Citrus07

For those of you savvy with the news, you won't be here to read this. To those still here, get out. This site is doomed. I started uploading art to this site around 2009-2010.

This was my place to show the world that I could draw, I could write, I could BE an artist. I used to think I owed my learning of art in all its forms to this website, more than it being just a place to just put stuff here. I shrugged off the whole NFT thing, but this? AI generated art?

No.

Hell no.

The fact that this site's leaders chose the side of destruction for profit, kills me inside.

The fact that I fell into a lie that AI generated art was a tool to be used to further improve my own, makes every cell in my body shiver and retch to no end.

They didn't tell us before they implemented this. Your artwork is already pulled into the ever consuming image pool of 5 million and counting. They use the same image pool of Stable Diffusion. They automatically set every piece of art on this fucking website to opt in, and once an image AI learns them, they cannot be unlearned. They cannot be removed. This website has killed itself.

This is appalling, and I will not be a part of it. You have lost my trust.

I leave you with an excerpt from this video, The End of Art: An Argument Against Image AIs

"the AIs will be very capable of running on autopilot, and they will get just as good at telling stories as they are at making images and videos. They will produce novels, essays, and scripts in amounts that can fill the library-of-babel, each piece a composite of half quotations and unattributed swipings. All this auto-generated text can be processed by the image and video AIs to generate long-format media, and the cycle will be complete, self-contained, and human-free.

Companies will leap on this system, of course, since it’s predictable, consistent, and lacking the hard-to-maintain wetware and mercurial moods of the human artist. They will produce an endless stream of every imaginable film, tv, game, news story, and image as well as every imaginable permutation of each instance of these.

This will completely flood the realm of story and the future will find itself overwhelmingly ghost-written. The “anime” that you’ve been dreaming of making since you were 8, which you are willing to forsake all of art to produce, will get the attention it deserves in this environment–none. And when your dream project, regurgitated in moments by an AI, receives no attention, no clout, and no money, you will rest well knowing you earned it. Not even your mother will be able to find it in the unending surge of the Mega Feed. This wouldn’t be a problem on its own- you were otherwise never going to make the thing anyway- except that you will be ruining the market for everyone who is positioned to pull something off by their own efforts. You will gain nothing and hurt your friends and peers.

The idea that everyone will be empowered to tell their story is one of the few arguments for AI art that compels me, there’s a nuanced discussion to be had here, but I believe it is ultimately bankrupt. It is a nice sentiment, and I can empathize with the frustrations of being an artist who feels their skills do not measure up to the scope of their vision– but we’re overlooking something very important here. You don’t just want to tell your story, and you don’t just want to tell it well–you want it to matter that you told your story. The AIs will rob you, and everyone else, of this.

The execution of your petulant “vision” by the AIs will ensure that no one cares about your story, and that it is washed away in the heaving sea of AI dross. Your art already doesn’t get attention. It’s not going to get any more attention when it’s competing with the unending stream of self-generated and highly targeted comics, novels, images, films, games, and songs. As I’ve said, these AIs will not need to be prompted by humans for very long and will instead auto-respond to the ebb and flow of the internet, current news, real time sales, and even private conversations. After all, we have already readied these inputs for them. We all feel a little uncomfortable when our phone shows us an ad for something we mentioned to our friend over dinner, but what happens when it shows you a movie it made just for you about your break up? A song about that careless word from your mother? A finished version of that comic idea you started researching? You’ll start getting notifications saying- “Hey! Check out one thousand finished versions of your dream!” Our ambient digital systems already have intimate access to so many of the inputs that define our taste- in some sense we sold our souls long ago." End quote

One more thing, just in case my ex is reading this:

In 2017-2018, Nobuhiro Watsuki aka Nobuhiro Nishiwaki, creator of the series Rurouni Kenshin, was fined ¥200,000 for possession of hundreds of child pornography DVDs found in his home and offices.

I have opened up commissions. I've been debating to myself whether I should make money off what I can do, or not to, because it can be seen as ripping off other people's work. I have decided to disagree. I love making art and I see the models as not just pieces of art themselves, but as another tool to create cool pieces of art with. So, in saying that, I will do my best to link the models and assets I've used to create renders, in the future. I hope I get some replies as to what other people think about my decision.