Weekly Discussion: How does AI "art" impact the furry fandom?

For me AI generated images are double-edged sword. As a non-artist I find that these are an amazing tool that allows me to create the specific type of Yiff that I really enjoy. However, I can definitely empathize with the concerns voiced by artists.

To be honest, I have to say that I don't believe that learning or training from publicly available artwork is immoral, especially if it's not for profit, I am worried that many of the popular models seem to be clearly 'over-fitted'. Over-fitting happens when you train a model so much that it ends up reproducing content that seems almost copy/pasted instead of merely being able to reproduce certain concepts present in the prompt.

The second concern I have is related to mediocrity and saturation of AI imagery. I believe that in upcoming years many of us will grow tired of seeing AI imagery as a replacement of stock images. The truth is that most images generated aren't really that good and people will quickly grow tired of seeing them pop up everywhere. It will become a sign of mediocrity or poor quality.

However, I also think there's a silver lining: AI images have the chance to drastically increase the amount of visual support that any type of content has. This could lead to us growing into a society in which images and other forms of visual representation such as mascots might become more and more popular (as it is in Japan, for example). And, as a consequence, this could increase the demand of quality artwork produced by real artists.

In regards to the furry fandom, I think it's a good idea to separate AI images from artist-drawn artwork. Not only because of the controversy, but also because of the potential for massive amount of low-quality an low-effort content.