A fierce debate over creative AI art recently erupted in a Facebook group, after a user shared several photos of AI art depicting a character from the video game Baldur’s Gate 3 – and then violated anti-AI art. Banned from the group. Moderators and other users.
The user then retreated to a subreddit called Defending AI Art to seek sympathy from fellow AI art enthusiasts and lick their metaphorical wounds.
“I’m disappointed by the amount of hate,” posted Reddit user Marilangina, who created AI fan art images of Astarion, an elf vampire character with white hair and a devilish grin from the hit game Baldur’s Gate 3.
They posted images created with the AI art platform Midjourney to an anonymous Facebook group that clearly did not ban AI art. At first, he said, he got a positive response from other people — but then came flak from haters of AI art.
“I got maybe 5 or 6 positive comments and 50 likes, then the negative comments started coming in,” he tearfully said. “Some of the comments were pretty nasty.”
Although he spent “6 hours to get 5 images that resembled the character,” Marilangina said the moderators assumed the AI art was “stealing” and then clearly on the AI art in the Facebook group. Banned.
Other Redditors came to Marlangina’s defense, saying that anti-AI art people are “jealous” and “crazy and bitter”.
“I think a lot of anti-AI people just…want the world to have less beautiful art,” one Redditor responded in the same thread.
“I hope someday being anti-AI is seen as a meritocracy,” said another.
Another Redditor essentially called non-AI artists elites who – Get this – Just want to get paid enough for their skills.
“The reason is simple, before AI they enjoyed a monopoly on art that was gate capped. [sic] For example, because of the high talent and less great art, the demand for it was high, so they could raise the prices of their work,” he fumed.
Anti- and pro-AI art debates and the usual arguments over the nature of creativity aside, perhaps the backlash the Redditor faced is part of a sea change in the opinion of many who think that corporate AI is plagiarized. Forms are exploitative and extractive. in nature because their datasets rely on copyrighted material without permission from the original artists. And that’s without the negative drag of AI on the environment.
A Redditor in the same thread noticed the same changing tide.
“I went through the same thing in a recent post,” he wrote. “[L]Ast post didn’t get this kind of insane hate months ago.”
Other examples of AI suffering from an image crisis include disappointing public opinion polls, the recent banter of a pro-AI sizzle reel at SXSW, and the massive public outcry that led to the CTO for OpenAI not going as expected. received from whether the company’s text-to-video program Sora was trained on YouTube and other public sources.
Add in the lawsuits that OpenAI and other platforms are facing and you get the general feeling that people aren’t going to take this AI thing lying down, despite the admonitions that people should “progress” in the name of it. But AI should not be resisted.
As for Redditor marilynjayna, when reached for comment, she stuck to her guns on AI art and said that people getting angry at AI art is like “a photorealist artist getting angry at a photographer.”
“Just because machines can do things humans can do so quickly, that doesn’t make it any less special when humans can do it themselves,” he said. “And I don’t think it’s right to hate people who use this new tech, any more than it’s right to hate a photographer just because he didn’t spend days painstakingly creating his image. “
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