-=☆ Art of Snappy ☆=-

＊ New Years Resolutions!

★ Believe in myself and my abilities more

☆ Go on more walks

★ Post and create more casual drawings and doodles

☆ Work smarter in school

★ Work harder on my personal projects

☆ Be nicer and more forgiving to myself :]

Or are you just worried your job will be automated (it won't)

There’s a protest going on against AI art over on artstation, so I feel like now is the time for me to make a statement on this issue! 

I wholeheartedly support the ongoing protest against AI art. Why? Because my artwork is included in the datasets used to train these image generators without my consent. I get zero compensation for the use of my art, even though these image generators cost money to use, and are a commercial product. 

Musicians are not being treated the same way. Stability has a music generator that only uses royalty free music in their dataset. Their words: “Because diffusion models are prone to memorization and overfitting, releasing a model trained on copyrighted data could potentially result in legal issues.” Why is the work of visual artists being treated differently?

Many have compared image generators to human artists seeking out inspiration. Those two are not the same. My art is literally being fed into these generators through the datasets, and spat back out of a program that has no inherent sense of what is respectful to artists. As long as my art is literally integrated into the system used to create the images, it is commercial use of my art without my consent.

Until there is an ethically sourced database that compensates artists for the use of their images, I am against AI art. I also think platforms should do everything they can to prevent scraping of their content for these databases. 

AI art as a concept is not going away. Argue it on a philosophical basis all you want, the genie isn’t going back in the bottle. And in the future, artists (and writers!) are going to be using AI in various ways to supplement their work. It’s inevitable that will happen, just as every other tech innovation of recent years has been folded in to processes.

But AI companies need to be very transparent about what datasets are being used to train their programs, and that training data needs to be gathered ethically and with fair compensation.

On a broader level, we’re going to need updates to the law regarding intellectual property rights and fair use, to better reflect the reality of our modern tech and culture.

I have seen a tremendous amount of fear-mongering, moral panic, and fundamental misunderstandings of how these programs work, and while I understand the emotional response, it’s not helpful. That’s how you lose this fight.