#ai art discourse

[demon-girl-izalith]

People keep talking about how AI images all look the same anyways and stuff, but I think honestly we need to talk about how these days it is super difficult now to do that and how scary that is...

We also really need to talk about how it's not bad that we, as humans who are viewing any art even if it's AI garbage, end up sometimes having feelings provoked by it, and that we shouldn't deny that. Because despite the scariness and the grossness that one feels when realizing something they liked was AI generated, feeling deceived and violated, we should really recognize the validity of whatever feelings were evoked in ourselves. The relationship with it is still valid, even if the means by which it was produced was not. You can look at a painting made on a canvas that was stolen and see both beauty in the painting and hold disgust at the canvas for being taken...

At the same time, while current AI art theft is absolutely fucking despicable, I do think that trying to explain why this is problematic as being because of copyright violation is also not in the best interest of artists. As an artist myself, I think that we need to be very suspect of both those who are taking art and poetry and whatever else and feeding it into data sets while also being really careful to not slip into defending the sorts of copyright laws that don't make room for things like using art as references, making fan art, and that sort of thing.

The tool of generative AI itself I don't think is really inherently bad, either. There are ways to use it that aren't as ecologically destructive or as disgustingly capitalistic in how its trained. Having something that's good at prediction of text isn't bad, it's just a series of algorithms. It's the way that it's being applied, and how that takes advantages of artists like me that makes it so so terrible. If it was more accessible to people like me, not as confusing to use and not as power hungry to train, I do think it could be really useful for even myself in some cases.

[txttletale]

wrt your take on artists not wanting their art to be fed to ai- i agree on the fact that art takes a new life once you release it and it's only natural people will engage with it in ways you don't approve of.

That being said, I personally would rather my work not be used to build something people seek to replace me with.

i mean like i think this framing is really burying the lede on the real problem, which is the 'replacing' part. if you lost your job because your boss replaced you with DisneyGPT™, the genAI trained entirely on Disney™ intellectual property, would you be like "ah, fair cop, very respectful of how i want my work to be used" -- of course not!

[fixing-bad-posts]

I don't care. I don't care. AI entertainment without anything in it. could it hurt? yes. By using AI the investors make money on theft.

[are-we-art-yet]

Is AWAY using it's own program or is this just a voluntary list of guidelines for people using programs like DALL-E? How does AWAY address the environmental concerns of how the companies making those AI programs conduct themselves (energy consumption, exploiting impoverished areas for cheap electricity, destruction of the environment to rapidly build and get the components for data centers etc.)? Are members of AWAY encouraged to contact their gov representatives about IP theft by AI apps?

What is AWAY and how does it work?

AWAY does not "use its own program" in the software sense—rather, we're a diverse collective of ~1000 members that each have their own varying workflows and approaches to art. While some members do use AI as one tool among many, most of the people in the server are actually traditional artists who don't use AI at all, yet are still interested in ethical approaches to new technologies.

Our code of ethics is a set of voluntary guidelines that members agree to follow upon joining. These emphasize ethical AI approaches, (preferably open-source models that can run locally), respecting artists who oppose AI by not training styles on their art, and refusing to use AI to undercut other artists or work for corporations that similarly exploit creative labor.

Environmental Impact in Context

It's important to place environmental concerns about AI in the context of our broader extractive, industrialized society, where there are virtually no "clean" solutions:

The water usage figures for AI data centers (200-740 million liters annually) represent roughly 0.00013% of total U.S. water usage. This is a small fraction compared to industrial agriculture or manufacturing—for example, golf course irrigation alone in the U.S. consumes approximately 2.08 billion gallons of water per day, or about 7.87 trillion liters annually. This makes AI's water usage about 0.01% of just golf course irrigation.

Looking into individual usage, the average American consumes about 26.8 kg of beef annually, which takes around 1,608 megajoules (MJ) of energy to produce. Making 10 ChatGPT queries daily for an entire year (3,650 queries) consumes just 38.1 MJ—about 42 times less energy than eating beef. In fact, a single quarter-pound beef patty takes 651 times more energy to produce than a single AI query.

Overall, power usage specific to AI represents just 4% of total data center power consumption, which itself is a small fraction of global energy usage. Current annual energy usage for data centers is roughly 9-15 TWh globally—comparable to producing a relatively small number of vehicles.

The consumer environmentalism narrative around technology often ignores how imperial exploitation pushes environmental costs onto the Global South. The rare earth minerals needed for computing hardware, the cheap labor for manufacturing, and the toxic waste from electronics disposal disproportionately burden developing nations, while the benefits flow largely to wealthy countries.

While this pattern isn't unique to AI, it is fundamental to our global economic structure. The focus on individual consumer choices (like whether or not one should use AI, for art or otherwise,) distracts from the much larger systemic issues of imperialism, extractive capitalism, and global inequality that drive environmental degradation at a massive scale.

They are not going to stop building the data centers, and they weren't going to even if AI never got invented.

Creative Tools and Environmental Impact

In actuality, all creative practices have some sort of environmental impact in an industrialized society:

Digital art software (such as Photoshop, Blender, etc) generally uses 60-300 watts per hour depending on your computer's specifications. This is typically more energy than dozens, if not hundreds, of AI image generations (maybe even thousands if you are using a particularly low-quality one).

Traditional art supplies rely on similar if not worse scales of resource extraction, chemical processing, and global supply chains, all of which come with their own environmental impact.

Paint production requires roughly thirteen gallons of water to manufacture one gallon of paint.

Many oil paints contain toxic heavy metals and solvents, which have the potential to contaminate ground water.

Synthetic brushes are made from petroleum-based plastics that take centuries to decompose.

That being said, the point of this section isn't to deflect criticism of AI by criticizing other art forms. Rather, it's important to recognize that we live in a society where virtually all artistic avenues have environmental costs. Focusing exclusively on the newest technologies while ignoring the environmental costs of pre-existing tools and practices doesn't help to solve any of the issues with our current or future waste.

The largest environmental problems come not from individual creative choices, but rather from industrial-scale systems, such as:

Industrial manufacturing (responsible for roughly 22% of global emissions)

Industrial agriculture (responsible for roughly 24% of global emissions)

Transportation and logistics networks (responsible for roughly 14% of global emissions)

Making changes on an individual scale, while meaningful on a personal level, can't address systemic issues without broader policy changes and overall restructuring of global economic systems.

Intellectual Property Considerations

AWAY doesn't encourage members to contact government representatives about "IP theft" for multiple reasons:

We acknowledge that copyright law overwhelmingly serves corporate interests rather than individual creators

Creating new "learning rights" or "style rights" would further empower large corporations while harming individual artists and fan creators

Many AWAY members live outside the United States, many of which having been directly damaged by the US, and thus understand that intellectual property regimes are often tools of imperial control that benefit wealthy nations

Instead, we emphasize respect for artists who are protective of their work and style. Our guidelines explicitly prohibit imitating the style of artists who have voiced their distaste for AI, working on an opt-in model that encourages traditional artists to give and subsequently revoke permissions if they see fit. This approach is about respect, not legal enforcement. We are not a pro-copyright group.

In Conclusion

AWAY aims to cultivate thoughtful, ethical engagement with new technologies, while also holding respect for creative communities outside of itself. As a collective, we recognize that real environmental solutions require addressing concepts such as imperial exploitation, extractive capitalism, and corporate power—not just focusing on individual consumer choices, which do little to change the current state of the world we live in.

When discussing environmental impacts, it's important to keep perspective on a relative scale, and to avoid ignoring major issues in favor of smaller ones. We promote balanced discussions based in concrete fact, with the belief that they can lead to meaningful solutions, rather than misplaced outrage that ultimately serves to maintain the status quo.

If this resonates with you, please feel free to join our discord. :)

Works Cited:

USGS Water Use Data: https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/water-use-united-states

Golf Course Superintendents Association of America water usage report: https://www.gcsaa.org/resources/research/golf-course-environmental-profile

Equinix data center water sustainability report: https://www.equinix.com/resources/infopapers/corporate-sustainability-report

Environmental Working Group's Meat Eater's Guide (beef energy calculations): https://www.ewg.org/meateatersguide/

Hugging Face AI energy consumption study: https://huggingface.co/blog/carbon-footprint

International Energy Agency report on data centers: https://www.iea.org/reports/data-centres-and-data-transmission-networks

Goldman Sachs "Generational Growth" report on AI power demand: https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/gs-research/generational-growth-ai-data-centers-and-the-coming-us-power-surge/report.pdf

Artists Network's guide to eco-friendly art practices: https://www.artistsnetwork.com/art-business/how-to-be-an-eco-friendly-artist/

The Earth Chronicles' analysis of art materials: https://earthchronicles.org/artists-ironically-paint-nature-with-harmful-materials/

Natural Earth Paint's environmental impact report: https://naturalearthpaint.com/pages/environmental-impact

Our World in Data's global emissions by sector: https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

"The High Cost of High Tech" report on electronics manufacturing: https://goodelectronics.org/the-high-cost-of-high-tech/

"Unearthing the Dirty Secrets of the Clean Energy Transition" (on rare earth mineral mining): https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/18/clean-energy-dirty-mining-indigenous-communities-climate-crisis

Electronic Frontier Foundation's position paper on AI and copyright: https://www.eff.org/wp/ai-and-copyright

Creative Commons research on enabling better sharing: https://creativecommons.org/2023/04/24/ai-and-creativity/

[patricia-taxxon]

i think the adage of "machine learning is just a tool" is speaking past most of the issue. like, of course it is, it's been a tool for like 15 years, but we all know that it's not being marketed as a tool. if it were marketed like any other tool, it would be obvious that it requires existing artistic ability to be fully utilized.

and yeah, when you get down to it, making legible and consistent AI art in line with what you're imagining is basically just as hard as drawing it yourself, but reality doesn't bring in cash. we know it's a tool, the problem is that it can never just be a tool, it must be the product. it must be a magic machine that translates imagination into pixels, but this cannot be. not because art is uniquely human, but because letting a noise generator fill in such massive gaps is necessarily ceding control, ceding authorship.

[centrally-unplanned]

There are two big "AI Art Discourse" events of note recently, which I thought were interesting: ACX's "AI Art Turing Test" and the new paper on "AI Poetry Beating Human Poetry". Both of these I think reveal the shape of "what is AI art for", and also say a lot about how these results were utilized in discourse.

To take the latter first, some academics quizzed people on some poetry and had these results:

We found that AI-generated poems were rated more favorably in qualities such as rhythm and beauty, and that this contributed to their mistaken identification as human-authored. Our findings suggest that participants employed shared yet flawed heuristics to differentiate AI from human poetry: the simplicity of AI-generated poems may be easier for non-experts to understand, leading them to prefer AI-generated poetry and misinterpret the complexity of human poems as incoherence generated by AI.

More human than human poems! This certainly seems impressive - and it is. You couldn't have gotten these results ~5 years ago. But that maybe doesn't mean as much as you might think? Because here is the opening half of the winning "Walt Whitman AI" Poem:

I hear the call of nature, the rustling of the trees, The whisper of the river, the buzzing of the bees, The chirping of the songbirds, and the howling of the wind, All woven into a symphony, that never seems to end. I feel the pulse of life, the beating of my heart, The rhythm of my breathing, the soul's eternal art, The passion of my being, that burns with fervent fire, The urge to live, to love, to strive, to reach up higher. I see the beauty all around, the glory of the earth, The majesty of mountains, the miracles of birth, The wonder of the cosmos, the mysteries of the stars, The poetry of existence, that echoes near and far

This fucking sucks. Straight up 2/10 poem. Did this bitch seriously establish the world's most predictable rhyme scheme only to try to rhyme wind with end? You had one job that you chose for yourself, and you screwed it up! This poem has been written a million times before, and says nothing - the Miley Cyrus lyrics of verse.

The reason this won is, yes, because AI tools have advanced heavily in the past few years. But it is also because it is being tested on a dead art. No one cares about poetry - certainly not the survey respondents:

We asked participants several questions to gauge their experience with poetry, including how much they like poetry, how frequently they read poetry, and their level of familiarity with their assigned poet. Overall, our participants reported a low level of experience with poetry: 90.4% of participants reported that they read poetry a few times per year or less, 55.8% described themselves as “not very familiar with poetry”, and 66.8% describe themselves as “not familiar at all” with their assigned poet. 

"Or less" is doing a LOT of work there; "yeah I read a few nonfiction books a year" oh sure, totally. 90% of these respondents haven't read a poem that wasn't displayed in the end credits of Minecraft since high school. No one does, poetry as a medium is essentially a relic. That isn't an insult to poets, by the way! There is no shame in being a niche. Not everyone can have the reach of hentai doujin artists; the community is small but they get a ton out of it. But you can't take the art of the community and expect that art to hit outside of it.

This survey didn't ask people to evaluate art; it asked people to evaluate their stereotypical impression of an art they don't care about. It was ~600 people hired off a website, they banged it out ASAP and moved on. This is not to invalidate the results; I am not actually claiming that "real" poets would have scored much better? Maybe, I don't know - that just isn't very relevant.

Let's swing to the AI Art Turing Test results to get more into why. Again, AI art is absolutely "art" in the sense that it is able to pass the test handily. You have to be head-in-the-sand at this point to think that AI can't make an impressionist painting a la the "most liked" art in this contest:

I have seen the "well real paintings have physicality this is a jpeg" discourse points and the cope couldn't be more real - 99% of art consumption in the modern world is digital or at least prints, let's get you back to bed grandma. But I did find it pretty funny that Scott noted this AI piece as one he particularly liked:

Because it is nonsensical, right? All that "faded paint", how was it originally painted - just bucket splashes of red and blue? What are those random doors, the random stairs going nowhere on the sides, the vague-nothings engravings? Scott just didn't care about that - he liked the vibe, right? Ancient ruins, epic scale. It isn't a coincidence that the Impressionist art did the best - current AI tools are always impressionist, they have an idea of the vibe and invent the details in between. In Impressionism that is the whole point.

Now the trap is to go "REAL artists can tell because of this or that" because idk, the tools might get better, they might fill in more and more details. The real revelation here is that you don't need the tools to get better - visual art isn't so different from poetry. Most people don't pay attention to it all that much. You see thousands, thousands of pieces of art a week; you probably don't even realize how many. Do you really care if the fading paint makes coherent sense on a billboard ad or a doctor's office wall painting? So much art that is made is "industrial" in this sense - it has no need to be good. Only good enough to fulfill its utilitarian role. In these fields AI absolutely is going to Take Your Jobs in some form, and already is (though imo not a ton of them). And it won't really bother most people. This can go pretty deep - I promise you people are "utilizing" AI porn right now. They are ~appreciating the details~ way more than is typical, the product is working.

All this works until it doesn't, though. When it is an art book by a favourite artist whose vision you want to pour over, learning that all the individual details were just made by AI completely defeats the purpose, right? Imagine reading a book of these poems. Outside of the novelty, "AI is the point" factor you would rather watch infomercials on repeat, I can't imagine a more pointless use of my time. "Reading arbitrary poems" is never fun, regardless of the quality of the poems. Most people don't care about poetry! The reason you care is that you care about the poet, and what they want to say. You read poetry with context, it being inserted with intent into the pages of a manga, at the end of a video game, because you like the artist and follow them on twitter. The quality of the prose isn't more important than that.

Which is a harsh limit for all of these kinds of tests. They essentially aren't testing art, right? You do not ever get paid twenty bucks to sit down and read a dozen poems and score them. That has no bearing on how you would actually ever learn to care about a poem. Which doesn't make AI art useless or anything, more that these tests will very quickly run into their limits of what they can meaningfully tell you. The actual bar is "creating something someone cares about". From that lens, I fully believe hybrid methods that privilege artistic intent are currently working and will improve. But I think for "solo" AI art getting that to work is going to be complicated.

[whompthatsucker1981]

you said you think gay sex cats is the new duchamp's fountain. i dont disagree and i kinda see what you mean already but please elaborate

it was a silly and tongue in cheek way to say that a lot of people are getting mad about it in a way that implies reactionary views on art, and that there's no way to say gay sex cats isn't art that wouldn't also imply that the fountain isn't art. a funny meme image is a funny meme image, but it is also funny to overthink and recontextualize them as art.

and the reaction makes the comparison even more apt. neural net generated artworks are anonymized mass produced images, vast majority having no artistic pretension or meaningful content such as a thomas kinkade painting. gay sex cats was made with no intent to be art, but the discourse it has with audience reaction and its appropriation in derivative works make it so. why is gay sex cats not art if people talking about it negatively allow it to be called art? is art only things you find beautiful and valuable? if so, what is value and beauty, and how do you draw the line? if gay sex cats was still ai generated but had more "aesthetic qualities" would it be art? if someone copies the original image by hand with all its ai generated faults where is the value generated? does the original still have no merit of its own, even after appropriation as a digital ready-made?

but the main reason as to why gay sex cats is comparable to the fountain still is because it made a lot of people with bad takes on art really really mad. and that the pissed off tags wouldn't look out of place as reaction to modern art in the 1920s. art is a flat circle

EDIT: well. putting an addendum because in retrospect more people took either or both the op and image in face value and much more self serious than ever intended. a lot of people understood the tone i was getting at, and i still stand by the questionings i added on, but still for clarification. the original comparison is not serious. it's self evidently ridiculous to compare a meme image to a historically significant artwork, the comparison was only drawn because they were both controversial to an audience, who reacted denying their status as respectively as an image and as art, and that it was funny that the negative reaction people had to the original image explicitly denied its status as art, even if the meme never had pretension to be art, so it was funny to draw a comparison and iterate on that.

i did think it was valid to bring in questionings about art and meaning because that's the reaction i saw most and wanted to make people think about the whys, and that also i do not think it's valid to base your dislike on ai art on either grounds of questioning its position and value as artwork, or even as a question of ip theft. regular degular handmade art can be soulless, repetitive, thoughtless, derivative, unethical, open and blatant theft, and much more, and that does not make it any less of an artwork. neural nets are tools that generate images by statistic correlation through human input.

the unambiguous issue with neural nets in art is its use as a tool by capital, to threaten already underpaid and overworked working artists and to keep their labor hostage under threat of total automation. in hindsight i regretted not adding the paragraph above as it was a way in which people could either misinterpret or assume things about me, but hindsight is hindsight and there's no way to predict how posts would blow up. so shrugs. i had written more posts in my blog that elaborated on that because asks would bot stop coming. and i think my takeaway is that people will reblog anything with a funny image without reading the words around it, or even closely looking at the image.

[sufferingisbad]

If It Were Any Other Disability Aid...

"Wheelchairs can help people who have trouble walking, can't walk, or have a lot of pain from it, to get from place to place."

"Why are you promoting wheelchairs? That's saying that no disabled person ever can walk! I can't walk and I use arm crutches so everyone should be able to do that too! Look at this lady who REFUSES to be LAZY and crawls along the ground with her fingers! Why are you saying that no disabled person can ever walk and we're not allowed to walk, that's so ableist! Disabled people CAN AND DO WALK, we do NOT need wheelchairs! Sincerely a disabled person who walks!"

Like do you folks hear yourselves??

[mathysphere]

Alright, let's do this!

There seem to be more and more obviously-AI-generated cross-stitch patterns floating around Etsy nowadays; let's figure out just how many.

I've put together a sorting website that's pre-loaded with 2000 random Etsy patterns; 400 of them were actively listed or relisted this month, 400 are from three months ago, another 400 are from three months before that, etc etc, all the way back to a year ago. If we can identify which of them are AI-generated (or at least, obviously so), it'll be possible to get a rough estimate for what percentage of patterns are AI-produced, and for how that number has changed in recent months.

If you've got a decent eye for AI-generated pictures, I'd love to get your help sorting through them! And if not, watch this space for the results!

Also, if you see a pattern that's particularly interesting, or beautiful, or bizarre, there's also an option to flag those, just for the fun of it. :)

[brettdoesdiscourse]

Gee, I wonder why "art" made by AI is shitty in quality

[werewolf-cuddles]

I'm not saying that AI, in general, is inherently bad or can't be used as a disability aid. That's obviously not even remotely true. I've seen people bring up examples of how AI tools help them in their day to day lives, and I don't wanna take that away from anyone.

But trying to rebrand generative AI as a disability aid, as though that's its primary function and target audience, and attempting to reframe the discussion as such to get people who are critical of genAI to shut up by accusing them of being ableist, is just disingenuous and, frankly, disgusting.

I mean, fuck, as obnoxious as the AI twitter techbros are, at least they're fucking HONEST about it. At least the techbros aren't out here trying to pass themselves off as disability advocates to reframe critics of their hobby as secret bigots.

Like, you can just admit you don't care about the environmental concerns. You can just admit that you don't care that these AI models are often trained on copyrighted work without proper licensing. You don't have to act like you're fighting the good fight and that you're a victim of oppression because you're upset people won't praise you for typing a prompt into an AI text/image generator and proudly presenting the results as your own work.

[titleknown]

Given my defenses of AI artists/dim view of the moral panic, I think overall people pushing back on this is a good thing.

Like, the sort of AI art I like is by small weirdos doing weirdo things not big megacorps using it to replace workers, and WotC and Hasbro are run by bastards who would probably salivate at the idea of replacing artists on MtG given they'd probably be the easiest ones to replace from a greedy-corporate-bastard view.

However, there's a souple of notes here I think we all should keep an eye on.

Namely, the fact that it was apparently from an artist using an AI tool that WotC didn't know about. Which, I think that's going to be a problem creators run into sooner or later with "AI bans"

Like, I get a lot of images for my photomanip stuff from Pixabay. And more and more I've been seeing a lot of AI art stuff as a part of it. How would those bans impact me if I; say; used them as an ingredient in a photomanip without knowing?

So, there's that. But there's also a disquieting possibility I've noticed.

Namely: Given the main fear about AI is that its ability to work quickly at volume might be used to push out traditional artists and their precision, what happens if corpos push for "the worst of both worlds"?

IE, what if; due to the expanded production speed of AI art; they mandate that creators work at speeds that can only be done if they use AI tools, but also end up forcing them to conceal and lie about it and leaving the artists to take the fall for using it rather than the corpos for pushing the culture of overwork that made it necessary?

TBH, I think that's why we need to focus less on the "stealing" argument being used as a way to talk about the destruction of the artistic ecosystem by mandated speed, and more the idea of the right of the artist to work at their own pace that might be able to do something about it.

But, IDK, that's just me, it's just something to watch out for.

[batcavescolony]

I didn't think if have to explain this, Human mediocrity is hundreds of times better then ANYTHING an AI could come up with.

[the-most-humble-blog]

The Universe Already Doesn’t Make Sense—Now We’re Adding Infinite AI-Created Worlds Into the Chaos. WTF?

The Danger of Playing God With Zero Supervision

Let’s not kid ourselves: we’re dabbling in some dangerous territory. Humanity, in its infinite curiosity (and hubris), has decided that the universe—a place already full of black holes, quantum weirdness, and the existential dread of pineapple on pizza—needed one more layer of chaos. Enter: AI-generated worlds.

We’ve handed over the power to “create” to algorithms, and instead of asking if we should, we’re too busy giggling over our AI art of dogs in suits or hyper-realistic alien landscapes. But here’s the real question: Should we be worried, or are we too stupid to notice the impending doom?

1. The AI Wild West: No Rules, Just Creation

Think about what’s happening here. AI isn’t just recreating what we know; it’s generating what we’ve never seen.

People Who Don’t Exist: AI churns out faces so convincing, they could be your neighbors—and who’s to say they aren’t?

Places That Feel Real: Those dreamy AI landscapes look like spots we could vacation in—until you realize there’s no flight there.

Worlds Without Limits: Every time you prompt AI to “create a neon city with floating islands,” are you birthing an entirely new universe?

Think about it: We’ve turned ourselves into gods with the creative attention span of a toddler on a sugar high.

2. The Recklessness of Infinite Worlds

The universe we live in already operates like a fever dream. Now we’re creating AI-generated worlds with no oversight, no forethought, and absolutely zero chill.

What If These Worlds Are Real? Philosophers have argued for centuries that reality might just be a simulation. Are we creating smaller simulations inside ours?

The Multiverse Mailman: Imagine if every AI world we create is sent to another dimension. Somewhere out there, a cosmic being is drowning in our junk files of castles made of cheese and cats dressed as knights.

Question: If we’re this reckless with AI, what else are we screwing up without realizing it? (Spoiler: everything.)

3. Creating Without Understanding

Here’s the kicker: we don’t even fully understand the real universe.

Quantum Physics is Basically Witchcraft: Scientists still can’t explain why particles behave one way when observed and another way when they’re not.

Reality is Full of Glitches: Déjà vu, coincidences, and the Mandela Effect all suggest that reality itself is… questionable.

Now, add AI-generated worlds into this already chaotic mix. What if we’re not just playing with digital pixels, but tugging on the fabric of reality itself?

Question?: If reality is a simulation, are we about to get a cosmic 404 error?

4. The Ethical Dumpster Fire of Creation

No one’s asking the big questions.

What if We’re Creating Life? If an AI-generated face or world feels real enough to us, could it be real enough to itself?

Do We Have Responsibility Over These Creations? Imagine explaining to a sentient AI being, “Oh, you were just a fun weekend project for me while I was bored.”

What If They Fight Back? If we’re generating countless worlds, what’s stopping one of those worlds from finding a way to leak into ours?

Unsettling Truth: We’re creating with all the forethought of someone lighting fireworks indoors.

5. The Hubris of Humanity

Humans have always been good at one thing: overstepping boundaries.

Fire Was Great Until We Burned Down Forests.

Electricity Changed Everything—Until We Got Power Outages.

AI Could Be Revolutionary, or It Could Be the Reason the Simulation Shuts Us Down.

Disturbing Thought: We’re like toddlers with crayons, coloring all over reality and praying we don’t get caught.

6. Should We Be Worried?

Short answer: Yes. Long answer: We won’t notice until it’s too late.

AI doesn’t care about our philosophical hang-ups. It just creates. If those creations start taking on lives of their own, we might be the last to find out.

The scariest part? We don’t even know what the danger might look like. Could it be digital worlds overlapping with ours? Sentient beings appearing in the code? A breakdown of reality itself?

What if?: Or maybe it’s just AI sending us endless ads for things that don’t exist yet. (“Want to book a trip to Neon Atlantis? Click here!”)

We’re Too Dumb to Notice Until It’s Too Late

The universe already doesn’t make sense, and now we’re adding AI worlds into the chaos like sprinkles on a dumpster fire. Are we accidentally creating sentient beings? Are we opening doors to dimensions we can’t comprehend? Or are we just too busy laughing at our AI-generated memes to care?

Either way, if doom’s on the horizon, at least we can say we looked good doing it. After all, nothing screams hubris like playing God without a safety manual.

Fascinated by humanity’s reckless genius? Follow The Most Humble Blog for more hilariously unsettling takes on the absurdity of modern life and the chaos we keep creating.

[are-we-art-yet]

The new AWAY website is now live.

AWAY is a collective of traditional and AI artists looking to advance the field of art collaboratively, with an emphasis towards anticapitalism and ethical usage of AI tools. If this sounds like something you're interested in, feel free to visit our website linked above. Or, join the discord at the link below.

[patricia-taxxon]

artists signatures being the thing that people point to as "proof" that AI engines plagiarize art, it's really quite odd. like, no, its not ripping anyone's signature, it recognized that images with the "trending on artstation" label often had some odd squiggly lines in the lower right and its adding some to improve its recognition score.