On the AI Art Debate (I'm Not Concerned with Whether or not it's Art)

Ok so let me get this straight.

NFTs came on the scene and y'all complained that it was a whole bunch of enviro wastefulness that was overvaluing low-quality art that looks like a stoned incel in his basement could've burped it out.

Then AI art came on the scene.

While servers were beta testing, literally the process of fine-tuning the machines to be less exploitative, less racist, less focused on body-normative standards etc as well as open to developer feedback on the Discord servers y'all were ignoring it or already complaining.

When things ramped up a few months later and apps started offering pricing or much more limited free tiers you complained that it wasn't real art.

And now, when most of you haven't bought the tiniest of shit nuggets off your friends' merch stores or even reposted their stuff for FREE unless it gave you clout, you're complaining that AI is stealing from artists. Who are, clearly, out here wiping our asses with money, right? Because of how valued our art was to begin with? And not with the money we're making from our NFTs, because those are wrong and immoral.

Oh and if we talk about any benefits of AI we are somehow simping techbros? Even though we're largely the ones to help guide its learning tools?

Sweeties. Make it make sense.

For those with certain types of ethical concerns, evidence supports the trend that most techs/services, end up with increasingly restrictive ToS and operational parameters, due to fine-tuning.

A lot of these situations start out very "wild west"/ libertarian (lowercase l) because there is minimal restrictive precedent. Then things get refined as we go along.

So since a lot of these were built on open source datasets:

If you're upset about what you're seeing, can you please take opportunities to be a participant in public beta testing for future things like this? If people want to see more inclusive/progressive values on research tools that basically start out somewhat value-neutral, go out and be a part of it. Join the Discord servers like I did and go straight to the developers.

We help program the machines.

Separately: When did technological philistine-ism become a virtue? Just because someone embraces the benefits of a new piece of technology doesn't make them a "simp" or a bro. That's a nice way of shutting down a conversation you're probably not qualified to participate in. I speak this as a lifelong luddite who usually didn't have family who bought the latest and greatest. Let's be nuanced about the fact that we're tired of hyper-capitalism co-opting everything, but that tech isn't inherently "bad." That is reductive AF. Like, a bunch of us literally had the beta tester timeframe to participate in the learning tools for AIs and to tell the developers what you are and aren't ok with , but you didn't. I do wish they would have made that info more widespread but I think we need to get less passive about this work. In general we need to be making our attitudes towards confronting and shaping tech less passive. I'm not going to assume this is coming from risk-averse Gen Z, but my dudes, we program the machines. We need to get our hands dirty a bit if there's shit you're not ok with. This is not blaming victims. This is asking all of us to communicate about what we're ok with early on, because we've seen that it does have some power to stir and make change. Because clearly our crappy baseline for consent culture is showing in this.

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And you can buy some of our merch here: https://www.redbubble.com/people/MMIX-Art/shop