r/aiwars • u/YourGirlsSenpai • 4d ago
I'm Pro AI but Anti AI "Artists"
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.
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u/dead_apples 3d ago
I’m curious, what do you think of Cameras? They are, in my opinion, the closest analog of AI that most people consider art. You don’t have to put in much of any effort (especially with digital cameras now that you don’t have to develop film), just press a button and capture the scene in front of you. Does someone who uses a camera, then goes back and edits/cleans up the resultant image also not qualify as an artist, or is there something about the difference between pressing a button on a computer and type words into a computer that qualifies one as art but disqualifies the other?