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I am a little shocked at the lack of solidarity I see between artists working in different mediums wrt genAI.
Musicians who would never use it to make music use it to make cover art
Graphic artists reach for it to make music over their videos
Writers use it to illustrate their articles
And, considering software development an art, many use it to create web sites or apps to host their art.
None of this is necessary. All of this is harmful to the other artists.
Collaborate ffs.
Stop it.
Aug 09, 2026, 12:17 AM
BASED
As a musician, and as a friend of many graphic artists, writers, programmers, designers, and other kinds of artists, I hate how many people just think in their own benefit. Like, they don’t seem to understand that’s one of the main problems, because while I use AI to create cover artz and at the same time complain about not having enough demand and about my music being stolen, which takes away my opportunities to work, a graphic artist/cartoonist could be using AI to make music for their showcases/shelves and complaining about not having enough demand and about others (me, in this case) stealing their art. What I mean is, we’re both harming each other and reducing our net benefit margin, thus leading to a Pareto suboptimal.
EFF leading by example in their post yesterday Who (or What) Generates Images for EFF?
Legends
I do music and other art. I did use early AI to make a few music videos because I liked the jankyness of it all. How it was strange and surreal - like a dream. If anything, it was more of an experiment in a medium that wasn’t ready.
I don’t use any AI today except to mock it. I reject it as much as possible.
Seen this myself.
I just semi-retired after 10 years of writing My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fanfiction. It was a nice little side hustle that brought in 1-2k a year and I enjoyed learning how to write stories.
In the past I would write a story and then either commission an artist for some cover art, or find some that suited the story on one of the many MLP art databases and ask permission to use it. In 10 years of writing over a million words I was never once refused my request to use someone’s art, and I always made sure the artist was credited.
But, in the past year or so the primary website for MLP fanfictions (fimfiction.net) started allowing AI art for covers which like the OP, I feel to be a betrayal of our fellow creatives. We definitely need to stand together against the tide of AI slop, no matter its genre.
No slop on my clop!
And yeah, I’ve contributed more than my share of clop, but if you are looking for good non-clop stories check out:
The Dresden Fillies series - Dresden Files crossover
White by Crimnar - short horror story
Changeling Space Program - a riff on the Kerbal Space Program game
Celestia vs Garble - pure comedy in Monty Python style
It Sleeps Beneath Foal Mountain - Lovecraftian horror
Parlous - some of the best uses of archaic words and phrases I’ve ever read.
None of these are by me. Just some of my favorites
Realistically a lot of the people who are using AI for these were previously just ripping them off the internet and hoping nobody would notice…
So they’re actually not anti-AI art. They’re anti AI-art in their field, because they (rightly) percieve it as direct competition.
But if a visual artist uses it for music, how can he sleep soundly and claim a musician using it for visual arts is inethical?
That’s just slandering competition tooth and nail, all the while proving it’s good enough by using it yourself. Not an ethical stance.
I think maybe you misread?
What did I misread?
If they use it for cover art, then it’s clearly good enough for it.
I think a big part of the problem is that most people just can’t afford each other.
Sure, you can do “paid in kind” (which has it’s own complexities) but mainly there’s so many overheads in life, as well as middlemen extorting out their cut that hiring a creative is cripplingly expensive.
It’s something only affordable to either those with a lot of disposable income, or those who are planning to make a hefty profit from it (and won’t be worrying about money in the meantime either).
Even in times when I was making the same income as a plumber, the idea of hiring one was deeply financially intimidating. Even an independent one. The way it’s stacked, you can only afford to hire people in a lower class/caste/tax-bracket than yourself.
100% this. They couldn’t afford each other before. Just because AI options are cheap and fast doesn’t make them able to afford real work suddenly.
Yep. And people want to work on something they’re passionate about. So unless you’re actively collaborating all through the creative process, it’s mostly going to be one person’s creative vision. You can say that the music video is a collaboration between the animator/effects artist and the musician, but if the musician has something specific in mind that they want to make, that’s not going to feel like a collaboration for the video artist,it’s going to feel like a commission. Which no one wants to do for free.
Unions. We need 'em. Great episode on unions in a TrueAnon ep (podcast) about a week ago.
The cat’s outta the bag on AI. Either learn to prompt or fall behind. All professional industries have implemented it into their pipelines. Even my local hole in the wall bars and restaurants have that shit on their menus now. It’s everywhere. It’s in everything.
Most consumers don’t even give a shit until someone builds a data center in their back yard. Fuck AI, but also purity testing on AI is gonna burn more innocents than it will halt the adoption of AI.
I agree. Also we should keep dumping carbon into the atmosphere, and toxics into our rivers, and logging old growth, out women back in the kitchen and maybe consider bringing back slavery. Fuck ethics, convenience is the only thing that matters.
That’s a false equivalent and you know it. Despite the current US administration being bought by the oil barons, green energy is trending upwards. Maybe not as fast as it needs to, but oil’s days are already numbered.
With AI it’s the exact opposite. We have kids growing up with ubiquitous access to it. The normalization of AI use is what’s trending upwards.
That’s all well and good until the tech industry do what they always do when they decide to take over and industry (e.g. taxis or delivery) and just crank up the prices once they’ve got everyone hooked.
It’s all just subsidised by constant investment, and makes a loss of about $99 for every dollar it makes.
What you see now as a customer is not what it will be like in a few years.
Imagine uncritically regurgitating the lies of billionaires. They are not going to give you any billions, bro. You are literally nothing to them.
Lies? Look at what OP said. The shit is in everything. Go look on the Steam forum for any new release caught up in AI accusations. For every post calling out the AI there’s 10 other posters calling them luddies. It’s not even as bad as it’s going to get.
Lemmy is a big damn bubble. Outside of this safe space nobody gives a shit. Bots, shills, whatever; they’re loud and persistent. They’re the endgame of the dead internet.
It’s so heavily subsidized that you get access to AI for free, e.g. Google’s search summary, but on the other hand, they’re busy building up infrastructure to such a degree that they caused a shortage of hardware. In general, nobody would be willing to pay for unsubsidized AI. The only way AI sticks around is if the taxpayer ends up footing the bill. And Trump will probably try to make this happen.
If everyone were angels we wouldn’t need money and the issue is that struggling artists have none to spread around. Collaboration is not the answer. Ending the oligarchic kleptocracy so we can afford to pay artists their worth is.
How do we do that without collaboration?
The human brain always picks convenience.
We simply cannot help ourselves.
I’ve grown immensely cynical about that this past decade. Like, literally every chance we get to take a less destructive path, I observe people skip it because it’s slightly less convenient… that’s why they use AI.
They could give another artist $20 for something important, but our monkey brain is tired and picks the 5 second solution instead. I bet they don’t even look outside ChatGPT.
…So yeah, I think we’re in trouble. As this is not going to stop.
IMO the drive to convenience is a product of the pressure of living under capitalism (as you mentioned, tired, but also fearful), and our society’s abdication of nearly all forms of responsibility (of which looking out for each other is one).
As much as I love to blame capitalism for most things, I think this one does just boil down to human psychology. It’s probably fair to say it’s exacerbated by capitalism though.
There are things we could do to mitigate it; that’s what regulations are for. But yeah, if left alone, people will tend to do whatever spends the fewest calories.
I’m just going to take a moment to appreciate that they considered software development an art. It’s a rare moment.
It’s funny how many non-programmers see programming as a repetitive and boring task… Like, the whole point of it is to take boring repetitive tasks and automate them away. And the bits that are really well understood are the bits you don’t need to deal with, because there’s already libraries for that. Definitely an art (or a craft at least).
One of my favourite things is to watch a programmer wax poetic about the beauty they see in good code.
It tangentially reminds me of “clocking screws”, a practice in which one screws in flathead screws such that the slots are all aligned . It’s easy to do, but a lot of faff; manufacturing variances means that each screw will require a slightly different number of turns to be sufficiently tight, so you need to:
" Line up the screw so the slot is aligned vertically- Screw it in until it’s tight
- If the slot is not aligned vertically, estimate how far off from ideal it is (i.e. if the slot ended up horizontal, then that’s around 90° off from what you want)
- Unscrew the screw, and line it up again, accounting for the angle you estimated in the previous step
- Screw the screw back in and repeat the process if necessary.
It takes a lot of skill to reliably gauge how to do, especially because repeated screwing and unscrewing the screw can loosen the hole enough that it affects the process. Even for skilled craftsmen, it’s an absurd level of work for something that, even when flathead screws were more common, most people would never notice. Nowadays, the only place I’m likely to see clockable screws are at old churches or similar
It’s so persnickety and silly, but that’s why I love it. I imagine that the craftspeople who care(d) about this stuff were a lot like today’s programmers who wax poetic about elegance in their code. It makes me so happy whenever I peer underneath a century old pew and see clocked screws, because it makes me think about the person who put such care into a part of their work that next to no-one would even see, let alone appreciate. It is especially nice because I imagine that many of these craftspeople were of a socioeconomic class that were thought unable to appreciate Beauty and Art.
No matter the field, people will find ways to impart Beauty and Art into their craft.
Same to mathematics then again the relationship most people have with math is a far cry from the creative, hopefully ingenious, and creative labor of what mathematicians do. Most just remember suffering to learn rules discovered by others and themselves never getting the chance to do the discovering.
I love maths, did a major in it (plus a summer project). But its also one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and I never did anything that felt remotely like discovery or like creativity (though I agree it is creative). It’s in a league of it’s own in terms of dedication required, IMO.
What branch of math did you study (assuming you got a graduate degree)? I was more so in CS so had a heavy discrete math background. I particularly love graph theory. I think with applied math in CS you’re often asked to do something new-ish with designing algorithms. That said I also didn’t discover anything.
It’s funny how many programmers see it the same way. Actually bugs the shit outta me, haha.
Dude have you ever tried to collaborate with anyone?
Also, A, no one has money.
And B: it turns out learning an art form to a high enough degree to use it to sell something involves (generally) doing it from a young age and each different skill requires other related skills. Nobody has the time to make music, and learn art, and then graphic art, and marketing, and writing, and accounting.
I used to be a whizz at Photoshop elements. I could make .gifs, I could do lense flares, gradients, clean up line work, color in layers, shift chromatics, all of it.
Now i can barely understand Gimp enough to mirror a copy paste command.
So there’s also an element of maintaining relevant skills.
No one is saying everyone needs all those skills…
See line 1
Stop it. Get some help.
Which bit? Caring about the welfare of other creatives?
This was a reference to the MJ meme about using drugs. I’m saying people should stop using AI to replace creatives and get help from humans instead.
Thanks for the explainer :)
Something tells me they’re using the Michael Jordan “stop it, get some help” as a representation of what the post is actually meaning to say about artists. Not that you, OP, are wrong for and need to not make this post. Poorly communicated, at least lol
Ah, could be, thanks.
To add to your point, that user posts to the Fuck AI community
Everyone thinks AI can do everyone else’s job except their own.
I personally don’t think so, and will not disrespect people by using it. It’s just amazing how the fad at work went with everyone posting how they were going to automate away every other job responsibility but theirs. The crazy part is how eager they shared their concepts with the very people they were basically saying were obsolete.
AI can do any job. Doing the job with finesse and originality, not so much. But it will do it adequately, expediently, and repeatably. It will never get bored, (so long as that is not programmed into it) and does not require rest, food, or recuperation time. If a robot breaks, it can either be repaired and be back to work in hours or days or be replaced instantaneously with no troublesome moral entanglements regarding ending a person’s lively hood.
You can hate them all you want, but from a purely CBA perspective, it’s plain to see why there’s’ a move to it.
As CGP Grey put it in his fantastic video on the subject: Not everyone wants a triple press fair trade soy macchiato with oat milk foam; most just want a decent cup of coffee.
AI can do any job.
It can’t do every job, or else it would have happened. There’s a lot of limitations that prevent it from accomplishing even the most basic facets of some jobs.
Ironically, especially the manual labor jobs not already replaced by robots are some of the toughest nuts to crack with AI. For example, any task where a human starts to have a hard time just by putting on some gloves, we don’t have ways to feed the AI the usual set of inputs that the human is acting on that is needed to properly imitate the behavior.
On the front of dealing in fact based work, LLMs don’t really deal in ‘facts’ but facts are very highly correlated to the narrative, so it can frequently do a passable job, but it is factually incorrect a fair amount of time and if the facts actually matter, then it’s a tricky scenario. If you can hook it up to a feedback loop where mistakes are both harmless and fed back into the model for a retry, then you can significantly mitigate this drawback, but it’s not always feasible to do this.
Now perhaps it can ‘do’ every purely fictional output of text, audio, images, and video, which would be the topic of the post. The stuff we were kind of hoping to be freed up to do as fun and rewarding art. Instead, it’s the first thing that is ‘nailed’ by AI as far as corporates are concerned freeing up people to be those plumbers and HVAC technicians instead of doing art, and we get stuck with the most milquetoast slurry of slop to consume instead.
But it will do it adequately, expediently, and repeatably.
LLMs have a key weakness in that they aren’t repetitive. They come up with a new solution to the job every single time they’re prompted. Sometimes it can do the job adequately and expediently, sometimes it produces nonsense, and you’ll never know when.
The c-suite have convinced themselves that LLMs don’t have this flaw and that they can be treated like any other automation, that they can be relied on to do the same thing over and over, and then reality intrudes when they find out these are probability engines.
The chatbots can’t actually do any job.
I’m not talking about chatbots. AI can be tailored to suit the need. You wouldn’t expect a receptionist to do the job of the engineer anymore than you’d expect Excel spreadsheets to operate a CNC machine.
Cnc is numerical data. Excel can do numerical data very well, and can export cad files that will control cnc machines.
Source: i do this sort of automation as part of my work, and have seen excel run pacman in the spreadaheet using the cell background colors as pixels.
Its more a matter of people in outside fields not understanding the work people do and the tools people use.
Sorry. Had to put that in there.
just because a hammer can drive a screw if your determined enough doesn’t meant that’s the optimal way to go about it.
or to put it another way:
The OP is obviously about chatbots, so, I’m not sure why you aren’t talking about chatbots.
I’m talking about ALL AI. Narrowly defining them to just chatbots skews the scope of the discussion on the matter, IMHO.
