An extremely frustrating phenomenon I have observed is that people who vehemently hate "AI art" generally employ a lot of arguments that I really strongly disagree with and display some attitudes I find pretty troubling.

For example:

Generally speaking it also seems to me that people do not actually believe these things; they are not real principles that they hold in general or apply in any other circumstance.

Fanartists whose livelihoods depend on copyright infringement insisting that copyright infringement is a grave sin; digital artists who work with tablets and computers insisting that they simply cannot abide the use of technology built on exploited labor; people who make collages and blackout poetry insisting no one should never use someone else's art for your own purposes without permission; people who were making fun of crypto bros and their NFT profile pics now insisting that right-click-saving their jpegs should be illegal.

I also see a lot of people behaving as though no art or industry has ever before been replaced by automation and this is a completely unprecedented and uniquely society-destroying event, which makes them come across as deeply myopic and ignorant and lacking in any actual solidarity. How many of these same people have used Google Translate or Canva templates, perfectly happy to participate in the machine-facilitated elimination of trades and devaluation of artwork until it happened to them? Probably most of them!

Pillowfort has this explanation in their ban on generative AI:

We define Generative AI as online tools for producing material based on large data collection that is often gathered without consent or notification from the original creators.

Generative AI tools do not require skill on behalf of the user and effectively replace them in the creative process (ie - little direction or decision making taken directly from the user).

According to this definition, under Pillowfort's rules, Google Translate is generative AI. But Pillowfort staff doesn't think so, because a translation "doesn't create anything new." (That's what they told me when I asked.)

This is factually incorrect, obviously; there was no translation, and now there is. I think the intended meaning is, to be frank, "translation is not art, it is a purely mechanical process of transforming Language A into Language B." This is also incorrect, but a common thing for people to believe if they are not especially interested in thinking about translation.

This is also how many visual artists come across in discussion of generative AI and LLMs; they believe that their field is uniquely valuable and that their labor is more important, more meaningful, more beneficial to society. It's wrong to exploit their labor; everybody else's, though? Whatever. Only illustration and painting is art, only they are artists, and thus they are deserving of protections no one else deserves, thus any negative impacts on their field are completely world-shattering and have never been seen before.

Cobblers, tailors, embroiderers, knitters, coders, translators, welders, bookbinders, designers, typesetters, carpenters – they weren't really artists. It's perfectly fine to offload absolutely anything to a machine besides drawing profile pictures of anime girls; using a machine to draw an anime girl will destroy society and culture as we know it.

It's hypocritical, snobbish, and based entirely on a kneejerk emotional reaction that they haven't bothered to actually examine.

Working translators have been writing and thinking about machine translation for a while now. They've been watching their industry wither and shoddy machine-generated translations get incorporated into every facet of the internet. They have had to work with and around machine translation, they've been hired to do cleanup duty to make up for the inevitable poor results and rampant errors that result from the use of machine translation. But who cares? Why would anyone look at anything they have to say, anything they've done? They're not real artists.

The justification for allowing Google Translate and disallowing Midjourney is: "who cares?" or "come on, that's not art" or "it's not that big of a deal" or "it's not reasonable to expect someone to pay a translator for every little thing." Arguments which are somehow perfectly acceptable to level at every form of art besides drawings.

It pisses me off! I think that it fucking sucks that people are more invested in their own feelings than in cultivating solidarity or engaging with work and writing that already exists or fostering a deeper understanding of the issues they're facing. I think it fucking sucks to base arguments on Vibes rather than reality, I think it fucking sucks to be self-aggrandizing in your self-pity, I think it all fucking sucks shit.

Over and over and over again I see artists being harassed and insulted by random Hot Take Posters because their art "looks like AI." A blog I follow on Tumblr that just posts decades-old scifi illustrations, captioned with the source and artist of the pieces, semi-regularly receives nasty messages telling them how awful it is that they're posting AI.

It's the same shit it has always been online and probably always will be. A big portion of the population want an angle of attack they can use to be nasty to people and justify it to themselves. They build frameworks around the impulse to hurt and destroy things they dislike, launder it into politics or religion or whatever's most appealing to them. Harassing people is community justice; harassing people is anticapitalist; harassing people is protecting children; harassing people is accountability; harassing people is teaching them a lesson; harassing people is saving their souls. Whatever! The reasoning doesn't need to be consistent or coherent, because the only thing that matters is that you get to be nasty to somebody online.

"Your art isn't art, only my art is art," is a nasty, mean, juvenile attitude. I wish people would just grow up and put some effort into respecting other human beings. Try actually thinking about things with their brains for once. The exploitation of labor matters even when it is done to people different from you. Shocker! Being a bitch to Ethel The Librarian because the local Family Fun Movie Night had an ugly Midjourney kitten on it that she pulled from Google instead of an organic home-grown ugly clipart kitten that she pulled from Google is not doing anything to Microsoft's bottom line. Double shocker!!

I hate this stupid AI fad. I hate that every single thing a computer program does gets labeled "AI" and then suddenly hundreds of online randos are screaming and crying because they think that now that a data-harvesting algorithm has a different name it has become Evil. I hate that ChatGPT is getting plugged into absolutely everything because nobody seems to understand what it is or how to use it. I hate how easy it is for snake oil salesmen to sell their snake oil and I hate that it's equally easy for a snake oil salesman to put a hat on and say, "Don't trust snake oil salesmen, trust me, a notsnake oil salesman!"

I hate everything and everybody, as well, while I'm at it. I need to log off everything and not engage with any words any other human beings say or write for a while.