I’m also in art college. And even if I wasn’t, I’ve been doing art for almost a decade now. I’ve been disabled the whole bloody time.

AI, isn’t art.

There are many disabled artists and we have adapted our own ways of dealing with how we create. Fuck you, we have been doing this forever.

Vincent Van Gogh had temporal lobe epilepsy; Henri Matisse became a wheelchair user after surgery for cancer; Michelangelo had osteoarthritis, limiting mobility and causing pain in his hands and feet.

Paul Smith had a severe case of cerebral palsy and created art using typewriters.

Peter Longstaff has no arms due to Thalidomide, and paints with his feet.

Frida Kahlo not only had polio that disabled her as a child, but of course as we all know was injured in a bus accident at the age of 18, which caused her lifelong pain and medical problems.

Fuck, you want a personal annecdote? I knew a girl (we have lost touch since) who was paralysed from the neck down and she painted with her mouth and there are other artists who do so too! And with eye tracking technology I’m sure disabled artists will be getting more and more tools as the years pass. But we do NOT condone AI art. All that does is put us, real disabled artists, who exist and need support, out of jobs and commissions.

hi, another disabled person here for more personal anecdotes! here is an art piece i made entirely with my non dominant hand 1 week before my most recent shoulder surgery on that same arm. i also wear splint rings to keep my fingers from dislocating while painting (or playing bass guitar cause i do that too). i make most of my income off hand painted art despite having hand tremors, frequent wrist dislocations/subluxations, and migraines.

my friend and her wife also make their incomes off wig making, leatherwork, and digital collage prints. both have chronic pain as well.

It takes me fucking forever to create anything, BUT I DO IT.

This is the cover art for my latest book it took 2 years to finish:

This is the sculpture I've been working on for 6 months (it's not finished):

LLMs (they're not AI) are tools, sure, but all the ones that are any good are based on THEFT of actual artists' labour.

Is it art? Eh, with my philosopher's hat on, I can see it as equivalent to found object art. But it doesn't really matter, because it's THEFT. And the idea that it's a disability aid is INSULTING ABLEIST GARBAGE.

Why did I use 8kg of clay to make a sculpture that I would take months of physical activity that I would have to painstakingly pace? BECAUSE I WANTED A GODDAMN SCULPTURE SHAPED BY MY OWN HANDS.

It was messy and visceral and physical and MINE. The butt *I* shaped.

I'm not aware of any 'AI' sculptors yet, but I imagine one could feed a bunch of 3D printing designs into an LLM and later ask it to produce a design for a butt sculpture and it would give you something, but it wouldn't be the product of whoever entered 'butt sculpture' into the LLM. It would be the product of the millions of human created 3D designs you fed into it. As an artist... that's kind of a bummer.

I want to create things from MY vision.

As for the book cover... there are scum out there using LLMs to replace commissions for real human artists, and it sure would have been quicker to mess around with prompts for 'two naked men embracing on the floor' until I got something like I wanted. But I, a disabled artist and writer, WOULD NEVER DO THAT.

Firstly, watching me draw my careful drawing over 2 years got me a lot of followers who were interested in both my art and the book the art was for. People LIKED that I was drawing my own cover. It almost certainly got me significant numbers of sales I wouldn't have had with an AI cover.

Secondly, I'm proud of the result. It looks great and I MADE THAT.

Thirdly, I learnt a lot about drawing digitally as part of the process as well as drawing the physical human form. Every time I draw a new naked person I get better at it! 'Promt engineers' don't get better at squat. They learn nothing about the human form or whatever they are drawing. I get not only skills but valuable contemplation from staring for hours at what makes up the shape of a foot, a hand, the dips and gentle mounds of the muscles of a back.

Fourthly, the work of more than one artist went into this. I used the stock photo Gay Love 2 by TheMaleStockNude as a reference. All he asks is that you comment and link to the artwork so he can see what you did with it. I do that. He's credited on the copyright page of my novel (along with the photographer of the public domain photo of runes I used, but whose name I can't remember rn). LLMs have illegally scraped his photos too, but I couldn't credit him if they were just part of the churn, he would never see the result, and I doubt I could have used a prompt that would have found as tender and beautiful a moment as he and his models created. For free. Just to enable other artists to produce artwork that expressed gay love.

Lastly (I'm sure there are more reasons, but I'm getting tired), these 'tools' rely on training databases that scraped the Web, including artist repositories like DeviantArt. We know they did this. It's why DeviantArt had to add an option to mark artwork as not for scraping (although there's really no guarantee they won't do that anyway - it was already illegal to steal copyrighted art). You think I want to use a tool THAT STOLE FROM ME. That churns out 'pieces' based on MY WORK, uncredited? That enables anyone else to mimic MY STYLE without credit or payment?

No, I do not, you lickspittal, thieving scum!

This is not a disability aid! This does not help disabled artists *create* anything. It's a theft machine. It spits on disabled artists and the hours and hours of labour it takes us to produce art of real labour and value.

How DARE you use disabled people as a crutch to support your thievery?

I also help run art groups. I don't consider myself a particularly skilled artist, but the support of my friends and community have helped me improve substantially. Sometimes it's tough. I can't always work. But I'm proud of the things I create, and having those hours of labor stolen to feed machine learning models is heartbreaking. The turn of DeviantArt towards embracing AI has done irrevocable harm to the communities I've poured years of my life into.

A close relative, who writes books, has almost certainly had her work scraped and fed to LLMs. She is disabled herself and cares for a disabled family member! Her books are her pride. She barely sells because of how difficult it is to get your work out there. Having her words stolen hurts her more than it hurts me to have my work stolen -- I'm just a hobbyist, while writing is her career.

I know at least one disabled person who makes and sells his artwork online full-time, not only because he enjoys the work, but because it's the one option available to him that allows him to make enough to live independently.

Also: art doesn't need to meet a certain standard to be worth doing, and artists' skills don't need to be at a certain "level" for it to be worth it for them to make art.

If disabled people are feeling like they can't access certain artistic mediums because their disability is incompatible and the works they create are therefore Not Worth It, that's not a flaw in their disability, or in the medium itself. That's a flaw in how we view art, and the value of people's time and effort.

If you made something, that is valuable. If you care about it, that is valuable. If you got something from the experience- knowledge, skills, a peaceful moment, catharsis- that is valuable. If someone else gets something from the work you created- enjoyment, meaning, connection- that is valuable. It doesn't matter if it looks "good enough" to meet a subjective cultural standard of Art Worth Making. The point of art is not to measure up to other people's art; it's to express, connect, and communicate.

We've had this conversation before! You don't need to make a realistic rendering of a grand & important Bible scene in oil paint in order for your art to be worth making. That's why we left salon culture behind centuries ago. That's why just about every artistic movement since then has argued for the recognition and acceptance of more and more diverse ways of making art.

AI art is not an accessibility tool any more than commissioning an artist is.

Only it's worse, because you're getting a for-profit company's program to steal the work of real artists without their permission rather than just, y'know, paying a working artist.