TLDR: I believe it should be used for jobs that humans don't want to do so that humans have the freedom to pursue careers they DO want to do.

I hate that it is being used in the opposite way.

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It all starts with how you define AI. As a scientist by career and an artist by hobby, I define artificial intelligence as manmade technology that learns, retains memory and thinks things through as humans do.

Do I think AI itself is evil? NO, it is a manmade tool with no true mind of its own, that people use and it exists everywhere. The only evil aspect of its use is the functional theft of human creativity.

Do I like AI? ALSO HARD NO. I would much prefer that humans did everything to keep both their minds and drive sharp, since a common source of demotivation is the absence of pressure from having to put in effort to accomplish a task. As much as our lives depend on lower-scale application of AI, I wish the human race as a whole could get comfortable being without it.

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Which brings me to my main point: AI is a double-edged sword to me. It enables us to do a lot more than what we care to learn, but at the same time, is being used to invalidate a lot of what we have already learned to do.

Specifically, I aim at generative AI in that statement - the kind that generates new information and images by patchworking things that already exist and let the user get the credit for prompting it. I can see how the minds behind it saw it as harmless - "let's give people with imaginations but no skill the power to bring their thoughts to life!!"

One problem with that - generative AI gives no compensation or credit of any kind to the artists it trains from to make the image of the user's prompt. That, my darlings, is the work being STOLEN by a thief who can't be caught and brought to justice.

And of course, the common defense is "it's not fair, you're talented, I'm not, and I want to see my ideas take shape just as much as you do!!" Hate to break it to 'em, but it's not supposed to be fair. Talent is not something that is equally distributed and just like people it has to be nurtured to grow. It is true that some people can train their whole lives but never get to where they consider themselves "professionally good" at art due to a lack of talent, but that does NOT justify someone with talent having their work distorted to fit some random idea of someone that did not put any work in. Those two wrongs DO NOT make anything right.

This goes beyond the arts, however. AI is also being used to automate what would normally take human intelligence to do, such as build code, write reports, answer questions and analyze results. A lot of us devs technically create varying extents of AI analogues for our games (randomization of enemy elements, inventory/shop systems, choice pathways in visual novels, etc.) so we don't have to babysit every one of our game's play sessions worldwide.

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Personally, I try to avoid generative AI as best I can - and I would still do so even I couldn't draw a stick figure. I always hand-draw my character, background, and animations, stick to looking at forums, manuals and the process of elimination for my coding, and refrain from supporting anything that I find out was created using generative AI. I get that some folks like to use generative AI with no intentions of acting like they did the work (like if they use it for memes), but it remains very tasteless to me as both a scientist and an artist so I don't enjoy seeing any of it.

This is also why I refrain from having major platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, who are known to train AI models on works published to them. Even if my art style isn't the best, I don't want it to feed into AI and be used by it - anyone who uses generative AI to make images or writing of my work would be able to cheat me out of my artistic property. Unfortunately it is getting harder to tell the difference because of what generative AI has learned about, so I also fear that I would have to one day prove that a character in an AI image is mine with the image having better resolution and linework than mine.

All around, AI has the potential to be a saving grace and it is often squandered on folks that would rather use it to feel like the artist they never trained to be, which is quite the slap in the face to artists that did do the work.

#art #discussion #noAI #AI #antiAI #generativeAI #OCart #science #gaming