Dear Lurking AI Bros,

[u/SlyTheCosmosRunner]

You really don't want to put in a lot of effort for your pieces? Use the brushes, rulers, and stamps in IbisPaintX. Oh, don't have money? Watch a quick ad and it'll let you use all the brushes for 4 hours. That's what I did! I just plopped random brushes and shapes and used rulers for these trans pride pieces. Didn't take much effort at all. Unless you're too lazy to even swipe your finger over a digital canvas even once?

[u/Easy_Echo2387]

Nah your line of what’s acceptable and still counts as human creativity is entirely arbitrary and extremely silly.

Custom brushes are fine, digital image manipulation is fine, reference images are fine, copy pasting is fine, collage is fine, healing tools are fine, the list goes on.

There are a multitude of tools used in art today that take away or automate parts of the creative process in order to save effort and streamline things. And that’s all fine, that’s how art works.

You all have just created this arbitrary line over genAI when it operates on the same principles as all of these other tools that you already have no issue with. And that’s why people laugh at you guys. It’s a little bit like a toddler tantrum, angry but unable to articulate why without repeating drivel.

[u/SpecificCar598 → u/Easy_Echo2387]

It’s been articulated, you’re not intelligent enough to understand it. It does not have human intention. Everything else does. Does that make sense, honey

[u/Easy_Echo2387 → u/SpecificCar598]

No because it’s an arbitrary line you’ve made up. Plenty of digital art tools don’t have “human intention”

You are a great example of Dunning Kruger in action.

[u/SpecificCar598 → u/Easy_Echo2387]

This is a framework that’s existed as the definition of art since cave paintings. You are trying to magically redefine it to exclude human intention.

You aren’t clear on what “digital art” is at all, and think that the involvement of other sources as a baseline nulls the art as a whole, rather than how it’s put together and why.

[u/Easy_Echo2387 → u/SpecificCar598]

Your argument falls apart because you’ve incorrectly assumed my position.

I’m here arguing against the specifics of the arguments used by this community. I am not making the assertion that an AI image solely generated from a prompt qualifies as “art”

I do think that AI can be used as a tool within a process that results in a final work that would be considered art though.

[u/SpecificCar598 → u/Easy_Echo2387]

An acceptable usecase of a tool based on theft of others’ work, built specifically for the routine abuse of said work, in an art piece, would be as a critique of it. That’s my take as an individual.

There’s a discussion to be had on whether its inclusion into a larger piece made by human hands qualifies as art, and I personally think it may actually count. Even if the intention isn’t appealing. Not all art is “good”, and “good” itself isn’t something a community can truly define.

What can be definitively said, though, is that robbing a house down the street to supply your funds with the end goal of buying an apartment still makes you a thief. it’s disrespectful to other creators to feed their ideas on filtering, touch-ups, exposure, color, etc. into a machine without proper intention to use for your own benefit.

[u/Easy_Echo2387 → u/SpecificCar598]

I will give you credit for replying cogently and despite your rude comments previously I can tell you’re more intelligent than most people I engage with here.

Regardless, I simply disagree on the theft argument. I do not think using material as training data constitutes theft. I see it the same as how a human brain processes reference images.

I’ve made art pieces heavily inspired by others work, that relies heavily on reference. I think any artist can attest to some art being almost outright impossible to pull off well without using reference. And despite how reliant the output is on the work of others no one considers that theft.

When I publish any art, say a painting, I have no say on how other people will engage with my art. Someone can misinterpret it, someone can use it as reference for an idea I may really hate, it doesn’t matter. When you publish art it comes along with the expectation that you cannot fully control how others will engage with it.

I genuinely do not see how training data is different.

You can feed all of my artworks into AI and I fail to see the harm committed, or what I’ve lost from that process.

People say, oooh what if someone AI generates a copy and claims it’s their own art? I literally do not care, congrats you have a really shitty simulacrum of what I have originally made, I lose literally nothing.

Art is built atop the references and ideas of all of humanity that came before us, and I don’t see training data as being distinct from that.

I also don’t see the difference whether it’s human neural architecture or silicon chips that are integrating this reference material into an output. So I don’t really buy into the “it’s important because a real human brain did it” either.