An upset Reddit user said they shared several AI art images in a Facebook group and then got banned for posting AI art.
Setting aside the usual arguments on the anti- and pro-AI art debate and the nature of creativity itself, perhaps the negative reaction that the Redditor encountered is part of a sea change in opinion among many people that think corporate AI platforms are exploitive and extractive in nature because their datasets rely on copyrighted material without the original artists' permission. And that's without getting into AI's negative drag on the environment.
people forget that what makes art impressive is also the skill of the artist in the respective medium
if someone creates a perfect color gradient fill in Photoshop nobody is going to be impressed but make it with colored pencils and people may regard it as stunning
the beauty is also in the effort it took to create, not only in what the result looks like - i don't need to take time to look at stuff people didn't take time to make
if someone creates a perfect color gradient fill in Photoshop nobody is going to be impressed but make it with colored pencils and people may regard it as stunning
Funnily enough, that was what Mark Rothko was doing with paint. Exploring color to get the perfect shade of something. Looking at color at its most basic. That's why those of us who understand what Rothko was going for often really love his paintings while most other people say, "I don't get it, it's just rectangles."
Oh I do get it but it's still just rectangles. If the only people who like your stuff are other painters, not other artists in general but other painters, then I think it's fair to say that what you're doing is 99.99% craft and maybe 0.01% art.
That kind of stuff also exists in an AI context, btw, people doing things for the heck of getting it to work and showing off technical aspects. Like absolutely a milestone when it comes to video2video, absolutely at a stage where it's usable for artistic expression if you're willing to work within some limitations, though the video here is much more dicking around than art. You'll also find gazillions of AIified tiktok dances from the same crowd as tracking limbs isn't exactly trivial.
Respectfully disagree. There's a plethora of artists with exceptional skills that create photorealistic art in several mediums. While the process takes an inordinate amount of time it is completely devoid of any creative input. These are essentially human xerox machines that match color values from a photo using the naked eye. The skill is impressive, the art: not so much.
I always hated that the most upvoted art on reddit was just photorealism... Abd then the comments were all like, "Wow! I was 100% sure this was a photo until i zoom in!!!"
the beauty is also in the effort it took to create
While I support your whole statement, I think the beauty of art lies in the message, vision or emotion that the artist wants to convey to the world through a visual medium. You can have a super realistic portrayal of a human and still prefer the art of Van Gogh because he shared his emotions through his art and people could feel that.
I just need to press a button and my DSLR will automatically upload the picture I took. Is photography art? Different people get different things from art. If you want to see something that took a human a hundred hours of consideration, that's fine. But I don't care what the artist was thinking most of the time. I care how it makes me feel. What inspiration it sparks in my mind. I've been moved and inspired by AI art. Admittedly I could also probably have been moved by inkblots. But people hang inkblot prints in their house because it does something for them. Art is subjective, meaning it's more about the subject viewing it than the artist.
Typically, I don't find anything offensive about the images ai creates. What I do take issue with is the outlandish claims of artistic ownership because they strung some words together.
Agreed. Consider this absolutely batshit take from the reddit post linked in the article.
Your art looks pretty good, so most people wouldn't be able to tell it's AI unless you told them it's AI.
Generally it's always best to just lie and tell everyone you made it yourself, just to avoid all the toxic people that hate AI, because not having to read hateful comments from people like that is reason enough to lie. Don't need to provide any evidence or go into details, just tell everyone you made it yourself and ignore anyone that question it.
"Your art". I'm sure clicking the "regenerate" button on mid journey for 5 hours took lots of work. It's hard not to feel real hate for these people.
I mean I agree that AI is stolen because of its basis and all, but the 5 hours weren't just hitting regenerate, they were likely consisting of changing extensive parameters and such. Have you seen the insanely long prompts people write that are only half comprehensible?
Whether the stuff is art is questionable, effort did go in though
you're all hung up on ownership. IP is completely a result of capitalism. no one would care who used their images if we weren't all struggling to survive in a post scarcity world. the problem isn't AI, it's the people that own this shit and insist that the world cling to these outdated ideas of ownership. I use AI in my art all the time. I'm an artist with 40 years of experience. I have no problem with it.
Quit bitching about AI and start dismantling capitalism (by any means necessary).
There are many consumer apps based on stable diffusion where people just type what they want “astronaut sitting on a horse” most work is below the hud and therefor i agree with your sentiment, asking something isn't a creative process. The results is usually decent but rarely amazing but anyone can recreate it with the right prompt and seed
But things change quickly when you use proper tools like comfyui where you get full control of what the tech can do. Not all models play well with plain descriptions and prompts start to resemble a lengthy magical spell of keywords that become unreadable to a human being. Some keywords perform consistently but are highly counter-intuitive but they only work with some models and settings.
Then there are all the modifiers that change the weights and interpretation of the prompt, latent information, customize noise generations. Mix/matching multiples models iterating on the same picture, using custom or native vae, clip skip 0, 1 or 2…
During the process of changing things the results are usually utter crap but the more you understand what your doing the closer you will get to a workflow that can consistently output good images.
A last step is taking the parameters/seed that generated best pictures from a batch and editing the prompt/settings further to fix the last details.
The process is a creative one and the result is impossible to recreate without someone knowing exactly all the steps involved so here i would say artistic ownership can be applied.
I like naunce so I do appreciate your post. I dream of a world where AI can assist all sorts of creatives bringing their imagination to life so they can share their inner world with others. If we go back to my OP, though, I stuck that word outlandish in there purposefully. Often these AI artist will have some hokey back story where you know they are attributing the AI's creativity as their own.
I've never found an AI image itself offensive. It's people shortcutting for profit and clout that irks me.
These people just want to be able to sell their AI art alongside other artists, because they "spent 6 hours to get only 5 images" is obviously on par with someone who has spent years honing their skills and craft the create art on a canvas or other blank medium.
Some AI art is pretty interesting, but let's not equate it being the same as someone with actual creative talent.
This is maybe the must frustrating argument I've seen, there are TONS of artists with disabilities work within their limitations to create art that is utterly unique and representative of their physical and mental struggles and triumphs.
Funny, just this morning I woke up to someone commenting on one of my pieces of art that I'd posted on Reddit that if I hadn't put in the comment how I did it, they'd have thought it was an AI generated picture.
It's super-painful to be a technologist and an artist at the same time right now because there are way too many people in tech who have no understanding of what it means to create art. There's people in the art community who don't really get AI either, of course, but since they are trending towards probably the right opinion based on an incomplete understanding of what the things we see as AI actually are, it's much easier to listen to them. If anything, the artists can labor under the misapprehension that the current crop of AI tools are doing more than they actually are.
In the golden age of analog photography, people would do a print and include the raw borders of the image. So you'd see sprocket holes if it's 35mm film or a variety of rough boundaries for other film formats. And it was a known artistic convention that you were showing exactly what you shot, no cropping, no edits, etc. The early first version of Instagram decided that those film borders meant "art" so of course they added the fake film borders and it grated on my nerves because I think it was the edges from a roll of Velvia, which is a brilliant color slide film. And then someone would have the photo with the B&W filter because that also means "art" but you would never see a B&W Velvia shot unless you were working really hard on a thing. So this is far from the first time that a bunch of clueless people on the tech side of the fence did something silly out of ego and ignorance.
The picture I posted is the result of a bunch of work on fabbing, 3D printing, FastLED programming, photographic technique, providing an interesting concept to a person and an existing body of work such that said person would want to show up to some random eccentric's place for a shoot, et al. And, well... captions on art exist for a reason, right? It adds layers to the work to know that the artist was half-mad when they painted it and maybe you can tell by the painting's brushwork or just know your art history really well but maybe you can't and so a caption helps create context for people not skilled in that particular art.
And, there's not really "secrets" in art. Lots of curators and art critics will take great pains to explain why Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko so if you are still wandering around saying "BUT IT LOOKS LIKE GIANT SQUARES" that's intentional ignorance.
Now, I've been exploring my particular weird genre of art for a while now. Before AI, Photoshop was the thing. Much in the same way as I could have thrown a long enough prompt into a spicy-autocomplete image generator, I also could have probably photoshopped it. Then again, the tutorials for the Photoshop version of the technique all refer back to the actual photographic effect.
Describing something as it's not has long been a violation of social norms that people who are stuck in a world of intentional ignorance, ego, and disrespect for the artistic process have engaged in. In the simultaneous heyday of Second Life and Flickr, people wanting to treat their Second Life as their primary life caused Flickr to create features so people could mediate this boundary. So, on one level, this isn't entirely new and posting AI art in the painting reddit is no different from posting filtered Second Life to the portrait group on flickr. It's simple rudeness of the sort that the unglamorous aspects of community moderation are there to solve for.
I have gotten quizzed about how I make my art, but I've never seen anybody go off and then create a replica of my art, they've always gone off and created something new and novel and interesting and you might not even realize that what got them there was tricks I shared with them it's so different. Artists don't see other art in the gallery and autocomplete art that looks like what they saw, they incorporate ideas into their own work with their own flair.
Thus, there's more going on than just mere rudeness. I've been doing this for a long time now and the AI companies have a habit of misrepresenting exactly what content they have stolen to train their image models. So it's entirely likely that the cool AI picture that someone thinks my art looks like is really just autocompleted using parts of my art. Except I can't say "no" and if there was a market for people making art that looks roughly like mine, I'd offer paid workshops or something.
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I like AI art. It can be fun and interesting, I play around with a couple engines myself. I occasionally use the imagery to kick-start my imagination or as inspiration for things I might be working on or thinking about. It’s useful to give your brain a “starting point.”
What I don’t like is people trying to pass off AI computer generated images as some form of accomplishment for themselves (excluding working out a good prompt or modifiers, that can be a bit of work) or trying to pass off the imagery as real in any way. Real IRL or like “I painted this.”
As far as the corporate models scraping content…yeah, they are definitely playing the usual game that it’s ok for them to fuck over the little guy but heaven help you if you’re a day late with a payment to them or torrent a movie.
Art is a key branch of human endeavour that can be described as "the study of choice". That's what so many people misunderstand in modern art, is that it's often more focused on the choices themselves rather than trying to be a skillful representation or depiction of some kind. "That's just a ___, my kid could do that."
What is missing from every conversation about AI art is what contribution to "the study of choice" can be made here. There are a thousand variables in the choices made along the way, from which AI and training data was used, to the myriad of prompts used. I am certain that if you were thoughtfully making these choices along the way with a clear idea in mind, you'd be able to make incredibly impactful art that actually enriches us in the usual sense that good art can.
My complaint about AI here, if we will set the enormous scale of theft to one side, is simply that it is being used to create art that doesn't mean anything, which is inimical to the pursuit of art itself.
My complaint about AI here, if we will set the enormous scale of theft to one side, is simply that it is being used to create art that doesn't mean anything, which is inimical to the pursuit of art itself.
Thank you.
The meaninglessness and soulelessness is a big part of the problem with AI art.
It has no more "point of view" than a random number generator.
Fair enough. AI art is often just a highly skilled visual meme generator used in a reactionary manner to whatever is happening at the time, whether it be denim-infused fediverse posts or mocking political figures.
Other than a few drop-down menus that aren’t any better than an iPhone photo filter app, yeah, all the choices have essentially been already made and recombined by the art generation software.
If a computer auto generating music isn’t called a musician, or a robot tossing a football isn’t called an athlete, then a person making a picture with a computer isn’t an artist. No matter how badly that person wants to be called one.
Depends on the workflow, in my opinion. There are people who just type "1girl lol" into a text box and there are some people who set up workflows with hundreds of steps including significant manual work done in Photoshop or GIMP.
Similarly nearly all music these days is made with a DAW, which enables you to selectively edit and combine performances that otherwise you wouldn't be able to achieve. Drummer off beat? Quantize it. Want a string section but don't know how to play violin? Use a synth. And certainly there are people who are overly reliant on those tools because their core music abilities aren't very strong.
If you think any amount of computer assistance means that something isn't art, then basically all music made since the 90s would also not be art. It's not a binary. Any tool can be used tastefully or be used to mask an underlying lack of talent.
You don't usually call the audio engineer a musician though. The fact that you "want a string section" is the important part. Art is communication, if you fuck with the AI until it communicates what you want, that can be art, as long as you're not trying to pass off that the fake brushstrokes contain any meaning. If you learn all the right prompt words to make it "good" and then Photoshop it to fix all the telltale AI glitches but the only idea being communicated comes from 6 random people on Deviantart smashed together, that's not art.
I just call the people in my Discord who generate AI images AI Handlers because to me it's like getting a half trained unruly animal to do what you want. That being said when they take requests for character art for tabletop games they put out some good stuff. It's just a tool to be used and it often takes an experienced handler to get what you want out of it.
I'd be perfectly fine being called an AI Handler over an artist, its an apt descriptor and I'm not doing this to trick anybody. One of the top posts on all today is about true luxuries, and one of them is the Luxury of being able to fully express ones self, to which this new tool has provided to me faaar more than any tool previous. If I'm sharing my creations its because I'm excited to have a visual representation and I want to share it with those interested, I'm not trying to downplay the skillset of other artists, nor do I care about cred. I'm just excited to finally have an outlet for my creativity that doesnt require me to devote years of my life to learning specific skills before I'm able to start doing what I actually want to do, which is to be creative
How does this argument not also apply to photography? A modern camera is a computer, you fiddle with the settings, press a button and it automatically makes a picture for you. People produce billions of shitty photographs a day which aren't art, but that doesn't mean someone working in photography as a medium can't be an artist.
In my experience it's only non-artists who make this argument, because in their heads they're comparing AI to painting. But for visual artists there are tons of mediums and disciplines where you don't physically make the marks yourself and it's the concept and composition that's important.
There was an exhibition of AI generated art at the big local gallery here last year and I expected artist friends to be against it, but they were just like "oh, that's interesting". They just see AI generation as another way of creating an image and whether a particular image is or isn't art depends on the intention not the process.
In the hands of someone that doesn’t know what they’re doing, a camera is useless. Any one can make a computer create an image. All it takes is being able to complete a descriptive sentence.
Taking medium into account changes everything. A sculpture artist or painter doesn't have the same interest or concern about AI art yet, and may never. They also tend to not have the same comprehensive view of AI generation as well as training data.
That being said, digital photography doesn't remotely compare. If I were to set my DSLR up with a lens, set an F stop and shutter speed, the results would be similar to that of a film camera. A sensor takes in light in the same way film does. A 30 second exposure at a 500 ISO will compare to a 30 second camera on a certain film type, which is comparable to ISO settings.
Artificially bumping up light sensitivity on a DSLR degrades image quality. Analog and digital are largely comparable. So how would it apply to photography? It's not just automatically making a picture, and if it were doing that on auto, it's still not all that different from a film photo with generic catch all sensors and light metering.
Photography is all about catching the moment, personally I captured night landscapes via manual long exposure on a DSLR, but none of that is automatic.
Until it becomes part of the samples/loops for a whole new genre of music two decades later. Like the TR909 drum machine and the popular "amen break" rhythm line.
Yeah no one will ever have any use for synthesized voice. It's like the drum machine, just a silly gadget which will never have any impact on music...
Hmmm.
Ai image gen will continue to improve, a kid born today will likely grow in a world where they're completely used to game render engines using generative ai, where they design complex and beautiful virtual worlds, and where art lessons focus more on design and expression than technical skill (which people interested in will learn with thy help of ai tools).
You're welcome to feel however you like about new technologies but don't tattoo your idea that ai image gen is just a fad because it won't age well.
I think there are interesting aspects of AI art. It takes a real artist to properly instruct an AI to create something new, different, and interesting. When I think of modern art, a lot of art snobs were dismissive of it because "it's not art." I think we will see the same opinions of AI art change as new, different, and interesting artwork is made.
Thing is, generated art is not new or different. It's a machine amalgamation of existing works. The only vaguely interesting bits are how it mangles body parts into some kind of Cronenberg horror.
I think there already is AI art but it's not the art that everyone is talking about, it's not your run-of-the-mill fantasy illustration prompt but people exploring what can be made with tools like that.
Rather than focusing on emulating traditional illustration, they invent their own processes and that is the work.
Average AI art is average. Exceptional AI art is exceptional.
People who use AI as the tool it is, rather than just feeding it a single prompt and taking a few good results, can make art just like any other artist using a tool. Some of that art is exceptional. Most of it is average. Just like any other tool.
The best AI art is often the result of multiple passes with inpainting and refining, and touchups in other tools. But that takes time, effort, and skill. Just like any other tool.
I fully agree with you. However, there's no point bringing it up here in this echo chamber of luddites. They're deathly afraid of ai (for no real reason), and it really shows.
"I feel like a lot of the anti-AI people just... want there to be less beautiful art in the world"
I certainly don't want to speak for all "anti-AI people", but personally ...yeah.
Even before the generative AI boom, you could find an essentially limitless stream of artworks on the internet. If you exposed yourself to that for long enough, you'd eventually go numb to things just being beautiful for the sake of being beautiful.
Occasionally, you'd stumble over expressive art, which had a meaning beyond that, which conveyed an emotion, which was a labor of love and/or hatred.
Even before the generative AI boom, this expressive art was buried under heaps of profitable artworks, because artists were taking the second-best option for pursuing their passion.
So, while I would've preferred less profitable artworks and more expressive art, I was always perfectly fine with it, because I knew it was humans doing the necessary.
Now with generative AI, it's just yet another magnitude more artworks thrown on top, with even less meaning.
Where a missing finger might have been a powerful expression of the artist's struggles, now it's just an every-day-defect of the AI.
It just buries the expressive art even further, obstructs any meaningfulness and makes me even number to beauty. I absolutely do not care for a greater quantity of art. I want greater quality, and not in terms of beauty.
Start at the bottom. It doesn't start with Godzilla, but eventually we discovered the true meaning of AI image creation. Also because it's getting close to 8000 posts at this point.
We really like putting Godzilla in ridiculous situations.
I like the idea that AI art is for art that wasn't worth having a human create. Does it make sense for a human to create pictures of Godzilla in ridiculous situations? If you're feeling really inspired, then go for it, but nobody should otherwise feel obliged to spend an afternoon on it.
A little while ago, I created a LLM Vogon poetry generator for a Hitchikers themed party. Is it worth having a human create intentionally bad poetry for a party? I would again say no. Even there, though, a lot of people didn't like it. Partially because they were afraid of just how bad Vogon poetry could be, but there was some clear dislike of anything associated to AI, even for this silly use case.
Not terrible, usable as rough concept art but not nearly good enough to be reference. While the general likeness has consistency there's inconsistencies in the eybrows and ears and don't get me started on the costumes they're all plain different.
The main issue I have here, knowing that it's AI, is whether he's holding his blade by the, well, blade because he's just that kind of vampire or because the AI messed up and the human didn't notice.
This just in: thieves realize law means that they aren't supposed to steal, theft rate collapse to 0%.
Also those signs at school campuses saying they are a "no gun zone" means school shootings are officially a thing of the past. Phew, why didn't we think of this earlier?
People talk about A.I. art threatening artist jobs but everything I’ve seen created by A.I. tools is the most absolute dogshit art ever made, counting the stuff they found in Saddam Hussein’s mansions.
So, I would think the theft of IP for training models is the larger objection. No one thinks a Balder’s Gate 3 fan was gonna commission an artist to make a drawing for them. They’re pissed their work was used without permission.
It's not replacing artists who make beautiful art, it's going to replace artists who work for a living. Doesn't matter if the quality is bad when it's costs nothing.
The problem is artists often make their actual living doing basic boiler plate stuff that gets forgotten quickly.
In graphics it's Company logos, advertising, basic graphics for businesses.
In writing it's copy for websites, it's short articles, it's basic stuff.
Very few artists want to do these things, they want to create the original work that might not make money at all. That work potentially being a winning lottery ticket but most often being an act of expressing themselves that doesn't turn into a payday.
Unfortunately AI is taking work away from artists. It can't seem to make very good art yet but it can prevent artists who could make good art getting to the point of making it.
It's starving out the top end of the creative market by limiting the easy work artists could previously rely on to pay the bills whilst working on the big ideas.
You should check out this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF, and this one by Katherine Klosek, the director of information policy and federal relations at the Association of Research Libraries.
Using things "without permission" forms the bedrock on which artistic expression and free speech as a whole are built upon. I am glad to see that the law aligns with these principles and protects our ability to engage openly and without fear of reprisal, which is crucial for fostering a healthy society.
I find myself at odds with the polarized argumentation about AI. If you don't like it, that's understandable, but don't make it so that if someone uses AI, they have to defend themselves from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment. Those accusations are often times incorrect or made without substantial evidence.
I'm open to that conversation, as long as we can keep it respectful and productive. Drop a reply if you want, it's way better than unexplained downvoting.
Yes, using existing works as reference is obviously something that real human artists do all the time, there’s no arguing that is the case. That’s how people learn to create art to begin with.
But, the fact is, generative AI is not creative, nor does it understand what creativity is, nor will it ever. Because all it is doing is performing complex data statistical analysis algorithms to generate a matrix of pixels or a string of words.
Im sorry, but the person entering in the prompt to instruct the algorithm is also not doing anything creative either. Do you think it is art to go through a fast food drive through and place an order? That’s what people are objecting to - people calling themselves artists because they put some nonsense word salad together and then think what they get out of it is some unique thing that they feel they created and take ownership of. If not for the AI model they are using and the creative works it was trained on, they could not have created it or likely even imagined it without it.
People are actively losing their livelihoods because AI tech is being oversold and overhyped as something that it’s not. Execs are all jumping on the bandwagon and because they see AI as something that will save them a bunch of money, they are laying off people they think aren’t needed anymore. So, just try to incorporate that sentiment into your understanding of why people are also upset about AI. You may not be personally affected, but there are countless that are. In fact, over the next two years, as many as 203,000 entertainment workers in the US alone could be affected
You want to have fun creating fancy kitbashed images based off of other people’s work, go right ahead. Just don’t call it art and call yourself an artist, unless you could actually make it yourself using practical skills.
Also, good luck trying to copyright it because guess what, you can’t.
You've decided all popular music is bad and only the obscure stuff you listen to is art? And you expect me to take you seriously?
if you had any concept of music history you'd know they said that about all the music you think is worthy, Dylan almost had his show ended by an axe wielding Pete Seeger because he played a new fangled electric guitar and Pete thought that meant it wasn't real music.
Art it's the same, cezanne got endless hate for not doing real art, and literature Shakespeare wasn't a real writer because he didn't know enough Greek..
You're just filling the role of antiquated gate keeper in a drama that's played out a billion times with your side losing every single time. Good luck though I guess?
IMO I'd call "AI Artists" a type of Art Director, since they themselves don't make the art but instead direct and dictate what exactly they want, and if the result is different they tweak their wording to direct the art into a different direction
Art Directing, whether for a human or a machine or otherwise, is still a skill itself and still has to be learned to get good results, but it's distinctly different from making the art yourself so I wouldn't call them "Artists" outright
“Art is whatever the artist chooses it to be.” And I’d also call art whatever the beholder chooses it to be. If Dog Art is something that exists, AI Art is something that exists.
Whether you think in the case of AI the artist is the LLM or the prompter, that’s irrelevant.
If you consider the prompter to be the artist then do you consider me to be an artist when I make a Google search and click on images? I still get an image I didn't make but I wouldn't say that makes me an artist.
And according to your quote the ai model couldn't be an artist simply because it can't consider anything to be an art, it just gives you the random noise that is the result of putting some text through its network. There are of course other reasons why the model shouldn't be considered an artist but this was the simplest I think.
Anyway, I'd say that ai art shouldn't be called art when there's no artist.
Despite what people with no knowledge of the field will tell you, Machine Learning and LLMs fall under the category of AI. What you're looking for is a very specific type of AI. If AI art doesn't exist, it would be because the art usually doesn't have meaning or effort, not because AI doesn't exist.
The field of AI would never develop if everything they made along the way had to be thrown away as "not real AI".
At one point, getting computers to understand the rules of chess at all was part of the AI field. So was Conway's Game of Life, which uses a few simple rules to simulate cellular organisms and create some fascinating patterns. Optimizing compilers and virtual machines also came out of AI research.
The "not real AI" meme has no basis in the history of the field.
The analogy doesn't work. The difference is that this "printing press" is stealing massive amounts of creative work and calling it its own, and using massive amounts of energy to do so.
I say in every art form you'll find more copies than originals. Literature, cinema, paintings, photography, music... Everybody who's creative is copying and reusing and recombining and sampling and synthesizing ideas.
And that's true also for computer generated art.
The difference is that it's hardly possible to claim ownership for a picture or a video that was automatically generated by algorithms.
Pretty sure that artists are pissed because they are gonna lose jobs and money. To which I say we'll you chose that career path deal with it or go on another career. I hate the argument that AI is stealing art as it's using existing art to generate other art, oh yeah ? Then what about you, how do you think you get inspired? Oh by looking at other art ? Hmm sounds an awful lot the same to me! Let me put it this way due to AI even I might loose my job in the future but you know what I do to combat that ? I try to learn how to use AI as that's the skill that will be required in the future!
I'm pretty sure that artists are pissed because techbros have taken the artists' creations without permission and used them to train computers to mimic the artists. This is bad for a host of reasons. One obvious reason is that the thieves can then use this to make money, using the artists' work but without paying them - ever. Another reason is that since the AI can make work using the 'style' of an artist but without the creative direction of the artist, it devalues the style that the artist has worked to create. The new AI created work looks similar, but is not of consistent quality. Another reason is people generally think of art as a creative outlet; where someone's thoughts and efforts go into creating something. But if the work is done effortlessly, and primarily through the lens of what the AI sees rather than what a person sees - then it just devalues art and artistic creation itself. Art creation is basically the very worst thing to automate; economically, morally, and philosophically.
Sometimes I think we could get to a point where nothing new is created. Like, if everyone is just using prompts and profiting from other people's work without consent, and this is more lucrative than creating content yourself, what's the point in creating new things?
I don't know how to put this without sounding alarmist, but I fear we might be heading towards a halt in creativity. Trying to come up with something fresh will become less rewarding, so we'll be feeding from the same source material over and over again.
Your comparison of taking inspiration and literally generating something from someone elses image is the most braindead take on ai I've read. As a human you can't replicate someone's style to the extent that ai does. And if you are drawing from reference and trying to make something as close to the original as possible then it's normal to give credit (with digital art at least).
Yeah, sure, you can't replicate someone style to that extent. It not like people made fakes of famous paintings to sell them as originals just because the originals are expensive. Please tell me how humans can't replicate someone's style some more!!!
I feel ya. They complain a lot about something being better than them. Aren't humans supposed to adapt and overcome or did we forget that skill a long while ago?
Adapt and overcome how? Using AI? By the nature of the matter, less artists will be needed using AI, some will not make it. So, what then? Dropping their artistic career to go carry boxes for Amazon? What a shitty path we are making for humanity if we need to drop careers of passion to do menial jobs.