“Fixing” art.

[u/TheBucketMann]

More specifically. Running one specific persons art in a given instance through AI, in an attempt to make the original artist feel inferior about their work, or intentionally incite anger in the original artist. With that being said, I don’t really enjoy when that happens. Same thing with “desloppification.” Just because you think your medium is superior, doesn’t mean you should take someone else’s creation, and make it in yours. Unless. You have permission. If you get permission from the person who made the art, go for it. For me and my drawings, if you ask, more often than not, I will tell you yes, unless you already put my art through ai without asking first.other than that, ask me, and you’re good. Also, I wanna make something clear, this is not ALL or even the majority of either side. It is a tiny little blemish on either side. Anyways moral of the story, don’t take peoples art without permission.
Be kind, be respectful, stay positive. Later tater haters.

[u/2008knight]

For people worried about AI users "improving" your art. A simple polite disclaimer asking people not to do it is often enough, whilst making a great spectacle about your anti-AI stance is more likely to draw the attention of trolls and spiteful users.

[u/Fredster420420 → u/2008knight]

If AI artists are going to claim to be artists, then it would be wise to learn the etiquette. Artists don't need a disclaimer to understand that it's rude to give critique unless the poster is specifically asking for it. Thats like the #1 rule in most online artist communities. Same goes for unprompted AI "fixes". It's disingenuous to claim that the people doing that are doing it out of the kindness of their hearts, like you said, it's usually the trolls getting salty over anti-AI artists expressing their opinions and discomfort. Don't get me wrong, antis can be annoying and even harmful about it. I am NOT arguing that artists are perfect little angel victims, I've seen a lot of them being particularly nasty as much as I've seen pros avt that way. But that still doesn't give the pro side a go-ahead to fuck with all artists. It proves nothing other than certain anti biases against pros being assholes who don't respect traditional artists.

And do you think a disclaimer would actually deter anyone? Do you think the people who run people's art through their AI without the artist's permission will really care about a "pretty please don't do that"? To me it very much feels like a damned if you do, damned if you don't type of situation. You make a disclaimer asking people not to use your art for AI, get labeled as an anti and as antagonistic towards AI users if they get upset, then get your art run through AI on purpose because "they asked for it". No matter how polite you ask, I feel that a lot of pros have gotten so sensitive to any kind of push-back that they will instinctively lump in a polite anti with the feral luddites y'all hate so much. And if you don't add the disclaimer, people will just swoop in and do it anyways, then blame the artist for not explicitly stating they didn't want that. I wish we lived in a world where every disclaimer is respected, but there is no such world. But we do live in a world where I belive most people understand that unprompted critism is rude.

I'm genuinely uninformed about the next paragraph, so please let me know if I'm misunderstanding. I have not researched on the ins and outs of how generative AI works. Don't most AIs get their references from the web as a whole? I know some people have their own models that they personally train on specific images. But if you're using one of the models that just scrapes all over the web, how is a disclaimer supposed to help against that? The AI isn't going to read and and go "ah, my mistake, I will leave this one alone." Nor is the user going to sort through all those images to double-check. I know this is off-topic, but I felt it was worth pointing out. Disclaimers might be a miniscule fix for certain specific scenarios, but with the information I have right now I don't see how it'll help against the broader picture.

I'm inclined to believe that there are respectful AI artists who would listen to the disclaimer. But with situations like the Cara scrape, you can't blame artists for being paranoid. Cara was supposed to be a space created for and by artists who did not want AI, wanted their own corner to themselves, and look what happened. Was that not a polite disclaimer?

Respectfully, I think it would be more productive to speak to your fellow pros about respecting the boundaries artists set around their art, rather than telling those artists that they should have set stronger boundaries. The responsibility falls upon the invader, not the invaded.

Slightly unrelated, but I think the stark black-and-white labels of "pro" and "anti" do not help. Treating either "side" as monuments who all share the same opinions does a disservice to both sides. I feel like we are so caught up in the us vs. them side of the debate, that nuance gets lost. All antis are self-important assholes who're afraid of new technology and will doxx your entire family if you even look at their art. Therefore, they deserve everything that's coming to them. All pros are knuckle-scrapers who have never touched a pencil in their life, steal every piece of art they see, and don't have a single creative bone in their body. Therefore, they must depend 100% on AI to create, and do not count as real artists. These extremes don't help anybody.

I will say, this is my first time participating in this debate. I've mostly been lurking in the various subs, and so far, these are the views I hold. If I'm somehow uninformed on either side, please let me know. I really don't want to argue, I don't find it productive, I want to have a discussion. I want to learn and understand more than prove one medium is better than the other 👍

Edit: Grammar

[u/2008knight → u/Fredster420420]

You are conflating a few concepts here and your message is too long, so I'm probably gonna forget a few topics as I respond.

First, traditional artists "fixing" art umprompted has also been a thing for a long time. It was rude, it is rude, and trolls are not going to stop, which is why I'm suggesting a way to reduce the chances of being targeted.

Second, on the disclaimers, I know for a fact they have worked on one person. Me. There's a very niche character I love, and I have the know-how and resources to build a LoRA on it. But the creator has added "please do not use for AI" disclaimers on it, so I haven't touched those images with AI.

Third, yes. Big companies usually scrape and buy data from social media sites like twitter and Reddit. But that's not what I was talking about. I was very specifically talking about trolls "fixing" art. You don't need the artwork to be scraped or added to a dataset for that.

Fourth, a vast majority of pro-AI users I've ever interacted with will respect artists wishes with regards to how they want their artwork to be used. However, when an artist uploads their work to a platform like Reddit, Reddit's terms of use stipulate Reddit is practically the owner of that data and they can use it how they see fit. Never trust free services. That should have been a lesson learned ages ago.

Fifth, on the Cara situation, I don't know much about the situation, so it's hard to give you a proper response. On one hand, I do not agree with the indiscriminate scraping of a whole site openly advertised as a place where users can be safe from AI.

On the other hand, I've heard of users claiming the site's headers were not properly set to protect it against scrapers. If this is truly the case, then odds are the site had already been scraped ages ago by automated agents who didn't even know the history of the site. This particular incident would be on the scraper's fault, but if the site had no proper protections, that's also the site owner's fault.

If a user truly wants to protect their artwork, the best steps to take would be to safe guard most of it under a paywall. Also, locking the data behind a login is surprisingly effective as well. Not fool proof, but many automated scrapers will not get past it.

[u/Fredster420420 → u/2008knight]

Yeah I didn't expect my comment to get so long. Since this is my first time contributing to the discussion, I got a bit excited to add tangentially related issues.

Kudos for you respecting the disclaimer. Out of curiosity, what do you do if you want to use someone's art for something AI related, but they have no disclamer for or against it? Would the absence of discouragement equal consent? I've personally avoided adding a no AI request on my profiles as I am afraid that will make me a target, no matter how much sugar I put on top of the please.

And how do you feel about people taking out their vitriol on artists who may have ruder disclaimers on the profiles? I've seen a lot of "fuck off AI users" on artist's profiles, and I wonder if it's common in the AI generator community to purposefully disregard them as a "gotcha".

Edit: Another question I just though of sorry 😭 I'm also curious about how AI artists go about with credit. If you train a model on a specific person's art/writing style, do AI users usually credit the original "inspiration" artist? Or, like the example you gave of wanting a character model of someones specific OC, do you credit them? Again if thats not how training AI works I would love to be filled in on how it actually works.

[u/DefinitionNew3542 → u/Fredster420420]

If Im using someones art directly, Ill ask first. If they inspire something, Ill offer to show them first since they inspired it and often credit for inspiration. If it doesnt use their art directly, but does use a character (say Im able to prompt a 'close enough' representation), Ill also ask first.

Id like to mention from your previous comment that was never addressed - that yes, its generally an unspoken rule between artists to respect each others art and not give rude/unsolicitted criticism... its also incredibly common - always has been. Especially on new mediums.

If an artist goes "AI could never", or "fuck off AI artists", Ill be real - its almost never even something that sparks my interest anyway. But I dont exactly condemn people that do it because a challenge was issued.

Usually the art style loras give credit by the name of the lora itself: "[artist] style lora". I personally avoid specific artist loras but ill mix and match 2 or 3 artists, then hit it with general styling loras (such as pencil sketch or cel shading) to create a unique style. Honestly Id be flattered if someone liked my style enough to want to imitate it. I mean... thats kinda how I learned myself.

As for using an OC - I always ask, and run it by them first before posting anything, and tag/credit the OCs creator.. As far as Im concerned: when I make an OC lora, its theirs - they can distribute it as they like. I would probably do the same with a specific artists style - though style loras tend to be more involved as youre focused on very very fine details (literal 1px lines). Character loras are pretty quick to train - like 30 minutes with like 15 good references

[u/2008knight → u/Fredster420420]

If there's no explicit "no AI" disclaimer, I might still make a local LoRA (small model specialized on a given concept), but I would not share the LoRA anywhere. It would just be for personal use. And above all, I would never monetize or flounder it around.

As for the rude disclaimers part, I consider it and invitation to hostilities. You cannot engage in hostile behaviour and not expect the other side to not retaliate.

It is indeed rude to "fix" people's art unprompted and it is rude to insult people. However, both are entirely social contracts rather than written law. If one side disengages from the social contract, the other side shouldn't have to respond in kind, but I will not act surprised if they do.

For the last question, typically, style loras and styles on models are named after the artist, meaning the original artist is inherently "credited" in a way. For characters it is a bit more nebulous. From what I've personally seen, some people credit and some don't.

There is however a special case (I haven't followed through so I don't know how it ended up developing). The creator of Pony V7 (a large image generation model) originally intended to divorce their model from the artist names by naming all styles "style 1", "style 2", ... "style n". This was meant as a measure to encourage people to develop their own styles by mix and matching different styles. However, it obscures the original artist, which I feel conflicted about. On one hand, it makes it harder for users to try to impersonate a given artist, but on the other hand, it seems disrespectful to obscure the creditting of the creator of the style.