#fuck ai fuck ai tech bros fuck them all make your own art and be happy

[gayestcowboy]

i’m tired of the ai generated gay sex cats i don’t want to keep seeing them everywhere i’m sure it’s very funny and i’m sure there’s lots of theoretical ethics discussions to be had about it but have you considered. i don’t care

[ryo-maybe]

can u explain why AI art is bad without fearmongering, moralizing or bootlicking lol

I'm going to answer in good faith, even though the tone you're using sounds like you're harboring anything but. The issue with AI art isn't specifically inherent to the tools used to produce it, because, ultimately, a tool is merely that: something devoid of will which, in the hands of a human, can produce a specific outcome. It's the human element that taints what we could otherwise enjoy for the unquestioningly fascinating topic that is AI art and, by extension, AI software as a whole.

Now, the problem isn't people, period, but the kind of people that are responsible for giving AI the bad rep it's been getting, along with the intent that goes into both the development of AI tools and the things produced by dint of said tools. I'm talking about the tech bros happily rubbing their hands, waiting to provide business moguls with a brand new means to commodify and mass-produce what artists stake their entire livelihoods upon, because when you have enough zeroes lined up in your bank account, your eyes are utterly blinded to the soul and personality that human beings put into their handiwork, and which a machine won't ever be able to reproduce no matter how much stolen art you feed it. Oh yeah, by the way, that's how AI art tools have been making the rounds: by chewing on thousands upon thousands of stolen pictures made by actual people so that they may learn how to ape someone's style and spit out absolutely soulless derivatives, while the original authors don't see a lick of recognition or monetary retribution for any of it. Do I need to tell you why stealing and parading someone else's art as your own is a terrible, vile thing to do?

But sure, you did ask me to refrain from "fearmongering, moralizing or bootlicking", which I guess I've already done. So since you'd rather I skipped straight to the point in a concise manner, lemme offer some quick examples of why the culture surrounding AI art has already developed into one of the most abysmally disappointing displays of how greed and an utter lack of human decency can ruin something objectively brimming with possibilities:

Less than a week after the sudden death of Korean artist Kim Jung-gi, someone trained an AI model to mimic his artstyle, having the audacity of asking for credits if anyone wished to use it. I sincerely hope I don't have to explain to you why this is a ghoulish example of the kind of tone-deafness sported by tech bros who buy wholesale into the AI art craze.

A piece of AI art was submitted to an art contest and won. The "artist"'s work amounted to little more than picking a series of prompts and letting the machine do the work. It's as much art as googling a smattering of terms and making a collage of pictures taken from Pinterest (and even then, you would have put more work into it than this person did). That they won at all says a whole damn lot about how abysmal the respect given to artists - real artists - nowadays is.

There are a multitude of people out there already selling prints of AI-generated art. I could link some of them here, but honestly, type "ai art prints" on a search engine and you'll get inundated by them. I've seen and personally know artists who have had to undersell their works because commissions were the only thin, frayed string they could hang on in hopes of making it through the week without fucking starving themselves, but here we are: any random asshole can now yell "MASSIVE BREASTS, THIN WAIST, COCKTAIL DRESS, HUGE BADONGAS" at a computer, let it mash together a trillion of other people's hard work, and print it for easy bucks that the actual authors of the basic ingredients of their insipid soup will never, ever see a dime of.

It really bothers me that you mentioned "no bootlicking". Whose fucking boots is this side of the debate supposedly tasting? That of the artists who post every day about how angry, sad and terrified they are by the prospects of what the development of AI art will entail for their livelihood and passion? What kind of gall did your mother birth you with that you have the spiteful spunk to type that word, when you've got shit like an artist who had their sketch stolen while they were drawing it on stream, then fed to an AI and posted by someone passing it off as their own art? How does that not ignite your indignation? "Bootlicking". Like anyone's tongues have been tasting leather but those of the same tech bro chodes who kept trying oh so hard to convince us NFTs were the future while ruining the environment to make the absolute stupidest point ever made in the history of humanity.

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

People: corporations are bad and evil and blinded by greed!

Corporations: *Dangles AI in front of them*

People: Fuck artists, this is the way of the future! What's that you say? These things worsen climate change because they suck up tons of fresh water and cause shortages? Who cares! I can stick it to the greedy artists and make millions! Money money money!

No wonder we keep getting fucked; it's all too easy for people to point fingers at the greed of others, but they always make excuses for their own greed.

As far as I can tell, it's training AI models in general that takes a lot of water for cooling, not AI art in specific, and it hasn't caused any shortages yet. Servers in general require a lot more water than you think and while they're working on solutions to try and offset the water footprint by using non-potable water, there's not enough transparency in how much is being actually being used by data centers and in tech firms' promises to be "water positive" by "replenishing watersheds" (which sounds suspiciously like the whole 'we plant two trees for each we use.....in a massive tree farm that is in no way a good replacement for the ecosystem we destroyed!' deal).

Yes, AI sucks up way more water than your average data center and that's another mark against it, but it's part of a much bigger problem. Getting rid of it won't save us and blaming it all on tech bros and AI art just distracts from the real, systemic problem we all have to deal with.

[neutronstarchild]

are you supported writers in ao3 against a.i. thieves ?

I did not realize my stance on this issue was super hard to figure out (hint: it's not. I'm against AI and have said so, so this ask seems to be about signaling rather than a sincere request).

Right now A.I. is not intelligent. It is ingesting the unprecedented amounts of data that human beings have created. This is the first time in history that statistics could be applied to such enormous language training sets (can you imagine trying to enter the data onto a computer back in the day when computers were terminals?)

That means that right now, it is taking as much human created data as it can to try to spit out things that are similar but not identical to what it ingested. It's why AI is extremely well-versed in the Omegaverse, because it's been scraping fanfic archives (and everything else, including a LOT of stealing intellectual property that could lead to lawsuits).

So someone coming to an unfinished story, copying it into some AI bot and then saying "give me an ending" even if they have no intention of publishing it is stealing, because it's giving new intellectual property to the A.I. language set to use to more efficiently parrot things back.

Don't buy into the hype that we are three steps away from self-awareness. A.I. can only give us a guessed model of things that it ate (kind of like when I fit a line through lots of datapoints!), often illegally. It's very good at plagiarizing and lying.

So please stop sending me asks about whether I will stand up and say (AGAIN) that of-fucking-course I support AO3 writers against thieves coming in and stealing their stories and feeding ever more into the plagiarism machine.

What else am I doing about it? Well, I reupped my membership to OTW, so that I can voice these serious concerns to the board as they sit with the reality of A.I. and what the unscrupulous are doing with that A.I. AO3 is an archive designed for people to look at things that they loved and closed their eyes and imagined what (and who) their favorite characters could be doing, then sat down at their computers or with their notebooks and actually put to words (or art) those things to share with the rest of us.

So... do you want to know what to do since your favorite story ever ended on a cliffhanger and it's driving you nuts because you want to "know the ending?" Here are some non-A.I. things you can do!

Comment on that fic, explaining why it is your favorite and how it makes you feel (though avoid "when is the next chapter?" comments, they can make the muse go back into its cave to hide).

Make some fandom friends. especially ones that love said story as much as you do, and roleplay an ending privately in a Discord server with those friends. The reason that putting a story into ChatGPT and then finishing it is ucky is because ChatGPT remembers and steals that input.

Ask yourself why you loved that thing so much. Is it because it is a clever trope perhaps? Or the premise is delicious? Well then, sit down and open a document (or notebook) and write your own version, then use AO3's Inspired By to credit the original story. Why is this different than A.I.? Because it's connections you yourself are making, instead of parroting out plagiarism.

Go onto your fandom social media account and say something about how much that unfinished story means to you and why, because you never know if there's a writer out there who just needs that tiny little push to finish.

And when can we think about all this generative A.I. stuff and use it? Well, once policies are in place for transparency in what is in the training set. Ways to opt out your creations (this includes retroactively). Right now the tech bros are running away as fast as they can with the stolen treasure chest and hoping they run far enough that governments throw up their hands and don't tell them to return what they stole. Don't let them do that.

So, there you have it.

I support writers against content thieves throwing their work into A.I., and now you even have a handy-dandy little list of things you can do if you are hungry for the end of the story that does not involve plagiarizing and stealing!

[cacola]

A lot of “anti AI art” arguments are either essentialist appeals to some inherent undefinable “soul” that makes it not art (an argument which is bad for the same reasons assertions of “objectively good/bad art” are bad) or are basically just arguments for intellectual property to be expanded to the abstract notion of someones “style”, and are also unknowingly arguing against the entire concept of sampling (an argument which is bad cause copyright and IP law are destructive to art as a whole)

The actual problems with AI art are 1, capitalism, artists are already severely fucked over under capitalism, and giving companies a way to fuck artists over more by cutting them out of the process is fucked. This would be more effectively solved by effective unions for artists, rather than by seeking to demonize and ban the technology, the technology is not the source of the problem, it merely has the potential to exacerbate it. And the second big problem with it is really just that the AI art community sucks as it exists, and that’s just cause tech bros suck and are idiots. This is, again, not an evil inherent to the technology itself, but a cultural evil that stems from who this technology appeals to first and foremost. AI art as a technology itself is entirely value neutral imo, I think at it’s best it could be a genuinely useful tool for artists, it’s very useful for generating raw material images to be curated, edited, and contextualized. It has the potential to cause problems by way of how large corporations could use it, yes, that harm is not really at all mitigated or solved by being reactionary and abrasive to independent artists making use of the technology.

That being said, I find authorial claims to the raw output of AI Art programs themselves to be kinda absurd. I think AI art outputs are best thought of as raw material to be shaped and used and contextualized. To me it’s most similar to discovering some obscure screenshot from some hazy VHS tape and posting it to an aesthetic account, or using it as cover art, or editing it into an artpiece of your own. It is still art in of itself, but to claim you “authored” such a thing would be silly. You discovered it. There is value in discovery and curation though.

[shinxistudio]

Studio Thoughts 2024MAR01

I've been thinking a lot since first finding out about the MidJourney deal Tumblr is taking. I've been wanting to make this post for just as long. (This sounds ominous, but it's not.) (Cut for a giant wall of text. Massive rambling.)

I don't know what to do. I've made an infinite number of new accounts across all the different social media I can find. I had to make a sheet to keep track of all the different websites I've joined. The thought of trying to post and maintain 20 accounts minimum to cover myself depending on where people flee to is overwhelming. I'm already averse to updating the accounts I have now. It takes too damn long as it is. (I need to set up PostyBird for the love of god. It doesn't work on a lot of mainstream sites, though.)

I want to share my art, but I don't want that to mean that I'm giving up my rights to it so some fuck can shove it into his dataset to create images and act like they're superior to something made by a real human and the human experience. I've opted out of the 3rd-party sharing option that they gave us, but I know that doesn't mean anything without proof. If they were giving data over that they shouldn't have from private conversations and password-locked blogs, they're not going to give a shit if someone toggled a setting. The whole issue with these datasets is the lack of consent to begin with, so why would they stop Now. I don't even know why they plan to pay Tumblr for the data in the first place because how much of it has already been scraped before they decided to tie it up in a bow for them?

I hate that people just parrot "Nightshade and Glaze!!" as if they're not open-source software that the tech bros can reverse engineer with the available coding. (As well as being easy to remove/get around in the first place.) Not to mention the stupid amount of processing power to use them, if they even work on the type of art you're putting into it in the first place. Even if they worked for your art, they're not accessible to everyone. That's not fair to artists who don't have or can't afford the highest-end PC parts. And even if they Worked to prevent AI it would only be a matter of time before they Didn't, like the constant fight UBlock is having with blocking YouTube's new coding to prevent ad blockers.

I'm just tired. I'm tired of feeling that the modern internet hellscape is just not meant for artists because the algorithms expect you to post as much as possible in order to get seen. I'm tired of artists finding a place to settle only to feel the need to move again and again because they just want their work and themselves to be respected. I miss old DeviantART when it was still a giant hub and community for artists instead of the shell it is today. I still see a lot of people still posting when I check in every now and then.

I don't know what the answer is, because I know data scraping for generative models isn't going away. I can only hope that it cannibalizes itself into hot garbage by taking in generated images that weren't tagged as AI. I would love it if all the wild shit people post on here could make the dataset completely unusable.

At the moment it looks like the only thing I can do is continue to watermark my art heavily and post low-quality versions. I've never had a large enough following to worry about art theft, but I can't control an all-consuming bot scraping everything.

I've been toying with the idea of making my own website and it's seeming more and more appealing. I've seen that you can make your own Patreon-adjacent subscription setup and have a pay-to-access feature. I don't know if that could help prevent scraping or if there are methods to get around that, too. Can bots scrape Patreon itself?

I'll need to update my LinkTree with all the other hundreds of sites that I'm on I guess. I was hoping that this long-ass post would help me come to some sort of conclusion or peace. I think I just gave myself more work to do. I also feel bad that my only other text post here is so hopeful, only to be slapped down immediately in this one.

TLDR: I'm gonna keep posting but like, I'm Not Gonna Like It. MidJourney Sucks. Tech Bros Suck. Ya'll can eat my entire ass.

[russenoire]

some points raised by AI advocates that made me stroke my chin and maybe even empathize a tiny bit.

idk, but i like nuance and think it gets elided easily in online discussions. i do not think these below are GOOD justifications, ever, for plundering the hard work and talent of human artists using AI to make art for profit, but they're valid points.

some people tempted by or who make AI art

don't want to take the time to 'git gud, n00b' because they emphatically do not enjoy the process of sucking at shit until they don't suck. and this includes those who might be interested in taking the time, but look at everything they feel might be required and think: 'i could go to film or art school for 3+ years or i could spend 30 minutes tailoring a midjourney prompt.' i kinda get this one, tbh. artistic skill is hard-won whether you're formally trained or not. i am untrained; i would say self-trained. but i never stopped drawing as a child like most people do. something visually and mentally clicked for me, something that i couldn't even articulate until i read drawing on the right side of the brain in my 20s, that allowed me to jump over the initial 'why can't i just draw what i SEE AAAAKSHDKF' hurdle. maybe this is what 'talent' actually means? that early mental/visual shift—where you come to see the world and things in it as a collection of shapes, lines, planes, lights, darks, color blocks, mostly divorced from context or meaning—is present in others like myself, and it does smooth your path. adults just draw for two, three, four years, compare themselves to people who felt some version of that aforementioned shift and/or went to art school, and conclude that they 'have no talent'. while that understandably feels like a long-ass time to go nowhere fast, three years really isn't a lot of time for organic, undirected skill development. i'm serious. inventing the wheel by yourself takes fucking forever; my drawings didn't stop sucking until i was around 11 or 12. that's half my childhood. easily. but actually taking classes or diving into hardcore study? can and will drastically shorten that time. the progress i've seen competent drawing teachers achieve with their students in weeks or months, or artists on youtube who do frequent, deliberate practice in a year is not a miracle. real progress is attainable within a reasonable fucking frame of time IF YOU WANT IT.

really, really aren't satisfied with art that looks bad to them and still want to realize their ideas. and i'm talking crying themselves to sleep over the mismatch between their own skills and said ideas. that frustration is REAL and a version of it is actually a huge factor in why children stop drawing. see all of the above. i don't know how to ease the pain of that skill mismatch. me, i sat with a lot of frustration for a long time; hell, I STILL DO. i think i'd still be halfway decent at lineart and intimidated by actually painting it if i hadn't just started pushing myself to fucking PAINT already, even if it looked really basic. being simultaneously OK with whatever you can do right now and still striving to improve is emotionally difficult. and i know it hurts to have a really cool idea and feel blocked from making it real, especially if you're just not there yet. 'THEN JUST COMMISSION AN ARTIST,' i can hear you artists screaming from the ether. yo. artists are expensive. we are, and we kinda need to be to make a decent living or a feasible side hustle (i'm not going to get into artists underselling themselves). i do think most folks in this boat are not greedy tech bros, just ordinary working class folks who want beauty that is good enough without having to shovel over half a week's paycheck for it. to which i would also argue... dude, you can just save up, too.

often only recognize certain styles of painting (realism or hyperrealism; super-glossy, shiny, high contrast digital painting) as art and want to make art like THAT. putting aside the fact that art is all-encompassing and literally anything can be art, paintings in realistic styles are what i would argue most lay people think of as capital-A art. there is a reason why dictators tend to discourage or prohibit non-realist art; why the early USSR and CPC commissioned bright realist murals everywhere; why more abstract art didn't really catch fire in the western world until the advent of photography. people can see themselves and their history, represented in full color and often writ large. that's fucking powerful and sometimes lost, i think, on those of us who see things differently. but that kind of art is even more out of reach for the lay person who wants it. it takes far longer to make and train for, and artists who work in a realistic style can and do command stupid money. not everyone has that kind of patience or pockets that deep.

firmly believe that some people have more talent than others, so skill development doesn't matter. these are usually the people i mentioned in my first point, who've actually tried for months or years to git gud but never knew how or what to practice. they've been exposed to lots of people their age who felt the shift™ and can't really explain their faster improvement. if you know this feel, gentle reader, and have no clue what's actually happening, i understand why you might throw in the towel. US culture in particular is terrible at growing and nurturing talent of all kinds, and artists don't often share the hours they're actually pouring into improving specific skills. 'talent' by itself is fucking useless; a person who is willing to work at continual improvement will mop up the floor with someone who doesn't think they need to build skill. artists know this. and if you don't feel that shift as a kid, you can learn how to unlock it as an adult.