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this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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Fuck AI
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The fundamental problem is that your AI model was trained on the art of those that did not consent for it to be used for that purpose. In the most charitable sense, AI art can be understood as a type of college or sampling style, and I don’t think I’ve seen many examples of appropriately ethically trained models.
I find it hard to be empathetic to the plight of “I have an idea, and it’s hard to bring into fruition!” That cycle of frustration/desire and occasional hopeful release is part of the eros that gives art its purpose.
Here’s a shitty sketch of a chicken in the backyard of a place I used to live:
I’m not a good sketch artist. That picture is not what I would make if I had the magic art machine that printed the depictional[1] image I want to see. But to me, the sketch’s purpose is more an attempt to capture a quiet morning where the world felt timeless. The chicken is dead, the way I sketch now is maybe better in some ways and worse in others, but there’s a dialogue and growth and process that does not come from downloading a model.
You are trying to weave something from the electric sheep - human creativity tokenized and quantified in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the beauty and purpose of “art” in the way I see “AI art” being used. The reality is the porn spam and the generic fantasy - phantasms that have no use beyond the brief moment they are looked at.
[1] If you are looking for abstract - water marbling and collage don’t really have the same kinds of immediate “barriers” to entry in terms of technical precision. Paint flow techniques are fun and mesmerizing, regardless of whether you “know what you are doing” or not.
The consent thing is pretty much a myth.
Most people don't bother to think what licence they are publishing their art under when they upload it to the internet. It's almost always a creative commons licence or something similar that allows anyone or at lead the company that owns the website you are uploading it to, to use that image for whatever purpose they fit. Which includes training AI models.
And I'm sure you'll disagree with this point, but when a human uses an image as a reference or inspiration, or even just views an image and subconsciously recollect it when creating their own art, do they ask for permission to do so?
I don't really like to engage in esoteric arguments like these because the "purpose" of art is entirely subjective. So to you that cycle might be the purpose of cresting, to others it won't be.
I'm not trying to weave electric sheep or anything that effect. I'm using tools that are available to turn the product of my creativity and imagination into a material thing in the real world. Sometimes that's with a pen and paper, sometimes it's a camera and editing software, sometimes it's cloth and stich and sometimes it's with a bit of software and a mouse, and sometimes it's with a more advanced piece of software and a keyboard.
Drawing a line in front of that last one and saying it's not valid or immoral or not real art is very much arbitrary and I remember many years ago people making similar arguments to draw the line in front of using any computer program. AI is simply a tool that you can use to create art just like any other, it makes art widely more accessible and easier to produce than ever before, yes that means some people will use it to make slop, just like digital art and photoshop and cameras allowed more people to make slop and things that don't have "use" beyond advertising or spam or whatever (frankly the idea of art needing a "use" is a bit antithetical to what I think the point of art is)
So basically I think there's no real argument to why people are drawing a hard line in the sand here and decaying anyone and everyone that uses AI as inferior or lazy or something to that effect other than those people being scared of change and wanting see themselves and the thing they like as superior.
Can you show something you have produced? If you feel that what you are doing is a good example, then please, I’d love to see someone do AI art right.
Unfortunately, I take consent as a pretty axiomatic principle. When someone uploaded pictures of their art 20+ years ago, they did not know that this type of technology existed. There are ample examples of AI art reproducing things like signatures, which also indicate something that’s a bit more than “looking at an image for inspiration.”
I’ll believe AI is a tool for art just like any other when I see it I guess. Most of what I see is that kind of generic guff - the equivalent of those mall t-shirts with gangster SpongeBob or like that kind of lion/wolf thing on them. I’m not seeing evidence of any of the ideas of the author. I can’t see a prompt like I can see a brush stroke - I can’t try to imagine what the process was like other than stringing a bunch of words together until some permutation looks “acceptable” enough.