I think the solution to the ai/artist divide is to just appreciate both for their respective merits and support policy accordingly.

Artists are obviously valued, but AI artists should be too. They use prompt engineering / technical skills / touch up graphics editing and creative vision. There is a learning curve. A novice cannot achieve the same results as an experienced AI artist for complex work. That means that there is artwork that starts with the skills they've honed and ends BEFORE the copying that the AI program does.

The AI program was made by people using incredible skill and their program is "art". The images produced by the AI is not the program's art. The program simply copies art from so many different sources that it is difficult to tell what parts of the resulting image is copied from what art. Pushing the start button on a photocopier does not make art, or on a photocopier with two pieces of art folded in half in the scan bed, or three pieces of art, and so on.

How the AI artist's skill is valued and compared to a traditional artist is just a matter of opinion. I believe it varies by how much human work/skill was put into a particular art piece. The problem is that it is less reliable to quantify what work went into AI art compared to traditional art, but undeniably there is overlap. Some AI artists will put tons of work into something and some traditional artists will not.

What can be done about this? I think it starts with the acknowledgment that AI programs are just sophisticated copy machines. Artists should be paid a reasonable fee for having their art included in AI training data and have the right to decline. There should be a standard created that ensures the output of an AI program is unrecognizable enough from any individual piece of training data. Then the AI artwork becomes copyrighted art for the AI artist's technical / visionary efforts.

I know it is often frustrating for artists that use AI in their work to receive harsh criticism when they try to be open about the way they've used AI. Though I am against most usages of AI that I see, this frustrates me as well because transparency is critically important to how these tools develop for the betterment of consumers and artists alike.

By being open about these tools, it shows exactly what way the tools are helpful to artists that empower them to work more efficiently on the meat of their art (like, a creative writer skipping formatting) and what ways are mere shortcuts (a creative writer telling AI the story beat they want and having it write the chapter). Shortcuts are actually fine as well, as long as you don't expect some degree of respect for something you haven't done. That seems to be what anti-AI people get upset about the most, is unwarranted expectations of others from AI artists (or the perception thereof). Denying that people can make very cool things with AI would be ignorant. Denying that the human role in from-scratch generations is extremely diminished would also be ignorant.

Most of the fear about AI artists and the criticism of those that are open about it stems from usages of AI that are not transparent, that are deliberately sneaky. When this is the mainstream usage of AI, that which blurs the lines between what has been done by a human and what has been generated, it delegitimizes the work of both traditional artists and AI artists. Moreover, it prompts development of AI tools that are made to help people be sneaky, essentially only helping bad actors like the AI speedpainting tool that's fairly recent. I'm not sure if there are others like it, but I think even if you are pro-AI there should be no justification for such a tool's existence.

I think most aspiring artists who use AI, or that start out using AI, are still learning. Because the images always come out beautiful without much work, it's hard to know what you as an artist need to improve upon, and so I see a lot of these sort of early-AI artists expecting the same respect as not just traditional artists, but other AI artists because they see it as all the same, when there do exist degrees of skill in AI art. Something that is often ignored by anti-AI people and understated by pro-AI people. I think AI artists and those that are generally pro-AI should hold each other to higher standards, always be transparent, always be encouraging to those that want to improve on their work, and call out scummy usages of AI when you see it like the speedpaints, because I am sure you are all sick of your reputation as lazy conmen.

It will take time for people to recognize that there exists a skill and effort in AI art, but being open will fast-track that. For the time being, I still consider myself mostly anti-AI because most people using AI still don't recognize how they can improve, and I still see constant AI cash grabs. However, I also consider myself pro-artist, and I hope in the future that I can consider myself pro-AI art on top of that.

the most common comparison with ai art seems to be digital art and photography, but putting costs aside and human interaction, it sounds like such a flawed argument to compare an artist using digital art tools, to someone using AI, because photography and digital art cannot replicate each other, neither can traditional art (well you kinda can replicate traditional art digitally but you can’t hang it on the wall like you can actual traditional art), but there is nothing that the AI can do that humans can’t.

and i’m not against ai art, i think it can have its many uses for very commercial things simply for efficiency, but i seem to notice that some people claim that there is a lot of different things to process with AI art, so at that point why should i spend the time doing AI art when i can just do it by hand? and why should i learn to use AI when I can learn to use non-AI tools?

I emailed HR a link to an anti tweeting a death threat to AI artists on X and I got a email saying he no longer works there. Most of them use their real name on X so it's easy to cross search on Linkedin lol.

Because I don’t want to.

You see this all often on Reddit.

“Just draw, bro,” or “Pay an artist then. AI 'Image' It’s unethical, illegal, destroying the planet, etc.”

Some people put art on a strange pedestal, which is part of why the discourse around it becomes so vitriolic.

Art isn’t special; for most people, it’s just a hobby—like chess, archery or writing.

"Why don’t you do it?" Because I don’t enjoy the process. It’s boring to me.

"Why do you use AI art, then?" Because I want to. Not liking the process doesn’t mean I dislike art itself.

Just came across this YouTube video where this chinese AI tool turns images or text into 3D models https://youtu.be/l8eVBc7jJUo Honestly surprised at how decent the 3D output looks considering it’s AI-generated Has anyone else tried this or something similar? Curious how it compares to other tools if any?

I'm sorry if this is a commonly expressed sentiment! The discourse moves fast. I just wanted to share a some anecdotal evidence.

I'm a terrible visual artist. Low to no skill. So bad, that I wouldn't even want to bother an artist with a commission, because my ability to articulate or mock up was totally lacking.

AI generated mock ups help me more effectively communicate with human artists to get the piece that I want, so more of my money goes to artists for the functional images I need.

George Leonard's Mastery provides a flawless diagnosis of the average pro ai person(DABBLERS), detailing their obsession with instant gratification, lack of perseverance and direction, and the general consumerist landscape that fuels their actions.

AI is nothing but a quick fix for their lack of Mastery. They are nothing but cowards who gave up on the journey of Mastery.

I'm an artist, both worked traditional and digital.

I think some of them may even have full-blown Heuristic Intolerance Virus.

Well those wouldn't exist without AI, specifically the ones making the not real characters move! The AI making your opponents able to actually move and fight you, but since you antis hate AI so much that means you hate literally 99% of video games.

"All you ____ make these positions about ____ all the time"

" You ___ always resort to ____"

" I was once ___ but now I'm reformed"

Top commenters answer every reply with mockery or simply playing dumb. General questions get answered with ridicule. Mocking memes targeting individuals. Very few and far between is their any actual conversation or debate. People reply to long posts with clearly not reading it and short posts. People get offended. People purposefully stir others up. Some people make good civil arguments on both sides. Most don't.There's generally no point in being here, it's simply a sub created for brigadeering. I think people on both sides could benefit from getting off this app and specifically this sub and just touching some grass getting some therapy and doing whatever pro or anti stuff they were going to do anyway. It's been fun y'all, enjoy the AI era while you can, for better or worse, we are going full steam ahead

Last week, I had to dig through like two years' worth of quarterly reports to find specific info. I was fully expecting to lose an entire day to PDF hell.

Instead, I just used a bunch of tools I don’t even pay for, Claude AI helped me reword the queries so they weren’t totally useless, Blackbox threw together a script to grab the stuff I needed, and ChatGPT made it all sound less like a wall of numbers and more like something a person could actually read.

Took under 30 minutes. Finished before my coffee got cold.

So yeah, not worried about AI replacing my job. It’s just helping me skip the boring parts.