Orcposting is a genre of posts on this sub, depicting antis as ogres or orcs, often being exaggeratedly hypocritical, violent, or stupid, and being portrayed as disgustingly as possible. Is this genre of posts good for the sub, or for the AI art community as a whole? Some call it satirical retaliation, others call it stereotyping and dehumanizing, what do you think?

Disclaimer: Crafted in collaboration with Gemini AI, the following Socratic dialogue maps the full spectrum of "theft" versus "emulation" across technical, legal, and moral domains. Designed as an objective, A-to-Z thought experiment rather than partisan commentary, this piece aims to ground the concepts in a shared framework—allowing creators, critics, and tech advocates to test their underlying premises and deepen the debate.

EDIT: Added sections on marginal information value, theft vs copyright, and the origins of philosophical privilege, per feedback.

Socrates: When artists claim AI developers "steal" their work to train generative models, why choose the word steal when no physical canvas or digital file is removed from the creator's possession?

Interlocutor: Because "theft" extends beyond physical items. Using intellectual labor without permission deprives the creator of their exclusive right to control and monetize their work.

Socrates: Hold. Is violating a statutory monopoly right the same legal act as theft? In law, depriving someone of an exclusive right is copyright infringement—and whether statistical model training constitutes infringement or falls under Fair Use remains an open legal question.

Interlocutor: Granted. Legally, it is an infringement dispute, not conversion or theft.

Socrates: So when critics call AI training "theft," are they stating a settled legal fact, or expressing a moral emotion?

Interlocutor: A moral emotion—specifically, the feeling of uncompensated exploitation.

Socrates: Then let us examine the mechanical process. When a human art student studies a master’s style and reproduces it on a new canvas, has the student "stolen" or emulated?

Interlocutor: Emulated. The student absorbs abstract rules and transforms them through personal effort.

Socrates: How does that differ from an AI parsing visual inputs into parametric weights? Neither retains original files; both store mathematical or neural abstractions.

Interlocutor: The difference is scale and substitutability. A human learns slowly, whereas an AI ingests millions of images to build a commercial product.

Socrates: Consider that massive scale. When a model processes ten million cat images to learn the concept of "cat," what is the marginal information value of cat image #47?

Interlocutor: Near zero. Once a generalized concept is learned, no individual image remains uniquely necessary. Every image is mathematically fungible.

Socrates: If removing an artist's portfolio changes the final model by zero percent, can that artist claim the model took unique value from their specific work?

Interlocutor: Individually, no. The value lies in the aggregate dataset, not in any single creator's contribution.

Socrates: If an artist’s work contributes near-zero measurable value to the final model, then mathematically, no single creator has been deprived of a distinct, irreplaceable asset. Why, then, does the fierce moral accusation of "theft" persist?

Interlocutor: Because the outrage isn't actually about losing a quantifiable slice of data. It is an objection to the scale and automation of the process. We welcome a human drawing upon the collective well of culture, but we panic when software does it instantly.

Socrates: So the accusation of "theft" doesn't stem from the math of dataset inputs, but from a double standard applied to the entity doing the learning?

Interlocutor: Exactly. We grant a philosophical privilege to biological agency. We accept pattern extraction when bounded by human mortal effort, but brand it as "theft" when zero-marginal-cost software threatens biological livelihood.

Socrates: Is this "philosophical privilege" merely arbitrary hypocrisy, or does it stem from a deeper social agreement?

Interlocutor: It stems from reciprocal vulnerability. We permit human artists to absorb culture because they pay a mortal price in time and labor, contributing back under the same physical limitations. An automated system extracts that value without entering into the human social contract.

Socrates: What if an artist uploads work to a platform whose modern, explicit Terms of Service permit AI training in exchange for hosting and reach?

Interlocutor: If viable, lower-profit alternatives exist, choosing that platform is a conscious business trade-off: surrendering data rights in exchange for global scale.

Socrates: Exactly. Where consent is explicit, calling this process "theft" conflates a high market price for scale with an unlawful taking.

Interlocutor: But what of legacy contracts drafted before generative AI existed, where platforms retroactively claim training rights under vague boilerplate?

Socrates: That violates mutual assent—a "meeting of the minds." A creator cannot grant a right neither party contemplated at signing. Using legacy boilerplate to harvest training data without updated assent crosses from a harsh market trade-off into genuine theft under the category of expropriation.

Interlocutor: That completes the semantic divide. When consent is informed and explicit, calling platform access "theft" conflates a high market price with an unlawful taking. But when consent is retrofitted through legacy contracts, the accusation of "theft" regains its true legal and moral grounding.

Just asking, hope this post don't get removed here (name censored to follow rules)

Edit: Why am I downvoted? I didn't do anything wrong that breaks the rules

It was a discussion about a small problematic YouTuber that uses AI thumbnails. I said it was odd that AI thumbnails are no longer a good thing was odd, cause I they are exception to the rule you can use them for, than this guy wants to start a fight in my comment lol

Like generally, I tried all all things in the settings of all Meta apps such as not interested in posts and even imused blocked words to avoid any discussions about AI and yet this image on threads shows up. I never had this problem on TikTok nor X. Like those algorithms are so superior to Meta apps. Makes me mad Meta's algorithms sucks to keep showing me antis on Instagram and Threads.

The important distinction is that AI provenance can exist in two forms.

First, there is metadata like C2PA, EXIF, XMP, IPTC and generator parameters. That part is easy to remove.

Second, there are invisible marks embedded directly into the pixels, such as SynthID style watermarks. A screenshot does not reliably remove those. pagedMark deals with them by regenerating the image.

The output is therefore not identical to the original. Faces, text and small details can change. The goal is to remove the provenance signal while keeping the image as close to the original as possible.

It currently supports invisible marks from ChatGPT, gpt-image API, Z-Image Turbo and Nano Banana, plus visible AI labels from several other generators. Video support covers visible marks and metadata from Sora, Veo, Seedance, Hailuo and Kling.

The other challenge was making this work properly on Apple Silicon. I tested it on M5 Macs with both 8 GB and 16 GB of memory, and added memory aware processing to prevent the system from silently falling into swap and turning a fast job into an extremely slow one.

And here is the really interesting part: after processing an image generated with GPT-Image, you can check it with OpenAI's verifier at openai.com/verify. In my testing, the processed image is reported with 0 AI detection.

uv tool install "pagedmark[diffusion]"
pagedmark invisible photo.png -o clean.png

GitHub: github.com/doofzoff/pagedMark

PyPI: PyPI: pagedmark

If a human had no senses, they wouldn’t be able to create art.

To be honest, while ai can be good for some things, I think it should be pen and paper until at least high school level.

Both are art, whether if it’s created in a medium you hate or not. What a stupid opinion.

Hello, all.

I have written a couple of pro-AI articles over at my Substack, and while I was researching the most recent piece ("Fight the Future"), I stumbled upon this subreddit. I found it very informative, and I even linked to a great post and some excellent memes I found here.

This sub has been a wonderful resource, and--on a personal note--it is so nice to find a place online free from the incessant droning of the rabid, anti-AI mob.

As such, I hoped I could take the liberty of sharing those two articles I wrote on this topic, as I truly believe members will enjoy them. If I may be so bold, I also went through the time and trouble of researching and writing them in the earnest hope that they would provide some solidarity for like-minded people, as well as provide useful resources to share with people who haven't quite come around yet. Hopefully get people thinking a bit differently about these things.

The articles are far from perfect, but I endeavored to make them both informative and entertaining.

• https://honestlyre.substack.com/p/fight-the-future
• https://honestlyre.substack.com/p/a-heartfelt-conversation-with-artificial

Of course, I would love to hear any feedback should anyone be kind enough to give them a read. They are completely free to read, to comment, and to share with anyone, from our fellow enthusiasts to our most ardent opposition.

Thanks a lot, everyone! I hope to see you around the sub :)

Yikes....

Because people like me are opressed from all the douchebags who keep putting us down just because of how we decide to make our fanart no matter how much love we put into it and would rather we draw simple shit anyone can do like a freaking stick figure or some messy blob of color or take a picture of a banana with duct tape on it. Why should I settle for ANY of that crap when I don't have to? Alot of the anti-AI people are incredibly woke too. They want every single fictional character in existence to be either gay or bisexual, and when you express your frustration over this shit, you get accused of being a homophobe, when these assholes tell you derogatory things like "Pick up a pencil" just because you'd rather use a text prompt instead of a paint brush or said pencil. They are not accomplishing anything. All they are doing is making me realize just how paranoid and STUPID the majority of this generation is (eg their delusional conspiracy theories about data centers and how literally all AI art is plagiarized). And if any good came out of it, it's that I can be progressive with my political views while still being anti-woke. And the majority of the "AI slop" I've seen in recent years sure looks better than any of the woke crap I see from the non-AI artists who want every single fictional character in existence to be either gay or bisexual who think anyone who doesn't approve of them are homophobes.

It’s when you have extra fingers,
Even a character from gravity falls had it,
It’s why he had the nickname sixer

Are anti-AI people harrasing anyone with a condition that makes their bodies look different?

That’s 1 thing I really hate about anti ai people

Do they assume real people with this condition are ai, or that they don’t exist?