I love your channel and have a lot of respect for you but this is in no way identical to human artists learning to draw using references.
5 months ago | 3
I would much rather have a crappy thumbnail that you personally made and created than an AI generated thumbnail. There are a few reasons why a lot of artists don't mind humans taking inspiration from their work but do mind when AI does. Some involve scraping and stealing. But others are because AI is nowhere near a point where it can be "inspired by" others' work. There is no personal touch by the AI. There is no creativity. It's cold algorithm. There is no life in it while taking from others who don't want theirs used. If AI were sentient, that might be a very different issue. Then perhaps it could be creative. It could actually be "inspired." But AI is nowhere near that. There are human artists out there of all different levels and pays, some quite cheap and some quite expensive. I'd much rather see you create the thumbnails yourself or hire a cheap artist if money is an issue, rather than AI art. Edit: clarity Edit 2: Also to address what you wrote about accusations of stealing, no one I've seen is accusing you of directly stealing. However, the nature of how AI "art" is created is from stolen works. Or works that artists did not give their permission to use. And by using that then the thumbnail inherently has stolen works as part of it. Whether or not you personally feel it's stealing, many artists themselves have said that it's stealing. Even if a company claims that their AI does not use stolen works, how can you verify that? There has been so much controversy around this, specifically from the artists themselves. If you respect human artists then please do not be dismissive of them by trivializing their fears and concerns.
5 months ago (edited) | 3
Bro at least trace over it or something. Naked ai on displat is nasty ngl
5 months ago | 2
For me, it’s a matter of using a service that is well documented in stealing from artists. It would be a whole other conversation if art-generating AI companies acquired their art ethically from living artists or if it was only trained on public domain works. It doesn’t matter that humans also look at art for inspiration to make new art. What matters is that LLMs and image generating AI companies can only exist through stealing work.
5 months ago (edited) | 19
History related channels being open to using AI generated imagery is a huge red flag for me regardless of other ethical concerns. Who's to say it won't be used in place of photos or proper artistic renditions of places, people, artifacts, etc? Lots of channels have started taking shortcuts like that to create more visually appealing or engaging videos lately.
5 months ago | 8
I think this is a fight worthing losing, I'd much rather see a google image as a thumbnail than AI art. It's the principle.
5 months ago | 0
It is not the same as human learning. Humans cannot instantly memorize and analyze many artworks. When humans learn from art to make their own they are influenced by their own life experiences, biases, physicality (ex: handwriting), mood, capacity to memorize, time & effort to train the skill, etc.
5 months ago | 14
Sure, it isn't replicating a single artist's work. It's sad to say though these AIs have been fed by millions of works by thousands of artists almost entirely without their permission. No matter how it turns out, it's an amalgamation of a number of artists, hardly any of whom gave consent to AI companies to use their work for clearly for profit purposes. It's an ethical matter of the intellectual property of the world's artists and whether it truly belongs to them. And do we honestly want to live in a world where every aspiring artist never picks up a paintbrush or pencil because AI has made the act of human creativity obsolete?
5 months ago | 26
I don't carr about Ai thumbnails, but I'm concerned when Ai generated "footage" is used in videos that present themselves as factual, rather than an artist's conception, which should be labeled clearly as such.
5 months ago | 1
I do not want AI in my life. I will boycott all who use it, if I need to.
5 months ago | 0
Ive actually changed my mind and will be i Unsubscribing and will no longer watch your content. I dont wanna support companies who steal from other artists and use it to benefit them without ever giving anything back to thise artist. And i dont want to support those who support those companies. I respecr your channel and your work but i dont respect ai art
5 months ago | 1
Anything involving joe rogan or graham handcock isn't really worth much more than ai slop anyways
5 months ago | 0
This is extremely disappointing. You act as if you're open for discussion, but you disregard all comments that disagree with you. Generative AI exists by stealing other people's art. By using it, you contribute to that -and you cannot disagree. There are tons of other ways to create thumbnails and you know it.
5 months ago | 1
This is irrelevant to a silly thumbnail, feel completely free to ignore it. Your channel isn’t about art. But I just feel like I would like to explain the thought process behind the criticism, since you gave a gracious explanation of your views I would like to explain the views of an artist who doesn’t like the use of AI in a respectful way. I don’t want to argue with anyone, thats not the point and it’s completely unnecessary: I feel like the issue is more about a sense of all the hard work it takes becoming an artist feels undermined when being compared to an algorithm taking the work of artists who has done countless of hours of hard work both on the pieces in question and to get to that point. That’s why many people are very sensitive about it. Having a passion and spending your life honing it just to have a computer taking those works without consent and people saying it’s the same thing. And recognizing that all content, even the kind that you do, can be easily replaced by AI with the same logic. I feel like the human element is important too, we place great value of the human element behind art historically, so why not now? Would looking at AI art as a historical artifact in the future have the same feel, you could revel about the technology yes but what would it say about the humans at the time, about us. There used to be great value in skill, people were payed to do beautiful things after honing their craft for years, this is the basis of so much in history: it gave us beautiful monuments, pottery to study, sculptures to revel at, painting and mosaics that we praise for their beauty today. We don’t do that anymore because it’s all about convenience and money which is why modern stuff can feel bland to a lot of people. And the fact that we are able to see so many skilled artist due to the internet makes it easy to write off every drawing as just some person making something without placing value in it and not recognizing that it is a good piece of craftsmanship that has taken a lot of work to be able to make. Just because it doesn’t feel scarce doesn’t mean it doesn’t hold value. Not everyone can make good art because it takes a lot of hard work and skill to get there, that’s why people use AI. It’s not about just being angry and “not understanding the tools of the future” it’s about your hard work being for nothing, because a lot of artists ARE being replaced by this kind of mass produced generic stuff on a large scale. We used to place value in hard work and skill but now we are taking the result of that for granted. Being passionate about your craft used to be a good thing, now it’s often look down upon as just a shaky career, nothing you should dedicate yourself too because you can’t make good money off of it, you should give up on making art and “get a real job”. I’m sure this concept isn’t foreign to someone working in a field that too is underfunded. It’s all about the implications and the bigger picture, that’s it. I love your work Doctor and i see the full value in what you do, not only because it’s important and entertaining but because i like the way you do and present things as a creator. I would not let it get replaced by AI: even if it at some point too could learn to use proper sources and create entertaining and educational videos.
5 months ago (edited) | 0
Yeah, this guy has other ethical issues. It’s not even worth talking about, though, because he just doesn’t deserve viewers if he’s this quick to condescend to them. I hope my English was serviceable enough.
5 months ago | 0
If ai can do what people do to create art then it can think and reason. In that case using an ai would be tantamount to the enslavement of a person. That is pbviously false. To generate images an ai must contain images made by humans as a set of training data. Then it copies specific parts of its training images to create a collage of existing overlayerd art. If it disnt do that it wouldnt need to use other artists images as stored copies inside itself. It is not a robot that has been programmed with specific ways of drawing and cannot learn to draw. It can only replicate other artists work that have been built into it. It is art theft and plagarism. I will now be unfollowing your channel and telling everyone I know to do the same.
5 months ago (edited) | 1
these "dont use AI Art" sound like boomer woke people. dont worry about them. im finding those types are the Karens of the art world and are the ones that draw stuff like steven universe. they wanted to draw it for you for a commission of $150 . thats only for black and white $200 for color print! art types like that are the worst toxic behavior of society!
5 months ago | 0
There's a big difference between an artist seeing other's work and being inspired vs. systematically scraping the internet with an algorithm for images. The "I can't afford better art" argument is a crappy shield to hide behind. Don't want to undermine or disrespect visual artists... you just want to replace them? Some real cognitive dissonance going on here.
5 months ago (edited) | 20
One thing: when people do it, they get paid or choose to give their labor/art. When people learn, they looked at the art of other artists or, more likely, received direct instruction from another artist at some point. Again, something the artist modeling the work consented to on some level (unless someone is violating copyright/trademark/whatever else). That artist chose to make their art available to be looked at and used as inspiration or reference or teaching etc for a human person. They didn't put them up to be used to as a means to teach generative ai. That wasn't even remotely a possibility the overwhelming majority of these people knew when they put their work out there for others. That's at the core of my issue I suppose - the lack of consent, the violation of it all. I understand what you're saying here, I appreciate you've thought it out quite thoroughly. We're allowed to disagree on some things. There will continue to be these thorny issues with generative ai. I mean, eventually, prompt-writers will expect to have enforced copyrighted, the issues within publishing and music production will continue to grow, the impact on research in almost rvery field. I mean, how long until one of these false citations chatGPT puts out is putting a prominent historian as authoring a book that's on the wrong side of important issues? Probably not too long at the current rate. We will see. Anyway, cheers and thank you to any who read this.
5 months ago | 9
If you can't afford to pay an artist; then you shouldn't have art. Simple.
5 months ago | 2
World of Antiquity
I appreciate everyone who raised concerns about the thumbnail artwork used in the video below. It was the first time I used AI art in a thumbnail, though I have used it before within videos from time to time. I understand that some channel viewers are against the use of AI-generated art in principle and feel very strongly about it. Over the past couple of weeks I have been thinking about it, as I am always concerned about doing the right thing.
Some people don't like "AI slop" simply because it is crappy. This post is not for such ones. If you think it's poor art, that's understandable. I have made many crappy thumbnails in my time, and many of them are still up, but I never got much hate for any of those.
First, as I said in some of my replies to the comments under the video, I have great respect for human artists and love their craft. My use of AI-generated imagery isn't a dismissal of human creativity but simply an accessible alternative given the financial constraints of my budget.
Several people have accused me (either directly or indirectly) of stealing from human artists. But no copyrighted imagery was used in the thumb. Stealing would imply using a specific, identifiable piece of artwork created by someone else without permission or compensation. This AI-generated image is a completely new illustration that does not replicate any particular existing piece of art or any character created by a human artist.
It doesn't even copy any particular artist's style, or art studio's style. It draws broadly upon general cartoon illustration conventions, blending several influences to create an original look. Specifically, it integrates elements commonly found in editorial cartoons and caricatures, retro boxing posters and vintage advertisements, and a dash of influence from Ligne Claire comics. It's an original synthesis, and that is exactly what human artists also do. Human artists continually build upon the works of those who came before them. AI-generated art is trained similarly: it analyzes patterns, styles, and techniques from a vast pool of publicly accessible data to produce original compositions.
Now, someone can argue about whether DALL-E (by Open AI), the app that I used, violates copyright by drawing from other artist's material, and I know that there are legal cases pending, but the way I see it, the AI is only doing what people themselves do. It looks at other people's art and is influenced by it. The only legal cases I think have legs are those in which the app outputs actual images that are copyrighted or characters that are copyrighted.
Thank you all again for voicing your concerns. I realize that I cannot give this complex ethical topic its due justice in a relative brief post like this, but constructive dialogue helps us all better understand this issue, so feel free to chime in. I hope this clarifies my position and demonstrates that my intention was never to disrespect or undermine human artists.
5 months ago | [YT] | 75