Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been the hot topic for a while now thanks to ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and other tools which have made recent advances. On one hand, there are those who believe AI will replace human content creators. On the other hand, there are those who view AI-generated "content" as little more than plagiarism and spam, particularly since there is no actual human engagement by many who are posting AI content.
The biggest public controversies now are probably complaints from writers and artists that their intellectual property is being used to train these systems without their consent. Here on HIVE, the concern is lazy content creation presented as original work by copy/pasting AI output. This is akin to plagiarism in the sense that the content is not your own work, even though AI is more like a highly advanced tool than another creator.
People keep predicting one day AI will write a literary masterpiece. Science fiction is full of artificial intelligence examples, and I would be curious to see them at play in the real world. However, what we have now remains a complicated algorithmic process susceptible to good ol' GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
I wanted an illustration for this post showing a robot unveiling a piece of art. This image was made by pasting one AI-generated picture inside another and adding some shoddy digital brushwork in Paint3D afterward. I used NightCafe Studio over several sessions for both key parts of this unsatisfactory result. Could I do better if I had more understanding of AI art creation prompts and parameters? No doubt. Is this better than using clip art and shapes in Canva, or sharing a stock image? Maybe, maybe not.
It is possible AI tools can improve productivity and creativity. If AI helps inspire you, better organize ideas, or overcome a language barrier, that's not a problem for me. If you need to plagiarize a robot to maintain your output rate and reap rewards, we do have a problem. I dispute "intellectual property," but HIVE is still fundamentally a community for creators, not copy/pasters, regardless of the source.
I may dabble in AI art to see if it can actually help me create quick cover images for posts, but if I do, I will endeavor to offer attribution just like I already do for stock photos or Canva creations. I encourage other creators here to do the same. Be honest and transparent about the content under your name, and always give credit where credit is due. Remember, there are tools to help catch the dishonest.
All opinions in this mess of a post are those of the fallible human who typed them out himself, and as such are subject to change based on further information and consideration. No AI tools were used beyond those for the illustration. This disclaimer can be implicitly assumed unless explicitly stated otherwise so I don't feel a need for a stupid wall of boilerplate text after every single post, OK?
