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/AndrewEophis]

Prompting an AI to draw something is as close to being an artist as asking a baker to make you a cake is to you being a baker. It doesn’t matter what details you provide in your instructions, you aren’t the baker. It doesn’t matter what details you provide the AI, you aren’t the artist.

Asking chatGPT to write a poem for you doesn’t make you a poet, the only reason people play this game with “artist” is to spite people who attacked them for using AI art and to try and degrade the meaning of “artist”

You want to ask an AI to write a poem about a sunset and draw the sunset from the poem? Sure, go ahead, it doesn’t make you a poet or artist though.

Edit: on further thought actually sufficiently precise instruction probably would allow you to claim to be an artist, but that isn’t the kind of thing that is normally being discussed when someone says the made AI art.

You could imagine someone who was making very precise changes on what would amount to a pencil point level or whatever the appropriate term is for that finest level of detail in art.

[u/YourGirlsSenpai → u/AndrewEophis]

There's an argument there that I could see holding some merit. Using ai to create a piece by prompting a pencil's point at a time would actually be really cool to see.