[archerx]

As someone who is an artist and also a programmer I find the differences between both very different. I never see programmers crying over A.I. chiming “they stole our code so it’s evil and I’ll never use it and neither should you!” Like the artist seem to do.

I don’t really care if the image gen models are trained on my renders or photos as long as they are open source.

Also I have been making the assets for my game which needs at least 2,000 sprites and honestly it’s very tedious and I’m looking to automate as much of the pipeline as I can so I welcome anything that removes the the tedium and pain from the process.

[asddubs]

people did complain about it stealing GPL code scraped off github etc and then license laundering a lot, especially during the earlier days. I think now people are just worn down to have the conversation again.

I do also think the threat is bigger to artists. Sloppy code will cause problems, and at some point you'll need someone who knows what's going on to step in. Sloppy art, a lot of people accept.

[bandoti]

I’m not sure over time people will continue to accept sloppy art.

The “glitchiness” of the AI sprites can be quite unsettling because one can feel the something-quite-wrong that is difficult to place.

This is a worse state than using even rough illustrations by actual artists.

If one must use AI for this I would recommend having an artist in the pipeline who uses AI to create assets but then makes sure they are seamless.

[archerx]

That's why artist should incorporate gen ai into their workflows. They have the artistic eye and separate the slop from the gold better than non artistic people. Also knowing composition and etc helps getting better results from Stable Diffusion, Flux and etc.

I remember when 3D CG was new and it got so much hate for not being "real art". I heard the same drama happened when Photoshop and Illustrator hit the market, they weren't considered "real art".

[asddubs]

artists like making art and having some sense of intentionality, rather than just typing stuff in and then messing with it. that's the difference between cg and ai. you cannot cut intentionality out of the process and then just do tweaks to have it not be slop, at that point you cease saving time.

[davidclark]

From a recent blog shared on HN, among a list of reasons they can’t or won’t use LLMs:

>The training data for LLMs is stolen. I don’t mean like “pirated” in the sense where someone illicitly shares a copy they obtained legitimately; I mean their scrapers are ignoring both norms and laws to obtain copies under false pretenses, destroying other people’s infrastructure. [footnotes omitted]

“I think I'm done thinking about GenAI for now” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44193018

[archerx]

I do agree that the scraping is annoying and I had to set up some anti scraping measures on one of my image heavy sites. However I am for the freedom of data especially if the models are open source. I only use local models and haven't used Claude or ChatGPT since last year and it's pretty awesome.

[davidweatherall]

I think there's a big difference with how designers and programmers can use AI to enhance their work, and how exploited the average person's work has been. A lot of designers publish their work on social media, or it's visible on their websites etc., which AI models have used to train with. But with coding, most people's code only exists in private repos, or is compiled to a format that LLMs cant easily be trained on.

[archerx]

There is so much code on github and all the other repos that it can compare with the amount of art that is out there. Also all of your Javascript code is public once your site is published.

There is nothing stopping artists from using A.I. to improve their work. The sketch to image work flows are great, the variation work flows can save from the tedium and inpainting can help fix and improve images.

Text to image is lazy and is the cause of most of the slop but no one is saying artist should replace their Wacom tablets with text prompts. I feel like there is a lot of hurt egos going on. I remember back in the day on CGtalk, there was so much elitism and in hindsight it probably held a lot of people back, myself included.

[nkrisc]

I’m not opposed to generative AI, in principle, it’s how it’s being employed that bothers me.

[archerx]

Please elaborate.

[nkrisc]

It bothers me when it's sold as a tool to replace human creativity. I do believe it can absolutely be a tool that aids human creativity. I would rather see more of the latter than the former.

They say, "you don't need an artist with our AI" instead of "you too can learn to become an artist with our AI". The vision they're selling is a world without artists. They want the art without the arist.