In my opinion, AI just feels like the logical next step for capitalist exploitation and destruction of culture. Generative AI is (in most cases) just a fancy way for cooperations to steal art on a scale, that hasn’t been possible before. And then they use AI to fill the internet with slop and misinformation and actual artists are getting fired from their jobs, because the company replaces them with an AI, that was trained on their original art. Because of these reasons and some others, it just feels wrong to me, to be using AI in such a manner, when this community should be about inclusion and kindness. Wouldn’t it be much cooler, if we commissioned an actual artist for the banner or find a nice existing artwork (where the licence fits, of course)? I would love to hear your thoughts!
In my opinion, AI just feels like the logical next step for capitalist exploitation and destruction of culture.
I don’t think AI is inherently bad. What’s bad is how we (or well, the corpos) use it. SEO, vibe coding, making slop, you name it.
About training material being stealing: hard agree here. Our copyright laws are broken, but they are right about AI - training is strong in a retrieval system, which is infingement. Shame they aren’t enforced at all.
What fascinates me is the similarity between AI and photography. That is, both are revolutionary tools in the visual medium. Imagine this thread being an opinion column in an 1800s newspaper, and replace all instances of ‘AI’ with ‘photography’. The arguments all stand, but our perspective to them may change.
My PFP is actually AI generated with a local model (Stable Diffusion 1.5) thanks to my producer, Neigsendoig (who goes by Sendo). Personally speaking, both Sendo and I are into generative AI, and use it with proper disclosure.
Most people should do that whenever they use generative AI for anything, provided that AI is an integral part of the production.
You should definitely support artists! You know how good it feels to support someone you know? I’m personally going to give my music away for free. I think intellectual property is meant to be shared, but I do recognize that we gotta eat in this parasitic system, yo. How about this? We support artists with our commonwealth? It’s fucking important, man. Culture matters. No need to shift the blame to the individual when it’s the system that’s rotten. Two more ideas, then I’ll fuck off. Guaranteed dignity in death, and defensive, non-coercive, no entanglements protection of holy sites. I’m a deterministic atheist through and through, but man, we gotta heal our fucking souls.
There are a lot of talented artists here on lemmy.ml and I think it would be wise to ask them if they were interested in providing a banner image that is not ai generated, surely someone would take up the offer.
If they wanted to do it for free, they would have offered.
Artists do labor for free for the benefit of their communities all the time, myself included, mostly out of the goodness of their hearts. Although maybe Lemmy can offer some compensation if they want to commission something. Tbh, I’ve never approached someone or an organization and said, “hey, I think you should change your logo/banner/whatever, want me to make a better one?” I think that’s a bit forward.
I’m glad you have the privilege of being able to give away your time and work for free.
You don’t know anything about me and idk why you say it like that and then totally disengage from the latter half of what I said.
You:
Artists do labor for free all the time **myself included **
I’m glad you’ve had that privilege. I’m not sure what else you think I might be referring to or how you think this is not ‘engaging’ with what you said.
I said nothing about the second half of your a message because it’s a semantic argument, a.k.a skill issue:
Yeah, go to someone telling them you can do their work better than them, out of the blue, and they’re not going to have have a good response.
What if you said: “Hey guys. I love the community! You might have seen me commenting around too. I just wanted to let you know I do art sometimes and if you’re ever looking for new assets, like your banner, I’d be happy to collaborate. Cheers!”
Would you be upset at getting a message like that out of the blue? People cold solicit all the time, it’s not a bad thing.
But it’s not going to work if you present like you know better than everyone else. People disagree with people, not with facts.
My whole point was that being able to give away your time and skill for free is a privilege.
What’s the point of clutching pearls at the use of AI, if the result of not using AI is checks notes artists don’t get paid for their work anyways because now you can hang the use of AI over their heads to get art for free, with the excuse that doing so ‘is not pro free labor, it’s anti AI’
Valuing art is giving value to art. No budget for art? Cool, use AI. You get what you pay for. But wait, you’re telling me the solution to put more money in artists pockets is instead for artist to give MORE art for FREE? (For the noble cause of avoiding AI of course) See how insane this is?
I have nothing against gifting art. But that is what is it is: a gift. Something of you that has value, with your time as a baseline, that you are choosing to share. Some people are privileged enough to be able to give it away for free. Some are not. The effective reality is that the more art is gifted in the name of moral crusades against AI, the harder it is for artists to live off art in a world where the genie of AI can’t be put back inside its bottle.
I hope this makes you happy and engaged lol
Edit: Here’s another idea. Want to volunteer for your community? Cool, how about organizing a GoFundme to put together money to commission a banner. Maybe make a post about the possibility of doing that instead.
Bam. You have given to your community for free, you have made a community event of it. And even if all you get is 5 bucks, that’s five bucks that some artist got to spend in their gacha addiction thanks to something they created.
That’s what I mean when I say valuing art means giving value to art.
You wouldn’t necessarily even need to comission someone. There are plenty of Creative Commons licensed pieces of art that could be used.
Wouldn’t it be much cooler, if we commissioned an actual artist for the banner
I hate it when AI is used to replace the work an artist would have been paid for. But uh, this is a random open-source forum; there’s no funding for artists to make banners. Rejecting AI art – which was voted for by the community – just seems like baseless virtue signalling. No artist is going to get paid if we remove it.
But like if you want to commission an artist with your own money, by all means go ahead. You’ll still most likely need another community vote to approve it though.
That doesn’t change that real artists who made real art will have had their work used without permission or payment to help generate the banner. I’m with OP.
If I drew something myself, those artists would also not be paid. I can understand a deontological argument against using AI trained on people’s art, but for me, the utilitarian argument is much stronger – don’t use AI if it puts an artist out of work.
It’s not about anyone getting paid, it’s about affording basic respect and empathy to people and their work. Using AI sends a certain message of 'I don’t care about your consent or opinion towards me using your art", and I don’t think, that this is a good thing for anyone.
Well yeah, I don’t care about IP rights. Nothing has been materially stolen, and if AI improves, then the result could some day in theory be indistinguishable from a human who was merely “inspired” by an existing piece of art. At the end of the day, the artist is not harmed by AI plagiarism; the artist is harmed by AI taking what could have been their job.
They’re harmed by both IMO.
how
If I saw the artwork myself and it inspired my artwork, would it be any different? Everything is based on everything.
Yeah, but if you drew it yourself then they wouldn’t expect to be paid. Unless you plagiarised them to the degree that would trigger a copyright claim, they would (at worst) just see it as a job that they could have had, but didn’t. Nothing of theirs was directly used, and at least something original of theirs was created. Whereas AI images are wholly based on other work and include no original ideas at all.
You haven’t explained how it would be different in any way. Human artists learn by emulating other artists, and vast majority of art is derivative in nature. Unless a specific style is specified by the user input, AI images are also not plagiarised to the degree that would trigger a copyright claim. The only actual difference here is in the fact that the process is automated and a machine is producing the image instead of a human drawing it by hand.
You’re posting on lemmy.ml; we don’t care much for intellectual property rights here. What we care about is that the working class not be deprived of their ability to make a living.
Agree with that. I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive though?
I agree that they are not mutually exclusive, which is why I usually side against AI. On this particular occasion however, there’s a palpable difference, since no artist is materially harmed.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the tech itself. Your issue is with capitalist relations and the way this technology is used under capitalism. Focus on what the actual problem is. https://dialecticaldispatches.substack.com/p/a-marxist-perspective-on-ai
I read your link. I think my main issue is the framing as though AI is just a new tool that people are afraid of similar to the introduction of the camera.
Even outside of capitalist exploitation, AI generated art suffers from an inherent creative limitation. It’s a derivative and subtractive tool. It can only remix what already exists. It lacks intention and human experience that make art meaningful. The creative process isn’t just about the final image. There’s choices, mistakes, revisions, and personal investment, etc. No amount of super long and super specific prompts can do this.
This is why a crude MS Paint drawing or a hastily made meme can resonate more than a “flawless” AI generated piece. Statistical approximation can’t imbue a piece with lived experience or subvert expectations with purpose. It is creative sterility.
I can see some applications of AI generation for the more mundane aspects of creation, like the actions panel in Photoshop. But I think framing creative folks’ objections as an act of self preservation as though we are afraid of technology is a bit of a strawman and reductive of the reality of the situation. Although there are definitely artists that react this way, I admit.
It is true that new tools reshape art. The comparison to photography or Photoshop is flawed. Those tools still require direct engagement with the creative process. In the link you provided the argument is made for a pro-AI stance using the argument that the photographer composes a shot and manipulating light. In contrast to AI which automates the creative act itself. That’s where their argument falls apart.
As for democratization goes the issue isn’t accessibility (plenty of free, nonexploitative tools already exist for beginners) and that is something that could be improved. AI doesn’t teach someone to draw, operate a camera, paint, reiterate, conceptualize, and develop artistic judgment. It lets them skip those steps entirely resulting in outputs that are aesthetically polished and creatively hollow. True democratization would mean empowering people to create.
I think, ultimately, AI-generated images have their own utility, but fundamentally cannot replace human art as an expression of the human experience and artist intent through their chosen medium. AI-generated textures for, say, wooden planks in a video game does little to nothing to change the end-user’s experience, but just asking AI to create a masterpiece of art fundamentally lacks the artistic process that makes art thought provoking and important. It isn’t even about being produced artisinally or mass-produced, it’s fundamentally about what art is to begin with, and what makes it resonate.
AI cannot replace art. AI can make the more mundane and tedious aspects of creation smoother, it can be a part of a larger work of art, or it can be used in a similar way to stock images. At the same time, just like AI chatbots are no replacement for human interaction, AI can’t replace human art. It isn’t a matter of morality, or something grander, it’s as simple as AI art just being a tool for guessing at what the user wants to generate, and thus isn’t capable of serving the same function for humanity as art in the traditional sense.
I always like your posts when I see them here, so I really do value your perspective on this.
I always like your posts when I see them here, so I really do value your perspective on this.
Thank you, I was hoping I wasn’t going to get eaten alive for my comments. That said, the question asked in the original post is why is our banner AI generated? And I think our answer should be: It shouldn’t be, if this is going to be a community made of people for people, then banner should be made from someone from this community not a capitalist AI image generator. I don’t think that should be controversial and illicit responses that are hostile to the question even if OP’s intentions are being questioned.
Haha, I went back and forth on whether or not to post my thoughts for quite a while, I understand being reluctant to posting on this. Up front, I am not an artist, which I think is obvious but nevertheless should be stated.
I personally don’t care for the people trying to question OP’s motives, that’s not the point here. Questioning the purpose of an AI image is an extremely salient issue, and one OP has every right to ask. AI is not a “settled issue” in my eyes on the left, and what I shared earlier is easily one of my least strong opinions.
As for the purposes of the banner, I think, personally, whether or not it is AI generated depends on what the users of the community want. If someone wants to put in the time to design a banner, and the people using the community prefer it to the AI banner, then it should change to the artist’s banner. Art made by humans is desired for that artistic process, grappling with the medium as a form of expression, something the viewer can contemplate (in my again untrained, unartistic view), but in the interim AI can at least make servicable images, especially if run locally and on green energy.
I see AI images fulfilling a similar use to stock images. Good for quickly drafting up something as a visual representation of an idea, horrible for being art as a stand-alone subject to contemplate and appreciate, the skill, the decision making, the expression.
Am I off-base? I dunno, I feel a bit like I got eaten alive in my comment I made earlier. I’m certainly not “pro-AI,” I don’t even use it myself, but at the same time I took issue with how people are framing the conversation.
Even outside of capitalist exploitation, AI generated art suffers from an inherent creative limitation. It’s a derivative and subtractive tool. It can only remix what already exists.
There’s little evidence that this is fundamentally different from how our own minds work. We are influenced by our environment, and experiences. The art we create is a product of our material conditions. If you look at art from different eras you can clearly see that it’s grounded in the material reality people live in. Furthermore, an artist can train the AI on their own style, as the video linked in the article shows with a concrete use case. That allows the artists to automate the mechanical work of producing the style they’ve come up with.
It lacks intention and human experience that make art meaningful.
That’s what makes it a tool. A paintbrush or an app like Krita also lacks intention. It’s the human using the tool that has the idea that they want to convey, and they use the tool to do that. We see this already happening a lot with memes being generated using AI tools. A few examples here. It’s a case of people coming up with ideas and then using AI to visualize them so they can share them with others.
This is why a crude MS Paint drawing or a hastily made meme can resonate more than a “flawless” AI generated piece.
If we’re just talking about pressing a button and getting an image sure. However, the actual tools like ComfyUI have complex workflows where the artist has a lot of direction over every detail that’s being generated. Personally, I don’t see how it’s fundamentally different from using a 3D modelling tool like Blender or a movie director guiding actors in execution of the script.
I can see some applications of AI generation for the more mundane aspects of creation, like the actions panel in Photoshop.
Right, I think that’s how these tools will be used professionally. However, there are also plenty of people who aren’t professionals, and don’t have artistic talent. These people now have a tool to flesh out an idea in their heads which they wouldn’t have been able to do previously. I see this as a net positive. The examples above show how this can be a powerful tool for agitation, satire, and political commentary.
Those tools still require direct engagement with the creative process
So do tools like ComfyUI, if you look at the workflow, it very much resembles these tools.
the argument that the photographer composes a shot and manipulating light. In contrast to AI which automates the creative act itself
I do photography and I disagree here. The photographer looks at the scene, they do not create the scene themselves. The skill of the photographer is in noticing interesting patterns of light, objects, and composition in the scene that are aesthetically appealing. It’s the skill of being able to curate visually interesting imagery. Similarly, what the AI does is generate the scene, and what the human does is curate the content that’s generated based on their aesthetic.
AI doesn’t teach someone to draw, operate a camera, paint, reiterate, conceptualize, and develop artistic judgment. It lets them skip those steps entirely resulting in outputs that are aesthetically polished and creatively hollow. True democratization would mean empowering people to create.
Again, AI is a tool and it doesn’t magically remove the need for people to develop an aesthetic, to learn about lighting, composition, and so on. However, you’re also mixing in mechanical skills like operating the camera which have little to do with actual art. These tools very much do empower people to create, but to create something interesting still takes skill.
It honestly just seems like you want AI to be a stand in for creative thinking and intention rather than it actually enabling creative processes. Your examples you provide don’t teach those skills. Everyone has ideas. I have ideas of being a master painter creating incredible paintings, I can visually imagine them in my head, AI can shit out something that somewhat resembles that I want. It can train on my own style of [insert medium]. But I am always at the mercy of the output of that tool. It would not be a problem if it were a normal tool like a camera or paintbrush. But when you use a thought limiting tool like AI it gives you limited results in return. It is always going to be chained to the whatever that particular AI has trained on. Artists develop a style over years, it changes from day to day, year to year, AI cannot evolve, yet an artist’s style does just through repetition of creation. AI creates the predictive average of existing works.
I think the biggest thing here is that AI is a limited tool from the ground up rather than enabling creativity. You can’t train AI to develop a new concept or a new idea, that’s reserved to humans alone. It’s that human intangibility that’s yet to be achieved via AI and until sentience is achieved you’re never going to get that from a limited tool like AI. If sentience is achieved, you’d have to recognize its humanity and at that point prompts are no longer needed, it can create its own work.
It honestly just seems like you want AI to be a stand in for creative thinking and intention rather than it actually enabling creative processes.
I think was pretty clear in what I actually said. I think AI is a tool that automates the mechanical aspect of producing art. In fact, I repeatedly stated that I think the intention and creative thinking comes from the human user of the tool. I even specifically said that the tool does not replace the need for artistic ability.
Everyone has ideas. I have ideas of being a master painter creating incredible paintings, I can visually imagine them in my head, AI can shit out something that somewhat resembles that I want.
This is just gatekeeping. You’re basically saying that only people who have the technical skills should be allowed to turn ideas in their heads into content that can be shared with others, and tough luck for everyone else.
But I am always at the mercy of the output of that tool. It would not be a problem if it were a normal tool like a camera or paintbrush.
That’s completely false, you’re either misunderstanding how these tools work currently or intentionally misrepresenting how they work. I urge you to actually spend the time to learn how a tool like ComfyUI works and what it is capable of.
It is always going to be chained to the whatever that particular AI has trained on.
What it’s trained on is literally millions of images in every style imaginable, and what it is able to do is to blend these styles. The person using the tool can absolutely create a unique style. Furthermore, as I’ve already noted, and you’ve ignored, the artist can train the tool on their own style.
AI cannot evolve, yet an artist’s style does just through repetition of creation.
Yes, AI can evolve the same way artist evolves by being trained on more styles. Take a look at LoRA approach as one example of how easily new styles can be adapted to existing models.
I think the biggest thing here is that AI is a limited tool from the ground up rather than enabling creativity.
With all due respect, I think that you simply haven’t spent the time how the tool actually works and what it is capable of.
It’s that human intangibility that’s yet to be achieved via AI and until sentience is achieved you’re never going to get that from a limited tool like AI
Replace AI in that sentence with paint brush and it will make just as much sense.
If sentience is achieved, you’d have to recognize its humanity and at that point prompts are no longer needed, it can create its own work.
You’re once again ignoring my core point which is that AI is a tool and it is not meant to replace the human. It is meant to be used by people who have sentience and a critical eye for the specific imagery they’re aiming to produce.
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it’s just a crappy and lazy image regardless of origins, but the fact it is AI makes it crappier
Right now, anti-AI rhetoric is taking the same unprincipled rhetoric that the Luddites pushed forward in attacking machinery. They identified a technology linked to their proletarianization and thus a huge source of their new misery, but the technology was not at fault. Capitalism was.
What generative AI is doing is making art less artisinal. The independent artists are under attack, and are being proletarianized. However, that does not mean AI itself is bad. Copyright, for example, is bad as well, but artists depend on it. The same reaction against AI was had against the camera for making things like portraits and still-lifes more accessible, but nowadays we would not think photography to be anything more than another tool.
The real problems with AI are its massive energy consumption, its over-application in areas where it actively harms production and usefulness, and its application under capitalism where artists are being punished while corporations are flourishing.
In this case, there’s no profit to be had. People do not need to hire artists to make a banner for a niche online community. Hell, this could have been made using green energy. These are not the same instances that make AI harmful in capitalist society.
Correct analysis of how technologies are used, how they can be used in our interests vs the interests of capital, and correct identification of legitimate vs illegitimate use-cases are where we can succeed and learn from the mistakes our predecessors made. Correct identification of something linked to deteriorating conditions combined with misanalyzing the nature of how they are related means we come to incorrect conclusions, like when the Luddites initially started attacking machinery, rather than organizing against the capitalists.
Hand-created art as a medium of human expression will not go away. AI can’t replace that. What it can do is make it easier to create images that don’t necessarily need to have that purpose, as an expression of the human experience, like niche online forum banners or conveying a concept visually. Not all images need to be created in artisinal fashion, just like we don’t need to hand-draw images of real life when a photo would do. Neither photos nor AI can replace art. Not to mention, but there is an art to photography as well, each human use of any given medium to express the human experience can be artisinal.
It’s worth noting that the argument regarding massive energy consumption is no longer true. Models perform better than ones that required a data centre to run just a year ago can already be run on a laptop today. Meanwhile, people are still finding lots of new ways to optimize them. There is little reason to think they’re not going to continue getting more efficient for the foreseeable future.
Fair point, but I do think that until we see more widespread adoption of renewables in the US and other heavy-polluters, energy use in general is a hot topic we are already beyond capacity for. There needs to be a real qualitative leap to green energy some point soon, and we can’t just rely on the PRC to electrify the world if the US is intent on delaying that shift as much as possible.
Oh I completely agree there.
If that’s what it seems to you, you might want to reread their comment. You’re way off base.
We know this is the very famous “starry night”, right? Is OP asking to troll, or maybe is there a joke or detail I’m missing, or OP just hasn’t yet seen the Van Gogh and marveled at what was encoded into the painting?
Yeah, it doesn’t have to do anything with my point, to be honest, I was just trying to make my post prettier to look at. My complaint is about the banner for this community.
Impressive footgun. I agree with your point though, it’s jarring.
If you wanted to make the post look good, why didn’t you commission an artist to make your image? Instead you stole the hard work of another artist without their permission, attribution or compensation.
You know that the painter behind a stary night is long dead and this work is public domain, right?
You know that asking a question isn’t an answer, right?
Is it AI? It’s been the banner since at least the Reddit API thing and I don’t see common AI artifacts. All the eyes and whiskers look fairly consistent for example, so do the paws. Especially with the relatively primitive AI models back then it would actually be impressive if they generated this image. I think it’s just a generic looking CGI image with the same off shelf 3D model posed in different ways.
Someone else has highlighted spots on it
These kind of posts always have the feeling of UFO or cryptid people dissecting a grainy 3 second clip of video and coming to the conclusion that Bigfooted Aliens exist.
They already have their conclusion before they even start.
These kind of posts always have the feeling
They already have their conclusion before they even start.
🤔
I’m not sure weather it is AI or not. It’s much easier to tell when the images are ment to look realistic.
I very much agree. Text generation has many valid use cases and I use it on a day to day basis, but image generation as much fewer valid use cases and much more malicious ones.
Text generation has many valid use cases and I use it on a day to day basis, but image generation as much fewer valid use cases and much more malicious ones.
Do you not extend the same sympathy to writers as you do visual artists?
Yes I do. Although I don’t use text generation for writing creative pieces I use it for coding and help in the Linux terminal. It’s not like I was going to pay anyone to do that for me.
Fair enough
Wait what? I’m really confused I thought this post was about a different image when I commented that.
I totally agree this is definetly ai and I can tell very easily.
AI bad. Upvotes please.
There likely isn’t a public domain photo depicting the same thing.
A less than 24 hour old account, who’s entire comment history is this post which is pushing rehashed anti-AI nonsense in the guise of a concerned community member.
Ladies and gentleman, this is an excellent example of a concern troll:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Concern_troll
A concern troll is someone who disingenuously visits sites of an opposing ideology to disrupt conversation by offering unwanted advice on how to solve problems which do not really exist.
Topics of “concern” usually involve tactical use of rhetoric, site rules, or with more philosophical consistency. The concern troll’s posts are almost exclusively intended to derail the normal functions of their targeted website.
With a little prep time and some VPNs the OP could have enough alts available to ensure that anyone arguing against them receives enough down votes to make the OP’s position seem reasonable.
If you examined the population of people who contributed down votes, you’d likely find a bunch of new or low comment history accounts who seem to exclusively vote in anti-AI threads.
*whose
🤔, fair
Well, but you are not of an opposing ideology, your sub is called “ask Lemmy”, not “ask AI obsessed people”, so your definition doesn’t even make sense. I honestly don’t understand why you people insist on painting me in such a negative light, just because I am new. That is called bullying by the way. I didn’t even intend this thread to blow up in such a way, I guess a lot of people seem to care.
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I honestly don’t understand why you people insist on painting me in such a negative light, just because I am new. That is called bullying by the way.
“ask AI obsessed people”
This you? You use bad faith arguments and ad hominem and you’ll get the same back.
I guess a lot of people seem to care.
Yes, who knew AI was such a hot button issue on social media? /s
It seems incredibly unlikely that you could be unaware of the the volatility of the topic while also parroting all of the anti-ai talking points. Your mask is slipping.
