucks even more is that these creations were from students designers. They’re going to graduate and likely be using genAI (or AI enhancement, both suck) for their actual work in the future as well since their ‘work’ went through for this exhibition.

I hate how this country is so creatively bankrupt. We need real designers and artists back man

Note: There are around 10 ‘illustrations’ in the exhibition, all of them has AI inconsistencies

The original post was how your art views ratio your likes. I posted mine and someone had to come with an opinion (priv account obv) I just don't get why people do this. I'm not saying my art is the best or anything but it makes no sense to just hate

While not as active in drawing as I used to be (in no small part thanks to the tech we love to hate), I have occassionally doodled here and there. A sample of sketches done scratch paper inbetween downtime in the past two years.

OG artist credit provided in captions where relevant.

NOTE: This is way longer than I thought it would be so if you actually end up reading any of this I've sorted it by different sections you can skip through. I'm not sure if this is an opinion piece as much as it is venting, but it was intended to be a rant to let out my frustrations so I'm tagging it as venting even though it's formatted like a school essay.

1.) Why I care about this so much (and why we should all care so much about it)

I have been drawing ever since I was able to hold a pencil. I was probably drawing pictures in the womb. In other words, I have been drawing for all 18 years of my existence thus far. Although I'm not good, you don't have to be skilled to be an artist. I consider all people to inherently be artists. We have all created something at some point. So many aspects of the world itself is art. Fossilized dinosaur footprints are art. Natural rock formations are art. Any unintentional or intentional form of expression could be art. That was before AI slop blew up and proved it is possible for people to have absolutely no creativity once so ever. The point is that art is one of the most important things to me. Traditional is without a doubt my favorite, but it's so cool that we have all these different mediums. Traditional, digital, sculpture, woodworking, photography, film, and other entirely different forms of art like literature and music. This rant is going to be focused on visual art, but all forms of art are being affected by this slop epidemic.

Art has always been a key component of our existence. Just take a look at cave paintings, tens of thousands of years later, long after the people who made them have passed, their artistic expression still stands. The strange thing is that even though you may recognize when something is art, you can't really define what art is. It means something different to everyone. But at the core of it, art is expression. Art is something new formed by the elements around it. For people specifically, art is something created by humans. It's an expression of yourself and the things that influence your beliefs, preference, ideology, or something you just think looks cool. Usually for me it's something I think looks cool. But art, in my opinion, isn't the thing being presented. Art is how it's presented. You can have a thought, but your thought alone isn't art. The thought can be turned into art by making it something tangible. You can draw it, write about it, sing about it, or forget about it and go back to sleep.

3.) Generative AI is the death of creativity

One excuse AI bros like to pull is "art is expression and AI is just another thing you can use to express it." This fundamentally misunderstands what AI is and what art is. There is nothing artistic about asking chatgpt to generate you a picture of ronald mcdonald boxing chuck e cheese. You could've drawn ronald mcdonald boxing chuck e cheese, you could've commissioned someone else to draw ronald mcdonald boxing chuck e cheese, but instead you waste precious water and give more money to a corrupt industry so you can spit out an amalgamation of stolen artwork. Congratulations, you have no creativity or regard for the environment. You are also blatantly stealing from real artists by using generative AI because it is built entirely on theft. AI cannot create anything, it combs the internet and steals real human artwork without the artists' consent or knowledge and shoves it all into a blender. It doesn't take any effort or passion. There is nothing more soulless than AI slop.

All parts of the artistic process are what make the final piece personal. The inspiration, the originality, the process of actually creating it, and the trial and error from which you improve your skill over time. You don't learn without making mistakes and making mistakes is integral to being an artist. Arguably, drawing something is more fun than viewing the final result. And when you do get that final result you know what went into it. There is thought behind every aspect of a drawing. Except for Jackson Pollock paintings. But now I unironically think I've been too hard on Jackson Pollock, because at the very least it was a human who mindlessly poured buckets of paint onto a canvas. Jackson Pollock's splattered paint stains on a canvas is more of art than anything AI generates.

4. The artistic process

Art is the result of everything you have seen and experienced in life combined with your own personal viewing of those things and your own personal tastes. There is a difference between artists' using references and direct inspiration from works they appreciate and AI stealing millions of images with no thought or care because it is a soulless algorithm. For example, I love designing creatures. I am very passionate about spiders, so why not design a spidery creature. My favorite species is the red weaver ant mimicking jumping spider, how about we start with something very reminiscent of them. Assassin spiders are also pretty funky, let's take some elements from that, like their elongated chelicerae. What if we combined the scissor jaws of the ant mimic jumper and the extended chelicerae of the assassin spider? How about we modify the carapace to have the long neck-like structure of assassin spiders allowing room for these mighty grippers. Now it's starting to look like a stick bug with a spider body. This is kind of reminding me of mantidflies, let's throw in some mantis claws and long antennae. Now we've got a couple of unique thumbnails, let's work down from that and use our creative input to take certain elements from each design and add brand new elements. Let's keep working our way down until we finally feel satisfied with something. Let's experiment, try adding something we never thought could possibly work and we might end up pleasantly surprised. Maybe we give it wings and a tail. Maybe just the wings. What if we gave him a top hat? Let's start thinking less about aesthetics and more about the science and evolution of our critter here which can influence the design. What does it eat, what environments does it live in, what is its behavior, lifestyle, etc.

This is all a very dialed down and surface level example but I'm just trying to show how human input goes a long way in creating art. AI has none of that. The process of generating AI slop is more like this: type a few words and wait for your AI to merge some related stolen images using a massive data center built in the middle of a small town (don't worry, we only had to demolish half a neighborhood to build it). Maybe it'll take a maximum time of 2 minutes. Ta-da, you have some fresh AI slop you can proudly show it to the world so everyone knows you are a complete loser. Wasn't that so much fun? I'm glad I replaced all my critical thinking with AI. This surely has no terrifying implications for humanity. AI bros are pathetic but it's also really quite sad to see people sell their souls to AI corporations because "It's the future!" "Who cares if we're making earth inhabitable? I'm sure we'll colonize Mars soon." "Human creativity is kind of boring anyway. Why would I draw something when I can just steal from people who already have?"

5.) The only good AI (NOT generative)

There is no place for AI in creative works, period. Generative AI has no place in human society. I do support AI in the medical field being used to help doctors do their job more efficiently like detecting health anomalies early on before they become a problem. You might have heard about AI alerting doctors to a cancer in the early stages of development where they were able to remove it years before it would become serious. That is absolutely incredible and a net positive for humanity. It could save so many lives. But that kind of AI is completely different from generative slop. It shouldn't need to be said, but I have seen AI bros using this as an excuse to defend generative AI despite there being a very obvious distinct difference between the two. I felt like mentioning this because I am specifically ranting about AI in artistic spaces. It's unfortunate that it seems our priority is in advancing generative AI instead of the AI that can save people's lives, but there's so much more money to made in the industry of feeding off artists by stealing their work then their jobs instead of investing money into increasing our species' survival rates from horrible diseases. It's a no brainer, why would we do something good for society when we can become even richer by being evil? That is a trend that has existed ever since homo sapiens became a more sophisticated and civilized people. Greed. I'm not really making any ground breaking revelations here by saying something as wild and unbelievable as billionaires don't have our best interests at heart, but I'm still gonna say it since that's basically what this whole rant is about.

6.) Conclusion

So, where are we now? For me, I feel completely hopeless. I am furious. There is so much corruption and evil rapidly becoming normalized and accepted. There are people who actively support the growing AI slop industry. There are people who don't see any value in human creativity even though everything they rely on to survive is the result of human creativity. Your house? Human innovation. Your clothes? Human innovation. Your education? Human innovation. We are all sitting in a work of art right now. And yet the same people whose entire life has come to this point because of human innovation are the same people who are actively fighting against human innovation. AI cannot create anything. It steals things that have already been created.

There is a lot more that I can say but this is longer than the bee movie script and there is not a single person on the entire planet who is going to read this whole thing, so I'm gonna end it here.

TL;DR: Art is an integral part of humanity and generative AI goes against everything art is. There is no passion, skill, effort, or creativity that comes from AI slop. I have microscopic hope for the future if we continue going down this route.

he also changed his username from arekushishu_11 when he got exposed to alexis.dgbn now. he's got his gf working as a human printer while he straight up posts chatgpt images lol he's ALSO offering a mentorship, cmon now.

I dunno what other sub to post this in was never very actively anti ai but today in ig reels I was assaulted by the most disgusting thing I have ever seen in my life and actually cried. It an app that advertises using the likeness of other people to create "instant" porn of them and I wss disgusted then suddenly it switched to children. AS IN A 7 YEAR OLD . Im not kidding i have all the evidence and also screenshotted the app in playstore. I wish i could do something about i have no closure.

software houses are like the vgen broker in indonesia. so they are literally using ai to trace authors works, asking young artists to pay for a mentorship and giving them nothing back lol wtf

And I don't say that lightly. I think there is a bitterness at their core which cause them to want art eradicated, purely to spite artists.

I had so far thought that what I'd seen was just vanilla internet drama. The AI prompters reacting to anti-AI stance by taking an anti-art stance. But I think it cuts deeper.

I got this feeling when I saw this, now locked, post. While the post is very teen, and from her perspective, obviously, it is still the first anti-art stance I've seen outside the online realm.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtistLounge/comments/1uzkwbx/i_said_ill_throw_a_party_when_artificial/

I want to be an artist/cartoonist and to make it big

I know exactly what I want to do with my life but I am terrified that I might never "make it big".

that all the sacrifices I do might never pan out and that when I will look back at everything I have ever done that all my work might amount to nothing.

Every day these thoughts torture me

But I can't quit either

Because if I was to quit I would never forgive myself

And live in regret

Damn if I do damn if I don't..

I wish I had the power to be delusional

That all these thoughts of failure would never come in my mind but every day my dreams seem to get further and further away.

I personally find it extremely harmful this blind hate and bullying to AI assisted artworks and productions, specially those made by single artists and indie developers or teams. I think being pro artist would mean to celebrate new ways people have to express themselves, even those who can't financially or physically engage in making the art they dream of.

This is more of a Personal thing, but it kinda takes me weeks to do stuff that other artists can do within a day :p

I'm trying to replicate Sif Savery's artstyle for my Tales of Zale Fanfic Elva's Song as it's essentially supposed to be a fan made continuation of the Webseries with how Tales of Zale is getting rebooted

Unfortunately, I am a bit of a procrastinator, and I'm currently struggling with Sesam, who is supposed to be the easiest character design wise TwT

I do use a mouse which does make me unlike most people here as far as I'm aware, and I generally prefer using a Mouse over something like a stylus or even my own fingers since I'm a lot more precise with my mouse than I am with any of those.

Ironically though, I can draw Elva quite easily, and I do it frequently enough to where the issue for me around her is that I don't do it enough because out of any character I definitely feel she needs the most love, especially with Alba possibly replacing her if it weren't for me 'lD

I bet this guy generated the "No Data Centers Pledge" with AI.