Around 1-2 years ago, my mind was blown when I found out about AI-generated art for the first time. Back then, AI-generated art were still at their infancy, so such art generated from AI looked like the stuff of nightmares. It was hilarious. I remember laughing together with my friends as we looked at all the abomination we've generated from DALL-E 2 Mini (now renamed to "Craiyon"). I seriously thought -- and I still thought so today -- that these AI art generators can be a very useful tool as "idea generators": basically, the AI generates a picture, and you are supposed to use this picture as reference for your next big art project. It would've been very useful in aiding artists who are suffering from a severe case of art block.

What I had not anticipated was just how ridiculously good these AI art generators have gotten now. Too good, in fact, to the point that people are now using the final generated output as the completed picture itself, with little to no modifications whatsoever. And that's a scary prospect for artists, really.

I'm sure that many of you have heard the news, such as a guy who created an entire children's book within a few hours and selling it, and another guy whose AI-generated art won an art competition, much to the anger of all the other participants of that competition. Of course, artists would be very angry: why wouldn't they? Art is a form of human expression, the one thing that makes us human. It's how we express ourselves to the world. And now, it's being generalized by some latent space and/or neural networks. What took weeks, if not months -- if not years, even -- to produce can now be generated from only a few mouseclicks.

And then, the Internet exploded when Netflix posted a short anime called "The Dog and the Boy". The short anime was a test case on how AI art can be used to help with the process of drawing all the backgrounds. What really got people up in arms, however, is how Netflix worded it: that this can be used in response to the shortage of background artists in the anime industry. Considering that artists and animators within the anime industry are being severely underpaid and struggling to even go by, only for their work to be underappreciated, this is a terrible prospect, and why I posted that initial reaction on Twitter.

How fast that this technology has been progressing is quite... scary, to say the least. Now, we've reached the point where entire videos can be generated as well. That part of the technology is still in its infancy, but the mere fact that it's possible now is both fascinating... and worrying, too. Combine that with how realistic real-life celebrities' voices can be replicated as well, plus existing deepfake technologies together, and we're seeing the potential for this technology to be abused in order to tarnish the reputation of key political figures, by making them say stuff that they would never say.

Advancements in technology is something to be celebrated, yes. But at the same time, it's... also something to dread with. I've had been optimistic about AI-generated art back then, because such a tech wasn't as mature then as it is now. There were safeguards in place to prevent users from generating art that they're not supposed to be generating, such as AI-generated porn of famous celebrities. But now, we got stuff like Stable Diffusion, where even that is no longer restricted anymore. More and more artists are fed-up with their art being used as training data without their consent, as we've observed with what happened to ArtStation, where artists posted nothing but variations of the "No to AI art" poster in protest to ArtStation's implementation of its own AI art generator. We've seen the same thing happened in DeviantArt, too, until DA made it so that artists will need to give consent to DA first to allow their art being used as training data (which I imagine that a massive majority of artists in DA will never). Meanwhile, sites like Fur Affinity made it clear that AI-generated art are not allowed to be posted there.

I can only hope that we're not reaching the future where everything is AI-generated. That just about anything and everything can be created via a few clicks of the mouse button. Again, art is a form of human expression, and, well... it's something that we should protect now. See, that is one of the reasons why I started doing art streams on Twitch: it's to prove that a human -- okay, more like a little green critter, but you get what I mean when I said "human" -- is drawing all that art, and not some AI passing itself off as a human. It's funny that, just a year ago, we were protesting about NFTs. And now, something even worse than NFTs started emerging.