The fierce debate over generative AI art recently erupted in a Facebook group when a user shared several images of AI art depicting a character from the video game Baldur’s Gate 3 — and was subsequently banned from the group after confronting the anti-AI art moderators and others users.
The user then took to a subreddit called Defending AI Art to elicit sympathy from fellow AI art enthusiasts and lick their metaphorical wounds.
“I’m disheartened by the amount of hate,” posted Reddit user marilynjayna, who generated AI fan art images of Astarion, an elf vampire with luscious white hair and a devilish grin from the hit game Baldur’s Gate 3.
They posted the images, generated with the AI art platform Midjourney, to an unnamed Facebook group that does not specifically ban AI art. At first, they said they got a positive reaction from other people, but then got heat from AI haters.
“I got probably 5 or 6 positive comments and 50 likes, then the negative comments started coming in,” they whined. “Some of the comments were quite unpleasant.”
Although they spent “6 hours to get 5 images that look like the character”, marilynjayna said the moderators took the view that the AI art was “stealing” and then specifically banned the AI art from the Facebook group.
Other Redditors came to marilynjayna’s defense, saying that anti-AI art people are “jealous” and “crazy and bitter.”
“I feel like a lot of the anti-AI people just…want there to be less beautiful art in the world,” one Redditor responded in the same thread.
“I hope one day being anti-AI will be seen as capable,” another reflected.
Yet another Redditor called non-AI artists elitist who— take this — they just want to be fairly compensated for their craft.
“The reason is simple, before AI they enjoyed a monopoly on art that was kept at the door [sic] as they had a lot of illustration skills, and the less great art there was, the more it was in demand, therefore they could raise the prices for their work,” they seethed.
Leaving aside the usual arguments about the anti- and pro-AI art debate and the nature of creativity itself, perhaps the backlash the Redditor encountered is part of a fundamental shift in opinion among many who believe that enterprise AI platforms are exploitative and extractive in nature as their datasets rely on copyrighted material without the permission of the original artists. And that’s without even getting into AI’s negative drag on the environment.
A Redditor in the same thread noticed the same changing tide.
“I went through the same thing in a recent post,” they wrote. “[L]the previous post months ago didn’t get this kind of crazy hate.”
Other examples of AI suffering an image crisis include a dismal public opinion poll, the recent booing of a pro-AI sizzle reel at SXSW, and the massive public backlash OpenAI’s CTO received for allegedly not knowing whether the company’s text-video program Sora was trained on YouTube and other public sources.
Add to all of this the lawsuits OpenAI and other platforms are facing, and you get the general feeling that people aren’t going to take this AI stuff lying down, despite admonitions that people shouldn’t resist AI in the name of “progress” .
As for Redditor marilynjayna, when reached for comment, they stood firm on AI art and said that people getting mad at AI art is like “a photorealist artist getting mad at a photographer.”
“Just because machines can do what humans can do much faster doesn’t make it any less special when humans can do it themselves,” they said. “And I don’t think it’s right to hate people using this new technology any more than it would be right to hate a photographer just because he didn’t spend days painstakingly painting his image.”
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