Chucking My Phone Into A Volcano Because it Sends Me Emails (kidpix, 2021)

Mt. Assiniboine–Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada. ca. 1940.

If your complaint is:

It's too easy, and will take jobs from artists because someone might be able to make the images they want with a computer instead of having to hire someone.

Then you admit you want artificial barriers between the average person and creative expression, and would arbitrarily restrict the ability to make certain kinds of pictures to whatever subgroup of people you happen to think are sufficiently worthy, because they "worked hard enough" or something like that.

AI generated art is low quality, there's no real creativity involved, it's not real art.

Then you have nothing to worry about, it should be easy to tell the difference between AI generated art and non-AI art because the AI art looks bad, and any discerning viewer will always naturally prefer the non-AI images. If this isn't the case, and you're telling me people are having trouble distinguishing pictures a computer made from pictures you made, then necessarily either the computer has creativity and is making good art, or you lack creativity and are making bad art. Pick one.

AI generated pictures are a form of art theft, plagiarism, copyright infringement etc.

@apollodrome

Hi! I assume you're not an artist because the sheer disrespect shows that much, but if you aren't a troll and genuinely misinformed, here's a thread by an industry artist whom I admire, debunking most of these arguments and more. I recommend you give it a read, and if you feel that your arguments still hold water after the fact, at least you know for sure they aren't strawmen :)

I am an artist in that I create art (physical, paint and canvas art if it matters to you) - I'm certainly not a professional artist, if that's what you meant? More to the point, the idea there's a real distinction between "an artist" vs "not an artist" has been outmoded since long, long before neural nets came into the fray. I think the very first bullet point in the linked twitter thread unintentionally illustrates this really well:

This is about as oxymoronic as saying "this can't be the democratization of government, the kings and barons didn't vote on it!" and makes even less sense, because at least feudal nobility were an actual social class, whereas can you tell me who, exactly, would get to vote in this hypothetical election among artists? What credentials do I need, specifically, to be allowed to call myself an artist, and who gets to decide all this?

There's a whole lot more to be said about this, but first we're really going to have to address the bigger problem every single one of these arguments is implicitly based on, which is human exceptionalism. For example, bullet point number two:

Putting aside the fact that Google employee François Chollet just possibly might have a vested interest in convincing people the AI he's working on can never become sentient (and thus will never be entitled to basic rights), and putting aside that this line of reasoning is immediately dead in the water as soon as he says that deep learning based AIs have "no shared characteristics" with biological brains (really?), and putting aside the fact that, as a species, our current understanding of neuroscience is nowhere even remotely close to the point where we can be making confident assertions about the relative similarity or dissimilarity of human thought process to AI thought process...

We keep hearing over and over again that the way neural nets go about learning is different from the way humans go about learning, and my response is: yes, and?

Yes, in all likelihood the way DALL-E and Midjourney learned to do art is very different from the way I learned to do art. Likewise, the way I learned to do art is almost certainly very different from the way any given person reading this right now learned art, and so on. Perhaps I'm the only real artist in the entire world, because I have true inspiration whereas everyone else is just sort of mindlessly copying each other? Even given the assumption that neural nets fundamentally process information in a radically different way than humans do, there's no coherent, objective metric by which we could say our way is "better."

Or to put it bluntly: there's nothing special about being a computer made of meat instead of silicon.

To be perfectly clear, I don't personally think any currently existing neural net is anywhere near achieving consciousness, but I do believe that AI sentience is likely to become reality within the lifetimes of most people reading this. More importantly, it sets an extremely dangerous precedent for the future to simply dismiss the notion offhand as categorically impossible. Ten years ago, people said AI sentience was impossible because a machine would never be able to produce a beautiful work of art, and now after being proven wrong in the most dramatic way possible everyone is tripping over themselves to come up with ad hoc reasons why it doesn't really count and trying to make it illegal.

So coming back to the topic at hand - if you've posted your artwork online, you've inescapably opened yourself to possibility that some other artist might learn from or be influenced by it in some way. This was generally not considered problematic until now, and if you want to maintain it's suddenly different now that machines are doing it, you're going to have to explain in specific detail the circumstances under which someone can claim general patterns, concepts, and styles as intellectual property, and the principles by which one would determine whether any given picture constitutes an act of art theft as differs from currently existing standards, all keeping in mind your methodology can't just boil down to "if a human did it: art // if a machine did it: copyright infringement" because that would be starting at the conclusion you want and working backwards to the premises you'd need to make it so.

Otherwise, it's going to look like a rather transparent, self-serving attempt to eliminate perceived competition.

So you'll understand it rings rather hollow when one says something like:

Art should be easily accessible to all, except when "all" includes people I don't consider artists using tools I don't approve of. And of course this is fundamentally dishonest to begin with, in that art is very obviously not "already easily accessible to all" because half of this argument revolves around "if we make art too easily accessible to all, then I'm afraid people won't have to rely on the correct group of people anymore," which (despite many protestations to the contrary) is directly analogous to how photography wasn't widely considered "real" art for many years and how to this day (non-AI-assisted) digital art has comparatively limited mainstream recognition.