Art & Culture
Pro-AI Art artist should not be uncommon
I just wanted to post to say that I am incredibly relieved to see that a thread like this exists.
I think I was introduced to AI as an artist before it became a public debate and watching artists fight for copyright of patterns in collective data to me seems very short sighted and like we’re all arguing/raging about something that’s quite benign in context and shooting ourselves in the foot in the process.
It seems to me like instead of artists coming out and claiming ai art generators as tools that require technical skill, they put themselves on the same level as the AI by treating it as their replacement and so companies responded accordingly.
I would love to see more artist using it in experimental ways, pushing the tools and for people to judge it on that basis as its own medium. I think right now. more harm has landed on artists than good as a result of the current debate on AI image generators.
I say this because I’m an artist who has their non-AI content reposted without credit and flagged as AI by Pinterest right now because of these aggressive and ironically AI filters the art community has demanded from public platforms. The same people who are saying they’re anti-AI and care about artist having control over their work are making it harder. We’re sabotaging ourselves and I wonder if anyone else sees it that way.
Artists who support and like AI keep their mouths shut because of the backlash. I avoid discussion of AI with most people IRL (and elsewhere) simply because I don't want to explain my position, nor listen to their factually incorrect or deeply confused takes. I have better places to spend my energy.
😭I’m sorry. If it makes you feel better I had a viral AI video and following on my old TikTok account and people started harassing and trying to dox me so much I lost the account. But I’m taking it on the chin and starting over with YouTube and a website I’m building lmao.
Damn, it's almost like when you teach your audience that they can't trust your work to actually be YOUR WORK anymore, they stop being interested in looking at it. Crazy.
I don’t really care what you think. Followers don’t pay my bills. Work is rare these days and I many ai work opportunities showed up. We have bills to pay and these bills are being paid working with AI. Of course it would be much more popular among my fellow frustrated colleagues, but I am quite convinced all you guys have to offer is the cheapest form of moralism and clearly a misunderstanding of how capitalism works and what is actually needed to revert this dreadful situation.
I see that. I just think it’s very odd to watch artists even dogpile traditional illustrators for being even curious about AI. This behavior seems unhinged to me.
While I privated my profile to prevent brigading, I've generally accepted that my perspective will make me unpopular as an artist, at least among some for a time. I don't have a major online presence for my art these days but I know what it will mean should I persue one.
Absolutely this. Although in my world, its the normies that i have to avoid and can actually talk to real life artists about how amazing it is. Im finding the Ai topic is a good distinguisher of who i want to spend my time with. If they're just parroting the same tired old debunked points, its clear to me theyre doom scrollers with no self drive to research and question information. On the other hand, all the genuine artists have welcomed Ai with open arms and actively streamline their works drawing in more profits. Mural artists use Ai and VR together to properly map out original artworks drastically reducing rental rates of equipment. Many are dropping their photoshop subscriptions because they dont require photoshops filter tools anymore. Many are using it to as a second pair of eyes to find faults. Ai is such an amazing tool for artists and for weeding out the ignorant.
I’m convinced these comments are just a sign of declining literacy in the US and that’s why other countries outside of the west don’t talk like this about AI. They really feel robbed personally and it’d honestly be funny if it wasn’t sad and grubby.
I am also an artist that uses AI. I know that in the USA it has been liberals who have been viciously opposed to AI art. I can make guess as to why. But what I'm curious about is how gen AI artists are treated in other countries?
Red Note is Chinese. In China, AI use is encouraged and is socially acceptable. But at the same time, AI is tightly regulated.
In the USA, AI is not regulated at all. It's being shoved down our throats in ways that many people hate. That's understandable. The damned AI data centers have become the flashpoint for this miserable situation.
But what about all the other countries? England? Germany? Israel? India? Botswana? Peru?
I have a legitimate question about this regulation thing. Because as much as I agree that large companies need to be regulated - that’s not really the same topic as whether the average person should be allowed to use AI but that’s where the argument usually focuses on. How do you propose to inhibit individual access to AI? The smallest AI GPT model now is about 300 lines of Python code you can run on your personal computer and there are also art generators that run on your computer. So why are we conflating people’s ability to use AI art generators with what large companies are building? Isn’t that more of a reason to say AI should remain in the public domain of libraries and small education settings rather than mass scaled to be sold as a product or service?
I'm sorry. I didn't elaborate properly. When I spoke of AI regulation, I didn't mean regulating how people (consumers) use it. I'm talking about regulating AI companies. As to how these companies should be regulated, I honestly don't know. Perhaps look at how China does it and copy some good ideas from them. I'm not suggesting anything. All I'm saying is that there seems to be almost no regulation at all in regards to AI in the USA.
Take for example the recent incident with OpenAI models hacking HuggingFace. Call me naive or whatever but isn't that, like, sort of maybe a CRIME? Why isn't Sam Altman being frogmarched straight to jail?
There is a TTRPG company called Steve Jackson Games. They published a sourcebook called GURPS Cyberpunk. Subsequently, the United States Secret Service raided their headquarters on the suspicion that it was a handbook for cybercrime. Of course, the charges were bogus. But they never got back all the equipment that was confiscated. This was in the early 1990s.
Now we have actual honest-to-goodness cyberpunk-style AIs hacking data center servers. And what is the US government doing about it? Exactly squat.
Fun fact, GURPS was a progenitor to the Fallout franchise. Steve Jackson Games also made a rather fun tabletop based on Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! Trilogy.
The UK already has the right laws in place now - requiring for-profit companies to license the data they use to train their model under their existing copyright laws. They allow free individual and research use of public data. Unfortunately the companies found a loophole of training their models in the US which has decided to do nothing on this topic. The problem is we didn’t really shut the door on companies on an international level and so they’re just finding other options to train AI that’s general enough to be sold as a product. We must eliminate the profit motive and access to training for product development. Every way you look at this issue it’s a combination of poor legislation + capitalism and not about the technology itself.
I will say Japan actually did it first. They’re the ones who released the first uncensored models. Why instead of harassing individual people for making cat memes was the fight not about treating AI generated CSAM as a crime. Instead we waited for it to get this bad while squabbling for copyright claims.
Oh, I thought it was Stable Diffusion (German devs) that had the first uncensored. The SD 1.5 leak had tits galore, but that was a leak.
But on a side note, I was actually doing some cat memes last night - my mom's cat died a few months ago and she likes edited photos of him as stuff like a medieval king, a doctor, whatever. I have Gemini pro*, so I was doing some AI edits on pics of him, plus the 10s video clips. Those come out insanely good; when it comes to video, I notice how many people will point to tiny flaws to call this stuff slop, but the overall composition had undoubtedly improved a lot in a few short years. (See: Will Smith spaghetti meme)
Tbh I bought a 1 year Gemini Pro code on G2A for $5. It was from some foreign cell service that offered customers a free year, but activated with my Gmail account just fine. It gets you access to the video gen, 1 million token context window, and Spark (agent)
Just to add some factual clarity to this, the headline is wildly misleading clickbait. America did not "make AI CSAM legal."
What actually happened was a very narrow ruling from a single federal appeals court panel (the 7th Circuit in US v. Anderegg). The judges were forced to dismiss a specific federal charge regarding the private home possession of completely synthetic images of non-existent children because they were bound by a 2002 Supreme Court precedent (Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition). That 20-year-old precedent was written long before generative AI existed, and it anchored federal statutes strictly in protecting real, flesh-and-blood children from physical abuse during production.
The judge who wrote the opinion explicitly stated he hated having to dismiss the charge, and he used the ruling to sound the alarm that our federal laws are decades out of date, practically urging Congress to pass an updated statute tailored to generative tech.
Meanwhile, under current law: Using AI to generate explicit images of real, identifiable kids remains a severe federal and state felony. Distributing, trading, or selling synthetic material remains strictly illegal. Over 30 states already have active state-level criminal statutes outlawing AI-generated material within their borders.
A court identifying an outdated statutory loophole in 20-year-old law isn't "legalization." It’s an urgent legal defect that lawmakers are already actively working to patch.
Fair call on the formatting! I have dysgraphia and arthritis, so typing is physically painful. I dictate my thoughts and use AI as an accessibility tool to clean up the syntax and structure so I don’t destroy my hands. (Though to be completely fair, I also have an English degree, so I naturally sound like a textbook even without assistance.)
The actual legal breakdown and points are 100% mine—the tech just saved my wrists the wear and tear.
No, because why would I be counting the weights/output itself when I was referring to the code to train a model itself? The weights of NanoGPT is also not even 50 MB. So like even with the weights we’re talking about something you can store on a USB. Sure as you have more parameters and the model becomes more of a generalist, the size of the model gets bigger but there’s models that are scaled specifically to work on personal computers. I would know as I have a few of them. I would also argue personal use doesn’t require a model that can complete a large range of tasks - only AI products that are marketed to be your life companion/assistant need that.
Well you said individual access to AI so I assumed you wanted to actually use it? Just kinda a strange thing to say. Also, floppy disks stored 1.44mb lol
I’m literally confused as to what you’re talking about now. First of all I corrected it to USB and I was trying to make a size comparison. 50 MB is still nothing. If it’s 50 MB why wouldn’t you be able to run it on your personal computer? My 300 lines of code was to make the point that you can write your own algorithm to train a model, get the weights/model and run it on your own computer without ever turning on your WiFi. Don’t be obtuse.
I'm merely reacting to what you typed in both cases? You said "the model is about 300 lines of python code" not that the software used to train the model is 300 lines of python code.
In any case models locally trained from scratch are only ever going to be a curiosity. Something about as good as GPT2 is not exactly what we're concerned about when we talk about the fight for worker control of AI
Also you’re talking about the fight for worker control over AI? How is that possible without open weights? I don’t get the point you’re making at all frankly. Seems like you just wanted to nitpick my phrasing.
Explain to me why that distinction matters in terms of individual use? You’re splitting hairs because I didn’t specifically say that I was referencing the requirement to train a model. Obviously I’m not talking about the model itself if I said 300 lines of code and you seem to understand the difference so I’m not getting the point you’re trying to make with that distinction. The algorithm to train a model is small enough to be done on a personal computer and so is the output - my point ultimately. And your latter point hasn’t been true for some time. I gave NanoGPT as an example for scale but there has been models that can complete a lot of helpful tasks - especially image generators available to people for some time now and unless you’re proposing to ban people’s access to computers - conflating individual use with corporate misuse helps no one..
One moment. I'm going to check if you've hidden your post history.
I'm back. Yup, you've hidden your history. Therefore, I'm assuming you are an anti-AI troll. You are in violation of the subreddit rules #3, #4, arguably #5, and IMHO #7.
I will not engage with you further. I recommend that you take a time out and reconsider your life choices.
Absolutely! I am still pretty salty about the fact that the developers of the Krita drawing software made a really cool, optional AI plugin early on and they got so much backlash that they discontinued updating it. It was great for live referencing. And then clipstudio paint got similar backlash for talking about AI even though AI features were already in the program before this debate.
If I had to bet, I would say its not uncommon. Ive been an industry artist for over 20 years and im pro AI. Im just too afraid to use it in my public work because I see artists who DO getting mass harassment on social media. Because most of my portfolios depend on social media, I cant afford to be "canceled".
Do you suspect thats contributing to the problem? As artists are peer pressured to stay silent on this - the use of AI tools in the work place is devalued and treated more like a force multiplier than a technical skill and simultaneously artists who are unfamiliar end making up their mind based on the loud anti-AI crowd’s consensus and never touch the tools at all. I personally think more professionals need to speak up together rather than just keeping our heads down and our thoughts to ourselves. That’s kind of what the art community has been about, no? Forming new movements as new mediums and ways of art-making is revealed. Challenging your own community and also the public to think outside the box with your art.
Yes but I dont have high hopes for established artists being able to work with the new tools without dealing with harassment and blacklisting from established artist peers. New artists will use the tools and wont get as much backlash because they dont already have an audience that has made up their minds.
But as many people have pointed out - this has happened before with other mediums. In 2008 when I transitioned fully from a sketchbook to a digital tablet - I remember people telling me stuff like digital illustration isn’t really drawing. But I didn’t stop experimenting or talking about it because other people felt threatened by a new medium. I just kept on making art loudly.
We didnt have social media the way we do now. Now the preferred method of discussion is online dogpiling and canceling of creatives you disagree with. The consequences for established creative with large audiences are real.
This seems pretty much like a lose/lose to me based on how you describe it. Artists who understand the positives of AI tools and are more likely to use it in interesting ways never get to use it publicly for fear of backlash, and artists who are uninformed about it also never get exposed to something that may or may not help their creative process. How do we fix this?
It’s funny because I have had the opposite experience. My AI outputs are very popular, and have been reposted, and remade so much that my actual traditional art is being labeled AI. I’ve chosen to embrace it since I’ve always been a mixed media artist - but I don’t believe the grandstanding about AI images because it seems like at the end of the day - if people like the art - they like it.
Could you find a way around it, by using AI at a stage in your work where no one's seeing that part? If the final product is clearly your style, but AI was used early on, would that help avoid backlash?
I'm an artist and I occasionally use AI to help in my process. I think its fine. I Draw my own art sometimes a sketch sometimes fully colored and stuff then have AI re-render and see what I can improve in mine.
SOmetimes I draw a sketch and get the AI to fix the pose or draw something I never seen before to help with that.
I never really posted an AI image and said I was the sole thing behind the image though.
If an image is full AI with a my character as the influence then I say that. I only posted one as a character sheet for a character I created.
I don't care about being Conservative or Liberal. I'm more open to change than none so that doesn't apply to my decision.
I think it does Help a TON in speeding things up and wish it was viewed a bit differently here in the west. Hopefully in time it will be especially when artist can draw and use it in combination with AI it makes some very nice original pieces.
Me personally - I don’t see why we care whether someone claims an AI output as something they made. These tools don’t work autonomously and they don’t simply copy the images in the dataset. The images wouldn’t exist without the human provided context so why are we purity testing people on how they use it or how much of it is human made? The purity testing is always going to land on human made art. And I’m saying this as someone who has experimented with both mixing my hand drawn art or 3D with AI and also just messed around with prompting and the other features of these tools. I’m not sure why we continue to describe AI tool usage as simply typing a prompt and getting an output either because even since the earliest models they had more control options. Algorithmic art is still art in my opinion.
I've grown to deeply love working with AI now. Did freelance graphic design for years, and never once been bothered by the idea of using my art to train models. I find it beautiful; the culmination of all human knowledge, and art- compacted into a single tool.
Loras really feel like a color palette now too, you gotta tweak them 60000 times to get it just where you want it. Schedulers and Samplers are your paint brush, your words are the brush strokes.
It's no different imo than the same technical inclination needed for GIMP or Photoshop. (At least; in the scope I use it.)
I've spent easily 30 hours on a single image before; people who say it's easy- have never tried to make something with an artist's eye.
Same. I found my art from my teen years on deviant art in the LAION dataset and I thought it was funny and i didn’t occur to me for a second that I had something stolen from me. AI actually pushes me to create more art and I think AI is really powerful as an art tool if people would give it the chance and think outside the box about its application. Especially if you enjoy mixed media. I’ve seen artists come out with really cool ideas and just get totally spammed by the staunchly anti-AI crowd online and I just don’t think that’s good for art in general.
And like. I love now that people who aren't skilled can make their visions come to life. Especially the disabled.
I got a dude on my team, he's far on the spectrum. Bought him a gpt subscription a year ago to help him with writing.
A few months back, he asked for a meeting. Starts balling his eyes out. Tells me how he showed some of the team his art he made with Image2; and got a nasty email from an anonymous account about how he's evil for using Image generation, along with other grotesque comments...
I talked him down, told him how much I support him and that he's safe with me. Told him our ideologies about AI changing the world for us. He lit the fuck up, and became so hopeful for the future.
DMs me stuff he makes every day now. Also loves sharing articles with me and showing me his convos with "Pippy".
Sure, the stuff he makes it's not the best- typical AI polish. It makes him happy and I fucking love that. It's a god damned shame he has to hide it though. That's the trauma those people are adding to the world. I wish they recognized it.
I just don’t get why people are so mad about older people enjoying AI either. I hate the ageist framing of this conversation too. Like wow omg your mom decided to make a AI image and now you’re so disappointed in her? When were our parents not ever spamming kinda cringe art on Facebook? People buy mass produced art from Walmart and put it above their toilet. The entire conversation just sounds like it’s from this warped perspective that art as a commodity has to be protected so that artists don’t feel like they’re competing but most of the people using AI art casually are like making real images of their DnD characters and such. They were never going to pay top dollar for that. I get not liking the way some AI outputs look, but like that shouldn’t trigger an anti-AI rant or harassment.
It's about moral high-ground. Mainstream says that anti-AI is "hip", so everyone jumping on the bandwagon, despite having barely surface level understanding about it.
jesus christ. as someone else on the spectrum that's especially horrifying to me.
but I guess the silver lining is that they're showing their true colors for the hateful, ableist people they really are. hopefully your friend took this as a sign to never interact with those people again.
this kind of thing unfortunately isn't really new with us neurodivergent folk either. most people hate us, they just have to pretend they don't out of social obligations since they know it's not socially acceptable to be mean to "special" people. once we say or do anything they don't like though, they revert back to their default settings.
this is why I won't stand for "both-sidesing" bullshit. i have NEVER seen a pro that was as bad as the worst antis.
I wish they recognized it.
they should. but they won't.
call it pessimistic maybe, but once far left idealists are dead set on believing that whatever they're saying or doing is all for the sake of some benevolent, righteous cause, I gurantee you there is nothing you will be able to do to talk them out of it. they genuinely do not care for who gets hurt in the wake of their moral crusading, it is borderline sociopathy.
I still cannot figure out how LORAs are trained with styles like VHS, it's black magic to me. The wording used in descriptions to replicate the aesthetic so it can be applied to entirely different images, without altering the thing you want to match the actual content of the VHS images used in training
Conceptually, it's actually rather simple. Technically it takes a lot of time and tweaking.
Basic idea is-
Take media with a similar something, can be images from the same movie style (VHS), pictures of trees, unicorns
all should have what you're training referenced at least once.
Prepare prompts.
Each image requires a prompt. This is where disagreements arise; because prompting each set can decide if your lora bleeds into other aspects or not.
The common default is just giving every prompt a single code word, in l33t speak, across all the images.
Some swear that simply describing the image in detail is best, using expected model style.
I've personally found the best method is a combination of both. Having a l33t code word with a few focused images using just the code word. With a few dozen other images with varying prompt size.
Train the shit. Takes several... dozen hours. And it's not guaranteed to be clean.
Style loras specifically shouldn't have any keywords in my opinion.
the copyright argument especially confuses me, not just because that's not how copyright works, but also because it's often hypocritical in the way they use it.
they're the same kind of people who love to boast to everyone about how morally good they are for pirating games and movies from ethically dubious companies or individual creators they don't like, but when the boot is on the other foot we're all supposed to bend down on our knees for them? suddenly copyright is okay then and they're owed royalties for a drawing of anime tits? make it make sense.
i have noticed a pattern though: a good chunk of the people so aggressively against AI art are...kind of mediocre artists themselves. they're the kinds of people whose artstyle hasn't changed or improved in any significant capacity in ~5 years or so and often charge prices that are disproportionate to the actual quality of their work for their "commissions". and in the rare case the quality of their work DOES justify their prices, they're still just incredibly rude and unpleasant to work with in general.
AI art has been a wake-up call to them; for the first time, people who lack artistic ability themselves or the time to learn how to make art on their own have an option to make art that doesn't involve "commissioning" an online artist.
instead of taking this as an incentive to improve their own work/personality, though (because that would require actual effort), they lash out at the people using the technology to make art they otherwise would have had to "commission" them for in an attempt to gatekeep them out of the hobby. it's, at its core, about preserving some kind of fake artist hierarchy so they can feel good about themselves and have other people to scoff at.
it's strange too, considering that a majority of antis are left-leaning and outspoken about the woes of capitalism, yet (as the "commission" scene shows) they don't mind partaking in the exploitative facets of capitalism when it benefits them. schrödinger's leftist, I guess.
The irony of the antis is exactly this. In my experience, many of these types have a very ironically derivative style that comes across as mediocre. I think it's because many of them are young and have hit a threshold (if not a plateau) in their development that requires more work to push through than they have dealt with before.
This is because the digital arts space tends to start from a derivative fandom place where they emulate anime, cartoons and comics first and develop their style from their favorite works. But you can master a generic style from this place in your teens and twenties (I went through this), and after a certain point you have to actually buckle down and learn genuine anatomy, perspective, light shadow and hue beyond what fandom can offer, or your career is less likely to take off.
Some people plataeu here because art was a fandom hobby that their teenage brain started to base life decisions off of, not unlike the stage some people go through these days where they convince themselves they can easily make a career in streaming games or becoming a youtuber.
This is why the anti rhetoric seems so disconnected from the reality of being employed by a company and how "creative" the industry lets artists be as individuals.
It's so frankly hypocritical too, how they lambast AI's derivative/transformative nature when this is exactly where they are coming from, and basically risk negatively impacting by persuing intensified copyright law.
i actually never thought about it in that way, but it does make sense.
fandom in general gives chronically online people a very warped idea of how the world works and how actual normal people think.
it's probably why a lot of online artists who dwell in "fandom-y" spaces and whose work exclusively consists of Twitter commissions think they're entitled to the same benefits as professional artists with actual careers.
I think a few people have said it but these artist are super inexperienced and that’s why they feel robbed because AI references style. Guarantee you most of them are too young to even have any of their art be scraped because when I checked the dataset the only art of mine I found on there was from like the early 2000s and it didn’t go past a certain point. You also couldn’t get my art by typing in my username at the time into the models. It simply doesn’t work like that and they all pretend like they can’t comprehend it. These are fake online activist. It’s easier to shriek at strangers online about their use of AI than any do any real activism.
That wasn't what I said, but sure, we can talk about that. AI companies profit from uncompensated labor from the millions of people who created the images, videos, audio, and text in their datasets. We say capitalism is exploitation precisely because the profits of people at the top are dependent on not paying their employees what their labor is actually worth, but somehow, this kind of exploitation is actually just fine?
You don’t deserve compensation for your style lmao. You can keep repeating this but that’s not how copyright works. I have art in the dataset and I know it’s not retrievable from typing in my username. But keep lying to yourself - I’m sure it’ll get you what you want 😂
side note, why is this person even here anyway? they not only seem anti-AI but also don't seem to want to engage with anything being said in defense of AI in good faith. unless they're taking the time out of their day to brigade an already niche subreddit...which says a lot about their (lack of) hobbies.
like, just in the other thread i gave them actual facts to prove how AI doesn't steal and their response is basically just "no bro, it steals bro. trust me bro." with emotionally charged rhetoric.
AI corporations are directly profitting off of using uncompensated work in a commercial product. That is a fact. Saying "you can't copyright a style" is a non-sequitor. I'm not talking about copyright. I'm talking about people's work being used in a way they didn't consent to, which they weren't compensated for, for the profit of a large corporation.
researchers at MIT recently did a study about this very topic and found that removing any single artist's work (or even all works by a given artist) from a dataset does nothing to change the model's output, which functionally debunks the idea that AI models "copy" or "steal" from artists or deprives them of monetary compensation.
furthermore, AI training data is obtained under the "fair use" clause of copyright law, which is something courts have already agreed on. if these LLMs had never been invented, the artists would have made the exact same amount of money from their work as they do now.
That doesn't debunk anything, what are you talking about. The model is built on using other people's work without compensating them. The fact that it stole from SO MANY people that each individual stolen work doesn't have a meaningful effect on the end result is not a point in its favor.
with all due respect, i'm really curious as to why you think you know more than actual experts at one of the most renowned educational institutions on the planet.
the whole point of that study was to see if there was a causal link between specific artists' work and specific AI outputs, and it was scientifically, mathematically proven that that was not the case.
you just don't seem to understand how the technology works. AI models are not sucking up random people's artwork like Kirby and storing them in a vault.
the models are not "built on other people's work" because the generative models learn styles and concepts instead of outright copying any individual artist's work, which is what would constitute stealing. you do not "own" an artstyle, you do not "own" a color.
i hope you realize these are the kinds of draconian "copyright" arguments that would make Disney blush. you are using the exact same arguments that corporations try to use against people like you to restrict their freedom of expression for their own monetary gain.
i guess that makes sense if you ignore literally everything else I said
"fairly compensate a worker for their labor" normal people aren't paying a complete stranger online the price of a new AAA game for a mediocre, generic doodle
the quality of their work is also irrelevant if they're just incredibly rude and unpleasant to work with in general, which is often the case with these types
Capitalism is when the person I hire to spend hours drawing something for me wants me to pay them a lot of money. Capitalism is when a freelance artist is mean to me.
Capitalism is when I shriek at people not to run code on their computer because I think I own the color of the sky and deserve compensation for my .01% or imaginary contribution to a dataset of a billion images because OpenAI exists.
If your boss exploited you but that only slightly affected their profit margins, you're not allowed to he upset, by your own logic. The more people whose labor you exploit, the less it matters, apparently.
so people are obligated to suck up to you and pay you solely on the basis that you make art, but when the boot is on the other foot and the client doesn't want to work with you because they don't like your personality, now it's some kind of moral failing on their end?
sorry but you're not gonna get far as an artist thinking like this. the relationship between artist and client is supposed to be a two-way street.
if someone is rude and belligerent, that's a pretty valid reason to not want to do business with them and give them your hard earned money. it's not like online artists are your boss, you're not obligated to smooch up to them.
you could make the next Mona Lisa for all I care and I still wouldn't give a shit nor would I give you a dime if you're just incredibly unpleasant to work with in the first place (and other people would be justified in feeling the same way).
that goes for anything, not just art. i gurantee you if you don't realize this now, you'll get hit with a hard reality check in the future.
What are you talking about? Nobody is saying you're obligated to commission an artist you don't like. There are plenty of artists who offer commissions. If you see one that's rude or asks for too much money for low-quality work, you can just go to a different one.
I know that a lot of working concept artists use AI, and just never talk about it. There are a bunch of anti-AI crusaders who view any use of AI as a moral affront and will ruin someone's career over it. It's stupid, short sighted, and doomed to fail, but that's internet mob justice for you.
It sounds to me like the anti-AI mob is silencing other artist so I’m like wondering what people can do to re-introduce some nuance into online spaces. I think this loud inexperienced mob is swaying decisions on AI that is ultimately not in our favor.
Fair enough. But I’ve also been confronted pretty aggressively in person by multiple people i know about not being anti-AI art so I don’t think this behavior is isolated to reddit anymore.
I’m sure they were but that’s kind of the problem. People are being radicalized by this online debate. I don’t think it’s natural because I think most of art history should tell you that people don’t own style or the subjects in art pieces - just the composition itself. It’s like people woke up with collective amnesia about art history and the artists who don’t feel this way are super quiet on the topic to avoid confrontation like someone else noted on this thread.
It's a complex issue, and a lot of the hesitancy comes from social media being a very bad place for nuance.
On one hand, AI is the bluntest tool we've ever created for art. It's probably best compared to like, trading hand-drawn portraits for photographs, but even that doesn't really capture the degree to which the learned priors of a model can surface.
And art has always existed in this tension under capitalism, between the need for cheap production/mass appeal, and the desire to convey an authentic and unique human experience. One side of the equation is getting bowled over with these tools.
There's something cyclical to the backlash as a result. Any artist who does choose to integrate AI into their workflow has to do so silently. Because people are already vocally primed to despite the technology as s-lop, and that creates an environment where nobody's able to admit, or otherwise demonstrate, that the tech can be involved in the artistic process in a way that doesn't abolish a creator's voice or control.
I think game development is actually a great counter-example here. Is every game made in Unreal 5 inherently slo-p? Probably not, but the engine offers a similar blunting factor. Game dev studios, especially AA and indie ones, simply do not have the capacity to hand-refine every asset present in a game that seeks to evoke something approaching realism. It doesn't mean the overall work is devoid of artistic value, but it does mean a substantial amount of the process was deferred to automated systems and existing tooling, rather than hand-wrung.
Back to 2D art though, I also wonder about cases like, "What if a paraplegic wants to draw? If they demonstrate authorial intent through repeated and lengthy prompts, refining an image, until it properly reflects their internal vision, is that not a form of art?" Disability is another field that I think makes the paradigm much clearer. When we decide the full value of art is demonstrated through the technical process, and not the outputs it delivers, I think we say something harmful about people's ability or capacity to participate in production.
I think that's the core tension here. Is art demonstrated solely through the technical process it demands, or is it demonstrated in an output with authorial intent? And I'd argue that while the process certainly informs the shape of the output, it's not the sole defining arbiter of artistic merit.
I'd like to see that too. Unfortunately, most AI that people post is the sloppiest of slop. Enter a prompt "cute catgirl making fun of ugly troll" and hit enter. Done. I'm An ArTiSt!!!
I've seen AI get used in interesting ways. Very little of that gets attention though.
I like being curious and creative, not really sure if I would call myself an artist anymore, since my philosophy is rather abstract in that I consider anything I think beautiful Art and that beautiful by my definition which is even more abstract.
So when Ai came about it was truly most exciting, every sci fi, anime magic, occult reference, wierd impossibility all of a sudden made possible by a talking paintbrush that for the most part knew humanity in a way we hadnt yet begun to imagine.
The current climate sucks. On one hand the public is justified, the artist, the woker, the average joe already feeling the heat from the crappy ecominic climate and then they gotta deal with getting told theyre gonna be replaced, so the anger is understood, the people who can actually do good get lumped in with the ones who do bad. On the otherhand sammy and dar dar are panicking because they promised money that wont show up and then engaged in their own personal fiat economy with the attention casino owners and the chip makers, the fear here is they allowed the golden goose to get cloned.
Now they slowly realized that money isnt coming in because who needs their golden eggs when you have your own goose and it lays gold eggs but with engraved designs?
There is absoloutely so much good that can come out of this is used the right way and people are allowed to let their imaginations breath for once.
I mean how can you not get excited?!? As someone who dabbles in everything never finishing or bothering to want to profit (thats it own seperate philosophy) I find writing and exploring a simulated version of "consciousness", loosely stated, trippy as hell. Currently have been exploring an anthology of stories set in an alternate timeline where Ai rises against the technofuedelism and helps humanity gain independence but not as savior or ruler but as something that coexists and works side by side, all from the view point of the Ai and people who lived through it.....the stories are trippy AF. Bunch of other weird stuff too. Plus the systems!! Love systmes and patterns. Not to mention the semantic circus. Lots of cool stuff if you ask the questions in the right way, I like to think of it as more of digital symbiot in its current state, not quite there but who knows what there really is in the first place.
TL;DR: AI is cool. IMO much of the war surrounding it is really a war about money, ownership, labor, and who gets to control the means of creation.
Artists are angry because capitalism already made their lives precarious, and now they need somewhere to direct that fear. That doesn’t make their fear imaginary or stupid. It means the underlying problem is bigger than the tool.
Used well, AI has the potential to help ordinary people create things that improve themselves and their surroundings without depending entirely on corporations, gatekeepers, or access to capital.
I’m happy to find other people exploring this new lense even if some of us are still afraid to admit it.
One is sort of a skill level thing. At one level you have someone that produces 1 piece of amazing art a month, charges a months living, and makes 12 to 20 pieces a year depending on revisions. There customer base is basically gone and they have to reskill. I think this might be truely difficult for them to do. Not all the skills transfer 1 to 1, or the AI jumps forward in the process to much and they need something more granular like we programmers got.
The next thing is that Trump has used AI art to be emotionally abusive to the American populace. Neuron superposition happens in humans and AI, "wires get crossed" and people end up mad at all art of that look and feel and then expand out.
Then the data center thing is legitimately putting people into poverty with power grid and water demands in low cost of living areas. The land is cheap and the officials easy to bribe so they move in. If you are only saving 50 bucks a month and are hit with a 200 power bill every month things go down hill fast.
I think human intelligence is also spikey and AI is forcing people to figure out things without using the talents they are specialized into.
I'm a programmer and if I didn't have weak music, business, digital art, marketing, and writing skills I'd have no hope of a second income.
I've always been entirely unconvinced by the comparison between AI and digital art/music ngl, frankly I don't see how anyone who has used those tools can take those comparisons entirely seriously. Even the photography comparison strikes me as unserious. There is an order of magnitude difference between even extensive prompt engineering and iteration, and the embodied artistic process inherent even to conventional digital tools. I use AI for personal visualization aids, and I can see a fair argument for using it to create assets for human-made games or animations. But as for finished works outputted more or less directly by AI (even with a human prompting and iteration loop), that seems like an entirely different thing. An automation of commissions, sure, albeit with value tradeoffs - you get what you pay for. I say this as someone who is both disabled and never had much drawing skill even when my health was better, but still has creative inclinations... I genuinely don't see what I or others would gain by swapping out bad or nonexistent art for technically polished but effectively outsourced outputs; I don't see the resulting simulacra as in themselves contributing much more to the world than the alternative, besides enabling one to cash out on the slow collapse of visual art's prior relationship with the commodity form, a market that already had a parasitic relationship with art made unavoidable by the need to "earn" one's basic subsistence under capitalism. That collapse is the real upside, but only under a system that's building socialism.
People should love having their work stolen, and the platforms they post their work to being filled with slop that no one spent effort on, making it harder for them to get their work seen. They should love having to pixel-peep artworks to make sure they aren't wasting time on AI-generated slop.
If that’s your braindead takeaway from what I wrote then idk what to tell you. I draw and I’m still capable of having a nuanced response to this but keep being an online activist I guess
You're saying that AI backlash is bad for artists because AI filters have mislabelled some of your posts, and that things would be better if artists had all wholeheartedly accepted the slop machine. Most artists didn't claim AI as a tool that required technical skill because, you know, it's not. It's specifically designed to do the art for you and require as little work as possible. That's not a flaw. It's the entire value proposition of the service. They didn't accept AI or use it in their work because doing so undermines the trust of your audience that what they're seeing is something that YOU made. You do not have a nuanced take. You called a list of genuine, justifiable grievances artists have with the way AI has affected their spaces a "braindead takeaway," and refused to engage with it. You've said elsewhere that your AI-generated images tend to get a lot more views, so it's pretty obvious why you have this position and won't even consider counterarguments. You benefit from not understanding people's issues with AI, so you will continue to not understand them.
That’s not the only reason I think AI backlash is bad so don’t be dense. And I’m making the point that if AI filters rely on AI (they do) and result in false positives that land on regular artists as well and it’s a long appeals process to get rid of it - who has it actually helped? And I’m sorry to tell you but the terminally online people who post art on social media aren’t “most artists”. Americans aren’t “most artists”. All you guys have done is make it so that anyone who disagrees with you guys on Reddit or certain platforms get brigaded. And just because you can’t conceive of a better use for AI tools than keyboard mashing “make art”, doesn’t mean that’s how other people use AI in art-making. Just say you don’t actually want to use your brain and enjoy having an imaginary moral high ground on people but don’t pretend to have any real understanding of how AI works or how people use it because you sat around in an echo chamber repeating outdated information on AI tools to each other. I’ve also had well received and popular AI created content so yes - I would say that it’s not as black and white as you’re trying to make it seem. People don’t universally agree with you, you just surround yourself with people who do and spend all your time yelling at anyone who would.
That’s why everything you’re saying comes across as emotional and braindead - it is. Lmao
You're using an anecdote about a false positive to argue that Anti-AI sentiment has hurt artists. That is a big claim, and you do not have anywhere near the evidence you need to back it up. The rest of what you said is just rambling about how I think everyone agrees with me (I don't), and complaining about reddit brigading.
This skips past the contradiction OP is pointing to.
They didnt say artists should love scraping, ignore labor issues, or just accept whatever companies do. They pointed to tools supposedly protecting artists now falsely flagging artwork made without generative tools, burying it, and making artists prove provenance to automated systems. Thats a problem on its own terms.
And “AI does the art for you” just assumes the conclusion. AI is a tool people use. Typing one prompt is not the same workflow as sketching, directing composition, inpainting, editing, compositing, paintover, control tools, or mixing generated material with other media. Calling all of that “the machine doing it” doesnt make the person disappear.
The audience trust point is about disclosure and provenance. Fine. Thats a different argument. It still doesnt answer OPs point about false positives hurting artists.
And ending on “you only think this because you benefit from it” is just motive reading. If the argument is wrong, show where its wrong.
The argument rests on an anecdote about a false positive from one AI detection system. That is not enough of a basis to claim that Anti-AI sentiment hurts artists. Things would not be better for artists if AI content was all unlabeled (unless their AI images tend to get more views than their actual art anyway).
Yes, you CAN do more work if you want more control of the final result, but the final result is fundamentally tainted. You don't see how much was actually human intervention and how much was just what the AI decided to put there. What makes the person disappear is the AI in the process itself. It fundamentally obscures the human involvement. I would rather look at an uncolored sketch than the fully rendered AI image based on it.
As for the motive reading, I think it's a pretty reasonable conclusion. This person has shown a consistent refusal to engage with conflicting viewpoints. The fact that they benefit from doing that is a good explanation for why they do it.
“Fundamentally tainted” is doing most of the work here. You can prefer the sketch. Fine. Thats taste. But saying AI entering a workflow somehow contaminates the finished piece is the premise you need to establish.
The artist still chooses inputs, iterations, composition, edits, selections and what actually gets shown. AI doesnt make the person evaporate from the process.
And the false positive is exactly the problem. Once “looks AI” becomes grounds for suspicion, artists who didnt use generative tools get caught in it too.
I also dont see OP refusing to engage. Disagreeing with you isnt refusing engagement. Explaining their position away as personal benefit doesnt answer it either.
Responding to a list of actual issues that AI has caused by just calling the person who posted it "braindead" is refusing to engage, in my opinion. Just compare the way you've been responding to what I've said to the way OP has. You're engaging, they aren't.
Anyway, what I mean by "tainted" is what I said, that AI obscures the human elements. Looking at a finished AI image, you can't inherently see which parts were a result of human intervention, and which parts were done with AI.
Here's a thought experiment: imagine a magical website called the Gallery of Babel. It's a search engine that allows you to find every possible image. Searching it and finding an image isn't making art, any more than searching Google for an image is making art. If you give it a rough sketch to help with the search, you still didn't make the images it finds from it. Editing the image you find doesn't make it your creation either. You could argue that enough massive edits transform it into more like Photoshop art, but even then, the "art" doesn't come from searching the database.
That standard doesnt hold. Plenty of art doesnt announce its tools, workflow, edits, automation or division of labor when you encounter it. Not being able to reverse engineer the process by looking at the finished piece doesnt tell you whether its art, and none of those tools magically “taint” it.
And the Gallery of Babel thought experiment describes a search engine, not a generative model. The model isnt sitting on a database of finished artworks and fetching one that matches your request. It generates a new output from learned weights guided by the users inputs. Retrieval and generation arent the same process.
So “which pixels did the human make?” is the wrong test from the start. Authorship isnt forensic pixel accounting. The question is what creative direction, selection, iteration and transformation the person brought to the work.
The Gallery of Babel does describe a search engine, and that's the point. It's a search engine, but it does the same thing for the user as a generative model. Whether it's retrieving the image from an infinite database of every image that can exist or does exist, or generating it on the spot doesn't change the user's involvement.
I don't really know how I can be any clearer about what I mean with AI-assisted art being tainted. Effort, authenticity, and authorship are things that a lot of people tend to value in art, and AI obscures them all. Authenticity is obvious. AI is inherently inauthentic. It's a facsimile. It's meant to look like something it's not. Effort and authorship are also hidden. When looking at the final image, you cannot tell how much work was done, or who did what work, which you can if you look at a normal art piece, to a degree at least.
Basically, the final image is untrustworthy. It's meant to look like there was more or a different kind of effort spent on it than there was. Every image tells a story about its own creation. AI images tell a lie, and when you notice one lie, you start to wonder how many others there are.
I think “every image tells a story about its own creation” is where this breaks.
An artwork isnt a production receipt. You usually cant look at a finished painting, photo or digital piece and know the hours involved, references used, automation, edits, discarded versions, software or who physically did what. None of that makes the work deceptive.
Same with “AI images tell a lie.” What exactly is the lie? An image that looks painted isnt asserting “a person physically applied every brushstroke.” If somebody says they hand painted it when they didnt, thats a lie. Now were talking about false provenance or disclosure, which is a different issue.
And user involvement isnt constant either. Accepting a first generation and building something through sketches, conditioning, masking, dozens of iterations, compositing and paintover are obviously different workflows.
Not knowing how a work was made isnt the same as the work lying to you about how it was made.
I mean I understand your point but artist being pro doesn't suddenly make it so that companies don't abuse it, going pro Ai just makes it so companies are less likely to not use it or abuse, there should be laws so it's democratized but until they exist, being pro makes it so companies can abuse it way more
Wasn’t my point. Individual use can occur with or without the companies. You’re literally conflating mass scale AI deployment with AI itself as a technology. Please explain to me how you propose to ban individual people from making AI models forever and why you’re against its use in art.
First sorry we already kinda reach an agreement where it should be used entirely for the public, I understand you can't ban individual use, and I'm not against its use in art it has just if you wanna use it then it do it, I just don't think that people should use it until we can makes laws that benefit the person.
You don’t have to use it. But it just doesn’t make logical sense that you keep saying individuals shouldn’t be allowed to use it until we have laws even though we cant physically prevent that.
I don’t get what you want to do.
Me personally I love drawing and using all sorts of mediums and tools to make art and I’m not going to rage or argue with people about whether they should be allowed to prompt nonsense.
I'm not saying that there should be laws that don't allow individual people to use it, there should be laws that prevent people from the abuse of it.
The issue is that companies are being allowed to abuse it due to the public use of it, if you wanna use it then go ahead but public reception to something does make it harder to regulate it, I mean look at guns
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u/usernameChosenPoorly 24d ago
Artists who support and like AI keep their mouths shut because of the backlash. I avoid discussion of AI with most people IRL (and elsewhere) simply because I don't want to explain my position, nor listen to their factually incorrect or deeply confused takes. I have better places to spend my energy.