Regardless of you being right or wrong. That sentence right there demonstrates your problem with AI Images. "You're just building on the work they did with no right to do so." What about the common fantasy tropes and such that others building upon to use in their own LEAGL commercial works? Nah. Fuck those guys. They had NO RIGHT to build upon the ideas someone else had. It's not like that's how innovation works.
Cry all you want. Images generation is here to stay. And with all the publicly available choices of AI image generators, those "awful" people are free to generate many different images. What scum, how do they sleep at night.
Are you sure it's a good idea to be that provocative in your reply? That's usually only a good idea when you actually have a good argument.
Otherwise, someone might come around and completely deconstruct your argument.
Which is...
What about the common fantasy tropes and such that others building upon to use in their own LEAGL commercial works?
1. The vast majority of common fantasy tropes predates all of modern society. Orcs, elves? Do they come from Tolkien? No, Tolkien took them from nordic and north european mythology. They're not the invention or the design of a single artist to whom the origin can be traced back. They're inherited from our society & history. Thus, they are common good.
2. The vast majority of fantasy tropes are the result of our human experience intermingled with fiction. The brave hero, the evil villian. Those are essential stereotypes derived as a simplification from observation of our human existence. Human existance is not copyright protected.
3. Tropes are not the key of writing a good story. In fact, they often have little to do with the final result. Rather they are unavoidable building blocks when creating a story, as human experiences materializes itself in the writing. The anti-hero trope is not some copyright protected unique invention, but a reaction to decades of the hero, who not only acts as protagonist, but as moral guidance, often in a world with very clearly delinated boundaries. The anti-hero is the product of the realization that such characters are unrealistic, since in reality, personal experience, the human and material condition, all create limitations to "being the hero", meaning that the "hero" is a simplistic and unrealistic model that can only exist in the imagination since the writer carefully strips away all challenges to the hero's moral authority. Thus the anti-hero was born. The Geralt of Rivia. The person that does not live in a world where everything will go his way, but where sometimes, all you can choose is "The Lesser Evil".
Thus "tropes" are merely emerging materializations of the human experience that with enough repetition will become tropes. They are a reflection of our perception of society & norms, not unique constructs evoked from nothing.
They are earth, water, stone. Materials to build with. Not the result.
Sometimes people mix tropes, or create reactions to tropes.
Sometimes people mix earth with water, and get clay.
New things are created from a reaction or combination of the old.
Earth and Water are not copyright protected. Neither is clay.
4. Books are fundamentally not what you imagine them to be. A book is not a collection of tropes, an arrangement of things that happen.
Books are a blueprint to an emotional experience evoked in the readers imagination. They consists of hundred thousands of deliberate decisions, made to evoke highly specific emotional reactions in readers. From intertextual connections that are woven between scenes to establish context, emotional tones, arrangment of scenes, multiple narravtive arcs for plot & characters, down to the pacing and the narrative & dialogue beats that make up the structure of the work.
No one cares whether it's a goblin, an orc, or a troll that killed the love interest of the protagonist. What people care about is what the scene makes them feel and whether it suceeds at conveying what it sets out to do.
5. Your entire argument hinges on the misunderstanding, that somehow "tropes" are they key ingrediant in a work. Be it a book, a painting, or whatever. They're not. Just because you draw an orc does not mean someone will be interested in your drawing of an orc. It's how you materialize the concept, the idea of an orc, and filter it through your unique perspective of what you imagine them to be, that results in a highly specific artwork, made with hundred thousands of deliberate decisions, that stirs something
emotionally in the audience.
An AI does not take the idea "orc" and asks itself: What do I think an orc is? How could I make an orc be? Is it a tribal creature roaming the lands? Perhaps I could show an orc sitting near a tent made of furs, stitching a simple piece of clothing for a young orcling, who - with big eyes and wondrous gaze - observes how things are made.
An AI simply mimics the patterns it has observed in people who asked those questions. And it replicates those patterns with a divergence that is sufficient enough to constitute something that looks somewhat different.
But there's a reason so much AI work looks similar. It's 'cause they mimic the same artists, with the same technqiues, in the lighting, the shadow, the color, the saturation, the positioning, etc.
That's why you can literally copy "the style" of an artist.
The AI does not actually learn, it does not ask questions, it does not grow. It mimics patterns it has observed. But it does not understand what it draws, or why it draws it.
So.
In order for you to make the argument you made, the following things had to happen.
1. You did not understand the origin of tropes.
2. You did not understand what tropes are.
3. You did not understand how tropes come to be, and what they are used for.
4. You did not understand what books and stories are, and confused them for collections of tropes where the trope is the thing that makes a person read the book, rather than the experience of reading the book.
5. You do not understand what actually makes up any art. You have only the most superficial understanding of how art works and what its made up of, or the process an artist uses to learn.
Cry all you want. Images generation is here to stay. And with all the publicly available choices of AI image generators, those "awful" people are free to generate many different images. What scum, how do they sleep at night.
The angry vitriol of a person who has no concept of what makes art art, and hopes to bypass learning & understanding by laundering other people's works.
You'll be surprised when anything you make of AI art very quickly looses its luster, and people bemoan that beyond "nice looking pictures" they are all empty, hollow, because they AI can only replicate patterns, not compose scenes with the understanding of a human that bases their work on their human experience.
You're just angry because deep down, you realize that this freedom to strip other people's work of their value and benefit of the fruits of someone elses labor, will not remain.
And any game you make with AI art now? Might not even be allowed to be sold or made money of in a couple years.
The helpless and bitter "AI Art is here to stay" is just a sign that you, too, cannot read what I write.
I already made clear that AI art will remain, will integrate into workflows and will become part of most future environments. Like photoshop for images. Like key frame rendering in animation systems.
It just won't in the way that you want it to be.
