Chat with a dev at a coffee shop changed my mind about AI art

I was grabbing a coffee last Tuesday and this guy next to me was tweaking an AI image generator. I told him I thought it was just stealing from real artists. He showed me his process feeding it his own sketches and adjusting the output over 40 tries for a single illustration. That hit different because I saw it as a tool, not a replacement. Has anyone else had a conversation that flipped their view on generative AI?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_richard1mo ago

Man, I gotta call this one out. I still think it's mostly theft with extra steps. Feeding your own sketches into a machine that was trained on millions of uncredited images doesn't make it okay. The problem isn't the tool, it's the data set. No one asked those artists if their work could be scraped. And the "40 tries" thing? That just proves the machine is bad at getting what you want without burning a ton of electricity and time. It's like saying a car is a tool because you can push it uphill instead of just walking.

grace_campbell1mo ago

Yeah 40 tries sounds a lot like my drawing abilities.

wright.richard1mo ago

A buddy of mine is a graphic designer and he was totally against AI until his client demanded a specific style that would have taken him weeks to do by hand. He ended up training a small model on his own past work to speed up the boring parts, like coloring and background fills. Watching him treat it like a fancy paint roller instead of trying to replace his own creativity changed my mind a bit. Now I still hate the big companies that scrape everything without asking, but for someone who builds their own little system from scratch, it feels more like a helper than a thief.