AI tools like ComfyUI are already being used by artists to collaborate and bring their visions to life, particularly for smaller studios. These tools streamline the workflow, allowing for a faster transition from the initial sketch to a polished final product. They also facilitate an iterative and dynamic creative process, encouraging experimentation and leading to unexpected, innovative results. Far from replacing artists, AI expands their creative potential, enabling smaller teams to tackle more ambitious projects.

People who attack gen AI on the grounds of it being “soulless” are recycling a tired pattern of gatekeeping. In the 1950s, programmers derided high-level languages like FORTRAN as “cheating,” insisting real coders wrote in assembly. They conflated suffering with sanctity, as if the drudgery of manual memory allocation were the essence of creativity. Today’s artists, threatened by AI, make the same error. Mastery of Photoshop brushes or oil paints is not what defines art, it’s a technical skill developed for a particular medium. What really matters is the capacity to communicate ideas and emotions through a medium. Tools evolve, and human expression adapts in response. When photography first emerged, painters declared mechanical reproduction the death of art. Instead, it birthed new forms such as surrealism, abstraction, cinema that expanded what art could be.

Respectfully this author can go fuck themselves.

“The artists are just wrong” is the epithome of what makes academic Marxists sometimes completely insuffurable.

They use one example of a possibly useful use case for AI while not mentioning at all the already cases we had of AI artists scammers in literal art competitions or mass industrial scale AI art you can find these videos going back years now.

Stop arguing about it being a tool, take your head of your ass and see the actual real world harmful use of AI art. This isn’t a question about it being a tool otherwise we would have crashed out of digital art 25 years ago. Please tell me of the 1995 art competitions where people were fooled by someone taking a photo of an 18th century piece, mushing it together in Photoshop and then selling it as if it was real, successfully.

In the cases where this happened in the past, and it sure always did, art forgeries itself is something that exists for thousands of years, it was never at the level of industrial scale output and threatening competence and frankly it already puts AI defenders at a very bad.

What you’re arguing for is already something that is used for the worst case scenarios with little to not upside compared to traditional methods. You’re trying to find excuses for “best possible use cases” while ignoring the real existing bad use cases right now. Why are we not to make a moral argument? How can one reasonably say a capitalist is stealing from the workers labour but someone using AI to replace that labour entirely is NOT stealing.

But here is the ultimate elephant in the room this person is unaware. AI needs constant new input otherwise it will never be able to produce anything new. It means a constant addition of new data. It means a constant addition of new, unique and novel human labour otherwise AI models stagnate and become useless.

Now where are you ever going to get that human training data? Is someone training a Lora at their PC vastly different from OpenAI and other tech giants doing the same? Again take your head out of your ass, go to Civitai and look at the fact the best models right now have been created and continue to be perfected on top of thousands of unlicensed stolen work.

On that level there is no difference between using it as a “tool”, you’re doing literaly the same shit as the capitalists. If you call yourself a Marxist and ever had the ball to say the artist garment maker is wrong to believe the machine which only real purpose is to give the capitalist another mean to remove him from the fruit of their labour is of no benefit to him then you’re not a Marxist at all, you`re contrarian larping.

What is the upside? That magic machine doesn’t work without the mountain of dead artists behind it continually making new and unique training data. The magic machine has no purpose but to make us more “efficient”, yet this efficiency manifests itself only through either slop or literal scam. The magic machine is disgusting which is why they try to hard to pretend its not the actual Magic Machine doing the work.

God how can you be a Marxist and not see any of that.