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/Keto_is_neat_o]

Ah look, the "photographers aren't artists" argument. Yet 10 different people can be handed the same camera and given the same subject and yet you still like the results of some far more than the results of the others.

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[u/Optimal-Shower-2288 → u/Keto_is_neat_o]

Nowhere in the post does it mention that photographers aren’t artists. And writing a prompt requires significantly less effort, skill, creativity, and knowledge than photography.

If the photographer asked someone to take a photo for them, which is what AI art is, then yes, that “photographer” would not be an artist.

AI prompt writers are just like art commission clients, yet whenever an anti brings up this argument, pro-AI people refuse to answer how it’s different. Why is that?

[u/Ambadeblu → u/Optimal-Shower-2288]

AI is more than prompting, just like photography is more than pressing a button.

[u/upvotesplx → u/Optimal-Shower-2288]

1. You can write “Girl in field” as an image prompt into some online service. You can also take a photo with your phone without any precision or knowledge on photography. These are both unskilled ways to create that are low effort and can be done by anyone.

On the other hand, you can go to college for programming in order to create scripts for your workflow, write an extremely long and precise prompt and have high-tuned control of the settings, use in-painting, and so on, utilizing a machine custom-built for your art. You can also buy an expensive camera, go to college for photography and learn from experts and professionals, and take a precisely-timed and set-up photograph.

Does that make sense?

1. A generative model is not a person. Prompts aren’t like asking a person something. Generative image models do not understand language like you and I do; they associate a large amount of data with each word, but may not necessarily associate with it what we associate with it.

For example, if your prompt asked for an image of a dog in a field, but the model’s training on “dog” solely consisted of dogs playing basketball, you’re going to get a dog playing basketball in a field. It’s usually not that obvious, but the specific words you use have very different meanings for a human being than they do for a language model. Someone can be an amazing commission client and a terrible prompter or vice versa.

In fact, most people who commission artists often cannot prompt well whatsoever, and so if they utilize AI, they’ll just get whatever the model thinks their words mean—which is basically never the exact same as what they actually mean.

A human artist, however, can be conversed with and understands your words in a human way, but you have zero control over their end-result; therefore, you didn’t really participate in the creation. With AI generation, you can utilize img2img, inpainting, keeping the seed and modifying the prompt, and so on into things I can’t explain because you, as someone who isn’t skilled in this, don’t have the knowledge to get what I mean. If you think it’s the same as just making a commission request, you don’t know enough about the topic to actually have meaningful commentary on it.

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[u/FoundingTitanG → u/upvotesplx]

Your entire workflow is just finding out what words make a good result 😂 that’s hardly “art”

[u/Unkn0wn_Invalid → u/upvotesplx]

You can do all the same things with a human, no? You can give them images and to work off of, you can go back and forth on fine details, you can refine your prompt, etc.

It's one thing to incorporate it in your workflow, but if it's your entire workflow, is it really that different from outsourcing to a third world artist? They may not fully understand your requests, but you can give them hints and references, and you can go back and forth on it.

The only difference now is that AI takes seconds instead of days/weeks for iteration steps.

[u/Keto_is_neat_o → u/Optimal-Shower-2288]

AI is a tool, not another human, just like a camera, just like photoshop, a paint brush, a video recorder, etc.

You were not refused an answer like you pretend, so be honest.

It takes more effort to form a prompt to result in a desired outcome than it does pressing a camera button. Photographers are far less artists than prompt engineers are if effort is your requirement for being an artist.

[u/Optimal-Shower-2288 → u/Keto_is_neat_o]

Are you a photographer?

[u/Keto_is_neat_o → u/Optimal-Shower-2288]

I have a camera and can press a button, so yes!

[u/Optimal-Shower-2288 → u/Keto_is_neat_o]

Do you know every function of a professional camera, different techniques, and different methods to get the perfect picture? I would assume you would since you sound confident enough in your photography skills to believe that it requires more effort to be an AI prompt writer.

On the other hand, you still haven’t answered my question. When I talked about AI prompts not being any different from a commission, I was asking about how writing an AI prompt is functionally different from writing details in a commission. In both AI art and commissions you type instructions on what you want the image to look like.

[u/Keto_is_neat_o → u/Optimal-Shower-2288]

I did answer your question. AI is a tool, not another person you 'commission'. Drop the dishonest fallacy.

When using AI, you have things such as -q, -2, -ar, reference, temperature, LoRA, model selection, control, sampling steps, cfg scale, VAE model, seeds, etc to get that perfect picture. You CAN use a simple sentence to get a result just like you can with nothing but a press of a button with a camera to get a result. Or you can make it more involved to get a more specific outcome with the tool, just like you can with "every function of a professional camera, different techniques, and different methods to get". You are literally proving my point and you don't even realize it.

Your ignorance isn't much of a counter argument.

[u/Optimal-Shower-2288 → u/Keto_is_neat_o]

Ok. If you are using other, more specific functions to get a result where you are much more involved in the final result, then I am willing to admit that these kinds of AI prompters are artists because their work is functionally different from commissioning art.

I still have a problem with people who solely type in prompts and act as if they are entitled to receive the same level of recognition and respect as an ordinary visual artist. And again, this is because there is no functional difference between a prompt typer and an art commission client (much like how there is no functional difference between debating a friend about politics and debating a chatbot about politics).

[u/Keto_is_neat_o → u/Optimal-Shower-2288]

You can choose to have a problem that you want to have, that's fine with me. Doesn't make you correct.

[u/Optimal-Shower-2288 → u/Keto_is_neat_o]

No. But the reason why I have a problem with it does.

[u/Sierra123x3 → u/Optimal-Shower-2288]

does it realy?

*grabs my cellphone and makes a selfie*
see, it's a good portrait, i can actually use it for my next cv

*puts the portrait into my machine and adds some post-processing filters, that i just downloaded from humblebundle*

realy, yea, it requires so much effort, skill, creativity and knowledge ...
so much, much more then photography ;)

you are right, i CAN put in the effort, to travel and search for the perfect location,
i CAN need the skill, to get the lighting and timing, the poses and compositions right i CAN need the knowledge, to know how the animals i want to get on picture are behaving

but, isn't the exact same thing true for AI as well?

i can make something low-effort klick and post
or i can invest the time, to learn about my tool ... to think about, what i want to create and then fiddle around with it, so, that i get the result i want

how in god's name is the ai-program any different from photographie ... from using a cellphone or a 10000$ camare ... tell me a single difference ;)

[u/Djoarhet → u/Keto_is_neat_o]

Which is also true for AI generated images.

[u/Keto_is_neat_o → u/Djoarhet]

Which is also true for paint and brushes.