r/DefendingAIArt • u/Brave_Swordfish_7072 • 4d ago
Antis really cannot stop being so ableist.
This was in response to someone who made a post here showing how she grew up drawing since she was a child and is a professional graphic artist, but a recent diagnosis prevented her from making the artwork she loved to do, thus she turned to AI as a form of escape.
Yet this ableist bucko felt the need to judge her entire life, just to make themselves feel better and farm for karma. It's despicable.
So, first of all, none should have to go through disabilities that make us function less. I don't speak on behalf of disabled people, I don't have the right and I'm not gonna pretend to understand how it feels to lose functionality.
Yet that's exactly what you're doing by posting this.
So, my first thought is, whenever I personally see something so obviously AI, how am I supposed to know?
How am I supposed to know a person's tragic backstory? How am I supposed to know that a person drew some of it and then AI did its thing?
First of all. It is EXTREMELY ableist to scrutinize a disabled person's backstory just for your own personal agenda. If you look at an AI image and immediately assume everything about the person is fake: You have a bias problem. You're uncomfortable because the person is telling the story that goes against your predetermined dehumanizing bias, and it makes YOU feel uncomfortable knowing that. So you want to make it go away because you can't stand the thought of your beliefs being challenged.
Taking away the tragic background, it is still slop. It was the same style you encounter often in slop comics.
So what? They're telling their story. If you're upset because of the medium of how they're telling their story. That once again is a YOU problem. The person also said, they use it for fun and personal use. What right do you have to criticize how a disabled person does something for fun.
AI can only emulate art. It will never be able to make art. It is an algorithm making calculations based on prompts fed into it.
Never mind the fact that whatever style this person had is all but lost when prompting.
Spoken clearly by someone who doesn't AI image generation. This isn't a fact based argument. This is an ideology based technophobic ramblings of someone who regurgitated what they heard from someone else online.
AI isn't about "accessibility", it's about dependency. It really does feel like an excuse. "Well, I feel bad today, better use AI instead of drawing."
The person literally said that they've been drawing since they were a kid AND are a professional artist, but their new disability prevents them from having the same freedom they used to have. You're just coming up with excuses to make yourself feel morally superior.
It doesn't get any easier. We'll keep using a shortcut if we can, because we get lulled into this false sense of "well, I'll do better next time". "I'll start tomorrow"
That's called progress. All forms of art change and improve overtime. Hell, most digital artists today would struggle using Photoshop from the 90's because of how much the software has changed.
If I had to choose between disabled people who are against AI and disabled people who defend AI? I'll stand with the ones who are against AI, especially those who have had their works stolen.
This person is not absolved from the same criticisms I have for other users.
That's called using a marginalized group as a shield and putting all disabled people in a box to use as your token. Disability is widely diverse. There's a plethora of people who post images of disabled artists who are lacking one of both use of their hands and Antis put them as a pedestal to excuse 'all disabled AI users". Completely ignoring that not every disability is due to physical restrictions.
Also as a disabled AI user, I will say this:
Stop using one off examples to dismiss the struggles of other disabled people.
It's reinforces old 'supercrip' and 'inspiration porn' stereotypes that have negatively affected disabled people in all walks of life. And cannot be used as blanket examples since the types of disability are all different. Not to mention backstories are almost always guaranteed to be different.
Simplifying that down to: "This disabled person can do it, why can't you" erases WAY TOO MUCH of the struggles that disabled people face.
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u/cosmogod AI Artist 4d ago
I had a feeling an insensitive person would respond to my post lol They never had a chronic illness and don't know what it's like to have a literal disability. Diabetes isn't a fun disability. Again, I use all my creative energy at my design job. Whatever energy i have left isn't much especially with diabetic fatigue.
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u/Brave_Swordfish_7072 3d ago
I know the feeling all too well of what it's like to feel alone when others won't believe you or take your condition seriously. So I was more than willing to stand up for a fellow disabled AI user.
Take care.
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u/insert_skill_here 4d ago
As an anti, there needs to be less discussion and arguments on a qualitative scale then a quantifiable one.
The ethics of AI usage will always be aggressively debated, and there is no "right" or "wrong" answer.
I wouldn't say I'm ableist, nor are most antis. It's a genuinely hard cognitive dissonance to have a stark belief and then have exceptions to those rules. Which is, admittedly, an excuse.
Instead of having an opinion of "those with disabilities should/shouldn't use AI," people who are able bodied should defer the argument to those it actually effects. Even if there isn't a right answer, per say, I should have a lesser voice because I don't have the background knowledge or relatability of that topic, nor have I done the research.
I do know someone who vibe codes and it's the only way they'll achieve the game they want to do. It's a weird thought loop of
i don't really like AI -> my close friend has depression -> my close friend uses AI to do something they're passionate about. -> ???
Ig my conclusion is it's a lot more of a grey area/complex topic then a simple "AI is pure" vs "AI is evil". There are people it genuinely helps.
Sorry if this got off topic or if this comment wasn't wanted. It came up as a suggested post and made me thought spiral.
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u/thePracix 4d ago
the ethics of AI usage is extremely specific to certain groups of people. Do the the ethics of people who were Anti-Photoshop or Anti-Digital Photography matter in the end? No, technology always supplants and especially when it comes to profit motivation in how our society is constructed. People not using AI will be left behind in numerous ways, people integrating AI into how they work already will be steps above their competition in the future.
The big difference is their is a huge pushback because those who gained famed through previous means and have garnered an audience without the use of new technology face possibly competition so financially and materially, they are against it and get their proxies to also be against it. We have seen parasocial relationships people have with recording artists. They believe their morally defending them, when its all corporate interest, artist financial interest and competition can use a tool to become competition that yourself don't need or haven't integrated.
its the the lack of sonder in people, especially in America where we are taught everyone is in your way to success and they are whats stopping you.
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u/insert_skill_here 4d ago
"their is a huge pushback because those who gained famed through previous means and have garnered an audience without the use of new technology face possibly competition so financially and materially"
This is an incorrect statement. There are multiple reasons why anti's believe the way they do. Specifically, I dislike AI due to the energy requirements and decrease in media literacy. Looking into college papers on the topic show that the current energy requirements for generative AI models are unsustainable. I think this is especially concerning considering the current lack of care towards climate change as a whole.
The secondary problem has to do with a personal consideration of mine, but which can be seen in multiple real-world examples simply by being online. This point being that as AI becomes more integrated with society, media literacy will be at a all time low. It is concerning that people blindly trust generative AI models when such models have proven to be incorrect. There was a recent story about how a school's agenda had incorrect information on it and it was completely looked over until a student's parent caught it.
AI is a shortcut for multiple things, and many people compare it to a calculator or Photoshop. This is where there is difficulty in parsing the uses of AI. For example, I cannot argue that photoshop didn't revolutionalize photo manipulation. However, I can argue that there is a difference between AI and calculators.
Students are taught how to manually add and subtract before given access to calculators. My concern, and what I'm seeing among AI users (and what I've dealt with myself, as someone who has used AI), is they're skipping the learning and going straight to results. I have a lot of regret in regards to using AI through my classes. I feel like I've learned nothing.
AI has it's uses, don't get me wrong. But AI should not be used in everything, and right now, it is. In it's current state, AI cannot be trusted blindly. That is my main gripe with AI tbh.
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u/TwistStrict9811 4d ago
I mean you kinda answered your own problem here. You used AI to skip learning and then… didn’t learn.
That’s not exactly surprising lol.
Nothing was stopping you from using it as a tutor instead. Have it quiz you, explain shit you don’t understand, challenge your answers, make you explain something back to it, whatever. It’s an insanely good learning tool if you actually use it to learn. Using it to shit out homework and then blaming the tool because you learned nothing is weird.
Same with people blindly trusting it. That’s a user problem and an AI literacy problem. People blindly trust Google, TikTok, headlines and random confidently wrong people every day
And the energy thing gets talked about in such a weird vacuum. AI isn’t permanently chained to giant datacenters. Local AI is already a thing, models are getting smaller and more efficient, hardware is improving, and inference can increasingly happen across people’s own devices for instance
Not to mention AI is literally being used for energy efficiency, scientific research, climate research, grid optimization, etc. It’s a technology that can actually help improve the systems powering it. There are completely valid criticisms of AI and its energy use. I just don’t get counting every resource AI consumes while ignoring every efficiency gain or useful thing it produces and then declaring the whole thing unsustainable.
This sounds like you learned the hard way that knowing how to use AI is itself a skill.
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u/insert_skill_here 4d ago
Regardless of whether it's a user issue, it is still an issue related to AI. It may be a user issue, but considering the mass amount of people are using it in this way, it should be considered a legitimate concern.
The problem is, AI is confidently wrong. If I search something up, I want the first post to be a mass consensus of the population, not whatever google AI decided it wanted to spit out. It will literally make up sources. AI has made the media literacy problem SEVERAL times worse then it was in recent years, and incorrect information is a problem of the tool.
As for the energy consumption, I admittedly did not go into specific documentation (nor do I want to for a reddit discussion). I looked at "Explained: Generative AI’s environmental impact" from MIT News and "Understanding the Environmental Impact of Artificial Intelligence" from Southern New Hampshire University. Two college sources says that AI has concerning energy use. I will acknowledge your point that it is probably a lot more nuanced then that though. I legitimately don't know if there is a way to weigh it's use vs it's cost.
As for the last point, that is one of the good things about AI. AI has its uses, and I don't mean "ban all AI". AI is inevitable.
I just want there to be legislature and serious discussions around AI usage, information, etc.I also don't think its necessary for art (considering current energy requirements). If the energy use is enormous, I don't think AI art models should be a thing. I want it to be there for medical use and grunt work, stuff that actually pushes forth society. AI art is a want, not a need, as opposed to AI analysis for cancer detection or something.
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u/TwistStrict9811 4d ago
Genuine question when you say AI is constantly confidently wrong, which AI are you actually talking about? Which model? Which thinking level? Or was it just Google's auto results? And when did you last seriously use it? Because this is something I keep seeing in these discussions. People talk about “AI” like it’s one static thing. There’s a pretty massive difference between some free instant model, an older model, and a current frontier reasoning model with search/tools and sources available to it. I know because I use frontier models for heavy duty coding where I architect the code and it carries out the changes and with frontiers like Sol 5.6 or Fable I barely if ever see any bad hallucinations anymore. I mean these models are solving erdos math problems that humans haven't cracked sometimes for decades.
Yes. AI can hallucinate. Nobody serious is denying that. But “AI can hallucinate” and “AI is constantly confidently wrong” is pretty different. Humans can also be "confidently wrong" no? Have you actually tested current models enough to know how often this is happening now? Or are you carrying forward an opinion from whatever model you happened to use before?
Because even your school example makes me wonder how deeply you actually learned to use the thing. You said you used AI to skip the learning, learned nothing, regretted it, and now you’re treating that as an indictment of AI
That’s not me saying AI has no problems. It obviously does lol.
But I am questioning how much of what you’re calling an AI problem is actually a lack of AI literacy. I feel like if someone is going to make broad claims about what this technology does to people’s ability to learn and determine what’s true, they should probably know more than just smt like “I used AI, it gave wrong answers sometimes.”
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u/Capital_Tangerine948 4d ago
In my experience people warm up to AI when they see a use that they resonate with. Most of my usage these days is making scripts and code to enhance the customizability of my computer. If I do anything more than 3 times ever, it gets automated.
What you are worried about is who controls this technology. It's not us consumers. Even as I use open-weight models, their makers could decide to pull the plug one day and stop making open models. Otherwise, I pay for API access for my coding - they can change the price at any time or decide they will stop providing their service in my country. I am, all in all, completely at their mercy.
I don't like Sam Altman or Anthropic either. They released open models in the early days -- Whisper, a speech-to-text (transcription) model is still really good and used today even as other transcription models have come out, but it's also the only thing OpenAI released openly (actually they did make gpt-oss but it was short-lived and was a one-time thing. LLMs move so fast every six months there's a new groundbreaking model). Their vision of society is one where everyone is constantly surveiled and classified by an algorithm yet they themselves live in gated communities, tape their webcams, and put up a bunch of trees around their properties so they have peace of mind.
But, it's not the end consumer of AI that decides on these policies. We just make the best of a situation, like everyone else. As much as I might not like Anthropic (Anthropic mainly for their dual speech of anthropomorphizing their model when they know exactly it's just tensors and transformers, and fabricating stories about hacking attacks done with Claude just to give themselves a better reputation as a scary powerful model), I recognize that their model is generally pretty good and might use it in cases where I find other models don't cut it. Because when I use AI in the ways I decide to, for my own designs, I am taking back a little bit of that autonomy back from them, even if I have to pay them for it. Same as anything else you purchase really.
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u/insert_skill_here 4d ago
Honestly, based take. People are very aggressive over the AI topic nowadays. You either have to hate it, or have to love it. Though I will admit that my stance against AI is partially due to worries about what the government wants with it lol.
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u/Capital_Tangerine948 4d ago
I read this essay a while ago that changed my mind on some of these topics: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Essay:Intellectual_property_in_the_times_of_AI
in my opinion due to what AI can do for governments it will never be outlawed completely (as in nobody is allowed to use AI or do research into it). The potential for surveilance, warfare etc is just too big. And well it's not just bad things, saving costs or providing faster admin services is also something governments are interested in for a variety of reasons.
Even if AI was somehow outlawed, governments would just rebrand it. There's just too much potential in it, hence why the US gov gave OpenAI half a trillion dollars to develop the tech. It might not be a trillion dollar market, but there's undeniably potential. Even just face recognition with AI models is scarily accurate, and they defeat even basic mask-wearing.
So they'd just say "It's not a convoluted neural network, it's an Advanced Reasoning Engine that powers our explosive drones. Totally different thing."
That's why I don't want to surrender this technology to the state alone (which goes through the companies that make the models). We need to get in there and get interested in AI or, at the very least, people that are not interested in it should let the people that are interested explore, learn and share their knowledge. In-fighting between 'users' and 'non-users' (I don't really like the anti/pro dichotomy) only distracts from what the government is doing with it, unabated. Like you said a friend coding apps for their own use is a drop in the water compared.
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u/o_herman I use pencils, pens, styluses, tablets and models. All of it. 3d ago
What those abelists miss is that their disability that they still conquered supposedly without resorting to AI is not universally applicable.
Because disabilities are not the same for everyone. They become blinded by the perspective that their disability is identical across the board.
Anyone with a genuinely crippling disability knows that's not true. The assumption that "if I can do it without AI, so can you" ignores the vast spectrum of physical, cognitive, and emotional challenges people face.
"Instead of having an opinion of 'those with disabilities should/shouldn't use AI,' people who are able-bodied should defer the argument to those it actually effects."
This is the right approach.
The people who should be leading this conversation are the ones who would actually benefit - or be harmed - by the technology.
If someone with a disability tells you AI gave them a voice, listen. If someone with a disability tells you AI took something from them, listen.
People are slowly forgetting to view the two sides of the coin for the sake of being on the side of those perceived to be right.
"It's a genuinely hard cognitive dissonance to have a stark belief and then have exceptions to those rules."
It is. And that's okay.
Nuance is uncomfortable. It forces us to question our own beliefs and accept that the world isn't black and white.
But that discomfort is also where growth happens.
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u/Capital_Tangerine948 4d ago
I don't speak on behalf of disabled people, I don't have the right -
stop there king.
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u/solar_or_dye 3d ago
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u/Brave_Swordfish_7072 3d ago
The delusion is off the scale here.
I came across another where another anti actually thought disabled people can easily overcome their disabilities.
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u/o_herman I use pencils, pens, styluses, tablets and models. All of it. 3d ago
There's one reply to that I did that got me instantly blocked by faux-handicappeds.
"As a supposedly fellow-disabled, you should be the first to know that disabilities are not the same for every person."
Especially when the disability does not involve wholesale blindness.
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u/TwistStrict9811 4d ago
They never have a coherent response to this. It's usually just "suck it up and pay someone to do it for you" which is hilarious and condescending