Raw LLM Responses

Long take incoming: Starting out, I want to say I'm a big fan. I love your style and your instructional videos in particular have been invaluable help as I have been trying to develop my own art style. Seeing your takes on the matter, I felt the need to share my perspective. I believe the situation around AI art is complicated and incredibly frustrating. As a tech enthusiast, and someone who dabbles in art, I have really enjoyed the rise of generative AI and image generation. The power and functionality of this technology is absolutely mind boggling. I have moderate Aphantasia and ADHD, and the ability to flesh-out huge ideas incredibly quickly has been a boon to both my hobbies and my work, allowing me to preserve and develop projects, creative or otherwise, that would normally "fall out the back of my head" and be forgotten. That being said. The way a very vocal portion of the AI community are treating it, and the way the corpos are developing it, is disappointing, uninspired, damaging (to both artists and consumer art culture as a whole), and just depressing. People calling themselves 'artists' and trying to sell purely generated images (or use them in consumer products) is ridiculous, insulting, and dangerous, both to art and artists (as mentioned), but also the technology (surprisingly enough). I see this as someone using the gradient or fractal tools in an art software and then slapping a title and price tag on it. I think AI generation has a huge potential as a tool for art, as well as lowering the barrier for entry, not in the way you analyzed in your video, but as a tool to ease the difficulty of parts of the process that someone may struggle with/ be held up by, and help them break into making art of their own. Something like an intelligent texture brush, a landscape bucket, or an intelligent shading filter will help people who struggle or are intimidated get their ideas "on paper" as it were. And human art and skill will always have something that AI lacks, so there will always be a reason to tackle and learn these skills once you're more comfortable with your style. Or not, for that matter. If someone just doesn't have interest in drawing backgrounds but still would like one for their character, this could easily be a way to put more of their vision on the page (I'm aware that there are other solutions to this, but AI shouldn't be a curse or stance, it should be a tool for everyone). As I see it, the main issue here is in how AI enthusiasts and artists are communicating about their issues, and the companies behind the tech's complete and total disregard of artists' complaints. I don't think that it's controversial to say artists deserve credit for their work, but I also don't believe it's accurate to say that AI art is theft. HOWEVER, the legality of it and how datasets use art are something that needs to be talked about and decided upon, and no one with any power in this space wants to do that. If an artist doesn't want their work included in a dataset, that is their right as a creator, and frankly poisoning your images is a fantastic and valid way to go about that. in a perfect world, this would be unnecessary, and OpenAI or others would take steps to respect peoples wishes, but alas, that's not the world we live in. When I see artists railing against AI, I find it disheartening, because too often the issues they raise (while valid) are not the ones I believe matter. IMO people shouldn't sell generated images as their own art. Use them for your own processes or internal projects - or give them away - sure - but don't sell them. But harassing people that use AI in their workflow, calling all AI or AI assisted art trash/garbage/crap, or demonizing people who enjoy the tech, just lets the corpos get away with not addressing or regulating the real problem - The unapproved usage of someones work - for that much longer. Both sides of this argument should be bringing these huge companies to task and demanding they create this technology with the art landscape in mind, in an ethical and sustainable way, because as we're going now, this will all come to a head, and both sides will suffer. PS: No AI was utilized in the creation of this rant (not for research, editing, writing, or otherwise) out of respect for the argument at hand. Please enjoy my terrible grammar ;P