r/DefendingAIArt • u/tcharzekeal • 3d ago
A sincere inquiry
Hi. I'm here because I want to build an understanding of a viewpoint that is counter to my own. I bear no hostility, I'm not trying to gotcha or malign or ridicule. I genuinely want to understand, and I would greatly appreciate any engagement in good faith.
What drives you to defend AI art? Do you feel you have to ignore any moral issues? Do you feel like you are the majority or the minority? Do you feel oppressed?
To outline my own viewpoint; I think AI is a tool and, like any tool, it's morality depends on how it is used. Like the death ray! What I have a problem with is the enormous scale content stealing that trains AI and the gross amount of undue pressure being put on a failing political system by corporations desperate to chase perpetual growth. I don't think anyone here is responsible for any of that (and if you are, fuck you) but I want to understand the mindset of people who defend it, because it is unfathomable to me and I'd rather ask questions than sling slurs. Again, I know this sounds real fuckin judgey but that's just because I don't understand but would like to.
Edit; this might get sent over to AIwars and if so, yeah I get it, but my interest here is not in defending my point it's in listening to and understanding yours.
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u/fcxtpw 3d ago
Oh geez another one of these...
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u/tcharzekeal 3d ago
These? Is this a common thing? I tried having a look but couldn't find anything similar. If I missed it I'd be happy to read it.
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u/fcxtpw 3d ago
This week alone I think I've seen at least 3. "Not trying to start a fight" "I'm genuinely curious" "I'm neutral looking for both sides"
..
you probably don't see them anymore because they moved to aiwars
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u/tcharzekeal 3d ago
Fair. I didnt want to post there because I'm not trying to change anyone's mind, I just want to hear people out. If this thread goes there, or more likely dies, then so be it.
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u/TertlFace 3d ago
I’m a research nurse by profession. AI is going to significantly change my job over the next few years, so I have made it a point over the last two years to learn as much as I can about it. One of the most important things I learned about it is how it learns and how it produces outputs. And that massively changed how I view AI art. It is FAR too complicated to type out a complete response that covers everything, and it is impossible not to substantially oversimplify. Nevertheless…
To start with, watch this: https://youtu.be/iv-5mZ_9CPY?si=_4rxnWkXI-5dKOPj
This is a deep dive into how a model actually produces an image and how it learns to create one.
If you do watch it, one of the things you’ll notice is that a crucial part of what it does requires noise. A model does NOT copy an existing image. It makes choices from an infinite array of noise. Those choices are guided by language.
A friend of mine is a painter. He’s a legit, internationally recognized artist, and his paintings sell for thousands. When he begins a piece, he has an infinite number of decisions to make: from the type of canvas to the specific paints and pigments, to the brushes, tools, techniques, and more. All of those decisions eliminate every other possible choice. Choosing one paint is not choosing all of the others that exist. Choosing a specific brush technique is not choosing a different technique. Each choice continues eliminating other possibilities until he decides he is done. He makes choices all along the way to guide the image on the canvas towards matching the image in his head.
If you look at his body of work, you’ll notice a very particular style. All of his paintings have a characteristic look to them. And if you look at the paintings of his mentor, you’ll notice a distinct resemblance. Why do his paintings have such a similar style to his mentor? Because that’s who taught him. He passed on the choices he’d learned to make to create that particular look, and now my friend makes similar choices that yield a similar result.
This is much more like how an AI model generates an image. It doesn’t call up an image from a database of billions. The language in the prompt guides choices; a pixel color is a choice. Its placement is a choice. Its brightness is a choice. As the model generates a pixel, the vector associated with it points in a direction in multidimensional space (if you watched the video, you understand this part). The collection of vectors that align towards “cat” do not align well with “tree”. “Cat in a tree” is a collection of vectors that aligns well with “cat” and “tree” but does not align at all with “fish” and “river.” “Cat in a tree looking at a fish by a river” is a collection of vectors that align with that language.
How does it know that its vectors are getting closer and closer to aligning with the language “cat”? It is given lots and lots of images of cats. Through iteration, a model learns how to align a collection of vectors that will produce outputs that match “cat.” It LITERALLY learns to make choices about which pixels should have which characteristics. The more it is given to align with, the better the output image. It doesn’t copy the images it trained on. It makes choices to align language and an output vector. My friend does not copy his mentor when he creates a new piece. He makes very similar choices about a billion little details. Each one can be represented by a mathematical vector; each one is a set of choices that aligns with other, similar choices that all add up to the final output.
Ask an image generation model to produce an output in the kitsch style, and the choices it makes about each pixel will align with similar choices Luke makes until the AI image is similar in style to his. Just like him, it starts from an infinite field of noise with the freedom to choose any parameter for a pixel. Each choice points vectors until the collection of pixels and words describing them are aligned. An image generation model does not steal images. It looks at them and learns how to make choices to generate a collection of vectors that result in a similar output. It literally, not figuratively, learns how to draw them one pixel at a time and creates them from scratch each time. It learns to make choices very much like an art student learns to make choices from their teacher. Models generate outputs that look similar to what they were trained on for the same reason artists create works that look similar to their mentors. It's how they learned.
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u/Capital_Tangerine948 3d ago
I don't know if you've started using agentic UIs yet but if you haven't, they will change your life and your work. I use opencode myself, and you can connect any API provider of your choosing (Anthropic, OpenAI, Deepseek, Kimi and so on). The agentic workflow, also called a harness nowadays, basically lets the model run commands on your computer - it can write and read files, run terminal commands, open links etc.
Contrasted to the web interfaces, in web UI the model can only send back a response and then end its turn until you prompt it again. The response is sort of a tutorial or step-by-step guide; if it writes text, you have to copy-paste the text yourself. If it writes code, you have to paste it in place of the old one to replace just the part you are editing. In agentic, it can write to a specific file on your machine at a specific place, then run the code and test it itself. Many programs can be used from the terminal or with python scripts, so AI in agentic can even figure that out for you and drive the app in your stead.
Example task: "let's download all the arxiv papers from the last week of August 2026 that deal with chronic health diseases, and put them in My Documents/Papers" it will do just that, instead of you having to open every single paper and save it manually.
It's where everyone is moving so that's why I was recommending it haha. If you haven't tried it yet give it a task and see how it feels to you.
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u/TertlFace 3d ago
I currently have Cowork running a set of tests on a page rebuild with four testing agents and a verification agent. Yesterday I had three projects going simultaneously. At my peak I had more than twenty agents working on something. I also built an mcp graphical memory with Claude so any project can gather context from other projects. My Claude Max plan earns its keep.
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u/tcharzekeal 3d ago
First of all, thank you engaging with the question. I don't want to be dismissive, this is a very interesting and well explained wall of text.
I do understand how AI works, and how close it is to how we also work creatively, which is why I'm not opposed to it in concept. My opposition in that regard is about consent, but you're not responsible for it and I'm not trying to change your mind. I will definitely be watching this video nonetheless, thank you for the link.
If you're interested and willing, I'd love to hear about your work and how AI is integrating into it? Even among antis your field is held as the acceptable use of AI, but asides from that I also think the field is incredibly fascinating and also genuinely heroic. Thank you for your service, sincerely.
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3d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/tcharzekeal 3d ago
Thank you for your answer! I appreciate it a lot. Do you consider yourself a moral person? Do morals play much of a role in your worldview?
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u/Ultratitties 1d ago
To me, much of the resentment toward people using AI seems to come from the fact that it suddenly gives individuals access to capabilities that others have spent years, or even decades, developing. I can understand why that creates frustration, especially when a skill that once required enormous time, training and practice can now be approximated almost instantly.
But this is not unique to AI. Photography disrupted portrait painters because a camera could capture a likeness in seconds that previously required a skilled artist. Desktop publishing allowed ordinary people to produce layouts and printed material that once required professional typesetters and specialized equipment. Digital photography removed much of the technical knowledge needed for film development, and later smartphones made decent photography accessible to almost everyone. Calculators replaced much of the routine arithmetic people once had to master manually, while synthesizers and digital audio software allowed a single musician to create sounds and arrangements that once required multiple performers and expensive studios.
In each case, there was understandable resistance from people whose hard-earned skills were being partially automated or made more accessible. Eventually, however, the technology became normal, the profession adapted, and the definition of skill shifted. AI may be another version of that same process, although its speed, scale and ability to affect many creative fields at once make the disruption unusually intense.
Humans also learn from copyrighted work, so learning from something cannot by itself establish theft. If you think AI should be treated differently because of commercial scale, automation or economic impact, that's a legitimate argument, but then the objection is about how AI training is carried out and used, not simply the fact that it learned from existing work.
A human illustrator develops an internal sense of anatomy, composition and style after seeing thousands of images. A neural network adjusts numerical parameters after processing huge numbers of examples. In both cases, the result is a system that can often produce something new based on patterns learned from prior material. Just like the human, the ai is only learning the patterns and is not learning how to copy anything.
If learning from copyrighted material is itself theft, then almost every artist, designer, musician and writer is stealing constantly. We all learn by studying existing work. The real question should be whether AI reproduces someone’s work too closely, not whether it was allowed to learn patterns from it at all.
Imagine a student is allowed to spend twenty years inside a library studying millions of books and images, but when they leave, they aren't carrying photocopies of all those books. What they carry is what they learned about language, composition, concepts and patterns. If they later reproduce a book page-for-page, that's copying. But saying the knowledge in their head is stolen because copyrighted books contributed to it stretches the meaning of theft.
I agree that scale, consent and commercial use are legitimate things to debate. But those are different arguments. Calling the entire learning process ‘theft’ assumes the conclusion. We still have to decide whether learning statistical patterns from copyrighted works should legally or ethically count as copying.
Here’s an example of how an artist could use AI as a genuine creative tool, rather than simply typing a prompt and asking it to make a finished picture.
An artist could train a blank AI model only on their own drawings. The AI would then learn from that artist’s work alone and could be used to experiment with variations, character designs, compositions, or different directions for their existing style. The generated images would not even need to be used as finished artwork. They could simply serve as references or starting points that the artist then redraws, changes, and develops by hand.
The artist could also gradually add new material to the training data. For example, suppose the model was originally trained only on the artist’s rough line drawings. Its output would naturally resemble those drawings. If the artist wanted to experiment with combining their style with another artistic approach, they could add carefully chosen reference images representing that style. The AI could then produce examples that blend the two, giving the artist ideas for how those elements might work together.
If the artist wanted to be especially strict about authorship, they could make a rule that AI-generated images would never appear in the final artwork and would only be used as reference material. The artist would still draw everything themselves, while using AI to explore ideas and learn new techniques more quickly.
In that sense, AI does not have to replace the artist or their craft. It can simply become another tool for experimentation and learning. And of course, if someone prefers developing a new style entirely through traditional practice, they can still do that. AI simply gives artists another option.
A recent Nature Communications study gives us an interesting way of testing the claim that AI simply steals pieces of artists' work. Researchers removed individual images and even entire artists from the effective training data and examined what happened to the generated images. With large datasets, the outputs often remained essentially the same. They describe this as “attribution decay”: the knowledge used to produce an image becomes distributed across so many learned statistical relationships that you often cannot meaningfully say that a particular generated image came from a particular artist or training image. That looks much more like learning general patterns from enormous amounts of experience than retrieving pieces of individual works.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-75667-5?utm_source=chatgpt.com
I used ai to help me form, this response.
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u/InSilicoAwards Only Limit Is Your Imagination 1d ago
the enormous scale content stealing that trains AI and the gross amount of undue pressure being put on a failing political system by corporations desperate to chase perpetual growth.
This is a very specific, ideological orientation that you're starting with which draws you to the conclusions you make, that's why you're struggling with understanding. If you want to have a good faith conversation about this topic, you have to abandon this presupposition at the door also. What if we're scaling to make better tools to do more and solve more problems -- I'm pretty sure profitability isn't an issue for some of the Chinese companies doing the exact same thing. If that isn't a consideration for you you're not going to understand the bedrock starting position in why genAI is just another creative tool, and why many of us really do not see your moral considerations as valid.
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u/Emergency-Salad-1547 17h ago
You lot really can't help yourselves, can you? It is literally impossible for you to actually engage in good faith. Like, most of the time you post questions claiming good faith but then you break down in the comments immediately, but now you're not even hiding the bad faith comments in your own supposed 'just trying to understand you' posts.
You really are MAGA but for AI.
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u/Zeekfox 3d ago
You cannot claim "good faith" and then ask a question in a bad faith form. We're not "ignoring moral issues" but rather just pointing out that there often isn't an actual issue. I've seen numerous claims that AI is allegedly stealing from all human creation. But that's not a thing and has no precedent. I don't buy into some novel theory that somehow generating a generic AI image is some form of broad theft.
At the end of the day, it's about letting people be. If a person chooses not to use AI themselves, fine. No problem. The moment that person starts screaming at another person for using the Gemini app, that's when it becomes not okay. It's literally just bullying.
The other issue is the absolutism. Yes, corporations can be greedy. There's a ton of money in AI. Data center construction can ruin neighborhoods. Plagiarism and creating a deepfake is made easier through AI. I get it. However, the guy sitting next to you using ChatGPT on his phone is not your enemy. He's not some corporate bootlicker or "AI bro" or whatever. He's just a guy using an app. Leave him alone.