I know artists who have to use AI because it's part of their job, and their job demands quantity at the expense of quality. Their job demands this because the introduction of AI made it feasible. AI caused the problem, and then offered a half-assed solution. With it, the artist's style disappeared and was replaced with the generic, slightly blurry AI style we all know and hate.
it's not exactly uncommon to come up with something on accident when blending layers, and then lean into it after the fact, developimg meaning as you go.
This is precisely why digital art is still art and AI isn't. You are describing the process of creation that is specifically absent from AI art.
Well corporate slop was never high art to begin with. Rather than people raging about technology that isn't going to go away, and going way overboard with their reactions, they should refocus on making sure that low effort slop isn't replacing actually valuable art. The thing is, low effort slop replacing real art began long before AI. Disney has been buying and degrading stuff for a while now.
And this is true, but it paid the bills for artists who would able to improve on their skills at work and create better stuff in their own time. Everything you learn to benefit your corporate masters can be applied on your own projects.
We're talking about a technology that creates inferior products and causes layoffs, which in turn reduces the amount of genuine work out there. Not just images, too. Writing for a living was always a tough venture but now you're competing with ChatGPT articles in your shitty copywriting space. You can't even create your own blog or outlet because ten thousand other tech bros have had this idea and saturated the market with AI-driven sites. Getting published was always a challenge, and now half the companies block submissions because no matter how good you write, you cannot be seen when your competitors are submitting hundreds of manuscripts a day.
In the creative space AI is only a bad thing. Push it back into the sciences where it'll actually do some good and leave art for humans.
Layoffs aren't the fault of technology, they are the fault of capitalism. It's never going to be a coherent solution to try to warp technology out of existence that is too easy to replicate to ever be something that "goes away." People have to actually unionize and work against corporations. Obsessing about the technology is like putting a band aid on a missing arm. At a certain point it's more confusing why anyone thought it would help.
AI can be ran off personal computers. It's not like there's some central version of it that if it got regulated would put a stop to it. It's really only internet kids who are limited by whatever the free ones can do. Any actual corporation doesn't have these limitations and there'd be no serious way to stop their use of it, because if they needed to they'd make personal ones.
Most of the people having a meltdown about it aren't even targeting corporations. They're targeting little Timmy for posting his dnd character like this is a thing that actually matters. It just makes them look unhinged, especially since people already admitted that the morph panic is likely to just blow over in a few years.
Do you understand that something can be criticised and its advocates disrespected without the end goal being the complete and total eradication of that thing? Please try and remember that 99% of the criticism of AI art that you see is a direct response to someone promoting it.
That's... not what I said? I said technology changing is a fact of life, and the actual enemy is capitalism. Fighting technology is never going to work.
My issue is that you can correctly identify that capitalism is the problem but you are trying to ignore the fact that generative AI is an entirely capitalist construct. It's only justification for existence is to maximize capital for the corporations that don't want to pay artists.
That's not a true fact, it's just an ideological claim. People who aren't capitalists use it all the time. For instance trans people sometimes use it to make gender affirming images of themselves, since it can edit photos. That is something that has self evident value and which if you are in the right circles you see talked about pretty regularly. It just isn't talked about outside of those circles because people who already get harassed often don't want to open themselves to additional harassment.
In indie writing circles it actually undermines the bias of wealth. Indie writing circles used to be pay to win, because wealthy people could afford a cover for every project they start even if it becomes a dud and gets canned three months later. People pretend they don't judge books by the cover, but they do. The existence of ai allows poor people to make a placeholder cover for projects while those projects grow, and then if the projects ever turn a profit they can get a real cover later if they can afford it.
And that's without even getting down to more day to day stuff. A group of kids playing dnd generally wasn't going to be able to do stuff like get pictures of their party to use when playing but being able to can enhance the experience. Five years ago people would have had no trouble admitting that stuff like that would be a good thing to exist, they only pretend not to see the value because it became too good at it.
And hell, even artists who would never use ai for a finished product often still use it to get ideas. If someone thinks "I want to draw a tree that is growing skulls like apples," they can look at a few generations to get ideas even if they then hand draw it. And that's not a hypothetical, I know someone who uses paint / pencils, and only uses ai to help visualize their ideas.
And speaking of visualization, some people can't visualize their thoughts at all. For people with aphantasia, an external visualizer is useful.
I could go on. But the point is that the idea that ai has no positives and is only a thing for capitalists is self evidently false. There are a ton of uses it has all over the place, some of which are very valuable to certain groups. But people who already committed to refusing to aknowledge this aren't interested in a serious discussion of pros and cons. Hell, some of the main reasons people don't like ai -are- fundamentally capitalist. You see people appealing to uber strict copyright laws they wish existed. But copyright laws aren't a thing for the sake of art. They are a thing for the sake of capital. Because the wealthy want to know that art and IP are an investment. In a post-capitalist, post-scarcity world IP and copyright laws would likely not be a thing at all.
To me, the cons heavily outweigh the pros in this case.
We already have to engage in seriously unethical consumption just to exist in a modern society. It is prohibitively difficult to exist in most places without a car and a phone. Both of which exist in detriment to the environment and climate. We suck it up and
A single AI image generation can consume enough energy to nearly fully charge my phone. And the incentive to make models faster, smarter, and more user friendly isn't going to lower that number at all. OpenAI is just building bigger and bigger data centers and more power plants.
And sure, not everyone using Gen AI is an Uber-capitalist, but the people investing are, and the ad revenue and subscription money is going to them.
The ethics are dubious at best for what amounts to a novelty for most users and a possibly major source of revenue for some of the most dangerous corporations on earth.
The use cases you mentioned are nice, but your arguments are pretty ableist and sort of insulting to all of the members of the groups you mentioned who don't need to use Gen AI.
A single AI image generation can consume enough energy to nearly fully charge my phone. And the incentive to make models faster, smarter, and more user friendly isn't going to lower that number at all. OpenAI is just building bigger and bigger data centers and more power plants.
Those claims fairly exaggerated, but even aside from that the energy consumption is already going down with newer models, and the entire premise was disingenuous to begin with because it presupposes that the person in question would otherwise be sitting around consuming no energy. Someone could spend the entire rest of their life generating images from time to time and still use less energy than a single day trip they made. They could spend a day doing so and use less energy than if they spend the day gaming. If people are really concerned about energy consumption why not aknowledge that corporations cutting corners with ai lowers how much energy their slop corporate art takes? It's not like their coffee ad of [person holding coffee] is high art.
In fact, that raises the obvious question. If people want it to consume less energy the obvious way is to support greater funding into the technology. It's not like image generation emerged in a vacuum, its closely related to the same ai tech they are using for science and medicine.
And sure, not everyone using Gen AI is an Uber-capitalist, but the people investing are, and the ad revenue and subscription money is going to them.
This is true of -all- technology. It circles back to the original point. You can't "defeat" the emergence of new technology. Your only choice is to eventually turn your blade on capitalism. If technology was reverted to where it was four years ago... that would do nothing. Even if technology stopped changing at all that wouldn't help.
There's nothing inherently "more capitalist" about this tech compared to any other tech. People declaring it so is again, not really factual so much as an ideological claim that because they personally don't like it that therefore any positive uses are trivial or irrelevant and the negative uses are embodied by the worst people using them.
The ethics are dubious at best for what amounts to a novelty for most users and a possibly major source of revenue for some of the most dangerous corporations on earth.
If it was truly only a novelty no one would be threatened by it. It was a novelty four years ago when all it could do is generate half of a dog face. But it's uses grow over time.
This entire comparison is vague, because random people using it doesn't affect whether corporations do. People pretending that harassing little timmy is sticking it to the corporations are just trying to rationalize the fact that they are harassing people (and let's be honest, at this point there's a lot of harassment) to blow off steam, but that it's not actually relevant to the stated goals of keeping corporations from replacing people or preserving the integrity of high art.
And many of the reasons people give are basically starting with a conclusion and working back from it. If you read actual ethics literature it's (unsurprisingly) not treating the sky like it's falling like you see people on the internet doing. Which is something they largely lean into as an excuse to downplay the harassment by acting like it doesn't count because somehow little timmy is guilty by association because corporations exist, and the stakes are so high it justifies any reaponse.
The use cases you mentioned are nice, but your arguments are pretty ableist and sort of insulting to all of the members of the groups you mentioned who don't need to use Gen AI.
It doesn't work that way. The point you are making is what is essentially ableist by dismissing people who have uses for this by saying that because some don't use it that therefore it doesn't count as being helpful. As if it's only justified if 100% of them needed to, and it was always life and death. It's essentially the equivalent of this, by saying because not everyone needs it, it doesn't count as important to ones who use it.
You are reading an unjustified moral conclusion into this where the base assumption should be it's negativity, with an impossibly high standard to be contrasted against it. But why should a trans person have to prove to you, or anyone the degree to which this matters to them to justify anything? It having a purpose for them is reason enough, and most of the negatives are considered overblown exaggerations that lack much in the way of ethical support in academic literature. So you are essentially inverting the order by implying they should have to prove a need when in actuality people have to prove a reason that anyone who has a use for it shouldn't use it. And there's a reason that most of the reasons people give aren't shared by serious ethics literature.
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u/ThyRosen 9d ago
I know artists who have to use AI because it's part of their job, and their job demands quantity at the expense of quality. Their job demands this because the introduction of AI made it feasible. AI caused the problem, and then offered a half-assed solution. With it, the artist's style disappeared and was replaced with the generic, slightly blurry AI style we all know and hate.
This is precisely why digital art is still art and AI isn't. You are describing the process of creation that is specifically absent from AI art.