As long as the AI art is being used for-profit then there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. Huffing and humming about “soul” and “sentience” or “theft” (plagiarism is more accurate) does nothing but risk the appearance of looking more pretentious than intended.
This is the fundamental truth and art is subjective, hence any argument about AI in creative mediums is at it’s heart never going to be objective.
Part of me likes to think this is karmatic retribution for NFTs.
But my prestigious r34 inflation art :((, it was going to be in the national museum the day I pull my behind out of Goldshire.
Can assure you, plenty of people use AA as a means to find new artists, by following the credits on pieces they find cool.
I don’t think people posting an AI-made portrait of their char stops other people from posting art that credits the artist though.
I will just say AI “art” has no place as it is currently being trained without knowledge or consent of artists, and pretty much 99% of the time by datascraping various websites as well.
For people saying “hurr durr just funny generated image” please go outside and touch grass, artists are being called gatekeeping and living in the lap of luxury neither of which is true for being rightfully against AI scraping their images, some which are even NDA and on what is supposed to be secure servers (they’re not evidently) which can cause a mass of legal problems as well.
We could have had a fantastic tool, instead we get art theft and even wonkier hands than usual.
AI art 
(This comment will come back to haunt me during the inevitable robot apocalypse)
Wasn’t there a thread on here that had someone use an AI program to make roleplay encounters or stories or something?
Not the ‘Your character story… written by AI’ one, although that was also met with criticism.
I can’t find it at all. I just remember sippets of it where the topic was using an AI to make roleplay encounters and interactions. And people weren’t happy about that one either.
My brother in Christ, we´re in a thread where people are sugesting that RPers should be prevented from posting free AI generated art of their characters on a roleplaying content page and only be allowed to post either art they created themselves, or art they bought from human artists for real life money.
It´s literally trying to gatekeep people who aren´t artists themselves or don´t have the disposable income to pay for character art.
I think people would argue against AI art even if it was trained only on images commissioned by the company that created it for this very purpose.
In the end, AI art (no matter how moral its learning process was) is a threat to livelihood of artists because suddenly they aren´t the only means for people to create pictures of their characters.
At its core it’s about raising awareness of this being an exploitative business practice. I already posted the many issues at length in the thread Loras linked to, so won’t go into repeating it all here.
The current AI models don’t just replace artists: it replaces artists through the exploitation of their works without permission. The AI companies make big money out of this, and as a result even less money go to people whose works made it possible in the first place. Let’s be honest, the amount of excellent art that these tools have been trained on, and trained to mimic to produce such results, is fairly small in the grand scope of Internet images.
I still stand by that we shouldn’t let companies do anything they like with our content online and just nod along at foul business models. The more normalized the current practice gets everywhere, the harder the fight against companies to be more ethical about their data laundering and possible copyright infringements.
Interested to see where all the legal actions are going about these tools in the next few years. There’s a lot of them bubbling right now. This is a much bigger topic than just people generating character art for a RP website, after all, and concerns many creative fields.
And it’s important all the things you mentioned are solved, and if the practices used to create AI were indeed illegal, then it’s good that those responsible get punished.
But none of these problems are going to be stopped by preventing people from posting AI art on AA, which is what this thread is about. Deleting a picture Jimmy generated through AI and telling him he should have paid an artist 100 euros instead will not help anyone, it will not hurt the big corporations, it will not send a message to anyone but Jimmy (who will not be happy about being unable to post a picture of his character into his profile).
Not to mention that there have already been cases of established artists, who could prove their credentials, having art they themselves posted deleted from pages like Reddit because the mod thought it was AI art (followed by hilarious conversation where the mod told artist to change his style because it looks like AI). Glorious self-own of anti-AI people aside, there’s just no way to reliably police this, especially not for a free service.
Personally I don’t mind if people use it for merely visual references, even though I’d never dip my toes into it. What I dislike about it is when the users pander the AI made imagery as their own art and in often cases seem to be surprised or insulted upon being called out. The biggest issue I find with it is how it takes samples of already existing artworks and gets slapped with an award for art.
I see where you are coming from, and I understand the AA team’s difficult position in this. Knowing the team and considering them friends even though I don’t actively help with the site anymore, from what I’ve understood they’re not particularly fans of the current AI models, but moderating it would just be too much of a headache. And the team is tiny and they don’t have much time to handle it.
As for my personal opinion when legal matters are put aside, I also prefer reading stories written by humans for humans, and see visual art made by humans in places that have long embraced human creativity. Just like I’d prefer reading human made stories on a writers’ community, or explore human made visual art on sites where I could appreciate a person’s skill in the field. Many of them are now flooded with AI works and I find myself visiting them less and less.
I also wouldn’t wish to see people in the long term feeling discouraged from posting their own visual art or writing in creative communities when their works get compared to non-human made pieces next to them. Especially if they’re still beginners in the craft.
Roko’s Basilisk says hello
I second this. I can only hope that in the future maybe they’ll create a separate tag for it that also filters AI content out of the ‘New artwork’ front page.
Currently the Miscelleaneous profile content category does exactly this (doesn’t show on the front page) so shouldn’t be hard to implement a new category either if they wanted to. I originally requested that function when I was doing a lot of news articles for the site, and felt awful that my billion news screenshots would flood other people’s screenshots off the front page 
Edit: As for just tags though, yeah that’d be trickier and unsure if possible at all with the old system that AA uses.
It isn’t.
Humans have been creating art by copying and getting inspired from pieces and bits and parts of other people’s art for as long as art has existed.
That is why we even have art styles from Rococho, Claccism, Baroch, Cubism etc.
It would be a different thing if the AI generated a nearly identical picture to one of the original pieces without properly referencing it- But the vast majority of them do not.
AI art is fine and here to stay.
Edit: Speaking as someone who has received art from Acrona, probably one of the best artists in this server alongside Shuang, I understand your concerns and I agree it’s not fair.
But it was not fair for the people who had their manual labour automated either. Or accoubting or whatever else- And just like you put it Acrona, once that genie is out of the bottle there is no putting it back in anynore.
Even if you took these AI off the grid right now and/or banned them from using other people’s works, it has already such a vast database it can do perfectly fine with it. And you can’t erase the whole program from the internet either anymore.
This very simplified comparison falls flat because the way humans learn, are inspired by, direct, or reference art is far from how these software calculations are doing it. Human brains don’t function at all the same way as AI algorithms do, or how the data is gathered and used.
It is simplified, yes. But where do we draw a line between what learning and inspiration is ok, and what isn’t?
I am also unsure that we as humans even understand where does the barrier go between algorithmic thinking and human thinking. Human intelligence and consciousness and AI by extension is not a very well understood field.
Two years ago my professor told me that AI that would be capable of creating art, moving imagery let alone stories like this would be decades away. A man that has been working in the industry for decades. And yet, here we are.
The paradigm shifts very quickly and by the time we have regulation in place it will already be too late.
The genie’s out of the bottle.
I don’t mind AI images.
I once saw a AI created image and it was one of the most beautiful art I ever saw. More beautiful then most images ever created by Humans.
I’ll be honest. Yea, it sucks that Artists can and will loose out on income due to it in the future. And in the (near?)future, I will also be replaced by a military robot and I doubt most of the artists would give 2 
about me loosing my job/income to a robot with AI either…
So why should I care? I had neither the time to learn how to draw nor the income to toss out 100+ bucks for a drawing of my RP-characters the way I would like them to look. So if I can have awesome art of my characters without losing money over it, as the world is expensive enough as it is, I see that as an win.
I would never claim I made the image myself, tho… And yea, people who do that are just their own kind of “special”.
The amount of lukewarm takes in this thread?
Far too many.