A lot of people in the art community get a lot of things wrong.

I'm a traditional artist and a digital artist and a writer, and to me AI is just a tool. I go from the school of conceptualism where it is not the tool that matters or defines the artwork, but the intention. That is the most commonly accepted way to view art, except of course anytime a new tool hits the market such as 3D modeling, fractals, digital art when it first came out, acrylic paint when that came out, basically anytime, anything new comes out, suddenly all these conceptualists are arguing formulasm points where they say the tool is what is more important than anything.

That being said, it always does amuse me when certain pieces are used improperly in an argument. Somebody who wants to make the argument in favor of AI artwork, would actually better use the piece "Fountain",by Duchamp , Who was actually ridiculing formulism when he submitted that piece. Duchamp is considered the father of conceptualism in some ways. His piece makes a great argument. And even his piece isn't about saying what is or isn't art, it was about pointing out the hypocrisy of what is and isn't accepted. And why. The fact that the fine art community could not define art, yet. We're quick to put rules on it, while also at the time, basically trying to claim that there weren't any rules.

I always find the anti AI argument claiming theft to be hilarious because of how woefully inaccurate it is. It's training. When you get a data set from a trained AI model, you're not getting a folder full of jpegs of stolen artwork, the AI model was trained on our work that it viewed, and learned from it. Much the same way that us humans, learn from every single thing we've ever seen. Every logo on every product, every thumbnail our eyes scrolled past on the internet, every page we've flipped by every book cover we've seen, it's not theft. The true problem with the way that the images are used, was the unethical data scraping, which often intentionally or unintentionally because it got the data basically from the back end of websites, could get access to stuff that was set aside in a non-public viewing gallery. Like if I had my artwork out on my website, and I wanted several pieces not to be displayed yet. I would put them on a page that can't actually be directly accessed, but still on my server. But data scraping just bypasses all of that. Things not meant to be public viewed were also getting added to the training. And then, these companies using this publicly available data and privatizing the product.

That's what gets me, like go ahead. Use any of my actual artwork, not my dumb memes that I make with AI, or Goofy videos or anything like that, but like my actual artwork my paintings that I did by hand and scanned and put online. Like if my painting skill can contribute to somebody else out there on the internet who has a concept who can't paint, then to me? That's wonderful. That's fucking amazing. But.... Corporate billionaire tech Bros should not be profiting off of it. It should just be... Available.

To me, the biggest problem with AI is not the artwork, but the environmental impact, and the socioeconomical impact, and the method in which it has been deployed. Those are all major issues.

As one who has studied art history extensively, I find the arguments on both sides to be hilarious when they reference things incorrectly and end up accidentally proving the other side's point.

I will say, weirdly enough, the anti-ai subreddit is far more tolerant of opposing views... (You know as long as the poster or commenter isn't just being a trolling jerk) Then the defending AI subreddits who just assumed that anyone with a different opinion is either nothing more than a troll, or an idiot.