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Xander Jake de los Santos
Xander Jake de los Santos

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AI art stuff.

You might have heard of all the AI art generators going around. Maybe you have tried them yourself. You might be interested to know that a group of passionate people hate them, artists.

There are two main reasons they hate AI. One is that AI training data(artworks) are mostly copyrighted content. When somebody creates art, it automatically has a copyright. To use art commercially, the artist actively permits by using tools like CC. Most artists, as far as I know, don't do this.

AI developers scrape art all around the web without regard for copyright. AI itself is not a problem, it is interesting in my opinion. But the unethical way that it's trained leaves a bitter taste. One analogy I came around to is comparing it to a chef. A robot learns to make dishes by eating the chefs' yummy food while the chefs don't get individual credit or compensation for their work. It is happening to artists.

Deviantart is a platform for artists to share art. Recently, they released an AI art generator likely trained with their user's artwork. A huge offense and they got the backlash of the same degree for it. A similar platform with a focus on professional work also got some backlash, Artstation. They didn't release an AI product (yet), but it started featuring AI-generated art on the front page. It is the other reason artists hate AI.

The nature of AI generators is that they are fast. They can spit out half-finished images in minutes. Humans can do the same in an hour or more. Artists use these art platforms to showcase their skills. "Competing" with AI defeats the purpose. They want Artstation to prevent this so AI images won't flood the timeline and make it harder for potential clients to find real artists. Artstation stayed neutral hence the backlash. People are starting to leave the platform.

I know this community isn't about art, but I just wanted to say all these for context. There is an opportunity to explore web monetization to solve some of these problems.

  • Can it prevent bots from scraping art from centralized art platforms?
  • Artists are leaving mainstream platforms, with their fans wanting to see their art. Could it be enough motivation for them to adopt web monetization?

Just sharing because it's getting weird in the art world, and I hope web monetization could be part of the solution.

Any ideas? xD

Latest comments (4)

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priya profile image
priya sharma • Edited

The AI art scene is a double-edged sword. While fascinating, the unethical use of copyrighted content by AI generators is concerning. Web monetization could be a potential solution, preventing art scraping and motivating artists to stay on mainstream platforms. Let's brainstorm ideas!

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chrislarry profile image
Chris Lawrence

@xanderjakeq Love that you brought this topic up. It does seem like the public conversation about AI art, writing and other creative outputs has started to get louder. I do wonder how WM can play a part.

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radhyr profile image
Radhy

I know this community isn't about art, but I just wanted to say all these for context. There is an opportunity to explore web monetization to solve some of these problems.

  • Can it prevent bots from scraping art from centralized art platforms?
  • Artists are leaving mainstream platforms, with their fans wanting to see their art. Could it be enough motivation for them to adopt web monetization?
  • I don't think WM can do anything against bots, as long as the majority of art contents aren't being locked behind WM paywall. Happy to be proven otherwise.
  • At this point, tipping might good enough for artists but as for streaming WM payment, I think it's not so much. Digital arts are something that people enjoy and consume in a few seconds window, it doesn't return much time invested by artist like other content medium like films and web articles or stories. In the future once more features of Interledger being adopted and developed for the mainstream (subscriptions, more robust revshare, etc) maybe they'll be good enough to contend against mainstream funding platforms that artists use like Patreon or Kofi. As for now I think we need to focus to develop some roadmap for Interledger to have the ecosystem that provide the same functionality and utility that most funding platforms have, like "patrons" and "buy me a coffe button" to make it more appeal for artists migrating from centralized platforms.
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xanderjakeq profile image
Xander Jake de los Santos

it's true that WM can't compete with Patreon, but maybe it could be used as scraping protection. Artists are worried about their work being scraped, if they can protect it with WM, then they would want to use it. However, if somebody's really motivated, they could just pay the $5 to get to the content...