Wouldn’t it be much cooler, if we commissioned an actual artist for the banner

I hate it when AI is used to replace the work an artist would have been paid for. But uh, this is a random open-source forum; there's no funding for artists to make banners. Rejecting AI art -- which was voted for by the community -- just seems like baseless virtue signalling. No artist is going to get paid if we remove it.

But like if you want to commission an artist with your own money, by all means go ahead. You'll still most likely need another community vote to approve it though.

Honestly, it's because it went in early days.
When ML generated art was a novelty, and people hadn't had a chance to sit down and go "wait, actually, no".
And it's an absolute arsepain to replace, because you'll get 1001 prompt engineers defending slop.
feddit.uk banned generative AI content to make this process easier, and still needs to sweep through and commission new art for a few communities.

Intellectual property is made up bullshit. You can't "steal" a jpeg by making a copy of it, and the idea that creating something based on or inspired by something else is somehow "stealing" it is quite frankly preposterous.

The sooner we as a society disabuse ourselves of this brainworm the better.

Edit: I have very mixed feelings about so-called generative AI, so please do not take this as a blanket endorsement of the technology - but rather a challenge on the concept of "stealing intellectual property," which I unequivocally do not believe in.

Though this is about Lemmy.world I think sh.itjust.works has a similarly sad story.

We had a vote for the banner when sh.itjust.works started where a bunch of artist came forward with art for the banner and some AI guys came in with art as well. This was clearly stated by the AI guys, with no trickery. The community voted in the agora to reject the art of its users in favour of this stable diffusion slop.

I think you can tell I dispise AI art. The reason for it here though is that the community voted for it over real artists time, dedication, and love for the community.

If someone really wanted to change it though one could create a discussion post in the agora, our community voting community, to have it changed. They'd likely need to provide new art which, as an artist, I'm unwilling to do. The community has shown it cares little for the time, effort, and skill involved so somebody with an hour and stable diffusion would win out over the multi-day process of making something meaningful

Right now, anti-AI rhetoric is taking the same unprincipled rhetoric that the Luddites pushed forward in attacking machinery. They identified a technology linked to their proletarianization and thus a huge source of their new misery, but the technology was not at fault. Capitalism was.

What generative AI is doing is making art less artisinal. The independent artists are under attack, and are being proletarianized. However, that does not mean AI itself is bad. Copyright, for example, is bad as well, but artists depend on it. The same reaction against AI was had against the camera for making things like portraits and still-lifes more accessible, but nowadays we would not think photography to be anything more than another tool.

The real problems with AI are its massive energy consumption, its over-application in areas where it actively harms production and usefulness, and its application under capitalism where artists are being punished while corporations are flourishing.

In this case, there's no profit to be had. People do not need to hire artists to make a banner for a niche online community. Hell, this could have been made using green energy. These are not the same instances that make AI harmful in capitalist society.

Correct analysis of how technologies are used, how they can be used in our interests vs the interests of capital, and correct identification of legitimate vs illegitimate use-cases are where we can succeed and learn from the mistakes our predecessors made. Correct identification of something linked to deteriorating conditions combined with misanalyzing the nature of how they are related means we come to incorrect conclusions, like when the Luddites initially started attacking machinery, rather than organizing against the capitalists.

Hand-created art as a medium of human expression will not go away. AI can't replace that. What it can do is make it easier to create images that don't necessarily need to have that purpose, as an expression of the human experience, like niche online forum banners or conveying a concept visually. Not all images need to be created in artisinal fashion, just like we don't need to hand-draw images of real life when a photo would do. Neither photos nor AI can replace art. Not to mention, but there is an art to photography as well, each human use of any given medium to express the human experience can be artisinal.

People are so dramatic over AI

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the tech itself. Your issue is with capitalist relations and the way this technology is used under capitalism. Focus on what the actual problem is. https://dialecticaldispatches.substack.com/p/a-marxist-perspective-on-ai

There are a lot of talented artists here on lemmy.ml and I think it would be wise to ask them if they were interested in providing a banner image that is not ai generated, surely someone would take up the offer.

I mean is it really a problem if the only problem is that it's AI

actual artists are getting fired from their jobs, because the company replaces them with an AI, that was trained on their original art.

Are you sure that's happening? Under the previous mode of capitalism, what kind of companies were hiring artists?

As I understand it, that isn't the actual gripe from the general perspective of the artist. Instead it's about copyright, a concept I fundamentally disagree with. I don't think it's necessary, and that the artist's capacity for prosperity being tied to copyright is a symptom of a bigger problem than being usurped by software.

I think there is good art and bad art. I think there is good AI art (tbh I can't think of any examples, I just think in principle AI art has the capacity to be good) and bad AI art. I think the relative ease of access skews people's exposure towards slop. I use the term slop as a descriptor for AI art that is sloppy or wholly derivative; not to prejudge it.

I think perspectives like yours haven't compelled me to think they are meaningfully different from that of the Luddites, or those opposed to implementing computers in the workplace, etc. I genuinely sympathise with those groups, but ultimately wouldn't have us go back.

it's just a crappy and lazy image regardless of origins, but the fact it is AI makes it crappier

You wouldn't necessarily even need to comission someone. There are plenty of Creative Commons licensed pieces of art that could be used.

I'm not sure weather it is AI or not. It's much easier to tell when the images are ment to look realistic.

I very much agree. Text generation has many valid use cases and I use it on a day to day basis, but image generation as much fewer valid use cases and much more malicious ones.

The AI sector is not pushed by consumer money. A consumer strike won't alter at all the macro-dynamics happening at the moment. If you want to resist AI, go blow up some data center or unionize some tech workers.

You're making a moralistic point, blaming consumers instead of corporations, which leaves not much room for action.

How else would someone have been able to get all those chipmunks in one photo?

That's your opinion. I disagree with it. Keep the banner as it is. Someone surely took the time to make that image. As it's pretty good even more for the time it was created. You are just dishing that person's work. I respect that person work, so the banner should stay.

It would be fine if it was possible to ask the person who made the banner how did they made it and how long it took.

Your complain seems to be mostly based on AI being able to do things faster. At that point why stop there.. don't hire digital artist. They took jobs away from traditional artists. Pretty sure the only good thing we could do I commission the banner to a full crew of sculptors to do the 3d mesh on granite and then a full tome oil painter for a year to capture the image into canvas. That would make sure that not technological advances would steal anyone's job.

Edit: It's fucking ironic that anti-AI people use downvote/ upvote bots. But I catched it. Fucking ironic.