I've used AI to get an idea of what my sona should look like. I stuck with THE ONE good generation of it for a year until I found a good artist.

Thanks for your input! I feel like that's an ok use of it. As long as you're not being like "Hey I drew this! Look I'm an artist!" then it's not that big of a deal.

Then there's the AI hunters here on FA that I was warned about. I get it, you don't like AI art, but why art you taking down entire accounts because of it?

I feel how you've described using it isn't inherently wrong.

I feel like it's sort of a simplified version of what artists already do, taking elements from other artists and things they see and using them in different ways to make something new. As long as you are drawing it yourself and adding your own elements, thoughts, and ideas, I think it's a valid way to make art.

Easy to say: Yes its totally wrong

Using AI is largely the issue of asking, are you fine with corporations performing mass-scale theft of intellectual property rights for commercial purposes from those either unable to learn about the theft of their art and often unable to fight back against the theft.

Because the “training” isn’t learning anything it’s figuring out patterns and compiling a result from everything it sees.

A person taking inspiration from another’s art inherently still passes through the lens of that person’s personal style and patterns. An AI is literally just a predictive engine that sorts the keywords that a prompt is by the keywords it was given from the data it was fed, and then overlays everything it’s taken and then uses some natural random noise to filter down the results until it creates an image that’s “close” to what the data says a “tower” should look like. It’s why stuff like Glaze is so poisonous to the data because the machine doesn’t have any idea what some the info is it just pulls from the data and if the data has lots of pixel specific errors designed to poison the model it will replicate those because to the machine those aren’t errors those are the correct results.

Referencing AI art for a single person’s non-commercial use isn’t a bad thing but the support of the AI system as it exists is supporting corporations who don’t care about artists or their rights and careers but wants to steal enough art fast enough that they can become mainstream and get away with mass art theft to resell themselves and cutting the artists they rely on out of the picture.

The other issue is crediting, there is no way for someone who uses an AI generator to actually know who their art is based on because of the company ever released the training lists they’d be literally released the list of who has a right to sue them. The training models that exist required millions upon millions of pictures and comments scrapped from as many places as they could without paying anything for any of the art they’ve stolen.

If an AI was built with consent, with proper attribution, and done with a mind towards ethically handling what kind of content it was intended to generate that’d be fine.

But the industry as it has been built was done by grifters hoping to use Google Images as source for their get rich quick scheme before anyone finds a way to force them to divulge the list of who they stole art from or someone passes a law that requires it or requires them to create a way to remove training data from a model.

I use AI in exactly the same way. Just commissioned and artist I worked with in the past to draw their interpretation of this AI image I found

I use it to generate references to give to the artists that I pay. I also use it for character images of RPG characters that I play since I cant afford to have comms done of every character (and I am waiting patiently for art of some characters.)

As long as you're not profiting from it and youre spending the same or more on art as you would without it I dont see any major moral issues with it.