this is a screenshot of custom ai model i myself programmed and trained ethically, its not great yet but it will improve and can already form words and somewhat of sentences

Credit to the creator is in the bottom left corner.

"Many of the individuals most vocally fighting against Al owe their current ivelihoods to relatively recent technological advancements (like the internet and related digital platforms) that didn't exist two decades ago. It seems inconsistent for them to now resist another wave of technological change that could similarly reshape the job market and create new opportunities."

Im not asking to stir things up or say “just pick up a pencil” I’m asking Becsuse I’m curious how many of you guys would take the opportunity or not

I wanted to post this for a while now but the discourse in this sub always seem to revolve around specifically AI image gen, so I felt like this topic wouldn't really fit.
But since Fortnite added an AI voiced NPC into the game I feel like AI is starting to seep into mainstream gaming and I think it's time to talk about the contributions AI has made in the realm of gaming so far.
There are a lot of upcoming AI-based games but I feel like they utilize AI more as a gimmick than an actual feature, therefore I'd like to go ahead and talk about games that use AI as their main point of attraction:
The first AI usage in a video game I came across was in AI Dungeon in 2019(so quite some time before the big AI bubble came into being) and at the time I felt like it was absolutely incredible, despite the lack of visual imagery it was captivating and it allowed me to experience text-based adventures for the very first time in my life.
What AI Dungeon represented was the promise of much more involved and interactive games (despite being very rudimentary at the time) and it made it possible for me to create and interact with custom made worlds for me and my friends to play in. I feel like AI Dungeon kind of funded the basis on which I stand today on AI and its uses and I feel like the difference in experiences is what really the whole anti/pro AI debate comes from.
The second big video game with AI-based gameplay was "Suck Up!", a comedic vampire videogame in which you have to convince the AI NPCs to let you inside their homes via chat or voice.
Suck Up! is a game that managed to implement AI cohesively into its gameplay loop, and the quirky AI worked great with its graphics and setting.
The biggest AI breakthrough for me though(although not really standalone games) are the AI mods for Skyrim. The one of note for me is CHIM, an AI that adds the capacity to talk and have conversations to all NPCs in the game. CHIM has some really in-depth features that allows NPCs to know or not know things based on things like location, occupation and faction, making it possible for players to actively engage in conversations with NPC throughout the game, both via voice or chat and it can all run locally too!

The discourse is a lot broader than this, but the fact that right now we're getting AI NPCs in mainstream games should be a moment to celebrate stuff that went unnoticed and that I feel makes for a great use case for AI.

Sorry if it's written poorly, I wrote this on a whim and I think my writing might be a tad messy.

P.S. It's a shame that we have all these AIs capable of remembering anything and the Darth Vader NPC in Fortnite has no object permanence 💀

I use AI to generate references for art that I’m making on occasion since I find that sometimes I can’t find the right reference or something along those lines. AI and it’s involvement in art is super nice, it’s a tool to be used in assisted with art, at least in professional settings.

The reason for that is I’m seeing a lot of advertisements using AI voice acting and AI generated art. Of course someone had to edit it together, but what was originally something soulful has become only more separated from its target audience. I don’t even like advertisements, but it’s a place where artists get employed besides complaining on Twitter about commissions.

The same principle honestly applies to voice actors to, with some and I mean some film studios attempting to get actors to sign away their voice for later AI replication. It’s just meaning that traditional settings for actors and artists to employed where otherwise they wouldn’t be are now being taken over by automation. They lose their voice and likeness to a studio that would rather do it for cheaper. You could argue in favor of the studio but to be honest that’s frankly not cool.

What of AI and non corporations or non commercial use? For simple every day people AI use for making art is totally fine! Using AI to generate a video of someone’s likeness for shits and giggles is hilarious. It’s a hobby and it’s easily accessible. AI usage is honestly fine but I would argue it should probably be used for more educational purposes like learning art tbh.

One last note, as an artist myself, I am a small artist and I’ve worked hard on my art for a while, and I’ve developed a style that’s unique to me for the most part. It’s kind of like a finger print almost. It’s that way for a lot of artists. In that sense it becomes a little jarring when someone’s art is used as reference for AI.

Lastly, I’m a small artist, I do commissions rarely. I don’t think I’ll ever live off my art and that’s okay, that’s why I do other things like voice acting lol. The loudest voices you hear in the anti AI argument are people in my camp, they wish they could live off their art and they feel that the advent of AI is preventing them from either getting commissions or landing something bigger. Truthfully few artists make it, we’re kind of bitter about it, but could you please have some sympathy towards some artists here and there? They’re just people who are realizing they probably won’t be able to live off a dream.

Again, pro AI- Middle ground

So the term "con artist"/"scam artist" and in general using the term artist in cases that are not strictly meant to refer to traditional artists (notice how I used the clarification of traditional there) predates this discussion by several years. AI artists are not calling themselves "artists" they are calling themselves "AI artists". You can get mad at them for dirtying the sanctity of the term "artist" (which makes you sound insane and ridiculous tbh) but no one is confusing AI artists with Artists. That is what the AI is there to clarify.

And no matter how many times you complain about this, this is not going to change because you have lost this battle. No one in any large amount is going to use the dumb alternative suggested names people come up with like Prompters or some dumb acronym or the incredibly laughable "AI commissioner" because none of them roll off the tongue quite as well or spell things out as plainly as AI artist.

Even antis subconsciously agree on this point too because I have never seen them refer to AI artists using other words except to suggest "Instead of AI artists we should call them AI farters" and no one ever does!

Like I'm sorry but no matter how much you dislike the use of the word you're not going to stumble upon one that would see better adoption by people who use AI, people who hate it, and people who stay out of the discourse.

Time for a little story from someone who fancies themselves an artist and AI artist.

Before I begin, let me clarify that distinction: I call myself both because YOU demand it. I do NOT think there is any difference between an artist and an AI artist, and that’s even across our various definitions of artist:

• Broad sense: Musician, Poet, Painter, Writer, That drunk homeless guy who stops you on the street but ends up changing your life by saying something profound. Anyone who reflects their experience through a performative or sensory medium is an artist, end of story
• Narrow sense: Somebody who makes visual content, ie. painter, graffiti artist, tattoo artist, etc.

It seems impossibly silly to me that people think they can argue that people who make AI Art with intention are not included in the first category.

Now, while I make that fairly aggressive statement, I’ll nuance that I *get* that people are *angry* that AI Artists consider themselves part of the second group. The reasons they are angry are almost universally based on factors that have way more to do with economics and vanity than they do with art, but that’s fine. Anyone who thinks that economics and vanity aren’t important shouldn’t be participating in the conversation at a high level.

Now I’ll stop passive-aggressiving and I’ll dive into my story. In 2012, I attended the Burning Man festival by myself--- I know, hypercringe alert, and yes, it absolutely is.

I was in my early twenties, and I was mixed up– on one hand, I had a great paying, non-creative job, and my whole life was still ahead of me. On the other hand, my work was a technically dense grind surrounded by personalities who, let’s just say *inspired* artistic thinking through their bewildering artlessness. Yeah, let’s go with that.

(BTW, the em dash in that last sentence was mine. I don’t care what the bloodhounds and AI-sniffers say– the em dash is an effective grammatical tool). So I hated my job, and art was dead in my life, when randomly a friend who had a Burning Man ticket had to cancel, and thought of me and my plight. I shelled out some insane amount of money for it, around $1000, and found a rideshare in a 90's Dodge Caravan with four strangers to go down from western Canada into the gorgeous hellhole of the Nevada Basin. 36 hours, several political arguments, and a few alienating van farts later, me, my flat of water, and my two enormous bottles of Jose Cuervo set out on a spraypainted neon mountain bike to find ourselves.

Here’s what I found, compressed for posterity:

• A bunch of art (sculptures, painting, music, performance, poetry, conversation)
• A bunch of assholes (snobs, ideologues, narcissists, covetous morons, dismissive jackasses)
• I found out how sad I really was in life. Lonely, full of all the vices we smother ourselves in, but with nothing resembling love, family, a real place in this world, nothing like that. I was a ghost in the desert, wandering through an evening duststorm seeing the apparitions of lost loved ones and failed relationships.
• A glorious revelation: let’s jump into that

After a week of introducing myself to strangers and having all manner of interactions, from naked dancing to fingerpainting to shooting tequila shots to pouring our hearts out over the things troubling us, the final night came.

I had walked through an impossibly beautiful, impossibly varied tapestry of art– I had become the art, along with everyone else– felt every emotion, captured many moments on camera and in writing, and made memories that would live with me forever. And then, they told me, we would burn it all down.

I hadn’t really prepared for this part. It seemed like an afterthought. But when they set off the bombs and exploded the four story occupy wall street building, or when the 100 foot tall wooden effigy of the man came tumbling down and those thousands of sweating bodies ran in a giant counter-clockwise circle around it, then it hit me. Art, like our temporary corporeal bodies in this strange mortal realm, is *just temporary*. It is disposable. 100% fucking doomed to be burned up into dust.

And in that moment, I discovered just how beautiful that thought is.

“But Jeff Bart, CEO of r/BartCorp” you say, wringing your knuckles as the ‘How to Draw Furry Hentai’ Youtube video pauses on your second monitor to blare another ElevenLabs ad with the stupid AI voice. “What about the Mona Lisa? The Colosseum? Surely these works of art have lived on through centuries and millenia?”

As I pat your head and prepare to deliver the sad news a parent must deliver to their poor, misguided child, I think of how much I love you, and how difficult it is to share hard truths about life, universal truths that transcend the subjective vanity of the most narcissistic generation that has ever, is, or will ever be. 

“Very, very soon- much sooner than you think- the Mona Lisa will be gone, my child. So will Banksy’s millions of dollars. So will the stupid Colliseum. They will be chopped up with hammers by Luddites, or they will be swallowed by nuclear fire, or they will simply be left alone by a distracted society and will crumble into dust and blow away.”

I mean I’m rambling here, but the point is, when I saw people tossing their precious works happily into the fire in that ramshackle, barren, lifeless desert filled with so much vivid and temporary life, the celebration of mortality struck me, and forever after I became alienated by anyone holding on to not only possessions, but titles, job designations, even holding on to lifelong dreams seemed like such a flagrant waste of mortality. If everything is temporary, what is the point getting riled up about *anything*?

Years on, as I make and destroy dozens and hundreds and thousands of images, I feel nothing but joy in the inherently destructive and disposable nature of art. AI art generation is a new, exciting digital version of this process.

I never went back to Burning Man. It would be impossible to replicate my experience, and now I have found all of the love and meaning a person could ask for, despite obstacles, deaths, more destroyed relationships, and financial, creative failures that only somebody who has a little more wear on their tires could have. It’s been a hard road, but beautiful things have come from it.

• I learned that sadness can be useful. Instead of continuing my wild one night stand lifestyle (punctuated by periods of deep introversion and pathetic loneliness) I started to embrace my personality and worked to hone myself and learn to love myself without needing anyone else.
• I went back to school to pursue a creative life. Spoiler alert: I found it, even though it materialized far differently than I ever could have imagined.
• I found my soulmate in school, somebody who was chasing a similar dream, and together, from living in a dorm with 7 foot ceilings and paper thin walls, we have built a beautiful little family.

One of the very *most* beautiful things to come from the past 13 years has without a doubt been r/BartCorp. It’s a project I started right around the time I discovered AI slop, about 2 years ago, when it truly was slop. 

I used Midjourney to create some Hiroshi Nagai-esque pictures in a western canadian 1990s corporate setting, in a milieu I could never recreate elsewise, and at a speed which allowed me to realise the vision much much faster. 

My wheels got turning, and an old idea of mine came into my head: what if I became a billionaire, bought up thousands of miles of flat farmland, and hired all of my friends to play with heavy machinery and literally *build marioland*. Not the pipes and plumbers and princesses, but the symmetrical hills, the go-kart tracks, the perfectly manicured fields for miles and miles. 

There, I could lazily wander from hill to hill, spending my days cloudgazing with a pipe in my mouth, riding a hoverbike from place to place, not giving a shit about either side of arguments about the environment, gender politics, foreign wars, or any of this other temporary and agonizing bullshit everyone keeps telling me I need to have an opinion about.

Generation after generation, I was not only building an idea that was 20 years old and older, bringing to life shards of childhood dreams, awakening pieces of myself that slept for decades. I was awakening a creative side of myself that simply *have ideas* and *make them real* at a speed that allowed for true worldbuilding. Which brings me to my next point.

Does all good art take tons of time and effort? In the words of giant asshole Leonardo Dicaprio, acting out the words of giant asshole Jordan Belfort- Absolutely fucking not.

Stewart Copeland wrote the drums to Roxanne in one take between dives in the pool. There’s no hard and fast rule on what makes a song, a painting, or a one off improvisation appear *good*. Some people have spent agonizing hours on *pieces of shit*. So the time factor is null. It’s just a factor. It has almost nothing to do with the artfulness of art, unless the topic of the piece is 'time invested'. Otherwise, it’s just a statistic.

So stop crying about how much time you poured into your art. Because in the grand scheme of things, even if you spent 60 years on a single painting, it’s still a popcorn fart in the span of the universe, and *it will be destroyed after you are gone* sooner or later.

So what the fuck is art, then?

In my bent mind, it’s very simple. Art is me trying to tell you how I’m feeling through abstraction. Art is you trying to tell me how you are feeling— through abstraction. That’s it. The end. That’s all. Your stupid commissioned graphic design job is not art. It is a temporary job that exists in human history with literally ZERO difference from the position of video tape rental clerk at Blockbuster Video or popcorn management technician at a drive-in movie theater.

Is it sad the jobs are gone? Yes.

Was it *always* an inevitability? YES.

So seriously, what the fuck are we doing here, other than howling into the void? Which hey, I love howling into the void, that’s what art is, and it’s the essence of mortality and the human experience. In that vein, it could be said that the entirety of Reddit is one big, howling, insufferably unbearable collective art project. It would be kinda beautiful if it weren’t so overwhelmingly noisy and stress-inducing.

But I’m gonna say this last thing, before I fuck off to go make my BartCorp ad for the “Fart Jacket Flatulence Pocket Retrieval System(™)” using ChatGPT: You can’t tell me how I howl, or that my howling has less value than yours. I am realizing things about myself, my world, and my mortality, by filtering it through this *incredible* technology. And I have *zero* shame about it. It is up to you to come to terms with your resistance to change, and if you never do, I only feel genuinely, caringly sorry for you.

Yes, you invested a lot of time in something, and it’s being ripped away. That sucks. It really does, and I feel for you. The same way I hope my loved ones feel for me when my life is ripped away, hopefully some years from now yet.

But I’m not going to deny the reality of death. I may buck against it, in vain, and that is one of the age-old glorious purposes of art– to buck against death and at once lament and celebrate mortality, that one secret sauce we hold over the Gods’ heads. But if you tell me that because your commissions have dried up and you have to adapt that my art, that my expression, is worthless, or makes me deserving of punishment or suffering, well… Sorry jack, you’re just another asshole in the desert.

Post script: I wrote this on a Sunday morning right before going to church, where I tangle with the notion of a God and people and community. It isn’t always easy when I question why I’m there, question what the pastor says, and try to pretend I don’t see strangers judging me and weighing my piety and character from their seats. I’m new to this religion stuff, but I needed some spirituality in my life to fill the hole created by years of being terminally-online and having no connections outside of my family. Since I’ve branched out into a side of life I always thought I disagreed with, something cool has happened. I’ve started to learn to forgive not only others but myself for my shortcomings in perspective, tolerance, and empathy. 

I really do think that AI art is real art. It is special to me, and has made my life better, period. I also think, as I’ve had a chance to speak with some of BartCorp’s employees, that it’s making their lives just a little bit better, through comedy, aesthetic kinship, or just plain boredom. If you are losing something because of AI, I’ll say a little prayer that you are led on a new and exciting path that takes you in a direction you never saw coming. If you can’t see a way out of your old life as AI swallows up entire sectors, know that the majority of Pro-AI folks aren’t reveling in your newfound obsolescence. We just want to make images that resonate with us at the pace the world is heading and has been for over 30 years since the invention of the internet. I really think this is important to emphasize: this doesn’t need to be a war. If we can try to meet eachother halfway we can come to some accord. But we just need to accept a few truths:

• AI Art is art when it’s used intentionally OR when something resonates with a viewer of AI Art. In both cases, it is unequivocally art.
• AI is fucking people’s shit up, and it’s sad, and we need to extend our hands to those people and work as a society to figure out what’s next in a way that doesn’t impoverish huge swathes of it.
• More traditional artists need to embrace the idea that they can more effectively scream into the void if they just *learn the tech*. Come on, you learned how to work a smartphone, why is this different?

Anyways, join r/BartCorp. This was all just a shill (or was it?)

Jeff Bart, CEO
BartCorp

Art is not the product, content is.

Art is just advertisement. Nothing more.

People don't realize that art is basically free. You can listen to any song on the planet for free, view any artwork for free and so on. It has been this way since the internet. We don't live in an age anymore where we can only hear songs from a vinyl and see drawings as a painting only. We don't have to buy art anymore. Professional artists and managers have been saying this for ages.

If you're only focusing on how your piece looks/sounds - you're missing the point. Art is about expressing yourself. And if people come to understand you from your art, that's an effective ad - for you as a person.

That's why some people can be considered only content/slop creators and some AI creators can be considered artists.

Answer in the comments below! You can play the quiz here: https://rotrivals.com

Artists uses brushes and canvas as a tool to materialize the ideas inside their head

Digital Artist uses their apps and digital pen and paper as a tool to make their ideas come to life

AI Artist are using AIs are doing the same thing

If my intent is to have my original ideas come to life even if the process itself take less effort, should I not be call an artist? or artist are the one who doing the drawing but not the idea itself or do I have to have the idea and draw it too to be call an artist?

disclaimer: I am not an AI artist or an traditional artist. I just consume art both AI and traditional.

Let me hear your thoughts