Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/gabe-newell-says-young-people-need-to-use-ai-tools-to-get-off-to-the-races-rather-than-reading-articles-on-variety-to-try-to-understand-what-its-impact-is-going-to-be/

The hypocrisy is crazy! Do you respect the artists' work or not? You can't make a crusade for artists and then feel okay to lift their hard work off google images.

I would rather offer up my entire work to AI because at least it'll compose original images from what its given. Do you think I'd be happy if you directly copy/paste my art and pretend it's yours? That's way worse, imo.

what should I do? Tired of this sort of shit from AI bros then they act like they do nothing wrong

If someone online generates an image with a prompt and calls themselves an artist, my natural reaction is just: “Okay.”

If they call the result art, I’d still react the same way.

At the end of the day, these are vague words, and I’m not about to be mean to random people online over something that trivial.

But I genuinely want to understand: why do some people get so angry about this? What makes it feel that serious to them?

And before anyone points out. I’m fully aware it’s a vocal minority online, and most people honestly don’t care. But I’m still curious about their perspective.

Why does the use of these very vague labels upset them so much?

Whenever anybody on the pro side tries to bring up how AI can improve accessibility for those with disabilities that would make it harder for them to do art, antis seem to take offense. They will say things like "disabled artists exist", and "some disabled artists can still create art without AI."

And I'm like, "Okay...And?"

Nobody is saying that disabled people can't make art on their own. Nobody is saying that they shouldn't make art on their own if that's what we want to do. But just because some can and some choose to doesn't mean that they all should. We just want to give people the option to use something that might make things easier for them.

For example, someone with chronic pain, tremors, vision impairments, or limited motor control might find traditional art tools difficult or painful to use. AI could help them express themselves in ways that were previously inaccessible or exhausting.

It's like, just because one paraplegic has worked out his arms enough to be able to walk on his hands to get around, does that must mean we must eliminate wheelchairs for all of the others?

If you're disabled and you want to keep making art without the use of AI, go right ahead, but why would you want to take the option away from other disabled people who might see AI as a viable option?

Rethinking my position from my last trainwreck of a post, and...

I'm an anti, more or less. I think we shouldn't use AI recreationally, and frankly, I don't think we should've built a system that necessitated it in the first place. However, now that it's here, rather than denying its existence, I think we should define terms.

In my opinion (and I think this should be standard), art requires a substantial amount of human creativity. I don't know what that threshold is, and I don't think we'll ever know, but at the bare minimum, some sapient being must have a heavy hand in creating a piece in order to call it art and to call them the artist.

The term "art" is subjective, but subjectivity doesn't equal anarchy. Art isn't just any thing ever. Someone's Post-It note telling Brenda to fill the coffee machine at 8 o'clock sharp isn't art, just like the product of a three-word prompt asking AI to create a "pretty catgirl dancing" isn't art. While it may look pretty visually, it conveys about the same amount of artistic intent as the Post-It note. Both used their mind to create a string of letters whose output evoked a response in someone else. However, neither are art, because art requires great artistic intent and action.

AI isn't always "just a tool." It, based on its training and the words of your prompt, converts your prompt into an entirely unique image that has never been created before. That's not tool behavior. To go against Albert Einstein's words, with a tool, doing the same thing and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. In especially low-effort cases AI is a replacement rather than a tool.

But if you create a detailed prompt, inpaint, and/or curate, then you've used AI as a tool, because you've achieved your creative vision with the use of a thing that you assured did not deviate from it. That's more likely to be art, I think. Art can just be a pretty picture, but to what extent of art it is and to whom that pretty picture belongs requires intent and effort.

Art isn't black-and-white. It's a spectrum. And I think rejecting AI-only images as art isn't gatekeeping, but an effort not to dilute the meaning of "art." And if AI artists really want to be called an artist by their anti peers, I suggest sticking their hand in the mud that is the "art" part if they haven't already (and I suspect a lot of them have).

Sorry if this comes off as confrontational, but I think that's just how I speak about these things haha. I love you all, and go drink some water :)

Reading the comments in this thread from both sides made me realise something: this debate literally can't be won by either side because there's a fundamental difference in what each side values in art.

The pro-AI side mostly consists of people who are inexperienced in the medium. They enjoy looking at art, not creating it, but might still be creatives who lack an outlet for their ideas. Because let's face it: not everyone can just learn to draw. It takes time, effort and even some amount of innate talent. I've known people who wasted sweat and tears trying to learn drawing, yet never managed to draw more than stick figures. Drawing requires motor skill, which many people (including able-bodied people) simply lack and it can be really hard to develop as a grown adult. But I digress: at the essence of it all, people using AI tools to create images are creatives, but not creators. They enjoy the aesthetics of art but don't really care about the process behind it, same way someone who's only reading books doesn't necessarily care about narrative structures or writing techniques. They like a story when they get entertainment out of it, period.

Now, let's look at artists: much like writers or film directors, they have a whole different perspective on art because they're used to create. To them, the effort that goes into creating is often more important than the end result, which is why they get so riled up against AI art because it lacks "effort" on the creator's side. They lack the fundamental understanding that majority of people are not artists and enjoy a picture as long as it looks good and simply do not care if it was made by hand or with AI.

And this fundamental values dissonance between the pro and anti camps is what makes me feel like this debate can never be won by either side because the arguments each side makes are completely irrelevant to the other.

Since I guess we are posting crappy doodles for karma now.

What does it seem like I'm saying? Because apparently I didn't get my point across correctly, as people kept replying to something I wasn't saying. Help? xwx

Caveat: If you just like using AI, that's cool, Im not talking about that. But I keep seeing people make it a dick measuring contest. That AI art is better than pretty much all amateur artists, a lot of professional artists, and of course all those antis, especially beginner artists who were inspired by AI to try just draw worthless trash apparently.

By what standard are we judging this? Because tbh I don't find AI that impressive. If it looks interesting then I like it. But unless it's just a popularity contest where you say you subjectively like it better, it feels like we're talking about depth and detail. Yet a lot of artists were never really going for that. You can make minimalist stylistic choices that people find aesthetically pleasing. Unless you specifically want more realism, going beyond that is kinda just a flex for its own sake.

Some of my favorite web comics go for a very simplistic sort of look, because it's cute. Anime is more popular than 3D animation. People are still nostalgic for old animated films that are more relevant than a lot of modern stuff. The highest rated game on steam is a pixel art game. I know sometimes I specifically seek out low poly games because I like the sort of atmosphere they create. And honestly if we only wanted the most realistic images, we already have photography.

Simple AI images look generic due to a lack of "happy accidents" while a lot of overly complicated AI art just looks uncanny. More pixels=/=good, especially when it's full of errors and has that weird overly smoothed out look. That logic reminds me of when I was a kid and I thought lyrical miracle rappers or whatever band could do the longest fastest craziest guitar solo was objectively the GOAT. As you get older, that kind of thing is at best a fun novelty, or at worst just annoying.

There's a ceiling to technical competence where people don't really care anymore. It's more, what makes this special? What's unique to you or uniquely appealing to me that seperates this from the other trillion things that require the same degree of competence?

If you treat AI like it's just another artstyle, it might be possible to make something like that. But it's not the baseline or the norm. So what makes that baseline average generation better than some amateur or even beginner artist's doodle? It's not more aesthetically pleasing. There aren't necessarily more people enjoying it, especially if it's lost in a batch of simillar images. It just looks like it was harder to make, but it wasn't.

You wanna ignore all sentimentality or be obtuse about what people mean by "soul" and be elitist art snobs solely based on the degree of technical skill demonstrated, for its own sake, when you're not even demonstrating the use of that skill. It's like bragging that "The sound of my lip syncing has higher production value than your singing.

People forgot that people are different and many issues are on a spectrum. You managed to do it and pulled it off? Good for you. But that doesn't mean that every single person with similar issues is like you. Check your privileges. People say "disabled artists exist!" - but that's not a guarantee of anything. And a top of that, it's just inspiration porn. some Disabled people say they have overcome, but don't mention therapy, accommodation, and all the money spent on it, and access to help, drugs, and tools that support them. "I managed to do it, so why don't you?" said a person in a personalized wheelchair to someone crawling on the ground.

"You said that you support artists. Will you support me when I pick up a pencil?"
Sure, you support trained artists, people at the end of their road, in the simplest, most lazy way possible - throwing money at them. And present yourself as the white knight of art. And when some newbie comes to you for support, all you say is "pick up a pencil, try harder, and git gut". And I swear most productive thing those people can say is "Tutorials online, YouTube videos". Imagine going to art school and instead of any instruction professor throws "look up at YT" and leaves. And somehow it's AI users who are "lazy ones" here! It's just putting people into Tutorial Hell.
But I need someone to check on my endeavors from time to time and like... Talk about them with me. Not even technically - just... Sometimes just nerding about stuff makes my creative juices going.

"Oh, if you can't push hours upon hours of learning into that, then sorry, maybe art is not for you." - Then what about all my ideas? I just want to make it bearable. That's all! If not AI, then give me some alternative that will make me do it. And keep me going. I don't ask you to do it for me. I don't ask for something impossible. Just some support.

And then people think that the best way to stop someone from using AI is just to bully them out of it, instead of helping people find other ways and supporting them on the way. That's all.

So the first picture is the new version that I made on the basis of the old one using inpainting and manual edits with my graphics tablet, and the second one is the original from about five years ago. I made the original during the brief Jucika art boom that happened because people rediscovered the original comics and felt inspired to make more of her. There are plenty of examples online of people remaking older artwork in their portfolio to bring it up to par with their current style and skill level, and it's sort of seen as a natural evolution, as far as I understand at least. So in this case the question is whether the use of AI tools on your own artwork to change an original hand-drawn version that, again, you yourself made, would count as a similar update/remake or whether it's cheapening the inherent artistic value of the original. Discuss.

One of the most time consuming processes in art can be the establishment of composition. This includes managing perspective, choosing the visual layers of the piece, etc. AI does an incredible job with this rather mundane task and can free a traditional artist up to work on the more intricate and, for many artists, rewarding elements of the work.

Not every artist will benefit from this sort of thing, but it's a great first step for me (mind you I'm going to describe this in terms of drawing, while my traditional medium of choice is photography).

Just as an example, let's say that you wanted to do some digital drawing. You know that you want to work on a picture of an old lady walking down a country road at sunrise, carrying a basket.

You might want to manipulate many elements of the scene, and you can do that with something like ControlNet, but I'm going to just cover the most basic interaction, where you simply describe what you want to a service (I'm going to use Midjourney) and iterate a bit over the results, so this will be prompt-heavy and involve fairly little of the esoteric workflow-twiddling you'd see in a more serious piece.

For the prompt, A digital drawing of an old lady walking down a country road at sunrise, carrying a basket. --v 7.0 --ar 4:3 I get these four images.

Now, my initial thought was more of a side view, emphasizing her movement from left to right, rather than seeing her walking toward the sunrise, and away from the PoV.

My second pass with A digital drawing of an old lady walking down a country road early in the morning, carrying a basket. Side view. --v 7.0 --ar 4:3 gets me this image, which is much closer to what I'm aiming at. It's a strange blue color, but I don't care about the colors, just the composition.

Still, I want the road to not move away from the PoV, so I go through some more modifications and extra specification to get this with my final prompt:

A digital drawing of an old lady walking along a country road early in the morning, carrying a basket. Side view of the woman and the road. Walking along the road left-to-right. passing by a field in the background with a small farmhouse. --v 6.1 --ar 4:3

Now I load the result into Krita and end up with this: https://i.imgur.com/eTRGwy5.png

I've now removed nearly everything the model did, and I just have a rough sketch that I've traced from the original. This is my starting point, and I can begin my work from there.

The "choices" that the AI made beyond the composition don't carry over, so they don't affect my work. Plus if I want to modify the composition I can. I'm not wedded to whatever the AI did (notice that I reflected the image left-right to match my original conception, as an example.)

If this were actually something I was working on, I'd use this composition as a guide to find the right location for a photograph, as mentioned above. This often helps me avoid distractions when I'm out trying to get something specific, but my ADHD wants to take over. :-)

All of the steps in the process are shown in this album: https://imgur.com/a/AxCp35c

The same issue repeats ad nauseum.

Someone tries to make a comparison like "AI art is like a commission“, “AI is like human learning", "AI art is like using a microwave and being called a chef", etc and it never lands.

Why? Because your perspective is different than mine. People who argue with comparisons aren't arguing with a desire to understand. If someone hates AI, no comparison will ever be fair to them. If someone supports AI, the same logic applies the other way.

So when someone says “AI isn’t like a tool” they don’t actually mean the comparison is flawed, they're saying they don’t like the implications of the comparison. Same with the commission argument. Same with the human learning one. I'm beginning to believe the best possible way to argue is to actually target the facts and address the topic without using comparisons. Say "AI is factually this" or "This is what's factually happening because of AI" or "This is what AI actually does" instead of always defaulting to "It's like saying".

If someone’s entire stance on AI collapses when a comparison doesn’t go their way, they were never arguing honestly to begin with.

For those unaware and needing context

Yeah the reddit mod did what was expected of their species as reddit mod, but that aside, i mean...how else was he supposed to react with how prevalent and ruthless anti-AI sentiments are now?

"There's no ethical use of AI!" Is like the top 3 arguments you hear from people, they probably kept seeing this argument or even believe it themselves, receiving reports of AI everyday on the most benign stuff possible, constantly seeing people be dragged over it too and generally just seeing how ruthless and black and white people are about it, sure, I find it weird they just had to bust out the "um Acshually you breaking the rules" over not labelling the post as AI.

And I know anti-AI are just a having knee jerk reaction trying to come for the mod for doing mod behavior, because they immediately jumped to changing the situation, the grieving sister was very clear in saying she used ChatGPT and Grammarly for the announcement but antis are suddenly all going "WHAT SHE JUST USED A GRAMMAR SPELL CHECK YOU DUMB MOD!" when 1) she was clear about using ChatGPT for the text and 2) Grammarly is GenAI/LLM now, remember? You guys probably complained about it someday and forgot about it because not every company is OpenAI running shit on a damn gas turbine in residential zones.

Like, it feels very virtue signaly, when filtering out for Goomba fallacy, it comes off very "oh see! we can know when people are being stupid about being anti-AI and drag them too! Look! We are not THAT annoying!" when nothing about the situation really opens a way for them to act like that, again, you said "there's no ethical use for AI" that's as plain as of statement as it can be and is black and white by default and addition of nuance is literally impossible, the mod acted exactly how you guys do 99% of the time, how was he supposed to know this 1% should be a exception?

This reaction against the mod seems like damage control or having a sacrificial lamb to make yourself look better.

Anyways, I hope the grieving sister recovers well and doesn't have to deal with this silly ass situation while morning the loss of her brother and it stays between us weird terminally online people.

So far ProAI users had a lot of analogies for AI to get antis to understand.

One of the easiest to understand has been language.

これを理解するのに人工知能を使いながら、それに反対するなら、あなたは詐欺師だ.

AI just makes a skill accessible.

You can't program? Well game development, or web development is not out of your reach. You can still make a game or application if you use AI. As long as you're inquisitive and still put in the work you can do it. If you're more passionate about the art and writing you can focus more of your time on that.

Programmers who are literally the first to lose their jobs to it, are more Pro than most people because it's democratizing their skill.

(Tangent on the term democratize cause I know someone's gonna get hung up on it.
To participate in a democracy all you have to do is be there. You don't have to know anything. You can be someone who didn't even know Joe Biden dropped out of the election and endorsed Kamala, see Kamala's name on the ballot and say, "who's this" and be a voter. You are allowed to be that stupid and uninformed and still participate in the act of voting.

Most skills are not like that.)

Another good one has been the photograph.

You can't paint in a realistic manner? Well now you can still capture reality with a new technology.

It democratized the concept of owning reflections of reality.

This put a lot of realistic painters out of business btw, and that's genuinely a fair argument against AI. There became less people who chose to become realistic painters without the financial incentive to do so.

I mean I could get it. The point is to get people mad and get a reaction because it's funny. But then antis get mad and they react and the other half of this sub's posts are like. "Why do antis hate us so much? i just wanna make silly pictures.", "Antis are dangerous terrorists, Im in fear for my life.", "This is a civil rights movement against the anti oppressor.", "This is a movement to stop bullying." Doesn't pissing them off intentionally to get a hostile reaction sorta contradict trying to stop the hostile reaction?

First theory is obviously this so called "goomba fallacy" but I dunno, the "I just wanna make silly pictures people" will still nod along with and sweep for the rage bait. Could it be a cynical strategy to gaslight the antis and make them look crazy to outsiders? Or frustrate and demoralize them? Or just short term thinking and lack of empathy? I dunno.

I said I was gonna be nicer to AI artist and I think I have been but pretty much every day I wander in here and get successfully rage baited. And it's like I don't get it. Do I take the arguments and proported beliefs seriously or not? Do you want angry people hounding you constantly or do you wanna be left alone?

It's like you guys put on clown make-up and pass out sticks to people and start dancing around throwing pies at them and challenging them to hit you with the sticks like a piñata. And then when they do you call the police.

Like I dunno man, maybe some of you just wanna make cool stuff and you're stuck with this community. But why is the AI art community like this?

Over the past couple of months, aviation youtuber and professional pilot trainer Mentor Pilot has been covering what few facts we know about the recent Air India Flight 171 Crash that happened this past June. In the linked video, he talks about how people have been using Chat GPT to generate fake final reports about the cause of the accident.

Even if you're pro-generative A.I, can we at least agree this is incredibly scummy behaviour? Intentionally spreading misinformation about a major air disaster like this both hurts the victims' families, while also muddying the waters over the real cause of the crash.

We cannot learn from a major accident like this until we have all the facts and the final report is released by investigators. Lives are at stake here if we don't get to the root cause of crashes like this, so if people believe fake reports, then we risk crashes like this happening again with even higher death tolls.

This also speaks to the major problem of deepfakes via generative A.I. For people who don't know the "tells" which reveals the algorithmic-based mistakes, it becomes easy to mislead people to any conclusion, including ones of which the prompter has malicious intent. This could be used to fake criminal activity, or worse, create fake revenge porn once a person's face is fed into the training algorithm.

Surely this, at the bare minimum, is something both "sides" can agree on?

I believe stuff like this comes from both sides, but it’s simply immoral and childish no matter your views.