cashew | On the subject of AI art

Because it came up, I figure I'd just throw out a clarification of my stance on AI art and thoughts on the ethics, not that it matters because there's a lot of people already spilling digital ink and whatnot over the subject, but whatever.

My position:

The entire controversy with AI art, from what I understand, at its heart has to do with AI scraping art from real human artists without compensation, then regurgitates/remixes the material and spits it back out to make money off of users who pay to use the AI generator to make the stuff.

So.

To put it simply, the real problem is paying AI company money.

If the art has already been generated by someone else, is hosted on another company's server on the AI company's dime and I hotlink it to my blog? I have not in anyway contributed to the AI economy nor fed the AI machine.

In fact, by hotlinking from the AI company server (or a company that uses AI to generate art), I'm draining the AI company's funding (a drop in the sea, but it's a drop). By not giving the company any credit, it means I'm not giving the company any free advertising, further eating into their profits (if they're even making a profit at the moment).

I can't stop other people from using AI. I can't stop AI companies from stealing artists' work to train their machines. But I can definitely leech a minute amount of funds from their coffer every time I hotlink an image hosted on their servers.

So, I don't use AI generators personally. But if someone else already generated an image? You can bet I'm going to hotlink the fuck out of that thing.