In my opinion, AI just feels like the logical next step for capitalist exploitation and destruction of culture. Generative AI is (in most cases) just a fancy way for cooperations to steal art on a scale, that hasn’t been possible before. And then they use AI to fill the internet with slop and misinformation and actual artists are getting fired from their jobs, because the company replaces them with an AI, that was trained on their original art. Because of these reasons and some others, it just feels wrong to me, to be using AI in such a manner, when this community should be about inclusion and kindness. Wouldn’t it be much cooler, if we commissioned an actual artist for the banner or find a nice existing artwork (where the licence fits, of course)? I would love to hear your thoughts!
In my opinion, AI just feels like the logical next step for capitalist exploitation and destruction of culture.
I don’t think AI is inherently bad. What’s bad is how we (or well, the corpos) use it. SEO, vibe coding, making slop, you name it.
About training material being stealing: hard agree here. Our copyright laws are broken, but they are right about AI - training is strong in a retrieval system, which is infingement. Shame they aren’t enforced at all.
What fascinates me is the similarity between AI and photography. That is, both are revolutionary tools in the visual medium. Imagine this thread being an opinion column in an 1800s newspaper, and replace all instances of ‘AI’ with ‘photography’. The arguments all stand, but our perspective to them may change.
AI bad. Upvotes please.
If that’s what it seems to you, you might want to reread their comment. You’re way off base.
How else would someone have been able to get all those chipmunks in one photo?
Taxidermy
You wouldn’t necessarily even need to comission someone. There are plenty of Creative Commons licensed pieces of art that could be used.
There are a lot of talent artists here on lemmy.ml and I think it would be wise to ask them if they were interested in providing a banner image that is not ai generated, surely someone would take up the offer.
If they wanted to do it for free, they would have offered.
it’s just a crappy and lazy image regardless of origins, but the fact it is AI makes it crappier
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the tech itself. Your issue is with capitalist relations and the way this technology is used under capitalism. Focus on what the actual problem is. https://dialecticaldispatches.substack.com/p/a-marxist-perspective-on-ai
I read your link. I think my main issue is the framing as though AI is just a new tool that people are afraid of similar to the introduction of the camera.
Even outside of capitalist exploitation, AI generated art suffers from an inherent creative limitation. It’s a derivative and subtractive tool. It can only remix what already exists. It lacks intention and human experience that make art meaningful. The creative process isn’t just about the final image. There’s choices, mistakes, revisions, and personal investment, etc. No amount of super long and super specific prompts can do this.
This is why a crude MS Paint drawing or a hastily made meme can resonate more than a “flawless” AI generated piece. Statistical approximation can’t imbue a piece with lived experience or subvert expectations with purpose. It is creative sterility.
I can see some applications of AI generation for the more mundane aspects of creation, like the actions panel in Photoshop. But I think framing creative folks’ objections as an act of self preservation as though we are afraid of technology is a bit of a strawman and reductive of the reality of the situation. Although there are definitely artists that react this way, I admit.
It is true that new tools reshape art. The comparison to photography or Photoshop is flawed. Those tools still require direct engagement with the creative process. In the link you provided the argument is made for a pro-AI stance using the argument that the photographer composes a shot and manipulating light. In contrast to AI which automates the creative act itself. That’s where their argument falls apart.
As for democratization goes the issue isn’t accessibility (plenty of free, nonexploitative tools already exist for beginners) and that is something that could be improved. AI doesn’t teach someone to draw, operate a camera, paint, reiterate, conceptualize, and develop artistic judgment. It lets them skip those steps entirely resulting in outputs that are aesthetically polished and creatively hollow. True democratization would mean empowering people to create.
Even outside of capitalist exploitation, AI generated art suffers from an inherent creative limitation. It’s a derivative and subtractive tool. It can only remix what already exists.
There’s little evidence that this is fundamentally different from how our own minds work. We are influenced by our environment, and experiences. The art we create is a product of our material conditions. If you look at art from different eras you can clearly see that it’s grounded in the material reality people live in. Furthermore, an artist can train the AI on their own style, as the video linked in the article shows with a concrete use case. That allows the artists to automate the mechanical work of producing the style they’ve come up with.
It lacks intention and human experience that make art meaningful.
That’s what makes it a tool. A paintbrush or an app like Krita also lacks intention. It’s the human using the tool that has the idea that they want to convey, and they use the tool to do that. We see this already happening a lot with memes being generated using AI tools. A few examples here. It’s a case of people coming up with ideas and then using AI to visualize them so they can share them with others.
This is why a crude MS Paint drawing or a hastily made meme can resonate more than a “flawless” AI generated piece.
If we’re just talking about pressing a button and getting an image sure. However, the actual tools like ComfyUI have complex workflows where the artist has a lot of direction over every detail that’s being generated. Personally, I don’t see how it’s fundamentally different from using a 3D modelling tool like Blender or a movie director guiding actors in execution of the script.
I can see some applications of AI generation for the more mundane aspects of creation, like the actions panel in Photoshop.
Right, I think that’s how these tools will be used professionally. However, there are also plenty of people who aren’t professionals, and don’t have artistic talent. These people now have a tool to flesh out an idea in their heads which they wouldn’t have been able to do previously. I see this as a net positive. The examples above show how this can be a powerful tool for agitation, satire, and political commentary.
Those tools still require direct engagement with the creative process
So do tools like ComfyUI, if you look at the workflow, it very much resembles these tools.
the argument that the photographer composes a shot and manipulating light. In contrast to AI which automates the creative act itself
I do photography and I disagree here. The photographer looks at the scene, they do not create the scene themselves. The skill of the photographer is in noticing interesting patterns of light, objects, and composition in the scene that are aesthetically appealing. It’s the skill of being able to curate visually interesting imagery. Similarly, what the AI does is generate the scene, and what the human does is curate the content that’s generated based on their aesthetic.
AI doesn’t teach someone to draw, operate a camera, paint, reiterate, conceptualize, and develop artistic judgment. It lets them skip those steps entirely resulting in outputs that are aesthetically polished and creatively hollow. True democratization would mean empowering people to create.
Again, AI is a tool and it doesn’t magically remove the need for people to develop an aesthetic, to learn about lighting, composition, and so on. However, you’re also mixing in mechanical skills like operating the camera which have little to do with actual art. These tools very much do empower people to create, but to create something interesting still takes skill.
It honestly just seems like you want AI to be a stand in for creative thinking and intention rather than it actually enabling creative processes. Your examples you provide don’t teach those skills. Everyone has ideas. I have ideas of being a master painter creating incredible paintings, I can visually imagine them in my head, AI can shit out something that somewhat resembles that I want. It can train on my own style of [insert medium]. But I am always at the mercy of the output of that tool. It would not be a problem if it were a normal tool like a camera or paintbrush. But when you use a thought limiting tool like AI it gives you limited results in return. It is always going to be chained to the whatever that particular AI has trained on. Artists develop a style over years, it changes from day to day, year to year, AI cannot evolve, yet an artist’s style does just through repetition of creation. AI creates the predictive average of existing works.
I think the biggest thing here is that AI is a limited tool from the ground up rather than enabling creativity. You can’t train AI to develop a new concept or a new idea, that’s reserved to humans alone. It’s that human intangibility that’s yet to be achieved via AI and until sentience is achieved you’re never going to get that from a limited tool like AI. If sentience is achieved, you’d have to recognize its humanity and at that point prompts are no longer needed, it can create its own work.
It honestly just seems like you want AI to be a stand in for creative thinking and intention rather than it actually enabling creative processes.
I think was pretty clear in what I actually said. I think AI is a tool that automates the mechanical aspect of producing art. In fact, I repeatedly stated that I think the intention and creative thinking comes from the human user of the tool. I even specifically said that the tool does not replace the need for artistic ability.
Everyone has ideas. I have ideas of being a master painter creating incredible paintings, I can visually imagine them in my head, AI can shit out something that somewhat resembles that I want.
This is just gatekeeping. You’re basically saying that only people who have the technical skills should be allowed to turn ideas in their heads into content that can be shared with others, and tough luck for everyone else.
But I am always at the mercy of the output of that tool. It would not be a problem if it were a normal tool like a camera or paintbrush.
That’s completely false, you’re either misunderstanding how these tools work currently or intentionally misrepresenting how they work. I urge you to actually spend the time to learn how a tool like ComfyUI works and what it is capable of.
It is always going to be chained to the whatever that particular AI has trained on.
What it’s trained on is literally millions of images in every style imaginable, and what it is able to do is to blend these styles. The person using the tool can absolutely create a unique style. Furthermore, as I’ve already noted, and you’ve ignored, the artist can train the tool on their own style.
AI cannot evolve, yet an artist’s style does just through repetition of creation.
Yes, AI can evolve the same way artist evolves by being trained on more styles. Take a look at LoRA approach as one example of how easily new styles can be adapted to existing models.
I think the biggest thing here is that AI is a limited tool from the ground up rather than enabling creativity.
With all due respect, I think that you simply haven’t spent the time how the tool actually works and what it is capable of.
It’s that human intangibility that’s yet to be achieved via AI and until sentience is achieved you’re never going to get that from a limited tool like AI
Replace AI in that sentence with paint brush and it will make just as much sense.
If sentience is achieved, you’d have to recognize its humanity and at that point prompts are no longer needed, it can create its own work.
You’re once again ignoring my core point which is that AI is a tool and it is not meant to replace the human. It is meant to be used by people who have sentience and a critical eye for the specific imagery they’re aiming to produce.
I think, ultimately, AI-generated images have their own utility, but fundamentally cannot replace human art as an expression of the human experience and artist intent through their chosen medium. AI-generated textures for, say, wooden planks in a video game does little to nothing to change the end-user’s experience, but just asking AI to create a masterpiece of art fundamentally lacks the artistic process that makes art thought provoking and important. It isn’t even about being produced artisinally or mass-produced, it’s fundamentally about what art is to begin with, and what makes it resonate.
AI cannot replace art. AI can make the more mundane and tedious aspects of creation smoother, it can be a part of a larger work of art, or it can be used in a similar way to stock images. At the same time, just like AI chatbots are no replacement for human interaction, AI can’t replace human art. It isn’t a matter of morality, or something grander, it’s as simple as AI art just being a tool for guessing at what the user wants to generate, and thus isn’t capable of serving the same function for humanity as art in the traditional sense.
I always like your posts when I see them here, so I really do value your perspective on this.
I always like your posts when I see them here, so I really do value your perspective on this.
Thank you, I was hoping I wasn’t going to get eaten alive for my comments. That said, the question asked in the original post is why is our banner AI generated? And I think our answer should be: It shouldn’t be, if this is going to be a community made of people for people, then banner should be made from someone from this community not a capitalist AI image generator. I don’t think that should be controversial and illicit responses that are hostile to the question even if OP’s intentions are being questioned.
Haha, I went back and forth on whether or not to post my thoughts for quite a while, I understand being reluctant to posting on this. Up front, I am not an artist, which I think is obvious but nevertheless should be stated.
I personally don’t care for the people trying to question OP’s motives, that’s not the point here. Questioning the purpose of an AI image is an extremely salient issue, and one OP has every right to ask. AI is not a “settled issue” in my eyes on the left, and what I shared earlier is easily one of my least strong opinions.
As for the purposes of the banner, I think, personally, whether or not it is AI generated depends on what the users of the community want. If someone wants to put in the time to design a banner, and the people using the community prefer it to the AI banner, then it should change to the artist’s banner. Art made by humans is desired for that artistic process, grappling with the medium as a form of expression, something the viewer can contemplate (in my again untrained, unartistic view), but in the interim AI can at least make servicable images, especially if run locally and on green energy.
I see AI images fulfilling a similar use to stock images. Good for quickly drafting up something as a visual representation of an idea, horrible for being art as a stand-alone subject to contemplate and appreciate, the skill, the decision making, the expression.
Am I off-base? I dunno, I feel a bit like I got eaten alive in my comment I made earlier. I’m certainly not “pro-AI,” I don’t even use it myself, but at the same time I took issue with how people are framing the conversation.
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People are so dramatic over AI
I feel like it’s just perseveration at this point. This tech exists, it’s not going away, people just have to learn to live with that.
Global fresh water demand will exceed supply by 40% by 2030
AI’s projected water usage could hit 6.6 billion m³ by 2027
Drought and famine are going to kill billions in this century.
The artist you would have paid would have consumed more water than a query
I wouldn’t have paid an artist to make my furry porn fetish video tho’
Who do you think makes it then? God?
I wonder how many people died because someone generated a silly banner.
Some people probably think that thousands will die because of that, while deciding to which exotic country they will travel by plane next month.
The whole crusade just seems so out of proportion
Ah, whataboutism, how refreshing.
A cool glass of ‘this is no worse than that’, with a little ice cube that represents the stability of our ecosystems. Very cool, very mindful
X being bad is no argument against doing something (even a little) about a different bad thing Y. Fuck excessive flight travel and fuck generative AI. There’s no need to only pick one thing to hate.
Yep very true. I actually intended my comment as an agreement but I guess something got lost in translation, lol
For good fucking reason. AI wastes fresh water and ruins our climate while being terrible at what it does
Not correct if ran locally
It was still trained in a datacenter
Damage is already done and it’s free. They can’t monetize you using it. If anything, downloading it costs them money.
Also some models weren’t trained with an obscene amount of compute, like deepseek, which used one data center for only 3.7 days.
Doesn’t that mean the damage is already done?
Not all of it, but the majority, yes.
It seems to do simple illustration images just fine
A less than 24 hour old account, who’s entire comment history is this post which is pushing rehashed anti-AI nonsense in the guise of a concerned community member.
Ladies and gentleman, this is an excellent example of a concern troll:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Concern_troll
A concern troll is someone who disingenuously visits sites of an opposing ideology to disrupt conversation by offering unwanted advice on how to solve problems which do not really exist.
Topics of “concern” usually involve tactical use of rhetoric, site rules, or with more philosophical consistency. The concern troll’s posts are almost exclusively intended to derail the normal functions of their targeted website.
With a little prep time and some VPNs the OP could have enough alts available to ensure that anyone arguing against them receives enough down votes to make the OP’s position seem reasonable.
If you examined the population of people who contributed down votes, you’d likely find a bunch of new or low comment history accounts who seem to exclusively vote in anti-AI threads.
FauxLiving: na na na! I don’t like their opinion so this must be nonsense! stupid silly forum users cannot even have real values like me…
on another note, I would be interested in how did you amass 1400 comments in mere 5 months!
Ah, I see we’re being mature now.
FauxLiving: na na na! I don’t like their opinion so this must be nonsense! stupid silly forum users cannot even have real values like me…
WhyJiffie: blah blah blah, I don’t have opinions of my own so I follow the downvoting winds to sling shit and ask dumb questions.
I would be interested in how did you amass 1400 comments in mere 5 months!
In Lemmy, if you type words into the text field and press the reply button it creates a comment. If you do it 2 times, then you have 2 comments. I’ll leave the rest of the exercise to the reader.
your condemning tone is really not needed. However it’s always somewhat suspicious when someone posts so many comments as if that was their day job, with easily half dozen detailed comments in an hour. in 5 months, your 1400 comments is basically 9 comments a day every day, on average.
I’ll just add “troll” to your label besides “AI apologist”.
Upvoting and downvoting patterns in this thread are weird. Votes come and go in blocks that happen at precise points.
I’m almost sure that some anti-AI guy is using bots to try to influence opinion, which os hilarious if you ask me.
Everyone understands that social media is the primary vector of disinformation, but if you ever try to point out this process in actual practice people act like you’re talking nonsense.
Here we have a post started by some random account less than a day old which is suddenly rocketed to the top of the community.
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The OP lives in the thread full time for the entire day, not commenting anywhere else on Lemmy, and then disappears.
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This person simultaneously knows all of the anti-AI arguments by rote and also seems clueless as to why anti-AI posts get a lot of traction.
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The post is brigaded/botted, the vote:comment ratio is off, the downvoters are primarily accounts with no comment/post history (you can see upvotes and downvotes with moderation tools, they’re not private).
I would bet money that if a site admin were to look into the primary participants of this thread, you’d find that they’re all using VPNs. None of this on its own is suspicious, but taken all together it makes the thread very suspect.
I could be wrong, this isn’t exactly an easy thing to prove even when you have server admin tools. But I participate in the community quite heavily and am a moderator of a fairly populated instance (so I can see the server logs for our instance) and this post is giving off a lot of red flags.
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*whose
Yeah because these comments are totally getting buried /s You have to make a first post at some point, and it’s gonna be something you’re passionate about.
Well, but you are not of an opposing ideology, your sub is called “ask Lemmy”, not “ask AI obsessed people”, so your definition doesn’t even make sense. I honestly don’t understand why you people insist on painting me in such a negative light, just because I am new. That is called bullying by the way. I didn’t even intend this thread to blow up in such a way, I guess a lot of people seem to care.
Notice how the community is also not called “ask Anti-AI obsessed people”. I’m sure that name is free, you may like to create such space, and stop trying to discriminate other people.
Instead of walking in with a brand new account with some large topic and then bitch about getting called out as a troll.
Try actually starting with a normal question, make some friends. Actually try to look like a normal God damn person. Not a carefully curated caricature of a human.
You are either insanely tone deaf to how online communities work. Or exactly what your being called.
There’s nothing wrong with being tone deaf, we all have to learn at some point. But you can’t say your not then complain when the only other option is also not to your liking.
post with a score of 181 currently … kinda difficult to argue that someone asking a question as politely as possible, and getting a lot of agreement that the question is worth asking, is simply trolling.
Well, of course everyone that disagrees with these people is a bot, lol
Someone in this thread is using bots to support an anti-ai statement. I don’t know if you or other person, that I don’t know. But I’m almost sure about bot usage.
Using bots to oppose AI is hilarious btw.
How would you know that?
Voting patters. screw up relations between votes and comments. Buch of votes coming in at particular points in time. Comments that were being upvoted for hours suddenly getting 30 downvotes at once. It’s pretty obvious.
I’ve been on the lookout as it’s not the first time this happen with anti-AI gang. I have been suspicious about bot usage by some user on this topics for some time. So I’ve been comparing post where people talk about AI and other posts and the voting patterns are all different.
This could as well be just old classic brigading. But with brigading you usually get more one line comments, when it’s just the votes it’s usually bots.
I honestly don’t understand why you people insist on painting me in such a negative light, just because I am new. That is called bullying by the way.
“ask AI obsessed people”
This you? You use bad faith arguments and ad hominem and you’ll get the same back.
I guess a lot of people seem to care.
Yes, who knew AI was such a hot button issue on social media? /s
It seems incredibly unlikely that you could be unaware of the the volatility of the topic while also parroting all of the anti-ai talking points. Your mask is slipping.
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Anti-AI people using bots to try to improve their influence when they lack human support is the funniest thing ever.
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And you are forever blocked. Good ridance.
That’s your opinion. I disagree with it. Keep the banner as it is. Someone surely took the time to make that image. As it’s pretty good even more for the time it was created. You are just dishing that person’s work. I respect that person work, so the banner should stay.
It would be fine if it was possible to ask the person who made the banner how did they made it and how long it took.
Your complain seems to be mostly based on AI being able to do things faster. At that point why stop there… don’t hire digital artist. They took jobs away from traditional artists. Pretty sure the only good thing we could do I commission the banner to a full crew of sculptors to do the 3d mesh on granite and then a full tome oil painter for a year to capture the image onto canvas. That would make sure that not technological advances would steal anyone’s job.
I generated it, actually, and I put no time into it whatsoever.
Can you share the model, the input parameters and the seed?
What part of “I put no time into it” do you not understand?
Do you respect the truth?
Or you think that lying is justified when defending a cause you believe worth?
Yeah fuckin bombardio crocodillo is art, come at me
Is it AI? It’s been the banner since at least the Reddit API thing and I don’t see common AI artifacts. All the eyes and whiskers look fairly consistent for example, so do the paws. Especially with the relatively primitive AI models back then it would actually be impressive if they generated this image. I think it’s just a generic looking CGI image with off the same off shelf 3D model posed in different ways.
Someone else has highlighted spots on it
These kind of posts always have the feeling of UFO or cryptid people dissecting a grainy 3 second clip of video and coming to the conclusion that Bigfooted Aliens exist.
They already have their conclusion before they even start.
These kind of posts always have the feeling
They already have their conclusion before they even start.
🤔
“It’s not AI, also even if it is (and honestly why are you looking at something critically for more than 3 seconds to even determine this, you should just let the slop wash over you in perpetuity and never think about it) then it is good actually and the people criticizing it are just cranks”
Who cares? Who makes a new account just to ask this sort of leading question?
Well, obviusly I care. I joined Lenny today, yes. I joined this sub and was immediately a bit disgusted by the banner. So I made a post about it. Why do you care if I care then?
You care too much over something that is so significantly unimpactful.
So you’re here for less than a day and you’re already judging? First rule of the fediverse, you can go make your own community
Maybe you should make your own instance and ban anyone asking questions you dont like?
Is this a joke?
how many days until we’re allowed to judge you exactly?
Feel free to go ahead. I think it’s presumptuous to show up on your first day and rather than look around and get a vibe for something, immediately call out things you dislike. Call me old fashioned, but that’s rude.
ok, again you mention the first day. what is the acceptable number of days at which it becomes not presumptuous?
Let’s start at 2 and go from there
damn they were so close
