Inky Xward
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As someone who is an artist (not professionally, but I do have thousands of notes on one or two things I made), I wish the average Tumblr user artist (who maybe gets some tips in their Ko-Fi but does not do it professionally and isn't affected by workforce automation) were more willing to admit that it's about clout and attention and feedback and other things without a price tag. I wish we could talk about how to increase visibility for artists without co-opting labour language.
Also, I have to say:
Posting art online has always had its ups and downs. If it wasn't one thing, it was another. Sometimes it's art thieves pretending your work is theirs, or repost accounts reposting an artwork and cashing in all the engagement while people ignore the artist who actually made it. It's always been a little rough, and a flood of AI art drowning out regular art stings, but feels like same old in a way. I'm used to having to fight for every scrap of engagement, you know?
But the response the community has had to AI art? The witch hunts? People taking art people post for their followers and hyperanalyzing the pixels and shading and any lines that might be out of place to prove that the artist is "cheating"? Often without having a goddamn clue about anything? This from the community of art appreciators, the people who, theoretically, I'm posting FOR, when I post art for free?
Now that makes me actively hate my own 'fanbase' and feel like I don't want to post anything for them.
AI art in the art industry is one thing. But in the hobby circles, anti-AI art hysteria is so much worse for artists than the tech itself could ever be.Thanks for speaking sense.
Anonymous
It does feel like there’s an element of “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” present. Like we can’t let AI artists hang around because what if *they* get all the fame and fortune *I* was supposed to get?!
But yeah. Yesterday I saw two different people comparing AI users to Nazis - one of whom was talking about dnd players who were just generating images of their dnd characters on a private server - and a person who runs an AI art blog getting multiple people telling them to kill themselves.
I fully support unions putting protections in place for their workers, I fully support people organizing to protect their jobs, and I fully support boycotting multi-million dollar companies who use AI instead of paying artists. But the sheer vitriol and hatred being leveled at people who are just fucking around having fun making stuff is so insanely overzealous right now. It’s extremely performative and it’s exhausting.
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now I do agree with a lot of what you're saying. AI is a tool that can be used (even by traditional artists also, the same way many traditional artists use 3D tools to create backgrounds in perspective instead of drawing it own their own)
But what really bothers me is the environmental impact. We know everything we do online has impact on the environment, but AI elevates this to the next level. I'm not even talking about training and maintaining GenAI, which is already pretty devastating but not unlike other technologies we have, but about the end user being able to cause a pretty big negative impact.
There is also a huge inequality of distribution of that impact. Companies that might be interested in keeping their energy usage carbon free or sustainable in, say, parts of europe, will do no such thing in asia and south america. We end up with data centers that will strain freshwater resources in the global south so that AI artists can make art?
I understand your points but I still think that all things being considered, we shouldn't be focused on whether AI art is art or not but rather on it should be regulated and it's environmental risks addressed.
Anonymous
Actually, AI barely budges the needle on environmental waste. The vast majority of industrial water use is for farming and agriculture, followed by apparel, beverage, and automotive manufacturing. You would do far, far more good for the environment by going vegetarian than by giving up AI art, and even within the tech industry, I’m pretty sure things like chip manufacturing take significantly more water and energy than data centers do.
End users barely make an impact at all - a chatGPT prompt or an image generation uses significantly less energy than, say, an hour of playing a video game or watching Youtube.
You are correct that offshoring data centers and manufacturing to dodge environmental regulations is a problem! But it’s already a huge problem in multiple manufacturing industries. That’s not a hypothetical future problem, it’s literally happening right now. But the same people up in arms about how bad AI is for the environment are suspiciously quiet when it comes to demanding that individuals stop eating meat, buying new phones or playing video games, even though they are orders of magnitude worse for the environment.
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RIP to that old man who was snoring when it was raining and pouring
(via beetledrink)
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People Love Studio Ghibli. But Should They Be Able to Recreate It?
rare example of rhetorical headline with a simple “yes” answer
insisting that if you really want your selfie drawn in Studio Ghibli style you should hire Miyazaki / spend three days and three nights kneeling outside his hut pleading to become his personal apprentice to ensure that it’s done in a manner that respects the traditions of the craft
(via reachartwork)
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Look, I’m not gonna pretend that I don’t get it, when it comes to AI. But it’s like this:
In most parts of the US, a residential electrician works only on houses and apartments. They use romex wire, that yellow cable stuff. You run it from the panel to wherever it’s going, staple it to the studs, then make up both ends. You need to know basic electrical code but mostly it’s pretty simple. A fast learner could be a decent residential electrician inside a month.
I, on the other hand, am a union industrial electrician. I work primarily in hospitals, factories, and research labs. Most of our wire is run in steel conduit that has to be hand bent on the job, which is an art form in and of itself. We work with much higher voltages, much heavier wire, much more complicated equipment, and we need to know much more of the code. Our apprenticeship is 4-5 years and that’s only enough to scratch the surface of everything an industrial electrician might do.
And yes - I absolutely get a little defensive when unknowing people compare me to a residential electrician. There’s absolutely a knee-jerk impulse to declare that they’re not *real* electricians, that they’re merely a pale imitation of what I do. But I fight that impulse because it’s a *bad impulse*. Resi still takes skill and work, it’s just different than mine. We’re both electricians. And it’s better for us to work together to improve working conditions for all workers than to get into pissing contests about whose job is more “real”. And both our jobs are in increasing danger due to the proliferation of low voltage systems that the average homeowner can install and repair without hiring a professional.
So yeah, I do get it. But it has been very, VERY insulting over the last year to hear people repeatedly say “AI was supposed to replace blue collar jobs, not *my* job! My job is ~special~ because it has ~humanity~!”
Your job is not special. It’s not more important than my job and it’s not more fulfilling to you than my job is to me. And I don’t get to insist that everyone start building homes with steel conduit just so less skilled people can’t be electricians, and I don’t get to yell at people for hiring a handyman to replace an outlet for $50 when my time would be worth $200.
I absolutely understand the instinct that AI art can’t be real art because people who use it didn’t “earn” it, or that automating art is uniquely damaging in a way automating other jobs isn’t because it’s “supposed” to be about human expression. But please actually think about what you’re implying and who you’re throwing under the bus when you say shit like that, and whether it actually holds up to your other values or if it’s just a knee-jerk reaction you need to examine.
(via reachartwork)
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i’m starting a collection of things insane people do in animal crossing
ANOTHER
some of them are just so good
(via yeah-yeah-beebiss-1)
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Woke Putin has run Russia into the ground
Introducing our new president…
WOKE PUTIN
ALT
ALT(via boy-and-girl-crazy123456)
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Was anyone gonna tell me we found who Cleo was??? The integration genius on math stack exchange from 10 years ago?
TLDR it was a professor from Uzbekistan named Viktor Reshetnikov who did it because he wanted people to be more interested in the niche problems people would post on there. Cleo wasn’t even his only account, he was doing multiple people
additional detail - he picked very tricky problems where he had a good guess for the answer but was really struggling to prove it. he would post the problem on an alt, then instapost what he thought was the answer as Cleo, and then hope that he could bait other people into doing the work to verify step by step that his solution was correct. and it worked a bunch of times!
previously he had just posted “hey i think this is the solution to this complex integral but i want help proving it” and then got zero interaction
(via schafpudel)
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Digimon is calling me out more than usual lately.
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Tumblr users: “Be gay! Do crime! Steal shit!”
Tumblr users ten seconds after someone copies their mid text post onto twitter or gets a rusty old penny’s worth of youtube money voicing it over: “It is like food has been stolen straight from my fucking mouth”
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