Yeah... Ai tools really seem to have a scary addictive nature to them. Between ppl that rp with chatgpt and fall in love, or peopke that begin to implicitly believe what it tells them.

Tbh we really need more training and education on how to approach it, and how to protect ourselves from some of its pitfalls.

Its not going to go away, even if the bubble bursts. So we might as well learn to navigate the waters and learn to ride waves.

That said, i love this site, for its total ban of ai generated content. It's kept this a much more human space, and much more thoughtful than the dead spaces of soulless slop.

agree whole heartedly. i generally do try to not use it too much, but there's days when i do fall into at least a couple of hours of prompting it.
It's our world's equivalent of a magic mirror and i think the cautionary tales in fantasy/mythology of such kind of things are pretty accurate.
Like anything else humans abuse, ya gotta still have your own self-guided life priorities and path to follow. In vacancy of purpose, many things offer to live in your mind.

And totally yeah, i really appreciate them taking the no AI approeach to this, it makes it feel like a beacon of hope for art in general to me. Despite still generating images with AI and storing them myself, i would not want the people running this site to be paying to maintain the site running just for it to be hosting soulless crap

Back in the day where modern AI image generation technology was in its infancy, I was addicted to generating images for entirely made up words. The images were absolutely terrible, and not at all realistic, but it was interesting to see when the model decided the gibberish was a person or a pastry. DALL E mini tended toward pastry, Stable Diffusion went toward person.

My programming teacher even gave us a project that basically boiled down to "Mess around with this free AI video generation software," because AI tech had developed so fast that it had derailed us learning Linux.

A few years later and I'm kinda soured on the whole thing. The idea of developing a product with the goal of replacing creativity, and/or companionship with a cheaper alternative is one that kinda makes my stomach churn. It is, without a doubt, very good at generating large amounts of content, it cannot recreate the soul that goes into it, whether that be text, images, or video. My only worry is that a majority of people won't be able to tell, or won't care what they consume is made by a machine.

This has been tired post-work rants. I get wordy when I'm tired.

honestly, like all things that eventually become comodified, i think the quality version of it will always have its place. Slop has always been around, it just happens to be supercharged with AI now. If you go around place where slop is generally rare, it will be harder to run into it.
I'm not saying there is NO possibiliy to gain some worhtwhile experience from interacting with AI, but it all just feels tainted if it is involved in anyway.

The blatant theft involved in creating is just detestable, no two ways about it.
You could argue similar things about reality shows (and i personally do) about how there is no much to be gained from it really. All fluff and no substance.
If one can tell a compelling story with AI, then so be it. But it will never ever be as compelling as it would be with proper human input.

Ai has no senes of direction, design or purpose of things, it just meshes existing concepts and designs by their likely hood to mesh together in some sensible way. Sometimes making no real sense (to us) anyway.

When you see a character made / designed by AI, even if the person was super specific with what they requested, it will hardly ever have a meaninful desing. Same goes for most things it outputs. as you say, it lacks any soul.

The point of looking at art and interpreting it as a viewer is to discern what the creator means by this, why it was made, and from where it comes.
None of which has an answer when it comes to AI created things. You could glean more from looking at a literal rock or wall than you could an AI image.
At least those mundane objects have some grounding in reality. AI output is a nebulous amalgalm of statistics and pixels, with no real mening behind them