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Description
Original design by Alexander Nanitchkov (Artstation includes sensitive content)

A few months ago I regarded AI like Dall-E and others as yet another slightly awkward technological curiosity.
Then over the course of two months a threshold was crossed and everything went out of control. People's time, practice and passion have been thoroughly pillaged to train generic-as-fuck-image-producing machines, or worse, style-imitation machines. Anyone with an easy access software can now reach ridiculously higher productivity than the trained craftspeople who were instrumental in making the technology possible, before spitting in their face. Get lost, creator, your work is done : the bot can do it, you are no longer useful.

Making pictures by hand is hard. Making good pictures in general (and I'm not saying mine are) is hard. Gift or not, talent or not, it's something one learns, it's something one spends time and energy mastering. You quite literally devote a part (be it big or small) of your life, your living time to this for results that can often be frustrating. It's a struggle. Even photographers are not just random shmucks who picked up a camera and started taking photos of random shit, they have to learn if they want to make good photos.
Making pictures is hard, making good ones is harder and trying to make a living of it even moreso. Yet now there are machines that can make pictures easy – not good ones, mind you, but will the clients see the difference if the cost-to-productivity of that refined noise slurge drops low enough ?

AI products cannot be copyrighted in the United States – jolly good, problem solved ! Please, that's just one fucking country, and that doesn't mean one can't find ways to sell their production anyway. Copyright laws did not prevent art thieves from minting and trading NFTs, because you are on the internet, cupcake, everything goes too fast for a person or even legal entity to efficiently regulate anything; and those that might have that power usually don't care and/or profit far too much from no regulation at all.

Technology isn't good or evil. It is, however, fundamentally normative : it creates new conditions of existence, both legal and material, and influences how other processes will unfold, how other conditions will or will not emerge. And in a capitalistic model that is itself extremely normative and decides what gets to live or not based on short-term profit-seeking, technology does not just open possibilities : it closes all the other ones that are not deemed profitable enough. Not "useful" enough. Not marketable enough. It encourages the easy way, the one that produces more for cheaper while being assured of selling better. It crushes initiative, singularity, originality in favour of what will most efficiently insert itself into the background noise of trending consumable products. In that regard, AI image generation does not come from nowhere : it is the very logical continuation of an already toxic and out-of-control socio-economical system, and will fit just right within it.

This technology spits out massive amounts of consume-and-throw-away pictures for cheap, just like automated industry produced cheap shitty ready-made food and furniture and appliances, then through sheer mass made itself the only viable option for the majority of the population, except for a select few who could financially afford higher-quality "luxury" goods. AI aligns to the same inhuman standards of high quantity, absurdly low cost and vaguely acceptable quality, making the humans (who by definition cannot conform to inhuman standards) uncompetitive unless they embrace AI at the detriment of everything else ; ultimately setting itself as the new and only viable standard of production for the vast majority. That includes you, unless you are part of the ultra-rich super-elite whom I doubt come visit my DA page very often.

Some say "Adapt-or-die". But adaptation implies that one keeps some level of agentivity on their environment. It means spotting, recognizing and choosing the better option – not the only one left after it killed everything else.
That is not adaptation, just a surrender.

Description
Original design by Alexander Nanitchkov (Artstation includes sensitive content)

A few months ago I regarded AI like Dall-E and others as yet another slightly awkward technological curiosity.
Then over the course of two months a threshold was crossed and everything went out of control. People's time, practice and passion have been thoroughly pillaged to train generic-as-fuck-image-producing machines, or worse, style-imitation machines. Anyone with an easy access software can now reach ridiculously higher productivity than the trained craftspeople who were instrumental in making the technology possible, before spitting in their face. Get lost, creator, your work is done : the bot can do it, you are no longer useful.

Making pictures by hand is hard. Making good pictures in general (and I'm not saying mine are) is hard. Gift or not, talent or not, it's something one learns, it's something one spends time and energy mastering. You quite literally devote a part (be it big or small) of your life, your living time to this for results that can often be frustrating. It's a struggle. Even photographers are not just random shmucks who picked up a camera and started taking photos of random shit, they have to learn if they want to make good photos.
Making pictures is hard, making good ones is harder and trying to make a living of it even moreso. Yet now there are machines that can make pictures easy – not good ones, mind you, but will the clients see the difference if the cost-to-productivity of that refined noise slurge drops low enough ?

AI products cannot be copyrighted in the United States – jolly good, problem solved ! Please, that's just one fucking country, and that doesn't mean one can't find ways to sell their production anyway. Copyright laws did not prevent art thieves from minting and trading NFTs, because you are on the internet, cupcake, everything goes too fast for a person or even legal entity to efficiently regulate anything; and those that might have that power usually don't care and/or profit far too much from no regulation at all.

Technology isn't good or evil. It is, however, fundamentally normative : it creates new conditions of existence, both legal and material, and influences how other processes will unfold, how other conditions will or will not emerge. And in a capitalistic model that is itself extremely normative and decides what gets to live or not based on short-term profit-seeking, technology does not just open possibilities : it closes all the other ones that are not deemed profitable enough. Not "useful" enough. Not marketable enough. It encourages the easy way, the one that produces more for cheaper while being assured of selling better. It crushes initiative, singularity, originality in favour of what will most efficiently insert itself into the background noise of trending consumable products. In that regard, AI image generation does not come from nowhere : it is the very logical continuation of an already toxic and out-of-control socio-economical system, and will fit just right within it.

This technology spits out massive amounts of consume-and-throw-away pictures for cheap, just like automated industry produced cheap shitty ready-made food and furniture and appliances, then through sheer mass made itself the only viable option for the majority of the population, except for a select few who could financially afford higher-quality "luxury" goods. AI aligns to the same inhuman standards of high quantity, absurdly low cost and vaguely acceptable quality, making the humans (who by definition cannot conform to inhuman standards) uncompetitive unless they embrace AI at the detriment of everything else ; ultimately setting itself as the new and only viable standard of production for the vast majority. That includes you, unless you are part of the ultra-rich super-elite whom I doubt come visit my DA page very often.

Some say "Adapt-or-die". But adaptation implies that one keeps some level of agentivity on their environment. It means spotting, recognizing and choosing the better option – not the only one left after it killed everything else.
That is not adaptation, just a surrender.