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Steve Foxe's avatar

I’m a pretty new subscriber, but I’m hopping off here given what I feel is a very intellectually dishonest stance on AI art.

Illegally (at least in most territories, and at the least without permission) training models on intellectual property so you can create a program that allows people to make content in the explicit branded style of a studio you are in no way affiliated with is not the same thing as screenshotting a TV show and putting some white text over it, and I think you know that.

And while you can write various justifications to minimize the environmental cost of AI usage, the fact that the “average query is equivalent to driving a car 15 feet”…adds up fast when there are millions of queries. When we’re staring down cataclysmic climate change, why are we ADDING a completely superfluous way to contribute to that? Not to mention that image generation, as I’m sure you know, takes more energy than a ChatGPT query, though you’ve misleadingly only mentioned the latter’s cost here.

I also think you know younger people today, who have attention spans that run the length of TikToks, are not going to see this meme (which only seems to appeal to older people who are already familiar either Ghibli anyway) and run out and watch Mononoke legally. All this stands to do is cheapen the image of a studio and artist long associated with auteur creation.

I’ve really enjoyed your write-ups and round-ups even though I have side-eyed the usage of AI header images. I don’t believe every use of AI = one artist’s gig lost—that’s naive—but the continued use does serve to devalue the creative arts, enrich some of the scummiest Silicon Valley vultures to ever exist, and negatively affect the environment for what? Produce the equivalent of a photo filter? What price we pay for progress.

I’m sure this will fall on deaf ears, but I was surprised to see you make such disingenuous arguments, particularly the comparison between AI image generation and friggin’ screenshot memes, and wanted to let you know why you lost a subscriber today.

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DJ's avatar

I dunno man, the EU might be on to something with banning advertising. The ad model is a huge part of the reason our media ecosystem is so screwed. In a world of CPM and CPC business models, traffic is everything. The easiest way to drive traffic is outrage and lies.

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