For context, I've been drawing for over a decade (and really even before that, if you count all of the drawing I did before I ever moved over to doing digital art) off and on, and it's always been something I enjoyed!
Even more, I've always had an intense passion for the visual arts in general (I literally spend hours per day browsing Twitter and Pinterest and Pixiv etc. and looking at art just because I like to)
Yet, people always assume that I have no artistic experience and the reason why I like AI art (and call myself an AI artist) is simply because of lack of skill, or lack of effort, or because I dislike drawing.
But none of that is true! I would say I am a pretty intermediately skilled traditional artist. I enjoy putting effort into artwork, I put tons of effort even into AI artwork. I literally enjoy the process of creating art, no matter what method is used. Whether it's 3D modelling, or drawing in Clip Studio Paint with my tablet, or doodling on an envelop, or coloring in line art, or making vector art pieces in Illustrator, or training LoRAs to use in ComfyUI, or generating AI artwork - I enjoy almost every kind of visual art production that there is!
Not to say that every person who is an AI artist has to be a traditional artist as well. But my point is that not everybody fits into neat little boxes that you want them to fit into!
I am a traditional artist and I use AI tools because 1. I like to stay up to date with new technologies, and I would rather learn now than regret it later when I have to catch up and 2. It helps me bring quick doodles to life much faster, so I don't have to invest so much time into little comics, memes, or whatever else. I would rather be spending that time on my actual pieces!
And that doesn't make somebody a traitor to art. It's likely that my art is a part of what was used for AI training, but I don't resent that fact! Actually, many of my Pro-AI friends for one reason or another could not enjoy expressing their creativity in the same way as I can before AI, and I wholly support more people being able to bring their imagination to life with new tools.
So don't assume that just because somebody is Pro-AI art, or thinks that AI art is real art, that they are some newcomer to the visual arts with no prior experience!!!
JUST DO BETTER. I can't stand it because both sides still have individuals making them look bad or easier for others to generalise, especially when they are insulting people that have nothing to do with the whole discussion and getting in their way,
Also humans can create slop too, I can't believe there's actual people that act like a shitty drawing by 3 year old is automatically better than the latest Image gen models or software just because it is real on paper and not artificial...
I've been seeing more and more Al videos lately, and honestly, it's kind of crazy how much they've improved in such a short time.
It got me wondering if we'll eventually reach a point where Al can make an entire anime, with actual characters, a good story, and animation that doesn't feel off.
I wonder how I'd feel about watching something like that. If the story was genuinely good and I got attached to the characters, would I even care that it was made by Al?
What about you guys? Would you give it a chance, or do you think knowing it was Al-generated would make it hard to enjoy?
The most common argument against AI content that I see is that it "isn't art" because the prompter isn't manually drawing the lines, painting the canvas, or controlling the precise mechanical output. Opponents argue that letting an external system "generate the content" invalidates the expression.
If we accept this rigid definition of the artistic process, we have to throw out an entire century of established art history.
Take Hans Arp. In the 1910s, he pioneered a technique where he tore up pieces of paper, let them fall completely at random onto a surface, and glued them down exactly where they landed. He explicitly stated that he was surrendering human control to the "laws of chance." The human hand did not choose the composition; gravity and air resistance did.
By the logic used against AI today, Arp’s work isn’t art -- it’s just a gravity-generated collision of paper scraps.
We can go further. Marcel Duchamp didn't construct his Readymades; he signed a urinal he bought at a hardware store. John Cage sat at a piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds of total silence; the "composition" was just random environmental noise from the audience.
Art is identified by expression, not by the rigidity of a specific manual process. A person selecting a specific generation out of dozens of algorithmic outputs is doing something functionally identical to Hans Arp, who famously dropped paper scraps onto a canvas and curated the random arrangements he felt were expressive.
If your definition of art requires a human hand to manually execute every single line, your worldview is over a century out of date. If you can't accept this, you aren't an artist -- you're just a smug elitist.
I do my comics with Midjourney and photoshop, and just recently I have decided to bring my stories to Kickstarter in the hopes of making something off of it. And just like anybody who crowdfunds, I would naturally need to advertise, so I started posting about the campaign on some groups.
Now dont get me wrong, I never claimed that this will be an ultimate all-time bestseller. Im fully aware that the medium, the genre, and the tool that I used will make this an uphill climb. Especially with all the heat AI is getting from the artist community. But I went with it anyway... Which is why I feel like every small win I get is something to celebrate.
Right now I'm just ecstatic that there are some people out there who are actually willing to give this a shot.
Just look at how big is this gap, and how much upvotes you got compare to them. If it's not obvious enough, go to 3B1B and learn your math from beginning again.
At best, you could call this personal development, but what benefit does society derive from your cultivation of abilities that serve only your own pleasure?
I’ve seen an argument sometimes go like this: "Well, sure, we’re useless, but at least we’re eco-friendly, or, at the very least, *more* eco-friendly than AI." Even if that’s true, it’s a pretty bleak outlook. You want to engage in something that’s essentially endless, yet your primary criticism is just that someone else’s "useless" work happens to be more environmentally damaging? I don’t think that’s a healthy perspective, you’re essentially demeaning yourself.
If you argue that the output is what matters also as process, then you can no longer play the "another process" card; instead, you must explicitly state where and how this "other process" affects the final image. Personally, I believe that a hand-drawn image will, by definition, differ in its details from one created by an AI, but is that really so important? In this regard, you have to concede that there is a valid reason for AI to exist.
In that case, your claim extends to the entire period for which you wish to grant the author full rights to the work; if that period is 5 years, then, in your view, it is acceptable for training to take place using all content produced up until 2021.
If copyright weren't as unfairly long as it is now, it wouldn't, in essence, particularly conflict with how AI is trained.
Before AI art I was mostly a digital artist, and before digital art, I was mostly a traditional artist. And sprinkled inbetween, I've also done dancing, singing, acting, and various other forms of artistic expression throughout my lifetime.
The misconception that AI artists lose their skill when you take AI away or that we somehow hate other art forms is just incorrect. Just because we have a preferred medium doesn't mean we don't experiment with other methods, I feel like most artists like to pursue all sorts of methods of self expression and seldom ever limit themselves to one.
I feel like collaborating is a great way to bridge the gap between art forms, like this person who wanted to collab with me on a comic.
Preface: I do not like generative AI very much. I don't enjoy using it, I'm not particularly interested in the current art it spits out, I don't like the companies and people behind it, I don't like how it seems to be putting many people out of work and into despair about their future. The only pro-AI people that really irritate me are people who have no respect for others. This sub is supposed to be a place for both sides of the argument, so hopefully this isn't an issue. I thought I'd just make my personal opinion clear.
Now, on to the meat of the discussion. I often see a lot of people compare the current AI hype to the NFT hype of the mid-2010s. However, I don't think this is correct. NFTs genuinely did not have any use outside of clout. I would liken them to something like a fashion trend or shiny new toy; sort of like when you were a kid and everyone in your age group wanted a Nintendo DS or an Xbox. They existed to show that you had the income to spend on them (or not, in the case of the 'all my apes gone' guy).
Personally, I liken the current AI craze to the dot-com bubble of the mid 1990s. For those who don't know, the dot-com bubble refers to the period from about 1993 to 2000 where the stock prices of internet-based companies experienced rapid growth and eventual collapse. Many internet-based startups recieved heavy investment and went public during this period, raising significant capital despite lacking viable business models, which ultimately led to the market collapse when investment funds dried up. The bursting of the dotcom bubble resulted in massive financial losses for investors, with several high-profile tech companies losing over 80% of their market value. Companies like Amazon, eBay, and Priceline managed to survive the crash, while many others went bankrupt as the market corrected itself.
However, dot-com domains did not disappear. We still use them; Reddit is a dot-com domain. They just stopped being profitable and cool. They were replaced by other tech and digital novelties. The same can be said for cloud computing; I am just old enough to remember when every tech company was constantly pushing cloud computing and saying that "we made a CLOUD SERVER for your CLOUD STORAGE so you can PUT THINGS in the CLOUD!!!" and that eventually trickled down into "okay cloud storage pretty cool whatever".
The public seem generally curious and wary of AI (link, link, link) in much of the Western world, but it is important to realise that optimism and anxiety around AI are both rising globally at roughly the same scale. There's also the fact that a lot of major tech faces such as Sam Altman and Dario Amodei and Alex Karp seem to reallyenjoyproviding horrible publicity for AI. Nobody likes to hear that they're going to be replaced or killed, especially not in a society that's already straining economically and has no sign of UBI, so I have no idea why these guys think "AI is gonna kill us all in six months" is some kind of incredible selling point.
The important thing to note in this post is that it's not a fuzzy warm "AI will die" moral. As much as it pains people, generative AI is not going away even though a lot of tech bros have the humanity and empathy of a rock. The toothpaste is out of the tube and cannot be put back in. I do, however, think that we are going to reach a point where it goes the way of cloud computing and dot-com domains in that it stops being profitable and is replaced with some other flashy new thing. There is also the point that your own opinion of generative AI will most likely shift and change. As I said in my preface, I personally dislike AI, but I find the dreamlike surreal images that very early models generated to be ten million times more fascinating and beautiful than the identikit anime-esque style of most images generated nowadays.
Are there pro AI people obsessed with anti AI people and keep egging them on, pestering them and invading their spaces? Sure. Of course.
But antis seem just way too obsessed with the other side and the vast majority of it comes from their side. It's not equal at all, it's almost all from the anti side.
Any pro AI space has antis in it. Like a LOT of them. Sometimes, depending on the sub, they make up more than half. They are in quite literally every pro AI space on the entire internet and they're only there to berate and insult you and say the same things they've said a trillion times at this point.
They're in this one, because it's for both sides. It's a coin toss what you're going to get here. Sometimes they'll swarm posts and literally all you will get in the replies is antis telling you how stupid you are and downvoting the fuck out of you. I've had it happen to me here multiple times, I just happened to get unlucky and boom everyone clicking on my post is an anti.
They claim they're only in pro AI spaces "because this shit keeps popping up in my feed" but they also keep interacting with it, clicking on it and making replies, so I don't believe that excuse. I'm pro AI, and when I see an anti AI sub, I usually just mark it as not interested. Guess what, because I didn't interact with it, it goes away and it takes a good while before I see the next one.
And then the stuff they post is just... the same things over and over and over again, endlessly regurgitated. It's very ironic how they hate AI because they think all it does is regurgitate things humans made again and again, but the majority of what they type online is:
AI SLOP
You're destroying the planet
("your ai slop bores me")
AI SLOP
AI SLOP
We can survive without AI but we can't survive without water
AI SLOP
At least I have a brain and don't need AI to do everything for me LOL
Why don't you just ask ChatGPT to explain it for you, dumbass
AI SLOP
get this worthless ai garbage out of here
AI SLOP
AI SLOP
Then when you look into their spaces it's just constant bitching and complaining about pro AI people and making fun of them. (Yes I understand I'm doing that right now from the other side, but I wouldn't call it hypocrisy because it's not all I post.)
When you look at art posts there's a lot of anti AI sentiment even when AI isn't even involved in anything whatsoever there. Someone will make art and put a little sticker of AI crossed out in the corner and then you get people in the replies going FUCK AI and getting awards and upvoted.
Then there's a sub for "deslopping" ai generated images that now has a trend because they all got ragebaited super fucking hard from one lazy AI image. This one
They got baited so fucking hard by this and got so mad over it that they started a whole trend of deslopping it with their own art, to then try and burn pro AI people with
"Maybe I draw like shit, but at least I draw"
"Maybe I draw like shit, but at least I don't use AI"
They're trying so hard to ragebait back but almost nobody that's pro AI even looks at the sub.
So it's kind of this one way thing where they keep getting ragebaited by pro AI people, trying to ragebait them back but they just do not care because they don't even see it.
Some of the art over there is pretty cool though.
Subs that have absolutely nothing to do with AI in any capacity will have them making anti AI posts, getting tons of upvotes and awards and it's just out of nowhere. I saw a post on the Winnie the Pooh sub of all things that was all the characters looking mad and disappointed with text like "When you find out bro is using ChatGPT"
And then the replies were what you would expect with FUCK AI and all that.
In the Winnie the Pooh sub. Out of nowhere. Just because. Why?
Then I'll be scrolling around Reddit and come across a sub for Ultrakill. Oh hey lemme scroll around this a bit. Find an image of V1 with the text "I may be a machine but even I fucking hate AI."
Then I happen upon a Warhammer sub a few days later and get an image of some space marines with the text "GLORY TO THE EMPEROR AND DEATH TO AI"
They just cannot stop thinking about it. They are constantly thinking about it, constantly posting about it, wanting to turn every space into an anti AI space and always going around looking for pros to insult and tell that they're evil and destroying the planet and we'll all die of thirst because of them. Even places that semi coexist with pro AI people, where the pro AI people aren't even being inflammatory or insulting to them, they'll suddenly start making posts about how the mods need to start getting rid of the pro AI guys and ban AI in the sub entirely.
I very rarely see pro AI people be mean and insulting and bully the other side. Does it happen? Yeah like I said at the start, of course it does, and of course some pro AI spaces has those dumbass "break the pencil" morons that nobody wants. But the extent of it is substantially less than antis, like by an enormous degree.
tl;dr, antis are obsessed with AI and pro AI people online and they need to chill the hell out and stop making it their entire personality.
Let’s be real for two seconds: an artist losing their gig just means there are fewer DeviantArt commissions and someone has to go find a retail job. The world keeps spinning without custom furry portraits. But if you automate programmers out of existence, who the hell is maintaining the spaghetti code running the power grid, hospital ventilators, and air traffic control? Society can easily survive a shortage of freelance illustrators, but the second we run out of actual qualified devs to fix a critical banking server at 3 AM because everyone relied on a hallucinating bot, civilization literally grinds to a halt. One is luxury cultural fluff, the other is the foundational plumbing of the entire planet.
I don't think ai is better than human art, I prefer seeing human art
I enjoy making ai "art" and i also vibe code random websites sometimes cause well, so I can't say I am anti cause I use ai
I disagree with arguments from both sides, for example antis talk about how ai takes up alot of water, dude where the heck do you think it goes? Matter can't be destoried, and also secondly showering takes up water, burgers take up water, and etc, so I disagree and agree with arguments from both sides
Both sides give each other insults and won't stop fighting, for example I literally once saw a pro ai guy say antis are a cult, which is dehumanizing imo cause he generalized literally everyone and etc, I get it's a debate discussion but debates and discussions can be semi respectful at the same time (though I'll admit sometimes it's funny to see antis and pros fight)
A weird bias in my subconscious, I sometimes subconsciously hate ai
And sometimes I might shift to who I agree with a bit more
So, those are reasons I am centrist:
Though I don't hate either sides, just its I find it hard to agree with them
