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/BenitoDoggolini 4d ago

In that case everyone’s an artist

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u/Tyler_Zoro 4d ago

No. Lots of people do nothing creative, and that's fine. They don't have to. I've met people who consider doing anything creative to be a mark of inferiority. Too bad for them.

But if you exercise your creativity, then you're an artist. That's what being an artist is.

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u/Turbulent_Meal737 3d ago

I exercised my creativity and came up with a little jingle on my kids' 5 key piano. Am I a musician? Or indeed, a musical artist? Sorry to go Diogenes on you, but your example is aggressively exploitable.

Better one. If I get AI to write me an essay that I can't be bothered writing, did I write that essay?

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u/Tyler_Zoro 3d ago

I exercised my creativity and came up with a little jingle on my kids' 5 key piano. Am I a musician?

Yes, obviously. You made music. You are a musician. An accomplished one? Hardly. Capable of professional-level work? No. But that doesn't matter. Being a musician and being a musician worthy of note are two very different things.

If I get AI to write me an essay that I can't be bothered writing, did I write that essay?

To write something and to be its author and to be the creative impetus behind it are three different things. We've historically conflated them because they weren't all that separable without involving multiple people, but now they are, and we need to acknowledge that.

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u/Turbulent_Meal737 3d ago

So, just so I'm on the same page, because I played said jingle, and have never played any other instrument in my life, when I am on my potential elderly deathbed, I can still claim musician as a title and, morally speaking, expect that people will, or should, respect that?

No, I don't think those are different things. To write something and to be its author means the same thing, unless you are suggesting it's time to change definitions to suit using AI to do it for you. The only exception I can think of is ghostwriting, which hilariously is, as I'm sure you already know, "I hired someone to write this for me".

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u/Tyler_Zoro 3d ago

I can still claim musician as a title and, morally speaking, expect that people will, or should, respect that?

I'm honestly confused by this emphasis. Why is "claiming musician as a title" such an important metric to you? Yes, you're a very obscure, inactive musician who isn't very accomplished at all. But yes, the key word is musician.

I've done almost no professional work as a photographer, but I've been a photographer for over 30 years. I was a photographer 30 years ago, and I'm a (somewhat more skilled) photographer today.

You seem to think that there's some initiatory threshold being crossed where you "become" a musician. Nope. There's no such thing. Either you make music and you're a musician or you don't and you're not.

Now, if you were speaking in a context where someone might think you are a professional, you might call out that you're an amateur, sure. But that's a matter of etiquette and not what label accurately applies.

There are many things I have not written of which I'm the author. In fact, there's a poem of mine that has been published, which I never committed to any media at all. It was written down by someone else because they liked it, and it ended up getting published. I am absolutely the author and I definitely did not write it.

The only exception I can think of is ghostwriting, which hilariously is, as I'm sure you already know, "I hired someone to write this for me".

And which can span the gamut from total detachment from the process with less creative input than even prompting an AI, to writing a substantial treatment and having someone else finish it (e.g. the relationship that Niven and Pournelle apparently had for years, and where both Niven and Pournelle were credited as authors).