EDIT: It’s honestly hard to believe how intense and personal some of the hostility in this thread is. I understand objecting to something when there is a valid concern, especially about ethics or consent. But this is something else entirely. It feels less like people are engaging with the actual work and more like they are reacting to the mere presence of AI in any form, regardless of context.
I don’t think LLMs are universally good or bad. I think they are very very bad at a large number of things, especially when people try to use them as shortcuts in places where care, originality, or expertise (or human understanding and subsequent empathy) are required. But they are also extremely effective in other use cases when used with skill, intention, and thought. That is the position I hold. It is nuanced. It does not dismiss the criticisms people have raised, but it also does not treat every use of the technology as automatically unethical or invalid.
What I did was not a random one-line prompt into a generator. I gave deliberate, specific instructions about pose, anatomy, style, and tone. I gave feedback. I adjusted the inputs. I guided it through a process that produced something unique and original. The result is not a collage of stolen images. It is not a copy of anything that has ever existed. That is important context, and it is constantly ignored in these arguments.
There is a real difference between raising concerns in good faith and launching personal attacks at people who use a tool in a considered way. The people jumping into these threads with moral outrage are not engaging in objective analysis. They are repeating talking points as if AI art is some kind of singular personal enemy. It often feels like they are reacting based on something they heard someone else say, rather than thinking critically about what is in front of them.
And this is happening in a community that is supposed to be supportive of neurodivergent people. That is the part I find most maddening. There is room here for discussion and for disagreement. But instead of debate, we get judgment, condescension, rabid hostility, and attempts to shame people for trying something different. That is not the kind of environment anyone should want to foster.
Your advice is to take three things directly created by other people and combine them together? That’s literally plagiarism.
No it's not. Not if you synthesize them into something new, which is what this comic would have been.
That is exactly what the LLM did, only to a greater extent. This pangolin has never existed anywhere else. It was created based on my specific prompts and my instructions about which styles to draw from. That is the same process humans use when creating images in a particular style. Inspiration is not plagiarism.
You're acting like you made a collage. You didn't. You typed a few words into a prompt, and an LLM used the work of other artists without their permission to spit something out.
Just make a collage next time instead, it has actual artistic value.
You didn’t understand anything I wrote
this pangolin is dozens of artists' pangolins. describing the prompt doesnt make it source magically ethical
the difference is that the people who make pngs of singular objects/animals mean for those images to be used by others.
AI companies force feed algorithms with everything they can find, permission from the creators or not
no, that's how image macros have literally always worked. youre plagiarizing the artists by using generative images that scrapes their livelihoods without their consent. also, if you took someone elses picture of a pangolin, you can credit the artist. can your AI do that?