I first dabbled with AI image generation back in 2022 and sprinkled a few such images throughout my worldbuilding project. It was easy to look past all of the flaws with the idea that it was nothing more than a novelty. And I never cared nearly enough about my worldbuilding to pay anyone for artwork of it.
Now that I look back at it, those images are obvious slop, which I’ve grown to dislike as much as the next person. But recent comments I’ve seen here and on other sites have made me wonder if my brain has rotted in the same manner that makes some boomers fall for AI slop. There will be videos where the use of AI is not very noticeable to me, but not with deceptive intent. Maybe an illustration to get the point across or a subtle two-second animation. Commenters will very passionately point it out. To be honest, I don’t see the creator either paying for the equivalent human work or drawing anything better themselves.
Does it really just look that bad? Is it an issue with what AI and the companies that sponsor it stand for? Theft of real artists’ work? Does it change at all if the images were generated locally with the creator’s own hardware and resources? What about upscaling images, like I do with old wallpapers so that they look better on new monitors?
I assume what I’ve just said will attract downvotes, but that was my thought process and I do want to understand where other people draw the line and for what reasons. Should we limit it to quick-and-dirty illustrations, pure novelty, upscaling existing images, a model that only incorporates work if the artist consents, or something else?
When teaching people how to spot AI images.
Never
I’m mutuals with one woman on twitter who keeps generating images of herself as like, a chinese special forces operator with a magical shadow kitty watching over her. They’re all completely benign. She posts other good shit about geopolitics but is clearly completely screen fried. She gets a pass. Everyone else can take a hike
It’s pretty much just this concept × ∞
I’d say it’s fine in a personal context, e.g. to use as your wallpaper or a in a private RPG campaign with friends.
No one would would give you shit for downloading other people’s art off Pinterest for your D&D character, but if you reposted it online as your own, it would be plagiarism. Since AI art takes copyrighted material from all over the internet, the principle is the same
I think it’s always fine to use AI stuff as intermediary material, but almost never as finished product unless you specifically need something that feels samey and average.
For world building it’s pretty cool cause you can finally visualize that city that you’ve spent time imagining in detail, and use that to sharpen your description of it or spot incongruities. And for writing in general there’s nothing wrong with story boarding scenes and characters to ground your writing if you have more of a visual mind. Anything that helps you on your specific craft without bogging down the quality of the finished piece.
blurry background art (eg. in a game like hollow knight, where there are thousands of images, i wouldn’t mind if like 100 of them which you barely notice wouldn’t have been made from scratch, saving peoples time)
I’d rather see MS paint illustrations than GenAI images.
Like others will say there is no ethical use of it, except maybe locally on your own hardware for personal curiousity. It’s an environmental catastrophy, if it’s used more it will increase the value for companies like OpenAI whos owners want to be the feudal chiefs of a new techno-fascist society, and the more encouraged and developed it becomes, the more useful it is for surveillance companies and totalitarian states.
I’m sure there are uses I don’t notice, but it does look very bad, and if I notice a company using it it makes me feel a sort of repulsion towards that company.
The worst problem, to me, is that it pollutes our “environment” that is, our cultural environment, our pool of input about the world, with potential corruption, inaccuracies, at worst the intensification of falsities, stereotypes, and mediocre conceptions. Even if you don’t detect them in an AI image, they may be there. A real world image contains details that humans have not already preconceived, and diluting that with the bullshit of what humanity thinks is reality but which may or may not be, will have a greater long run cost than we can imagine.
never. ai “art” is theft.
There are different reasons against AI, it depends which ones you consider more important.
A) taking jobs away from artists - you can argue that if you would never have hired an artist for this anyway (throw away character portrait for a D&D game) then it’s justifiable.
B) That AI was trained on stolen content. - depends on your definition of stolen, this is the area that makes me think twice.
C) Environmental reasons - I try to generate stuff locally if I use it, but you still have the impact from the model being trained originally.
It doesn’t necessarily look bad, but it has a certain look. Once you start to recognize AI’s tells you can’t unsee it.
I don’t think individual use matters that much. It’s slop, but if it doesn’t matter then slop is fine. It’s when institutions and companies and governments are using generated images instead of hiring an artist that it becomes a problem; an artist didn’t get paid for what is essentially stolen work and now that slop will be crammed down our throats.
When the model isn’t built on stolen licensed works and built/run in a way that isn’t in conflict with the community where the data center resides seems like some basic requirements to meet.
Morally: never. It’s built off stolen property and destroys the world with its ecological consequences.
Practically: as a placeholder. A real human will always outperform an AI, but if the intent is not quality but to just get the gist across, then it works in a pinch.
To be clear, it’s not just the quality of the final product that matters. An AI-generated product is unmaintainable and uneditable. You can’t make variations of a generated product. It’s technical debt at its most fundamental
Never.
