The Robots are Taking All Our Jobs.

AI art has existed in a usable form for barely a year, and I'm already sick of "the discourse" around it. I also refuse to argue about this with any of my artist friends, because I understand why they're angry and terrified, and my opinions on AI art aren't going to be popular with folks having a knee-jerk hate reaction to it. Not that I'm a fan, exactly. It's largely a corporate-owned thing, like everything else in this capitalist hellscape I'm stuck in, and that means it's a fucking dystopian mess. But it has its legit place in the world, imho.

Whether it does or doesn't, however, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. AI-generated art is here, and it's here to stay.

To my deep annoyance, it seems like a lot of really terrible arguments against AI are also here to stay too.

Especially the gatekeeping about it being "real" art, and even more especially the frankly ableist-flavored "If you don't spend X amount of time in the salt mines of learning to draw/If you don't take hours and hours meticulously rendering, then you can't make art" gatekeeping.

So thanks, folks! I may never have made art in my life. Certainly when I was young and got my first set of paints, that wasn't art. I hadn't spent years perfecting my skills, obviously, so I was not a real artist. And since I've never managed to invest time in art the way I do in writing, I probably still don't count. Nothing I've ever made is real art, nope. I'm just...er...not sure what I call myself then, if I can't say "artist"? Bit weird, that. Just some guy who sometimes picks up a pencil, I guess.

Not a stylus, by the way, because I've seen digital art come, and if the apocalyptic screaming is right, I'll live to see digital art go, taken over by the robot hordes that are coming for our art jobs.

Just like the button-pushing photographic hordes, dependent on their devices, took over all our art jobs a century ago. That was a thing that happened, right? Nobody paints portraits anymore, why would anyone hire a portrait artist when they can just click a button and get a photo? Cameras completely killed art forever, we all know that, so of course "just type in key words and push the button" AI art will kill art...uhm...that's still alive somehow? Huh. Weird, that. Digital art also killed physical media long, long ago, that's definitely a true thing that totally happened in precisely the same way!

Meanwhile the argument that "well of course taking good photos is a skill, and that makes it a real art, where putting in keywords to a bot isn't a skill and isn't real art!" is, and I'm going to be frank with you here, fucking nonsense. Yes, of course taking good photos is a skill, and photography is a real art! And making good AI images is a skill too, and is an artform that's just barely beginning. The people who are doing this now are the Thomas Wedgewoods of AI, messing around with a new thing whose place in the world is still entirely in flux, and nobody knows how things are going to shake out.

But look, claiming that they're not making art is like claiming that Duchamp didn't make art. Seriously. Even if you insist that there's zero skill to guiding an artbot, picking up a urinal and writing something on it also takes zero skill. "Art" isn't synonymous with "put in your required pain before you're allowed to make it" okay? It's just NOT! So please, please, PLEASE stop gatekeeping art. If you want to argue against AI, you need to find actual arguments against AI not arguments that also cover huge swathes of real humans making things with tools.

In any case, I feel like most of the people who are screaming about AI art haven't encountered much actual AI art? The majority of what's crossed my dash has been people reacting to the same two or three things, but those things haven't got much to do with where I've been seeing AI art popping up myself.

First, the obnoxious one that I have seen people arguing with, because it's fucking obnoxious: Smug young techbros, the same dudes that were all over NFTs, being their usual idiot selves about the Next Big Thing. That is a self-fixing problem, though, and not even worth addressing, imho, because by the time AI art truly hits its stride and finds whatever place in the art world that it's going to find, these guys will have long since moved on to something else. Reacting to these dudes is a waste of your time.

The next use case I've seen, and the one I've seen the most, is people using artbots a lot like picrews, to make art of themselves, their characters, their personal interests, etc. I find this an interesting case, because like picrews, it doesn't seem to be replacing commissioning human artists. (Adding an aside here: in Ye Olden Times portrait painting was a thing for the rich. Ordinary working people were never painted. And today, portrait painting is...well, still a thing! And still a thing for the rich, who get their portraits painted much as they always have. Photography just broadened the scope of who got to hang their pictures on the wall.) AI art is a way for people, largely young people who don't have any money, to see their characters or their special interests in visual form. Many of these people, when they do have money, also commission artists! I suspect it may actually become common to give AI-generated references to artists as part of the commission process, because the barrier to entry there is so much lower than drawing your own references, and you can fuss around with it until you have something that feels right, unlike commissioning somebody for that very first reference of a new OC.

Interestingly I've specifically seen a lot of the folks on one Hellenist pagan discord I'm in using it to make images of their gods, which some of the more common AI bots seem very good at, which figures since there's a vast pool of appropriate reference material of Greek gods. I'll get back to that thought later...

I've also seen one very good and very respected artist (Ursula Vernon) use an art bot to make images for a comic about a post-apocalyptic world, which seems appropriate! I didn't read her "how I did this" stuff in full, but I gather she trained it using her own art, and then further tweaked and drew on top of the images it put out. THIS is going to be an amazing use, I think, and one I hope becomes popular in the future! I've already seen a disabled artist wax poetic about their hopes for how it could open up the door to more disabled people who for one reason or another might not be able to hold a brush/stylus for hours, but who can type in AI prompts. In fact it reminds me of things like the chain or braid or rope brushes I've seen for digital art programs, where you can put a length of chain into a picture with a single stroke. And full confession time, the first time I saw one of those brushes, my initial impulse was to be offended. Drawing chains is a PAIN in the ass, and as a "traditional" not digital artist, I don't get to take that shortcut. But you know what? Taking that shortcut is perfectly fine. Why should an artist be made to do things the hard way if there's an easy way? Just because I still have to suffer, that doesn't make the suffering a virtue for somebody using a program that has those kinds of brushes!

Suffering is not a virtue.

Starving artists going through depression and engaging in self-harm for the sake of their art isn't romantic, it's a mental health and social welfare problem that should be solved. And no, insisting that AI go away so as to not take the jobs from said starving artists isn't the solution. NOTHING will make the corporate world value art and treat artists well. Nothing. Frankly, if companies want to have artbots rather than underpaid and abused artists, let them.

I had a teacher in college, for illustration, the class I was MOST looking forward to, since at the time that's what I wanted to do, but a class I soon hated, loathed, and didn't enjoy at all, who would spend most of a class period ranting about how digital clip art had ruined his job, since he no longer got hired to draw hamburgers for restaurant menus etc. everybody just used clip art on the computer now. (This was in 2002 or so.)

Just... My dude. Illustration is still a thriving field, there are endless places I see illustrators working, and you're upset that you don't get hired to draw hamburgers anymore? WTF?

Yeah, I guess his specific niche died, mostly or entirely, due to digital art. I guess for whatever reason he was unwilling or unable to find anything else to do as an artist, now that the "hamburgers for non-chain restaurant menus" jobs were all taken by robots. I guess that sucks for him, but damn, guy, do you not realize how many MORE art jobs computers have opened up?

A few other specific niches have died, down through the history of art. And yes, that's bad for the people making their living in those niches. Buggy whip makers put out of business, etc.

Bet you anything though that right this minute there are more people making a living making whips than there were back in the heyday of horsewhips. Just on sheer population numbers and the rapid rise of open kink-positivity. :D Time marches on, things go up and down, and once again, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. AI art is here, it's not going away. Are you going to kick and scream and claw at other artists that you're tearing down when you argue it's not real art, or are you going to go on with your life making your best art, or hell, are you going to embrace it as a tool, like Ursula Vernon did, and feed a bot on your own art to lessen the pain of needing to draw hundreds of comic panels?

In my opinion the only argument that really matters, when it comes to AI, is that feeding. The real issue here is how we manage the rights to the images the bots get trained on. Because right now there is a lot of deeply unethical shit, where bots are being trained on artists who have not given that right, and then said bots hyped up using those artists' names, even! That is unethical in every possible way, and by any reasonable interpretation of copyright laws ought to be illegal too, imho. There's where I draw my line in the sand, and there's where I think artists need to be concentrating.

The thing about artists is that they're not fungible. One artist can't be substituted for another like bland little corporate cogs, because every artist brings their own unique touch to creating their art, however they create it. When a bot is allowed to copy said unique touches without that artist's permission, that is the danger. If I want Nambroth's amazing skill with winged things and the quality of light, I have to hire Nambroth, I can't hire anybody else. Being able to hire a bot that's trained on Nambroth's art would be a gross violation of Nambroth's rights, imho.

But if the artist is dead and gone...

And now we're back to all those babby pagans, using bots trained on paintings that are hundreds or even thousands of years old, to get images of their gods. I think that's great! Some of those pictures are really neat. They were very obviously mostly based on Renaissance artwork, and that's a nifty style to be able to see something you specifically want in. They were a little janky, partly because of the bots, partly because of the kids making them not being skilled with the bots, but they were cool, and, importantly to my overall opinion about AI art, they weren't taking anything away from anybody. You think some high school kid with an enthusiasm for Apollo could hire an artist to do a Renaissance-style oil painting of Apollo for them? Of course not! These kids aren't using bots instead of artists, they're using bots in what was formerly a blank space that contained no art whatsoever.

That has me cautiously optimistic about this, honestly.

The inevitable corporate abuses don't make me happy, and I pray that the copyright law about training images shakes out the way it should, if it doesn't we're going to have an actual problem.

But problem or not, the robots are here to stay, and screaming about robots taking your jobs has never done anybody any good in the history of robots and jobs, while gatekeeping what is and isn't art only harms people like me, who are already insecure enough about not being "real artists" without having nonsense about how if you haven't dedicated your life to acquiring art skills you don't count thrown in our faces.

P.S. I will not gatekeep myself, but it is really difficult to keep my mouth shut when watching people who don't even know who Duchamp was opine about what is and isn't art. >.< I'd kind of appreciate if anybody who wants to dive in and debate that topic in the comments here maybe read up a bit and get educated on their art history before insisting that I'm wrong. Thanks!