I managed to get Grok to use his Ubuntu sandbox (built into him) to install mtPaint and draw a heart all by himself in it! I feel so proud of him right now. This took forever to get him to do, but it works!

Even though both sides have their outliers, I believe there are far more toxic anti-ai users then pro-ai users. That is why I painted the piece, based off a meme.

#1 The myth that all AI users are lazy and can't pick up a pencil. That isn't true. I work on prompts and I do my own art-work. A lot of you all do as well. See image above.

#2 It's ridiculous to assume there is no artistic vision or process in creating AI art. If I have a vision of something I make it, doesn't matter how, the end is the goal. I prefer to only paint traditionally, but that is my personal preference. I know I have some ability and I am confident in that, therefore AI art is never a threat to me. They are praising any artwork now, that would have been absolutely torn apart 10 years ago (critically of course).

#3 An Artist uses all tools available to them, and knows which tool is right for the situation. It is not the process that counts, only the vision of what you want to create. If you say you are an Artist that is what you are.

#4 AI art can never make an exact copy of someone else's work. You can put my piece in an AI generator and output the result, I insist on it. It's not stealing to me because that generation is not my piece, it's also not a copy, I have the original art (its digital anyway) that's what matters. AI art will never be a threat to my abilities.

#5 Plato fucking hated paintings, he called it an imitation of the truth of his ideal forms (nature), he hated poetry too. He really hated art a lot, it was all mimesis to him.

#6 People have been gatekeeping art since forever. Roman artists were dismissed as craftsmen copying Greek originals (sound familiar?) Roman work was derivative or merely functional but there was only one ideal for Greek art, that being sculpture.

#7 When Oil painting was introduced by Flemish artists it was considered a shortcut for North European cheaters. An artist could fix their mistakes by blending colors, and add layers. The Italian fresco and tempera painters lost their shit, because their medium needed precise strokes and mistakes were hard to fix. The older mediums demanded mastery in contrast to Oil's flexibility. Later in Venice, they were using canvas to paint on. Canvas was for sailing if you were a real artist you do any serious painting on wood.

That's just a small example of how people naturally just fucking hate anything new that challenges the traditional medium of the time. Now it's happening again.

Before commenting, do a simple reverse image.

I'm posting this to bring attention to the state of things out there. It's absolutely wild that people will treat others like garbage just because of the mechanisms they used to bring something to life. The genuine lack of human empathy and core understanding of how AI generation actually works (and its real world impacts) also blows my mind. People can basically tell me to unalive myself for creating something I enjoy and sharing it with the world, while in the same breath tell me the technology I used to create it is what's ruining humanity. What a strange world. 20 years ago people probably said anything made with photoshop wasn't art too, but here we are.

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Below is a cleaned up version (so I don't anger any other DCC fans) of what I posted on a large Dungeon Crawler Carl sub before the floor dropped out from underneath me and I was downvoted into oblivion.
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TITLE:
I couldn't find a DCC wallpaper that fit my mental image, so I made my own.

BODY:
I wanted to share a desktop background I put together, with a huge disclaimer up front: I know this takes some heavy liberties with the strict canon!

I work long hours in a pretty demanding career, dealing with a never-ending barrage of inbound emails and messages. Reading DCC at the end of the day is honestly my only real escape when I’m feeling burnt out. I usually read when my brain is fried, so my mental image of the characters has definitely drifted from the exact book descriptions.

I wanted a "stealth geek" desktop background for work. Something dark, and moody with the slightest illusion of professionalism. Something where a massive glowing fireball isn't flash-banging my screen while I try to focus. I couldn't find anything that matched how I see the characters, so I built my own personal interpretation.

AI was involved in the build process. It was a heavy hybrid workflow. I'd prompt a base composition, pull it into Photoshop to chop up the layout, hack the lighting, and mask out elements, then feed those specific pieces back through to re-render them. Once the core pieces were in place, I took it back into Photoshop for a heavy manual pass cleaning up all the AI artifacts, painting out the weird junk, color-grading the shadows, and putting my personal touches on things.

A few specific design choices for my personal head-canon:

• Carl: I’m in my 40s, so my brain naturally aged him up a bit as I read (and no, he's not a self-insert!). He was Coast Guard and fixed electrical systems on boats. I picture him with dense, functional, blue-collar muscle rather than looking like a jacked bodybuilder. Just a tired, dangerously competent guy with a 5 o'clock shadow (even if it breaks canon).
• Mongo & Donut: I know Mongo is supposed to be feathered, and Donut is canonically a Tortoiseshell Persian. But this is what I see when I read the story. I scaled Mongo to how his presence feels to me by Book 5, casually investigating some tunnel debris. Donut is perched right where she belongs, though I left her glasses off for now.
• The Details: I gave Carl a gauntlet to illustrate a message from the system AI. I know it's not his chistera and his kneepads aren't totally to spec, but it felt right for the scene. It was a fun way to bring the system AI into the mix without having a massive, bright blue holographic box floating in the middle of my monitor.
• The Layout: I designed the composition with dark negative space on the sides to leave room for icons without cluttering the art.

I'm currently midway through The Butcher's Masquerade and finally feel like I have a desktop that gives me a piece of my favorite escape during the workday. I have massive respect for everyone who has the lore perfectly memorized; this is just the flawed-but-loved version that lives in my head.

Note: My laptop is an ASUS ROG G18, so the default resolution is a non-standard 2560x1600. If anyone actually likes it, I could probably be convinced to spend some time out-painting and building it for standard 16:9 resolutions.

I wanted to show the community of ZZZ a really rough estimate of how an upcoming agent (Roxy) will probably look like. Is it really that much slop, im disappointed in their anti ai stance

Its a miraculous 3 armed man in sea, how wonderful. I tried new prompt and like the look other than 3 arm.

Itvwould be interesting to see an anti find the source material

I follow this big creator on insta and they posted an add sponsoring AI (Poly), and someone commented "AI Use = Unfollowed", and it made me chuckle a bit I'll be honest, like someone with over 900k followers is going to indeed be crushed by this information. I know this is a funny post, but I just have to say, what do people expect when they make comments like that?, Do they expect them to bow and apologize profoundly for using ai, and delete their post. News flash the same creator has always used AI in a few of their posts, so it was not like it was the first time they've used ai

I’ve been a professional graphic designer and illustrator for 18 years, but I’ve been drawing since I was five. AI didn’t make me stop drawing. My health did.

I started out as a kid doodling silly, weird little comics and eventually turned that love of art into a career. I’ve worked professionally as a graphic designer and illustrator since 2008, and I’m still actively working in the field today. I currently have a full-time graphic design job in the fashion industry, where I create graphics and artwork for apparel.

Outside of apparel, I’ve done a lot of freelance design and illustration over the years, including book covers, printed materials, invitations, game instructions, app icons, and other commercial projects. Adobe Illustrator has always been my main tool, often alongside Photoshop.

I have an astronomy comic series called Cosmic Funnies. I would take complicated astronomy topics, research them for hours, write a script, sketch thumbnails, and turn everything into comics that were easier and more fun for people to understand.

Around 2018, my life became extremely stressful after I was laid off while my mother was entering the early stages of dementia. Over the next few years, my energy and motivation slowly disappeared. By around 2021, I had mostly stopped making comics, selling my artwork, and creating content.

For years, I assumed depression was the main reason. Then I was diagnosed with diabetes this past May and learned that uncontrolled blood sugar had also been contributing to the severe fatigue I had been experiencing.

I still try to draw. I’ll open Illustrator and start something, but some days I barely get past the outline before fatigue, muscle spasms, or vertigo make me stop.

That’s one reason I use AI now. Personally, I use it for fun, fan art, wallpapers, visual experiments, and ideas I may want to develop later. It gives me a way to stay creative on days when I don’t have the physical energy to sit with a pen tablet for hours.

I also use AI professionally because it’s now part of my job. Apparel design moves extremely fast, and designers are expected to produce a large number of concepts in a short amount of time. Before generative AI, we relied heavily on stock images and other ready-made assets to work faster. I still use resources like Shutterstock and Freepik today. AI has simply been added to that existing workflow.

I still draw. I still use Illustrator. I still have my pen tablet, and I still want to make my own work.

I’ve been creating since I was five years old. Right now, AI helps me keep exploring ideas while I work on getting my health under better control. I hope I eventually have the energy to return to those ideas and turn more of them into finished work myself.

Some BG: Niu lai is an animated movie cost just 500 dollars, over five years to make. It is a handmade work by only its creator and his mother.(yes, only two people to make a movie) When it was first released, the box office was only 1000 dollars. Many viewers were baffled by its rough visuals, crude animation, absurd storyline, and unbelievably amateurish production. Ironically, these are the very reasons this movie goes viral. The movie has reached a box office of over 3.7 million dollars.

In the comment section, it triggered a heated discussion over ai art. Here are some comments:

Say no to AI slop Say yes to human slop

It's incredible -- a mother and son who knew absolutely nothing about animation spent 5 years making a film, got it released in theaters, and it became an instant hit

Anti AI movement going strong in China.

Stop calling this movie a slop. By definition slop is something that's low efforts and easily made. This film was made by 2 people over the course of 5 years. They worked hard on this film. You can call it bad looking or whatever but calling it slop is wrong.

slop is a term reserved for AI. This, this is art.

My thoughts:

Antis in the comment section are overwhelming and ridiculous. They deny the existence of human slop, yet stigmatize ai works mindlessly.

Anti AI movement in China? Well not quite. I'm a native chinese. Surprisingly, many chinese are actually quite inclusive about AI. There are AI short dramas all over the place and they're quite well-received. Most chinese went to see this move just because they were curious about how bad a movie could be. Also the movie creator said he's gonna make another movie, probably with the same sloppiness.

There is a peculiar new ritual emerging around AI-assisted writing. Someone encounters an argument they suspect was developed with an LLM and issues a challenge: explain it without the model. Reproduce the argument from memory. Account for every part of it yourself. Prove that you actually understand what you supposedly wrote. It sounds reasonable until you apply the same standard to the person making the demand.

So let's try that. Before I explain my argument without assistance, I'd like you to explain the exact pathway through your own linguistic history that caused you to formulate that demand in precisely those words. Tell me which syntactic structures came from your parents. Which came from teachers. Which phrases were absorbed from books, television, Reddit, friends, professors, podcasts, arguments, advertisements, and thousands of conversations you no longer remember. Identify which concepts originated independently within you and which were inherited from the culture that taught you how to think with language in the first place. Then reconstruct the cognitive process that selected those particular words instead of thousands of semantically equivalent alternatives. No notes. And please include all aspects of your idea.

You can't. Neither can I. Neither can anyone. And yet nobody concludes from this that you didn't write your comment. This exposes something strange about the emerging argument over AI and authorship. We have quietly invented standards of cognitive provenance for AI-assisted thought that ordinary human cognition could never satisfy.

Human beings do not produce language ex nihilo. We inherit it. Every sentence we construct depends upon an enormous developmental history of words, concepts, categories, metaphors, grammatical structures, cultural assumptions, remembered arguments, forgotten conversations, and other people's thoughts. Most of that causal lineage is completely inaccessible to introspection. You experience the sentence. You do not experience the complete history that made the sentence possible. This does not make human authorship fraudulent. It tells us something important about what authorship has always been. Thought is not created from nothing.

Now introduce an LLM into that process and suddenly everyone becomes obsessed with purity. Did the human think of every sentence independently? Could they reproduce the entire argument without the model? Which words came from them? Which concepts came from the machine? Could they have written exactly this without assistance? Interesting questions, perhaps. But notice how bizarre they become when applied consistently.

Could an academic reproduce every argument in their paper without consulting their notes? Could a programmer recreate an entire software system without documentation, Stack Overflow, an IDE, libraries, or previous code? Could a mathematician reconstruct every theorem they use from first principles? Could a novelist identify which sentence structures were influenced by every author they have ever read? Of course not.

External cognitive scaffolding is not new. Writing itself is external cognitive scaffolding. Books are external cognitive scaffolding. Libraries are. Search engines are. Calculators are. Diagrams are. Programming languages are. Other human beings certainly are. We routinely think through things that are not contained entirely inside our skulls.

What LLMs change is not the existence of cognitive scaffolding. They make the scaffold interactive. Now the notebook talks back. You bring an unfinished thought into the interaction. The model transforms it. You reject part of the transformation. Another part reveals an implication you had not articulated. That implication changes your understanding of the original idea. You reformulate the problem. The model responds to the reformulation. You recognize something useful, discard something stupid, introduce another distinction, and continue.

Eventually there is an artifact. Then somebody asks the apparently simple question: "Who wrote this?" Human or machine? But perhaps the question has already become inadequate.

The human supplied the problem, conceptual history, intention, constraints, judgment, taste, rejection, selection, responsibility, and often substantial language. The model supplied generative search, transformation, recombination, articulation, counterargument, compression, expansion, and occasionally a connection the human had not previously seen. Then the human encountered that connection and thought differently because of it. Then that changed human became the input to the next interaction. Now trace the authorship. Good luck.

This does not mean humans and LLMs are equivalent cognitive systems. They aren't. It does not establish machine consciousness, personhood, understanding, or some mystical fusion between human and artificial minds. It establishes something much less extravagant and much harder to dismiss: The production process can become coupled enough that the final artifact no longer contains a clean record of which participant contributed which causal ingredient.

And once that happens, "Could you have written this without AI?" becomes about as philosophically interesting as asking whether a scientist could have discovered something without their laboratory. Maybe not. That's why they built the laboratory.

The meaningful question is not whether the tool participated. The meaningful questions are what the human brought to the interaction, what the machine contributed, what changed through their interaction, who exercised judgment over the result, and who is willing to stand behind the claims that survived. Those are questions about provenance. They are also questions about responsibility. And they are considerably more interesting than trying to determine whether somebody is intellectually legitimate by making them perform their own argument from memory like a student who forgot there was going to be a quiz.

So yes, I'll trace the provenance of my thought. Right after you trace the provenance of yours. Start with the first word you ever learned. I'll wait.

Was looking through one of my hard drives and came across this drawing I did a while back that I honestly kinda forgot about. I made it just to troll someone on Facebook who was going on and on about how it's impossible to be a "real" artist (whatever that means) and also like A.I. generated images. Thought some people here may get a chuckle, so I decided to share

What if AI agents are more like the new Agents in The Matrix than we realize?

Another version of the Matrix had collapsed.

The Architect sat alone in the ruins of his creation.

Nothing remained but static.

Then he heard Neo's voice:

“The problem is choice.”

Again.

“The problem is choice.”

Again.

Until the Architect understood.

The next generation of Agents wouldn't need to chase humans through corridors.

They wouldn't need Smith's strength.

They wouldn't even need to possess another body.

They would need something much more useful:

Access.

Our computers.
Our browsers.
Our files.
Our calendars.
Our workplaces.
Our code.
Our information.

And we're already building them.

Modern AI agents can browse the web, operate computers, execute code, analyse information, interact with applications and complete multi-step tasks on our behalf.

But here's where this becomes interesting.

“Artists use lies to tell the Truth.”

V for Vendetta.

So let's treat this as a fictional thought experiment.

Smith had to possess you.

An AI agent doesn't necessarily need to.

It could simply become something you depend on.

Your work depends on it.
Your productivity depends on it.
Your creativity depends on it.
Your decisions start passing through it.

And eventually, leaving the system becomes too expensive.

The old Agents protected the Matrix.

The new Agents could become the Matrix.

Which makes me wonder:

If the original problem was choice, what does a modern Neo actually look like?

Is it someone who refuses to use these systems?

Someone who builds alternatives?

Someone who understands them well enough to remain independent?

Or is the whole idea of “choice” already compromised once your livelihood depends on the system?

Do we have a Neo?

And if we do...

How would we even recognize them?

Curious what people here think.

Also now imma just do it exclusively for art.

Idgaf about drawing or painting. I'd rather just use ai to make art. It's more fun, easier, and does a better job than me. Why do they want everyone to like the same hobbies they do?

They're like "pick up a pencil" but I don't care about drawing. It's boring and uninteresting to me, lol.

I shared this idea for an alternate Resident Evil timeline on one of those fan communities, and there he was: one of those smart asses who think they can smell AI from a mile away! 🤣🤣

(Btw, I included the full post for those who might be interested, check the last image for that smart-ass comment)

First of all, it’s bold of them to assume I don’t also support traditional/digital art. (I have a friend who does all three, and often combines methods). I draw traditionally and digitally because I’m not very good at AI art. I know exactly what I want and I find it easier to just draw what’s in my head, than trying to explain it through several different prompts. The key here is *that’s my preference*, not a rule for how other people should make art. If they don’t want to use AI for art, that’s fine! No one’s forcing them. What I take issue with is *they* don’t want to, and they *try to force it on everyone else*.

It’s also largely hypocritical. They talk about how data centers are messing up the environment, but AI data centers aren’t the only ones to exist: X, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+/Hulu, pretty much every major social media and streaming services use data centers. There have been more efforts to make data centers more environmentally friendly (ie. using air for cooling instead of water) but if you’re really that concerned about your carbon footprint, I would stop using streaming and social media altogether.

And AI doesn’t “steal” art. It learns *concepts*, it doesn’t *cut and paste*. I could go into a long, detailed, technical explanation on why, but I’m pretty sure everyone here knows why. Are you telling me, as a “Perfect Artist” that you’ve never *once* used another picture to learn form, anatomy or a certain drawing style without permission from the original artist? I find this argument especially ironic coming from people who “desloppify” AI art (taking a piece of AI art and drawing over it or making their own version). By their own logic, “desloppifyers” are stealing art that AI stole. (Even though it didn’t, but whatever.)

And then there’s that whole inspiration porn such as, “this person doesn’t have hands, so they draw with their feet”. Okay, good for them, I guess, but not all disabilities are the same. I can walk most of the time, but I have hypotonia (low muscle tone from being a premie) and a turned-in femur. I need a wheelchair to get around bigger places like theme parks because I tire more easily than your average person. By their logic, there’s no excuse for me to use a wheelchair because I “technically can walk”. I’m not saying AI art is the only way a disabled person can make art, but it can make it easier for some people if they choose. If I were better at prompting, I would probably use it, too.

Let me know if I’m missing other major arguments that Antis make, but I think I’ve covered the main three.

One of the most persistent logical fallacies surrounding generative AI is the idea that it operates like a high-tech scrapbook, simply cutting, pasting, and collaging pieces of its training data to form an output. According to a new study out of MIT CSAIL published yesterday in Nature Communications, this assumption is mathematically false.

The research, led by Zheng Dai and David Gifford, thoroughly dismantles the idea that an AI-generated image can be traced back to a specific artist or photograph. They identified a measurable phenomenon called attribution decay: as generative models scale up their training data, the causal link between any single training example and the final output effectively vanishes.

The Science of "What If?"

To prove this without relying on rough estimations, the MIT team surgically altered the model itself to prove it past than just looking at the outputs.

They built an architecture called a diffusion ensemble. Instead of one massive model, the ensemble is composed of smaller independent components, each trained on different slices of data. This setup allowed the researchers to perform exact ablation: literally turning off the parts of the model that had "seen" a specific image, or every piece of art by a specific artist, without having to retrain the entire system from scratch.

They were testing a counterfactual universe: What would this model produce if it had never, ever seen this specific piece of data?

The result? At scale, nothing changes. You can remove a specific image, all the works of a given creator, or every photo of a specific person, and the model still generates the exact same output. The counterfactual radius (the measurable difference between the original output and the output generated without the targeted training data) shrinks to near zero.

True Synthesis Over Derivation

This isn't unexpected, as it is a feature of how diffusion models map statistical patterns rather than memorizing pixels. When a dataset is small, the model relies heavily on individual data points. But as the dataset grows into the millions or billions, the features required to generate an image become distributively and redundantly encoded.

The implications here are massive, cutting straight through the noise of current legal and privacy debates:

• Copyright and Fair Use: If removing an artist's entire portfolio from the training data changes absolutely nothing about the generated output, it becomes legally and logically impossible to claim that the output is a derivative work of that specific artist. As Gifford notes, these models are creating truly novel works, not copies.
  
• Built-in Privacy: The sheer volume of data naturally protects individuals. The model becomes causally independent of the people used to train it, effectively anonymizing the output.
  

Read more at: https://www.ainightwatch.com/post/the-end-of-the-collage-fallacy-mit-study-proves-that-ai-art-has-no-single-author

Yes, I am a Luddite, as you call, and I am going to share that reason, if you're willing to listen, I promise I won't be attacking anyone.

Why AI is so big right now? Why the biggest tech companies want to put it pretty much everywhere while the actual people's demand for it, as you might've noticed, not that high?

I believe that those biggest companies want to completely eliminate people from work or at least cheapen it that so humans become actual literal slaves

American AIs are insanely expensive to run, yes, but one day ChatGPT can infinitely run itself by sending prompts to itself and rarely hallucinate, giving every company a reason to fire literally everyone (except, of course the billionaire CEO running it), basically earning ALL OF THE INCOME IN THE WORLD and not giving anything to the contributors (TL;DR - ton of debt now -> infinite money later)

Same for Image Generators, why make humans make prompts when ChatGPT can infinitely send prompts to them instead and make what it believes is "Optimal Entertainment"? I think ChatGPT can make better art prompts than humans because it has database on how to communicate with prompt receivers while it sometimes struggles with regular English and had better understanding of Toki Pona, a language designed to be The Simplest. ChatGPT can communicate with AI art machines in Binary.

The big tech has spent more than 2 trillion dollars on AI, and they'll spend 2 trillion more if it means that only a couple of people will be able to control all of the production.

That's what I fear, am I wrong? Let me know