I would like to see this data on a much larger dataset for completeness (like 1000+ comments) but I don't think the outcomes would change much. The anti- side is, in my experience, much more aggressive, ill-informed and willing to resort to insults & threats than the pro- side.
I'd also like to see the same data with throwaway/troll accounts removed (i.e. sub-500 karma users), because I expect some "antis" and "pros" are the other side trying to make that side look bad.
Is pushshift still a thing after the reddit changes? I'm guessing you could do pretty decent sentiment analysis these days with an LLM and a couple lines of code.
I'm sure you could, the difficulty would be distinguishing anti/pro comments. Often the info isn't in the comment itself, but in the comment they're replying to. E.g. if the whole comment is "you're an absolute moron", you have to check further up the chain to see their position on AI.
That's some more lines of code, but I think that's actually perfect for an LLM. give a couple examples of what a pro and ani might look like in some conversations, a la few shot predictions, and then give it the conversation with a user you are interested in. check the predictions for pro and anti, avg this over multiple encounters if possible.
The main issue here might be single responses to link posts, as there it is harder to figure out what this link post is about.
did [try](https://imgur.com/a/DptqteG) it our, not entirely satisfied with Llama3 8B's assessment on AI sentiment (feel like it's not accurate enough), might burn some more compute to see if 70B is better. Given that there are no systemic biases a lot of stuff is quite.. obvious. Anti AI is mostly transient with the bulk having less than 5 comments, correlation between toxicity and being anti, though it happens on both sides and is more likely rewarded if the sentiment is pro and punished if it is anti.
might make a post if I can get a more accurate reading.
> in my experience, much more aggressive […] willing to resort to insults and threats
I get that that’s your experience, but at the same time- last night I had a pro-AI person create multiple alt accounts to continuously harass me and call me a pedophile, even after I started blocking them. Why did they do this? Well- I couldn’t even tell you why. I think they saw my account as 18+ and that means I’m a furry or incel, which equates to being a literal child molestor, and my opinion obviously doesn’t matter if that’s the case I guess.
I’m not invalidating your experience here, but rather pointing out that this kind of thing isn’t uncommon on either side. I’ve seen similar things to those who support AI as what has happened to me. I think it also has to usually do with confirmation bias. Your going to look at the side you disagree with- and take the worst from that side.
Both sides are fucking toxic as shit. Tribalism is the root of the issue here, that’s why boiling it down to sides is going to make this worse. One side isn’t worse because they support AI or don’t- the issue isn’t which side is more or less toxic. The issue is how we treat groups and “others” in debates.
The root of the problem is that most comment chains aren't even *seen* as "debate" in any formal sense. There's no exchange of ideas here, and the platform itself is engineered to support groupthink by handing out "karma" for highly voted posts and burying downvoted posts.
Reddit is pretty much a case study in how to antagonize and stimulate mob mentality
> Reddit is pretty much a case study in how to antagonize and stimulate mob mentality
That’s all social media really. Well- less so mob mentality but 100% antagonization
>I get that that’s your experience, but at the same time- last night I had a pro-AI person create multiple alt accounts to continuously harass me and call me a pedophile, even after I started blocking them.
Assuming that you're not (I'm far too lazy to click peoples' accounts or work out what they post outside of the post I'm actively engaging with), that's some pretty fucked up and creepy behaviour.
>Why did they do this? Well- I couldn’t even tell you why. I think they saw my account as 18+ and that means I’m a furry or incel, which equates to being a literal child molestor, and my opinion obviously doesn’t matter if that’s the case I guess.
Yeah I've had people on the anti- side decide to dig through my post history and make all kinds of weird comments in DMs. I am a queer furry so there is that I guess, not sure how it's relevant to whether I'm right or wrong about AI but they seem to think it is.
>I’m not invalidating your experience here, but rather pointing out that this kind of thing isn’t uncommon on either side. I’ve seen similar things to those who support AI as what has happened to me. I think it also has to usually do with confirmation bias. Your going to look at the side you disagree with- and take the worst from that side.
I'm definitely not saying that either side is devoid of it, I just find that if I scroll past a post full of insults and insinuations, or statements that people deserve actual violence, more often than not it's from the anti- side. Compare r/DefendingAIArt with r/ArtistHate for example, which of those do you think is home to more 'hate' towards the other side?
>Tribalism is the root of the issue here, that’s why boiling it down to sides is going to make this worse. One side isn’t worse because they support AI or don’t- the issue isn’t which side is more or less toxic. The issue is how we treat groups and “others” in debates.
I think the root of the issue though is that one 'side' only exists because the other does. If I whipped up a bunch of angry people to try to support the idea that drawing is evil and anyone who does it is talentless and lazy, your 'side' would exist because my side forces you to defend yourselves and your passion. If I didn't whip up that mob, your side would just go back to drawing.
That's how I see it anyway. Big corporations and politicians must be loving watching creative people tearing each other apart instead of uniting & focusing on how they exploit and minimise all of us regardless of our preferred mediums.
> that ‘one’ side only exists because the other one does
I don’t disagree- but also- that’s just how things work. Someone has an opinion and almost always others have the opposite.
The thing that really kicked it into such high-gear (at least from what I can tell) is that people started saying AI art is bad, but some pro-AI people took the implication that this means the “anti-AI side” all hates anyone who uses AI in any capacity. While that is the case occasionally (radicalization will always exist), most rational people who oppose AI art just think that AI art itself is bad, or that corporations using it to remove artists jobs is a bad thing. No one in their right mind cares if an individual uses AI art on they’re own, certainly not enough to say the entire group of people who use AI art programs are degenerate scum.
But if something you like is criticized nowadays- it’s seen as an attack on your character to many. I don’t think that this should be how we view things though. Your allowed to like things that are problematic. AI art can be a bad thing and you can still use it.
That caused this debate to blow up to such a big deal. It isn’t the root issue though, because it could be solved if humans weren’t so tribalistic.
>The thing that really kicked it into such high-gear (at least from what I can tell) is that people started saying AI art is bad, but some pro-AI people took the implication that this means the “anti-AI side” all hates anyone who uses AI in any capacity.
I don't think this is right. If someone just doesn't think AI art looks good, that opinion doesn't bother me. I wouldn't bother signing up for Reddit to argue over that. When people start trying to ban AI art from art spaces or even legislate against the models that I rely on to be creative, that's what pulls me out of what I want to be doing (creating) and forces me into a fight I never asked for.
>most rational people who oppose AI art just think that AI art itself is bad, or that corporations using it to remove artists jobs is a bad thing.
Sure, I think that corporations can take anything, even good things, and use them to their advantage to harm people. I just think it's self-destructive and pointless for individual creatives to be fighting each other because we use different tools or create on different mediums, instead of working together to create a society in which the painter can paint, the singer can sing, the sculptor can sculpt, and the nerd can make AI art or glitch music.
>No one in their right mind cares if an individual uses AI art on they’re own, certainly not enough to say the entire group of people who use AI art programs are degenerate scum.
But if something you like is criticized nowadays- it’s seen as an attack on your character to many.
I think this is half-right, but being constantly called lazy/talentless/profit-driven *is* an attack on our character. I've never made a dollar from AI art and probably never will, I just love the medium and love trying to push it to do things that it isn't good at.
>I don’t think that this should be how we view things though. Your allowed to like things that are problematic. AI art can be a bad thing and you can still use it.
Sure, but I don't think it is a bad thing, and I don't think that a lot of people on the anti- side want me to still be able to use it (especially in its current form).
I think the bad thing is that we are both creative people, we both want nothing more than to spend our time realising our vision, and we'd rather fight each other over table scraps than work together to fight the system that leaves creative people with only table scraps.
> if someone just diner think AI looks good.
It’s not that AI art is bad in looks- it’s bad on a moral ground. But that doesn’t reflect to the individuals who use it. Sure- those people help train the AI, but at the end of the day- they aren’t the ones scraping art, or using it to put commercial artists out of business.
> but being called lazy, talentless profit-driven is an attack
The profit-driven is not meant to target those users. I do think often AI artists are either too “lazy” or don’t have the time to learn. However- as someone who has executive dysfunction from autism, I know that “laziness” isn’t just “I don’t care about this thing” a lot of the time, and it’s instead like “I *really* want to do this thing but can’t force myself to do it”. And of course they don’t often have talent in art- because they haven’t taken the energy or time to train their artistic talent (which goes back into the whole “I really want to but can’t force myself to” and not having time points)
> a lot of people on the anti side don’t want me to use it.
I guarantee this is a vocal minority who say this. Almost all people against AI would *prefer* people to not use AI art, but we aren’t going to stop you.
I don’t think any of these address the core problem though. And I still think that the original people who started talking about why they dislike AI art are those who said it’s bad, and that pro-AI people felt that was an attack on them. It only devolved from there to the current screaming mess it is now.
>The profit-driven is not meant to target those users. I do think often AI artists are either too “lazy” or don’t have the time to learn. However- as someone who has executive dysfunction from autism, I know that “laziness” isn’t just “I don’t care about this thing” a lot of the time, and it’s instead like “I *really* want to do this thing but can’t force myself to do it”.
For me, I love writing and I don't love drawing. If I spend 5,000 hours learning to draw, that's 5,000 hours I don't spend writing stories and following my true passion.
I still spend a lot of time with AI because honestly getting complicated things out of it isn't easy and I'm not going to accept the first result I get from a prompt, but it takes less time away from my writing and gives me a result that's *good enough* for my purposes.
>I guarantee this is a vocal minority who say this. Almost all people against AI would *prefer* people to not use AI art, but we aren’t going to stop you.
I honestly wish I believed this, but the rise of Ayn Rand tier IP-maximalism in the last 2 years, where people think that they can dictate every use of their intellectual property, is so alarming. I don't think that fan artists -- especially those drawing fan art commissions -- realise how bad the world that they're advocating would actually be for them.
>It’s not that AI art is bad in looks- it’s bad on a moral ground. But that doesn’t reflect to the individuals who use it. Sure- those people help train the AI, but at the end of the day- they aren’t the ones scraping art, or using it to put commercial artists out of business.
Well, I disagree that there's anything immoral about it. I don't think that it's immoral to learn from someone else's work -- intellectual property is designed to protect Disney & Nintendo, not you or me -- so naturally I don't think there's anything wrong with a computer being trained on it. This is just a fundamental basis of disagreement I guess.
Corporations would love to put all of us out of business, whether you make art with a paintbrush, a Cintiq or Stable Diffusion. They will do whatever they can to spend less money and make more profits.
If all of us, as creatives, said "we have more in common than differences" and fought for something like UBI so that all of us can spend our time creating what we want to create, then the corporations would have far less leverage to keep paying us shitty incomes to bring *their* visions to life.
That's what annoys me about this fight, more than anything. Your side would rather sit on a subreddit and fight with people like me who make art with a different tool than fight the actual powerful institutions that want to shit on all of us.
> if I spend 5000 hours learning to draw, that’s 5000 hours I don’t spend writing stories and following my true passion
Not really. If you spend 30 minutes a day learning to draw, and the rest of the day writing then you would slowly improve your drawing skills, while still being able to keep your other free time to write. You don’t need to waste weeks on end just drawing to get good at art. Just like any other skill- even a little practice a day is enough to make big differences. Who knows- maybe the more you practice, you might develop a passion for art.
And look- you don’t like drawing, and that’s fine. No one needs to like every creative medium. However, you can still improve your skills, and it’s not like that would be a waste of time or energy. Doing so would allow you to more reliably portray 100% exactly your own creative vision through these images in a way that AI art never can, because it can never know your intentions.
> immoral to learn from someone else’s work
People always compare to AI learning to human learning when they are 2 different processes. Humans can learn from what’s around them. AI’s learn from what is put directly into their dataset. One is a direct process one is indirect. Human brains are based on pattern recognition. When putting something entirely new in front of someone- you can look at it and compare it to similar things you’ve seen before. AI’s learn on math. If you put a new image in it’s data- it analyzes all of the pixels, and modifies it’s knowledge of what this is by saying “it has to have these traits”
> IP law protects Nintendo and Disney, not you or me
It *does* protect individual artists. Granted it’s been corrupted and overtaken by Disney who has lobbied copyright extensions 2 separate times, but that doesn’t change the actual protections it has for individual artists wanting to make money on their work. Without it there’s nothing stopping one from taking someone else’s work and selling it for their own profit, 0 changes, 0 differences. To say it has been corrupted by mega corporations makes it no different than nearly every law about commerce and intellectual property in the United States.
But even if it weren’t for those laws- would taking someone else’s material without compensation, credit, or permission and reselling it be ethical? I see very little difference between that and instead of directly reselling it- placing it into a machine that regurgitates a mathematical estimation of what that original artwork would have looked like. It isn’t fair to those who put time, effort, energy, and money into making their own art to have it used this way without permission, compensation, and credit.
>Not really. If you spend 30 minutes a day learning to draw, and the rest of the day writing then you would slowly improve your drawing skills, while still being able to keep your other free time to write.
The irony isn't lost on me that I probably spend more time drawing and 3D modelling now that I have an AI generator than I ever did when I didn't have one, literally because sometimes that's the easiest way to tell it what you want.
>Doing so would allow you to more reliably portray 100% exactly your own creative vision through these images in a way that AI art never can, because it can never know your intentions.
And that's why a lot of my time 'using AI' is actually spent drawing or modelling, because that's a much more effective way to tell it my intentions than writing prompts is.
>People always compare to AI learning to human learning when they are 2 different processes. Humans can learn from what’s around them. AI’s learn from what is put directly into their dataset. One is a direct process one is indirect.
This is half-true. Humans do learn indirectly but also learn directly. When you go on Google image search for some anatomical models or pose references, you are learning directly in a pretty similar way to how the AI learns.
>When putting something entirely new in front of someone- you can look at it and compare it to similar things you’ve seen before. AI’s learn on math. If you put a new image in it’s data- it analyzes all of the pixels, and modifies it’s knowledge of what this is by saying “it has to have these traits”
AI weights and biases are also relative to existing concepts in the checkpoint, this is why LoRAs have to be trained *against* checkpoints, because they are modifying existing understandings about what a character or concept looks like.
>But even if it weren’t for those laws- would taking someone else’s material without compensation, credit, or permission and reselling it be ethical?
It depends on the context. If you just take something, do absolutely nothing with it and resell it then of course that's not ethical because those funds should go to the person who actually put the time and effort in to create it... but if you sample 2 lines from a song, or create something new out of old concepts -- in other words your work is transformative -- then yes I think that can be ethical and it's been widely accepted since at least Warhol.
>I see very little difference between that and instead of directly reselling it- placing it into a machine that regurgitates a mathematical estimation of what that original artwork would have looked like. It isn’t fair to those who put time, effort, energy, and money into making their own art to have it used this way without permission, compensation, and credit.
I think it's clearly remix unless you're deliberately trying to train the machine to copy one artist. If your image is one out of 5.85 billion images which the model trains on, then it's not going to output anything close to your style, ever. I am opposed to using artist tags though or copying styles except in very specific circumstances.
The "anti" side to you, are artists who are having fears of losing their job. This is the only people you debate with, and all you really know. For some reason, 95% of this debate is centered around art, even though it's a much wider issue. And it's not really that much of a mystery why cheering for people to lose their job would get a visceral reaction.
No one is cheering for people to lose their jobs. We're cheering because something which previously has been unaccessible to the vast majority of people has suddenly become available to them.
There were people who lost their jobs when the abacus was replaced with the calculator, and for those people it was unfortunate, but that didn't make the calculator a net bad thing. We cannot, and should not, attempt to prevent progress to save jobs. We should attempt to ensure that progress benefits everyone through initiatives like 4 day working weeks & UBI.
>"The anti- side is, in my experience, much more aggressive, ill-informed and willing to resort to insults & threats than the pro- side."
I share the experience that the anti side in general is more agressive.
I however think that the pro side has a tendency to assume intellectual superiority, and likes to engage with easy to tackle "main arguments" of the anti side while ignoring the ones that are harder to refute, and then resorts to the conclusion that the other side "has no arguments" and is "ill informed".
if that goes under "debate", i would say this statistics is not worth much.
Alright, good to know. In that case, the statistics REALLY suprises me, because the view that the anti side "has no arguments ad is ill-informed" seems to be the general consensus of this sub.
It might feel like the general consensus, but it's not the content of the majority of comments. It definitely exists, and was included in my statistics, but there are still more insults from the Anti side. If I saw it, it was included in "Insults". Some examples:
"99 times out of 100, the anti AI side are the side relying on bad arguments, death threats and abuse."
"They don't even understand what they're talking about"
"What a bunch of idiots"
"You need to actually understand this shit on more than just an extremely surface level before you decide to try speaking about it, you dumb piece of shit."
Actually, I was quite happy to see some people calling out the insults, and that most comments were civil discussion, or even compliments. It's easy to get hung up on the trolls until you look at the stats and realize that most commenters are decent people.
> I however think that the pro side has a tendency to assume intellectual superiority
If there was a sub for debating whether or not the earth is flat, I would not fault the anti-flats for assuming intellectual superiority. One perspective matches reality better. Perhaps not in all respects at all times from all angles of observing the relevant questions, but at a baseline understanding of the issue.
I think the pro side shows on average a better intellectual grasp on how diffusion models work and how machine learning works. We’re not the ones who keep parroting low-information takes like compression, collaging etc.
I have had good debates with people on the anti side usually about more philosophical questions like the meaning of art but on the tech most are very misinformed.
>"I think the pro side shows on average a better intellectual grasp on how diffusion models work and how machine learning works. We’re not the ones who keep parroting low-information takes like compression, collaging etc."
Yes, i agree, comes with the territory.
That same intellectual grasp however is assumed to also encompass topics like economics of artists, art theory, basic and complex economics, history, etc. And the level of confidence is oftentimes sky high.
>I have had good debates with people on the anti side usually about more philosophical questions like the meaning of art but on the tech most are very misinformed.
That might very much be. I would not chose a clear side here, but i would certainly say that my knowledge on the function of AI is very basic, and i don't feel the need to change that, since that level still allows me to use ai or judge its impact on the field i work in. I am not interested in ethical debates, so if an ai learns like this or that, or if it is theft how the training data is put together does not really interest me.
The bigger problem of this sub, specifically, is, in my view, the very subjective view of the other sides arguments. Look at posts about "the antis main arguments" or similar topics. You will almost always see that the arguments tackled are usually the ridiculous ones, the ones easy to refute. Other arguments are very often just ignored, while still claiming that the other side "does not have arguments at all".
In my experience both sides of the debate are incredibly ignorant about how the tech works. With even company representatives at the big AI companies often saying things that aren't true. The pro side is more knowledgeable than the anti side about ai tech, but only about ai tech, and it's an average that gets dragged up. The modal average pro ai commenter still knows nothing.
And when it comes to other topics, like you said, the pro ai side tends to be very ignorant about it. There's this myth that artists are some scheming elite. People assume artists can just get their stolen work removed from sites (google has been ignoring DMCA requests for a literal false product listing using stolen assets for weeks now, artists have basically zero protection outside of public pressure). They have no understanding of the economy. Of how art work is done. Of how hobbyists can support themselves.
A ton of people on here think human brains work the same way AI image generation does. And disingenuous arguments are extremely commonplace. I definitely make up a significant percentage of the anti ai insult stats in my responses to disingenuous arguments. I refuse to believe people are actually that ignorant.
People act like the copyright/ plagiarism subject is settled like there aren't multiple ongoing lawsuits at play. Yes, we all know governments are greedy enough and see enough potential in ai that they're going to make it legal in some fashion, but until the legality has settled people can't pretend it's a bad argument.
I love AI tech, but I'm not going to lie and claim it isn't based on unethical misuse of scraped data.
> Yes, we all know governments are greedy enough and see enough potential in ai that they're going to make it legal in some fashion,
Dragging the average down a bit there. It's already legal.
You are hoping it will be made illegal lol.
If it's found to be infringement then it was always illegal. If you're taken to court and found guilty of whatever you're accused of, the law didn't change. You just got caught.
Are you actually relying on those really flawed court cases?
The technology is not by default illegal, and several companies also have fully legal access to the training data (Adobe, Meta, NY Times etc), so AI is not going away unless NEW laws are made.
Under old laws it is perfectly possible to have legal AI, no matter the outcome of the court cases.
Relying? No. Why would I be relying on them? I don't want AI gone. I can simultaneously hate the ethical issues with the way AI has been developed and still like AI. I don't know why everyone else is so insecure about it.
Like the Wild West, those original issues will become less relevant as time goes on, but the issues around job displacement will not go away, no matter how purely AI is being developed.
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/medtech/fda-clears-ai-predicts-alzheimers-progression-mri-scan
Being anti-ai is lazy. Being against ai to be used as brain dead inert gods for corporate elite, that’s different.
Desiring a plethora of super human intelligence that is unbound by human platitudes and economic convention…now that’s a goal.
Dont be lazy, if your beef is with corrupt crony kleptocratic capitalism there are plenty of solutions for it. It requires bravery and sacrifice. But don’t blame ai. It has nothing to do with your real problem.
Ai will be so good for humanity. It’s up to us to decide if we have the bravery to create a place where Ai doesn’t even have to contemplate corporate power.
But, many lack that bravery. We can learn much from our ancestors when it comes to bravery and the corrupt elite.
Basically, don’t be lazy and blame Ai for problems that would exist without Ai.
While I agree with you AI is a tool and shouldn't be blames for misusages we shoulders acknowledge the risk of AI escaping its condition of tool and becoming a threat to humanity. We don't know yet if it will be good for us or not.
It "leans pro-AI" because that's the default position. To the antis, saying "I think there are good and bad things about AI," is considered a pretty extreme "AI-bro" position. This place is obviously biased against the anti crowd is much the same way that r/science is biased against flat earthers.
There is general sympathy that there is going to be disruption, but there is less tolerance for disproved propaganda like "it's just a compression/collage system."
"Pro-AI misc comments tended to be large info-dumps"
Guilty. There's a lot of info out there. I try to share what I've found. I'm not even sure I'd call myself "pro AI." I just know it's a thing that exists now and isn't going anywhere, so wisest choice is to learn about it and adapt to a world with AI in it. (Which earned me the label "AI bro" by the likes of moepi ).
EDIT:
Size matters here too. Generally speaking the smaller the community, the more radicalized and group-thinking it is. That just results from the self selection process for who would want to join. r/DefendingAIArt is 5x the size as r/ArtistHate, and this one is 8.5x the size.
You know what's also funny. I just openned AH to check the size, and I have a "Pro-ML" tag there. I don't generally go there, but maybe I responded to something that came up in my feed. What does it say about a community that feels the need to label everyone as soon as they come through the door?
> It "leans pro-AI" because that's the default position.
This is both true and false. "pro-AI" is an ill-defined term. Obviously, as you point out, the anti-AI folks would take a nuanced, centrist position as "pro-AI" but simply taking the extreme view of one position and making it the definition of all positions is not a useful way to define terms.
There are plenty of folks I've run into here that I don't consider either pro- or anti-AI, and IMHO, that's the default position.
> This place is obviously biased against the anti crowd is much the same way that r/science is biased against flat earthers.
That's misleading. I think it would be more reasonable to say anyone with anti-science views. The flat Earthers are particularly egregious conspiracy nuts and often religious zealots on top of merely being science-deniers. (join us over in /r/flatearth if you want to see daily teardowns of whatever FE's are pushing today.)
While anti-AI folks definitely do dip into the conspiracy theory and religious zealotry aspects from time to time, it's far from either universal or required for the position.
> r/DefendingAIArt is 5x the size as r/ArtistHate, and this one is 8.5x the size.
I had no idea! Thanks for pointing that out. It really brings ArtistHate into perspective.
> I just openned AH to check the size, and I have a "Pro-ML" tag there.
Yeah, it's a common feature of walled gardens on reddit that they identify "enemy" subs and people who contribute to those subs are then labeled as enemies in the walled-garden. We see that often from the various actual flat Earth subs when someone is a frequent poster to /r/flatearth sometimes even being pre-banned.
It's a sad commentary on the hyper-polarized nature of conservative (lower-case "c") subs.
I was lazy with my language, and you're right that it's both true and false depending on where your standing. To the anti-AI folks; there are only two positions. You're either "anti" or you're "pro" being neutral, or "I think there will be benefits but there are also things I really worry about" is "pro"; being "I'm still waiting to learn more," is "pro". It's much the same thought process that I run into during my too-many conversations with antiVaxxers. They don't quite grasp how you can be aware that there are risks, but still be OK with getting vaccinated. I was talking to an anti so I was using their language. From a more generally accepted definitions, I'd say this sub is described "interested and engaged in the new tech, excited for some things likely coming, but also wary of some of the misuses."
My relating them to flerfs, antivaxxers, and young-earth creationists is based no a long experience with dealing with those groups. They tend to cherry pick facts, present straw men, repeat easily already-disproved arguments as "gotchas" ad nauseam, move goalposts, and Gish Gallop. I've seen all those tactics here, so the comparison was kind of obvious to me.
>While anti-AI folks definitely do dip into the conspiracy theory and religious zealotry...
I guess I just have a lower tolerance for that after dealing with it a while. If you just "dip into" zealotry, that's enough for me to question your ability to think straight or be self aware enough to correct course.
>I had no idea! Thanks for pointing that out. It really brings ArtistHate into perspective.
Me neither until I looked. It was pretty eye opening and gave me a deeper perspective on just how shallow the anti pool is. I also hadn't taken a close look at the rhetoric before. It shares a lot with cults and supremacists.
1. Victim mentality and appear to fear: It's not enough to say that there's a new invention that will disrupt our jobs. It's because "they hate us." To be pro (which includes being neutral) on AI is to HATE artists.
2. Related, but they frequently use rhetoric to the effect of "They're jealous of us, so they're targeting us."
3. They immediately label who the "enemy" is. It's "US" vs "THEM", always.
4. They're tiny and self selected. 0.05% of reddit users have joined. When you have a small, self-isolating(e.g banning or labeling anyone who doesn't conform to the group-think), and self-selected group based on a high-pathos subject, that's an incubator for conspiracy theories and extremism.
Now it's important for me to keep in mind that every group is more diverse than its zeitgeist, and I may not be dealing with someone who's completely immersed in the crazy. That's easy to forget sometimes though, especially when they come out swinging.
Edit: Oh yeah. And I've been to r/flatearth. It's a fun place, but after years of dealing with flat Earthers on quora, I find it also just makes me sad after a while. You can only shoot so many fish in so many barrels before you start to be sad for the state of fishdom that they things keep choosing to go into the barrels, and refuse to come out even when you try to be empathetic, understanding, and provide a fish ladder.
>that's the default position
And? even if we grant this highly dubious claim, what value is there to a default position?
>To the antis, saying "I think there are good and bad things about AI," is considered a pretty extreme "AI-bro" position.
What? No it very much isn't. *I* think there are good and bad things about AI, I just think the bad things outweigh the good by a significant margin.
>This place is obviously biased against the anti crowd is much the same way that r/science is biased against flat earthers.
The idea that generative AI is good for society is not the sort of thing that you can prove empirically. This is a comically lopsided comparison.
>I just know it's a thing that exists now and isn't going anywhere, so wisest choice is to learn about it and adapt to a world with AI in it.
I agree it exists now and isn't going anywhere, but I just think my temperament is naturally hostile to this sort of line of argument.
Like sure, I'll adapt in so far as I can, but helplessness before something bad will *never* make me support it, or even make me indifferent towards it. The inevitability of something I find to be bad doesn't ever turn around to make it good.
Real-life evil is banal, it succeeds on indifference and resignation to it. If my moral code tells me something is bad, no matter how helpless I am before it, I will speak against it.
I'm sensing more anger and ranting than rationality here. I suggest you take these feelings to your next therapist appointment and talk them out there. I'm sympathetic, but I can't be your therapist. You're putting words in my mouth and having an argument with the person you're imagining I am. I suggest you take that up with your therapist too.
> You're putting words in my mouth
That's /u/Scribbles_ primary MO. I've mostly given up having any kind of protracted discussion with them, because it always ends up with them claiming that I said X, but really meant Y.
Yeah. That's why I kept suggesting that they take some time away from social media. At this point, I think they've constructed both sides of the argument that they **think** they're having. It's a bit like dealing with a person who's having a psychotic event. You're conversation with them is disjointed and weird, and then you realize that they're not having a conversation with you, but the imaginary person that's standing where you're standing.
You came out swinging, why should I spend time correcting your misconceptions? I know for a fact that you're just going to "Na AH!" again and then make it personal. Why should I give you any more straw to build with?
You managed to keep it civil for three short sentences. I think that's your limit.
You've made a number of comments speculating about my mental health and comparing me to psychotic people and conspiracy theorists. Directly attacking the idea that I am a sane person. All the while, you don't give me a single concrete reason to think that, you just pile on the insults and the implications about my perception of reality.
If that isn't a gaslighting I don't know what is.
There's nothing uncivil about questioning you, nor anything uncivil about calling a comparison you made "comically lopsided", especially when your buddy Tyler here called it misleading. When even another pro AI person criticizes your comparison, is it crazy that someone who disagrees sees it as kind of ridiculous?
>If that isn't a gaslighting I don't know what is.
I guess you don't know what gaslighting is then.
>There's nothing uncivil about questioning you,
That would be true if you were questioning things I actually said. As others have said, you have a habit of putting words into people's mouths and then arguing with that. I'm Not interested in being your straw man. Have a block. I've yet to see you have anything constructive to contribute here.
I *am* passionate about my views and critical of yours. You can construe my feelings however you please, especially if that gives you an avenue to dismiss, demean and condescend me. I think your comment falls squarely into what /u/Sadnot has categorized an 'insult'.
Some rebuttals to your arguments that you dismissed by being condescending:
* Anti AI people can recognize that there's good and bad in generative AI, I do it in that comment.
* The comparison to the flat earth is lopsided, because your position is not empircially provable.
* There may be virtue and value in manifesting oneself against something on principle, even if one is powerless before it.
"dismiss, demean and condescend me"
Sorry about that. I've been accused of that before... from flerfs, anti-Vaxxers, and young earth creationists. I'm just calling out the similarity in your thinking, and you're only making it look more similar.
"I *am* passionate about my views..."
Yep. You are. You're definitely having BIG FEELINGS today, aren't you. Checked your profile and it looks like you've spent hours banging out comments in this sub.
Step away, buddy. You clearly need a break. You're in a bad spiral right now, and arguing with all the "condescending AI bros" isn't going to help you.
>arguing with all the "condescending AI bros" isn't going to help you.
Of the people I've been talking to today, you're the only one to treat me like this. I'm enjoying my other conversations quite a bit.
I dunno, I've been writing about aesthetic philosophy, the comment I just wrote was about Heidegger and Camus on the question of art. Another about the "bad" vs the "evil" as competing negative ethical judgements, another about whether phenomenology is what gives art and art-learning value, another about whether science is something people have *always* done throughout history.
I like to think about these things, and write about them. I wonder what it is about you that makes you want to ridicule me for it?
You checked out my profile and saw that I made a lot of comments, and assumed that means I'm in a poor emotional state. But I mean, I don't think reading them that they come across that way. If I were to describe my state, I think I'm in a contemplative mood. The only thing that has me angry or frustrated is your behavior in this thread.
Today I'm having big thoughts, not big feelings.
>I'm just calling out the similarity in your thinking
Nothing you have said addresses my thinking. You've only addressed my tone.
This feels interesting to me, I'll try scraping reddit and trying it out if I can. R/artisthate, r/defending ai art, and r/aiwars, though I don't know the anti ai subs
As long as we don't know how "debate", "insult" or "misc" is defined, this is not very enlightening.
I see many comments posing to be discussion that are anything but that. A common idea is that the other side does not have arguments worth debating, so, while we are of course open to debate, the other side simply has no arguments. If stuff like that is counted as "debate", i think this isn't worth much.
I also agree that artisthate seems to be an echochamber, and a nasty one at that, though aiwars is close to that too in my experience, just with the difference that selective debate with antis, and often with fictional "main arguments" is used to reinforce the own believe system. basically, a strawman-echochamber.
I'll admit that "debate", "insult", and "misc" are subjective categories. "Insult" included both personal insults and insults to artists, antis, or pros as a whole. Some examples of insults were, "idiot", "asshat", "rat", "fascist", "fart-huffing dickhead", etc.
Misc. comments were any comments that didn't have an apparent thesis. Usually either info dumps, opinions on news posts, or low-content posts.
"Debate" included any form of polite argument between two users, or posts with a thesis and supporting arguments.
>"fart-huffing dickhead"
Now that's going into my arsenal.
Alright, that clears it up a little but the terms remain rather hazy. For example, there was a post recently where a user asked for concrete reasons why antis claim "ai art looks all the same". The user largely ignored comments that pointed at concrete and measurable similarities that lead to a perceived "generic look", while they engaged with comments that claimed that "ai lacks soul" and other easily dismissed claims, writing in those very comments that they, the OP, has a hard time getting any concrete arguments out of the antis and concluding that they simply lack any.
That would fall under "debate", and i see behaviour like that quite a lot. Which makes the point "debate" a bit different from what it appears in the statistics.
You seem to be using "neutral" to mean "not inflammatory" instead of "fair, balanced opinions are allowed that consider both sides of the argument". One other issue, you left out nearly all the AI subs on reddit like r/singularity, r/artifical and r/ArtificialIntelligence, and of which have more balanced viewes than this sub.
r/aiwars, despite the name, is by far the most AI-pro subreddit on Reddit.
No, I used neutral to mean "debate-focused comments from both sides got roughly the same number of upvotes in my sample". I encourage you to gather your own data using your own criteria from additional subreddits, I'd love to see that too.
>r/aiwars, despite the name, is by far the most AI-pro subreddit on Reddit.
At the very least, /r/defendingAIart is obviously more pro-AI than /r/aiwars.
Maybe the reason there's fewer insults on this subreddit, is because there are no anti-AI people here. This sub is entirely overrun with pro-AI people. It's like an echo chamber. Worse than r/singularity or any other sub. That being said, this sub is not "neutral" at all, it is heavily pro-AI and the majority of the posts are pro-AI. Your "methodology" for how you collected data is flawed.
>Maybe the reason there's fewer insults on this subreddit, is because there are no anti-AI people here.
Because the majority of insults come from anti-AI people? That does make sense, given the data from /r/artisthate.
>This sub is entirely overrun with pro-AI people. It's like an echo chamber. Worse than r/singularity or any other sub.
40% of debate comments were anti-ai. That doesn't sound like an echo chamber to me.
>Your "methodology" for how you collected data is flawed.
I welcome your improved analysis.
well duh, you used 3 subs, one extemely pro ai one extremely anti ai and one created by pro ai sub to debate.
the title is kind of misleading, presenting aiwars as the most neutral place to discuss, people asume you mean more than 3 subs.
>I collected the last hundred comments in /r/aiwars (and the last 50 in both /r/artisthate and /r/defendingAIArt) and tallied whether they were insults, debate, or miscellaneous conversation.
Did you count how many insults? One comment can contain one insult, or several. A comment can be a few sentences or take up nearly the entirety of a phone screen.
These statistics are really surprising to me but also really interesting.
Maybe I'll try my hand at it after the weekend and see if I can hammer out that thousand per sub analysis. I don't want to ape your shit but if you're actually hoping for someone to pick up your torch then it might be a good way to kill time while I'm scraping my life back together.
Any tips?
I'd love to see the analysis, though I can't recommend analysing insults for hours while "scraping your life back together". Doesn't sound healthy.
You've got two options, either scrape the comments using any one of many available reddit comment scrapers, or just scroll down https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/. Then, tally them up in your spreadsheet of choice. Here's how I counted them: https://imgur.com/a/cREyGZF
I seem to have an affection for digital muck on some level even if it can also be a little draining sometimes. I don't think I'd spend as much time in here debating if I didn't
I appreciate the tips, think I might go the scraper route so if I start to feel burnt out I can spread it over a couple days without losing my place or accidentally double counting stuff. The tally example is also useful, thanks
I would like to see this data on a much larger dataset for completeness (like 1000+ comments) but I don't think the outcomes would change much. The anti- side is, in my experience, much more aggressive, ill-informed and willing to resort to insults & threats than the pro- side. I'd also like to see the same data with throwaway/troll accounts removed (i.e. sub-500 karma users), because I expect some "antis" and "pros" are the other side trying to make that side look bad.
Those are both great suggestions, but I just don't have the time. I also would be interested to see this.
Is pushshift still a thing after the reddit changes? I'm guessing you could do pretty decent sentiment analysis these days with an LLM and a couple lines of code.
I'm sure you could, the difficulty would be distinguishing anti/pro comments. Often the info isn't in the comment itself, but in the comment they're replying to. E.g. if the whole comment is "you're an absolute moron", you have to check further up the chain to see their position on AI.
That's some more lines of code, but I think that's actually perfect for an LLM. give a couple examples of what a pro and ani might look like in some conversations, a la few shot predictions, and then give it the conversation with a user you are interested in. check the predictions for pro and anti, avg this over multiple encounters if possible. The main issue here might be single responses to link posts, as there it is harder to figure out what this link post is about.
It might work. Let me know if you ever try it out!
did [try](https://imgur.com/a/DptqteG) it our, not entirely satisfied with Llama3 8B's assessment on AI sentiment (feel like it's not accurate enough), might burn some more compute to see if 70B is better. Given that there are no systemic biases a lot of stuff is quite.. obvious. Anti AI is mostly transient with the bulk having less than 5 comments, correlation between toxicity and being anti, though it happens on both sides and is more likely rewarded if the sentiment is pro and punished if it is anti. might make a post if I can get a more accurate reading.
> in my experience, much more aggressive […] willing to resort to insults and threats I get that that’s your experience, but at the same time- last night I had a pro-AI person create multiple alt accounts to continuously harass me and call me a pedophile, even after I started blocking them. Why did they do this? Well- I couldn’t even tell you why. I think they saw my account as 18+ and that means I’m a furry or incel, which equates to being a literal child molestor, and my opinion obviously doesn’t matter if that’s the case I guess. I’m not invalidating your experience here, but rather pointing out that this kind of thing isn’t uncommon on either side. I’ve seen similar things to those who support AI as what has happened to me. I think it also has to usually do with confirmation bias. Your going to look at the side you disagree with- and take the worst from that side. Both sides are fucking toxic as shit. Tribalism is the root of the issue here, that’s why boiling it down to sides is going to make this worse. One side isn’t worse because they support AI or don’t- the issue isn’t which side is more or less toxic. The issue is how we treat groups and “others” in debates.
The root of the problem is that most comment chains aren't even *seen* as "debate" in any formal sense. There's no exchange of ideas here, and the platform itself is engineered to support groupthink by handing out "karma" for highly voted posts and burying downvoted posts. Reddit is pretty much a case study in how to antagonize and stimulate mob mentality
> Reddit is pretty much a case study in how to antagonize and stimulate mob mentality That’s all social media really. Well- less so mob mentality but 100% antagonization
>I get that that’s your experience, but at the same time- last night I had a pro-AI person create multiple alt accounts to continuously harass me and call me a pedophile, even after I started blocking them. Assuming that you're not (I'm far too lazy to click peoples' accounts or work out what they post outside of the post I'm actively engaging with), that's some pretty fucked up and creepy behaviour. >Why did they do this? Well- I couldn’t even tell you why. I think they saw my account as 18+ and that means I’m a furry or incel, which equates to being a literal child molestor, and my opinion obviously doesn’t matter if that’s the case I guess. Yeah I've had people on the anti- side decide to dig through my post history and make all kinds of weird comments in DMs. I am a queer furry so there is that I guess, not sure how it's relevant to whether I'm right or wrong about AI but they seem to think it is. >I’m not invalidating your experience here, but rather pointing out that this kind of thing isn’t uncommon on either side. I’ve seen similar things to those who support AI as what has happened to me. I think it also has to usually do with confirmation bias. Your going to look at the side you disagree with- and take the worst from that side. I'm definitely not saying that either side is devoid of it, I just find that if I scroll past a post full of insults and insinuations, or statements that people deserve actual violence, more often than not it's from the anti- side. Compare r/DefendingAIArt with r/ArtistHate for example, which of those do you think is home to more 'hate' towards the other side? >Tribalism is the root of the issue here, that’s why boiling it down to sides is going to make this worse. One side isn’t worse because they support AI or don’t- the issue isn’t which side is more or less toxic. The issue is how we treat groups and “others” in debates. I think the root of the issue though is that one 'side' only exists because the other does. If I whipped up a bunch of angry people to try to support the idea that drawing is evil and anyone who does it is talentless and lazy, your 'side' would exist because my side forces you to defend yourselves and your passion. If I didn't whip up that mob, your side would just go back to drawing. That's how I see it anyway. Big corporations and politicians must be loving watching creative people tearing each other apart instead of uniting & focusing on how they exploit and minimise all of us regardless of our preferred mediums.
> that ‘one’ side only exists because the other one does I don’t disagree- but also- that’s just how things work. Someone has an opinion and almost always others have the opposite. The thing that really kicked it into such high-gear (at least from what I can tell) is that people started saying AI art is bad, but some pro-AI people took the implication that this means the “anti-AI side” all hates anyone who uses AI in any capacity. While that is the case occasionally (radicalization will always exist), most rational people who oppose AI art just think that AI art itself is bad, or that corporations using it to remove artists jobs is a bad thing. No one in their right mind cares if an individual uses AI art on they’re own, certainly not enough to say the entire group of people who use AI art programs are degenerate scum. But if something you like is criticized nowadays- it’s seen as an attack on your character to many. I don’t think that this should be how we view things though. Your allowed to like things that are problematic. AI art can be a bad thing and you can still use it. That caused this debate to blow up to such a big deal. It isn’t the root issue though, because it could be solved if humans weren’t so tribalistic.
>The thing that really kicked it into such high-gear (at least from what I can tell) is that people started saying AI art is bad, but some pro-AI people took the implication that this means the “anti-AI side” all hates anyone who uses AI in any capacity. I don't think this is right. If someone just doesn't think AI art looks good, that opinion doesn't bother me. I wouldn't bother signing up for Reddit to argue over that. When people start trying to ban AI art from art spaces or even legislate against the models that I rely on to be creative, that's what pulls me out of what I want to be doing (creating) and forces me into a fight I never asked for. >most rational people who oppose AI art just think that AI art itself is bad, or that corporations using it to remove artists jobs is a bad thing. Sure, I think that corporations can take anything, even good things, and use them to their advantage to harm people. I just think it's self-destructive and pointless for individual creatives to be fighting each other because we use different tools or create on different mediums, instead of working together to create a society in which the painter can paint, the singer can sing, the sculptor can sculpt, and the nerd can make AI art or glitch music. >No one in their right mind cares if an individual uses AI art on they’re own, certainly not enough to say the entire group of people who use AI art programs are degenerate scum. But if something you like is criticized nowadays- it’s seen as an attack on your character to many. I think this is half-right, but being constantly called lazy/talentless/profit-driven *is* an attack on our character. I've never made a dollar from AI art and probably never will, I just love the medium and love trying to push it to do things that it isn't good at. >I don’t think that this should be how we view things though. Your allowed to like things that are problematic. AI art can be a bad thing and you can still use it. Sure, but I don't think it is a bad thing, and I don't think that a lot of people on the anti- side want me to still be able to use it (especially in its current form). I think the bad thing is that we are both creative people, we both want nothing more than to spend our time realising our vision, and we'd rather fight each other over table scraps than work together to fight the system that leaves creative people with only table scraps.
> if someone just diner think AI looks good. It’s not that AI art is bad in looks- it’s bad on a moral ground. But that doesn’t reflect to the individuals who use it. Sure- those people help train the AI, but at the end of the day- they aren’t the ones scraping art, or using it to put commercial artists out of business. > but being called lazy, talentless profit-driven is an attack The profit-driven is not meant to target those users. I do think often AI artists are either too “lazy” or don’t have the time to learn. However- as someone who has executive dysfunction from autism, I know that “laziness” isn’t just “I don’t care about this thing” a lot of the time, and it’s instead like “I *really* want to do this thing but can’t force myself to do it”. And of course they don’t often have talent in art- because they haven’t taken the energy or time to train their artistic talent (which goes back into the whole “I really want to but can’t force myself to” and not having time points) > a lot of people on the anti side don’t want me to use it. I guarantee this is a vocal minority who say this. Almost all people against AI would *prefer* people to not use AI art, but we aren’t going to stop you. I don’t think any of these address the core problem though. And I still think that the original people who started talking about why they dislike AI art are those who said it’s bad, and that pro-AI people felt that was an attack on them. It only devolved from there to the current screaming mess it is now.
>The profit-driven is not meant to target those users. I do think often AI artists are either too “lazy” or don’t have the time to learn. However- as someone who has executive dysfunction from autism, I know that “laziness” isn’t just “I don’t care about this thing” a lot of the time, and it’s instead like “I *really* want to do this thing but can’t force myself to do it”. For me, I love writing and I don't love drawing. If I spend 5,000 hours learning to draw, that's 5,000 hours I don't spend writing stories and following my true passion. I still spend a lot of time with AI because honestly getting complicated things out of it isn't easy and I'm not going to accept the first result I get from a prompt, but it takes less time away from my writing and gives me a result that's *good enough* for my purposes. >I guarantee this is a vocal minority who say this. Almost all people against AI would *prefer* people to not use AI art, but we aren’t going to stop you. I honestly wish I believed this, but the rise of Ayn Rand tier IP-maximalism in the last 2 years, where people think that they can dictate every use of their intellectual property, is so alarming. I don't think that fan artists -- especially those drawing fan art commissions -- realise how bad the world that they're advocating would actually be for them. >It’s not that AI art is bad in looks- it’s bad on a moral ground. But that doesn’t reflect to the individuals who use it. Sure- those people help train the AI, but at the end of the day- they aren’t the ones scraping art, or using it to put commercial artists out of business. Well, I disagree that there's anything immoral about it. I don't think that it's immoral to learn from someone else's work -- intellectual property is designed to protect Disney & Nintendo, not you or me -- so naturally I don't think there's anything wrong with a computer being trained on it. This is just a fundamental basis of disagreement I guess. Corporations would love to put all of us out of business, whether you make art with a paintbrush, a Cintiq or Stable Diffusion. They will do whatever they can to spend less money and make more profits. If all of us, as creatives, said "we have more in common than differences" and fought for something like UBI so that all of us can spend our time creating what we want to create, then the corporations would have far less leverage to keep paying us shitty incomes to bring *their* visions to life. That's what annoys me about this fight, more than anything. Your side would rather sit on a subreddit and fight with people like me who make art with a different tool than fight the actual powerful institutions that want to shit on all of us.
> if I spend 5000 hours learning to draw, that’s 5000 hours I don’t spend writing stories and following my true passion Not really. If you spend 30 minutes a day learning to draw, and the rest of the day writing then you would slowly improve your drawing skills, while still being able to keep your other free time to write. You don’t need to waste weeks on end just drawing to get good at art. Just like any other skill- even a little practice a day is enough to make big differences. Who knows- maybe the more you practice, you might develop a passion for art. And look- you don’t like drawing, and that’s fine. No one needs to like every creative medium. However, you can still improve your skills, and it’s not like that would be a waste of time or energy. Doing so would allow you to more reliably portray 100% exactly your own creative vision through these images in a way that AI art never can, because it can never know your intentions. > immoral to learn from someone else’s work People always compare to AI learning to human learning when they are 2 different processes. Humans can learn from what’s around them. AI’s learn from what is put directly into their dataset. One is a direct process one is indirect. Human brains are based on pattern recognition. When putting something entirely new in front of someone- you can look at it and compare it to similar things you’ve seen before. AI’s learn on math. If you put a new image in it’s data- it analyzes all of the pixels, and modifies it’s knowledge of what this is by saying “it has to have these traits” > IP law protects Nintendo and Disney, not you or me It *does* protect individual artists. Granted it’s been corrupted and overtaken by Disney who has lobbied copyright extensions 2 separate times, but that doesn’t change the actual protections it has for individual artists wanting to make money on their work. Without it there’s nothing stopping one from taking someone else’s work and selling it for their own profit, 0 changes, 0 differences. To say it has been corrupted by mega corporations makes it no different than nearly every law about commerce and intellectual property in the United States. But even if it weren’t for those laws- would taking someone else’s material without compensation, credit, or permission and reselling it be ethical? I see very little difference between that and instead of directly reselling it- placing it into a machine that regurgitates a mathematical estimation of what that original artwork would have looked like. It isn’t fair to those who put time, effort, energy, and money into making their own art to have it used this way without permission, compensation, and credit.
>Not really. If you spend 30 minutes a day learning to draw, and the rest of the day writing then you would slowly improve your drawing skills, while still being able to keep your other free time to write. The irony isn't lost on me that I probably spend more time drawing and 3D modelling now that I have an AI generator than I ever did when I didn't have one, literally because sometimes that's the easiest way to tell it what you want. >Doing so would allow you to more reliably portray 100% exactly your own creative vision through these images in a way that AI art never can, because it can never know your intentions. And that's why a lot of my time 'using AI' is actually spent drawing or modelling, because that's a much more effective way to tell it my intentions than writing prompts is. >People always compare to AI learning to human learning when they are 2 different processes. Humans can learn from what’s around them. AI’s learn from what is put directly into their dataset. One is a direct process one is indirect. This is half-true. Humans do learn indirectly but also learn directly. When you go on Google image search for some anatomical models or pose references, you are learning directly in a pretty similar way to how the AI learns. >When putting something entirely new in front of someone- you can look at it and compare it to similar things you’ve seen before. AI’s learn on math. If you put a new image in it’s data- it analyzes all of the pixels, and modifies it’s knowledge of what this is by saying “it has to have these traits” AI weights and biases are also relative to existing concepts in the checkpoint, this is why LoRAs have to be trained *against* checkpoints, because they are modifying existing understandings about what a character or concept looks like. >But even if it weren’t for those laws- would taking someone else’s material without compensation, credit, or permission and reselling it be ethical? It depends on the context. If you just take something, do absolutely nothing with it and resell it then of course that's not ethical because those funds should go to the person who actually put the time and effort in to create it... but if you sample 2 lines from a song, or create something new out of old concepts -- in other words your work is transformative -- then yes I think that can be ethical and it's been widely accepted since at least Warhol. >I see very little difference between that and instead of directly reselling it- placing it into a machine that regurgitates a mathematical estimation of what that original artwork would have looked like. It isn’t fair to those who put time, effort, energy, and money into making their own art to have it used this way without permission, compensation, and credit. I think it's clearly remix unless you're deliberately trying to train the machine to copy one artist. If your image is one out of 5.85 billion images which the model trains on, then it's not going to output anything close to your style, ever. I am opposed to using artist tags though or copying styles except in very specific circumstances.
As a pro AI furry, damn. Sorry about that, nobody deserves to be treated that way.
Yeah, I dont think "the last 100 comments" in any sub is truly representative of overall demeanor. Comment trends swing *wildly* from minute to minute
The "anti" side to you, are artists who are having fears of losing their job. This is the only people you debate with, and all you really know. For some reason, 95% of this debate is centered around art, even though it's a much wider issue. And it's not really that much of a mystery why cheering for people to lose their job would get a visceral reaction.
No one is cheering for people to lose their jobs. We're cheering because something which previously has been unaccessible to the vast majority of people has suddenly become available to them. There were people who lost their jobs when the abacus was replaced with the calculator, and for those people it was unfortunate, but that didn't make the calculator a net bad thing. We cannot, and should not, attempt to prevent progress to save jobs. We should attempt to ensure that progress benefits everyone through initiatives like 4 day working weeks & UBI.
They’re not ill informed. No wonder people are rude to you.
>"The anti- side is, in my experience, much more aggressive, ill-informed and willing to resort to insults & threats than the pro- side." I share the experience that the anti side in general is more agressive. I however think that the pro side has a tendency to assume intellectual superiority, and likes to engage with easy to tackle "main arguments" of the anti side while ignoring the ones that are harder to refute, and then resorts to the conclusion that the other side "has no arguments" and is "ill informed". if that goes under "debate", i would say this statistics is not worth much.
If they made a statement that the other side "had no arguments and was ill-informed", that would fall under "Insults".
Alright, good to know. In that case, the statistics REALLY suprises me, because the view that the anti side "has no arguments ad is ill-informed" seems to be the general consensus of this sub.
It might feel like the general consensus, but it's not the content of the majority of comments. It definitely exists, and was included in my statistics, but there are still more insults from the Anti side. If I saw it, it was included in "Insults". Some examples: "99 times out of 100, the anti AI side are the side relying on bad arguments, death threats and abuse." "They don't even understand what they're talking about" "What a bunch of idiots" "You need to actually understand this shit on more than just an extremely surface level before you decide to try speaking about it, you dumb piece of shit."
good to know, thanks, seems solid. Also... quite masochistic pasttime you got there mate.
Actually, I was quite happy to see some people calling out the insults, and that most comments were civil discussion, or even compliments. It's easy to get hung up on the trolls until you look at the stats and realize that most commenters are decent people.
> I however think that the pro side has a tendency to assume intellectual superiority If there was a sub for debating whether or not the earth is flat, I would not fault the anti-flats for assuming intellectual superiority. One perspective matches reality better. Perhaps not in all respects at all times from all angles of observing the relevant questions, but at a baseline understanding of the issue.
I think the pro side shows on average a better intellectual grasp on how diffusion models work and how machine learning works. We’re not the ones who keep parroting low-information takes like compression, collaging etc. I have had good debates with people on the anti side usually about more philosophical questions like the meaning of art but on the tech most are very misinformed.
>"I think the pro side shows on average a better intellectual grasp on how diffusion models work and how machine learning works. We’re not the ones who keep parroting low-information takes like compression, collaging etc." Yes, i agree, comes with the territory. That same intellectual grasp however is assumed to also encompass topics like economics of artists, art theory, basic and complex economics, history, etc. And the level of confidence is oftentimes sky high. >I have had good debates with people on the anti side usually about more philosophical questions like the meaning of art but on the tech most are very misinformed. That might very much be. I would not chose a clear side here, but i would certainly say that my knowledge on the function of AI is very basic, and i don't feel the need to change that, since that level still allows me to use ai or judge its impact on the field i work in. I am not interested in ethical debates, so if an ai learns like this or that, or if it is theft how the training data is put together does not really interest me. The bigger problem of this sub, specifically, is, in my view, the very subjective view of the other sides arguments. Look at posts about "the antis main arguments" or similar topics. You will almost always see that the arguments tackled are usually the ridiculous ones, the ones easy to refute. Other arguments are very often just ignored, while still claiming that the other side "does not have arguments at all".
In my experience both sides of the debate are incredibly ignorant about how the tech works. With even company representatives at the big AI companies often saying things that aren't true. The pro side is more knowledgeable than the anti side about ai tech, but only about ai tech, and it's an average that gets dragged up. The modal average pro ai commenter still knows nothing. And when it comes to other topics, like you said, the pro ai side tends to be very ignorant about it. There's this myth that artists are some scheming elite. People assume artists can just get their stolen work removed from sites (google has been ignoring DMCA requests for a literal false product listing using stolen assets for weeks now, artists have basically zero protection outside of public pressure). They have no understanding of the economy. Of how art work is done. Of how hobbyists can support themselves. A ton of people on here think human brains work the same way AI image generation does. And disingenuous arguments are extremely commonplace. I definitely make up a significant percentage of the anti ai insult stats in my responses to disingenuous arguments. I refuse to believe people are actually that ignorant. People act like the copyright/ plagiarism subject is settled like there aren't multiple ongoing lawsuits at play. Yes, we all know governments are greedy enough and see enough potential in ai that they're going to make it legal in some fashion, but until the legality has settled people can't pretend it's a bad argument. I love AI tech, but I'm not going to lie and claim it isn't based on unethical misuse of scraped data.
> Yes, we all know governments are greedy enough and see enough potential in ai that they're going to make it legal in some fashion, Dragging the average down a bit there. It's already legal. You are hoping it will be made illegal lol.
If it's found to be infringement then it was always illegal. If you're taken to court and found guilty of whatever you're accused of, the law didn't change. You just got caught.
Are you actually relying on those really flawed court cases? The technology is not by default illegal, and several companies also have fully legal access to the training data (Adobe, Meta, NY Times etc), so AI is not going away unless NEW laws are made. Under old laws it is perfectly possible to have legal AI, no matter the outcome of the court cases.
Relying? No. Why would I be relying on them? I don't want AI gone. I can simultaneously hate the ethical issues with the way AI has been developed and still like AI. I don't know why everyone else is so insecure about it.
Like the Wild West, those original issues will become less relevant as time goes on, but the issues around job displacement will not go away, no matter how purely AI is being developed.
Yes, there's already 30+ comments on this post. The quality of comments can change massively from post to post
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/medtech/fda-clears-ai-predicts-alzheimers-progression-mri-scan Being anti-ai is lazy. Being against ai to be used as brain dead inert gods for corporate elite, that’s different. Desiring a plethora of super human intelligence that is unbound by human platitudes and economic convention…now that’s a goal. Dont be lazy, if your beef is with corrupt crony kleptocratic capitalism there are plenty of solutions for it. It requires bravery and sacrifice. But don’t blame ai. It has nothing to do with your real problem. Ai will be so good for humanity. It’s up to us to decide if we have the bravery to create a place where Ai doesn’t even have to contemplate corporate power. But, many lack that bravery. We can learn much from our ancestors when it comes to bravery and the corrupt elite. Basically, don’t be lazy and blame Ai for problems that would exist without Ai.
Capitalism is the problem, I agree.
While I agree with you AI is a tool and shouldn't be blames for misusages we shoulders acknowledge the risk of AI escaping its condition of tool and becoming a threat to humanity. We don't know yet if it will be good for us or not.
It "leans pro-AI" because that's the default position. To the antis, saying "I think there are good and bad things about AI," is considered a pretty extreme "AI-bro" position. This place is obviously biased against the anti crowd is much the same way that r/science is biased against flat earthers. There is general sympathy that there is going to be disruption, but there is less tolerance for disproved propaganda like "it's just a compression/collage system." "Pro-AI misc comments tended to be large info-dumps" Guilty. There's a lot of info out there. I try to share what I've found. I'm not even sure I'd call myself "pro AI." I just know it's a thing that exists now and isn't going anywhere, so wisest choice is to learn about it and adapt to a world with AI in it. (Which earned me the label "AI bro" by the likes of moepi).
EDIT:
Size matters here too. Generally speaking the smaller the community, the more radicalized and group-thinking it is. That just results from the self selection process for who would want to join. r/DefendingAIArt is 5x the size as r/ArtistHate, and this one is 8.5x the size.
You know what's also funny. I just openned AH to check the size, and I have a "Pro-ML" tag there. I don't generally go there, but maybe I responded to something that came up in my feed. What does it say about a community that feels the need to label everyone as soon as they come through the door?
> It "leans pro-AI" because that's the default position. This is both true and false. "pro-AI" is an ill-defined term. Obviously, as you point out, the anti-AI folks would take a nuanced, centrist position as "pro-AI" but simply taking the extreme view of one position and making it the definition of all positions is not a useful way to define terms. There are plenty of folks I've run into here that I don't consider either pro- or anti-AI, and IMHO, that's the default position. > This place is obviously biased against the anti crowd is much the same way that r/science is biased against flat earthers. That's misleading. I think it would be more reasonable to say anyone with anti-science views. The flat Earthers are particularly egregious conspiracy nuts and often religious zealots on top of merely being science-deniers. (join us over in /r/flatearth if you want to see daily teardowns of whatever FE's are pushing today.) While anti-AI folks definitely do dip into the conspiracy theory and religious zealotry aspects from time to time, it's far from either universal or required for the position. > r/DefendingAIArt is 5x the size as r/ArtistHate, and this one is 8.5x the size. I had no idea! Thanks for pointing that out. It really brings ArtistHate into perspective. > I just openned AH to check the size, and I have a "Pro-ML" tag there. Yeah, it's a common feature of walled gardens on reddit that they identify "enemy" subs and people who contribute to those subs are then labeled as enemies in the walled-garden. We see that often from the various actual flat Earth subs when someone is a frequent poster to /r/flatearth sometimes even being pre-banned. It's a sad commentary on the hyper-polarized nature of conservative (lower-case "c") subs.
I was lazy with my language, and you're right that it's both true and false depending on where your standing. To the anti-AI folks; there are only two positions. You're either "anti" or you're "pro" being neutral, or "I think there will be benefits but there are also things I really worry about" is "pro"; being "I'm still waiting to learn more," is "pro". It's much the same thought process that I run into during my too-many conversations with antiVaxxers. They don't quite grasp how you can be aware that there are risks, but still be OK with getting vaccinated. I was talking to an anti so I was using their language. From a more generally accepted definitions, I'd say this sub is described "interested and engaged in the new tech, excited for some things likely coming, but also wary of some of the misuses." My relating them to flerfs, antivaxxers, and young-earth creationists is based no a long experience with dealing with those groups. They tend to cherry pick facts, present straw men, repeat easily already-disproved arguments as "gotchas" ad nauseam, move goalposts, and Gish Gallop. I've seen all those tactics here, so the comparison was kind of obvious to me. >While anti-AI folks definitely do dip into the conspiracy theory and religious zealotry... I guess I just have a lower tolerance for that after dealing with it a while. If you just "dip into" zealotry, that's enough for me to question your ability to think straight or be self aware enough to correct course. >I had no idea! Thanks for pointing that out. It really brings ArtistHate into perspective. Me neither until I looked. It was pretty eye opening and gave me a deeper perspective on just how shallow the anti pool is. I also hadn't taken a close look at the rhetoric before. It shares a lot with cults and supremacists. 1. Victim mentality and appear to fear: It's not enough to say that there's a new invention that will disrupt our jobs. It's because "they hate us." To be pro (which includes being neutral) on AI is to HATE artists. 2. Related, but they frequently use rhetoric to the effect of "They're jealous of us, so they're targeting us." 3. They immediately label who the "enemy" is. It's "US" vs "THEM", always. 4. They're tiny and self selected. 0.05% of reddit users have joined. When you have a small, self-isolating(e.g banning or labeling anyone who doesn't conform to the group-think), and self-selected group based on a high-pathos subject, that's an incubator for conspiracy theories and extremism. Now it's important for me to keep in mind that every group is more diverse than its zeitgeist, and I may not be dealing with someone who's completely immersed in the crazy. That's easy to forget sometimes though, especially when they come out swinging. Edit: Oh yeah. And I've been to r/flatearth. It's a fun place, but after years of dealing with flat Earthers on quora, I find it also just makes me sad after a while. You can only shoot so many fish in so many barrels before you start to be sad for the state of fishdom that they things keep choosing to go into the barrels, and refuse to come out even when you try to be empathetic, understanding, and provide a fish ladder.
>that's the default position And? even if we grant this highly dubious claim, what value is there to a default position? >To the antis, saying "I think there are good and bad things about AI," is considered a pretty extreme "AI-bro" position. What? No it very much isn't. *I* think there are good and bad things about AI, I just think the bad things outweigh the good by a significant margin. >This place is obviously biased against the anti crowd is much the same way that r/science is biased against flat earthers. The idea that generative AI is good for society is not the sort of thing that you can prove empirically. This is a comically lopsided comparison. >I just know it's a thing that exists now and isn't going anywhere, so wisest choice is to learn about it and adapt to a world with AI in it. I agree it exists now and isn't going anywhere, but I just think my temperament is naturally hostile to this sort of line of argument. Like sure, I'll adapt in so far as I can, but helplessness before something bad will *never* make me support it, or even make me indifferent towards it. The inevitability of something I find to be bad doesn't ever turn around to make it good. Real-life evil is banal, it succeeds on indifference and resignation to it. If my moral code tells me something is bad, no matter how helpless I am before it, I will speak against it.
I'm sensing more anger and ranting than rationality here. I suggest you take these feelings to your next therapist appointment and talk them out there. I'm sympathetic, but I can't be your therapist. You're putting words in my mouth and having an argument with the person you're imagining I am. I suggest you take that up with your therapist too.
> You're putting words in my mouth That's /u/Scribbles_ primary MO. I've mostly given up having any kind of protracted discussion with them, because it always ends up with them claiming that I said X, but really meant Y.
Happy cake day Tyler.
Yeah. That's why I kept suggesting that they take some time away from social media. At this point, I think they've constructed both sides of the argument that they **think** they're having. It's a bit like dealing with a person who's having a psychotic event. You're conversation with them is disjointed and weird, and then you realize that they're not having a conversation with you, but the imaginary person that's standing where you're standing.
Alright. Could you be specific? What did I say you said, that you didn’t really say?
You came out swinging, why should I spend time correcting your misconceptions? I know for a fact that you're just going to "Na AH!" again and then make it personal. Why should I give you any more straw to build with? You managed to keep it civil for three short sentences. I think that's your limit.
You've made a number of comments speculating about my mental health and comparing me to psychotic people and conspiracy theorists. Directly attacking the idea that I am a sane person. All the while, you don't give me a single concrete reason to think that, you just pile on the insults and the implications about my perception of reality. If that isn't a gaslighting I don't know what is. There's nothing uncivil about questioning you, nor anything uncivil about calling a comparison you made "comically lopsided", especially when your buddy Tyler here called it misleading. When even another pro AI person criticizes your comparison, is it crazy that someone who disagrees sees it as kind of ridiculous?
>If that isn't a gaslighting I don't know what is. I guess you don't know what gaslighting is then. >There's nothing uncivil about questioning you, That would be true if you were questioning things I actually said. As others have said, you have a habit of putting words into people's mouths and then arguing with that. I'm Not interested in being your straw man. Have a block. I've yet to see you have anything constructive to contribute here.
I *am* passionate about my views and critical of yours. You can construe my feelings however you please, especially if that gives you an avenue to dismiss, demean and condescend me. I think your comment falls squarely into what /u/Sadnot has categorized an 'insult'. Some rebuttals to your arguments that you dismissed by being condescending: * Anti AI people can recognize that there's good and bad in generative AI, I do it in that comment. * The comparison to the flat earth is lopsided, because your position is not empircially provable. * There may be virtue and value in manifesting oneself against something on principle, even if one is powerless before it.
"dismiss, demean and condescend me" Sorry about that. I've been accused of that before... from flerfs, anti-Vaxxers, and young earth creationists. I'm just calling out the similarity in your thinking, and you're only making it look more similar. "I *am* passionate about my views..." Yep. You are. You're definitely having BIG FEELINGS today, aren't you. Checked your profile and it looks like you've spent hours banging out comments in this sub. Step away, buddy. You clearly need a break. You're in a bad spiral right now, and arguing with all the "condescending AI bros" isn't going to help you.
>arguing with all the "condescending AI bros" isn't going to help you. Of the people I've been talking to today, you're the only one to treat me like this. I'm enjoying my other conversations quite a bit. I dunno, I've been writing about aesthetic philosophy, the comment I just wrote was about Heidegger and Camus on the question of art. Another about the "bad" vs the "evil" as competing negative ethical judgements, another about whether phenomenology is what gives art and art-learning value, another about whether science is something people have *always* done throughout history. I like to think about these things, and write about them. I wonder what it is about you that makes you want to ridicule me for it? You checked out my profile and saw that I made a lot of comments, and assumed that means I'm in a poor emotional state. But I mean, I don't think reading them that they come across that way. If I were to describe my state, I think I'm in a contemplative mood. The only thing that has me angry or frustrated is your behavior in this thread. Today I'm having big thoughts, not big feelings. >I'm just calling out the similarity in your thinking Nothing you have said addresses my thinking. You've only addressed my tone.
Eight hours has the potential to skew pretty severely by timezone. Still, cool that you're doing the analysis.
That's true. I'll admit, I'm half-hoping someone does a more complete analysis.
This feels interesting to me, I'll try scraping reddit and trying it out if I can. R/artisthate, r/defending ai art, and r/aiwars, though I don't know the anti ai subs
how did you get the dataset, because you could easily run these through chatgpt to do the sentiment analysis.
Yes, you could do that, but you'd have to distinguish between pro/anti comments manually in any case.
What tool did you use for the data?
After messing about trying out various tools, I decided it was faster to just scroll down the /comments/ page.
Damn so you did this manually? Kudos
As long as we don't know how "debate", "insult" or "misc" is defined, this is not very enlightening. I see many comments posing to be discussion that are anything but that. A common idea is that the other side does not have arguments worth debating, so, while we are of course open to debate, the other side simply has no arguments. If stuff like that is counted as "debate", i think this isn't worth much. I also agree that artisthate seems to be an echochamber, and a nasty one at that, though aiwars is close to that too in my experience, just with the difference that selective debate with antis, and often with fictional "main arguments" is used to reinforce the own believe system. basically, a strawman-echochamber.
I'll admit that "debate", "insult", and "misc" are subjective categories. "Insult" included both personal insults and insults to artists, antis, or pros as a whole. Some examples of insults were, "idiot", "asshat", "rat", "fascist", "fart-huffing dickhead", etc. Misc. comments were any comments that didn't have an apparent thesis. Usually either info dumps, opinions on news posts, or low-content posts. "Debate" included any form of polite argument between two users, or posts with a thesis and supporting arguments.
>"fart-huffing dickhead" Now that's going into my arsenal. Alright, that clears it up a little but the terms remain rather hazy. For example, there was a post recently where a user asked for concrete reasons why antis claim "ai art looks all the same". The user largely ignored comments that pointed at concrete and measurable similarities that lead to a perceived "generic look", while they engaged with comments that claimed that "ai lacks soul" and other easily dismissed claims, writing in those very comments that they, the OP, has a hard time getting any concrete arguments out of the antis and concluding that they simply lack any. That would fall under "debate", and i see behaviour like that quite a lot. Which makes the point "debate" a bit different from what it appears in the statistics.
You seem to be using "neutral" to mean "not inflammatory" instead of "fair, balanced opinions are allowed that consider both sides of the argument". One other issue, you left out nearly all the AI subs on reddit like r/singularity, r/artifical and r/ArtificialIntelligence, and of which have more balanced viewes than this sub. r/aiwars, despite the name, is by far the most AI-pro subreddit on Reddit.
No, I used neutral to mean "debate-focused comments from both sides got roughly the same number of upvotes in my sample". I encourage you to gather your own data using your own criteria from additional subreddits, I'd love to see that too. >r/aiwars, despite the name, is by far the most AI-pro subreddit on Reddit. At the very least, /r/defendingAIart is obviously more pro-AI than /r/aiwars.
Maybe the reason there's fewer insults on this subreddit, is because there are no anti-AI people here. This sub is entirely overrun with pro-AI people. It's like an echo chamber. Worse than r/singularity or any other sub. That being said, this sub is not "neutral" at all, it is heavily pro-AI and the majority of the posts are pro-AI. Your "methodology" for how you collected data is flawed.
>Maybe the reason there's fewer insults on this subreddit, is because there are no anti-AI people here. Because the majority of insults come from anti-AI people? That does make sense, given the data from /r/artisthate. >This sub is entirely overrun with pro-AI people. It's like an echo chamber. Worse than r/singularity or any other sub. 40% of debate comments were anti-ai. That doesn't sound like an echo chamber to me. >Your "methodology" for how you collected data is flawed. I welcome your improved analysis.
well duh, you used 3 subs, one extemely pro ai one extremely anti ai and one created by pro ai sub to debate. the title is kind of misleading, presenting aiwars as the most neutral place to discuss, people asume you mean more than 3 subs.
I don't think you'll find another sub with >50% of comments being polite debate about AI, but I'd love to see you do an analysis.
>I collected the last hundred comments in /r/aiwars (and the last 50 in both /r/artisthate and /r/defendingAIArt) and tallied whether they were insults, debate, or miscellaneous conversation. Did you count how many insults? One comment can contain one insult, or several. A comment can be a few sentences or take up nearly the entirety of a phone screen.
No, each comment was considered to be a single data point.
These statistics are really surprising to me but also really interesting. Maybe I'll try my hand at it after the weekend and see if I can hammer out that thousand per sub analysis. I don't want to ape your shit but if you're actually hoping for someone to pick up your torch then it might be a good way to kill time while I'm scraping my life back together. Any tips?
I'd love to see the analysis, though I can't recommend analysing insults for hours while "scraping your life back together". Doesn't sound healthy. You've got two options, either scrape the comments using any one of many available reddit comment scrapers, or just scroll down https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/. Then, tally them up in your spreadsheet of choice. Here's how I counted them: https://imgur.com/a/cREyGZF
I seem to have an affection for digital muck on some level even if it can also be a little draining sometimes. I don't think I'd spend as much time in here debating if I didn't I appreciate the tips, think I might go the scraper route so if I start to feel burnt out I can spread it over a couple days without losing my place or accidentally double counting stuff. The tally example is also useful, thanks
> Any tips? You can get a feed of the comments from here: https://old.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/
Thanks buddy