LogFAQs > #968418292

So the premise of AI-generated images being 'superior' to hand-drawn ones is flawed for a lot of reasons. I think the simplest way to say it is that, although AI may be more reliable at creating "Shiba Inu Made Out of Watermelon Slices, Photorealistic" than someone you commission, the truth is that there was about 0 interest for commissioning that in the first place, especially before images like that became used to demonstrate the capabilities of text-to-image software.

AI Art hasn't actually solved or iterated on many problems or challenges yet. It is very impressive to obtain an image from text that was generated by that text, and a lot of people have enjoyed themselves using the novelty. But as it stands, people aren't and won't be turning to text-to-image tools for their problems that would normally involve professional artists. Real artists have less measurable advantages like vision, inspiration, and the ability to adapt and respond to the "conversation" of art in the world and online in order to create visuals that deliberately shock and impress the viewer of today.

I think the main place the argument that AI Art is "beating" or "outpacing", etc, artist-made art is that a lot of the general public have no education with which to judge the value of art except "how close it looks to real life." An absolutely enormous amount of people do not understand art as expression or communication or rebellion or conformity. They only understand it in terms of "real," "stylized", "abstract". And they often conflate "abstract" with "bad", "lazy", "unskilled", and so on. This is a fault of modern education.

Let's also be real that there is not a meaningful percentage of artists who took the massive time and labor to develop the craft because they couldn't find a whimsical photo without doing so. They draw because they enjoy drawing. They paint because they enjoy painting. Artistic expression and doodling are well-known joys.

The snippet presented in the OP is not the full exchange, though the way it's framed here reads like the 'techbro' is being shamed for preferring to use an AI tool to create an image instead of drawing it himself. I don't see a problem with that honestly, especially if he's more interested in computing than fine arts. The only way I can imagine that exchange beginning reasonably is if the anti-AI poster was claiming that text-to-image AI is unethical because there's been evidence the currently available ones were trained on data that was copyrighted or otherwise not given with explicit permission. That's a fair argument to have, but as far as the info just in the OP tweet is concerned, I don't see a basis to deny someone using a text-to-image tool any more than you would deny someone using a digital pencil over a lead one.