An example could be in the 19th century when factories and mechanization revolutionized production resulting in cottage industries and artisans being replaced.

between “a more efficient way to make the same thing” (mechanical production) vs. “cheaper alternative to actual creative art”

There are two reasons I stopped making "Pics of the Moment" for the DU front page. The first is pretty straightforward -- after the election I was completely burned out on politics. Trump was going to be president, and my pics frequently referenced Trump, and I could not stand to look at his face any more. It's why I have not manually posted a pic of Trump's face to the DU homepage since he became president again (the video thumbnails that show up in the right column are auto-posted) .

But the second is because any talent that I might have had when it came to making those things is now basically irrelevant. For example, if this Trump/TACO story had happened any time before 2025, I daresay I would have enjoyed spending a few hours conceptualizing and creating a Photoshopped image of something related to Trump and TACO, which I would have posted on DU's front page for people's amusement (or not -- I know I didn't post a winner every single day of the week, lol).

But now I kinda feel like... what's the point? Anybody with access to an AI image generator can now fart out a Trump/TACO image in a few seconds, requiring zero thought or talent. None of it has the "human touch," but that's not really the point -- the point is that even if a Photoshopped image that I create ISN'T auto-generated slop, it's still going to get lost in an online ocean of actual auto-generated slop. I feel like I'd just be wasting my time.

So I can personally attest to the fact that AI is changing the creative landscape.

By the way, I share these thoughts purely as an example of how AI is affecting creators. I would prefer it if after reading this comment people didn't start badgering me to create new rules to get rid of AI on DU. That's a separate discussion, and I've explained at length, elsewhere, the problems with trying to do it.

putting time and effort into art if it's going to get drowned in a sea of AI slop, people need to know that AI is having that effect on real creatives like yourself. It's also discouraging aspiring creatives from even trying, as well as cutting into the livelihoods of some artists so much that some I've talked to online sound almost suicidal.

I hope you won't mind that I edited the OP to direct people to your reply here.

And I want to add a link to the Community Help thread where your replies explained why you aren't creating new rules about AI on DU.

https://democraticunderground.com/125628750

Again, thanks!

Sometimes I can spot AI easily & other times I'm not sure if it's just really good Photoshop. Today someone posted some memes, & the one of Trump in the chicken suit, serving tacos, I couldn't tell.

https://democraticunderground.com/100220351462

If it's good enough for the Secretary of Education, it's good enough for me!

A serious question because I have been asking myself this. If the material is open source (or at least in the public domain for free public consumption), then is it "stealing" to expose algorithms to the media in order for the algorithms to learn, imitate, create, etc? I don't know where I stand on this. I've seen some really, really creative and superb AI videos and slideshows that accompany genuinely human-composed musical scores, and they were beautiful.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ai-doesnt-learn-like-people-do

The vast majority of stuff online is protected by copyright. All it takes to be protected by copyright is that it be eligible material (creative work of authorship) and created by a person. Registration is not required. Notice is not required. Posting it online does not erase copyright protection, and does not grant a license to anyone who wants to grab it.

Most AI was trained on material scraped from the Internet without the consent of the owners of that protected material. That is copyright infringement/theft.

The billionaire oligarchs stole lots of digital art (without paying for it) are using stolen narrator performances to power their new AI audiobooks, and stole from millions upon millions of published authors to train their AI, which is now trying to "write" books. This is all trained on stolen material, someone else's intellectual property which should not be used without them getting royalties for its use. Meta/Zuckerberg is currently being sued because they stole millions of author's books in order to train his AI.

if they had AI robots to paint the Sistine chapel. AI is being oversold IMO.

invested hundreds of billions - if not trillions - of dollars in flawed, hallucinating, hackable genAI technology that's not only harmful to many sectors of society, but a business bubble:

https://democraticunderground.com/100220066913

But, peel away the noise and it can do some amazing things.

the cleaning and restoration, and how it had taken Michelangelo four years to complete the ceiling. He shook his head and said, "If he had just used a roller, he could have done it in a weekend."

At our local galleries, salespeople say it’s rare for a person under 65 to purchase art. The young don’t have time to look up from their phones to actually look at art unless it’s art on their phones

AI has screwed photographers & artists big time - everyone who has a phone or beginning photoshop now makes their own art.

So - instead of wallowing in grief, the poorer me is using AI to add images to my photos. I have lots of NM landscapes where I try not to take the normal stuff but look for unusual stuff on the land.

So - I asked Groc to put an old fashioned girl wearing a bird mask into one of my photos - and I love it so I’m going crazy adding Javalina pigs, spaceships, aliens, animals, creepy people to my photos.

We no longer have a choice but to go with the flow. Almost all the galleries I ever showed work in have closed except a small coop gallery in my tiny town. Luckily- we have a nice art center where we have theme shows for the locals changing out shows every few months.

I also had thousands of images in stock photography, including Getty. Dumb me - I thought royalties fromthese images would contribute to my retirement. 🙃

unethical ripoff of other creatives' work.

Yes, Getty and other photography and art platforms ripped off photographers and artists by reinterpreting their TOS to include using all the human work there to train AI to compete with that human work.

But adding AI images to your real photos is not a good solution. Market to people who don't want AI.

whether you want it or no its coming. As a photographer i have very mixed feelings about AI.



but that doesnt change the fact that AI will continue to spread and theres not a lot. that can be done to stop it. just becasue some poeple will refuse to use it doesnt mean that most people wont.
and I say this as someone whose job was basically replaced by a computer . (floor trade on a commodity exchange)


i will say however that AI generated art should clearly be labled AI and should not get any of the protections afforded art in copyright law. if you generate an AI image anyone should have the ability to use modify sell etc anything with that image

liberals who should stand up for individuals against corporate thieves., and for reality instead of fakery.

There's tremendous hype around it, and constant pressure from tech companies to use it. Despite which it still isn't being used nearly as much as AI companies had hoped. ChatGPT's main user demographic, for instance, is still students - who are most likely using it for cheating.

Every single social justice movement - and opposing AI is one - heard a lot of warnings that resistance was futile. Movements that accepted that argument got nowhere.

The harm genAI does is already well documented, and the arguments against using it should be brought up again and again.

So I might as well do fun stuff with my work. I always liked college and surrealism.

work with artists on Twitter or Bluesky who hate AI but might be creating work that would look great added to your own. You could both use your online accounts to sell the images, and both profit.

Thank you for this really important post.
I struggle some mornings to come up with something worth reading, but I promise, what I post will always be original to the best of my knowledge. That means that while there's certainly a chance that my thought isn't original lol, it will not have been copied or stolen and if inspired by someone else, it brings me great pleasure to identify the source with gratitude.
If you use AI to help you get from A-Z in your thought process, that's legit. If you us it to write a post, please list AI's assistance.
There is so much genius amongst us here that I can only say that using AI to write parts of your post might look like a "lazy" effort.
I love what you create from your minds, please keep offering that!

really defeat the purpose of a discussion board.

It's actually harmful to use AI to help with thought processes, because people quickly become dependent on it.

The process of writing is extremely important for human reasoning. Working out what you want to say, by yourself. Putting it in your own words. Speech can also do that, of course, but we're writing here. And speech is often a less organized expression of your thoughts.

Using AI at any point subverts your own reasoning and your own voice.

I stand corrected with clarity.

A lot of teachers are in despair over what AI is doing to teaching, to their students. Some are giving up on teaching.

that they are decimating rental stock in expensive cities and tourist towns (and driving up rents, too). I still can't get my friends to stop using them. Or people who voted for a $20 minimum wage not to use gig companies like Shipt and DoorDash.

People do what's easy and convenient for them without regard to how it affects others.

With AI, even after they know the training data was ripped off without permission or compensation, they might latch onto the AI companies' excuses for the theft.

Although honestly, I don't know how they can do it.

I can kind of trace it back to Napster. It didn't seem to register with people that the name itself was a portmanteau from 'kidnap' and 'gangster', even while they were stealing music from artists.

Personal experience from yesterday… I’d become rusty on a particular technical topic and couldn’t remember a frequency range off the top of my head, so I google’d to double-check. The “AI Overview” result was just what I was looking for, with the info well presented and accurate (which was a change from my usual assessment of AI results). I was curious about what content the overview was based on, as a possible future direct source, so I clicked the reference link at the end of the paragraph and it led me to … one of my own old Reddit posts. So not only is Reddit making cash off my hobby interests, but now the AI bro’s are, as well.

of search or using them at all unless they click on every link provided with them, because those quick little AI answers are destroying traffic and ad revenue for websites they've ripped off for data.

One supplements her income selling art, the other sells art as her primary income. They both hate AI. They consider it a ripoff, as do I. My daughters put their thoughts and emotions into their work. They have spent their lifetimes building their talent. When I look at their work, I see them. Music sampling and songwriting by formula were bad enough, but this AI art seems so much worse.

job raising them.). I hope for their sake - well, for everyone's sake - that the backlash against AI continues to strengthen.

AI image generators cheat the artists whose work was ripped off, cheat society in general because it deserves better than AI slop...and cheat every aspiring creative who might, because of AI, give up on dreams of a career in the arts. There are all too many kids now already giving up on those dreams, switching majors if they had been studying art, or giving up at an even younger age. One of my great-nephews, now in his midteens, was told by his dad, who works in IT, that he probably should forget about any career in videography bscause that will supposedly be all AI soon. Kids are being told to train to be plumbers or electricians instead, and while there's nothing wrong with that as a career if it's what someone wants, newcomers flooding those jobs will likely bring pay down...and even more importantly, AI bros want robots using AI to take those jobs, too.

Looking at my hand-edited works (highly recommended) some of them include AI-generated slop, because "real" photos and drawings aren't as good starting points. That said, about 95% of the work is due to my mousing around with GIMP.

And let me tell you, a magic mouse is a disaster with GIMP, because if one holds down the control key (bottom left corner, duhhhh) the screen zooms in faster than any Star Wars or Carl Sagan movie intro. And there's no damn way to stop horizontal scrolling (maybe some $80 app does this but I don't go there) I resort to some other device, and I now have an ancient marble mouse, a trackpad and a Logitech gizmo, each .... oh well, never mind.

RECOMMENDED:
Cognitive series:
https://democraticunderground.com/100220348325
https://democraticunderground.com/100220349292
https://democraticunderground.com/100220351450

FAFOS (not FAFI!)
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219770873

And I dislike AI in general.
I have deliberately used it once (for fun)
Accidentally used it in image search (they are not labeled as such, but obvious), and
queried some text once for fun.

So, right now, in my own use, my use is transformative, as in copyright law --- "derivative work"
And at a low level.

I have grown through several cycles of "button pushing".
I had people working for me who used GUI's exclusively, and that little 1% bobble led to overlapping disk partitions and disaster.
I repartitioned disks with a 100% accurate command-line tool. I basically undid everything that guy did.
Lots of "educational certificates" but no "Street Skills" as in making computers work in the field.

And this extends to education. You can't stop the flood, so what does one do?
I am OK with labeling stuff (when we know that contents or parts thereof are AI-generated) but I'm not going to backtrack and label all my thousands (?) of witty images. Because the source was not identified. I used the "eyeball" test.

Here's what someone posted on Hacker News in reply to San Francisco adjusting some grades upward. It's to very seriously think about.
Button pushing has encroached, and please don't forget that site builders like DU are to a very large extent "button pushing" ... you get that from someone who put up one of the first websites in the internet, with the original CERN httpd.

This is not a criticism of your post. It's asking the question "How do we sensibly deal with the cat that escaped the bag and the horses that left the barn?" It's G.D. profitable stuff, so like drug trafficking, how do you deal with it?

even as a starting point.

Recent music videos by Ukrainian progressive rock act Karfagen. The AI animations are slide-by-slide and give the impression of a surrealistic metamorphosis of landscape art. See

] for an example.

recently used AI slop for a music video, and he really heard about it from fans. The most liked comment on YouTube was "God, how I hate AI art."

And fwiw it's worth, the constantly.deforming images in that video you posted are unpleasant to watch and really detract from it.

And there wasn't any honest admission that AI was used, or identification of the AI tool. Which should not have been used, period.

but I can understand that they wouldn't appeal to everyone. I would have a problem with it, though, if they had relied on static AI images, as living artists could do that. To do the metamorphosing thing, though, would require an army of animators to get this level of detail.

Yeah, it's not perfect, but for a video accompaniment, I think it works. And the music is cool as well and fits the imagery.

the same AI bros who think it's fine to rip off visual artists and don't want visual artists to have intellectual property rights have the same predatory, exploitative attitude toward musicians.

NO creatives should be using generative AI. If they do, they're sheep cozying up to wolves, either hoping desperately or stupidly assuming that they won't be victimized.

This is like the authors who cry out against book piracy, then use AI for their covers. These are all examples of stolen work, and people profiting off of stolen work where the actual artist is not getting properly paid.

And as artists, they understand this issue perfectly. How would they feel if someone stole their music and was profiting from it, while they were not receiving royalties? I hope this band does not complain when their music is pirated when they are stealing someone else's art (which was used to train AI generators.)

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220354192 ?

to take over the world. And it doesn't need us.

AI is stealing art, music, written words, etc. from their creators.

Too many are blatantly AI crap.

videos but showing no interest in politics until they discovered it was good bait for gullible viewers.

And sadly there are some truly liberal and actually talented people who do NOT need to use AI at all, who have started using it to save time and money, even though what they're producing with AI is just more AI slop and vastly inferior to their earlier work. Hate seeing that. They're failing themselves and their fans, all the while giving an implicit thumbs-up to the AI bros' theft of intellectual property.

The ability to create AI graphics exists because graphic art was stolen to feed and train AI programs. The actual artists who produced that art did not consent and were not paid. When you use those AI generators, you are encouraging this practice of stealing from those artists, and encouraging more AI systems to be made.

The ability to type questions into an AI program and get a written response is because those AI programs were fed lots of stolen material. There is currently a lawsuit against Meta/Zuckerberg because they stole MILLIONS of books from authors to train their AI.

Listening to AI books means you're cutting real narrators out of the process and in many cases, those AI narrators many have been trained on voices that were used without permission.

AI is absolutely terrible for the environment. The AI generation centers that are going up use a terrible amount of power, and a terrible amount of water, at a time when we need to be using LESS power and CONSERVING water. So think about that the next time you consider using AI just for a small task. It is literally killing our planet.

There are good uses for AI. I hope it can help us in certain fields. But all of the above uses are bad because they replace THINKING and they replace CREATIVITY or because they replace ART. We as humans should not be using a machine to dumb ourselves down. Let AI be used for better cancer detection rates, or to make navigational systems better. Not to replace THINKING.

Last edited Fri May 30, 2025, 05:41 PM - Edit history (1)

Here are two who are prominent enough to have their art on display in relatively prestigious locations - who disagree that AI is "always a slap at the artists and photographers.

Stephanie Dinkins

https://www.stephaniedinkins.com/projects.html

Her work has been exhibited in such places as Studio Museum in Harlem, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum

Refik Anadol



https://refikanadol.com/events/

A piece in the permanent collection of MoMA:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CyQtuiTryoU/?img_index=1

(Note: I had originally skipped this thread, but you keep pointing to it to assert that AI offends all artists and photographers, so I decided it needed the voice of a couple of artists who disagree. It is not the reality that AI Art is "always a slap at the artists and photographers." )

to admit that, especially if they've found a niche for themselves utilizing AI. The sort of thing AI companies are often happy to sponsor - and no, I don't know if any of their work is being funded directly by AI companies. But if they're using generative AI trained unethically and illegally on the work of other creatives, I have zero respect for what they're doing and consider them foolish and uncaring about real art and artists. Knowingly, or unknowingly, artistic traitors.

And possibly traitors to humanity as well, by seeming to think we should merge with AI.

Projects that Dinkins has worked on include "Seeing the world through technology" and "An Exchange of Human and Artificial Intelligence" and "The Intersection of Human and Artificial Intelligence.". She wonders, "Can an artist & socially engaged robot become friends?" She asks, "What does AI need from you?" She says, "Our stories are algorithms."

It's BS. She needs to step away from the chatbots and robots.

As an artist with social concerns, her concerns should have as a main focus the AI companies having in effect used creatives for slave labor by stealing their work to train AI.

AI, even in robot form, can't become anyone's friend. That's a silly charade.

AI doesn't need anything from us. It's software, badly flawed software, with no awareness of itself or us.

She dehumanizes humans, and anthropomorphizes AI and robots.

Which is grotesque.

Or what their work should explore? That was quite the tirade. I would never presume to tell another artist what they should feel it explore or what their values should be.

Both of the artists I noted have earned enough respect in the a art world that their work has been shown in places like MoMA. A piece from the second artist has been purchased to become party of its permanent exhibition.

I suspect both have far better art credentials than you, and are in a car better position to judge what is, it is not, a slap at artists and photographers.

Bottom line, not all artists are offended by the use of AI, and some embrace it. People reading your thread should know you do not speak for all artists.

of intellectual property around the world? You act as if their willingness to ignore it makes them valid spokespeople for artists, no matter how many other people are hurt. It doesn't. It makes them callous about that theft.

And the theft is continuing.

People around the world are being exploited and abused by genAI companies. Artists using AI are siding with the abusers.

As far as the validity of their work as art - trends come and go. Some artists and critics like to latch on to anything new and hype it.

And btw, with all the cautionary stories about people becoming emotionally dependent on chatbots, performance art like Dinkins' conversations with a robot starting in 2014 could be very harmful for anyone emulating her, especially anyone young.

The page about that - https://www.stephaniedinkins.com/conversations-with-bina48.html - says the robot she's talking to is "capable of independent thought and emotion" - which anyone familiar with AI knows is nonsense.

The company providing that robot is also interested in transhumanism - which is mentioned on that page - and in the so-called singularity, which they've programmed the robot to prefer to talk about. If it is really a chatbot at all and isn't something like Musk's fake robots controlled by humans.

The singularity and transhumanism are both Silicon Valley fever dreams, which she's promoting by what she's doing.

I have given you two examples (of many) artists to whom it is not a slap.

I never said anything about curing all of the ethical issues surrounding the use of AI. Nor did I focus on whether they find AI profitable.

What I said was some artists do not perceive AI art as a slap, including some who have gained enough recognition and respect in the world of art to have their works on display in some of the more prestigious art museums in this country (and possibly the world). You have no right to diminish their artistic credentials - which I suspect are far superior to your own - simply because YOU perceive AI art to be insulting.

When you proclaim an absolute, as you did (always), a single example disproves it. I have given you two.

You're trying to twist what I'm pointing out is actual harm to artists into talking about some artists not minding AI.

Theft of intellectual property is theft, no matter what people think of it.

Just as discrimination against women and minorities is discrimination even if you find people who are managing to do okay - or so they think - in a discriminatory system.

The existence of trad wives does not make misogyny okay, and the existence of a few artists who like AI does not create a bothsidesism where it's only a matter of personal opinion whether AI tools are unethical, and they can go on CNN and debate it and both sides are automatically equal.

The theft of all that intellectual property was an absolute wrong (and so is the continuing theft), and it cannot be detached from the AI companies and their AI tools and the people using them. It's completely irrelevant if a few artists are okay with it, because they have no right to okay the theft of other people's work.

Of course you're correct that you "never said anything about curing all of the ethical issues surrounding the use of AI." That's because you're avoiding talking about the theft, which is the fundamental ethical issue. Which is why using AI tools trained on that stolen work is a slap at the people whose intellectual property was stolen.

I don't care about the artists you mentioned. It's fine if some people want to applaud them (though I hope no one becomes chatbot-dependent or dazzled by jargon about transhumanism). But their careers don't and can't change or outweigh the harm done by that IP theft.

Nothing you have said changes that. You made an absolute statement. I have provided counter-examples of artists who disagree with you.

As to the ethical issues, those are distinct. AI does not inherently steal from artists and photographers. Most of the commercial versions do - but not all artists use commercial versions. Scott Eaton, for example, trained the neural networks he uses exclusively on his own art.

Don't make absolute statements about things which are not absolute.

harm done by theft of intellectual property.

You're arguing with a straw man you set up.

That's another straw man argument, another diversion from the subject of my OP. Yes, Eaton custom-trained an AI. It took him years to train it, starting with him taking hundreds of thousands of photos of nudes, photos of several volunteers, by himself, in his studio. Those photos were his intellectual property.

He then trained the AI by showing it the nude photos along with drawings that MIMICKED his drawing style. MIMIC was the word he used, in this interview:

https://thelondonmagazine.org/interview-scott-eaton-artistai/

He doesn't say where he got the drawings, but using the word MIMIC suggests they were done by someone else copying his style as they drew. He may or may not have owned the drawings, but I'm guessing he had permission to use them. They might have been work for hire, or a gift.

To be honest, I can't imagine why anyone would want to spend years to train an AI to do this, but it did give him a reason to take hundreds of thousands of photos of nude volunteers.

I'm not aware of anyone else who's trained an AI this laboriously. I don't think there's any chance anyone here at DU has trained an AI this way. And you know very well an oddly trained AI like this is not what we're talking about here.



No, the ethical issues are not at all distinct. And some artists using custom AIs in no way changes the worldwide theft of intellectual property for the AI tools most people use.

You're right that AI doesn't "inherently steal." The AI tools that are widely used were deliberately trained on stolen intellectual property. And their creation and peddling and their use by people aware of that theft is the slap AT artists.

about damaging livelihoods and stealing others' property as long as they can have fun with it.

This reminds me of Napster, and the howling and weeping that went on from "fans" who demanded free music and insisted free music would make it more available to more people and a larger audience and blah blah blah.

How dare Metallica complain about the blatant thievery of their legal property how many thousands of times?!

Anyone incapable of respecting others and their property could maybe take a moment to consider how they'd feel if they were the victims of theft, not once but hundreds or thousands of times, damaging or destroying their careers, simply for others' amusement and entertainment, or in the name of "progress."

It's stunning how people will justify themselves. SMH.

I will say my DU trashcan is very full.

And no, the idiots who do this, you are not "creating" or "making" anything, you are using a program that is working off stolen material from hard-working creative people.

I've had some of my own writing stolen to "train" these crappy programs that are already being used to put creative people out of work. And non-creative people, too, like consumer reps, those who make medical decisions and so on.

This site needs to decide if they'll continue to allow people to be thieves and stop allowing this trash here.

You're right that the goal of the AI bros is to put people out of work while simultaeously grabbing everything they can of any value.

Sam Altman of OpenAI has talked about the Silicon Valley business dream now being a one-person company worth a billion dollars or more. Just one founder/owner/CEO using AI.

AI that's valuable only because so much of the world's knowledge and culture was stolen for it.

Talk about wealth inequality...This is the greatest heist in history.

But if they can distract people by having them play with AI, churning out poems or stories or images or videos or music, they can distract from the heist and their ruthless power grab. And they can take the AI toys away from the no-longer-needed masses later, unless they feel they have to keep distracting them. Besides, AI is so useful for surveillance and propaganda...