DefendingAIArt is a subreddit run by mod “Trippy-Worlds,” who also runs the debate sister subreddit AIWars. Some poking around made clear that AIWars is perfectly fine with having overt Nazis around, for example a guy with heil hitler in his name who accuses others of lying because they are “spiritually jewish.” So we’re off to a great start.
the first thing that drew my eye was this post from a would be employer:
not really clear what the title means, but this person seems to have had a string of encounters with the most based artists of all time.
also claims to have been called “racial and gender slurs” for using ai art and that he was “kicked out of 20 groups” and some other things. idk what to tell this guy, it legitimately does suck that wealthy people have the money to pay for lots of art and the rest of us don’t
I really enjoyed browsing around this subreddit, and a big part of that was seeing how much the stigma around AI gets to people who want to use it. pouring contempt on this stuff is good for the world
the above guy would like to know what combination of buttons to press to counter the “that just sounds like stealing from artists” attack. a commenter leaps in to help and immediately impales himself:
you hate to see it. another commenter points out that well … maybe these people just aren’t your friends
to close out, an example of fearmongering:
I think the main issue at hand is them trying to pass themselves off as artists for typing in a couple words into a text box and letting the AI create an image for them by stitching together pieces of art that it scraped off of the internet, usually without the consent of the artists. It’s like commissioning an artist to draw something for you and then claiming that you are the artist who made it, but the artist being commissioned turned out to be someone who just takes other people’s art and traces over parts of them.
On some websites, such as Art Fight, AI generated images aren’t allowed because it falls under the rule prohibiting art theft. AI generated images also cannot be copyrighted.
Fascinating to see that the politics of the old crypto hype train have carried over to the new hype train.
Wtf did I just read
Oh god, this is a coincidence:
Kerbal Space Program 2 has been going through some drama as developers are speaking out about what went wrong during the project. This person wrote a long thread arguing against them. I’m not familiar with professional game dev so I can’t really weigh in on if this is a good take or not.
But I have the author tagged as a tankie (no idea if that’s accurate), but someone pointed out they also moderate /r/DefendingAIArt. This guy has been absolutely awful in the past so I’m not that surprised, but still a little surprised with the overlap.
Calls it a “hostile takeover” even though he literally explains why it wasn’t a hostile takeover: Developers were way behind schedule and not making progress, Star Theory leadership tried to hold T2 hostage with the project and T2 called their bluff and cancelled the contract. They then offered developers to transfer to new studio. Some developers wanted a pay raise or didn’t transfer for other reason.
This seems like bad faith rules lawyering. The publisher didn’t literally buy out the studio, they just withheld funding, made a new studio they owned and forced everyone over. They took over, it was hostile.
A pro-AI tankie? Now I’ve seen one more thing on my long journey to see everything
This is hilarious, thank you for digging this up. I love how they’re just co-opting completely wrong words (wow, why does that sound familiar?) like “anti” and “fundamentalist orthodox” to describe the people they don’t like
There’s another one called “ArtistHate”, but I was surprised it’s actually a pro-artist subreddit.
If you want another fun read, check out Adobe’s ‘Stock Contributors’ AI artist forum. I found it by accident, and it’s full of people struggling so, so hard to understand why their puppy photos with missing limbs or physically impossible landscapes aren’t accepted. Any time someone “asks for clarification” on the submission rules I swear you can tell what the issue is at a glance but they’re stumped over it.
Like, what is this person even trying to do??? Why do people feel the need to regurgitate responses from ChatGPT for no reason. Why are they even submitting AI art to Adobe Stock at all. Are they even getting paid? These are the same people who like those photos of snowboarding babies and have to reply “thank you” to every post on their Facebook feed because they think it was personally sent to them.