This image has always been my favorite counter to the "soul" argument.
I hate Indian AI slop factories as much as the next guy, but acting like human made art is elevated in some way due to being made by a person is retarded.
Online artists weren't afraid. I don't have logs saved from that time, but the general atmosphere was "okay whatever, this is funny I guess but it'll be a long time before this can create actual good-looking photos and art".
Thank you for bringing this up, I felt like I was missing something in my Chronology of AIDS in the Online Artist Community but couldn't remember what. It was this Sonic picture that cracked the "AI can only make blurry smudgy crap in generic styles guys, artists are safe" cope. They started to get really freaked out that AI could copy pencil strokes and specific styles. And it happened just 4 months after the smudgy DALL-E generations made them feel safe.
This single-minded focus on "typing" as original sin is hilarious.
The AIDS perspective is generally grounded in how abstracted the shortcut is from "the real work" with a heaping of labor theory of value, but it's obvious they're drawing the line of "acceptable sovlful abstraction" and "unacceptable lazy abstraction" arbitrarily. If you ask a LLM to create a 480x360 horizontal red-to-white SVG gradient, it will probabilistically determine to write and run this command:
python3 << 'EOF'
with open('gradient.svg', 'w') as f:
f.write('''<svg width="480" height="360" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
<defs>
<linearGradient id="grad" x1="0%" y1="0%" x2="100%" y2="0%">
<stop offset="0%" style="stop-color:red;stop-opacity:1" />
<stop offset="100%" style="stop-color:white;stop-opacity:1" />
</linearGradient>
</defs>
<rect width="480" height="360" fill="url(#grad)"/>
</svg>''')
EOF
They're claiming that if this was probabilistically written by a computer program, the output is sovlless slop, but if it was manually written by hand, or even copy-pasted from a tutorial website for that matter, it's not. The notion of "artistic sovl" is woo that belongs on Etsy pages run by fat women charging money for witch curses, if you couldn't already tell.
That comic has always been bullshit though, because it implies the issue is direct instruction (aka programming) of the models, rather than their emergent behavior.
There's a psychological argument to be made with the way LLMs responding in natural language can trick people of all intelligence levels to respond more emotionally. You can see people
admitting to raging at their AI assistants and companies tracking that information (
Archive). I've never raged at the robot before, but I'll admit that I sneed harder when I read a natural language "Erm chuddie this isn't aligned with muh heckin' moral guidelines! Do better!" than a standard "Error Code X: Response Blocked". Most of the blame lies on stupidity and profit motives. Ideally, a LLM should respond impersonally like the passive tool it is, but connecting with stupid people emotionally brings in too much shekels for companies to care.
Also it’s honestly kinda funny how so many people so easily takes and believes things at face value, and the “no AI used” disclaimer is one pretty good example of that.
Online artists are extremely gullible and fall for scams constantly (Palestine donation scams, "reported to the admins" scams). Their homeland Tumblr had to publish banners on top of the site and
add a list of common scams to their help page so they would stop bombarding the helpdesk with pleads to recover their accounts. They're afraid of "AI misinformation" because they don't have the innate ability to identify misinformation.
It's for both kinds of derangement, actually, the anti AI one just tends to be funnier. Maybe because the bulk of pro AI derangement reads like it was written by an AI and overlaps with the marketing material.
If the AIDS guys had some sense in them, they'd be banking on this - human rage is far more interesting to observe and discuss than robot shilling!
