In the same way that I would hope you would understand the problem with submitting 10000 drop shipped factory-made bowls or sweaters to a hand made competition or exhibition, I hope even if you appreciate AI art on the merits you can understand the frustration and challenges with trying to create them out of spaces intended for art created without AI.

The link links to 46 images. Not 10000.

Oh I wasn't talking about their work, I was talking about other AI "artists" that are poisoning the well for people like OP. I was trying to find some common ground between people like me, who are sick and tired of AI spam, and OP, who is sick and tired of reactionary responses to any attempts to incorporate AI into the creation of art.

One of the reasons I like computers is that they let me do things I couldn't do before even if others could without computers. I mean, think about the revolution in desktop publishing in the 1980s -- a person could use software to make a nice looking brochure or even a full book without any typesetting knowledge. And people were excited by it. They didn't say "You horrible person! You are trying to destroy the livelihoods of professional typesetters!", which I'd imagine would be the response if desktop publishing was invented now.

> a person could use software to make a nice looking brochure or even a full book without any typesetting knowledge

By using a template? Because based on my experience with inDesign and Affinity Publisher, it's still required to have knowledge about design and typesetting. They reduce the costs to get started and work in the domain, but the knowledge requirement was still there. Same with digital drawing and photo retouching. You're no longer gate-kept by the material costs. But AI is the equivalent of pressing X in a fight game and then saying you can do MMA and ready to go against UFC champions.

It ... really isn't. The one thing that an AI tool does do is create an image that looks like something right out of the gate. That might fool you into thinking it's easy.

However, getting the picture you want, consistently, is a little bit more work. You might need to involve many more tools, including some old ones (blender for setting up, photoshop or gimp for post-processing) , and some weird new ones (like what the heck is a LoRA?)

It's like the one time I wrote an essay using LaTeX. Even when I was half-way done. It looked really well typeset and professional from the get-go, but of course half of the text was missing and still needed to be added.

You're describing art. Most people who make "AI art" are not making art: they're using the computer as their own personal content mill.

Well, "most people" might be inaccurate. By volume, the people causing AI-generated content to come into existence are overwhelmingly just cranking the handle to churn out content, and that volume overwhelms everything else to the extent that it appears to be "most people", but might only be a few hundred. In the time it takes you to produce one artwork, they've got ten thousand 4096×4096 squares.

> Only when the crowd effect of "AI=bad" came along

It only came along after a crowd of "AI artists" who are just spammers came to the platform. I mean every platform.

> I posted a lot of my Disco Diffusion AI work on DeviantArt back in 2022 [...] it was very well received.

> Only when the crowd effect of "AI=bad" came along, the pitchforks came out.

You don't see how you spamming "a lot of" work onto a site reduces the value of that site? What you call the "AI=bad crowd", others were calling the "anti-spam" crowd.

There's 46 images at the link provided . There's some recent ones, and some examples of early AI art there that must have taken quite a bit of work to get right. Surprisingly the style has remained fairly consistent over the two years.

I'm not sure how you would characterize this as spam.