Glendon MellowDec 19, 2022

The #JohnMastodon and #JoanMastodon jokes would be funnier if people weren’t using AI to make images of the folkloric founders.

Current #AIart platforms like are built on the backs of literally billions of hours of labour scraped from the internet without consent of the artists and photographers whose work was then used to unethically train AI.

I get it. Shiny new internet thing. But if you want this place to be better than the other place, start by respecting artists.

Show threadThoughtseedingDec 19, 2022
@FlyingTrilobite It's a really interesting debate and as a pro photographer and designer I sometimes integrate AI or use it to help formulate an idea.
Almost every artist learns the same way as AI. They start out studying other artists and take influence and inspiration from them to eventually form their own style but very few are truly 100% original in nature. This includes music, dance, illustrators, painters, photographers, writers. The only difference is that it is a computer making new art
Show threadGlendon Mellow

@Thoughtseeding Except this is not true. Humans and machine learning do not learn the same way at all.

Human beings learn from other people’s art, it’s true. But we also draw upon our experiences, observing the world, happy accidents with art materials, experimentation, and muscle memory.

The AI *only* have what’s in their datasets, which was gathered unethically and without consent. This is not a C-3PO-level AI who is experiencing the world and decides to paint.

Dec 20, 2022 at 12:18pmWeb
Show threadThoughtseedingDec 27, 2022
@FlyingTrilobite
Given we live in very much a digital world these days with many people spend upwards of 30% of their time awake experiencing a purely digital world (including many artists who now learn their craft primarily from a digital environment based on a variety of data sources that they have curated based on others recommendations, is it really that different when a computer does exactly the same thing.
Show threadGlendon MellowDec 28, 2022
@Thoughtseeding It doesn’t do exactly the same thing though. That’s wholly inaccurate.