this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2025
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chapotraphouse
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Ask any artist if they are satisfied with their art. They won't be. That is the nature of the beast. Doesn't matter how good they are at it.
I have done art on and off for years as well. I would estimate I did maybe a few thousand hours of art in my life. Other people have done literally 10 to 100 times that and they are better because of it. You hone your skills over time. Anyone like me dabbling in art has to accept that there are countless people who put in more time, who are better and who will stay being better because they will keep putting more time in then us.
Using AI, you steal those hours from those people, for a product that doesn't show what's in your head. It's stilly to pretend AI can do that and you know it. If that were true, all the art prompters wouldn't include the names of existing artists in their prompts.
So yea, put in the fucking time, or get off the field. Don't be fucking selfish and then try to defend it in flimsy ways.
What's being stolen when someone uses genAI to make a picture for personal use? In what way is it selfish?
It's weird if someone acts like they're 'making art', but it's also harmless.
All of the art that was used to train generative AI was used without its creator's permission, meaning they weren't compensated for all of the years of work and study that went into creating it. Then all of that labour was repackaged into a product that corporations are selling at a premium, with none of the money going back to the people who made the creation of it possible. These companies have well admitted that they wouldn't be able to make a profit if they had to actually pay all these artists for their work. Now obviously, that isn't technically stealing, but neither is it harmless. I personally know several artists who've told me that work has dried up in the years since generative AI became popular, and who are upset that their own work was used to train the machines that are replacing them.
I feel like you can level these same arguments against piracy. I "steal" art without permission all the time; the sum of hours and hours of work and expertise, and I consume it all for free.
AI is going to fuck commercial artists and I'm opposed to that (though it's a capitalism problem more than it's an technology problem), but I'll stand by the fact that an individual making goofy pictures for personal use that they'd never ever had paid for pre-ai is harmless and by no means "stealing", because nothing is being stole. Same as why I don't feel guilty downloading a movie that I probably wouldn't have paid for and watched otherwise.
I mean, yeah, piracy is stealing. I thought most people were okay with it because it's mostly done with games and movies made by huge corporations who've already paid their developers and actors, and thus you're not actually stealing from artists. I've personally never understood the "I never would have bought and watched/played this anyway" argument, because here you are, watching/playing it. But also, I really don't care if other people pirate stuff, people must have their reasons.
Maybe I'm just going hard on the whole anti generative AI thing because of my personal connection to and harm I see it causing to people I know. But on the whole, considering the environmental impact, the corporatization of the technology, the exploitation of artists, the killing of creativity/critical thought, and the absolutely gross techbro culture that's spwaned out of it, I just thought more people on this site would be against generative AI in general.
piracy is not stealing, stealing deprives someone of something.
I’m opposed to how AI is going to interact with our economy, and hurt artists, but as I’ve said that’s an issue with capitalism far more than it’s an issue with the technology.
I understand the kneejerk reaction against it, but in my mind the tech is out the bag now and not going back in, so it feels meaningless to argue against its existence, especially along lines we as socialists otherwise don’t agree with, like on “stealing IP” or the “soul of art” or whatever.
As always we should advocate for the rights of workers. In a fairer economy, AI would just be a harmless toy if not a useful and productive tool.
"Hey man I need to see all your text and all your images you ever made."
""Why?"
"So I can make bad collage-copies of them and write shitty listicles."
"I don't want you to do that."
"Too bad, you put your stuff somewhere I could see it so I already did it and you have no recourse now because the powerful people that made me are above copyright law."
There is no personal use with this, because the AI was trained on everyone's stolen information. That is the problem, not the fact that it can make a bad picture because that was done. If the AIs could actually make anything from whole cloth, then we'd be having a different debate, but that's not what's going on.
Nothing is being stolen. Copying isn’t stealing. I’m a communist, I don’t believe in IP.
Steal from corporations, not form people's pantries you sick, disgusting fuck.
For real, do you not understand that the corpos are taking everyone's...EVERYONE'S things and making them theirs, for these garbage bots? That there is a difference between stealing from an individual as opposed to a company? You are gleefully saying that theft of personal property is okay, so long as it's the big boys in silicon valley doing it.
Sterling fucking socialist theory there, bucko!
And since you clearly need this explained more clearly: stealing from individual artists that honed a skill to the point they can make a living from it is bad, because you are stealing the livelihood from a fellow worker. Stealing form any individual is bad, actually. It really should not be hard to understand this, yet somehow...
Again, nothing is being stolen when an individual uses genAI for personal use.
Artists aren't losing anything. Their stuff is being copied and regurgitated but they've lost nothing.
As I've said elsewhere in this thread, I'm absolutely also concerned with how AI is going to impact workers in the commercial art, but the argument that AI is 'stealing' is just nonsense for the same reason piracy isn't stealing. We're in agreement on the conclusion I think, I just think the argument is poor.
duh. but "good enough" or "ok this is fine i need to work on something else" are out of reach too.
lmfao
idk lots of musicians try to copy the guitar tone or whatever else of their influences. what's in your head might be a copy of styles you've seen until you develop your own style... idk what "your own style" maps to in generative "ai", i'm not here to defend ai or say that the people using it are doing art per se, my whole thing is that I can't get even remotely close to an acceptable level of competence and it ticks me the fuck off when someone goes "aNy OnE cAn mAkE aRt" or upholds capitalist framings of intellectual property.
In that regard, I do think there’s a distinct difference between sampling (whether a still image, moving pictures, or sound) and using the AI treat generator. There’s plenty of people who can’t play a musical instrument worth a damn, but give them some loops, one shot samples, and sequencers and they can transform the samples material into something new and fascinating. Likewise with visual media.
12tone on YouTube had this interesting argument that samples, rather than being “cheating,” are turning a particular performance in time into an instrument unto itself. Whereas AI is a smudging of all past art into an average. So while sampling celebrates the greatness of a performance, AI reduces it to a Borg-like state.
It's always sad when I gotta actually block someone from hexbear, but since you are just a larper who doesn't care about others as soon as you can have the slightest whiff of a treat for yourself, I am not really sad about it.
??? comrade if you see this while logged out, i don't use gen ai to make visual "art".
this is only about the misunderstanding that people want to make stuff and can't because what they want to make is more specific than the head up ass maximum position that anything is art regardless of quality.
i am a professional artist (and maybe this makes me a bit out of touch,) assuming that it's for personal use and not for profit at all, i would rather have someone take my work into photoshop/gimp/krita/whatever and trace it near directly or make edits to it to fit their vision than have that person go spend money to further refine The Slop Machine. other artists may have differing opinions on this but since generative AI has gotten popular i just simply do not care anymore as long as my work isn't being fed to train image models. hell, if you're tracing someone else's work using tools on paper, that's still building muscle memory and linework skill and while not the ideal scenario it's doing more for you than you might think. with generative AI you are paying to generate an image based off countless images that already existed from artists that were not paid for their work to be included in the model. is that...not capitalistic or not at the very least exploitative?
Also a professional artist, and I agree with you. Someone making a collage or a trace from my art, or even just photoshopping it is still practicing creativity. Someone typing a prompt into the art slot machine has no creative process, they aren't learning anything, experiencing anything, struggling with anything, it's just empty output. It's just a "pretty picture" there's no sense of accomplishment or understanding. One of the most rewarding things in my life is when I draw something and recognise that I flat out wasn't skilled enough to do that 6-12 months ago.
And this can apply to any hobby or skill, are people so alienated from themselves that even the most basic concepts of satisfaction at self-improvement are seen as outright insults to them?
end-users aren't necessarily paying into anything other than their own electricity bill. We universally have a problem with the companies profiting at your expense of course, and that might be the more common case.
Those parts of "ai" discourse are tangent to someone's aptitude or ability to have something that looks how they want it to look and i'm trying to limit myself here to being mad about the position that art is accessible already because everybody can make shitty art that isn't what they want to make.
Stable diffusion works and learns on a conceptual level. If an AI model even understands artist tags, bias was trained into the model with a LoRA.
You looked at other people's art when you learned to draw you thief? Hand over the pencil and come out with your hands on your head
So you are seriously saying that AI has the ability to understand concepts? Waow.
Please educate yourself and don't spout bullshit, thanks.
Not concepts as we humans operate on, but concepts in the feature extraction sense. You have a gross misunderstanding of how these models work.
Imagine it as how an image detection model learns how to detect images. It extracts features (that are vectors of data that are completely meaningless to humans). Image generation can be somewhat imagines as the inverse of a feature detector, it creates features from noise.
These models are not plagiarizing your work. You teach it the shape a dog is expected to have, and you teach it the color black. Without such thing existing in the training set, it can generate a black dog.
This is fundamental to stable diffusion otherwise it could never work at all.