I’ve been watching this thread for a while, and I think I’m now ready to start sharing my thoughts. Generally people have compared AI to an additional tool people can use to make art, and IMO that’s really not the case. Generating art with AI is no different to telling a human artist what you want for a commission. The artist still owns the rights to the final product (unless you negotiated this with them beforehand for any sort of commercial use)
It’s long been my theory that people vote based on the thumbnails on their my:watched page. This just confirms that. AI art is passable at low resolutions, and folks here aren’t interested in zooming in to check if everything is wired together properly.
At least here on this site, it’s been no secret that people have had shockingly low standards and it’s honestly the case wherever you go. It’s impossible to grow as an artist if you don’t have a solid fanbase behind you and a reputation.
There’s definitely a difference between people who simply just like what they see, and people who also appreciate the artist or art style behind what they see. Bigger established artists will probably have minimal issues with getting “replaced” by AI, because people like the art style for them, and because they did it in the style/theme that they love and have become used to. However, smaller artists are going to really struggle because they still have to prove themselves to have any hope of their art getting seen.
This is already a problem over on FurAffinity, where AI images are banned. There have been fights over deletion when users accuse each other of uploading AI art. More worryingly, hybrid art has been removed. One notable instance was an artist who used AI to generate the background over which they painted human-made characters.
I’d argue this problem also exists here to a smaller extent, namely whether art is AI
assisted. I’ve seen people be unsure of whether art is AI or not, which is a problem. In
Ciaran’s own words in another thread:
Regardless, we feel like artwork made by humans should be the forefront of the site.
The only way to truly achieve this IMO is to ban AI art and any use of AI outright, or clarify what the Machine Learning Assisted tag means to remove any ambiguity. I could generate an AI image, put a single line on the canvas or put my signature on it and then say that it is now AI assisted art. I would be allowed to put my artist tag on it because I technically have a part in the actual creation process even though a computer did 99.999% of the work. The generated art probably doesn’t exactly look like any other existing artwork, and computers have no rights, so the point of artist copyright is also moot.
A more likely scenario is an artist is just drawing a pony head on an AI art piece, or tracing it to create a “WIP” if they are questioned about it.
@Ciaran
Bad people are really good at exploiting grey areas, so I believe Derpibooru staff need to do the best they can do to patch up whatever loopholes there are. If they already are, that’s great, but the site rules definitely need to be updated to reflect the widespread use of AI for art. If not, why not?
If you truly want to put human artists first, then more has to be done to clarify what is and isn’t okay with AI, and to separate AI art from human art. Otherwise, human art will never have that “luxury” status if people can’t tell the difference at a glance (or don’t care to):
It’s kind of like what Jay Leno says about horses.
The car didn’t kill the horse, it saved them. Hundreds of them a day that were dying on over crowded streets or in overstuffed stables in big cities. The car made the horse a valued luxury item. It made horses precious.
You can’t possibly mistake a car for a horse, especially today. But AI art is already fooling people as it is right now. Imagine what will happen in the future when it gets better.
Why go out of your way to collect AI art?
