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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.
I honestly think it's far closer to the opposite of ubiquitous, but it certainly is quite ferocious. But like so much ferocity that you see online, I think it's a very vocal but very small minority. I spend more time than I should on subreddits specifically about the culture war around AI art, and (AFAIK) the primary anti-AI art echochamber subreddit, /r/ArtistHate, has fewer than 7k members, in comparison to the primary pro-AI art echochamber subreddit, /r/DefendingAIArt, which has 23K members. The primary AI art culture war discussion subreddit, /r/aiwars, has 40K members, and the upvote and commenting patterns indicate that a large majority of the people there like AI art, or at least dislike the hatred against it.
These numbers don't prove anything, especially since hating on AI art tends to be accepted in a lot of generic art and fandom communities, which lead to people who dislike AI art not particularly finding value in a community specifically made for disliking it, but I think they at least point in one direction.
IRL, I've also encountered general ambivalence towards AI art. Most people are at least aware of it, with most finding it a cool curiosity, and none that I've encountered actually expressing anything approaching hatred for it. My sister, who works in design, had no qualms about gifting me a little trinket with a design made using AI. She seems to take access to AI art via Photoshop just for granted - though interestingly, I learned this as part of a story she told me about interviewing a potential hire whose portfolio looked suspiciously like AI art, which she confirmed by using Photoshop to generate similar images and finding that the style matched. She disapproved of it not out of hatred against AI art, but rather because designers they hire need to have actual manual skills, and passing off AI art without specifically disclosing it like that is dishonest.
I think the vocal minority that does exist makes a lot of sense. First of all, potential jobs and real status - from having the previously rather exclusive ability to create high fidelity illustrations - are on the line. People tend to get both highly emotional and highly irrational when either are involved. And second, art specifically has a certain level of mysticism around it, to the point that even atheist materialists will talk about human-manually-made art (or novel or film or song) having a "soul" or a "piece of the artist" within it, and the existence of computers using matrix math to create such things challenges that notion. It wasn't that long ago that scifi regularly depicted AI and robots as having difficulty creating and/or comprehending such things.
And, of course, there's the issue of how the tools behind AI art (and modern generative AI in general) were created, which was by analyzing billions of pictures downloaded from the internet for free. Opinions differ on whether or not this counts as copyright infringement or "stealing," but many artists certainly seem to believe that it is; that is, they believe that other people have an obligation to ask for their permission before using their artworks to train their AI models.
My guess is that such people tend to be overrepresented in the population of illustrators, and social media tends to involve a lot of people following popular illustrators for their illustrations, and so their views on the issue propagate to their fans. And no technology amplifies hatred quite as well as social media, resulting in an outsized appearance of hatred relative to the actual hatred that's there. Again, I think most people are just plain ambivalent.
That, to me, is actually interesting in itself. So far, the culture wars around AI art hasn't seem to have been subsumed by the larger culture wars that have been going on constantly for at least the past decade. Plenty of left/progressive/liberal people hate AI art because they're artists, but plenty love it because they're into tech or accessibility. I don't know so much about the right/conservative side, but I've seen some religious conservatives call it satanic, and others love it because they're into tech and dunking on liberal artists.
That hasn't been a tenable position for quite some time. Duchamp took a urinal and put it in an art gallery in 1917. Probably, he did not simultaneously impart a piece of his soul into it.
You are getting at something important though. I'd be a lot more interested in AI art if I had a reasonable degree of confidence that the AI was conscious, and that it created the piece with intent and drew from its conscious experiences as inspiration. I'd actually be very interested to learn about what it's like to be an entity who has the entire internet memorized! What does it experience, what does it feel. I have nothing against that at all, even if it does put humans out of work. Losing the Darwinian competition to another conscious, feeling subject is not so bad. Losing the Darwinian competition to a hoard of mindless replicators is horrific and should be avoided at all costs.
The AI art we have right now seems to me to be more akin to waves on the beach just so happening to etch very detailed pictures into the sand by random chance; this to me is lacking the principle features that make art interesting (communication between conscious subjects; wondering at what kind of subjectivity could have lead to the present work).
I'm not sure how you justify the "probably" in the last sentence. If we posit that, say, Van Gogh left a piece of his soul into his famous self portrait through the act of painting it, how can we deny that Duchamp left a piece of soul into the urinal when he placed it in an art gallery? What's the mechanism here by which we can make the judgment call of "probably" or "probably not?"
I think that's a perfectly reasonable way to determine whether a work of art is interesting. What I find confusing here, though, is that, by that standard, AI art is interesting! To take the beach metaphor, someone who types in "big booba anime girl" into Midjourney on Discord and posts his favorite result on Twitter is akin to someone who hovers over this beach and snaps photos using a simple point and shoot, then publishes the resulting prints that he likes (if we stretch a bit, this is all nature photography or even street photography). In both cases, a conscious person is using his subjective judgment to determine the features of what gets shared. Fundamentally, this would be called "curation" rather than "illustration," and one can certainly argue that curation isn't interesting or that it's not an art, but by the standard that it requires a conscious being using his subjective judgment to communicate something through his choices in the results, curation fits just as well as any other work of art.
This is why I believe there's something more to it than that and alluded to the mysticism in my previous comment.
I feel that the snapping pictures of a beach and choosing the best ones gets at something here. That doesn't really sound like art at all. It's an obvious thing to point a camera at and has little intention to it, only a few more degrees of freedom than your anime example. The more you specify the care and thought that goes into the choice of view and reasoning behind it and craft to control the image, the closer it gets to art. Same with prompting. If you do enough micro decisions, curation and combination and juxtaposition of what the ai gives you, the more you are moving in the direction of art.
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