[Coda]

I hope you don't mind if I reply to your points a little bit out of order, because I agree with you a lot more than it might seem.

my last point that i can make is that ais are not humans. they don't have the same process of learning, they don't have the same process of creating. until we create a fully sentient ai, they are not the same. do not treat them as though they're the same.

My apologies, I wasn't at all trying to treat AI and humans as the same. Indeed, they don't have the same process of creating, and even if they were sentient they wouldn't be the same.

But observing what similarities there are really is a useful way to try to understand something that's new. It's easy to get hung up on what's different, but it's the similarities that make it possible to reason about the comparison. Mechanically speaking, we don't learn the same way as an AI, it's true, and we don't learn the same kinds of skills or use them in the same way. But for both humans and AIs, we generally don't build up our skills by memorizing specific information -- we build up our skills by practicing with lots of examples to get an understanding of what we have to do in order to make something similar.

So the point I was trying to make with that comparison is that, ethically speaking, if it's okay for a human to do something, then that's at least an argument in favor of it being okay for a human to use a tool to do it. And the point of that observation is merely to try to focus people's attention on the parts that are the real problems with real impacts instead of getting caught up in an emotional reaction to the parts that aren't actually what's causing trouble.

i feel as though you're looking at it from a point of view that doesn't take into account late-stage capitalism.

No, I am -- I'm just saying it's too late. Late-stage capitalism is unhealthy, and the only way to succeed is to compete in the market, so fighting against a technology that isn't going to go away is only going to result in being out-competed by the people who choose to embrace it.

also this will put people out of jobs. why hire 500 artists when you can hire ten techbros and get similar enough results in terms of artwork? why hire people that know how to use 3d modelling software (particularly blender, as that one's notorious for being an absolute fucking bitch to learn) when you can feed some models through an ai and have the same result? why hire a concept artist that knows how to do their job, when you can just use ai?

It will, and that sucks, although I think your particular description doesn't really describe it accurately.

AI image generators are a tool that lets artists be more productive. It lets them get more done in less time. And the better of an artist you are, the more you can do with an AI image generator.

But being able to get more done in less time also means that you don't need as many people. That much is absolutely true, and that sucks. Robots replaced humans in manufacturing by being able to do better work faster and more reliably, with less risk of personal injury. People made the same complaints about automation when that happened, and industrialization shook the world up for a while before we as a society figured out how to deal with it.

So I think we're kind of at the point where we need to figure out how to deal with it. That's where we should be focusing our attention.

i've seen at least one case where someone was banned off of an art-based subreddit, because their style (realistic) looked too similar to something that was generated by ai. have you got any way to fix that? have you truly got some way of distinguishing between ai art and art produced by someone with the necessary tools and experience?

No, I don't have a way to do it, but I also think that's trying to solve the wrong problem. It ties in directly to the point I'm trying to make. Honest, hardworking people are getting hurt because of the bias against AI art. That person wouldn't have gotten banned if people weren't freaking out over new technology, and that attitude also pushes people away from the legitimate uses of it. The fear isn't helpful. The fear makes the problem worse.

people would still use ai art to claim that they were the ones to truly create it and not just feed thousands upon thousands of works through an ai. people would still steal artworks and feed them through an ai, even in-progress artworks, and demand credit from everyone they've stolen from.

That's no different from bots that scrape deviantArt to make t-shirts that I can go buy at the mall. It's no different from people who slap some Photoshop filters on someone's artwork and claim it's theirs. That's not a problem with AI art. That's a problem with humans being awful, and that's kind of one of the points I was trying to make -- it's not the tool's fault.

And what that says to me is that human society is really bad at dealing with this problem in general. Even if community outrage is somehow able to put the cat back in the bag and AI art generators become a dead-end technology that nobody ever uses, it wouldn't actually solve it. People would just find another way to unfairly enrich themselves using of the work of others. That's what we really need to figure out how to fight back against.

additionally, i am aware of how browsers work. images are downloaded, they get stored in a cache, which then get displayed on your client. at least, that's what i think happens?

I know you're aware; that's why I put in the disclaimer that I meant "you" as a general non-specific person. The only point I was making is that downloading someone's art isn't what makes it stealing. It's subsequently benefiting from giving away copies of it that makes it stealing.

if you suggest that we start using ai artwork for trisphee's items, i will fuck off and make my own site. i have no experience in making a site.

I suggest no such thing whatsoever. Even if I wanted to (and I don't), it's actually a perfect example for why the current state of technology can't replace human artists -- AI image generators are terrible at consistency! We have tens of thousands of items that all have to fit pixel-perfect on our bases, and we've put a lot of work into trying to keep stuff working with a very specific color palette so that items match as well as possible. Most items have multiple poses that need to line up exactly.

And even if you could train an AI image generator to match our style, it would still require a comparable amount of effort from our art team to clean it up and make it usable. It wouldn't end up helping us at all.