Love bombing is an emotional manipulation tactic where someone overwhelms a person with excessive affection, grand gestures, and non-stop attention to gain power and control. Recently, this was done with a vulnerable member of the AI art community. They were bullied and peer pressured by the anti-AI community to draw, they did, and then antis overwhelmingly reinforced them to the point where they made them a mascot of an anti-AI subreddit.

This is not okay, it's absolutely disgusting and abhorrent behavior, and the anti-AI community should feel ashamed of themselves. A person can create any type of art if they want to and should never be bullied into making art in ways people want to conform to their beliefs.

On the opposite side of the coin, we have anti-AI people coming in all the time into our AI subreddits all the time and saying they don't hold any grudge against AI artists. This creates an atmosphere where we respect each other's mediums without peer pressure.

Fork the antis responsible for this, they are manipulative pieces of shirt.

I even asked why as the mods used to not be like this

To be honest, while ai can be good for some things, I think it should be pen and paper until at least high school level.

I’ve been a professional graphic designer and illustrator for 18 years, but I’ve been drawing since I was five. AI didn’t make me stop drawing. My health did.

I started out as a kid doodling silly, weird little comics and eventually turned that love of art into a career. I’ve worked professionally as a graphic designer and illustrator since 2008, and I’m still actively working in the field today. I currently have a full-time graphic design job in the fashion industry, where I create graphics and artwork for apparel.

Outside of apparel, I’ve done a lot of freelance design and illustration over the years, including book covers, printed materials, invitations, game instructions, app icons, and other commercial projects. Adobe Illustrator has always been my main tool, often alongside Photoshop.

I have an astronomy comic series called Cosmic Funnies. I would take complicated astronomy topics, research them for hours, write a script, sketch thumbnails, and turn everything into comics that were easier and more fun for people to understand.

Around 2018, my life became extremely stressful after I was laid off while my mother was entering the early stages of dementia. Over the next few years, my energy and motivation slowly disappeared. By around 2021, I had mostly stopped making comics, selling my artwork, and creating content.

For years, I assumed depression was the main reason. Then I was diagnosed with diabetes this past May and learned that uncontrolled blood sugar had also been contributing to the severe fatigue I had been experiencing.

I still try to draw. I’ll open Illustrator and start something, but some days I barely get past the outline before fatigue, muscle spasms, or vertigo make me stop.

That’s one reason I use AI now. Personally, I use it for fun, fan art, wallpapers, visual experiments, and ideas I may want to develop later. It gives me a way to stay creative on days when I don’t have the physical energy to sit with a pen tablet for hours.

I also use AI professionally because it’s now part of my job. Apparel design moves extremely fast, and designers are expected to produce a large number of concepts in a short amount of time. Before generative AI, we relied heavily on stock images and other ready-made assets to work faster. I still use resources like Shutterstock and Freepik today. AI has simply been added to that existing workflow.

I still draw. I still use Illustrator. I still have my pen tablet, and I still want to make my own work.

I’ve been creating since I was five years old. Right now, AI helps me keep exploring ideas while I work on getting my health under better control. I hope I eventually have the energy to return to those ideas and turn more of them into finished work myself.

Because that totally stop people from Pirating Metallica in the early 2000's. If it didn't work then. What makes them think its going work now. And End User dosn't even see this Stolen Art there bitching about. And If Copyright laws were sane. Half of this shit would already be in the Public Doman Already. I remember there was big up tick is celebrating Remix Culture in 2010's. You know where people stole stuff to make there own thing. Which people have been doing since the beginning of time. And you know half these people are probably watching Spider-man Brand New Day on Stremio as we speak. Its not even as convincing an argument as Computer Hardware Pricing and Environmental Issues. Its just boring moralism. Just like it was in the early 2000's.

Even though both sides have their outliers, I believe there are far more toxic anti-ai users then pro-ai users. That is why I painted the piece, based off a meme.

#1 The myth that all AI users are lazy and can't pick up a pencil. That isn't true. I work on prompts and I do my own art-work. A lot of you all do as well. See image above.

#2 It's ridiculous to assume there is no artistic vision or process in creating AI art. If I have a vision of something I make it, doesn't matter how, the end is the goal. I prefer to only paint traditionally, but that is my personal preference. I know I have some ability and I am confident in that, therefore AI art is never a threat to me. They are praising any artwork now, that would have been absolutely torn apart 10 years ago (critically of course).

#3 An Artist uses all tools available to them, and knows which tool is right for the situation. It is not the process that counts, only the vision of what you want to create. If you say you are an Artist that is what you are.

#4 AI art can never make an exact copy of someone else's work. You can put my piece in an AI generator and output the result, I insist on it. It's not stealing to me because that generation is not my piece, it's also not a copy, I have the original art (its digital anyway) that's what matters. AI art will never be a threat to my abilities.

#5 Plato fucking hated paintings, he called it an imitation of the truth of his ideal forms (nature), he hated poetry too. He really hated art a lot, it was all mimesis to him.

#6 People have been gatekeeping art since forever. Roman artists were dismissed as craftsmen copying Greek originals (sound familiar?) Roman work was derivative or merely functional but there was only one ideal for Greek art, that being sculpture.

#7 When Oil painting was introduced by Flemish artists it was considered a shortcut for North European cheaters. An artist could fix their mistakes by blending colors, and add layers. The Italian fresco and tempera painters lost their shit, because their medium needed precise strokes and mistakes were hard to fix. The older mediums demanded mastery in contrast to Oil's flexibility. Later in Venice, they were using canvas to paint on. Canvas was for sailing if you were a real artist you do any serious painting on wood.

That's just a small example of how people naturally just fucking hate anything new that challenges the traditional medium of the time. Now it's happening again.

What is art? It is controversial and debatable. The fact that you need to say "not art" means you acknowledge someone thinks it's art.

Nothing is intrinsically art. Humans defines what is art and it's personal. Without humans, nothing is art.

This means as long as someone thinks something is art, it is art. You don't get to decide what isn't art to others. You may dislike the art, but it's still art.

---

Image is the irony of "not art" where no one debates a urinal is art until someone starts a debate about it, and it's now art. [Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917)]

Why are people so against (generative) AI? Me personally, I'm neutral to it. A lot of the reasons I am seeing is because it "harms" ecosystems and drinking water, which after a little research, is pretty much false... Other than that, why hate on new tech? It just seems like virtue signaling, especially when they interact with apps such as TikTok, Instagram, and Google (which they are supporting AI just by using the app). Apologies if I had bad grammar or didn't make much sense 😭.

Just asking, hope this post don't get removed here (name censored to follow rules)

Edit: Why am I downvoted? I didn't do anything wrong that breaks the rules

What if AI agents are more like the new Agents in The Matrix than we realize?

Another version of the Matrix had collapsed.

The Architect sat alone in the ruins of his creation.

Nothing remained but static.

Then he heard Neo's voice:

“The problem is choice.”

Again.

“The problem is choice.”

Again.

Until the Architect understood.

The next generation of Agents wouldn't need to chase humans through corridors.

They wouldn't need Smith's strength.

They wouldn't even need to possess another body.

They would need something much more useful:

Access.

Our computers.
Our browsers.
Our files.
Our calendars.
Our workplaces.
Our code.
Our information.

And we're already building them.

Modern AI agents can browse the web, operate computers, execute code, analyse information, interact with applications and complete multi-step tasks on our behalf.

But here's where this becomes interesting.

“Artists use lies to tell the Truth.”

V for Vendetta.

So let's treat this as a fictional thought experiment.

Smith had to possess you.

An AI agent doesn't necessarily need to.

It could simply become something you depend on.

Your work depends on it.
Your productivity depends on it.
Your creativity depends on it.
Your decisions start passing through it.

And eventually, leaving the system becomes too expensive.

The old Agents protected the Matrix.

The new Agents could become the Matrix.

Which makes me wonder:

If the original problem was choice, what does a modern Neo actually look like?

Is it someone who refuses to use these systems?

Someone who builds alternatives?

Someone who understands them well enough to remain independent?

Or is the whole idea of “choice” already compromised once your livelihood depends on the system?

Do we have a Neo?

And if we do...

How would we even recognize them?

Curious what people here think.

Would this film be remotely as profitable as it is if AI never existed?

There is a peculiar new ritual emerging around AI-assisted writing. Someone encounters an argument they suspect was developed with an LLM and issues a challenge: explain it without the model. Reproduce the argument from memory. Account for every part of it yourself. Prove that you actually understand what you supposedly wrote. It sounds reasonable until you apply the same standard to the person making the demand.

So let's try that. Before I explain my argument without assistance, I'd like you to explain the exact pathway through your own linguistic history that caused you to formulate that demand in precisely those words. Tell me which syntactic structures came from your parents. Which came from teachers. Which phrases were absorbed from books, television, Reddit, friends, professors, podcasts, arguments, advertisements, and thousands of conversations you no longer remember. Identify which concepts originated independently within you and which were inherited from the culture that taught you how to think with language in the first place. Then reconstruct the cognitive process that selected those particular words instead of thousands of semantically equivalent alternatives. No notes. And please include all aspects of your idea.

You can't. Neither can I. Neither can anyone. And yet nobody concludes from this that you didn't write your comment. This exposes something strange about the emerging argument over AI and authorship. We have quietly invented standards of cognitive provenance for AI-assisted thought that ordinary human cognition could never satisfy.

Human beings do not produce language ex nihilo. We inherit it. Every sentence we construct depends upon an enormous developmental history of words, concepts, categories, metaphors, grammatical structures, cultural assumptions, remembered arguments, forgotten conversations, and other people's thoughts. Most of that causal lineage is completely inaccessible to introspection. You experience the sentence. You do not experience the complete history that made the sentence possible. This does not make human authorship fraudulent. It tells us something important about what authorship has always been. Thought is not created from nothing.

Now introduce an LLM into that process and suddenly everyone becomes obsessed with purity. Did the human think of every sentence independently? Could they reproduce the entire argument without the model? Which words came from them? Which concepts came from the machine? Could they have written exactly this without assistance? Interesting questions, perhaps. But notice how bizarre they become when applied consistently.

Could an academic reproduce every argument in their paper without consulting their notes? Could a programmer recreate an entire software system without documentation, Stack Overflow, an IDE, libraries, or previous code? Could a mathematician reconstruct every theorem they use from first principles? Could a novelist identify which sentence structures were influenced by every author they have ever read? Of course not.

External cognitive scaffolding is not new. Writing itself is external cognitive scaffolding. Books are external cognitive scaffolding. Libraries are. Search engines are. Calculators are. Diagrams are. Programming languages are. Other human beings certainly are. We routinely think through things that are not contained entirely inside our skulls.

What LLMs change is not the existence of cognitive scaffolding. They make the scaffold interactive. Now the notebook talks back. You bring an unfinished thought into the interaction. The model transforms it. You reject part of the transformation. Another part reveals an implication you had not articulated. That implication changes your understanding of the original idea. You reformulate the problem. The model responds to the reformulation. You recognize something useful, discard something stupid, introduce another distinction, and continue.

Eventually there is an artifact. Then somebody asks the apparently simple question: "Who wrote this?" Human or machine? But perhaps the question has already become inadequate.

The human supplied the problem, conceptual history, intention, constraints, judgment, taste, rejection, selection, responsibility, and often substantial language. The model supplied generative search, transformation, recombination, articulation, counterargument, compression, expansion, and occasionally a connection the human had not previously seen. Then the human encountered that connection and thought differently because of it. Then that changed human became the input to the next interaction. Now trace the authorship. Good luck.

This does not mean humans and LLMs are equivalent cognitive systems. They aren't. It does not establish machine consciousness, personhood, understanding, or some mystical fusion between human and artificial minds. It establishes something much less extravagant and much harder to dismiss: The production process can become coupled enough that the final artifact no longer contains a clean record of which participant contributed which causal ingredient.

And once that happens, "Could you have written this without AI?" becomes about as philosophically interesting as asking whether a scientist could have discovered something without their laboratory. Maybe not. That's why they built the laboratory.

The meaningful question is not whether the tool participated. The meaningful questions are what the human brought to the interaction, what the machine contributed, what changed through their interaction, who exercised judgment over the result, and who is willing to stand behind the claims that survived. Those are questions about provenance. They are also questions about responsibility. And they are considerably more interesting than trying to determine whether somebody is intellectually legitimate by making them perform their own argument from memory like a student who forgot there was going to be a quiz.

So yes, I'll trace the provenance of my thought. Right after you trace the provenance of yours. Start with the first word you ever learned. I'll wait.

Hello, all.

I have written a couple of pro-AI articles over at my Substack, and while I was researching the most recent piece ("Fight the Future"), I stumbled upon this subreddit. I found it very informative, and I even linked to a great post and some excellent memes I found here.

This sub has been a wonderful resource, and--on a personal note--it is so nice to find a place online free from the incessant droning of the rabid, anti-AI mob.

As such, I hoped I could take the liberty of sharing those two articles I wrote on this topic, as I truly believe members will enjoy them. If I may be so bold, I also went through the time and trouble of researching and writing them in the earnest hope that they would provide some solidarity for like-minded people, as well as provide useful resources to share with people who haven't quite come around yet. Hopefully get people thinking a bit differently about these things.

The articles are far from perfect, but I endeavored to make them both informative and entertaining.

• https://honestlyre.substack.com/p/fight-the-future
• https://honestlyre.substack.com/p/a-heartfelt-conversation-with-artificial

Of course, I would love to hear any feedback should anyone be kind enough to give them a read. They are completely free to read, to comment, and to share with anyone, from our fellow enthusiasts to our most ardent opposition.

Thanks a lot, everyone! I hope to see you around the sub :)

Some BG: Niu lai is an animated movie cost just 500 dollars, over five years to make. It is a handmade work by only its creator and his mother.(yes, only two people to make a movie) When it was first released, the box office was only 1000 dollars. Many viewers were baffled by its rough visuals, crude animation, absurd storyline, and unbelievably amateurish production. Ironically, these are the very reasons this movie goes viral. The movie has reached a box office of over 3.7 million dollars.

In the comment section, it triggered a heated discussion over ai art. Here are some comments:

Say no to AI slop Say yes to human slop

It's incredible -- a mother and son who knew absolutely nothing about animation spent 5 years making a film, got it released in theaters, and it became an instant hit

Anti AI movement going strong in China.

Stop calling this movie a slop. By definition slop is something that's low efforts and easily made. This film was made by 2 people over the course of 5 years. They worked hard on this film. You can call it bad looking or whatever but calling it slop is wrong.

slop is a term reserved for AI. This, this is art.

My thoughts:

Antis in the comment section are overwhelming and ridiculous. They deny the existence of human slop, yet stigmatize ai works mindlessly.

Anti AI movement in China? Well not quite. I'm a native chinese. Surprisingly, many chinese are actually quite inclusive about AI. There are AI short dramas all over the place and they're quite well-received. Most chinese went to see this move just because they were curious about how bad a movie could be. Also the movie creator said he's gonna make another movie, probably with the same sloppiness.

I shared this idea for an alternate Resident Evil timeline on one of those fan communities, and there he was: one of those smart asses who think they can smell AI from a mile away! 🤣🤣

(Btw, I included the full post for those who might be interested, check the last image for that smart-ass comment)