the only ethical use of generative AI tools is elaborate shitposting. it won't put anyone out of a job, actually allows some innovation in the form (unlike most other uses of the tools), and actively costs the companies money for little or no benefit on their part, if not an active detriment
generative AI imagery's specific powerful niche is "find the most remote corners of the network and edge cases that slide right between powerful concept clusters" to make something really fucked up that's an artifact not of the network's intent (epic sexy elon chad, standing on mars, ready player one, badass, corvette darkwave), but of its training and origins.
without generative AI we wouldn't have portrait photograph of homer simpson holding his dog or portrait photograph of peter griffin embracing homer simpson. and that's not just because a traditional artist wouldn't paint something like this, it's because I created the images with the intent of highlighting something about the network and tool itself. the pictures aren't about homer simpson, they're about the features the training algorithms extracted from the absolutely massive training dataset and interpreted as "homer simpson," and the effect of structuring a prompt in exactly the right way to cause some kind of horrifying photograph/homer metastability. it's about the way the network rings when you strike it hard enough.
it's built to optimize its generated image to maximally match it to two mutually exclusive ideas and makes something horrifying. and to me that's something truly fascinating. all it takes to cause model collapse is eight carefully selected words.
and that's also one reason generative AI sucks so much in general: the hucksters who are trying to sell it as a solution to anything are trying as hard as they can to get rid of the weirdest, most interesting parts of its output, because it makes them look bad
I also would strongly encourage the use of generative ai in ways that attempt to highlight racial training biases, but that's less fun than photorealistic homer
Thesis: "AI art is only good for shitposts about Homer simpson"
Antithesis: "Using AI art to highlight biases and marginalization is real art, and profoundly human"
Synthesis: ethinically ambigaus Homer
Truly the dialectic is in motion today
