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Has anyone noticed how much vitriol there is towards AI-generated art? Over the past year it's slowly grown into something quite ferocious, though not quite ubiquitous. I'm starting to feel (almost) as if it's outside the overton window to admit to using or liking AI art. Like I said, it's not ubiquitous, but maybe it's getting there. Pretty much any thread I ever see that features AI art (outside of specialty groups devoted to AI interest) has many vocal detractors accusing AI art of being trash and stealing from real artists.
While my mind is not fully made up on the issue of whether AI art is "good", if you ask me, I wouldn't say that it's bad that AI learns from "stealing" from artists. Honestly, ask absolutely anyone who's learned anything creative: learning art is all about learning how to steal from people. I know it's not completely analogous, but I don't personally believe that it should be bad for AI to learn by stealing while it's okay for human artists to learn by stealing.
More than anything, I'm kinda surprised there's this strong sentiment, and willingness to call out AI art and its proponents as being some sort of evil in the world. Maybe it's mostly because people get off on being judgy these days, and believing they have some sort of moral high ground, and less that they actually care about artists? I'm not sure, but I would have thought the Butlerian Jihad would have started for something more severe than art.
Yes, the blowback against AI art seems to me a little insincere.
Ostensibly, it's about the AI 'stealing' public art to train itself. (I agree with you that this argument is nonsense)
More realistically, it's people disliking the idea of robots putting artists out of work.
Cynically, it's artists being sore that their highly developed skills can suddenly be near-replicated by a computer in 15 seconds.
Many times over the past few centuries, skilled workers have found themselves driven into obsolescence by technology. Very few of them succeeded in holding back the tide for long. If I were a digital artist, I would urgently be either swapping to a physical medium, or figuring out how I could integrate AI into my workflow.
Anecdotally, in the circles I move in, while concerns about stolen training data and artist livelihoods are real, I think the biggest factor is a combination of the aesthetic (i.e. AI art just looks bad) as well as what I think of as purity concerns. The way people treat AI art reminds me a great deal of Jonathan Haidt's purity foundation - people react to it the way they used to react to GM foods, or just way they reacted to junk, heavily processed foods in general. It's gross. It's icky. There's a kind of taint or poison in it. Real art is made by an artist, and involves creative decisions. Algorithms can't do that. People hate that sense that the image is inauthentic or 'not real', and if the AI art is curated well enough that they don't notice it's AI, then they were fooled, and people hate being fooled. If I say I hate AI art, you show me a picture, I like it, and you reveal afterwards that it was made by an AI, I don't conclude that maybe I'm wrong and AI art is fine. I conclude that you tricked me. You're a liar, and I condemn you.
That may sound uncharitable, though for what it's worth I'm anti-AI-art myself. Part of my concern is indeed aesthetic (the majority of AI art is recognisable as such; maybe high-quality human-curated AI art can escape this, but most of it is samey trash), and part of it is ethical (I admit my skin crawls a bit even to think that my writing might have been included in AI training data), but honestly, a lot of it is instinctual. AI art, like AI writing, is... well, impure. It feels dirty.
I'm upvoting not because I agree with you but because I appreciate you articulating your position so clearly.
The best kind of upvote!
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