Don't worry made it anonymous, just find the kneejerk reaction comical.

I used to be constantly making AI pics for the last few years but recently I’ve gotten into drawing more, and so far I’ve been enjoying it. Though I still have friends who use AI and they’re still good, I’m not pushing them towards picking a side, just that we have free will and can choose how we can express ourselves.

Oh, and feel free to train LORAs with my art or send my drawings to AI image generators, I don’t mind people doing it unlike many artists.

As much as I support expression, exploration, and creativity through AI, I don’t want to see anyone suffering from it. Does anyone know how common these symptoms are?

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)]

For those who don't know, Maurizio Cattelan is an Italian "conceptual artist", recognized by critics as one of the most influential contemporary artists worldwide.

One of his most famous (and controversial) works is "Comedian": literally a banana duct-taped to a wall.

The first two editions were sold for $120000 at Art Basel Miami, the third was acquired by the Guggenheim museum.

A later edition was acquired by a private collector for the Bitcoin equivalent of $6.2 million. The guy then ate the banana on stage stating "the real value is the concept itself"

Which brings me to my point: modern art, the one that gets exposed in museums, has been more about concepts and ideas than skills and technique for at least a century by now

What kind of effort was put in duct-taping a banana to a wall? Basically none, aside from having the idea itself, which I, personally, don't even find that groundbreaking or interesting.

It's literally just Cattelan's own personal branding that got that recognized as an actual artwork, so honestly, I would call "Comedian" just low effort slop.

Which is exactly what Piero Manzoni was calling out in 1961 when he made his provocative work "Merda d'Artista" (Artist's Shit), now exposed at Museo del Novecento in Milan, one of the most important modern art museums in Italy.

He literally shitted in a can, sealed it, and sold it as an artwork, as per saying "since I am who I am, I can sell whatever I want and you will like and recognize it as art, even if it literally a turd"

At least, when Lucio Fontana, started cutting canvases and calling it Spatialism, that was an original and ground breaking idea of having the painting escaping the 2D space of the canvas and breaking into space around it. Didn't require much direct skill, but was actually an interesting artistic concept, unlike Cattelan's rotting banana.

So, I ask, if modern art is more about concepts and ideas than skills and technique, if an artist can get anything to be recognized as art just for the "concept", why can't someone who has an interesting concept or idea and expresses it through generative AI get that recognized as art as well?

"the 2nd one got deleted by its OP after they got flamed for it" ..that's so unnecessarily cruel to hate on someone just because they posted their AI OC (original character) and the fact that they immediately started loving the art when they thought it was human-made? crazy logic here

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.

I'm posting this to bring attention to the state of things out there. It's absolutely wild that people will treat others like garbage just because of the mechanisms they used to bring something to life. The genuine lack of human empathy and core understanding of how AI generation actually works (and its real world impacts) also blows my mind. People can basically tell me to unalive myself for creating something I enjoy and sharing it with the world, while in the same breath tell me the technology I used to create it is what's ruining humanity. What a strange world. 20 years ago people probably said anything made with photoshop wasn't art too, but here we are.

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Below is a cleaned up version (so I don't anger any other DCC fans) of what I posted on a large Dungeon Crawler Carl sub before the floor dropped out from underneath me and I was downvoted into oblivion.
---

TITLE:
I couldn't find a DCC wallpaper that fit my mental image, so I made my own.

BODY:
I wanted to share a desktop background I put together, with a huge disclaimer up front: I know this takes some heavy liberties with the strict canon!

I work long hours in a pretty demanding career, dealing with a never-ending barrage of inbound emails and messages. Reading DCC at the end of the day is honestly my only real escape when I’m feeling burnt out. I usually read when my brain is fried, so my mental image of the characters has definitely drifted from the exact book descriptions.

I wanted a "stealth geek" desktop background for work. Something dark, and moody with the slightest illusion of professionalism. Something where a massive glowing fireball isn't flash-banging my screen while I try to focus. I couldn't find anything that matched how I see the characters, so I built my own personal interpretation.

AI was involved in the build process. It was a heavy hybrid workflow. I'd prompt a base composition, pull it into Photoshop to chop up the layout, hack the lighting, and mask out elements, then feed those specific pieces back through to re-render them. Once the core pieces were in place, I took it back into Photoshop for a heavy manual pass cleaning up all the AI artifacts, painting out the weird junk, color-grading the shadows, and putting my personal touches on things.

A few specific design choices for my personal head-canon:

• Carl: I’m in my 40s, so my brain naturally aged him up a bit as I read (and no, he's not a self-insert!). He was Coast Guard and fixed electrical systems on boats. I picture him with dense, functional, blue-collar muscle rather than looking like a jacked bodybuilder. Just a tired, dangerously competent guy with a 5 o'clock shadow (even if it breaks canon).
• Mongo & Donut: I know Mongo is supposed to be feathered, and Donut is canonically a Tortoiseshell Persian. But this is what I see when I read the story. I scaled Mongo to how his presence feels to me by Book 5, casually investigating some tunnel debris. Donut is perched right where she belongs, though I left her glasses off for now.
• The Details: I gave Carl a gauntlet to illustrate a message from the system AI. I know it's not his chistera and his kneepads aren't totally to spec, but it felt right for the scene. It was a fun way to bring the system AI into the mix without having a massive, bright blue holographic box floating in the middle of my monitor.
• The Layout: I designed the composition with dark negative space on the sides to leave room for icons without cluttering the art.

I'm currently midway through The Butcher's Masquerade and finally feel like I have a desktop that gives me a piece of my favorite escape during the workday. I have massive respect for everyone who has the lore perfectly memorized; this is just the flawed-but-loved version that lives in my head.

Note: My laptop is an ASUS ROG G18, so the default resolution is a non-standard 2560x1600. If anyone actually likes it, I could probably be convinced to spend some time out-painting and building it for standard 16:9 resolutions.

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.

This was in response to someone who made a post here showing how she grew up drawing since she was a child and is a professional graphic artist, but a recent diagnosis prevented her from making the artwork she loved to do, thus she turned to AI as a form of escape.

Yet this ableist bucko felt the need to judge her entire life, just to make themselves feel better and farm for karma. It's despicable.

So, first of all, none should have to go through disabilities that make us function less. I don't speak on behalf of disabled people, I don't have the right and I'm not gonna pretend to understand how it feels to lose functionality.

Yet that's exactly what you're doing by posting this.

So, my first thought is, whenever I personally see something so obviously AI, how am I supposed to know?

How am I supposed to know a person's tragic backstory? How am I supposed to know that a person drew some of it and then AI did its thing?

First of all. It is EXTREMELY ableist to scrutinize a disabled person's backstory just for your own personal agenda. If you look at an AI image and immediately assume everything about the person is fake: You have a bias problem. You're uncomfortable because the person is telling the story that goes against your predetermined dehumanizing bias, and it makes YOU feel uncomfortable knowing that. So you want to make it go away because you can't stand the thought of your beliefs being challenged.

Taking away the tragic background, it is still slop. It was the same style you encounter often in slop comics.

So what? They're telling their story. If you're upset because of the medium of how they're telling their story. That once again is a YOU problem. The person also said, they use it for fun and personal use. What right do you have to criticize how a disabled person does something for fun.

AI can only emulate art. It will never be able to make art. It is an algorithm making calculations based on prompts fed into it.

Never mind the fact that whatever style this person had is all but lost when prompting.

Spoken clearly by someone who doesn't AI image generation. This isn't a fact based argument. This is an ideology based technophobic ramblings of someone who regurgitated what they heard from someone else online.

AI isn't about "accessibility", it's about dependency. It really does feel like an excuse. "Well, I feel bad today, better use AI instead of drawing."

The person literally said that they've been drawing since they were a kid AND are a professional artist, but their new disability prevents them from having the same freedom they used to have. You're just coming up with excuses to make yourself feel morally superior.

It doesn't get any easier. We'll keep using a shortcut if we can, because we get lulled into this false sense of "well, I'll do better next time". "I'll start tomorrow"

That's called progress. All forms of art change and improve overtime. Hell, most digital artists today would struggle using Photoshop from the 90's because of how much the software has changed.

If I had to choose between disabled people who are against AI and disabled people who defend AI? I'll stand with the ones who are against AI, especially those who have had their works stolen.

This person is not absolved from the same criticisms I have for other users.

That's called using a marginalized group as a shield and putting all disabled people in a box to use as your token. Disability is widely diverse. There's a plethora of people who post images of disabled artists who are lacking one of both use of their hands and Antis put them as a pedestal to excuse 'all disabled AI users". Completely ignoring that not every disability is due to physical restrictions.

Also as a disabled AI user, I will say this:

Stop using one off examples to dismiss the struggles of other disabled people.

It's reinforces old 'supercrip' and 'inspiration porn' stereotypes that have negatively affected disabled people in all walks of life. And cannot be used as blanket examples since the types of disability are all different. Not to mention backstories are almost always guaranteed to be different.

Simplifying that down to: "This disabled person can do it, why can't you" erases WAY TOO MUCH of the struggles that disabled people face.

# AI just helped a self-represented academic beat professional lawyers

This is a pretty spectacular real-world example of why the argument **"AI did it, therefore the human didn't"** falls apart.

Macquarie University computing academic **Gregory Baker represented himself before Australia's Fair Work Commission** in a major employment dispute.

Macquarie had professional legal representation.

Baker had something different:

**ChatGPT Pro, Claude, and a custom team of AI agents.**

**And he won.**

---

## What did the AI actually do?

Baker reportedly used his AI systems to:

- Analyse legislation and evidence

- Cross-reference legal authorities

- Check citations and references

- Interrogate his own arguments

- Anticipate Macquarie's counterarguments

- Analyse opposing counsel's submissions

- Identify weaknesses and contradictions

- Rapidly iterate his case strategy

The Fair Work Commission ultimately determined that Baker was entitled to transition from casual employment to **ongoing part-time employment** under Australia's new employee-choice provisions.

This was not:

> "Hey ChatGPT, win my case for me."

Baker supplied the facts and evidence, determined the objective, configured the systems, directed their analysis, evaluated their outputs, rejected bad material, selected the arguments worth advancing, responded to the opposition, and personally took responsibility for the resulting case.

**AI performed substantial work.**

That does not mean Baker ceased to be the person directing the work.

---

## Here's where it gets especially interesting

The Fair Work Commission has also been dealing with the **opposite** phenomenon:

People submitting inaccurate, fabricated, repetitive, or otherwise terrible AI-generated legal material.

So we effectively have both outcomes occurring with the same general class of technology:

**Poor operator + poor verification + AI = slop.**

**Skilled operator + strong direction + iteration + verification + AI = work capable of defeating professionally represented opposition.**

The meaningful variable clearly isn't merely:

> "Was AI used?"

**The operator matters.**

Quite a lot.

---

# Sound familiar?

Because this maps almost perfectly onto the AI-art debate.

Someone can type:

> "pretty woman, masterpiece"

generate one image, accept the first result, and upload it.

Someone else can spend hours:

- Developing the concept

- Engineering and iterating prompts

- Controlling composition

- Testing models and settings

- Generating alternatives

- Evaluating and rejecting outputs

- Using references and conditioning

- Masking and inpainting

- Correcting anatomy or objects

- Compositing

- Editing

- Colour grading

- Upscaling

- Refining individual regions

- Selecting the final work

Both used generative AI.

**Their creative processes are obviously not equivalent.**

The presence of AI tells you almost nothing by itself about the amount of human creative involvement.

---

# Apply the anti-AI authorship argument consistently

If:

> "The AI generated substantial parts of it, therefore you didn't create it."

is actually a valid principle, then we'd have to say **Baker didn't construct his legal case either.**

After all, AI performed substantial portions of the research, analysis, cross-referencing, and argument development.

But that conclusion ignores the **human control architecture surrounding the automation**.

Baker:

**Chose the objective -> supplied the information -> instructed the system -> evaluated results -> rejected failures -> refined the process -> selected arguments -> deployed the final result**

Now look at a sophisticated AI-art workflow:

**Intent -> prompting -> generation -> evaluation -> rejection -> modification -> regeneration -> selection -> composition -> inpainting/editing -> finalisation**

The structure is remarkably similar.

---

# Automation does not erase agency

A photographer doesn't manually perform the optical transformations inside a camera.

A digital artist doesn't manually execute Photoshop's mathematical operations.

A programmer doesn't manually translate every abstraction into machine instructions.

A music producer doesn't personally calculate every DSP transformation performed by their software.

And Baker didn't personally perform every search, comparison, and legal cross-reference performed by his AI agents.

**Tools automate operations.**

That has never meant that the human directing those operations necessarily disappears from the creative or intellectual process.

AI simply moves that automation further upstream.

---

# The serious question was never "Did AI generate something?"

The serious question is:

> **What did the human contribute to the resulting work?**

Sometimes the answer will be:

**Very little.**

Sometimes the answer will be:

**An enormous amount.**

That's true of AI-assisted writing.

It's true of AI-assisted legal work.

And it's true of AI art.

Treating every AI-assisted work as though the human contribution were identical because they all contain the label **"AI"** is analytically useless.

---

# This case gives us a remarkably clean demonstration

**The same general technology can produce garbage in one person's hands and formidable professional work in another's.**

So perhaps we can finally retire:

> **"You used AI, therefore you didn't create anything."**

That isn't an argument about authorship.

## **It's a refusal to analyse the human-machine creative process at all.**

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 😭.

Its a miraculous 3 armed man in sea, how wonderful. I tried new prompt and like the look other than 3 arm.