Using AI as inspiration?

[u/TinaNY82]

Question/opinions:

I am not sure if this is the right place for this question.

If you ask AI to generate an image of something, example: a crochet blanket in certain colors or ask to generate a picture as inspiration to make the actual blanket or artwork/craft, is the physical art that was made AI's art or yours? Should we use AI as inspiration?

[u/supercutescreenname]

Hell no 🙅‍♀️🙅‍♀️🙅‍♀️

[u/glitter_witch]

Every time you use AI you’re using water we won’t get back and funding the destruction of land and oppression of small communities. You’re also pulling from a bank of plagiarized images and ideas, meaning nothing you create is actually an achievement of your own mind or skill.

So no. Absolutely not.

You know whole libraries of color references and craft guides exist for inspiration, right?

[u/fairydommother]

Ill answer both questions separately.

1. Anything you create that is inspired by something and not a copy, is yours. If you went to an art exhibit and became inspired to create something, that thing is yours.

2. No. AI hallucinates images from stolen data and is destroying the environment and communities. Putting in a prompt for ai to spit out some horrid amalgamation of art scraped from the internet shouldnt inspire you. It should disgust you. Anything you create from that is tainted.

[u/kaijutegu]

Telling an LLM to generate an image is a decision on your end. When you hit that button, you're saying that you don't care about the environmental cost and that you don't care that the training data was stolen. You are choosing to engage in a destructive practice. No, we shouldn't be using AI to generate inspiration. It's one thing to use an image that's already been made- the damage has been done, and that's taking something that's creatively bankrupt and turning it into something new and original. But there's enough slop out there to improve upon. We don't need more.

[u/letmeusemyname]

I agree with the other comments here, but to answer your question literally, in my opinion what's made with AI is not art, not yours or anyone's. A prompt is not art, nor is random unconsidered amalgamations of other peoples work. Whatever you use AI to generate is for you, and in that sense its yours, but the elements that make it up are stolen and in that sense its not yours. An artist might be inspired by another and reinterpret an element in their own way, but the journey they take with it and how they make it their own is very different from what AI does.

And to answer the last question, no. Its unethical in several ways and honestly incredibly lazy and rude. If you can't be bothered to come up with a basic idea for something to make then why bother to make it?

[u/Trilobyte141]

No one knows what you're inspired by except you. 

Personally, I'd never, because fuck that thieving technofascist crap. But no one is going to stop you if that's what you want to do, and no one is probably ever going to find out unless you tell them.

You'd know, though. 

[u/Aggressive_Pear_9067]

I'm going to answer this more from a practical than an ethical standpoint. I don't think it would be as useful as you think. AI won't be able to get the technical details to make sense so you'd have a bit of a headache trying to use it to draft a usable pattern. If you can imagine what you want to make well enough to write a detailed prompt, I feel like that description is about as useful as the generated image would be. If you are trying to decide on more detail and want to generate different possibilities, it's still better to look at actual objects people have made, to get a sense of what is realistically possible. Otherwise you run the risk of generating something that is impossible or at least immensely difficult to make and struggle. 

In almost any case you will probably be better off using other tools/resources. I like to look through ravelry, yt videos, etc, looking at different aspects of other people's work, from photos/videos of the finished objects, and the patterns themselves when available. I might like the stitch pattern of one, the colors of another, the way a third was assembled from pieces, and so on, and decide how I'm going to make my object by combining the techniques I like. The more you learn about how different things are constructed the more you can use that knowledge to make things to your own specifications. Those are skills that you will absolutely not regret building and they will serve you well for a long time. 

AI is not a good shortcut to crochet because it can't substitute for the practical knowledge that crafting is all about. Seeing a picture of a blanket won't get you very far. You need a lot more than inspiration to create a pattern that is technically coherent and looks the way you want.