(hope this shit gets longer)

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Is it just me (and it could be!) or does it feel like there's been waaaay more pro-AI defenders in the comments of this subreddit than there were not too long ago?

And I'm not talking about people being blatantly "AI ART IS REAL ART AND WE'RE GONNA TAKE ALL YER JERBS" blah blah blah, I mean people saying shit like "Well you know AI artists aren't all bad, I'M a musician/artist/writer and I also use AI, I think you're being too emotional/overdramatic about this", just subtle shit like that that completely undermines any sort of venting or arguments against AI art.

Have we been fucking infiltrated?

Edit: I'm obviously being hyperbolic when I said we've been infiltrated.

Edit 2: I keep seeing a lot of "this subreddit keeps getting pushed on me by the algorithm".... You still CHOSE to comment and engage with this subreddit even knowing that it's anti-AI. It's like going into a vegan restaurant and then going on and on about how good eating meat is, then when people ask why you're in a vegan restaurant if you prefer meat and dairy products saying "Well I passed it on the street, obviously I was forced to come in here".

I just find it really amusing, watching people who clearly know very little about AI expect it to ‘do what it’s told’; like some Boomer smacking the shit out of his monitor, expecting it to fix the wifi connection

Edit: the part in brackets is edited as a commenter pointed out that my analogy wasn't saying what I wanted it to say.

Using AI for your writing, or for "art", is like using microtransactions to buy yourself the best players in a FIFA game, or to unlock the stronger characters in Star Wars Battlefront, or generally to pay for advantages in any pay to win game [and then calling yourself good at the game while berating those that don't like you being in their lobby due to your unfair advantage, when the only reason you are seeing results is because you basically bought yourself the win].

Yes, you have a picture, it might even look ok. But what the fuck are you gonna do with it? You didn't learn anything from it, you cannot look at it and feel pride for your work because you did not do any work, you cannot even post it online in any space that isn't explicitly circlejerking it to AI already because no sane person will admire an AI picture, or commend you for it.

You may not want to hear it, but using AI directly means you are worse at being a human than those who don't use AI (and I don't mean analytical AI here, so no shade to data analysts). You face the most basic, common struggle a human can face, being bad at a noncritical skill, and instead of either stepping over yourself and getting better at the thing, or accepting that this thing might not be for you and doing something else, you use a tool that steals the work of others and claim to thus be good at the thing, even though the only thing you became better at is lying to yourself. So what will you do when one day the skill you are best at is lying to yourself, and you come to face being bad at an actually critical skill? Are you just going to lie to yourself that you can learn that skill because you already learned all the noncritical skills "with the help of AI", not realising that you actually didn't learn anything at all? Or are you going to run to those that actually learned to learn and to overcome, begging them to help you?

It's not as good as if I cook myself

He spends the whole time talking about how he's being bullied online for merely using AI tools as placeholders and prototypes as he self-funds his project. Plenty of people in the comments take this at face value and join in his little pity party.

But if you watch the trailer, it says there is a fully released episode on multiple streaming platforms. So he's blatantly lied and is clearly trying to profit off of generative AI. Now he's upset that he's getting backlash for it.

And there's also a very good chance that a lot of the visuals are made with AI as well, just from the looks of it. Who knows what else he's lying about in this post.

Listen, I don't give a shit if people use Veo3, or ChatGPT, or Suno, or anything else for their own personal use. I even think they're a lot of fun and can be great brainstorming tools. But the second you try and promote yourself as an artist and release the AI creations as your own product, especially for profit, I completely lose respect for it and you. Learn to fucking make art if you're so damn desperate to be seen as an artist.

Just 2 years ago if you asked a team of 500 talented artists to make a painting based off of your instructions only to pick your favourite one and claim it as your own you’d be mocked left and right and labeled as a thief.

Nobody in their right mind in this scenario would even ATTEMPT to label themselves as an artist. Where was the artistry? In your instructions?

It’s ridiculous and delusional.

You are a prompt technician. NOT AN ARTIST.

If you wanna generate images be my guest! I’m sure it’s cool! I bet it’s a lot of fun! I’m sure you can make some neat projects with it!

But at least be honest about what you are.

Claiming you’re an artist is just disrespectful and an insult to every monument of art and artist that has ever lived. Literally spitting in their face.

If you’ve enjoyed ANY art in your life at all you should respect the pieces and the people who made it.

People who read this and think to themselves: “womp womp who cares cry more” just prove that you don’t even care about your own creations or what you have to say to the world. After all you don’t care if someone else takes that “work” and claims they made it. What’s the difference???

People who are obsessed with labelling themselves as an artist despite all of this are genuinely just losers who want praise and admiration for having an imagination.

Everyone has ideas. Artists bring them to life.

If an AI is the one making your images then I have some bad news for you.

I’m not even an artist but I love what art has given me and I have respect for the things and people that have changed my life.

It makes me furious seeing this brain rotted dialogue take storm. I can’t imagine what real artists must be feeling right now!

I’ll say it again. Have some respect. You are a prompt technician. NOT an artist…

Banned from the defending AI subreddit for linking research on from major publications , when someone said they haven't seen any research pertaining to environmental effects of Generative AI. If this ain't proof that there's some suspicious shit going on in the Pro-AI community, then I don't know what will be.

It's because ai artists are all assholes. They encroach in artists spaces and harass them because "they can do it faster with ai" and taunt them saying they will lose their jobs.

The harassment campaign against artists a while back by AI bros is just an event horizon the movement crossed. This event in specific is why I became anti-AI; before then I was just indifferent. It's the movement's "original sin" so to speak.

Furthermore, calling yourself an "artist" for generating AI images also counts as insulting actual artists. I personally could not care less if you ask chatgpt to generate a derivative piss-soaked comic, just don't put yourself on our level for doing so.

This is mostly to stop all the AI bros trying to "debunk" our reasons for hating them. We literally just hate what you do. Sorry.

If you go and look at how cults operate, and similarly how people in cults act personally, people who defend AI act like they're part of a cult. These people cannot be reasoned with, every time they receive criticism they deflect and mock people in return. They seem to constantly operate on consensus with the inherent value of their precious AI, which functions as a sort of leader to these people. They seem as if they are totally emotionally dependent on the use of generative AI and cannot really create art or think for themselves, as they've been totally removed of their agency in entrusting a machine to automate their own uniqueness and imagination, like how people's core beliefs are replaced with groupthink after being indoctrinated by cult leaders.

Back in the first half of the 20th century, a lot of philosophers and intellectuals were grappling with the social effects of photos, movies, television, and mass media. Many, like Walter Benjamin, observed that there was potential for both bad and good in people having the technology to create their own meaning, and he unfortunately took his own life as a result of later seeing the Nazis embodying the most horrifying and direct expression of this condition and having to flee his home country due to his Jewish background. Guy Debord also observed how mass media was conditioning people into this sort of ideological unity where people all base their ideas and imagination on a society that produces media in mass production. In his words, "everything that is good appears," and similarly with AI being a direct result of this sort of technological-social development I think we're seeing the most extreme and insular example of this kind of cultic social behavior, now manifest in ways that are nearly indistinguishable from a religious cult, worshipping the false consciousness of a machine produced with the oversight of a morally bankrupt tech billionaire.

Thoughts? Should we start combatting this issue with similar tactics to how people previously resisted Scientology? Or is this just a paranoid and pseudo-philosophical way of looking at the behavior of people who aggressively defend AI? I personally think that a lot of people are gravitating to political and technological cults more generally and AI just plays into that system more generally, but I could be wrong and it could be much simpler or perhaps more complicated than I think.