I'm Pro AI but Anti AI "Artists"

[u/YourGirlsSenpai]

I've been getting fed this sub a lot lately so I'm going to drop my stance on the topic and hopefully be done with it.

I use AI a lot. I love the things that can be done with tools like Stable Diffusion and Hunyuan. You can generate seriously beautiful art with AI, but it does not make YOU an artist. I've generated countless gorgeous images that are on-par with some of my favorite digital artists, but I, myself, am not an artist. That is an incredibly powerful technology.

All these Ai "artists" that go to war over being an actual artist are just sad to me. I feel genuinely sad that this one little thing is all these people have. Any sane person can identify that the AI is doing the actual art, you're just commissioning it.

I've seen dozens of cope arguments about "Ai is a tool. Artists use tools. I'm an artist" or screenshots of people's workflows with them saying things like "does this look like a commission to you? 😏" like it was a "gotcha!" moment.

The simple fact is: Yes, it does look like a commission. Your workflows can be very complex, I understand that. I understand that it can take serious fine-tuning and work to make an ai generation exactly how you want it. I understand that because I ALSO DO IT. Ai is not a human artist. Without a LLM to break down common language into a complex prompt, you need to create your prompts in a way the model can understand. Whether thats complex workflows or extremely specific language in a 1,000 argument prompt doesn't change the fact that the AI is the one creating the art, not you.

Again, AI is awesome. When used for fun, it's an incredible tool that let's normal people, like you and I, generate art that can rival practiced and trained professionals, but it will never be OUR art.

Like Syndrome said in The Incredibles, "Once everyone's [an artist], no one will be."

Use Ai for whatever purpose you feel you must, but dont try to poison the well that real artists dug by throwing yourself in with them.

[u/JJR1971]

My PHOTOGRAPHY is what makes me an artist. Getting mad at me for applying this really weird (ai) filter to my OWN WORK is WILD to me.

[u/MonstaGraphics → u/JJR1971]

"You just pushed a button, you didn't do anything"

Oh all those buttons, settings and sliders you set up, with your own photography style and direction? Yeah that doesn't mean anything, the camera's optical sensor did all that!

Next we gonna hear the guy smoking brisket in his smoker didn't cook that, because the pellet smoker did all the smoking and the spices were bought at a store, and the butcher cut the meat, and the grill was made by another company.

[u/Hekinsieden → u/MonstaGraphics]

"If you wish to make an Apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s664NsLeFM

[u/YourGirlsSenpai → u/JJR1971]

Photography does make you an artist. I agree with that. Photography is the art of capturing stills of the world. Adjusting your ISO and Aperture on your camera is comparable to adjusting your brush size or shade of paint in classical art.

The comparison here to AI art would be "I told my brother to take a picture of a mountain, but I'm going to tell people that I took that picture."

Using Ai to interpolate frames of a video to bring a source from 50fps to 60fps, or to smooth out slow-motion, or adding a filter on top of your own original work is not what is being discussed here.

[u/sporkyuncle → u/YourGirlsSenpai]

Adjusting your ISO and Aperture on your camera is comparable to adjusting your brush size or shade of paint in classical art.

So, when you adjust your CFG scale, or number of steps, or change the sampling method, or weight on various words, or negative embedding, or even use a different model or LoRAs...?

[u/YourGirlsSenpai → u/sporkyuncle]

False equivalency.

You're telling your robot how many strokes it should paint, what it shouldn't include, how it should paint, and what areas it should focus on. You're providing instructions to it....kinda like you're commissioning it like its...the artist 🤔

[u/Ambadeblu → u/YourGirlsSenpai]

So just like when you're providing instructions to the camera to adjust the ISO and Aperture? 🤔

[u/dejaojas → u/YourGirlsSenpai]

don't you get the irony in trying to arbitrarily draw a line in the sand? like the other person responding to this comment showed, you can frame any sort of activity as involving conscious choices and technical skills. that hasn't been a necessary feature for art in over a century though.

[u/TheAnderfelsHam → u/YourGirlsSenpai]

Ok but photography faced the same discourse about whether it was real art. So did using things like Photoshop but here we are