The "Anti-AI Art" crowd is cringe af
So let me get this straight: y'all decided to use a free service to host your art on the internet, agreed to their terms (without reading them), and literally handed over your data to them - and now you're all upset that they capitalised on your data? Like, really? Did you think that Artstation was paying for the free hosting and storage that they provide so as to like, do a service to humanity? Are you naïve? The outrage is hilariously misguided given the reality of the situation.
Just to give a (perfect) counter-example - months before AI art really started blowing up GitHub announced CoPilot: an AI tool that just flat-out writes code. Where was the outrage from the tech community?
Where was the massive uprising of software engineers against GitHub, the free code repository hosting service used by most software developers?
Did anybody ever say: "But what about the innately special, irreplaceable quality of hand-written code, written by a human?!"
Even to me, as a software engineer, this seems like a preposterous notion. After all: why would you - the user - give a shit about who wrote the code that powers your devices and applications? Frankly: you don't. You shouldn't! You just want your things to work the way they are supposed to work. I don't blame you.
Most of of the "Anti AI Art" posts I've seen are people floundering through badly-formed arguments about the artistic legitimacy of AI art and whether or not it somehow indirectly counts as 'plagiarism'.
If you're concerned that AI art will destroy an already tenuous labour market for art, you are absolutely right in being concerned. Your job market will be seriously imperil'd by this new development, and that is a very uncomfortable situation to be in. Lives will be financially uprooted. Your anger at this is not unfounded. I just wish that y'all were mature enough to be honest about that instead of making flimsy, low-quality arguments about "plagiarism" and the "legitimacy" of "real art"...
And before you start blaming capitalism for "ruining art" please understand that it's deeper than that… It's not capitalism.
There is a whole legion of nerds out there for whom these machine learning models are an art-form. For many engineers, the pursuit of AI technology is our life's ambition; Something we've dreamed about since we were children. I think some people desperately want to frame this entire situation as "late-stage capitalism" but they don't realise that it's just STEM following the same course it always follows. Technology is just gonna advance because that's just what technology does. Engineers will always create new technology for the same reason artists create new art; it's what we have in our hearts.