[I wrote v 1.0 in Dec 2022, v 2.0 in June 2023, and v 3.0 on January 2, 2025 after getting to know some other AI users.]
In fall 2022 I began fucking around with generative AI to make character art and landscapes. Within a couple of months I was defriended by a few people on Dreamwidth who were vehemently anti-AI and said things like "people who make AI 'art' should go to jail." These are, by the way, the same people who also say ACAB and Defund The Police, so it's interesting to me how their tune changes over what they think is "stealing art". Also, some of the harassment I've received on Ao3 from people who aren't You Know Who and her friends, has been randos coming @ me about AI art, which contributed to why I turned off comments for good in 2023.
So yeah, I'm pissed off and have Opinions.
First of all, the oft-repeated argument of "Just learn how to draw" is bullshit. I do draw... and this is what it looks like. It is not, to say the least, the sort of photorealistic, cinematic imagery I have in my head of my guys and their worlds. It's fun to doodle now and again, but it's not satisfying the way "bringing them to life" is.
Since the 00s, I've made photomanipulations. I have some of my photomanips of my characters on this site. [My friend SemperViridis is better at it than I am.] I still do photomanips, but now I'm using AI bases that I edit and sometimes/often layer with other edited bases.
Most of the other AI users I've encountered since I joined deviantART for the second time in September 2024, do not use AI "straight up". Some do, but a lot of them, especially the ones who offer their work for sale, are doing quite a bit of editing. So the argument that "this isn't your work" is dead on arrival, with what I do and what a lot of other people do. This, for example, took me seven hours of tweaking individual images and layering together. Tell me fucking again there was no work involved.
Even for the people who use AI images straight off the generator as-is, though, it's still in my opinion a valid form of expression, and the AI haters parroting "it's stealing" don't really understand what they're saying.
Over the years, I have seen a lot of fantasy art [digital and traditional] and to be perfectly honest there are some professional fantasy artists whose styles are so similar that I wouldn't be able to tell them apart without labels. Is this plagiarism?
Guy Gavriel Kay was extremely influenced by JRR Tolkien. [He also helped edit the Silmarillion with Christopher Tolkien.] Is this plagiarism now?
Do you like the song "Uptown Funk" by Bruno Mars? Do you like anything by Pharrell or Jamiroquai? You can absolutely hear throwback influences. Do you like "Justify My Love" by Madonna? A lot of you don't know it samples a Public Enemy song. [Yes, for real.] Do you like The Weeknd? His voice sounds a lot like Michael Jackson's. Many rock bands were influenced by other bands that came before them. Elvis Presley was heavily influenced by blues legends. Is this plagiarism now?
"This has flowers and trees that vaguely resemble this other thing so it's plagiarism -" OK, so how many coffee shop AUs exist? How many Omegaverse AUs exist? How many gapfillers, fix-it fics, retellings of canon, etc, resemble each other on AO3, exactly? How many people try to imitate the literary style of Tolkien and fail? How many "Maglor's wife" OCs can dance on the head of a pin? How many "modern girl falls into Middle-Earth" stories are there? Is this plagiarism now?
"It's being trained on other people's art without permission" - every single one of us is a collection of influences and learning patterns that we may not consciously recognize. When I was a kid in school, our art teacher had us try to replicate Van Gogh paintings.
With non-AI fanart, it still often involves likenesses of other actors, whether their characters or as faceclaims, whether with photoshop or digital painting or traditional art. These likenesses are being used without permission.
With fanfiction, you are borrowing another creator's characters, worldbuilding, etc, without permission. The Tolkien Estate explicitly says "no fanfiction" [thankfully, they don't have a habit of going after archives/individuals]. GRRM doesn't want you writing ASOIAF/GOT fanfiction and has publicly said so; Anne Rice has gotten upset enough over it that she's sued and cyberbullied fanfiction writers. I'll stop with those examples but there's more. Additionally, if you write RPF, you are shipping actors and [more often than not] writing them in sexually explicit scenarios without their consent.
Where do we draw the line of "stealing", here? Why is this OK and AI art isn't? Nobody has been able to give me a sufficient answer.
As far as "putting artists out of work" - if you're 20 and trying to compete with 5000 other people drawing Sanic furry porn, AI didn't ruin your livelihood, sweetie. I know AI users who were professional artists before AI and still are - they learned how to use AI as a tool and make their job a little easier. They still do photomanipulation/draw/etc. I've seen some AI users' WIP art and they're doing all the same stuff... with AI bases.
In my own case, I've commissioned a few artists over the years, under my previous dA handle phoenixstarbird. One of the artists I paid didn't really follow instructions and botched Sören's tattoos and hair color [I was polite about it, but I was Not Happy]. Only one of the pictures I've ever commissioned has been worth showing anywhere and [putting it bluntly] I have mixed feelings about it due to the questionable company the artist keeps.
So in light of that, let me full-on Godwin this shit. Would you rather have "real", human-made art from Hitler, or would you rather do it yourself with a text-to-art machine and not have to worry that the person making art of your blorbo is an asshole and you forever have their bad vibes shitting up something you paid for? If I was making the kind of art in 2019 that I began making in the second half of 2024 once AI improved + my own photoediting abilities improved along with it, I could have avoided asking others to draw my blorbos and saved myself quite a bit of money.
And are you going to begrudge a disabled person that? Not having to spend thousands of dollars for a little bit of sunshine in this shitshow of a world?
Which is part of the problem here. Right now, my observation has been that anti-AI hysteria is a way for people in fandom to use theoretical/fictional "artists put out of work" scenarios [it's not nearly as much as it's being spun] and cry "ethics" [when their own consumption/behavior is not the purest ever] to go after real people who are "acceptable targets" [marginalized people] where the attackers will get cancelled if they say their actual problem is that the person using AI [or falsely accused of using AI] is trans/queer, or BIPOC, or disabled/mentally ill/neurodivergent/etc, and the attacker/s are just using AI as an excuse to dogpile the marginalized fan/s. [A lot of people in fandom who claim to be progressive allies in public, are bigots behind closed doors. Ask me how I fucking know.] If you gave THAT MUCH of a shit about "ethics", really, you wouldn't be doing half the shit you're doing every day right now without even thinking about it, and you certainly wouldn't be dogpiling some marginalized person for making non-commercial art of their blorbos.
...It's very similar to the antis who are ~so concerned about tEh cHiLdReN~ that they send fucking death threats to people who write problematic ships/kinks. Actually, it's not a coincidence that a lot of people in fandom who are vocally anti-AI are also antis and engage in some pretty awful behavior, which is why I tend to just go ahead and pre-emptively block people who I know are very anti-AI-under-all-circumstances-no-exceptions.
You're entitled to your opinion. I'm not asking you to suddenly lurve AI, that's not the point of this essay. The point of this is to maybe stop and think rationally and critically about what you're saying and why, instead of hopping on the latest virtue signalling bandwagon for clout and screaming "AI Bad" harassing others and then wonder why fandom is so toxic; you might be part of the problem.