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.
I just want to focus on the environmental question: how exactly do we determine what is worthy of electrons? Should we ban blogs because they also take power to run that can accelerate climate change? What about online gaming - that seems useless?
Degrowth is never the solution to any problem - all we can do is create more clean power to accelerate our economy, rather than shaming people for doing things that might use power.
Posting a meme using copyright material is an infringement, no ifs or buts. You copied an artistic creation without the permission of the rights holder. Training a model is a much greyer activity, and it's extremely hard to distinguish what they do from what an artist would do in being influenced but another artist.
Like i understand and even respect how much people hate ai stuff, but the ip critique is generally completely incoherent unless you are a complete luddite.
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.
I wonder if a lot of people are in a similar position to me: I’m a software developer, and it seems likely that AI tools will make that and every other marketable skill that I possess obsolete in the near future. Others can fill in the laptop job that applies to them. Every time I see a piece of AI art, it’s a reminder of the impending end of a career I’ve loved. Not a great feeling, and I think that deep sadness often emerges as rage posts.
I don’t feel as if I’m somehow entitled to keep working in the same field my whole life. But it sure burns, and I have some deep empathy for the AI haters.
As a fellow developer, I don't understand this attitude. It seems very unlikely that AI will take over like that, and if it does, frankly it would be glorious! If anyone in the world could dictate an app on demand from an AI engine, that would allow for incredible customization and power.
Every business could have a perfectly customized accounting engine! Every mobile phone user could have a set of apps completely tailored to their needs! The economic boon to our civilization would be enormous.
I don’t claim that there wouldn’t be benefits. But to the person who’s likely to be unemployed soon, it’s a huge bummer regardless. And my point is that there are likely others who see AI art and it triggers a fear of their own future obsolescence in the world of work. Huge swaths of human work will be eliminated. I think that’s behind some of the backlash that Jeremiah was mentioning.
Best example for how AI affects artists is how the Internet affected the Newspaper industry. People started getting used to getting news for free making it harder, sure news platforms pivoted and erected paywalls but even then, a lot of people lost their jobs.
I don't think that's an accurate description of what happened, though. Yes, there are issues with convincing people to pay for content online, but what killed newspapers is that they had a virtual monopoly on local information that allowed them to command huge margins on advertising and classifieds. Those margins then subsidized the hard news side of the paper that gave the paper its reputation.
Once Craigslist and other online info services destroyed the utility of the local paper, those margins were crushed, and there was no way to recreate them online. The actual cost of the news was always a hidden cost to the reader, and once it was revealed, many/most people were uninterested in paying that cost.
That is possible, yes, but what would you say is the answer to that? I don't think it would have been good to legally require newspapers to employ people, or to ban Craigslist.
For better and worse, change is a natural part of life, and when society changes, there are winners and losers. We can't avoid or prevent change just because someone might have to get a different job.
Job loss can't be ignored. The Great Depression and the Great Recession both brought changes because people cared about the unemployment.
I'm not saying ban AI. Maybe artists can contribute their art to a dataset which gives them monthly payments based on the AI that uses them? There may be a better idea than this but it's what I thought of.
I think you understate the likely effect of AI art on artists job prospects. For sure, at the margin, some art that would have been commissioned to a human artist is now done more cheaply with AI. For better or worse.
I personally do not mind shitty art like the garbage throughout this post being AI-generated. Why people are interested in making themselves and their families into anime is unclear.
---AI art is currently not nearly close to being able to 'replace' the work of talented artists for anything that actually matters.
---People who argue that using AI to generate images makes them artists, or who try to sell AI art, are pathetic.
---Using AI to make goofy nonsense is pretty fun.
---I feel like there's a good chance AI art will continue to improve over years to come, possibly to staggering degrees, and I am not opposed to this.
But I'm increasingly finding myself walking on eggshells whenever the subject comes up, for reasons that should be obvious considering how many "How DARE you!" responses you've gotten here for giving a neutral-ish opinion on an AI art trend rather than denouncing it.
Why there are such intense emotions over it is an interesting question, and would probably fit well with your kind of "internet anthropology". My personal guess is that it has to do with how hobbyist artists tend to be pretty central figures in many nerdy online communities. (Think anything relating to fantasy, video games, anime, TTRPGs, etc...) Many of whom supplement their income with commissions, and many of the sorts of people who pay for commissioned art online might also be the sorts of people to just be satisfied with a free AI image instead. In addition to the loss of business, making it harder to spend time on a beloved hobby, actual artists are more likely to notice the flaws in AI art and feel frustrated by people using it frequently.
A lot of the internet is downstream of those aforementioned nerdy communities, so after long enough opposing AI art basically became a left-wing (I think) culture war flag. It's kind of wild to think back to my old college Discord group posting tons of nonsense we made with Dall-e Mini back when it was new and fun. Now just about everyone in that friend circle will be vociferously anti-AI.
Personally, I thought AI art was pretty neat at first. These days I'm kinda ambivalent and neutral about it, but still curious to see where it goes. I'm friends with a number of those artist types who have very, very negative opinions towards it, which has gotten me to question it out of sympathy. But I still just don't quite agree with the overwhelming opposition to it. I do wish I was able to use it for quick things like making an image of a one-off NPC in a TTRPG without it being awkward due to the strong emotions around AI art, but that's very much a first world problem.
AI haters probably have gone a little too far with some of their rhetoric (ie: rotted souls), but I can certainly understand the pushback on AI. For starters, this doesn't seem that revolutionary. It feels like a more advanced version of a photo filter craze from 10 years ago - I'll go on record and say seeing my feeds filled with nothing but that for several days was annoying then too. For two years (three years? I can't remember when the AI craze kicked off) I've seen countless bros, wannabe influencers and ultra wealthy tech CEOs proclaim this was the next big thing: it would put us all out of work, it had the potential to end the world, it would take over entertainment, and then I'm told of an update that takes a "huge leap" and see... cartoon profile pictures.
Facebook is a slop factory, google search is noticeably worse than it was 10 years ago, Twitter feels like 4chan and Spotify's wrapped was a train wreck this year. I think a lot of people are feeling fed up in their relationship with tech these days and instead of addressing it, these companies are pumping up an AI bubble, I get the frustration.
Having said that, this post did challenge some of my pre-conceived notions on AI and gave some context to that Miyazaki quote I see everywhere. I appreciate that, looking forward to future posts.
I've only heard complaints about AI art from, basically, Western amateurs who post online all day and can only engage in basic generalities.
An example of that is calling the style "Studio Ghibli". That was developed by a specific person, and their name wasn't Hayao Miyazaki.
Japanese artists actually have the work ethic (and free time) to make stuff like this all day and generally you don't see them complaining. Also, they talk shit about Miyazaki all the time which is funny because Westerners basically worship him nonstop.
Well of course it is, it’s a Snapchat filter applied to other people’s vacation photos. You’re not supposed to care about those, but it’s not something anyone would ever hire an artist for either.
It’s the slop aspect that makes it grating. Anyone that’s ever been annoyed at a filter being trendy and being force fed the results will tell you that.
There’s no novelty, there’s no craft, there’s no artistry. It’s just having a 20 dollar photo filter shoved down your throat
> Anyone that’s ever been annoyed at a filter being trendy and being force fed the results will tell you that.
If this happens to you, you have undiagnosed depression and should see a psychiatrist. Or at least develop a meditation practice. (Serious!)
> There’s no novelty, there’s no craft, there’s no artistry.
There are two parts here, the filter and the original photo. The second one is where that comes in. The reason they're being posted is that the filter /removes/ some of it, which makes it safe to post because the "craft and artistry" also makes the originals too personal to let anyone see them.
Think you might be confusing "annoyed at a trend" with "visibly angry at a trend". You might not be familiar with the term overexposure, but it exists.
Second paragraph's a non-sequitur so I don't really have anything to say about it.
straight up unsubscribed for this pro-AI perspective. Seriously, Miyazaki himself denounced this shit. It is absolutley a direct counter to the messaging in all of his films. Gross. Unacceptable.
See, I'd hope that people would actually read the post before unsubscribing. You're free to do whatever you'd like to do with your life, but by reading the full post you'd realize that Miyazaki himself did *not* actually 'denounce this shit'.
Miyazaki's issue was that they were showing him a zombie moving in a way that was supposed to be "gross", but it reminded him of a disabled person he'd met once, so he thought it was ableist.
Best example for how AI affects artists is how the Internet affected the Newspaper industry. People started getting used to getting news for free making it harder, sure news platforms pivoted and erected paywalls but even then a lot of people lost their jobs.
No, I'm saying i hate the cookie directive with a passion. You can deduce from that that i don't think all eu regulation is good. I also think the uk child protection stuff is kind of nuts, mainly because it's gonna kill every small web forum if it becomes wider in application than the uk.
Yeah, I think every adult hits a point where they kind of just stop trying to keep up with every new technology, and I think AI is that spot for me. I've used chat GPT a little bit, and mostly found it unhelpful at best, and the image generated stuff is a crime against God and nature. I just can't use that stuff without feeling deeply unsettled. Maybe it's just some kind of overall trend of getting older, and being an elder millennial, but I have been consciously removing myself from social media, and on a macro level, despite the many, many good things that it has done, the internet as an endeavor feels....bad for people.
I think I have a similar views on internet as I do on unions, oddly, in that if you don't have it, you probably need it, there's a happy medium for a while, but then eventually it becomes entrenched and starts to do more harm than good.
That 404 article about slop is just... sigh. It used to be thought that network execs and studio heads were keeping good, smart, and/or challenging TV and movies away form a public who craved them. Nope! Turns out they were actually saving us from a lot of slop and audiences love slop.
I like the aesthetics of the “Studio Ghibli AI” -style generated images. I never like the aesthetics of the glossy-style AI generated images. Regarding Trump‘s White House press team using it in the fentanyl bust, it feels disarmingly powerful—the use of it—for the time being. The Trump brand—as president, has a wide range… and it seems that they’re good at trolling… Time will tell how effective it (trolling)— using all sorts of media styles, will be…
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.
I just want to focus on the environmental question: how exactly do we determine what is worthy of electrons? Should we ban blogs because they also take power to run that can accelerate climate change? What about online gaming - that seems useless?
Degrowth is never the solution to any problem - all we can do is create more clean power to accelerate our economy, rather than shaming people for doing things that might use power.
We don’t. The reality is Americans really don’t care that much about climate change
Posting a meme using copyright material is an infringement, no ifs or buts. You copied an artistic creation without the permission of the rights holder. Training a model is a much greyer activity, and it's extremely hard to distinguish what they do from what an artist would do in being influenced but another artist.
Like i understand and even respect how much people hate ai stuff, but the ip critique is generally completely incoherent unless you are a complete luddite.
Isn't training a model less gray, since the original material is no longer actual present in the final model?
Grey in the sense that it's questionable whether it's a breach of copyright at all.
> Illegally (at least in most territories, and at the least without permission) training models on intellectual property
It's not illegal most places and it's certainly legal in the US. You don't need "permission" to create transformative works and it is one.
Other countries have very explicitly made noncommercial model training legal, commercial training maybe not.
If model training without permission is illegal, then Google's search index also is.
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.
I wonder if a lot of people are in a similar position to me: I’m a software developer, and it seems likely that AI tools will make that and every other marketable skill that I possess obsolete in the near future. Others can fill in the laptop job that applies to them. Every time I see a piece of AI art, it’s a reminder of the impending end of a career I’ve loved. Not a great feeling, and I think that deep sadness often emerges as rage posts.
I don’t feel as if I’m somehow entitled to keep working in the same field my whole life. But it sure burns, and I have some deep empathy for the AI haters.
As a fellow developer, I don't understand this attitude. It seems very unlikely that AI will take over like that, and if it does, frankly it would be glorious! If anyone in the world could dictate an app on demand from an AI engine, that would allow for incredible customization and power.
Every business could have a perfectly customized accounting engine! Every mobile phone user could have a set of apps completely tailored to their needs! The economic boon to our civilization would be enormous.
I don’t claim that there wouldn’t be benefits. But to the person who’s likely to be unemployed soon, it’s a huge bummer regardless. And my point is that there are likely others who see AI art and it triggers a fear of their own future obsolescence in the world of work. Huge swaths of human work will be eliminated. I think that’s behind some of the backlash that Jeremiah was mentioning.
Yes, but those people are wrong and we should say so. We should work for the betterment of all mankind and stop being narrow-minded and protectionist!
Best example for how AI affects artists is how the Internet affected the Newspaper industry. People started getting used to getting news for free making it harder, sure news platforms pivoted and erected paywalls but even then, a lot of people lost their jobs.
I don't think that's an accurate description of what happened, though. Yes, there are issues with convincing people to pay for content online, but what killed newspapers is that they had a virtual monopoly on local information that allowed them to command huge margins on advertising and classifieds. Those margins then subsidized the hard news side of the paper that gave the paper its reputation.
Once Craigslist and other online info services destroyed the utility of the local paper, those margins were crushed, and there was no way to recreate them online. The actual cost of the news was always a hidden cost to the reader, and once it was revealed, many/most people were uninterested in paying that cost.
I'm not disagreeing with what you said but jobs were lost, and customer mindsets changed radically.
The job loss is what I'm worried about. Sure, maybe art will evolve and change but the change will result in a lot of people losing jobs.
That is possible, yes, but what would you say is the answer to that? I don't think it would have been good to legally require newspapers to employ people, or to ban Craigslist.
For better and worse, change is a natural part of life, and when society changes, there are winners and losers. We can't avoid or prevent change just because someone might have to get a different job.
Job loss can't be ignored. The Great Depression and the Great Recession both brought changes because people cared about the unemployment.
I'm not saying ban AI. Maybe artists can contribute their art to a dataset which gives them monthly payments based on the AI that uses them? There may be a better idea than this but it's what I thought of.
I think you understate the likely effect of AI art on artists job prospects. For sure, at the margin, some art that would have been commissioned to a human artist is now done more cheaply with AI. For better or worse.
I personally do not mind shitty art like the garbage throughout this post being AI-generated. Why people are interested in making themselves and their families into anime is unclear.
My view on AI art continues to be:
---AI art is currently not nearly close to being able to 'replace' the work of talented artists for anything that actually matters.
---People who argue that using AI to generate images makes them artists, or who try to sell AI art, are pathetic.
---Using AI to make goofy nonsense is pretty fun.
---I feel like there's a good chance AI art will continue to improve over years to come, possibly to staggering degrees, and I am not opposed to this.
But I'm increasingly finding myself walking on eggshells whenever the subject comes up, for reasons that should be obvious considering how many "How DARE you!" responses you've gotten here for giving a neutral-ish opinion on an AI art trend rather than denouncing it.
Why there are such intense emotions over it is an interesting question, and would probably fit well with your kind of "internet anthropology". My personal guess is that it has to do with how hobbyist artists tend to be pretty central figures in many nerdy online communities. (Think anything relating to fantasy, video games, anime, TTRPGs, etc...) Many of whom supplement their income with commissions, and many of the sorts of people who pay for commissioned art online might also be the sorts of people to just be satisfied with a free AI image instead. In addition to the loss of business, making it harder to spend time on a beloved hobby, actual artists are more likely to notice the flaws in AI art and feel frustrated by people using it frequently.
A lot of the internet is downstream of those aforementioned nerdy communities, so after long enough opposing AI art basically became a left-wing (I think) culture war flag. It's kind of wild to think back to my old college Discord group posting tons of nonsense we made with Dall-e Mini back when it was new and fun. Now just about everyone in that friend circle will be vociferously anti-AI.
Personally, I thought AI art was pretty neat at first. These days I'm kinda ambivalent and neutral about it, but still curious to see where it goes. I'm friends with a number of those artist types who have very, very negative opinions towards it, which has gotten me to question it out of sympathy. But I still just don't quite agree with the overwhelming opposition to it. I do wish I was able to use it for quick things like making an image of a one-off NPC in a TTRPG without it being awkward due to the strong emotions around AI art, but that's very much a first world problem.
AI haters probably have gone a little too far with some of their rhetoric (ie: rotted souls), but I can certainly understand the pushback on AI. For starters, this doesn't seem that revolutionary. It feels like a more advanced version of a photo filter craze from 10 years ago - I'll go on record and say seeing my feeds filled with nothing but that for several days was annoying then too. For two years (three years? I can't remember when the AI craze kicked off) I've seen countless bros, wannabe influencers and ultra wealthy tech CEOs proclaim this was the next big thing: it would put us all out of work, it had the potential to end the world, it would take over entertainment, and then I'm told of an update that takes a "huge leap" and see... cartoon profile pictures.
Facebook is a slop factory, google search is noticeably worse than it was 10 years ago, Twitter feels like 4chan and Spotify's wrapped was a train wreck this year. I think a lot of people are feeling fed up in their relationship with tech these days and instead of addressing it, these companies are pumping up an AI bubble, I get the frustration.
Having said that, this post did challenge some of my pre-conceived notions on AI and gave some context to that Miyazaki quote I see everywhere. I appreciate that, looking forward to future posts.
I've only heard complaints about AI art from, basically, Western amateurs who post online all day and can only engage in basic generalities.
An example of that is calling the style "Studio Ghibli". That was developed by a specific person, and their name wasn't Hayao Miyazaki.
Japanese artists actually have the work ethic (and free time) to make stuff like this all day and generally you don't see them complaining. Also, they talk shit about Miyazaki all the time which is funny because Westerners basically worship him nonstop.
It’s slop, sorry guy
Well of course it is, it’s a Snapchat filter applied to other people’s vacation photos. You’re not supposed to care about those, but it’s not something anyone would ever hire an artist for either.
It’s the slop aspect that makes it grating. Anyone that’s ever been annoyed at a filter being trendy and being force fed the results will tell you that.
There’s no novelty, there’s no craft, there’s no artistry. It’s just having a 20 dollar photo filter shoved down your throat
> Anyone that’s ever been annoyed at a filter being trendy and being force fed the results will tell you that.
If this happens to you, you have undiagnosed depression and should see a psychiatrist. Or at least develop a meditation practice. (Serious!)
> There’s no novelty, there’s no craft, there’s no artistry.
There are two parts here, the filter and the original photo. The second one is where that comes in. The reason they're being posted is that the filter /removes/ some of it, which makes it safe to post because the "craft and artistry" also makes the originals too personal to let anyone see them.
Think you might be confusing "annoyed at a trend" with "visibly angry at a trend". You might not be familiar with the term overexposure, but it exists.
Second paragraph's a non-sequitur so I don't really have anything to say about it.
straight up unsubscribed for this pro-AI perspective. Seriously, Miyazaki himself denounced this shit. It is absolutley a direct counter to the messaging in all of his films. Gross. Unacceptable.
See, I'd hope that people would actually read the post before unsubscribing. You're free to do whatever you'd like to do with your life, but by reading the full post you'd realize that Miyazaki himself did *not* actually 'denounce this shit'.
Miyazaki's issue was that they were showing him a zombie moving in a way that was supposed to be "gross", but it reminded him of a disabled person he'd met once, so he thought it was ableist.
Best example for how AI affects artists is how the Internet affected the Newspaper industry. People started getting used to getting news for free making it harder, sure news platforms pivoted and erected paywalls but even then a lot of people lost their jobs.
You mean the EU has absolutely awesome tech regulations.
I have clicked that fucking cookies notice about 1000000 times now and i have never been grateful for it or seen any value in it
So you just don’t like that tech is subject to any regulation whatsoever, great insight.
No, I'm saying i hate the cookie directive with a passion. You can deduce from that that i don't think all eu regulation is good. I also think the uk child protection stuff is kind of nuts, mainly because it's gonna kill every small web forum if it becomes wider in application than the uk.
Yeah, I think every adult hits a point where they kind of just stop trying to keep up with every new technology, and I think AI is that spot for me. I've used chat GPT a little bit, and mostly found it unhelpful at best, and the image generated stuff is a crime against God and nature. I just can't use that stuff without feeling deeply unsettled. Maybe it's just some kind of overall trend of getting older, and being an elder millennial, but I have been consciously removing myself from social media, and on a macro level, despite the many, many good things that it has done, the internet as an endeavor feels....bad for people.
I think I have a similar views on internet as I do on unions, oddly, in that if you don't have it, you probably need it, there's a happy medium for a while, but then eventually it becomes entrenched and starts to do more harm than good.
That 404 article about slop is just... sigh. It used to be thought that network execs and studio heads were keeping good, smart, and/or challenging TV and movies away form a public who craved them. Nope! Turns out they were actually saving us from a lot of slop and audiences love slop.
I like the aesthetics of the “Studio Ghibli AI” -style generated images. I never like the aesthetics of the glossy-style AI generated images. Regarding Trump‘s White House press team using it in the fentanyl bust, it feels disarmingly powerful—the use of it—for the time being. The Trump brand—as president, has a wide range… and it seems that they’re good at trolling… Time will tell how effective it (trolling)— using all sorts of media styles, will be…
That Cowabunga tweet is an idea that was done years ago (the original was just the more elegant “it’s a cold and it’s a broken cowabunga”)