General Discussion

crippling to those using it, and harmful to the livelihoods of real artists.

It is not a tool like photography. It's a plagiarism machine that those using it have little control over. Just selecting from the infinite number of images it can vomit out is not creating art.

And all the horrendous AI slop polluting the internet is much more representative of what's created by AI than very painstaking attempts to make it into any kind of worthwhile art. Because all the effort in the world does not make the user the creator of the images it spits out mindlessly.

I know entirely too many artists who despise AI to care about academic justifications of it. Those justifications sound a lot like the arguments for other uses of AI like ChatGPT in education.

The paragraph below, at the https://www.arteducators.org/advocacy-policy/articles/1303-naea-position-statement-on-use-of-artificial-intelligence-ai-and-ai-generated-imagery-in-visual-arts-education link you provided, is nonsense.

Image generators have NOT been used that way - with respect for artists' rights - and IMO it's absolutely grotesque for whoever wrote that to pretend that they have.

What image generators are you using, that you consider truly ethical? I'm not aware of any that are.

And there's no way to pretend that highly rated and popular image generators like Midjourney and OpenAI's DALL-E 3 aren't based on theft of intellectual property. PC Mag rated Midjourney at the top of the best image generators earlier this year, but admitted "it appears that Midjourney does not care about intellectual property violation.". No kidding. None of them do.

IF whoever wrote that ludicrous paragraph at that link TRULY respected the IP rights of artists, they should have identified whatever image generator they recommend that they consider ethical, and named and shamed every popular image generator built on outright theft. I suspect they didn't because they know very well that almost everyone generating AI art is using an unethical tool, and they don't want to discourage those AI art enthusiasts. So they offer a completely illusory image of ethical AI art that simply doesn't exist, instead of taking an ethical stand against all those unethical but popular tools.

As offensive as the AI bros saying they want to get rid of intellectual property laws are - those poor dears are tired of being sued over their theft of the world's culture - NAEA's pretense that AI image generators are currently ethical and respectful of artists' IP rights is nearly as bad. Because it's a coverup of what's really going on.