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Recent status, chat about AI (Patreon)

Published:
2026-10-02 15:34:08
Edited:
2026-10-02 15:35:28
Imported:
2026-10

Content

I've been affected by Gambargin's post talking about their job with AI. Drive me want to share some of my worries too.Lately, I’ve felt that the world around me has been actively encouraging the use of AI tools.I live in Taiwan. If you follow tech news, you’ll know that Taiwan is a major chip producer, and for the sake of our survival as a country, we’re fully embracing AI.

But this has had a serious negative impact on me. The people around me and the information I’m exposed to are almost overwhelmingly in favor of AI. Not to mention so many ppl have fun using AI to make slop or funny content. Everyone is encouraging the use of AI tools to increase productivity, improve efficiency, and so on. Since I started my company and began handling its administrative work, so many people have suggested things I could leave to AI. Some potential partners are also using AI, and it’s starting to feel like I’m becoming the person who will slow things down. As someone who draws, works at a slower pace, and has an artist’s mind, I’m under a lot of psychological pressure. I’m very anxious, to the point where it’s affecting my status to focus on drawing.

I can’t help wondering: do we really need to produce so much, so efficiently? What exactly is everyone pursuing?I used to believe I wasn’t afraid of whatever challenges the future might bring, but I really hadn’t expected an entire country to be supporting AI.

At the same time, as an artist, I also have to deal with the politics surrounding opposition to AI. I can’t openly use AI, and I can’t publicly discuss anything that might sound supportive of it. I’ve already tried. Even when I make it very clear that I don’t use AI to create my own artwork, any motive or connection to AI gets magnified and scrutinized. And then some ppl go mad at me.

What should I do? I don’t know.

I think I need to try to calm down first and take some time to think things through. And reclaim my pace.What about you? how have you all been doing? Has this belief in AI-driven productivity had a major impact on your lives? How do you feel about AI becoming part of your life?

Comments

Chaoscodex199

I personally dislike AI and try my best not to use it. I live in a state with more AI data centers than anywhere else in the world, and the effect on the environment is extremely noticable. I'm personally hoping the bubble pops sooner rather than later, before the data centers do irreversible damage.

Tyler Hobbs

I'm on your side, and I'm not a creative in any capacity. AI is killing us, simple as.

Ievgen Yelisieiev

I use so called AI a lot, but I'm a technical specialist. There's not much pressure to be "genuine", only to have job done. As for artistry - AI really feels like cancer, as it's not about producing as much images or whatever as possible but about being human something something. Also "stealing" code was never really a thing. IT crowd has the DRY principle as one of the core ones. Where in art stealing is stealing most of the time. So yeah. Hard place for you to be in.

John

I used to do technical writing for a living, but that's now all given over to the Super Amalgamated With Delusions of Competency Autocorrect... except that it's not. They've found out that even with so-called ironclad guidelines, the LLM makes stuff up and they have to have a human to fix it. As for creative writing, I do it all, no AI needed.

MEGA_KRIEG

a lot of my coworkers are super enthusiastic about AI and how its making evetything so much 'faster' and 'better' but I don't see it.

Axline Brimwyck

I’m a VTuber and content creator and as someone that is not artistically inclined I understand the temptation of using Ai to generate assets, scripts and other things that make content creation easy. However, at the end of the day I personally still choose to use real artist for my model, assets and other aspects of content creation. Ai is quickly becoming part of the day to day and corporate world. It’s unavoidable at this point. The office I work at has an Ai assistant we use to find files, I’m pretty sure my phones assistant is Ai at this point as well. I would never look down on anyway using Ai, or even speak against them, but I think that the creativity of the human mind and hand will never be beat by Ai. Even when I see Ai art that looks good there’s something just not quite the same. Soulless? Devoid of human attentiveness? I don’t know what it is, but it’s something. It’s a fine balance that I think each person needs to find on their own, but be informed about. At the end of the day Ai is a tool that some people will see as good, some evil and some will fall in between.

Bill Burdett

I see Ai as the same thing as the industrial revolution and later on the automation in manufacturing, it's going to be forced into everything to see what makes sense and improves outputs. Just as you have people wanting to buy local produce and handmade items, people will always have a desire for for something done with the human touch, it's just the mass produced items made as cheaply as possible that will be effected the most.

FrontlineSpark

It's tough cause I dislike generative AI especially for art. I'd like it to be used to cure cancer and other diseases but there is no profit to be had there so big tech won't allow it.

CrimsonShogun

I use AI to gain an advantage that is usually only affordable to those with large capital starting off. My wholehearted respect belongs first and foremost to those who create organically and have organic networks. Traditional art will never be truly replicated by machine. I hope everyone can have a fulfilling life either way.

Brendan Muse

I teach middle schoolers, and we have been making an active effort to not only keep them off AI but off their computers altogether. Look into the Luddite movement in England in the early 19th century. A great book that explicitly connects it to AI is Blood in the Machine.

Warriorcatv2

Ah that's a rough situation. Personally, I think AI is a helpful tool in VERY specific circumstances. Generative AI is a bloody menace & the public avalabilty is a nightmare. Non generative AI used for very narrow purposes or similar, I don't have as much of an issue with (an example that springs to mind was an AI trained on a huge dataset of cancer screenings. They used in conjunction with the regular doctors reviewing them & it was able to identify signs that were overlooked or prompted further testing). I myself don't use it outside of one specific application & that's resizing print labels for shipping. It only takes a minute or two manually but if I have 50 labels to resize it adds up. With the AI, it automatically realizes it to the correct dimensions in a second.

Rose

AI has some level of utility for certain applications with appropriate oversight by someone with expertise. Code generation, if you know what you're doing and are closely checking the output (I've seen it write code that would fail silently and dangerously), it can be useful. RAG, sure. Options generation for brainstorming where accuracy doesn't matter, maybe. AI for art is just... why? The entire point is the human element. That's also why I prioritize supporting artists on Patreon -- I want them to be able to focus on creating awesome art and not worry as much about how they're going to pay the bills or if the algorithm is going to shift or whatever.

John

Oh another thing, I have friends who run TTRPGs online and they are on the constant lookout for useable art. But, they don't have much money, or artistic talent, so they turn to GenAI to make their images. However, that's not free, and GenAI is purposefully bad at making art so the user has to spend tokens to "refine" their prompts, or redo a prompt. And like any good drug dealer, the first couple of hits are free. Then you gotta pay for more tokens. The wordier the prompt, the more tokens you have use. GenAI is a scam, since you cannot copyright anything made with it, something Disney realized when they were about to put a good portion of their IP into a GenAI scheme.

Kyle Maxwell

I use AI only to help make my reports ti sound more professional. It still let's me down. Half the time it's grammar is worse than mine. As far as art goes, it doesn't hold a candle to what you can do in your own time. I wouldn't worry about it in regards to your art.

Blades and ladies

I recently had to check some of my sources because I saved photos of original weapons or scans of artwork without saving their exact origin and provenance with them. I thought I'd give Google's bullshit ai overview a chance. It's not COMPLETELY useless, but anyone who believes it's GOOD or even acceptable is criminally incompetent in what they are doing and thus can't see how much bullshit the bullshit generator spews. I'm fervently hoping for the inevitable industry-wide collapse, because if that's the quality billions of euros of investment buys, then the guys doing the investment deserve to starve - and the people SELLING those investment schemes deserve jail.

Tristram

I have found that ai can be incredibly useful for things like assisting in web searching and productivity tasks. And for troubleshooting as well. I work in IT and while it very often gets things very wrong in the areas I work in it often gives useful avenues to explore I didn’t know existed. Where I have a problem with it is when it is used in more creative tasks. For instance the large amount of ai slop flooding literature, news, and fanfiction sites as well as YouTube videos making it hard to find quality works. Edit: in the case of this Patreon i subscribed because I really enjoy your art and style and don’t mind waiting for you to produce it. I would be pretty bummed it if turned into AI mimicking your style instead.

Overactive Imagination Games

I'm caught in a bind because as a creative writer and game designer, the authenticity of my art matters. I hate reading or looking at things that are AI generated. It gives me the creeps a lot of the time. Very uncanny valley feelings about AI images and video in particular. But as a software engineer with a Dreaded Day Job, I have been ordered as a matter of company policy to embrace and use AI for coding tasks and admin. And as a coding tool, it's pretty incomparable. It allows me to do a lot more, and now that the rest of my team has escalated their output to use AI, I must keep up with the pace around me. And that causes a bleedover, because now I know how much I can get done with coding through AI assisted workflows. So how can I not use some of that to automate or at least speed up the boring bits of a game project, as long as it is the mechanics and code side, but not the artistic output? So my feelings on all of this are really conflicted. I support artists like you, Ironlily, because I think that human-crafted art matters, and making sure that artists receive the credit and the income from their art matters. But I, too, see that there are ways that it is infesting our workflows and our lives that we can't pull away from. All we can do is choose HOW we use it, and what we will not tolerate or support, and wait for society to catch up and grow some ethical framework around it before it's too late.

Angelic Hero

Having to use ai systems everyday in a retail environment it makes me laugh seeing people say it's so much more efficient and productive, when i use ai powered floor cleaner that gets stuck to "No room to maneuver" in a 5 foot wide aisle with nothing around it and needs fixed 15+times a shift. And a ai powered safty alert system that regularly marks customers as safty issues that need cleaned up. As not an artist I understand the hate to ai. But I also don't, because it's regularly said "ai art is theft" while I've seen very few cases of ai art producing anything close to a exact copy of someone's work. but if someone traces or photoshops over someone else's work to recolor it or changes the hairstyle more often then not I see it being accepted. So it just leaves me wondering were the line is that makes it theft for one and not the other,

phallen1

My employer has been pushing us to use generative AI/LLMs whereever possible. My job would get no use out of generative AI, not unless the software vendor implements it, so I already fall well under the expected metrics. Of course management does not understand and does not care about this distinction. GenAI has a lot of overlapping problems. It's being pushed so hard because people have bet large amounts of money on "someone" finding some use for GenAI that justifies all of the investment. GenAI encourages laziness, and that includes finding a worthwhile use for itself. All AI-generated images are basically a glorified collage made of bits and pieces from other images. Currently all of the common models stole their source images from the internet at large without sourcing them, so it's unethical as hell. It's possible to ethically train generative AI by properly sourcing every resource used and being able to produce a bibliography of used resources. None of the common models do that; their creators were too lazy to do that, as they were in a hurry to get their product to market. I say: Push back. Never tolerate the use of assets entirely created using genAI. If someone insists on doing so, insist they put a human eye on the product to make whatever edits are necessary to address the obvious artifacts of genAI. Never give money to anyone who tries to sell entirely-genAI content as if they had created it by hand.

Icarus Septim

I am not a AI fan but it can have uses such organizating data, about the only thing it is really good for. For the creative arts it really has no place and can't match humans. There is even a IsThisAI subreddit that has fun picking apart pics to tell if it is AI or not and is often happy to explain how they do it. There is nothing a AI can do that a human can't. It is just cheaper for shodier work. Why would I pay for an artist when I can scribble on a piece of paper? Well because that artist can do it a lot better than I can! I hope to see you stick to your principals. These are hard times but if you stay strong in the end you will come out better for it and your skills will be a premium for you. Love you art and the history you bring to it. A AI would never be able to do that with all misconceptions and what not about the historical world on the Internet and in books. Just like the sisters stay strong when times are hard!

bliss

My personal stance on AI is, that I would trust an AI to do everything a trained pidgeon could do. Assistive AI for, say, medical purposes is totally fine in my opinion. But generative AI is an absolute no-go for me. As someone who works in tech I see the push towards AI regularly. Thankfully in my niche I can skirt around using it myself. So I get why you are struggling with it. Personally I don't believe in that increase in overall productivity. One person might get things done faster, but another has to double check whatever came out of the machine. I hope you take courage from not being alone in your stance of scepticism towards AI.

Milleniumsword

They are pursuing infinite growth. Which is literally impossible. I work in IT. Im known as the biggest AI Hater at work. :)

AJ Maneville

For me AI is simply a no and I cut any connection to any 'creator' who uses it. Built on wholesale theft of creative endeavours, to then 'replace' those creative people is simply unacceptable. In the things I do, the creation is at least if not more important than the result. I learn so much along the way, and AI would take that away from me, both the knowledge and also the joy of discovery and learning. It does not help that the term 'AI' is now a blanket term covering different things, from genAI that is autocorrect on steroids through to the kind of machine-assisted endeavours that can make a difference, such as those systems which can detect cancers earlier than ever. Clearly the latter is good, the former is bad, and there needs to be a better way to differentiate them. As for the situation we find ourselves in at the end fo 2026, I truly hope the bubble bursts, soon, and those behind it are held accountable for their actions. I feel for and do not envy your situation, Taiwan being such a technological hub, leaving you having to walk such a delicate line every day.

Kristoffer Illern Holmén

I use AI a lot as support for my day job and off-duty activities (a lot of role-playing). I don't create with AI though. I use it to gather e g historical data or extrapolating on historical data which usually have holes of missing information. Sometimes the it's better than me at finding the logical thing to fill the gaps with. Sometimes it's not. I only use as a way of effectivising information gathering or to spawn ideas from large amounts of text. I still write my role-playing games and adventures and scenarios and gaming worlds. I still take the ideas and work them to actually fit into the ongoing game. The AI might come up with good ideas every now and then but it doesn't know me and my gaming groups well enough to be even near a finished scenario or world building. Also I want it to have my touch. There's something with how I build worlds, scenarios, characters and so on that some appreciate and some not. AI does get me. Also I want to adjust it to work in the specific group where I wanna use the idea. It would be quite obvious for my friends and co-gamers if started to use AI right off. It would have "me" in it and conflict with earlier things. It's good tool and help though. I now left out the ethics aspect of it, how AI came to be what it is because I didn't feel that was part of the question. Also, I use paid AI versions. Microsoft's at work and Google's on my off-duty time. It do show in quality and integrity. At work it's about information security, that it stays within the organisation. Privately it's about my personal integrity and also that I mention data that somebody else came up with. I can't leak those things. Privately I have a small Google Workspace organisation consisting of one account for my private firm and one account for private me.

Han singer

AI should lower repetetive dull Workload and not the Creative process. I love your work because your OC feel like real Humans and i fear that AI would kill that. But in the end its your decision and you need need to be comfortable with it. I will support your work no matter what

Arjac

Machine learning algorithms were folding proteins for the better part of a decade before ChatGPT showed up, and that tech didn't require mass theft of personal work.

Andrea

Just do the art you like, using the tools you like, at the pace you feel comfortable. I'll continue to follow and support you. I fully understand your sentiment. I'm an electronic engineer working in the development of datacenter infrastructures for AI. We are working so much to increase efficiency to... just work more. Until we realize that it's unsustainable and we crumble.

Joshua V Devenere

I'm a cartoonist trying to make in an industry flooded with slop. I feel this in my bones. Thank you for sharing this.

Marcus Aurelius

I work for a small company that hasn't mandated AI use for coding yet. Most of the things we handle are incredibly custom and very specific to our use case, so I've avoided using AI just to ensure I always understand what's going on "under the hood." I also haven't been impressed with its use from our web vendor. Their support team is increasingly turning to it for answers to bugs and other issues, and I commonly have to step in and say no, it can't be that. I semi-frequently end up doing the testing myself to isolate the exact cause for them. From the outside, it's hard to get a good sense for the real situation on the ground. Academic reports indicate that most users do not increase efficiency as much as they believe they do. Reddit discussions end with person A from unverified major tech company calling it useless, while person B from unverified major tech company says you just have to slap the proper .MD file on there and it will outperform John C++ himself. All that to say, I'm interested in your experience using it at your company, where you think it performs well, and where it doesn't. I'm trying to remain professionally open-minded, while personally horrified, and that's a tough balance to strike.

Russell Birkner

Quality over quantity- especially in art. If you are slower than potential partners, then you can be sure that what you put out is correct

Marcus Aurelius

This has been my question for a very long time. The whole tech world seems built on these ethos of always doing more, being more connected, hooking more things together, knowing everything, quantifying everything, consuming and stealing more and more data. It's extremely disheartening, as a creative person, to hear so many people just assume that AI will eventually replace our jobs, loves, and passions. But I think we're actually seeing a trend in the opposite direction, among consumers. We're increasingly seeing people turn away from technology, not wanting to be connected all the time. We see people valuing real connections over a friend count. People really wanting to belong to communities. People directly supporting the artists they love on platforms like this. AI is absolutely a difficult problem, and there's so much noise around it right now. But ultimately, the entire point of communicating with other humans is to hear, see, and understand what another human is trying to tell us. Regardless of where AI takes us, I love the work you do. It brightens my morning every time I see a new illustration in my inbox. Everyone who has supported you so far wants to see the things *you* make, at the pace *you* make them.

Yourtime

when I was little I always wanted to talk with computers, people told me I was born with a computer. I became a programmer, especially as my dad always wanted to be one, but wasnt qualified for that. I really love programming as it allows you to solve little puzzles, you get instant response and you can solve little crime scenes. I always followed tech news and was quite impressed with how far openai came, making ai being able to find new solutions in simple tag games. when they started with LLMs I was quite interested and actually pro of it, but after time I lost my enthusiasm and it transformed more into anxiety, because people over time just wanted me using as a tool to get shit faster, be more the designer and the reviewer of your code. currently not even doing programming stuff, but as business analyst. I feel like I would have to do stuff private, otherwise I will lose some of my skills. using LLMs to get private projects faster or "learn" stuff is not really a good solution, I think. because I feel like you would not learn stuff over time. I guess.. this is the part where they say "I have forgotten more than others learned" idk, how I should go forward, I will try to learn by hand, but still use it for stuff, that usually ends up as a big side quest. TL;DR: I have passion for programming, but it seems not the way, you do stuff anymore and that destroys my joy of work.

Wolscott

I'm ideologically opposed to AI even if it produces "good" outputs. I feel like the whole point of making things and communicating things is that it's a type of sharing that we do. And it's a thing we have to learn how to do and teach each other how to do, and AI based on skipping all that and yet it would not have been possible without all the hard work that went into the materials it was trained on. an entire generation of people is being robbed of the process of learning how to write and how to draw and how to code, and that means they won't be able to pass on what they learned to the generation after them. Maybe I am stubborn and old fashioned. Maybe I WILL be left behind. But I would rather learn these things the hard way than not. It's not always possible to avoid all AI tools. they do that on purpose. But to me it means a lot when people take a stance against using AI. As for how I'm doing... still just slowly teaching myself things. I haven't drawn much this last year, but I'm trying to draw a little every day again. I work in software development, and I'm lucky I don't have a boss that's forcing me to use AI tools in my job. So I'm taking every opportunity to learn things in that field to, to show people I can do good work without AI.

Dominik Lelek (Drunken.dx)

AI has it's uses but need to be HEAVILY monitored, because it LOVES to "invent" stuff. While I understand hate toward AI in art community, but screaming "SLOP" at everything that they supect is AI made doesn't help at all.. personally I'm not against artists using AI, but the catch is that AI is tool for "touching up" not to replace talent and effort put in learning art. worst part where it comes to AI is that "experts" will turn out to be fools, because they'll learn nothing, because AI will do everything instead of them, and that's a disaster waiting to happen. AI is a tool, stupid tool, first and foremost, and using it as "miracle tool" that does everything instead of you is, as I've said, disaster waiting to happen.

SoSo_Tsundere

I think the bubble is going to collapse sooner rather than later, and not being reliant on current unsustainable programs will be a good thing for you. There certainly are uses for LLMs, but they are being vastly over-marketed to capitalize on quick cash and funding. It won't last. Also, you create with care and attention and methodical work, just like the scribes and nuns you depict and we all love. To do anything else would hollow out the spirit in the art. I'd rather have one good piece of art in a month than a hundred thousand worthless slop pics that get forgotten in a moment.

Henry Walker

I am a writer, so I write. Anything you see of mine which is published is free of AI. I have played with AI chatbots, and I find them amusing and little more, but do NOT in any way consider it "writing". I understand there are more people and more places which are embracing AI. The occasional generative summary at the top of a Google search is occasionally useful, but when it comes down to me actually writing, it is all me. Biggest part of this is because I enjoy the process. I have seen the infamous "write a book in a week" or whatever, and they disgust me. The individual is not writing the book, they are giving some inputs about which the bot creates the story. The concept maybe the "author's" as may be the characters and so forth, but they did NOT write that book. They sent the essential details to an outsource, and the outsource wrote the book. So, that's me. Regarding your position, you have a different situation. There are some things, especially regarding business administration, where AI might be quite useful. Some people are finding these 'bots useful for these purposes. So, there are lines that must be drawn, decisions that need to be made. I love the part where your art is "AI free", and I can tell it is, and that is what gives it so much character. The way you draw, the way your characters are shown I can tell that you enjoy the process, and my recommendation is to continue enjoying the process. Speed and efficiency never made good *real* art. Do not be concerned about slowing others down. Oh, and as for other people and their opinions, that is a "them" problem, not a "you" problem.

Schwarzpferd

I work as a quality control technician in a major manufacturing firm and many people keep telling me to use AI to calculate data or do reports and all that and I have flat out refused to use it at work. I just do not see the benefits to it. Part of my job is finding out what is wrong with a problem, and in some cases every minute I take finding the problem is downtime that costs the company money. Responding to issues quickly requires skills that need to always be refreshed. By not letting ai do any thinking for me my mind is always engaged in problem solving so that when faced with a new issue I can usually find it pretty quick. It also helps with stress. When you solve problems on your own often it is rewarding and makes life at work easier. That being said I am not against Ai for use for fun in personal life. For example I use an AI chatbot in a simulation as a copilot in a futuristic exploration vessel. I create a story in my mind and the AI input can create an experience that makes it more fun.

Mian

I'm glad to work in a field that won't be able to be taken over by any current "AI" systems. Though in my hobbies some people ended up joining in using AI tools and while it doesn't affect me in my own pursuits, it makes things very weird when having to interact with people that will just put whatever info you give someone into the nearest chatbot to do it for them... Makes me so much less excited to help people. 😕 I still do my own things, post things openly within the community, just am not really excited to help people that, in my eyes, just don't care that much.

Milosz Skowronski

I hate AI. It's not just inhuman, the way it's being pushed right now makes it anti-human. It contributes to climate change, destroys communities, increases water shortages, strains electric infrastructure driving up our bills, it makes us dumber and crazier (look up AI-induced brain atrophy and psychosis) and makes us more reliant on massive corporations, it's hurting our children's development and education, it's used in warfare to kill people, it's used by police states for indiscriminate surveillance, and finally, it's pushed and supported by the most evil people on the planet and that should tell you everything you need to know about it - Peter Thiel, the CEO of AI company Palantir couldn't answer clearly when asked "should humanity be allowed to survive the AI revolution?" That should ring some alarm bells. As for AI use for "art" it's pretty basic - if you know how AI works you know it's not actually creating anything. It's just regurgitating the average picture, pixel by pixel or word by word, of what the data it was fed suggests the correct average should be for a given prompt. It's not creation, it's just algorithmic data manipulation based on a set of training data and a prompt. And yes, AI training on art and literature is theft of intellectual property. Not to mention the books they scan and deliberately destroy, including rare and 1/1 surviving copies that will never be recovered, just to deprive their competition of the same "training data". It's a deliberate eradication of human history and culture for profit. With that said, it's also useful in so many ways. It's good for instantaneous translation, it can help us make better medicine, it can decipher long-lost languages and texts, solve complex problems and so on. There's definitely good uses for AI too. I think the use-cases where AI can do a lot of good are mostly scientific, so I'm very much for AI in science. Everything else is case-by-case, but I'd broadly ban AI in everyday use. With all that said, I use AI for work, because I have to as a company policy. My boss integrated AI into so many workflows it's impossible to avoid it. I try to limit my own use of it to simple information searching and data analysis tasks, but it's getting harder and harder to ignore it when it's being woven into everything you do. And that's by design. They want all of us addicted and reliant on AI for even the simplest tasks, so that they can make themselves indispensable and "too big to fail" for when the inevitable burst of the AI bubble. And it will burst, because there's only so much money in the world that can be invested into a wildly unprofitable business model, before that model collapses. And it is incredibly unprofitable. No AI company, except for Nvidia as a chip manufacturer, is anywhere near making profit, and never will be. And everyone knows it, but as they say: "The stock market can remain irrational for much longer than you can remain solvent." At least until it's no longer irrational, and the rude awakening comes. My advice: grit your teeth and try to remain sane and focused on not letting AI take over your life whenever possible. My friend is an indie games developer and he never uses AI on principle. Everything he does for his games is 100% human made, and he's the smartest guy I know, so he must be on to something. If it makes it any better, when we get older we will totally rule the world, because the next generations will be too stupid to even tie their shoelaces without asking the AI to remind them how ;)

Milosz Skowronski

One of the greatest tricks capitalists ever pulled on us was when they convinced everyone the Luddites were some kind of backwards savages that rejected all progress. I'm genuinely happy to see that this whole AI craze is at least pushing people to look up who the Luddites actually were and how they were right all along.

CanadianGold

I dislike generative AI on ethical grounds, especially around the plagiarism and such. The environmental impact is a concern but has been overblown by the most vocal detractors. I think the tech itself is neat, but I lose respect for people who rely on it as a replacement for actual human creativity. I had fun feeding screenshots of my HeroForge characters into "AI filters" back when it was still a novelty, I get it, but in my own professional office experience, AI like Claude isn't really an improvement for anything other than our software team automating the tedious parts of their job and the salesmen who physically cannot keep up with the hundreds of emails they get a day. I dunno.

CanadianGold

When it comes to art it's like, "If you couldn't be bothered to make it, why should I be bothered to appreciate it?" Doubly so when it's behind a paywall.

leafgreen

Given your post it hardly seems you are short on hearing opinions that a generally positive to AI but since you are asking and you seem to be in a difficult situation I will give you my honest experiences and thoughts on them . Perhaps it will help you feel better perhaps not. I agree that taking time to think and calm down is the correct action. Above all making peace with your situation is the most important thing to do. The seniors in my company lived though computers coming into the workplace. Listening to their stories the impacts of AI seem minor in comparison and in their stories there is a night and day difference between people who could adapt to computers and who could not. AI has not largely impacted my work space yet, but I expect it will in the coming years. I would be lying if I said I know how it will play out. Technology creates and destroys industries and that is something I made peace with a long time ago. I would not give up my computer but I know more careers than I can imagen have been destroyed by its very inception. Some of them co-workers of people I know personally. Your personal situation seems extremely unpleasant. Every move you can take looks bad and what is happening is unfair for you. I think unambiguously AI is the prime source of your troubles and it must be very difficult to be in a place where everyone around you celebrates something that in many ways Is or at least feels like your doom. I do not have any platitudes and I will not say I think AI is bad even if I do think it is bad for you personally. I have seen this pattern play out before in my lifetime and those older than me have seen even more extreme shifts play out. The wheel of time lifts people up and grinds them down with no mercy or distinction. Outside of work in my personal life I use AI frequently. I find using it for petty things demystifies it and makes its looming specter a lot less intimidating and easier to face. My seniors have always pushed me to stay on top of technology so I have been using it as a hobby as I watch it develop. Search engines have declined and AI can be a reasonable substitute to find the web pages i need. I have used AI to design characters, create 3d modules and then 3d print miniatures, I have used it to create videos of my nieces stuffed animals walking around their rooms and talking to them and i have used it to develop some simple apps and I use it for translation. I also use generative AI. I don't consider myself an artist. But I think the comparisons to drawn art that people make are somewhat absurd. AI image generation as a user experience and creative exercise is very similar to my experiences with digital studio photography (or taking a selfie with a flip phone depending on your effort and intent) and not even remotely similar to drawing even if it can make outputs that look like drawings and it directly competes with digital drawings on the online markets. None of these things are amazing. They are simple petty activities, but they help me emotionally face what I have coming instead of cowering in terror or turning a blind eye. I do not know what options you have or what options are right but, I hope you are able to make peace with them and do your best to do what is right for you. Regardless I will continue to support you for the foreseeable future.

Andrew Akiyama

While I personally don't use AI, I see it as simply another tool for people to use. While I understand people's concerns about it's use, it is not their place to dictate and shame others for using it. I've seen plenty of such individuals throw such abuse online, including your recent experience, but there are also plenty of individuals who abuse the technology for their own and/or just to be jerks. I have seen artists put in the time and effort to do paintings, only for an jerk to use AI to create a fake version of that artist's work in a matter of minutes.

Andrew Akiyama

In your case, discussing the use of AI with your fans is very challenging because many of them are that heavily invested in your work. Their mentality is "We support you and your art, so you owe us quality!" In reality, unless money is involved, you don't owe them shit. If they want to cry and throw temper tantrums like spoiled brats, let them! What you do with your art and how your friends go about in creating AI versions is your business and yours alone.

Andrew Akiyama

My suggestion would be to wait for a few weeks or towards the end of the year for things to calm down, then create an alternate account with a completely different username specifically for any AI-related content you and/or your friends make. However, I highly recommend turning off comments and messages on such an account, and maybe even make it private so that only users you approve can view the content.

Shiel

I hate AI with a burning passion and I am desperate and aching for the bubble to pop and the AI companies to lose everything. I am looking for work right now and despairing of the likelihood that I might be expected to use it in whatever job I get.

Schrödingers Katze

I am not big Fan. I understand it will be needed in the future but I detest the "Art" made with it when people try to pass it as the geniuine article.

Ben P.

I work in a (conventional non-AI) data center in an area with more data centers than anywhere else on the planet. Our management wants us to use it for every task we can, but I am professionally against it since we do actual hands-on work involving the electrical and mechanical systems in the facility, and I'd rather not trust my safety and health to some bored technician who doesn't care enough to actually learn about what they are doing. I'm also against it personally because we are already having issues with illiteracy and a lack of critical thinking skills in the US, and I don't want it to get even worse.

M

My biggest gripe with AI art is that we seek human connection with the artist through their art, as opposed to an addiction to a machine's output. The politics of AI resource consumption is not inherent to AI, but rather the way companies take resources at the expense of the public and uses it to benefit the owners. At extreme scale. When it comes to you permitting others to initiate your style in a certain scope, that's not anyone's choice but yours. As long as people don't misrepresent the effort of their work when using ai, I won't complain.

Hawk

As a writer myself, it's been hitting me even harder. Seeing my own works stolen from me, chopped up into a million pieces, then thrown back at me as a soulless husk that is held up to me as proof of how obsolete I am? It's honestly soul crushing. Even more so when people unironically tell me how I'm being rude and discriminatory for being upset at all of this. I know that this AI craze is just the continuation of the same trend as the Metaverse, and the blockchain before that, but even so, seeing the way AI has turned into such a horrid beast? It's hard to not be pessimistic

Tahvohck

I can appreciate the stress over it. It's such a contentious issue, and with you being a public figure the way you are you're always gonna get enough people reacting to see the extreme responses that normally wash out in the numbers; I hope that that knowledge provides you some solace at least. I work in the tech industry and it obviously has a major presence in my life though I've not been forced to use it myself (not that that stopped me from being jobless for most of this year regardless). I think the modern (past few hundred years, but even more so in past decades) drive to productivity over all else is a major issue in general and AI is a symptom of that. The tech behind it is pretty cool admittedly, but I'm pretty against it in most forms just between the environmental/ethical issues and the fact that it's pretty much always worse than the people it's (trying to) replace. Of course, with it currently propping up so many economies the eventual crash is going to hurt, and especially your country. And it will crash even if it doesn't go away, there's no sign of it being profitable in any sense of the word that I've seen. There's... a lot to be worried about, and we have to find ways to keep our spirits up in the face of it. I don't know what that looks like for you but you should get as much of it as you can.

Doug M

I don't use AI a lot, but I am in finance. We simply can't have an hallucination of a tax payment that never happened, and there are laws about giving client information to the AI companies. But when you asked, "why are we pursuing to produce so efficiently", I thought the same thing. A major bookstore here in the US says it will create AI generated books, but why? The problem has never been not enough books. There are plenty of people who will write books. It comes across as something the CEO said to make investors happy, but not a real plan to give something good to the consumer.

Ansuz's Ameateur Game Design

I'd like to throw my hat into the ring on this topic as I am very passionate about it. Generative AI use in writing, art and general culture is really grim in my opinion as a creative and teacher of history. What particularly saddens me is people are just chasing the next A.I fad rather than actually valuing genuine creativity or work. And I share your worries of feeling "left behind". Working as a secondary school teacher its all "Use A.I to make your lessons, use A.I to write emails" and even in assemblies to the students I see AI slop diagrams and pictures being used. Its really sad because I want to get these students critically thinking, enjoying the process of learning, rather than just shoving work in an algorithm and expecting it to do it for you. In that way...I would rather be a "luddite" of sorts. Completely against use of AI and completely supporting the old and analog ways of doing things! So keep doing what you are doing Ironlily, I love your work for its genuine nature and passion. Don't sacrifice that because of the ignorant masses and their obsession over a disgusting fad...

Eric Beasley

The current Agentic and ChatBot AI technology is not going away and has it's applications. Where and how it is utilized and applied is a very personal question, based on what makes sense, what''s available, and how it can benefit the user. Many artist focused tools are getting AI augmentations to improve operation and provide additional features--this is different from using a ChatBot to generate output. I believe that an artist needs to have the freedom to use the tools they need/like/want, and much more is about what they make. It is clear that Ironlily's art is not AI slop, but human effort and passion. All the other stuff, is practically not for anyone else to judge

Cryklo

Job wants us to use it, but it's a paper kind of job. It helps with the sheets, but it's mad that so many use it to fact-check info, then site sources that are misinformation. Having to correct senior workers daily is a chore.