Raw LLM Responses

super long read It's indeed a weird area, but I'm also in the middle because like a lot of people using Ai, we are not artists so don't know how it feels for their work to be taken without consent and for me personally, I feel like artists are trying to gate keep who can be called an artist and a lot of them come off as stuck up/better than you. Not saying it's good or bad since I see it more akin to piracy. Highly illegal, but still very much a thing and has been since the internet started. I honestly don't see any type of answer because I can see the negatives and benefits of both sides. Artists don't want their work to be taken without consent, but no artist would willingly consent and on the other side, Ai does some amazing stuff and it's advancing at a rapid rate, but if they introduced an opt in feature then that would heavily slow down the rate at which it is progressing and you'd get noticeably worse results with a lower sample size. (also internet people aren't just going to kindly stop what they are doing) I also dunno how they would compensate people either because that's just a small amount of money each artist would get because there are so many in the hat (so to speak) We are talking pretty much every artist, photographer, etc... people would literally get pennies as compensation because the amount of people would be too great. The bad thing is, since a lot of the stuff is already out in the wild, it's true, there is no putting it back in the bag now. People share models (.ckpt) which are trained from artists work and they are about 4~GB in size, portable and if you have a strong enough GPU, you can train yourself very easily. You can run SD on your PC locally and I just see no world where everyone is going to stop doing that because artists are getting mad. One side wants Ai to advance fast and sees artists as stuck up and the images are on the internet so = free and on the other side, you have artists that don't want their art used by the Ai/an opt in option which would drastically limit the AI's potential. I've been reading reddit/4chan and I see the arguments on both sides. Artists mock Ai for doing hands/faces badly or being deformed which then makes the Ai "artist" troll the "real" artist more. It's also a very weird area because you have fake Ai "artists" and "real" artists which further divides the group and causes even more issues since "real" artists don't recognize someone using ai to create "art" as it was "stolen" and ai "artists" find the "real" artists to be snobby like they are VIP and gatekeeping who can be called an artist and what art is. I'm in the middle and probably leaning more towards Ai if I'm 100% honest with you, but I still feel like if I worked years on becoming an artist, then my work got scraped into the ai machine without my consent and I saw people creating exactly the same art as me (my style and "human touch"), I'd feel pretty shitty and probably wouldn't want to be making art anymore so I can see where a lot of artists are coming from. It still always loops back to the whole piracy thing for me though because take you for example, you have a patreon/gumroad, you know for a fact people pirate your stuff there or just sign up, download everything, end membership and I'm sure for many years you, like many artists have tried to counter that, but almost all are unsuccessful because that's just the internet. It's not private and doesn't respect or abide by your rules or anyone's. It's because people perceive themselves as anonymous on the internet so whilst someone will call you a snobby artist on the internet, irl, they are probably completely different. A site called Kemono (dot) party exists for a reason which is one of many so pirates can literally go and link all of their accounts to the site and it automatically scrapes the users that person follows for content. (even you patreon is on there) so someone in your patreon is leaking your content and it's practically impossible to do anything about it. I hope ai "artists" and "real" artists can find common ground, but me personally, I don't see anything "good" happening and can see things getting worse for "real" artists. You know for a fact the big-wig companies are 100% foaming at the mouth looking at this ai stuff and imagine how much money they can throw at a dedicated training model instead of hiring a "real" artist. Epic (owners of artstation) will never ban ai art from the site because they can already see the amount of money it will make them if they include ai in UE5 so years in the future you could ask it to make you something and it'll just do it for you. That's a gold-mine and they will never get rid of it. Even Disney are looking at ai because there are Disney style models out which makes you wonder why they haven't come out about it or cracked down hard on it since they are a large enough company and could do something about. They can probably see the possibilities of it and the future it brings. Why have an artist make Disney sketches/reference pages when they could literally train a dedicated in-house model to do it for them probably cutting down the work by months. This imo is the digital equivalent of when machines took over lots of peoples jobs. I don't think "real" artists will ever be replaced because as you said, human touch and all that, I still think a lot of people will go to ai first before commissioning an artist just to see if they could get what they wanted for free. It will also become a problem when you have ai users that start opening their own commissions and undercut "real" artists by a lot. I can see a lot of problems in the future, but also a lot of advancements. Again, at the cost of "real" artists.