solarpunk memes

I'm from an entire instance that's friendly to generative AI. I'm going to explain it like I always do; I used to sell my art for a living. I'm fair at it. But anyone with any computer knowledge can find and use an AI, now, this very minute, for free, and get results that are better than what I've ever been capable of producing. And why on Earth should I fight that? Why wouldn't I embrace it?

There are millions of people in this world and each and every one of them deserves to have a visual representation of whatever they want. There's some kid on in the internet right now with their weird Sonic OC who deserves to be able to use art of that character as their avatar on Discord, and they shouldn't have to get a job or try their hand at drawing if they don't want to, in order to share that image.

Ultimately, this is what made me leave the field entirely. The kind of people I wanted to help with my art were almost universally people with very limited income, who had a weird little song in their heart and no way of sharing it with the world. And that was my passion, as someone who grew up poor- being able to help someone who had no way of coughing up the money required to keep an artist from starving, to be able to see what they were dreaming in their head. Balancing giving art gifts to people with no means, and taking commissions from entitled assholes who were going to send me 8 revisions because they didn't understand basic color theory no matter how fucking hard I tried to explain it to them, just so I could survive, was a nightmare!

So yes! I support AI art! I will support it til I die! The starvation of artists is a disgusting symptom of the system as a whole, but pretending that the solution is to turn our back on a useful bit of technology is treating the symptom, not the disease. Let SonicFan_2016 or xXxScEnEgUrLxXx or whoever have anything they need to express themselves. Maybe what we should be doing instead of posting pictures or words bitching about how the computers are stealing jobs, is find a way to fund the arts, and those who want to make them, so people like me can go back to making art without having to sell our souls every fifth image to some prick with a fistful of dollars!