I'd rather see MS paint illustrations than GenAI images.

Like others will say there is no ethical use of it, except maybe locally on your own hardware for personal curiousity. It's an environmental catastrophy, if it's used more it will increase the value for companies like OpenAI whos owners want to be the feudal chiefs of a new techno-fascist society, and the more encouraged and developed it becomes, the more useful it is for surveillance companies and totalitarian states.

I'm sure there are uses I don't notice, but it does look very bad, and if I notice a company using it it makes me feel a sort of repulsion towards that company.

never. ai "art" is theft.

Never. AI is unethical. It is environmentally, socially and artistically unsound. Guzzles water, owned by billionaires, steals artist's work.

Is killing puppies okay if I want to make a really cool fur coat? What if the coat is made out of fake leather and just the collar is made of puppy fur? That's not really a lot of puppies for a really cool coat, wouldn't you agree?

The worst problem, to me, is that it pollutes our "environment" that is, our cultural environment, our pool of input about the world, with potential corruption, inaccuracies, at worst the intensification of falsities, stereotypes, and mediocre conceptions. Even if you don't detect them in an AI image, they may be there. A real world image contains details that humans have not already preconceived, and diluting that with the bullshit of what humanity thinks is reality but which may or may not be, will have a greater long run cost than we can imagine.

Never.

It doesn't necessarily look bad, but it has a certain look. Once you start to recognize AI's tells you can't unsee it.

I don't think individual use matters that much. It's slop, but if it doesn't matter then slop is fine. It's when institutions and companies and governments are using generated images instead of hiring an artist that it becomes a problem; an artist didn't get paid for what is essentially stolen work and now that slop will be crammed down our throats.

Morally: never. It's built off stolen property and destroys the world with its ecological consequences.

Practically: as a placeholder. A real human will always outperform an AI, but if the intent is not quality but to just get the gist across, then it works in a pinch.

To be clear, it's not just the quality of the final product that matters. An AI-generated product is unmaintainable and uneditable. You can't make variations of a generated product. It's technical debt at its most fundamental

Basically NEVER

There are different reasons against AI, it depends which ones you consider more important.

A) taking jobs away from artists - you can argue that if you would never have hired an artist for this anyway (throw away character portrait for a D&D game) then it's justifiable.

B) That AI was trained on stolen content. - depends on your definition of stolen, this is the area that makes me think twice.

C) Environmental reasons - I try to generate stuff locally if I use it, but you still have the impact from the model being trained originally.

I don't know, I struggle to find a single use.

Maybe to make a quick funny thing with seven fingers to send to your friends...? But even then the downside is that these images get sort of normalised and I personally wouldn't do it. At least not now that the novelty is way over and there are fewer funny obvious errors.

As a person who can't draw a circle to save my life, for RPG-characters I thought I'd find use for it, but I actually prefer doing a horrible childish two-colour-crayon-sketch at the table rather than bring in a portfolio of images made artificially. My horrible sketches will become part of the lore we kaugh about.

I know that at work when we had out summer greetings sent out from the CEO, anything anyone talked about was how it was so clearly written with AI and it for sure didn't inspire confidence or pride in the work place as it was meant to do. The same with some project image very clearly AI generated, which led to the whole project being less reputable in the organisation at a ground level and having fewer qualified people conscript to it willingly.

And any project where the creator or images are generated, I'll trust far less than ones lacking images altogether.

I'm sorry if I couldn't answer your question properly.

Edit: I may have to go back to gboard - at least it could spell for me...

Honestly my main issue is that this gives more power to the corporations who can steal any content and then sell it as a subscription.

Even local generative AI is ethically sus, but as an occasional pirate I don't have any moral high ground. I don't really mind as long as its user in a way that doesn't harm the jobs of the artists (which it often does).

Quality wise, realistic images are often sloppy but I too am starting to fail to notice sometimes, which doesn't feel good if it's something that can misinform me. Recently I played for some hours with an anime based model, and I have no chance telling what is real there. But it still really drew home the fact that it lacks some of the artistic expression. No matter how much you write in the prompt you can't control all the details with intent like the artist does, and you're at the mercy of the model on anything that you leave to interpretation. And if the model doesn't have enough data on what you want it will just break down. So it only works as long as you have a relatively vague idea and don't care about the specifics. Which is why I also think it can't replace anyone as long as the audience cares about intent being there and being consistent (which again often they don't care).

Anyway, I consider these models to basically be creating interpolations of existing art now.

When the model isn't built on stolen licensed works and built/run in a way that isn't in conflict with the community where the data center resides seems like some basic requirements to meet.

Never

When teaching people how to spot AI images.

No.

Even if you manage to find a niche valid reason, even if you train on exclusively your own content, even if you run it on your own hardware powered by your own solar panels, it's still normalising the technology for everybody else who won't use it like that.

AI images have this uncanny valley effect to them. They are unsettingly off, because they are not human. I think they are fine for idea generation, but you will lose credibility if you use them elsewhere.

I think it makes sense as temp assets in my field (video games), but ideally, you get a real artist rather than use AI. Temp can help visualize the intent, but a real artist will always out perform a machine on creativity, style, etc. I’ve used it for image quality upscaling—I don’t know how to do this on my own, but I guess I could learn.

There’s likely other cases that are “visual” gen AI but maybe medical (pattern recognition?) or gap filling for something like architecture (like first pass treatments). I’m completely guessing there.

The cost to generate an AI image is something like 60 ml of water (shot glass?) or 1kWh (like watching 2 HD movies via stream).

Sure, yes, at scale, this stuff is bad. I would say the worst element is corporate profit of public goods: these machines were made with mass theft, and therefore, In my opinion, should be nationalized or universalized. In this reality, that is basically a joke.

At an individual level, and a personal level, I know driving my car is bad, especially if it runs on gas. Running ACs in the summer is also bad. Leaving the water running while shaving is bad. So is a myriad of many things I do. AI use is completely optional, but it’s not an automatic marker of anyone’s moral standing, at least not more than the other cases I mentioned. You can also offset these costs as a way to be more morally just.

For me:

• Use for temp art
• Hire a real human
• Offset as best you can.

One of my favorite shows is the Good Place because it highlights how impossible it is to live a perfectly good, moral life in the modern world. I think ascetics who aren’t using the internet or posting on social media are probably closest. I’m sure as hell not.

Hypothetically, any time you'd not be able to have a person do it.

Thing is, all the current models out there are built on stolen talent. So you have to decide if that matters to you.

Me? I don't hate generative software per se. I think it does fine for the exact cases you mention.

If you are very ugly, yet you need a new passport.

I think it's always fine to use AI stuff as intermediary material, but almost never as finished product unless you specifically need something that feels samey and average.

For world building it's pretty cool cause you can finally visualize that city that you've spent time imagining in detail, and use that to sharpen your description of it or spot incongruities. And for writing in general there's nothing wrong with story boarding scenes and characters to ground your writing if you have more of a visual mind. Anything that helps you on your specific craft without bogging down the quality of the finished piece.

I see no issue with locally run models like Z-Image Turbo. They take very little resources to run, so there's no real issue with energy use here. They produce good results when prompted properly.

The whole theft of artist work applies to commercial models where companies are profiting of other people's work. However, I simply don't see the argument when it comes to open models that anybody can use freely, and especially in cases where you're not producing images for profit.

No

It depends on the product. I don't want to be served slop, designed to generate mindless clicks but if AI is secondary to something being produced by a human, for humans, I'm a little less upset about it.

Examples: SNL used an AI photo as an illustration for a weekend upstate story joke. The star of the show was the news story and the punchline to follow. The illustration helps the delivery, but isn't the product.

I could also understand (for example) AI-generated background music when creating a video on YouTube, so long as the purpose of the video is worth a damn.

Learn using image generation properly rather than accepting slop and use it when you need it's. Just like with LLMs generating text.

These tools are going to stay and they can be useful. Refusing to use them when they are useful for a good cause is not going to help anybody.

Also, problematic aspects of these tools are always related to capitalism. Artists whose work was used against their interests suffer because of conditions of our current socio-economic system. In a system that doesn't make relationship with art alienated, it wouldn't exist.

Apple has “GenMoji” and I find that a good use for it. It’s using emojis that they designed for the model, generating other emojis that you can only use on their devices (or sending an image). I use it to make new funny reaction emojis for me and my friends. I cannot use any art for other types of reactions the same way that emojis work (like reacting with an emoji for an image).

so, my opinion is, when i want to showcase something, i do the following:

• first, think about what i actually want to show
• second, do some sketches on paper to get a feeling for the thing (often helps with thinking about the thing)
• third, to a cheap crappy drawing digitally, mostly libreoffice impress or krita
• then, ask the AI to basically make it more alive by adding details etc.

blurry background art (eg. in a game like hollow knight, where there are thousands of images, i wouldn't mind if like 100 of them which you barely notice wouldn't have been made from scratch, saving peoples time)

Whenever you want. Don't listen to these other wankers