I don’t think I’ve ever posted here before but reading this makes me want to throw my two cents in.
I think the biggest issue that drives this whole thing into being the scale of problem that it is, is actually bad faith behaviours. People who don’t approach from a set of well defined or positive moral principles. This, I think, is the link between the type of people that chubberdy is describing, the “I want” people, and what I’ll call “bad AI use”. I am against any sort of commercial use of AI trained on anything other than self owned property. The principles of operation of AI, at least to a tech pleb like myself, don’t seem to violate any sort of ethical boundary on their own. If you have a company that has its own internally managed property, be it code or art or writing, if they train an LLM to do work using their own content, I cannot see why there would be any moral problem. Sure, it’s enshittification and horrible for the people who get replaced, but at the end of the day the market will sort that out if the technology doesn’t perform better than a person and offers no extra benefit.
I have a particular dislike of cloud based AI, but it has a certain amount of merit as an advanced search engine. I work on my own vehicles a lot, and having ChatGPT on hand to quickly find out if something is a common problem or if many people have had that problem before is very handy. It doesn’t impinge on anyone’s hard work, and saves me a lot of frustration in diagnosing funky electrical or computer issues. When it comes to AI art, my views over time have shifted from “I just want a picture, what’s the harm?” to being basically totally against unfiltered use of it in any commercial situation. If you are making a game, and you generate something, especially from a cloud based generator, and slap it, unedited into your game, you should be browbeaten over it. That is a zero effort approach and you have added nothing to it and there should be a social stigma attached to that because it is a manifestation of your shitty attitude. People who try to use genAI as part of a workflow, and add value to it shouldn’t be lambasted to the same degree. People will use whatever they can to get by. As somebody mentioned before, artisan crafts are very costly, either in time or set up. There’s a reason a great deal of science and art was made by rich people for rich people for the bulk of human history. Having a hobby of this scale denotes a specific degree of money or time freedom that probably the vast majority of people on this planet simply do not have, apart from some people who’s natural talent allows them to bypass the time constraints or creative abilities let them work with less money than others.
Someone who is what I would call a good faith actor is somebody who understands that the genAI is a means to an end, and uses it as part of their pathway of development. Somebody who endlessly churns out straight gens for years on end is bad faith, but someone who starts off using it to plugs gaps, and over time develops their own set of skills and either does away with the AI or is no longer reliant on it as a method of creating their art is good faith, because they are pursuing the correct element of art, which is to add crrative meaning to something. Now one might say that I’m only saying that because of my own use of AI which I detail a bit below, to which I have no direct rebuttal. I can only say that I believe the moral structure that I am proposing and subjective interpretation of that will lead one to conclude I’m not being disingenuous.
Personally, I run local genAI for my own entertainment and learning. I find it fascinating to a certain extent and like to try to play with it and see if I can get it to break. As a personal rule, I would never ask for money for something that has been generated. I also don’t feel like sharing it all that much because objectively most of the stuff it puts out is rubbish. The advantage is I’m able to get an approximation of what I want to see without having to bother another human being. That being said, I also like to learn some artistic things by changing what the machine puts out to suit my vision. I have been doing basically since SD and others became a thing, and while I’m still no artist, it has given me a much greater appreciation and understanding of what real art is and what AI cannot do as a function of its existence. GenAI can never replace real artistry, and that is an objective reality grounded in the very definition of all types of creative art.
This stems from my main point about this issue, which is bad faith behaviour. I can only speak for myself, but I approach issues like this with a no harm mantra. Arguments can be made about certain things but at the end of the day anyone living in a developed nation is living their entire life off the backs of undeveloped countries, so there’s a set of degrees of harm that has to be accepted here.
I see low effort AI posting as harmful not because of its specific content but as a mechanism of enabling low effort bad faith people to undermine real effort. I’m less concerned about morals of art theft as much as I am about the theft of the VALUE of effort. To me, and from what I understand that a lot of creatives probably see it this way without articulating it in this particular way, the art itself is not the problem, it is the intent of the effort behind the art. Nobody spends years painting because the final product looks like a photographic representation of the subject matter. Instead it’s the individual elements of craftsmanship that compose the work as a whole that make it valuable beyond its objective value as a set of pixels or oil on a canvas. This is where I see the root of the issue really lies. GenAI fails to work beyond any surface level because the sub elements that give a creative work meaning are all wrong. And people who use it are undermining the value of artistic expression itself by removing the expression from it completely. It’s in a similar vein to the pushback against modern abstract art. If you don’t know art language, you’re just going to see scribbles and colours that looks offensive. GenAI does the same, but at a level where most people can ‘comprehend’ it, therefore validating it as art in their eyes. To be clear this is not the position I hold and I am not endorsing it.
It seems the reason it’s so hard to try to put a pin on the solution to the AI issue is because it’s too ill defined to be effectively policed in a way that can satisfy either side. Nobody can agree on a set of values it represents to both sides equally and then using that as a framework for interpreting genAI work and then using that as a way to police it. AntiAI sentiment is “anything relating to it”, proAI is “it doesn’t infringe on my immediate morals and gives me what I want”. There will never be any solution to this while the two sides are at cross purposes. Finding a way to objectively define genAI content within a framework that can then be policed in a way that satisfies the ontological needs of both sides is the only way to deal with this problem rationally.
I think the biggest problem is that there is a disconnect of purposes on both sides and neither is willing to address the other’s for fear of invalidating their own side because at a glance they appear incompatible. Finding a set of standards that both sides can agree on as being morally acceptable and unacceptable is the first step to clarifying the issue in such a way that it can be dealt with at any level beyond indiscriminate ban hammering.
I am extremely time poor, and this stuff isn’t my main hobby, but I do enjoy some of the creative aspects of it but have for years found that a lack of time to develop the necessary skills means turning to genAI is a very clear way of overcoming that. HOWEVER, personally, I am willing to swallow defeat and not create a work that uses genAI because it goes against my ethos. That being said, there will be people who are unwilling to make that personal sacrifice and are willing to use genAI to achieve their goals. This is where the faith framework needs to come into play; are they genuinely interested in their artistic craft and are using it as a stool to get them to a point where they can climb up by themselves, are are they content to either stay at that level or will they try to keep stacking stools to try to reach their goals instead of applying themselves? That is where I think most people could agree that you can draw the line for both sides as being unacceptable.
In a different vein, as someone in the manufacturing trade, I can empathise with creatives who see their work as being taken over by genAI. I learned classical machining/metalworking trades, and while some people might disagree with me, I see that line of work as being in the same type of work as artistic creativity, with slightly different end points. I have been replaced with CNC machines, which take out 9 out of every 10 who used to be me, and now genAI threatens even that with robotics and automation of toolpath finding and model generation. But because I have an obsessive fascination with things, I have developed a unique skill set that makes me difficult to replace completely, so I don’t suffer quite the same as someone who has a singular, well refined skillset. Many of the arguments that antiAI people use have already been run through machining and other metalworking trades and absolutely obliterated the job market there, hundreds of years ago. People who still make creatively with their hands stand against an industrial complex that has given us so much more than we could all ever dream of. Every single person using this website or any sort of modern device is standing on the backs of “work” rights of people from a century ago being swept aside for convenience and profit. There needs to be a sense of balance of progression vs retaining our fundamental values, and the current environment addresses neither, even beyond the scope of genAI.
Edited for clarity and so I sound less pompous.