Raw LLM Responses

I'm an unemployably disabled artist. I do art because the tactile and creative process of it is fun and satisfying, and it gives me a sense of agency and accomplishment that I lack in other areas of my life due to my disabilities. I also like to make art for other people as a way of providing something to others when there is little else I can offer in terms of labour. Generative AI could not replace art creation for me because it would remove the entire point of the activity. Even if the current limitations of AI image generation were magically taken away, AI making the art for me would mean I have nothing to do, no real sense of agency, I'm developing no skills, I'm not expressing myself, and I'm contributing nothing that couldn't have been easily done by someone else. A lot of people in the world today are in a position of frustratingly limited agency and control in their lives, especially disabled people, who on top of the limitations their disabilities bring often have family members, support workers, doctors, and other agents taking control over various parts of their lives. Even for abled people though, the housing crisis means people are largely living in rented living spaces or are unhoused, and so they have a great deal of outside rules limiting their ability to modify their living spaces to suit their tastes and needs. The rising cost of living and highly competitive job market means people are often unemployed or working low wage jobs, with little to no money to spend outside of necessities. Writing, drawing, or other creative endeavours can be a non-destructive outlet for the frustration this causes. It's a way of having complete control over something and expressing yourself personally instead of being filtered through other people's wills. For some people, they sell their art in some way or another, and it becomes a source of financial agency too. AI generation services make it harder for disabled people to be professional artists by burying their works online, soiling what for some people could be their only possible source of self-made income. Generating an AI image limits your control over the process and final product, and is ultimately bound by what has been supplied by other people, so it lacks the satisfaction of genuine agency that the creation process has. The argument that AI generation makes art a more accessible hobby hinges on the idea that the entire point of making art is to have a picture, which is simply not true. We have cameras and the internet for that already. There's a lot of different reasons that someone can want to make a picture, but especially if you are a hobbyist artist, the most common, most pivotal reason is to do something. As in, to actually spend your free time performing an action you enjoy so as to feel good. I think to the generative AI fans, it feels like the benefit of being an artist comes in having the ability to get any picture you can think of, and that by opposing AI art you're jealously gatekeeping that benefit to justify the effort you put into learning your craft in spite of the positive overall outcome sharing that benefit would have. Ultimately, artists do not care whether or not you as an individual make art, even if we think making stuff is a really good use of one's time. I think what most of us care about with regards to AI is some combination of having fewer income opportunities with our crafts, finding it increasingly difficult to source proper photo references online for our own art, the environmental impacts of generative AI, the wider culture of creative labourers being treated as disposable (despite them still being pretty vital actually), and the further homogenisation of art (already a problem due to how both social media and commercial media are).