The Line Between Automation and Tools
Responding to the AI art Reddit flame war.
Part of publishing work online is dealing with negative feedback. The Internet, famously, can be toxic. I’d seen this before but I’d never experienced it at scale until I shared my last piece — only to spawn an 130-comment-long flame war on Reddit, with some spillover into my YouTube comments section.
I had people finding out where I work and have worked, and pulling up old papers of mine to discredit me as a researcher with arbitrary and inaccurate assessments — like that my paper on image compression proved that I myself had worked on AI art generators. (I haven’t, and these are entirely separate domains employing completely different types of models.)
Many more people were simply calling me a fraud, a liar, a shitty artist, a shill, and an AI hater. I was told to “put my fucking head down” and “go back to [my] cave.”
My cave, I have to assume, being the lab where I do AI research for a living.
I didn’t expect my last piece to be so contentious. I wasn’t courting controversy or being purposefully inflammatory — if anything, I thought it was too mild of a take. And while most of the “feedback” was just angry Redditors calling me an asshole, I did have a few fruitful discussions with artists who shared their perspectives on the upsides of AI art. I read a lot of takes on the use of AI as a tool — notably this one from
:
I’m cheered by the discourse and how robustly it reflects the resilience of art. While I didn’t enjoy being the object of Reddit’s ire, if only for a brief moment, I respect the spirit underlying that ire: a spirit of chafing at any attempt to define, constrain, or police artistry.
I can’t define art. And I can define an artist only as anyone who makes art. I don’t mean to police artistry in any way, only to point out that there are real concerns here. The first being that fundamentally I don’t understand how it’s net positive to release models that automate the creative process and compete directly with human artists.
Secondly, if you saturate an industry with an infinite supply at zero marginal cost, I can’t help but think that’s going to hurt artists whose livelihood is based on commissioned work.
And lastly, while AI can be used as a tool in art, it can also, far more easily and accessibly, just be used as automation.
This is the focus of this week’s issue, explored in the video above.
