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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.
It's not.
The best way to understand people on the other side of a culture war issue is to start from the assumption that they really do genuinely believe what they say they believe.
Sure, that would upset anyone. But there are also many non-artists who don't like AI art. Also, people who have objections to AI painting also tend to have objections to AI music and AI voice acting, even if those areas don't overlap with their personal skill set. Which is evidence that the objections are principled rather than merely opportunistic.
We need a flashing banner along the lines of "Yes, your opponents actually think that. No, they aren't pretending to just to make you mad."
I've never for a moment thought that people opposed to AI art were actually fine with it but were just pretending to hate it to own the
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