License to Ill-ustrate

Artstation protest against allowing AI-generated art on the platform, which took form of artists flooding the site with pictures saying NO AI ART, has utterly fucked up AI Art generators that were sampling art trending on artstation without permission. Thus proving that all these generators do indeed steal artwork.

This is literally the AI bros trolling people who are against AI and everybody is falling for it.

The current popular models of AI are absolutely a problem because they’re trained on unethically sourced data! But that data is not sampled live. That is, the data they’re trained on is already scraped. Doing this is more of a protest towards the hosting service to say “hey, fuck you, we make you money by drawing in users who subscribe and/or view ads (as the case may be, per service), and we’re gonna drive them away by making THIS all they find from us unless you stop fucking over your artists!” than it is a means of actually fucking with the AI art generators.

Like, yeah, it would be hilarious–I would love to see it fuck with them. But that’s not how they’re working as of now.

And the AI bros are 100% using this to go “lol look, see, these artists don’t know ANYTHING about how AI works! All their fears are based on lies and fearmongering and not any actual substance! None of their protests need to be taken seriously because they don’t know what they’re talking about!”

That’s, like, their goal–make artists look like ignorant idiots who are just afraid of change instead of people who have actual, valid fears. That’s where the trolling part comes in. I mean, artists do very much have valid concerns. But falling for this is not an “own” to the AI bros because “lol they’re admitting their stuff is all stolen”, it instead comes off more as “lol look at the technophobes who’re mad about lies they made up lolololol”.