Write a witty takedown of this text, pointing out contradictions, poor reasoning and other fallacies: I understand this has mostly devolved into a ragebait sub, but if you're reading this and are not actually interested in entertaining or internalizing any of these points, save yourself the time and click away.

The state of this subreddit baffles me, honestly. I have to wonder: how many people are here because they actually want to engage with differing opinions? How many people are actually willing to have their minds changed? It seems like most people just upvote what they agree with and downvote what they don't, regardless of how cogent it is or what it contributes to the discussion. Going by that metric, it seems like this sub manages to be overwhelmingly pro-AI, so I might just be a fool for trying to challenge some common misconceptions. Regardless, I hope I can provide some insight on why anti-AI people tend to hold these beliefs so strongly — spoiler: it's not just “grrr technology bad”.

Hopefully my tone here comes off as lighthearted rather than antagonizing. I'm not trying to patronize or belittle anyone here, just give some (hopefully coherent) perspective and take an empathetic, open-minded position.

My background

I've been programming as a hobby for 12 years and as a job for 8. I enjoy the process of designing robust, clean solutions to problems; I'm the kind of person that aims to (and sometimes succeeds at!) implementing things correctly the first time. Naturally, AI tools like Copilot and ChatGPT tend to be at odds with this, as they shift the effort of programming away from problem-solving and toward auditing/retrofitting AI-generated code. This is not something I find fulfilling and makes it difficult to enjoy programming, which ended up hurting my productivity over the few months I tried to use Copilot at work. These tools make me feel like a manager rather than a creator.

Empirically speaking, it seems like AI has made developers worse at maintaining the projects they write with it, by depriving them of organically building up a mental model of how things work. Even when using AI to scaffold out a prototype project, any time saved doing so is quickly lost whenever requirements change or it needs to scale. AI coding tools are quite bad at creating flexible systems that can handle changing requirements, because they were never intended to do so. Vague plain-language prompts inherently cannot be mapped to precise and deterministic output; if it could, then the user would just be writing code.

All this is to say that I am not strictly against AI tools — they have merely failed to provide me value as a programmer, both personally and professionally. Simultaneously, I have witnessed its impact make things demonstrably worse and introduce a lot of hassle for people both within my line of work and outside of it. If a competent AI tool comes around, I would certainly give it a try if it actually helps me do more of the things I enjoy about programming, not less. (Bolded because this is an idea I'll reiterate on later when I talk about art.)

For the record, I think I'm at least a little bit knowledgeable about how AI generally works. As a hobbyist, I used to experiment with neural networks and NEAT for simple games — but that might be from a bygone era compared to modern AI methodology. :-) Admittedly, I haven't followed the field very closely over the past ~5 years as my interest tapered off. Please correct me if I show a gap in my understanding in this post!

Anti-AI people are still people

The term “anti” as a noun makes it easy to ignore that everyone involved in the discussion is a real human being, each with biases and emotionally-driven responses that they cling to based on their own lived experiences. The vast majority of people also suck at communicating their argument without resorting to generalizations or ad-hominem. This goes for everyone, whether they're pro- or anti-anything; if there is any emotion involved, then subjectivity will inevitably dominate the discussion on both sides. No debate is or has ever been purely a question of facts vs. feelings, and a crucial (though perhaps lost) part of human dialogue is mutual understanding. You will never coherently argue against the opposition if your knee-jerk reaction is to reject their perspective rather than deconstructing it as if you were in their position. Basically, empathy.

That being said, it's fallacious to disqualify someone's argument simply because they presented it emotionally, rudely, or otherwise poorly; I see this happen constantly on this subreddit and many others like it. Someone being anti-AI does not automatically mean they are a pearl-clutching luddite; not only are there plenty of knowledgeable experts who are against the current trends of AI usage, but regardless, one does not need to know the specifics of how AI works in order to fairly criticize how the technology is being used and applied. These are basic argumentation principles but I figure some folks need to hear them anyway.

I don't think it's much of a reach to say that generative AI is a large contributor to the Internet at large recently becoming a less fun, less helpful, and more mentally taxing place; this extends from search engines to spam-riddled art websites to misinformation and deepfakes. It's not unreasonable to conclude that unregulated AI will only continue to exacerbate these issues, and without the background to understand how these problems can be solved, most people who experience this will simply develop a rigid and unnuanced anti-AI stance.

This is not to suggest that being anti-AI is an inherently ignorant position, just that it's easy to arrive at this stance by default when someone is personally inconvenienced/threatened by AI. I don't believe that AI's negative reputation is unwarranted, really; there are genuine ethical issues that are going unaddressed for the sake of rapid iteration and advancement (I hope that everyone can at least agree on this part).

How AI is perceived by artists

Disclaimer: I am not a digital artist myself, but I have quite a few artist friends from various creative spaces. In this section, I'm sharing my own cumulative interpretation of their individual experiences and opinions.

Let's get this out of the way: my belief is that the fundamental difference between artists and non-artists is whether value is placed primarily on the process or on the final product. Throughout history, the arts have always been fighting for the legitimacy of their societal contribution, as the public and patrons alike take for granted the value of both the art itself as well as the work involved. Even so, despite the struggle, I think it's fair to say that most artists (especially hobbyists) do it because they ultimately find it rewarding to improve, develop their skills, and have something to show for it. This shouldn't be an unfamiliar feeling to anyone who has earnestly gone to the gym or learned an instrument.

This process-versus-product dichotomy is a consistent theme in AI “art” (term used facetiously) discourse — there are no shortage of AI detractors analyzing whether AI was used in production of some media, or enthusiasts saying they only care about how the end result looks. Image AI models are designed to pick up the discrete characteristics and content of a finished product, whereas an artist using another piece as inspiration is looking at artistic techniques such as composition, perspective, proportions, rendering, etc. that they can apply to their own process. These two means of creative derivation are different and yield different results. The ever-present reduction of art to automated pattern-seeking and regression, choosing to ignore the value of human interpretation and intent throughout the creation of something, is what many artists find insulting.

Whether or not you believe it falls under fair use, image generation AI was undeniably built off of the indiscriminate aggregation of digital artists' work; this should be evident just from how often specific websites or artists' names get thrown into prompts to improve results. Ethics aside, the (perhaps bad-faith) question among pro-AI discussion seems to remain: why are so many artists opposed to these tools that would make things substantially easier for them?

The simple answer is the same as my earlier comment about programming: it replaces the parts of the creative process they care about with a drastically different workflow and skillset that they find less fulfilling. I don't think many artists would be genuinely opposed to an AI-powered stabilizer that cleans up lineart as they draw it, or a colour theory AI that suggests complementary shades/tones. The distinction is that while these hypothetical tools still lower the skill floor, they integrate with the existing artistic process rather than replace it; their impact is encoded into the process itself and is not a prominent component of the final piece.

Honestly, I find that the common assertion that AI is “just a tool” to be reductive, considering that the tool in question does not work alongside an artist's existing skillset but in spite of it. If this weren't the case, there wouldn't be so many testimonials to the tune of “AI allowed me to illustrate my whole project without being an artist!” The appeal is clearly in the notion that artists' skills and labour are less valuable and more replaceable than ever.

In summary... artists have been given no real reason to be fans of AI image generation. It's a technology that wasn't asked for, was built by exploiting their work without recognition, offers little meaningful value to them, competes with them as freelancers in smaller markets, and is used as a basis to degrade and devalue their ability. What passionate human being wouldn't have an emotional response to such a thing? Also consider the recent enshittification of the Internet (driven in no small part by AI) and terrifying prospects like job loss, misinformation, deepfakes, etc. and you get a group of people who are emotionally primed to push back against AI at every opportunity. I, for one, can't blame them.

Conclusion

Hopefully this sheds some light on the anti-AI thought process and explains why people who hold such a stance are not the pyrophobic cavemen they're so commonly portrayed as. I would argue that the vast majority of anti-AI sentiment is largely justified and based on genuine concern, even if the perceived threat (and therefore response) is exaggerated. If any pro-AI folks reading this can at least empathize given this position, then writing this whole thing was worth it. Although considering how many comments on this sub are thinly-veiled variations of “Yippee! Artists finally have to get REAL JOBS!”, I'm not holding my breath...