Heard a guy at a coffee shop say AI art is just 'fast theft' and it's been nagging at me all week

I was grabbing a latte downtown on Tuesday and overheard this older artist guy telling his friend that using AI to generate images is basically stealing from real artists but just sped up. He said something like 'it takes the labor out but not the credit.' I've been messing around with Midjourney for about 4 months now making concept art for my D&D campaign and honestly it kinda hit me. Like where's the line between getting inspired by works you've seen and just having a machine blend them together for you? Does anyone else feel weird about using AI tools for personal creative stuff or am I overthinking this?

2 comments

2 Comments

evand6510d ago

Takes the labor out but not the credit" yeah that line would stick with me too. That's a brutal way to put it and honestly it's kind of true when you think about it. You type in a prompt and a machine spits out something that looks like it took an artist hours to paint. But you didn't do any of that work, you just typed words. And the machine used millions of other people's work to get there without asking them. So yeah you're not really overthinking it, it's a weird space to be in. I get why you feel that way, I've messed with some of those tools too and had the same nagging feeling.

troy_butler710d ago

Ngl @evand65, that line really does hit different. A buddy of mine who does digital art for a living was messing around with an AI tool just to see what it could do and he showed me the stuff it made. He typed in something like "cyberpunk cat in a rainstorm" and got back this insane image in like 10 seconds. But then he just sat there looking at it and said "this feels wrong, like I stole someone's homework." Honestly, he was kind of shook for the rest of the night because he realized how many artists' styles the thing was trained on without them getting a cent. It's one thing to hear about it, but seeing it happen in front of you with something that would've taken him hours is a whole different thing.