Sorry it took so long to get back to this, as they say, “Life, uh, gets in the way.”

I had to go and check the AI communities I have blocked because I could’ve sworn that I had multiple of different corporate GenAI blocked from DB0, but I stand corrected - I have only a handful of Stable Diffusion ones. Of course, I was also under the impression that Stable Diffusion is made by OpenAI or one of their competitors, so I blocked them instantly on that alone when I was largely blocking AI communities to clean up my homepage and to avoid the kinds of people those communities usually attract. There’s a certain kind of person with a “corporate fact cat/middle manager” attitude that can plague GenAI communities that drives me crazy because they think that generating an image takes as much skill and effort (or even more) than creating one by hand.

That definitely does change my opinion on Stable Diffusion, but it still comes down to a “it depends.” And as you so rightly put it, my problem is a capitalism issue, not a GenAI issue. My perspective is that not all of us are so lucky as to live in Ireland, which I believe has recently implemented a UBI specifically for artists, and so until capitalism is dealt with, any impacts of that take precedence - including those created as a consequence. Just because something is useful doesn’t mean we should be dumping it as fuel on to the fire of capitalism because capitalism is what’s actually burning us. Local models using images sourced with permission from the artists is a great thing. People getting paid to make things specifically to be used for training - awesome! A win in my book. In a world where artists have a guaranteed roof over their heads and food in their bellies, I do not care at all about whether or not their work is used to train AI. I bet artists can do some really cool stuff with GenAI as well - it’s basically a bigger, more advanced version of the same concept that makes the Gaussian Blur tool in Photoshop work.

This is why I’m also pro-piracy when it comes to corporations - you aren’t stealing from the workers, they got paid to make the thing, not when it gets sold - and why my opinion is “it depends.” I’m completely willing to go ahead and change my opinion once something stops hurting workers and becomes nothing but a benefit now that it’s out of the hands of the billionaires. There’s an interesting conversation to be had over the…I can’t think of a good word, ownership of identity maybe? Ownership of characters created to represent yourself at any rate (somebody coming along and saying “this is me” about a character you made as an avatar of yourself feels bad), and there’s a country in Europe that made an interesting choice in response to deep fakes, CSAM, and revenge porn created by AI by giving every citizen the copyright to their own face, body, and voice, but that’s a whole different conversation.

And this concept right here:

It assumes everyone has enough time to train on making art, which most wage-slaves undoubtedly do not. It’s an inherently classist argument to assume everyone has the free time to master any artistic skill.

Has a sense of capitalistic entitlement in it. You feel that you deserve the product of art but don’t respect the people who do put in the time and effort learning how to make it enough to properly compensate them for the time that they spent learning the profession. One, because they could have spent that time learning a different trade - programming, becoming an electrician or maybe an airplane mechanic or whatever - and two, because those who do art professionally almost universally talk about how they almost never have time to make art for themselves - stuff that they want to make just for them. And art (alongside the humanities) is a universally disrespected skill, with many commission based artists working for below minimum wage. It’s like arguing that because you don’t have the time or money to make a car, you deserve to be able to freely take cars from people’s driveways and use them as a form of public transit. In an ideal world where the US isn’t a car-centric hellscape and the trams always arrive on time, we wouldn’t even need for everybody to have their own personal car! But we don’t live in that world and hot-wiring somebody’s car to take for a joyride that makes them miss work isn’t cool. Just because I don’t have the genetics for it or the time to train to compete in the Olympics doesn’t grant me the right to free steroid injections.

And I use the word product up there very, very deliberately. Art is two things: the Product to be Consumed (and promptly discarded in this day and age of consumerism), which is what GenAI makes, and the Process, which is often what artists talk about as their favorite part of making art. But the end result - the Product - is just a small part of what Art is. Adam Savage said something along the lines of “I have no interest in AI art. One day, some college film student will do something amazing with AI - and Hollywood will milk it to death - but right now, I don’t see anything in AI that I care about. Because you don’t see anything of the artist in it, and that’s what I care about. Their intent, what they wanted to say with the piece, what they went through in making it and what they learned along the way, none of that exists in AI art.” I’m not religious, but as the saying goes: “God gave us grain but not bread so that we, too, could indulge in the joy of the act of creation.” Making something allows us to better understand ourselves and the world around us. It’s why people desire GenAI. To create something that only exists in their imagination. It’s why Art Therapy exists. One time I heard a college student reflect that “art is how artists process the world around us” and I absolutely agree. Van Gogh died a pauper, having barely sold any of his works in his lifetime, only to become one of the most beloved painters long after his death for his loneliness and pain that he expressed in his brushwork. One thing that is guaranteed to make me cry is that scene from Dr Who where the museum curator talks about why Van Gogh is his favorite artist while Vincent breaks down crying behind him.

One thing that people caught up in the GenAI arguments often miss is that artists (any worth listening to at least) aren’t gatekeeping art at all. Go watch a video on color theory, perspective, or additive and subtractive palettes. Artists love sharing information, and art is a conversation itself. I’m sure you can see it in the GenAI communities on your instance as well, people love to make things and be a part of a community with a shared passion. Artists don’t care if you aren’t an expert or anything, so I encourage anybody reading this to pick up a pencil, make something, and just share it with the world. I’ve talked to artists who say that their favorite commissioners are those who send them drawings to help interpret their vision - even if it’s just doodles of stick figures on a napkin or something. There used to be a tiny subreddit called r/Mona_Leslie, and it was one of my favorite places on Reddit because the whole idea of it was to professionally critique random people’s stuff as if it were in a museum gallery. People praising the brushstrokes of little kids’ fingerpaint art, the line work of stick figure drawings, whatever, it was just such a great vibe. In fact, I challenge anybody who uses GenAI regularly to take an image they generated and like, bring it into an image editor, create a new layer, and just start drawing over it. You can probably make it fit your original vision even more than the AI could with enough effort. Even if you just do a half hour a couple of times a week or something, what you learn simply from doing it will expand the horizons of your creativity.

TL;DR: You’re absolutely right that it’s a problem with capitalism, not with GenAI itself. But until such a time as capitalism no longer creates a problem from GenAI, I am firmly in the camp of putting a leash on what can and can’t be done with AI (largely on corporate AI) to minimize the harm as much as we can. Just because overfishing is a larger issue caused by capitalism doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t work on limiting the amount of micro plastics that end up in the ocean - especially now that supposedly something like 5-10% of the fish we eat is plastic.