AI Art Generation: Beneficial or Problematic?

[Lyndis]

I went looking to see if a thread on this topic already existed. Please direct me appropriately if so.

AI Art Generation: Beneficial or Problematic?

Everyone and their mama has heard about AI art generators and the various arguments and opinions folks have about them by now. Stable Diffusion, Dream, Craiyon, even applications like Lensa that use AI to augment existing images and countless others are arriving by the day. They've quickly become a mainstay in almost every artistic community I'm apart of or adjacent to. I've heard people argue both in favor and against their use, especially when it comes to collecting a profit off what people generate, and now I want to hear it from ya'll.

Which side of the spectrum do you fall? 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"? Do you think it's ethical for people to make money using these programs? Do you feel similar about AI text generators? Would you play a game, read a book, or consume other media that was made entirely from AI? Do you feel that artists should disclose whether or not AI was used in their works?

Why or why not?

 

[PolyesterH]

I say here what I do as a Software Engineer and someone that closely follows economic history and precedent.

The winners of AI generated art will be artists who use it as part of the creative process, and the losers will be artists who refuse to. AI isn't going to replace artists in the long term for the simple reason of control. As a tool, AI generation sacrifices a great deal of this control for the sake of speed. Any serious use of AI will need fine tuning and editing throughout the process. The person that won a contest using AI generation did so after hours of prompt engineering and editing.

Making a game, book, or other media entirely from AI is impossible and will be for some time. Chat GPT and AI Dungeon can write a few good paragraphs before veering wildly off course, forgetting about the plot, and putting the user in a time loop. Human hands need to vigorously grab a hold of the product at some point and get it back under control, if only to call upon the AI again. I use AI as part of the coding and system design process. Its a good assistant that makes me a lot more productive. I don't use it to write anything for roleplaying, but I do use it to give me ideas and help me organize thoughts when I make games.

I do not think AI generated images somehow aren't valid as being part of an artistic process. Much like a single brush stroke is not a painting make, a single image prompt is not an example of AI art. I do not think that they are obligated to state if they use AI. As for sampling artists, someof the objections have been rooted in really emotional basses rather than what would make good and consistent law. Members of the artistic community are understandably terrified of the current situation. The courts however seem to be taking care of this. Professional artists will adapt and freelance artists will as well. In a decade I have no doubt we will be talking about AI art the same way we talk about Photoshop for photography.

 

[Diana]

I think AI can be a really fun and useful tool, roleplayers as an example now have a "free" tool to generate character and setting art. People who never could've afforded commissions have something that is a little more fun than just grabbing whatever thing they can snatch off the net. AI will also NEVER be as good as a real human person who can adapt, edit, change, and create specific things with a unique style. This is the same with writing, and really all forms of creative work. AI can create a bunch of stuff, but it'll always lack the soul.

That said... the people who created and feed the AI databases often do it in unethical ways. >:[ They don't pay or credit the artists they're training their AI on, and that's shitty as hell. Then they end up charging users for the use of their AI, and never paying out to the artists that are part of that AI's data. On top of that, right now living artists are getting flooded out in the sea of AI generated images, so it's harder to find them! Lately I've been finding neat pictures on pinterest that I love the style of, try to track down the artist to see if they do commissions, only to discover it's an AI that I can't even use unless I pay for it.

And don't even get me started on the amount of garbage ebooks that are now getting shoved out there. Finding good stories to read was hard enough just with unedited trash getting uploaded willy-nilly, now it's unedited AI generated trash and it does NOT read well.


Basically AI itself isn't bad... just the creation/use/social etiquette of how to use them hasn't quite caught up yet. Assholes and lazy people are gonna abuse it until we eventually catch up to the technology. >:/ Personally, I don't have a problem with people using AI stuff here on Iwaku as long as they do so ethically and take some extra time to support our living artists, even if it's just helping advertise them.

 

[Lyndis]

I think AI can be a really fun and useful tool, roleplayers as an example now have a "free" tool to generate character and setting art. People who never could've afforded commissions have something that is a little more fun than just grabbing whatever thing they can snatch off the net.

Appreciate you adding to the discussion, and this line caught my interest in particular.

I know this has been a facet of RP communities and other creative areas of the internet since... well, the internet. But I can't help but wonder if this particular attitude towards images hosted by artists and communities has something to do with our present state of being. Do you think there's an ethical dilemma to be found with people grabbing whatever thing they can snatch off the net?

Personally, I've been drawing and doing RP long enough that I've been witness to someone taking character art that I've drawn personally, editing it, and using it as a faceclaim for their own characters on a RP site. It even happened to be a commission I had done for someone else's Original Character. Now there it was, altered and renamed, used for a third party's purposes despite either my nor my client's consent.

This is a common thing in our circles and has been since the first anime girls hit the internet. Why is one an acceptable use and the other, when compiled into a generative algorithm, making so many of those same people suddenly feel different?

 

[Diana]

For me personally, the difference has always been about personal use/funsies vs profiteering. I've never had my drawn art snatches, but I have had people snatching up my graphics, website codings, even whole roleplays. I'd get irritated sometimes depending on the hows/where, but usually when it's just peeps trying to have fun spaces I'll poke at them to link me as credit and then forget it.

But if they're selling my stuff, taking credit for my work and trying to get paid for it, then I chase them down cause it kinda crosses the line of fair use.

That is, of course, purely my own experience and opinion!

 

[Bab]

personally i hate AI, and also prefer people to not use my art without permission. especially for RP, because my portfolio is largely for me to RP with. i have had to opt out my own work from databases commonly used by AI as well, when quite honestly i'd rather they had asked in the first place. not for me to have to dig and dig to make sure i'm not there.

that's the keyword. without permission. i am one of those people that i would be perfectly fine if people actually asked to borrow refs, with credit. i might even have opted into databases for generative AI, if they hadn't already soured me on not asking before scraping. this isn't an uncommon stance among artists. we're just asking for our work to be respected.

 

[RiverNotch]

The focus on originality or authenticity is misleading, I believe. AI art isn't in and of itself negative, but the whole "move fast and break things" ethos of Silicon Valley has already led to such dire consequences as the worldwide breakdown of democracy, and it's to this ethos that AI is intimately bound. Unless the culture and economics of the tech industry -- really, of Western industry as a whole -- changes, I see AI going in one of two directions: it could rapidly disappear from the zeitgeist à la blockchain, especially with the hype for it at present already mirroring that portion of the industry, or it could broaden the scope of the algorithm driven hellscapes that are Facebook and X to have a more consistently negative effect on people that simply can't use AI for art, such as artists in much of the Global South.​