I Wish AI Art Bros a Really Really Bad Day :)
Word count: 476
Prompt: a teen girl with brown bob hair, wearing pink turtleneck, red midi skirt, and black leather boots, hitting a white man wearing ETHEREUM t-shirt with large hammer. she is smiling. rose tones. photorealistic. 4k ultra hd. cinematic lighting. award winning. anime
I have a friend on Facebook who like to post his surreal dreams. In 2021, he started using AI generated image to accompany these dream posts. Back then end-user AI art had somewhat of a signature look - painterly, surrealistic, psychedelic swirls of blurred subject. The generated images were like raw stream of thought turned visual. Other friends would post their silly idea or mashup of their favorite media. It was fun.
2022 saw the release of better, more photorealistic image generation model. I had a good laugh at absurd food photography and DALL-E Mini memes. AI images were silly and delightful and creative. Everything was fine...
... until NFT bros got bored of their monkey JPG. Or maybe they finally realise that the space is rife with scams. Either way, they have become fascinated with image generation AI, I think. I'm pretty sure AI art bros are the natural evolution of NFT bros - just take a look at top result for #AIart on Twitter.
Now I don't mind people using AI to generate their dream waifu, but when this same crowd started coming up with creative "slur" such as this and this, it starts to become a little problematic, isn't it? While I do find the term drawslave funny as fuck, I feel that it reflects a darker trend of discrediting artists' work. Artists have historically been undervalued by people who knows nothing about the effort behind each artwork, and now these same people think art is worthless because each image takes about a minute to generate. It's even more worrisome when people started profiting off AI generated images, which is built on web-scraped images taken without consent.
As a hobbyist artist myself, I do believe that AI can be used as creative tool. I sometimes generate image of places or characters that I can use as visual aid for writing. It allows me to describe the scene clearer as well as gives me additional ideas that I haven't thought of prior.
This image was generated to visualise a scene set in Risk of Rain universe.
My personal stance on AI generated images is no, it's not an (inherently) evil robot out to take our job, but yes, profiting of generated image is unethical if not legally dubious. I believe that AI generated images cannot be copyrighted as they are not intellectual property created by human (see: the monkey selfie). I also believe that in the right hand, AI allows people to express creativity, unfiltered thoughtstream, and concepts unexplainable in words.
Big-breasted anime girls aren't creative. There are thousands images of them and there will be thousands more. To claim this as the new frontier in artistry is, to put politely, terminally online as fuck. And if you're one of the AI advocates who think they're doing something extraordinary by typing in prompts and claim the result as your own hard work then I wish you a really really bad day :)