Forums » Smalltalk » AI Art Generation: Beneficial or Problematic?

Well, you're definitely helping the artists out with that approach so no complaints there.

Having said that, I knew someone who drew with poor fine motor skills. If you ever feel inclined to try again, you can always come to me for some advice. I want as many disabled people to find their creative spark as possible, but I also understand (because of my own setbacks) that it can be a real struggle when you have to fight your body.

If it helps at all, I can't cut cheese straight either. I have terrible depth perception.

It is problematic only on how much you want to make it complicated, honestly.

AI is a tool, like many others outside, and while it may look low effort (it is not, but the average person does not comprehend the gears inside the box until they decide to start messing with it), it is still capable of creating decent outputs that can be useful to many. Ofc, if you want more advanced stuff, you need to use many more tools, including more manual ones like Photoshop. That is the issue I'm seeing right now in the community: many people just do the text2img process, pick one of the many pictures the system generated and call it a day. It's kinda... limiting yourself and ofc, contributing to the flood\spam of AI images that give the idea they are, indeed, bad and low effort.

Regarding the ethical aspects of it, I won't express myself too much: the current system makes it fall under "fair use laws" (since it's transformative, not replicating, and the source material was used for training logical concepts, not to store billions of image in 4gb which is, currently, impossible), the same laws that allows to this very day for any artists to pick something copyrighted and add their own touch to create something new without paying a cent (a good example is this image), so I abide to this. Anyone can call it theft, but law books are clear: it is not, atm, so... I won't sleep less at night.



Besides, as said, fair use worked well for artists before so... I find it wrong to take it down just because it's affecting them now (also because, with my job as a researcher, it would literally butcher so many projects that are working with this same concept and are already struggling because they are underfunded... you know, the same projects that will, in the future, help mankind in a myriad of ways. Not talking only about AI: medicine, psychology, neuroscience, robotics, social sciences, all of these and more rely on using online data without paying a dime for their use).

I do believe all AI art should be labeled as such (even considering the current wave of people who think they are entitled to harass us generators because of this, which is disgusting behavior. Not all of the Anti-AIs are like this, mind me... but I found so many feeling entitled to insult me and my family just because "I clicked a button", and many more just staying silent or, worse, incentivizing their behavior), and it should be posted with this idea in mind, but aside from that, I'm not against it (hell I'm a user of it alongside text generations for personal RP, and as you probably remember I made you a pic of how I saw one of your characters; took me a while to refine it because I was such a noob at that time, but I'm still pleased I spent all that time and swear words to give you something).

I do believe regulations MUST be put in place because a bad usage of it can become a real threat to our current society (which could be good, bad, or something in between... but I don't like going on chances), but banning it altogether? No, that's excessive and even more dangerous (think what will happen if it gets relegated only to the Dark Web, where governments have, literally, 0 jurisdiction in there). I also believe the very tools should be free for all to use, giving everyone a taste of what their creativity can achieve and, hopefully, incentivize them to learn more about the tools and other forms of art that can be of support\being supported by AI (I learned how to do sketches to improve my AI generation on SD).

So, Kat, if you ever want to learn something, I can send you in the right direction (that goes for everyone: I learned a lot from many generous people when I was but a noob on this, and now it's only fair I give back to the community by teaching others). And I don't believe, no matter how many sticks and stones are thrown at us, that someone should feel awful because they got a bad hand in the genetic\life card game. While it is true that there are ways for you to learn art (or anything, really) despite your limitations, it is also true that it's you that should decide which path is right for you.
Want to learn how to paint with a brush and paint like a do (for my miniatures)? 100% fine. Hell, I can even teach out about this by applying BDSM (Basecoat, Drybrush, Shading & More... what, what you guys were thinking?).
Want to learn how to generate images, and then (hopefully) refine them with more tools, not all of them AI? 100% fine
Want to learn both? 100% fine
Want to learn none, and ask for others to do with AI\non-AI methods? 100% fine

To answer to the topic's questions:

Which side of the spectrum do you fall? I already explained it in the first wall of text.

Is AI a legitimate tool for people to use in artistic "creation", or do you feel more strongly about how it borrows from the artists these various engines "sample"? Again, check over.

Do you think it's ethical for people to make money using these programs? Depends. Is the creator generating income by donations, or "at will" payments? 100% okay with this. Is the creator generating income by requesting specific sums for their work? Thorn, but I'm over the "not okay", because the tools they are using a product of free open source programs, meaning they got all of them for free and making money over it. I would be okay if they used it and donate part of those funds to the very open source projects I mentioned before (like the big tech companies do for the Blender foundation).

Do you feel similar about AI text generators? I hold the same idea of image generation over text, also because the entire "low effort" idea crumbles even more because, to get good results, you have to write back at the AI to continue the story (and yes, speaking to it requires learning how the AI comprehends concepts.)

Would you play a game, read a book, or consume other media that was made entirely from AI? Yes, but I'd still like to see a human supervisor behind certain things.

Do you feel that artists should disclose whether or not AI was used in their works? Even at the current cost of being harassed, yes. While I don't mind using AI, having a human behind is an aspect that can make, sometimes, their work more appealing than an AI product. Think of it like the furniture from IKEA (which is mass-produced): most people will buy them, but artisans who carve wood with their own hands are still appreciated for their craft, right? Same concept. Sometimes it's not the output that holds value to me, but the process behind it.

I think it's worth pointing out that legality is not the same as morality. Especially with the laws not yet keeping up with AI.

Anybody who thinks it's not problematic is failing to see the larger picture.

1. It's often stolen art. Current AI generators use other people's pictures as a template to 'create' a 'new' image. It is without these artists' consent 99.99% of the time.

2. Corporations are already using AI art to soullessly replace actual artists to cut costs.

As Kim pointed out, legality =/= ethical. Laws take quite a bit to catch up to the situations involved, and it's only going to take someone plagiarizing Disney and Disney not liking it to change all that.

Regardless of how much 'effort' AI-generated art takes, it is going to be the death of the medium if we do not treat it with care.

If we're talking Legality and Laws -

The US Copyright Office did rule in early 2023 that all AI generated images were /not/ able to be copyright, ruling that the works were more machine than manmade so were not applicable for protections in that way.

Heard the same quote when Digital Tools like Photoshop, Krita and Gimp were introduced, and yet artists still are alive to this very day. The same quote was used, once again, when photography was shunned as "not real art".
AI will indeed change the medium of art in a deep way, but will it completely erode the concept of art? I'm not convinced it will, artistry will find another way to get into the market, IMO.
I mean, if this was not the death of the medium...



(Just to be clear: I refuse to call this "Low effort", because this piece was made for a specific purpose... and it did exactly what the artist envisioned. It is art, even for me that I'm not a big fan of the modern one).

In terms of morality, as said, it's not a white-and-black situation: the artists kept using copyrighted material for more than a decade to do their work, getting money from it (from the poorest painter sketching a Joker on a canvas with a pencil on the streets for a donation, or some famous digital artist making an entire comic of a Yaoi between the Joker and Batman for a commission... or a "certain" animation video with a YouTuber and the protagonist of Hazbin Hotel...) and not bats an eye (except Disney or Nintendo, those are... well, different kind of breeds). Now, this same law is applied to them, and suddenly, it becomes amoral? No, nothing has changed for my part, for others maybe, but again... there is no white & black situation; IMO it's more of a grey area where everyone has different opinions... and as long as we keep expressing them in a civil manner, I'm fine with this. Maybe big techs can be considered liable for some sort of compensation, which I find more... acceptable, but to strip this new tool for everyone doing this kind of thing for fun or for a modest sum given by donations? No, I stand about my position.
Besides, everyone posting something online is automatically under the law of fair use, both for their benefit and their "disadvantage." no one can be blamed if the fine print was not read... or was read, but it wasn't taken into account because it didn't affect them. It all depends on the four factors and, for the moment, AI follows all of them fairly. If the laws will change (probably, and I hope quickly enough with the utmost care in the regulation's changes), then the position of being "outside of fair use" will be more clear.

Regarding not having copyright over AI-produced material: I am partially okay with it, in the sense that if the majority of the work was done by the machine, then yes, It should not be copyrighted at all (if I use the fair use law to my advantage for the most significant part, then the fair use law should make my work usable by anyone by the same principle). If it is, instead, that the AI made a small part of the work (like that Author that used ChatGPT to write 5% of her book), then the copyright laws should still be applied.

And as said: yes, AI should be regulated in some ways, because they have potential to havoc disaster far, FAR worse than simply erasing a medium (they can, potentially, erase a good chunk of us... hopefully not like in the past...).


I want the strongest laws to be created with a deep discussions between various parts. If the fair law use was changed in the way so many artists' communities wanted (because you can't limit only the datasets used by AI if you change that law, but ALL datasets), then you would butcher so many scientifical projects that need the fair use laws to create datasets for their research... and honestly? Art, compared to medicine, robotics, economy, social science, neurology, architecture, bioengineering, chemistry, environmental research and many more, is a field that I'm more than happy to sacrifice to preserve all the others. Fortunately, this can be avoided... by simply letting various people, of various backgrounds and fields, decide how AI should be regulated... and I want those people to know exactly how the technology behind works, not someone who still believes that the AI simply creates "Collages" of images (and, worse, uses this as defense for their cases in a court of laws, perhaps banking on the ignorance of the judges; that is called "lying", and is punished by law. Do you want to change the regulation over something? You have all my support, but the moment you use incorrect data and pass it as "facts", there goes my support).

This isn’t photoshop. This isn’t a human being attempting to copy another human being’s character/style. In those instances, it is someone using their talent and skill to recreate the art in their own way. Even if someone were to copy try to copy it exactly, their own art styles would still be inflected on the piece.

AI generation is not that. It is someone taking someone else’s art and putting it into an algorithm. This will *take* jobs away from other human beings, and you bet that corporations will take every greedy approach they can to do it.

When I say this will be the death of the medium if we’re not careful, THATS what I mean.

If you want to use AI generation in your free time or because you don’t to pay an artist to create your characters, far be it from me to tell you not to. However, the art isn’t yours because you didn’t create it. As someone pointed out above, even the law agrees. Frankly, that’s how it should be.

Kamizombie can correct me if I'm wrong, but when they say AI might be 'the death of the medium' I don't think they're saying the death of Art as a whole like how Lord_Cegorach is implying. What I think Kami is saying is that it might be the death of Digital Art as a medium specifically.

Which, while I don't agree with that entirely, I can understand the sentiment. Already I've seen more than one artist who practices in similar styles to the ones scrapped for AI engines being accused of using AI to create their pieces. Honestly, even my mediocre and visibly sketchy style has been assumed to be the result of "Hitting a few buttons" in some computer program before AI generation was even a proper concept. While it may not be the death of the medium, I do see the devaluation of it in real time.

Sort of in the same way Lord_Cegorach mentioned photography. How many people have you heard dismiss photography as an artform because they simply see it as a point-and-click(shoot?) process? There's very little appreciation for artistic skill as something of value and worth, more specifically as something worthy of being paid for, and I think AI generated art has only served to compound that in an incredibly short amount of time among both corporations and everyday people.

It's a tool, and like many tools it can be used both for good and bad.
I think people who get paid for A.I art is already saturated, as more people understand they can do it themselves I don't think people will make much money from A.I art. You can develop an eye for detecting A.I art.
It still doesn't compare with having an actually intelligent artistic human being to commission.
I disagree that AI prompted art doesn't contain any artistic quality, not inherently anyway, when I prompt AI art I do my best to describe the vision I have of the subject and impose my own preferences (style) on the images.
I use AI art because my mind is chaos and if I paid an artist for every image I like to have, either to inspire my writing or use as a character, I'd be broke, and I go through characters pretty quick sometimes.
For me to pay an artist I have to know the character is special.

Mm. I believe people have a right to practice and develop their art skills.

I do not believe that anyone has any inherent right to someone else's art or artistic skill.

I believe that creating well-made, specific AI-generated art can be a complex process, even for those who did not create the generator they're using. I also recognize that pulling off a heist successfully involves a good amount of skill and effort, and that that does not make it an acceptable thing to do. (Yes, the example is extreme and involves far more malicious intent than I think the vast majority of of folks using AI art intend.)

I believe AI art can be a very helpful tool to assist with inspiration, mockups, and references; I also believe that a human who will actually review the outcomes and seek ways to further develop and improve them, at minimum, is extremely important, and that it's inappropriate to treat AI art as a finished piece.

Even "fair use" becomes flimsy, as there have been examples of AI generators outputting pieces that are sometimes close enough to one of the works it was "trained" on that it can be called into question if it is "different enough" - and there's a limit to how well the folks inputting prompts may even be aware of that at times, so part of the debate too is also who can be held accountable in such cases: the AI, the AI's creator, or the prompt inputter? As law stands, the AI generator itself is not recognized as an entity that can be held responsible; holding the AI's creator responsible would be a huge can of worms that would also backtrack on a lot of prior content rulings and laws; and while there's plenty precedent for people being charged with crimes they didn't even know they committed, that doesn't seem fair or appropriate, either, especially since even reverse image searches don't always turn up helpful or sometimes any results. Something that might at least help with that is if there was any reasonable way for sources used in a given generated image to be listed out for reference, but part of the aim of AI art is to use basically as many references as possible in the effort to create a "unique" image - so that list would be absolutely massive, and would inevitably end up containing previously-generated images as well that compound the issue in strange ways.

It's also hard to say how this all will affect prior issues with art theft, but the issues will certainly be tangled up.

And I'll go ahead and note that there are aspects of personal beliefs I hold that tangle the whole thing up even more. In fact, some of it can be taken as completely counter to some of the things I've said. At the end of the day, there is no simple, easy answer. The best we can do is try to find whatever the best-balanced answer seems to be, and no one person is going to be able to determine exactly what that is. And due to the complex nature of things, law is incapable of fully handling the issue (as, frankly, is generally the case with most things, maybe all things).

Apologies, I meant to say just a quick little thing, but ended up rambling a bunch.

I like to think I have a pretty nuanced take when it comes to AI art as a digital artist whose primary income was freelance commissions for many years.

That said, my primary opposition to AI art is not even necessarily the fact that it is taking money out of artists' hands (this is not a debatable reality, animation studios are already utilizing AI art for backgrounds, etc.). It is objectively a very cool tool that could open up a lot of creative doors, even to working artists. New tools are not inherently bad because they are emerging technology. As has been mentioned above, tools in the past have been heralded as the death knell of some flavor of art.

The aspect of generative AI that inherently upsets me is that it boils down to theft of IP without regard for copyright of the original works. Artists (hi, me included) have not had the chance to opt-out. I should not be able to enter some prompt words and replicate (insert artist here)'s style, whether for personal or commercial use. It's just not fair to someone who worked hard to get to that skill level, and it's not the same as pouring time into doing studies to improve myself and learn from them. To me, personally, it feels pretty yucky, and I cannot bring myself to engage with this tech in good conscience.

There is currently no ethically sourced learning model for generative AI. Everything on the market either contains stolen IP or has been otherwise tainted by a pool of AI art itself (looking at you, Adobe Stock and your new learning model).

If an ethically sourced learning model ever emerges, I will be very cool with generative AI and might even consider using it purely for concept inspo purposes. Unfortunately, like with so many cool new tools, Capitalism has poisoned the well for this one for many, many people. I'd like to hope that can change someday, but I'm not super optimistic based on precedent.

I wonder how much luck I'd have trying to claim artistic merit on the character portrait I made in Picrew the other day...

Look, guys, it totally took effort! I spent an hour deciding between two different eye shapes!

Dollmakers are a separate thing, and despite rampant resource theft between some of them, the art is still under the copyright of the artist who created the individual pieces and whatever rules and restrictions that artist places upon them.

Would just like to chime in and promote two free projects by the University of Chicago that aim to assist artists against AI theft:

Glaze
This tool adds a 'cloak' to an image that essentially distorts it when an AI tries to replicate it. It's nearly imperceptible to the human eye. This is an artist's current best defense against AI theft.

Nightshade
If Glaze is a defense, Nightshade is more of an offense. When you use Nightshade on an image, it changes the information on the image so that AI that aims to steal this art will have its data 'poisoned'. The stolen art will not be able to be duplicated by the AI. Again, this overlay is basically invisible to the human eye.

You can use Glaze and Nightshade together (and the university is working on a program that combines the two); however, if this is difficult for you to do due to computer issues etc, it is recommended that you prioritise Glaze.

In case it wasn't clear, I am extremely against AI 'art'. Amongst many arguments already made that I agree with, I also believe that homogenising art is dangerous, because it will lead to less human-made artworks being produced.

In terms of legality, we may have a monkey named Naruto to thank for an accepted argument against copywriting AI artworks:
https://5mag.net/news/computer-ai-copyright-dispute/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute

Keep fighting the good fight.

Poe called, he wants his Law back.

I know someone who's friends with a couple artists that poisoned the well with Nightshade and apparently Midjourney is really salty about it.

I recognized the sarcasm (albeit not what the intent behind it was besides to exist). Just wanted to point out that you were comparing apples to oranges.

AI 'art' is complete and utter garbage, and no matter the excuse you use, you're never going to be morally in the right. Actual people who've spent years and years honing their crafts can now have their stuff scraped off the internet to be tossed into this giant robot to churn out soulless, garbage pieces, wow, yay!

i have friends that are professional illustrators that are worried their art is going to be used to train models, and then be fired. or spend the rest of the career painting over AI pictures.

i am specifically calling them images, generations, or pictures. it is not art. it never will be about art.

but what about some common counters?

'i have a disability/something is preventing me from drawing': harsh, maybe, but find a way around it. there's thousands of disabled artists who have found ways that work for them. there's literally a guy who's PARALYZED from the neck down and makes beautiful art. is he resorting to AI images? NO, because he was willing to put in the work and improve.

'well, i keep trying and my art still isn't very good': do you think we just waltzed out of the womb making pieces like picasso? like be fr- it takes time, and however much time you put will reflect in your art. if you put in 10 minutes a day, your improvement will be slower, but youll be improving. i mean, literally, pewdiepie has videos about him practicing for what? 30 minutes a day? he's on day 100 and he's improved immensely. if you cant put in the work for half an hour every day, i dont think you want to be an artist- or improve

'artists have it soooo easy, they just draw whatever and make big money, im taking advantage of that': okay well, no. wrong. it's a competitive field all the same- and with the mass amounts of layoffs in the game industry, thats not really easy for all the artists and workers without a job, now is it?

you are not, and i mean this wholeheartedly, you are NOT a good person to stand on the side of image generation that knowingly scrapes from real artists. midjourney just got in a lot of flack because their engineers were caught scraping off HUNDREDS of famous artists- and dead ones too. AI should be used to improve our lives, like find the cure for cancer or some other scientific breakthrough. but instead, it's being used to scam people, make a bunch of garbage strawman arguments, and oh! of course, because literally any woman with a conscious saw this coming a mile away, now it's being used to make NSFW images of REAL PEOPLE.

theres no quality in image generation. any excuse you have, i will counter it. and it just boils down to either 'im lazy' or 'i want to make a quick buck'. pay your artists. art is a luxury. it is not a human right, you do not need to use some garbage robot to make your six fingered, uneven eyed anime girl. pick up a pencil and learn yourself if you want specific art, or pay an artist, plain as that.

and to the lazy people who do indeed, just type some words in and click a button- yes. you are doing exactly that. pick up an actual skill, typing words into a generator and refining your silly little waifu picture is not being an artist, you're just another scraper on the internet who lacks the ability to put your head down and work. there's no 'getting paid' for image generation- you're getting paid for being a scammer, because that's what you are.

signed

an actual artist lmao.

edit: using stonetoss as an example is already bad, he's not a good person (proven time and time again), but the comic is counter productive because the banana taped to a wall is still being talked about what? 15 years later? it had an impact cause it makes you think, which in turn, makes it art. same energy as ppl who destroyed the paintings that were just three panels of red. 'its not art' it is! you're just not seeing it the correct way or the intended way

Hello friends!

I want to pop in and add my two cents as well as advise that we de-escalate some of the language a little bit. I understand 100% why emotions are high on this topic, but we have a great opportunity for education here and I don't want us to have to lock the thread.

As the primary person responsible for developing a generative AI use policy at the company I work for, I've done a metric heckton of research about this. I've formed strong personal opinions, and so the following is a summary of the key issues which I hope everyone will find instructive. The following opinions are my own and differ somewhat from the policy I developed, but the broad strokes of the policy were "don't use generative AI to create images" lol.

Copyright & Fair Use
In general, I would advise that you stop speculating about copyright and fair use. These issues are still being worked out in the courts, and the way it goes in the U.S. will not necessarily be the way it goes in the rest of the world. We can use the spirit of the laws to inform our ethical discussion, but copyright has a long history of not actually benefitting individuals and favoring large companies instead.

Copyright In The U.S.
If you use generative AI to make art, you can't currently copyright it. In fact you may not own any rights to it at all. The statements I just made are reductive, but easy to understand.

The U.S. copyright office has refused to give copyright status to generative AI outputs. That means that no matter how much work you put into the input, the output may not be copyrightable at all. This doesn't have to do with work or skill but with authorship. A human didn't author it, and it is the current position of the U.S. copyright office that copyright is intended for human works. This is still up in the air, and may need to be worked out in court by people appealing the copyright office's decision.

That's critical to note; the copyright office does not have final say. Their decisions can be appealed and the courts may take a different stance.

Interestingly, the office was willing to grant a copyright to the arrangement of AI images in a graphic novel, but not to the images themselves. This indicates that even human modification after the fact may not be enough to grant copyright.

This means you do not own anything a generative AI model spits out until you apply for and obtain a copyright. This is much different to how copyright normally works, where it's assumed. If you value owning art, then generative AI isn't the way to go.

Fair Use In the U.S.
Again, this is still being litigated, so you should avoid speculating about it.

What we know is:

• Generative AI models must make copies of works in order to train on them.
• This copying is unauthorized, making it potentially infringement and a fair use issue.
• Google already won a case where it was sued for copying books for Google Books without authorization so the act of copying alone is not a strong infringement argument, legally.
• However, in my opinion, the difference is in the use case. A big part of fair use is potential harm to a copyright holder's ability to do business, and this is already being borne out. But we will have to wait for the rulings before we can say generative AI is, legally, not fair use.
• Ethically, it's a different story, and I'm about to get into that.

Ethics Of Generative AI (Lack Thereof)
Original Sin
Setting the law aside, generative AI image creators were created in a way that is fundamentally against the spirit of copyright and fair use. The creators of these models knew what they were attempting to create; a tool capable of replacing art and artists in the market. In service of this goal, they copied work without authorization. No matter what the courts say, this is a black and white ethical wrong otherwise known as theft. The law is full of things that are ethically wrong; if it wasn't, we wouldn't need to change it so much.

This makes everything generative AI models are used for tainted. AI itself can be an exceptional power for good but it can also cause great irreparable harm. In this specific case of generative AI image models (and text ones too), it's in the latter category.

The "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things" Effect
There are ethical use cases for this technology in theory. A model trained on open source work or work appropriately licensed would have no inherent ethical issues. And we have already seen some interesting use cases where the output isn't directly harmful; Adobe and Shutterstock both released tools that are trained on content they own. In Shutterstock's case, the company financially compensates artists whose work the model was trained on. These are examples of outputs that aren't directly problematic. HOWEVER they don't overcome the open copyright questions and the underlying models these tools rely on were still trained on unauthorized work. So even these good outputs are tainted by the original sin of the models.

Even then, we encounter the issue that businesses and executives are always looking to cut corners and enrich themselves. For every ethical use, there's a boatload of very unethical ones that are causing too much harm to justify the limited scope of ethical applications. Even ethical models would result in harm to art and artists because "we can't have nice things" -- our economic system incentivizes businesses to exploit people through technology. This sucks.

Personal Ethics
The ethics as applied to an individual are different to those applied on a larger scale and can have some nuance.

If you use generative AI, are you a bad person? Well, no.
Are you an artist? Also no.

But you should be aware of the potential harm of the technology you're choosing to use. We haven't even gotten into the disastrous environmental impacts. If we had any kind of decent environmental legislation in the U.S., then this technology would be functionally impossible to create because it's too resource intensive. That's a whole other discussion.

When you're evaluating your personal use cases, it's important to consider whether you're using generative AI for a purpose which you have the means to pay someone to do for you.

Is using it to make images for a D&D character that you play offline with your friends ethically compromising you personally? Well, I don't know that most people would pay an artist for every TTRPG character they make, and so I liken it to the piracy argument. Not every use case is necessarily a stolen sale. But if you CAN pay an artist to do this for you, you SHOULD, because it's the right thing to do and because you'll get a better outcome.

Other things that these models can do can actually benefit artists quite a lot. Like clean up or scale up images, assist with creating small parts of compositions, etc. But this doesn't overcome the original sin argument in my opinion.

Here are things that you absolutely should not do:

• Claim that you created art if you used generative AI. You didn't.
• Claim that you own images created by generative AI. You don't.
• Get mad at artists for having strong reactions to an existential threat to them.
• Create images with generative AI if you intend to publish them or post them publicly online -- the question of legal liability has not been resolved yet and it very well could apply to you one day.
  
  I hope this helps
  
  Generative AI is fascinating technology with a lot of potential. It's a shame that it began this way, and I'm personally rooting for the courts to hit the companies behind these initial models hard and force them to at least include artists in their profits. Imo development needs to be chilled and slowed significantly so we can address how to handle this tech safely and ethically on a societal level.

I can respect that: thanks for the very well-written and argumented post. I appreciate the time you've spent on it... and all without starting to hurl free insults, too.

I'm glad to know this.

I do want to clarify why you may be sensing some hostility.

I noticed a few posts above that you were invoking facts and saying you won't consider arguments not based on them.

But in the same post argued factually incorrect information about copyright and fair use.

This inconsistency can be extremely frustrating and difficult for people to respond to in good faith.

So I want to reiterate that I suggest refraining from attempting to interpret copyright and fair use, and also framing your arguments with the facts that these are still open legal questions. Don't demand facts from the other side if you're not sure of your own.