OutrageousHairdo

What do you mean by "Schlafly mentality?" I'm not really well-read on the history there.

Bees occasionally build hives inside peoples' homes. Like, between floors or walls. You can imagine this situation is not terribly pleasant.

Bees are pests if they're in your house. Like, one or two getting stuck in, yeah I'll help them find their way back home, but beehives inside your house? Nightmarish. Happens more in cold places, I'm told, since houses are warm.

I get what you're saying, but we have to draw the line between animals and vermin somewhere. Ticks, ants, bees, mosquitoes, roaches... these creatures are pests, and aren't worth the same consideration as, say, a bird or whatever. Everyone's line is somewhere different - maybe you are fine with spiders, maybe you hate even some mammals like rats, but there are some pretty reasonable experiential reasons people hold these opinions. It's easy enough to think a rat is cute when there aren't a bunch scurrying around your apartment complex making a mess of the place.

I do think there are of course exceptions. I'll never sympathize with people who go after animals that stay outside in their natural habitats, stuff like gophers or whatever. They have to live somewhere, after all.

His ass is not advancing to the Imperial Age

I love how the audio reading for this article is just straight-up AI generated. Like literally they mispronounce Xi's name within 3 seconds of the thing starting, kinda wondering why they even bothered.

You are what you eat.

Yeah I obviously can't really argue with that. I just prefer to say they aren't real art because it's more impactful I guess.

While I don't think delineating "real art" from mere images is as simple as coming up with the right math formula, I do think that we can get somewhere by looking at how many decisions a human is making versus the decisions they aren't making. For the sake of discussion, let's ignore all the commentary pieces specifically about AI, or for which the lack of any guiding intention is a part of the artistic message, let's just talk about plain old art. The thing that's important to me is that every single piece of an image is a choice - every line, every brush stroke, every pixel. Take, for example, Starry Night - the reason that painting looks the way it does, looks so meaningful, isn't just because van Gogh painted a really pretty town, it's not just about the complete image, but the way that each individual stroke swirls and loops into each other. There were thousands of mutually reinforcing decisions that the artist made there, each movement of the brush was chosen deliberately to reinforce the piece's intended viewing experience. The comparison to current technology is almost comically unfavorable, and while I don't think images created with AI assistance are categorically incapable of being art, the vast majority of this material is indisputably tripe, and I would argue the use of AI in the process does something to taint the final product in many cases.

Art is about making decisions. The guy I cited as a real artist literally didn't do anything - mailing in an empty canvas was his decision, so clearly the issue for me isn't the amount of effort involved. The reason I don't like AI isn't just because it's making things "too easy" - I hate it because it represents the minimum possible level of decision-making, the offloading of all creative responsibility to an algorithm. If tomorrow there was some magic brain-scan technology that produced an image directly from your thoughts, put the thing that you were visualizing mentally right on the screen the exact way you were thinking it, that would still be art, in my mind, while GenAI would not be. Once the human involved isn't the one making the calls, you're not an artist any more, you're just an editor.

This so colossally misunderstands every fucking point I made, nothing you said here is correct. Just to enumerate:

• Yeah, it is fucking theft if it happens under capitalism. The whole first paragraph was getting present day conditions out of the way before I indulged in hypotheticals. Pretending like it's "wrong" to try and hold ownership over your own work is just a total non-sequitir if we're discussing present day capitalist conditions, for reasons I should hope are completely obvious to any Hexbear native.
• I'm using the industry-accepted term that everyone already knows and uses, I'm not going to weigh down my writing with a bunch of air quotes. My whole fucking point with this is that it's not intelligent.
• It's still wrong if you as an individual make your own model instead of using the corporate AI. If you're using the same training sets full of internet art to churn out AI art, or a pre-trained model which makes use of those, I'm still going to look down on you. I know we're all pro-piracy here, and I am too, but it's different when you do it to normal people.
• It sounds like you're being deliberately obtuse here. The whole reason why AI sucks at art is that it represents the deliberate lack of choice, the absence of human intervention. The only reason you should be asking AI to make something for you is if you genuinely don't give enough of a shit to shape that part of your work yourself. Like, sure, if you didn't want to do a bunch of sand and dirt textures for your video game, go ahead I guess, nobody's out there pouring their soul out by deciding the exact arrangement of rocks on the floor, but for anything else it just feels counterproductive. The vast majority of my friends are digital artists, I certainly have no issue with computers, it just sounds like you're trying to avoid engaging with my points. The only way to make AI art into real art is to add the humanity back into it, and I don't see many artists doing that sort of thing. Most so-called "AI artists" I've seen just retry until they get an image they like, take the one they liked most, feed it back in with some stuff they wanna change highlighted purple, maybe photoshop out the shitty hands if they're really going the distance, and then they're done. I get that the definition of art is subjective and all, but it just isn't enough to clear the bar for me when the AI is making like 90% of the decisions and doing 95% of the work, and most people are not putting in that level of effort to begin with.