Someone turned me onto an argument in r/CMV and I made the mistake of waking up from a nap to read it. ^_^
In actuality, this might not have been the post that I originally intended to reply to.
Oh well. That’s how it goes! Maybe I can find the one I wanted to reply to that put me on this rage.
Look, I understand that not everyone is going to agree with me. I am an artist. My own son is as artist too, and we don’t hold the same view on this. I am on the OPs’ side on this tbh.
Among many tools I learned to use to draw better as a child, tracing was included in that too. It was simply an effective way to learn the hand motioned needed. In fact, I was so practiced at it, that when my middle school art teacher plonked me down and said “OK I don’t believe you. So draw it for me while I watch.” I did so, willingly, and re-prodocued the work flawlessly too. As my comp-sci teacher once told a bunch of people from public TV, this kid draws Garfield better than Jim Davis. Do ya think that I did not train on that? I studied like an LLM.
But copying art was only one part of the puzzle and I had to be good at making my own also. Ofc.
My point being that most artists do in fact copy. We all go through a phase where we imitate the ones who came before us, the ones we admire the most. The fact is, that’s just a nice way of admitting we really liked that artist and found them to be influential.
Generally speaking, artists grow up and grow past that phase. It has always been an allowable part of the process, even for humans. Why do we give the computer shit for it? O_o
Well, at any rate, you would probably not be surprised to hear that when tools like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion came on the scene over the past few years, I was more interested to actually try and learn what they can do than to simply come along and condemn them.
As I have said many times, I will pick up a Faber Castelle felt tip pen anytime and I can crank out anything you can possibly imagine with it. Give me a challenge like “draw one thing on the paper but never lift up your pen” and that’s not unthinkable to me at all. But I have been using pencils and pens and other implements for over half a century now. Would you truly tell me to stick to those like some kind of old-woman and never try the new and shiny stuff? Do you think I wasn’t faffing around with Corel Draw in 1993? ffs
In short, AI art tools are indeed just another form of expression.
I have absolutely spent an entire day screwing around with a text to image prompt, just trying to figure out why the model cannot understand what I want, installing extra plug-ins to work over the AI in various ways. Yes, prompt engineering is tough, and especially if you are doing image-to-image and trying to make that work. It takes many levels of scientific experimentation and creative input. The fact is that more bullcrap ends up on the cutting room floor than you will ever call a complete work of art.
So tell me now in 2025, that an artist can’t use AI tools, like you’re someone in 1985 saying that all animation has to be hand painted on celluloid or it’s not authentic. I can’t use Bucket Fill, because that’s an algorithm, so I must paint every pixel of the art myself dot-by-dot. C’mon get real.
So, I know the point of CMV is supposed to be to make the OP open up their mind, but it is not my place to do that. Instead, I will tell the OP, don’t change your view. You are alright. Other people need to open up their minds a bit on this one.
So, soon I realized maybe I posted it to the wrong thread.
So…
Haha! I may have come here for a different OP and only realized too late that I clicked the wrong link.
But yet again, I agree with the OP on this one.
AI isn’t itself inherently bad. The fact is that we lack good metrics on the balance between the carbon impact of AI vs the ways we use it that might save an immense amount of energy.
One can assume that AI has a negative impact. However, you can uniquely target the requirements of data centers to pull from hydro, solar, or nuclear sources. Good luck doing that with the way we use electricity ourselves in everyday lives. So, in net, it might actually end up being greener.
I also do not hear a ton of noise about people who self-host this kind of thing. In that case, it’s not concentrated in a data center, but it sits in your house and does the same terrible stuff you do everyday while being alive.
Have we considered that humans themselves are pretty awful and consume a lot of resources? What are the ethical implications of keeping a person alive, or choosing whether that person inputs enough into the human race to be considered a carbon net positive?
Personally, I don’t like the sound of those arguments. They have an ominous feeling about them.
