I first dabbled with AI image generation back in 2022 and sprinkled a few such images throughout my worldbuilding project. It was easy to look past all of the flaws with the idea that it was nothing more than a novelty. And I never cared nearly enough about my worldbuilding to pay anyone for artwork of it.
Now that I look back at it, those images are obvious slop, which I’ve grown to dislike as much as the next person. But recent comments I’ve seen here and on other sites have made me wonder if my brain has rotted in the same manner that makes some boomers fall for AI slop. There will be videos where the use of AI is not very noticeable to me, but not with deceptive intent. Maybe an illustration to get the point across or a subtle two-second animation. Commenters will very passionately point it out. To be honest, I don’t see the creator either paying for the equivalent human work or drawing anything better themselves.
Does it really just look that bad? Is it an issue with what AI and the companies that sponsor it stand for? Theft of real artists’ work? Does it change at all if the images were generated locally with the creator’s own hardware and resources? What about upscaling images, like I do with old wallpapers so that they look better on new monitors?
I assume what I’ve just said will attract downvotes, but that was my thought process and I do want to understand where other people draw the line and for what reasons. Should we limit it to quick-and-dirty illustrations, pure novelty, upscaling existing images, a model that only incorporates work if the artist consents, or something else?
I’m mutuals with one woman on twitter who keeps generating images of herself as like, a chinese special forces operator with a magical shadow kitty watching over her. They’re all completely benign. She posts other good shit about geopolitics but is clearly completely screen fried. She gets a pass. Everyone else can take a hike
It’s pretty much just this concept × ∞
I’d say it’s fine in a personal context, e.g. to use as your wallpaper or a in a private RPG campaign with friends.
No one would would give you shit for downloading other people’s art off Pinterest for your D&D character, but if you reposted it online as your own, it would be plagiarism. Since AI art takes copyrighted material from all over the internet, the principle is the same
Never
When teaching people how to spot AI images.
I think it’s always fine to use AI stuff as intermediary material, but almost never as finished product unless you specifically need something that feels samey and average.
For world building it’s pretty cool cause you can finally visualize that city that you’ve spent time imagining in detail, and use that to sharpen your description of it or spot incongruities. And for writing in general there’s nothing wrong with story boarding scenes and characters to ground your writing if you have more of a visual mind. Anything that helps you on your specific craft without bogging down the quality of the finished piece.
Basically NEVER
There are different reasons against AI, it depends which ones you consider more important.
A) taking jobs away from artists - you can argue that if you would never have hired an artist for this anyway (throw away character portrait for a D&D game) then it’s justifiable.
B) That AI was trained on stolen content. - depends on your definition of stolen, this is the area that makes me think twice.
C) Environmental reasons - I try to generate stuff locally if I use it, but you still have the impact from the model being trained originally.
I’d rather see MS paint illustrations than GenAI images.
removing ur ex from that one photo
No.
Even if you manage to find a niche valid reason, even if you train on exclusively your own content, even if you run it on your own hardware powered by your own solar panels, it’s still normalising the technology for everybody else who won’t use it like that.
Like others will say there is no ethical use of it, except maybe locally on your own hardware for personal curiousity. It’s an environmental catastrophy, if it’s used more it will increase the value for companies like OpenAI whos owners want to be the feudal chiefs of a new techno-fascist society, and the more encouraged and developed it becomes, the more useful it is for surveillance companies and totalitarian states.
I’m sure there are uses I don’t notice, but it does look very bad, and if I notice a company using it it makes me feel a sort of repulsion towards that company.
I see no issue with locally run models like Z-Image Turbo. They take very little resources to run, so there’s no real issue with energy use here. They produce good results when prompted properly.
The whole theft of artist work applies to commercial models where companies are profiting of other people’s work. However, I simply don’t see the argument when it comes to open models that anybody can use freely, and especially in cases where you’re not producing images for profit.
The worst problem, to me, is that it pollutes our “environment” that is, our cultural environment, our pool of input about the world, with potential corruption, inaccuracies, at worst the intensification of falsities, stereotypes, and mediocre conceptions. Even if you don’t detect them in an AI image, they may be there. A real world image contains details that humans have not already preconceived, and diluting that with the bullshit of what humanity thinks is reality but which may or may not be, will have a greater long run cost than we can imagine.
with potential corruption, inaccuracies, at worst the intensification of falsities, stereotypes, and mediocre conceptions
you’re saying this in a world where 99% of people wig out if they don’t see white Jesus (or their culture’s equivalent lie)
Now they’ll have video proof that Jesus was white. And had 7 fingers.
When the model isn’t built on stolen licensed works and built/run in a way that isn’t in conflict with the community where the data center resides seems like some basic requirements to meet.
never. ai “art” is theft.
Let’s not just exchange blunt claims, but reason a little.
Copyright critics have long made the somewhat compelling argument that copying isn’t stealing because the original digital item does not become scarcer in the process. So how can AI taking artists’ work be considered theft if it, too, just uses copies of the original work and maybe transforms them into a new work (which would, under U.S. law, fall under “fair use”)?
We might argue that, well, fair use does not apply because most AI companies try to monetise the models derived from other people’s work.
Which leads me to the question: would you find visual genAI more acceptable if it weren’t commercial?
As bad as copyright laws are, they are made even worse when they are applied to everyday people via life-altering fines, and often ignored completely when applied to giant corporations.
I get and share the criticism of double standards in the application of the law and the other ugly sides of corporate AI. The question I’m asking here is: if unshackled from its corporate contexts (i.e. proprietary models run for-profit in centralised data centres): is genAI still objectionable? Is the tech unethical as a wholez or is it only problematic because for now, it is mostly a tool of the oligarchs?
We wouldn’t even call it AI anything then. The whole framing as it is now is to undermine creative work. It’s hard to imagine how it would even remotely resemble what it is now, a cold reading con.
Because AI companies are making a huge profit (and wrecking the environment) on stolen art.
There’s a huge difference between someone that torrent 1T of books over his/her life and a company that torrent every books in history to make a machine that will try to destroy art as we know it for the profit of the 1% few.
Alright, I get that. It’s pretty much what I wrote up there in the second half of my posting.
I’d still be curious as to your answer to my question there:
Which leads me to the question: would you find visual genAI more acceptable if it weren’t commercial?
Personally probably still see it as slop, because I think that genAI are just a by product of the inherent spyware they are
Which leads me to the question: would you find visual genAI more acceptable if it weren’t commercial?
For sure. I couldn’t tell you where inspired, but new, work ends and theft begins, or how model training would be funded without commercial incentive. But I would be more comfortable knowing that companies have not ripped potential profits straight from every artist the model had been trained on.
And I like this kind of discussion. What’s bothered me before have been the jabs at the mere presence of AI without deeper discussion as to what qualifies as theft. I haven’t found myself buying art even before such AI models. I wouldn’t buy or sell images that I know are AI generated. And I pay the electric bill for locally-generated ones as if I were doing any other novelty activity like gaming on my PC. I’m curious, what would you think of local models that can be acquired for free?
I’m probably the most anti-AI person I know, but I agree discourse around how “AI is theft” is a bit shallow.
Copyright is often erroneously conflated with plagiarism. While the two do sometimes coincide, they’re very different concerns.
I, myself, believe copyright is so broken we’d be better off throwing it away. (The only thing I believe I’d miss about copyright if I woke up tomorrow and it didn’t exist would be copyleft.) But I do deeply believe in a right to attribution. I don’t think AI is theft. I think it’s plagiarism.
And I believe that listing the names of all those whose works were included in training data for a model would still be a great disservice to the artists buried tens of millions of names deep right after some dumbass “NFT artist”. Meanwhile, asking an LLM or image generating model which training data was involved in generating one particular piece of output it produced is futile the same way as asking a stage strongman which rep at the gym allowed them to lift that car.
And if someone objected that giving what I would consider “sufficient credit” to artists/authors/whoever would make AI models completely infeasible, then my response would be “that’s exactly my point.” If it can’t exist without taking advantage of huge numbers of people without their consent, then it shouldn’t exist at all.
Finally, one more point I want to make is that if AI didn’t make billionaires a huge amount of money, the legal system would have put a stop to the mass scraping of training data and made a very visible example of whoever undertook to do mass scraping in the first long ago. (Never forget what they did to Aaron Swartz for scraping on a vastly smaller scale than OpenAI or Twitter or whoever did to make their LLM models.) As terrible as it is having to deal with the shitty IP laws we have, the greater injustice is that the laws (IP and otherwise) only apply when billionaires want them to.
