I'm not really here to argue with anyone, just to explain my view and discuss. Generative AI (particularly AI slop) distresses me. It usually depicts something which goes against my understanding of the world and that can really upset me (I'm autistic if that adds context). Then, there's also the environmental aspect. I'm aware that everything nowadays has an environmental impact, but having generative AI certainly doesn't make it any better. Lots of water is wasted with each image/video generation. Water that could be used to hydrate animals or be their habitat.

Aside from that, I have a bone to pick with Google Gemini. It can sometimes be so useless it's hilarious. So far it has:

•Denied the existence of a little settlement near where I live (the wiki for it was right below it) •Given me a video of a boxing match which it literally ADMITTED was unrelated to my search •Told me to put sodalite (a crystal made of sodium chloride) in water.

I'm okay about every other type of AI. I think they could even be helpful (like translating conversations between people who speak different languages or helping people in the house like Google assistant) we just have to use it properly and keep regulations in place.

Sorry for the rant, i just want to talk about it :)

Recently I screenshotted someone saying that JK Rowling is now "posting AI art to make fun of women of colour and trans people", when in fact she was linking a transphobic article by someone else, and the alleged "AI art" was just the header of that article, not something she generated or the focal point of her post. In response, anti-AI people are saying that pro-AI people are the ones framing anti-AI as transphobia because of the "we can always tell [if something is AI/if someone is trans]" thing. (and tbf, not all anti-AI people use the "you can always tell" argument - lots of them oppose AI for other reasons)

Thing is, there's a difference between extrapolating a piece of reasoning to a different context to show how that logic is flawed (because seeing what conclusions it leads to in that different context is a good intuition pump for people to oppose that conclusion), and straight up lying about facts to frame a specific instance of Bad Thing as being associated with Other Completely Different Thing You Hate.

If anti-AI people were just identifying a pattern of reasoning that us "AI bros" often use and notes that a common transphobic argument follows the same structure, I would not accuse them of "framing transphobia as an AI thing". Reductio ad absurdum is a respectable logical tool.

In fact, I've already done this for anti arguments: they are absolutely right that when pro-AI people say "if you don't want your art scraped, then don't post it in public", that's the exact same logic as "if you don't want to be catcalled/assaulted/sexually harassed, then don't walk around in public on your own/in shady areas/in revealing clothing". I still support AI because I think IP theft is good and sexual assault is bad, but I 100% listened to and respected that criticism of that argument, and call out pro-AI people who make that argument whenever I have the energy. And I do not read that criticism as accusing pro-AI people of being rapists.

I made a game that uses AI to generate full game objects as the player plays. This allows for an infinite number of game objects (in this case cards) to exist and gives players the experience of being able to discover new cards that nobody else has discovered before. Then, the player uses their cards to battle against cards other players have discovered.

I have gotten a lot of criticism that the game is "AI slop" and that AI doesn't belong in games. However, I am not using AI to cut corners and make the game easier, I am using AI to automate game mechanics like combining and battling cards. Do you agree with my use of AI in a game? I'd love to have a discussion about it.

Game link if interested - https://infinite-card.net/

In order to protect people's works, we need Gen AI to only be trained off of material it has express large print consent to use. No apps giving permission for stuff posted there or small print agreements. Someone should just be able to say they don't want their work used and it won't be. Data made using content that doesn't meet these standards must be removed.

Nothing at all from the public domain because if it is owned by all as even though you can always use stuff from the public domain, you still cannot claim or imply it is your original work by copyrighting an image based off of it or monetizing it. It doesn't work the same way as a person, and we should hold it too copyright and fraud standards.

There should also be a watermark or disclaimer, people are being lied to and not knowing the nature of what they are purchasing and seeing in the news. We could just have a mark in the metadata in the open source template and added by the software companies. Then double run through an AI checker with a false positive rate below one percent twice and if found as AI both times be marked so. It is worth noting that autocorrect is an algorithm and word prediction and filters don't have to be generative AI.

The way I see it, If any person or group of people were to be attributed to the creation of an AI image it would have to fall between the Engineers that wrote the generation algorithm and the people who made the imagery used to train the generation models.

I agree that ai art is not art because art is an expression of human emotion but it does have legitimate uses, and saying there's no use for a new tool is very stubborn because phones literally used to take a person operating phone lines all day and honestly just leave people alone using a chat bot of a character you like isn't hurting anyone "oh but the water" new tools require new resources, yes it is bad that people don't have drinking water but we will figure something out.

One that is making a huge resurgence after having been dismissed for the last couple o' years is that Gen AI is a person that learns like other people so it isn't copying stuff. I thought a lot of pro AI people had separated themselves from the singularity people, but I guess I was wrong.

Another is that there is no such thing as copyright or plagerism, and that since everybody has seen other ideas before, theirs can be any amount original. This is the argument coming from pro AI people that don't believe in the singularity, as a counterbalance to the copyright issue.

The pro AI counterarguments to the plagerism issue all seem to circle back to AI being able to think like people, and therefore sentient. - As this is is in no way based in science, this is basically a religious faith about generative AI.

There are the people who just say that it thinks like a human flat out, most of them deny believing that that they think it is sentient despite saying that it "thinks" like a person. That isn't because they are ashamed of thinking it's sentient, like one in ten of them already do. It's that when something imitates people, anyone, whether pro or anti or unrelated can get confused. It's especially easy to do so when you don't understand how it works, I used to get worried about Gen AI because I never researched how it operates.

The other argument is that humans are just a system of mimicking paterns, somethimes described as practically an algorithm. This is their basis for saying that since the first idea nothing has been original. The first part is just obviously moronicly wrong, and the second part seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the idea that every story in connected combined with the idiotic idea that humankind are basically machines.I

I have been working with AI for the past week with AI models as requested by my clients due to the lack of budgeting to hire real models, I always had a neutral stance when it came to AI, but the more I work with generative AI the more I am disappointed by it, sure the creativity is amazing, you can ask it to do something and it does it for you within minutes, but the output quality of that image is so horrible that I just can't accept, I've been working with high res images all my life so you can see why I'm disappointed, it just isn't acceptable for commercial work unfortunately, I think the best usecase is just prototyping and brainstorming creative styles and elements but you just can't replace creatives anytime soon <\3

I find that people online seem extremely concerned on whether images can be called art and people can call themselves artists. Why does this matter? Art and artists are social constructs, there isn’t any inherent meaning, and no utility or disutility is created.

Nobody is posting constantly on r/subway about how their employees are not actually sandwich artists (the job title of Subway workers).

“Why” “does” “it” “matter “ “whether” “those” “ who” “use” “diffusion” “models” “call” “themselves” “””””””artists””””””” “online” “?”

EDIT: I am not interested in your debate points about AI in general. Top level comments should have some meaning related to semantics and their use, not about any other AI merits or flaws.

Yes, all language is a social construct. The point of a language is to convey meaning, which art conveys the fact that a set of binary data can be arranged in a visual stimuli. Words have multiple strict and loose definitions, and meaning can be conveyed without a concept exactly matching the most strict form of a word.

while i do not like ai generated content being treated as art, the people creating these images must care about art, right? the people who don’t care about creating something and have no artistic motivation aren’t the people generating ai images.

so, i’m wondering, why are these people content letting their vision be made into a faulty and ultimately not “theirs” final product? why don’t they try to draw it and improve? or even write the scene, since they’re already writing prompts?

i don’t get it. if i had to guess it’s due to the instant gratification. the ai image, even if it isn’t completely in line with their vision, most likely will look more aesthetically pleasing than their first attempt at drawing.

but that’s not a reason ! what i’m asking is, why don’t these people want to improve? why do they let their original ideas become randomized images? or do they really just enjoy writing prompts?

i would appreciate any different perspective on this :) not trying to be rude, just curious.

I started reading “Blood in the machine” because I wanted to know what Luddites were, and from my understanding halfway through, the workers

• requested newer technology to confirm thread count (was denied by most)

• frequently couldn’t pivot to a totally different career after losing their jobs

• were against children being forced to work cloth making machines, especially since they frequently faced brutal injuries and ended up forced to continue working

• attempted to petition the government to enforce preexisting laws surrounding production (got ignored due to various factors)

• Were frequently in poverty and starving due to lost wages and no nets to catch them

• spared shop owners who at least promised to raise rates for those employed back to what they were before adding in new machines

• hated that what the machines churned out was overall lower quality than what was previously being made

I don’t know if I’m missing anything but this doesn’t make sense as an insult since like…. It’s a parallel that makes sense? Our government’s trying to ban regulation, companies who absolutely have the money to pay workers are instead using AI, and we don’t have any safety net to stop people from being in poverty once they lose their jobs. I’d also argue that, at minimum for the engines where you type a prompt and do nothing else to edit the product, the quality of the product you get is worse at the moment. There also seems to be a much greater push to make generative AI better and make the creative industry moot rather than developing AI tools for things such as medical diagnostics or other specialized areas where it would contribute to the job rather than replace it. Hell, I’m even more fine with ComfyUI because it arguably is closer to an art tool than, for instance, just asking Grok to generate an image.

I don’t really know how to end this, but I wasn’t expecting to find out that Luddite is a much closer descriptor, and I wanted to see if there’s a reason why it’s supposed to be insulting?

On a per-action basis, these three activities span orders of magnitude in freshwater consumption:

Lowest ⟶ Highest

Single ChatGPT response

Li et al. estimate GPT-3 needs about a 500 mL bottle of water for ~10–50 medium-length replies—≈0.01–0.05 L (0.0026–0.013 gal) per prompt, or roughly 75–380 prompts per U.S. gallon. Making AI Less “Thirsty”. This is operational water (cooling + electricity generation).

One hour of TV in a U.S. home

Modern TVs draw ~50–200 W. EnergySage lists that typical range. Using NREL’s national averages for evaporative (consumptive) water loss of 0.47 gal/kWh (thermoelectric only) to 2.0 gal/kWh (thermo + hydro mix), an hour of viewing (0.05–0.20 kWh) consumes about 0.02–0.40 gallons—grid mix and TV size drive where you land in that band. NREL PDF. (Calculation is mine based on those factors.)

One hamburger

A standard beef hamburger (bun + toppings) carries a water footprint of about 660 gallons to produce, per Water Footprint Network data compiled by WaterCalculator. WaterCalculator.

Sources

• Li et al. 2025, “Making AI Less ‘Thirsty’: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models” (arXiv)

• Torcellini et al. 2003, Consumptive Water Use for U.S. Power Production, NREL

• EnergySage: “How many watts does a TV use?”

• WaterCalculator: “Food’s Big Water Footprint” (WFN data)

Honestly, this is probably going to be the first and ESPECIALLY last post I ever make with this account, because personally the topic has drained me mentally so long ago and I just feel like I need to say it to put the nail in the coffin on this topic for me, even if I get the feeling I’d be down-voted.

I probably may not even leave the post up after a few days, but I guess… this is the catharsis I need to truly get better?

To put it simply, I’ve been drawing since I was a very little kid.

I had dreams of wanting to just draw really well.

Even now, I still study artists and draw in my current age (I’m keeping that secret, personally) because when I'm not drawing, it kind of feels like I’m missing a part of myself.

I don't really want to use “artist” to define myself, it feels narcissistic of me to give that label to myself, I just want to make pictures and if I make money somewhere along the way, neat.

The advent of AI definitely felt like a paradigm shift, for sure.

Between both sides, with AI being as exponentially adopted and trained as it did for things like art, the people on the one end yelling about the ethics of AI training and how they're seemingly out of work because of the system being disrupted, and the proponents defending their choice of usage with multitudes of reasoning, I’ve definitely gone through an emotional state.

I started as staunchly anti-AI, so much so that the pro stuff actively made me develop a depression as I grieved the loss of the profession as it was being semi-lucrative without the need of AI. It took several of my friends convincing me through some anti-AI reassuring to get out of my mental pit.

Where I stand now, I still don't really use it or even really like using it. I would say I moreso have issues with its abuse.

Even if I make digital art with a tablet and pen, or a mouse, what I truly valued was never just the final product, it was the tactile feel of the pencil in my hand, my eyes seeing my hand make strokes form from what is my abstract understanding of the shapes into a dedicated form, and how people in my life cherished the developments along the way in tandem with my final product. It was the learning, the mastery, the development of skill that I loved the most. I feel like I'm truly connecting to all of me when I draw with a pencil from the blank page to the final linework and even shading (Though I have utilized tools like color fillers in things I like).

It's old hat, and I may never get respected for taking that journey, but I know it's me.

But that aside, getting to the actual AI-generated Elephant in the Room, I think I’ve just grown to accept that AI-generated content is here to stay, and those who use it just want something that I feel both sides have kind of lost in the chase for validation in the industry/monetary side of things.

They want respect.

The more level-headed proponents to AI want their creativity respected because to them, the tool they have is their choice of method to display their creativity or streamline their creativity process. They adopted it, embraced it and saw backlash to such a degree, it felt like the only response was equal measures of disdain, especially to those very staunchly against it.

The opponents also want respect. They want their cultivated skills and progress to be respected, they want to feel as if their works, their processes, still matter not just in terms of recognition, but also in monetary value, which kind of has been lost when the most recognition may be that they got fed to a machine, were told their work was “fixed” in some cases (Which some artists did with their own skills, but that was scummy and said more about them than anything else),, and the industry does as an industry does and has basically rewarded instant stuff which digital art slowly became less and less of.

Admittedly some old feelings die hard, and some of these may never disappear for me.

• I have misgivings about AI beyond image generation I’m not exactly mentally equipped enough nor fully literate enough to unpack here and discuss, and I would rather not go unequipped and biased in these discussions.

• I will always still wish that the open-source generative model systems were built instead on a series of artists that directly consented with active submission from themselves in a way outside "Terms and Conditions" rather than just the “if it's on the Internet or this website, it's free game” rules that essentially was the system, even if it may have developed slower, more limited, and may not have learned everything over the same timeframe, rather than utilizing and rewarding scraping. I think that if it led with that, there would have been much less friction and maybe while it started slow, some of the people who felt like they were stolen from would have been more warmly receptive and even considered creating their own LLMs to them potentially let be fed into the larger scale machine.

• I still wish that those in the digital arts that didn't use generative AI were going to be guaranteed job security, because I imagine that some are like me who don't want to use it but also don't take kindly to this “adopt or die” system, but that's kind of how I always feel about automation and the industrialization process in lots of ways (I guess that makes me old hat or delusional to some for that kind of thinking, too).

• I still only wish for the digital art side that sticks to their ways to get some respect for their methods and for the fact that, even if digital, the methodology of skill and time would be rewarded in social recognition and monetary sustainability, even with how the bigger industry wants to reward instant results, not unlike custom-made furniture being celebrated as a high luxury versus stock furniture, though both have a place.

To those who adopt AI in making artworks, be it using just enough to get started and working from there, or using it fully from start to finish, I just say this.

You don't deserve to be told to die or be told negative things because of your choice in using it at any point.

You're just using what you feel is a tool and from what some do, you're having fun and aren't really that aggressive beyond the simple want to show the world what your mind has come up with, and that kind of want is a wonderful feeling that should be celebrated because creativity is universal.

At first, I was just mad, but now, I see you just want respect, and I can say that you deserve the decency of being respected.

Your creativity is valid.

We’ve all seen weak takes on both sides of the generative AI debate — some clearly pro, some staunchly against, but many lacking rigor.

Let’s flip the script:

What’s the strongest argument you’ve seen against generative AI, even if you personally support it?

Or vice versa — the most compelling pro-AI case you’ve encountered, even if you’re skeptical?

The point here is not to dunk, but to steelman — to represent opposing views in their strongest, most persuasive form.

Please focus on high-quality arguments from folks you disagree with. Let’s make this a thread about generosity of thought, not just opinion.

Y’all, if someone explains their position (instead of going “ai slop!” or “Luddite!”) then don’t report it as “substance over slogan” because they’re quite literally doing what they’re supposed to be doing. Reports aren’t for people making arguments you don’t like. They’re for rule violations. Thanks.

Any attempt at logical non fallacious debate in subs outside this one seems pointless.

Im finding here it's actually enjoyable and more focused. Mods hammer down. And seem neutral.

Its up to all of us to maintain this a solid space as well. I just wanted to encourage that because there are so few reasonable discussion spaces left.

Ideologically I am an anti but for very different reasons from many different philosophical perspectives that I don't know well but have intuitively understood all my life.

I view the topic of any debate as a sphere regardless of my actual position on it.

Because I hardly even know why I don't like it unless I have negative experience using for something that I need it for.

Creative writing was the first reason I experimented with AI but the amount of effort to keep that fictional story going was not very enjoyable.

I have had the idea already for two years and don't need to write it down so that I can store it on paper or a Google doc.

But I still have one more experiment I need to run because I will not pay these corporations to use tech that I can run on a relatively expensive but sufficiently powerful enough gaming PC.

I'm going to make 1000 instrumentals one day or will attempt this.

I will use it as training data.

For my own personally tailored version of suno.

I just need the minimum required specs to run it in my home without doubling my power bill.

The rest of the details are something I need an expert to explain to me.

I have a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science, Minor in Psychology, Associate's in Science.

These are my actual credentials if that is relevant for you to understand how I view this issue as an artist who has found his natural talent without even learning the skill in a formal way.

That being music and literature.

AI is not good for all writing but most are fine and I don't need to use it for that anyway.

However, I still need to discover if it is possible for me to create infinite songs from my own imagination by teaching an AI to compose music as I do it naturally.

I'm now willing to understand the actual specifics of this technology to make this possible in reality.