Fuck AI

It makes it more accessible to the lazy and talentless.

The part I hate most is the "$800 phone" part. At least get a proper PC where you've got a fighting chance at being able to create stuff instead of a smartphone/tablet with an interface designed purely to consume, damn it!

Devils advocate here. There's open source services that offers AI gen for free, as long as you have an internet connection.

So a potato phone could be used and that's all that's required.

-# Doesn't make it more accessible than actual pen and paper but the gap is not that big either

What they mean by that is that they have no artistic ability and no interest in learning anything about how to actually make art, they just want a product to spec for free.

somewhere i should have a collection of "borrowed" ikea pencils

People get hilariously upset when you point out that sucking absolute arse at something is not a class issue nor a disability.

This post isn't accessible. Dont post pictures of text without transcribing it

I never spent any money on AI. Use locally run open source models.

It's not about accessibility moneywise - it's accessibility skillwise. Many people do not want to put any effort into learning a new skill, so asking AI to do it for them is just way more convenient and "accessible".

This is part of a large shift in society where "failure" is seen as something extremely negative. You either do something and are immediately good at it, or you should just stop altogether.

Aight, here's the thing.

All art is, at its base, about translating a person's inner concept into an external form. Sculpture, painting, poetry, dance, whatever.

To do any art form, there is a barrier to entry. If you want to be a dancer, some part of your body must be mobile, right? Even if it's just your eyeballs, dance by definition is about the human body moving.

But, what if you can't move your body? Is that, and should that be, a barrier? Why can't a person get an exoskeleton device that they can then program to either dance for them, or to respond to their thoughts so they can dance via the gear? Well, in that case the technology isn't here yet, but pretend it was.

Obviously, it wouldn't be the same as someone that's trained and dedicated to dancing, but is it lesser? It still fulfills the self expression via movement.

That can be applied to damn near every form of art. I can't actually think of any that it doesn't apply to at least in part.

There is a difference between a human sitting down (or lying or standing) to write a book and just telling a computer to generate a book. But it doesn't completely invalidate using a computer to generate fictional text. The key in that form is the degree of input and the effort involved. A writer asking an llm for a paragraph about a kid walking down the street when they're blocked isn't the same thing as telling it to write the entire book. There's degrees of use that are valid tools that don't remove the human aspect of the art form.

Take it to visual arts. A person can see things in their head that they may never develop the skill to see executed. They may not be physically capable of moving a brush on canvas, or pen on paper. A painter of incredible skill may be an utter dunce at sculpture, but still have vision and concepts worth being created.

The use of a generative model as a tool is not inherently bad. It's no worse than setting up software to 3d print a sculpture.

The problem comes in when the ai itself is made by, and operated for the benefit of corporate entities, and/or when attribution isn't built in. Attribution matters; a painting made by Monet is different from a painting that looks like Monet could have done it, but it was made by southsamurai. If I paint something that looks like a Monet, that's great! If I paint it and pretend it was made by Monet, that's bullshit.

A "painting" by a piece of software that's indelibly attributed as generated that way isn't a big deal. It comes back to the eye of the beholder in the same way that digital art is when compared to "analog" art via paints and pencils. It only really matters when someone is bullshitting about how they achieved the final results.

Is ai art less impressive? Hell yes, and it's pretty obvious that it isn't the same thing as someone honing their craft over years and decades. An image generated by a piece of software with only the input prompts being human generated is not the same as someone building the image with their hands via paint/touchpad/mouse/whatever.

This is still different from the matter of using ai instead of paying a human to do the work, which is more complicated than people think it is.

But, in terms of an individual having access to tools that allow them to get things inside their head out of their head where it can be seen, it has its place. It just needs to be very clear that that's the tool used.

And yeah, I know this is c/fuckai, and I'm arguing that ai has its place as a tool of self expression, and that's not going to be universally satisfying here. But I maintain that the problem with ai art isn't in the fact that it's ai art, it's the framework behind that that makes it a threat to actual humans.

In a world where artists can choose to create art for their own satisfaction without having to worry about eating and having a roof over their heads, ai art would be a lot less of a threat.

There's someone close to me whose near entire existence is basically pain. They still draw.

They hate the idea that their works got sucked by billionaires into giant plagiarism machines that are enriching them further. Pro AI people and tech bros think they should just suck it up and start using fucking AI horde or something, despite the fact that this trend makes them sick and the proposed solutions don't tackle real issues, but spread or ignore them.

One of my main gripes with GenAI is the tech industry's usual disregard for consent. GenAI users saying we should get rid of it altogether doesn't endear their ideal future to me. Saying the same thing as Sam Altman, but totally in a leftist way, just grosses me out.

Yeah, but how much did you cost?

The main thing here is that image generation trough an llm doesn’t even count as creating.

Asking is not creating. In these systems people ask an llm to use a genai tool, the people never actually touch the tool themselves. (They wont even allow it lol)

Thats why ComfyUi with stable diffusion and not chatgpt is the standard for serious art work using ai.

They are fully open source, offline and they don’t require any more energy then playing a video game.

Also workflows look like this, more accessible means a different set of skills can now get you similar results. But it is still skill.

you indeed dont need to know how to hold a pencil to build that.

(Also there are more and more models exclusively trained with artist consent)

So yes, ai does make art more accessible to a small group of technical people. Most people know no one in this group.

I think it seems to usually be more about disabled people, who ai bros tend to consider either too stupid or physically unable to make real art, which is bullshit. There are amputees painting with their feet, who knows how many artists who have prosthetic hands or chronic pain. And don't even get me started on mentally disabled people.

With the Ai Horde you just need a browser on a potato.

$30 a month so far, will be a lot more if their plan of forcing artists out works out.