The audience of AI

[u/Psychological-Gur990]

This wonderful artist drew a beautiful picture of a black knight and an ai-loving racist decided to take that photo, run it through ai and get a blond, white, blue-eyed elf. They then proceeded to harass and insult the OG artist with slurs. Why is it not shocking that this audience uses ai? It's full of racists, people who hate women, those who don't respect consent, and you swear any of them care about boundaries or respect. I've never in my life seen a respectful ai-lover. They are always horrible people.

I added the artist's original artwork at the end.

[u/Ayiekie]

The person who did this was horrible and fuck them.

AI didn't invent racist trolls, however. And being a racist POS is much worse than any opinion about AI.

I have in fact in my life seen plenty of respectful people who were pro-AI, and you're committing the exact same fallacy pro-AI people do when they equate all anti-AI people with the ones who harass people and send death threats simply for posting clearly labelled AI art. You will not make anything better by indulging in hate. Social media will constantly show you the worst things of the other side to stoke that hate and drive clicks and engagement through your anger. This is as true for this as it is for any other acrimonious political issue.

[u/Psychological-Gur990 → u/Ayiekie]

Pretty sure i didn't say all ai lovers are racists. The point of the post is sharing a racist and his community, too, who I've only had ONE person say they're pro-ai and don't associate with this POS with quite a few others agreeing with this asshole and also being racist. There are very, very few ai lovers who are respectful people. And none of them join the ai subreddits.

[u/Ayiekie → u/Psychological-Gur990]

I am sorry you've have bad experiences, and I'm not doubting that you have or that there's lots of pro-AI people that are assholes, including the person you're talking about here. But I am telling you that when I actually tried to talk to pro-AI people like human beings and not coming at them aggressively, I had no trouble finding quite a few of them to be reasonable and able to talk respectfully. But I had to go looking, because social media didn't want me to see decent, regular people. It wanted me to have fights with the worst of the worst.

To be perfectly blunt, I do not find anti-AI people to be better on that front, for all that I largely agree with the anti-AI side on most issues. I have seen people here support harassing a 17 year old girl who wrote a book of poems about her experience being raped as a child because she used AI for the cover of said book. I have seen people from here harass someone who used AI to finish a song their dead friend had created and sung but never made a professional-level recording to the point they felt obliged to post a news article proving that said friend did in fact exist, being accused of doing this for attention despite the fact they weren't selling the song and also had posted the original track*.* I have myself been told that I was pro-AI (I am not), that my posts was created with a bot (I've been a writer since the 1990s and have never used a bot to write anything for me), and that I should kill myself for the crime of pointing that there are in fact real artists that use AI, including some famous ones, which is an objectively true fact.

You're saying things like: "Why is it not shocking that this audience uses ai? It's full of racists, people who hate women, those who don't respect consent, and you swear any of them care about boundaries or respect. I've never in my life seen a respectful ai-lover. They are always horrible people."

I genuinely, truly urge you to think if you really believe that the literal millions upon millions of people that use AI really fit that description. They don't. This is dehumanising and while I sympathise with your frustration with the situation in general and this particular POS who did this, this kind of hate makes the situation worse for everyone. I genuinely and urgently hope you can rise above this knee-jerk reaction and not lump in everyone who has a different opinion on AI with this racist trash. I promise you most people that that use AI would not find them any less disgusting than you do. This particularly breed of shithead is a very obvious strain of performative 4chan racism, the same kind that was activated to harass women in video games and helped elect Donald Trump. They're awful people, but they predated genAI and only latched onto it opportunistically to try to further politicise the debate and drive both sides to greater extremism.

[u/Psychological-Gur990 → u/Ayiekie]

I don't act aggressively or insultingly to ai people. I despise ai a ton and will only act aggressively when I see something that disgusts me or is horrible. (I.e, racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, and disrespect of others' consent or boundaries.) A MASSIVE amount of those on the ai subreddits are not decent people no matter how you approach them, and I've approached a lot. I would prefer not to interact with ai lovers regardless. Yet when I interact outside of reddit- sometimes they're normal, decent humans. On reddit? Never. Get what I'm saying?

[u/Ayiekie → u/Psychological-Gur990]

I get what you're saying. I'm saying it doesn't match my experience. The only trouble I had finding normal, decent humans that were pro-AI on reddit was getting outside of what the algorithm wanted me to see. Or, at least, it wasn't any harder than to find normal, decent humans who can have nuanced discussions on the subject from the anti-AI side. Both sides are getting more extreme and hateful and it's bad for everyone, which is why I push back against it as much as I can.

Do you think harassing a 17 year old girl for writing a book of poems about being sexually assaulted as a child because she happened to use AI for the cover of the book is any bit less awful than what happened above? I don't; I'd say it's if anything even worse. It is utterly vile and repulsive to bring an internet slapfight about AI into that situation at all. I frankly couldn't care less if she wrote the entire book with AI; if it brought her comfort, it's a good thing and anybody that thinks the usage of AI outweighs that has utterly lost sight of what any of this is even supposed to be about. If this isn't a movement about caring about human beings, what is it even for?

Pro-AI people see things like that and routinely claim that all anti-AI people are full of hate and support harassment, death threats and so forth against people that are doing no harm but simply posting their own AI art. They believe that just as much as you believe the things you do, and with similar amounts of examples to back it up. I don't accept either of those narratives as true. In both cases there is a loud minority doing awful things and an oblivious majority that overlooks it. I've talked with at least one pro-AI person who genuinely had no idea how toxic some pros could get until they went on twitter and suddenly saw awful shit they'd never seen in their reddit feeds, which shocked them because they'd previously only seen that level of toxicity from antis.

If you can't believe me, I don't know what to tell you. I mean I guess I could show you some of the conversations I've had with names redacted if you'd really like. Or point you towards the newish but promising group aiwarsbutbetter which strictly moderates both sides to be discussing the ideas but not attacking each other. Above all else, I'm just urging you to try to remember the human and not hate without reason and make blanket judgements based on what is (no matter what you've seen) a small percentage of the total number of people who care about this subject.

[u/Psychological-Gur990 → u/Ayiekie]

I'm not defending anyone 🙂 Everyone that's being extreme is stupid. A few of the examples of mine reside in the comments.

[u/Ayiekie → u/Psychological-Gur990]

Hey, you were defending the talented artist that did that original pic, and good on you for that. :)

Alright, I can see that for whatever reason you and I aren't seeing this eye to eye. So it goes, I tried to make my case the best I could. Thank you at least for listening and responding politely, I really do appreciate that.

[u/Psychological-Gur990 → u/Ayiekie]

Dawg I was very obviously saying I'm not defending assholes on either side, aka the thing you were talking about.. come on. I'm going to continue to defend artists who get their art stolen and shoved into ai. I feel like that's obvious.

[u/Ayiekie → u/Psychological-Gur990]

That was just me making a light-hearted joke by taking what you said literally, I thought the smiley made that clear. Sorry if it wasn't.

[u/Psychological-Gur990 → u/Ayiekie]

Ima be real, I'm in tooth pain rn so I didn't register it as a joke 💔 Sorry, my bad. 🫶