A Patron recently rage-quit due to my AI policy. It's well within everyone's rights to leave; I won't stop you or hold it against you. But I vehemently disagree with the rude manner in which this user behaved. Unfortunately I am left in a situation where I feel compelled to respond, even though I'd rather spend my time making art.
This is not directed at anyone
I know there are others of you who do not like AI, though a small minority according to the poll. This post is not directed at you. Or at anyone really, not even the Patron in question since they already left.
I just feel the need to clear the air to avoid similar situations in the future, and I want to be more clear about how I think about certain aspects of AI
If you really dislike AI and want to quit
This is your right, I won't try to stop you, and there will be no hard feelings from me. I only ask that you be civil. Honestly, that is a rule for everyone here.
If you have a need to express strong opinions, you can DM me directly. You can even lambast me on your own platforms, I just won't tolerate such behavior my own platform.
I'm not supporting AI companies
This wasn't mentioned in any comment, but I want to point out that to this date, I have not paid a single cent to any AI companies. If anything, my usage of the resources that they give for free must certainly be a (small) burden on them, so I like to think of myself as a "loss" for them.
They may have profited from my traffic via ads, and you could say that by talking about their products, I am in a way "advertising" for them, but I have not directly paid them.
This may change in the future if I find a product that is compelling enough that it will actually add value to my work, but I have not found such a product yet. So far AI is just a plaything that occasionally produces an interesting result.
I won't be profiting from AI
Everything that I produce has been free, and will continue to be free. That even extends to the "Super" content; it just has a very long "early access" period. The AI stuff has been especially free: there isn't even early access for that, it just goes public first.
Yes, I do earn money from Patreon, but this is not in exchange for anything. You Patrons support me financially because you like what I do and want to help out. It's hard for me to think that the Patreon dollars you give me for my animations is somehow correlated with the time I spend playing with AI stuff.
Ethics of Training Data / "Art Theft"
A main concern of many is about "art theft". The generative AI base models are built using training data (images) that it learns from, and many accuse the companies who built them of "stealing" images from the internet.
This is not an easy question to answer. There's a LOT of nuance and grey area, I suggest that you read up online.
The first complexity is that there are many generative AI models: Stable Diffusion, SD1.5, SDXL, SD 3.5, Flux, and more. That's just for images! There are also many different AI models for video: SVD, Hunyuan, and more.
However, it seems pretty clear that given the large amount of data needed to train them ("billions" for SDXL, ref: https://ferventworkshop.com/ai-art/ai-art-legality-and-ethics/) that it is highly unlikely that the creators used any kind of "opt-in" data-set, because such a set simply does not exist in that size. Which is to say that they used the data without consent.
A further complication is that there really isn't a "language" for anyone to say if they do or do not agree to having their images used for training. DeviantArt has a setting where you can specify this, but that's just one site, and what happens if someone reposts the same image on another site without such mechanisms? This is to say that it isn't even possible (currently) to create an "opt-in" data set because we lack the tools to communicate it.
So, these companies did what most US (and likely most global) companies do: they "asked for forgiveness" instead of "asked for permission".
Is it "stealing"? Again, I think it's complicated. As an artist, I certainly take inspiration from many things that I see, mainly movies & TV shows. Is there any way for me to get consent from a filmmaker or showrunner before I make something that that is based off their work? No, of course not. I just make it anyway, and most people would not consider this wrong, bad, or stealing. All artists learn (somewhat) from being inspired by and emulating parts of the art they see.
And this is what the AI makers contend: the model is just "taking inspiration" from billions of images of all the artists available, therefore it isn't stealing anything. I don't really agree with that sentiment, but I can see some merit in the argument.
One last thing is that there are good actors out there. Civitai has a strict policy that any training of LORAs (a kind of mini-model) must be done using images that you own. They take down models that were trained with images that did not actually belong to the trainer. I've seen it happen.
Summary: it is quite probable that most generative AI models were trained without consent, but consent cannot be given on this scale. I feel like it is unclear if this consent is actually required, but at this moment, the AI models seem to be on the darker side of morality.
AI isn't going away
The genie is out of the bottle. Now that people have seen what these kinds of AIs are capable of, there's no going back. Self driving cars, LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini, and generative AI like SD; they (or something like it) are here to stay. Even if we banned them in the US, surely some other countries will (and already are) embracing it.
Those who fail to keep up are going to be somewhat left behind. If your coworkers are using ChapGPT to do more/better work and you aren't, well it's an easy choice for the boss to decide who gets let go. If some other creators figure out how to make videos like mine with AI and I can't keep up with them, I'll also become irrelevant.
It sucks, but that's life.
What you do with it
I think the most important thing about AI is how people use it.
I think what's grinding a lot of peoples' gears is that there are tons of low-effort bad actors out there doing exactly the WRONG things with AI. They produce a TON of mostly garbage content that mimics existing artists with very little thoughtfulness, variation, or even basic curation. This is when you see DeviantArt accounts that are crapping out hundreds of posts a day, but most of them look almost identical and only a scarce few are worth looking at.
This is why I have posted my AI doctrine.
If I want something in a drawn style, I'll commission an artist to make it. If it's something that can be photographed, I'll hire a model and photographer. If it can be done with video, I'll pay for that too.
That just leaves the things that can't be done with existing art, things like possession, transformation, and body invasion. In that regard, the things I make with AI aren't competing with anyone. Except perhaps myself?
Sorry for the long read, but this has been weighing on my mind for the past few days. If you have comments, leave them here on in the Discord, but as a reminder: Be civil!