A.I. - Where Do I Stand?

I have thought about this for a long time and mostly kept my mouth closed about it as I watch my friends, family, peers, and colleagues argue over both stances of this ordeal, whether to embrace or completely resist and eliminate all traces of this technology from our lives at every level. 

For me, I feel like I'm standing in the middle whether everyone is tugging me back and forth in either direction as I can see the sound justifications from both sides. 

FROM AN ARTIST "THE CREATIVE" MINDSET

Every single day, I question whether or not that label/moniker is the appropriate classification for what I do when I question and disgrace with everything from the "conventional/traditional" artist mindset. If I were honest with myself, I would call myself a creative more than an artist.

The Good I see in embracing this technology

• Could aid in conceptualizing ideas from clients and artists to produce pieces faster.

• Aid clients in visualizing ideas commissioned work to relay to artists in a much more coherent manner, thus eliminating the need for numerous revisions. This would free up commissioned artists to take on more clients and support their income/way of life easier. 

• Aid in reducing time in workflow in terms of creating multiple similar pieces, especially in the digital art spaces. I realize that this can already be done with Photoshop but this can expand on that. 

• Offer a glimpse of different styles and themes of art that can be applied to an existing work at a press of a button without extensively researching, learning, and applying that particular style or theme. i.e. You can imitate and create work in the style(s) of your favorite artists with ease. 

The Bad I see in embracing this technology

• Encourages laziness and lackluster quality in favor to quantity over quality. 

• Pay to win mentality in the same vein as live-service gaming ~ The more you spend on said AI software, the more elaborate results. This creates customers trapped into this addictive ecosystem of subscriptions and tiers to continue churning out more images and videos while allowing the users to have more chances or rather "instances" to generate what they want. 

• Creates a double standard when teachers, mentors, and peers are championing this technology while urging you to study the fundamentals when they aren't practicing what they preach in the least when it comes to applying that knowledge to their own AI output. 

• - AI has created a flood of spam and utter cesspool in terms of the oversaturation of AI generated imagery and video across every platform. Fetishes and smut from all genres have championed it, forcing a lot of creatives to submit or give into its demands. AI has given the average person the excuse to call themselves artists without putting any legitimate work into studying the artform nor practicing/honing their craft in any means whatsoever outside of entering prompts and waiting for the generated results/output.

Meet Evie Decker, an A.I.-created digital influencer. She's not the first and she definitely won't be the last. 

Look on Instagram, Fanvue, Twitter/X, Facebook, and OnlyFans (to a lesser extent since they have taken steps to mitigate against A.I.-generated influencers profiting off their platform) and you will see a wealth of these fake models with perfect curves and features looking to sink their claws into you and make thirsty (read: horny) followers into spending their hard-earned money on them on these platforms. Fanvue openly invites and encourages this new age take on catfishing to a distributing degree and allows these creators to make just as much if not more money than most OnlyFans models on that platform. 

It's hard enough for those genuine thrist-trap accounts to find stable footing when both Instagram and Patreon are cracking down on adult-oriented content, then there's a move to do the same with how both YouTube and Twitch has groomed an entire culture of these influencers/models "pretend" to be interested into gaming to attract viewers of all ages to seek out their adult-oriented content. It was bad when everyone was at home during the COVID-19 lockdowns and now it's even worse when anyone can create an avatar without even showing their genuine face and garner a following like this with a genuine voice and reacts to feedback in real-time. It's borderline terrifying what people are using this technology for in terms of malicious behavior just for a profit. 

I honestly can see the appeal when it's even more foolproof than catfishing since the creator doesn't even have to go making a one-to-one copy of some random model's social media pages. Creating an A.I.-generated influencer from scratch eliminates that fear and dread from the creator(s) where they are hoping and praying that the person whose identity that they stole never gets wind of it. 

I have seen some content creators go as far as creating interactive games where the A.I. mate/influencer learns your personal tastes and it continues the game to satisfy your preferences, who matter how kinky or disturbing they may be. 

(Laughs) This is going to either put Nev (creator of MTV's Catfish) out of business or create a whole new wealth of stories for a totally new generation of victims if this continues. 

It's both frustrating and soulcrushing to get excited to see one of my favorite artists, writers, creatives, or just one of my many peers across all walks of life, show up on social media or one of these numerous platforms where we share our work and I instantly recognize it to be AI generated.

Before people start bitching at me, I'm not against the fact that they are creating AI generated content. In the words of comedian Roy Wood Jr., "If that's your crab leg, then eat it! It's none of my business!" 

What bothers me is when I see that it's low effort image/video generation or the literature is obviously written by ChatGPT or similar applications. There's numerous errors/flaws in the work that those same people would chew me out and nit-pick if it existed in my own man-made work, yet it's openly accepted over their own genuine work. I have lost count at how many writers whose work I stopped reading mid-paragraph when I realize that whatever generator they used is repeating the same patterns, phrases, and word structure over and over. It annoys me as someone who is constantly told to join these various communities and circles online to share content and these are the same people who preach about perfection and striving for the best version of your work when they aren't even doing it themselves. 

To my peers (along with anyone else) who are actively using this AI software to generate content and take it from there to edit and tweak extensively to your own means without it just being a generic output that you paid to win for, I'm NOT talking about you. Most of you put in the work and it shows. Those who don't, I have made no qualms about expressing my dissatisfaction in said pieces. The flaws are nearly non-existent in your AI usage and it doesn't look like everything else that everyone else is churning out in the software across the board, whether they are an artist or not.

There's VERY few of my friends and peers here, there, and elsewhere who haven't adopted AI in some capacity or another, whether for art, literature, or for their basic day-to-day needs. 

Technology exists to make our lives easier and to help mankind ~ that's never going to change. 

With that being said, I doubt that AI is going anywhere. My problem with it stems from how it is being USED - something that is lost in ragebait in a lot of these discussions about the technology.

How would you feel if someone used your likeness without your consent and made millions profiting off AI generated images and video? I'm sure someone is going to be quick to say that is the same as artists who reference people they know in their own work when it's not. You can shout that it's your ART and you can interpret people in it as you see fit but the line of morality has to be drawn when people opt for using AI to put people in unfavorable and questionable situations, such as using celebrities in AI generated smut and pornography or stealing their voice to use post-humorously without the consent of his/her family/estate. This technology has gotten so dangerous that it is hard for the average person to make the distinction from AI-generated images and video versus reality. Sure, most people can catch an extra finger or other miscellaneous stuff off-balance but not everyone is looking that hard and then the trap is sprung. 

There's some truly remarkable and gorgeous work I have seen made with AI that has been shared with me over the past year alone that has left me speechless but at the same time, it's demoralizing. What happens when the next person just takes that and just steals it to feed it to the next AI generator as the basis for an even better AI generated image/video that they can easily profit off of your hard work no matter how many hours you may have spent cleaning and touching up the output or dollars spent do multiple instances until you created the original output?

The only people I notice who aren't speaking up, challenging, nor acknowledging the problems with AI is presenting and threatening our current way of life are the people who genuinely don't care about the long-term effects, those who only care about generating as much "content" as possible and fuck everyone else as long as the money keeps coming in droves, and the people who it hasn't affected in the least (yet) in their own everyday lives/they are too ignorant to acknowledge it.

As much as I hate to get into politics, but our President currently in the United States is the poster child of promoting and championing ignorance and closed-minded thinking. By backing this technology, we have seen critical thinking diminishing on a widespread level - not just in this country but globally, at an alarming rate. As someone who works at the university/college level of education, I see it every single day currently over the last few years. Students are quick to race to opt for ChatGPT to do their assignments for them instead of doing the work for themselves. No one wants to do their own research or write their own papers, especially when you see Harvard graduates bragging about ChatGPT helping them get their degree(s).

II. THE CONSUMER MINDSET

The Good

• AI assistants on devices aid your daily routines, regimes, and schedules to optimize and maximize your time. 

• AI tailors experiences and interactions across devices/browsers to suit your tastes and preferences. 

• AI creates EXACTLY what you want ~ For an artist, that is additive, especially when one would spend their entire lives obsessing over chasing the white whale of mastery and perfection to be able to create those mental images precisely as we see them in our head. Artists gravitate towards this magically opportunity to skip past the years of agony and trial and error of what you have to learn, study, apply towards mastery.