Brave new world?

Edited to add, 2 Jan 2025: For clarity, I do not like the way I think things may be going. This isn't a post saying "Hey guys, we should all stop worrying about this!" It's a rather poorly written post, and that's on me. I'll probably delete it eventually, but I don't want to do so now and pretend I hadn't written it. So it stays up for a bit.

The other day, Equestria Daily ran an editorial/discussion post entitled "What Should EQD Do About AI Art Once It's Indistinguishable?"  and after that brought a large reaction, Sethisto made a further post called "AI Art Filtering On EQD - A Followup".

It made interesting reading. The comments, though... they were a sometimes interesting, occasionally enlightening, but often frustrating read. For a start, some commenters entirely ignored the point behind the initial post: that AI art is not like it was even a year or two ago. While it still makes mistakes, with careful prompting for simple images at least some of those mistakes are now similar to those that human artists make. In other words, if you ban AI images on such grounds, the risk of false positives is pretty high.

Then there's the old chestnut that "AI art is soulless". Meaning what, exactly? Do you think deeply about the human artist behind the picture of flying Scootaloo you just grabbed from Derpibooru? Do you? For every single one of the 6,000 images in your Scootaloo folder? I'm afraid the first response that comes to mind there is "Yeah, right." In many, many cases what consumers think about is the picture itself. Not the human being who made it. I'm afraid I think at least some of this is artists trying to kid themselves into feeling better.

What about the charge that AI just steals artists' work without compensation or permission? Well, let me answer that with a question of my own. Do you get formal permission and pay licensing fees for the pictures of Rainbow Dash you sell online and at conventions? Why don't you? The easy, tempting answer of "Because screw corporations" doesn't really get anyone anywhere, especially as you are probably perfectly happy to go out and buy a bunch of plastic toy ponies and thereby enrich... corporations.

There are a number of people in the EQD comments complaining very stridently that even calling AI images "art" is disgusting and that their creators should be called "plagiarism machines" or some such. All I can say is, good luck with that. The really hard fact, the one you don't want to face, is that the large majority of consumers of your MLP fanart do not give a damn about you as a creator. If they treated every picture with love and respect and deep contemplation, they wouldn't have amassed thousands upon thousands and stuffed them in a PC or cloud folder.

All this applies just the same to us ponyfic writers as well, by the way. If there was a ponyfic out there as satisfying to read as the best of Cold in Gardez or horizon or Cynewulf but the product of an AI large language model, how many of its readers do you think would downvote¹ it purely for where it came from? I'll tell you: a damn sight fewer than already downvote every M/M shipping story, regardless of its literary quality. Most fans would lap it up.
¹ Or the equivalent. I'm assuming here the presence of a host site that did not ban AI-created works.

I think part of the problem here is the same one we see in wider social media: a relatively small number of very vocal people see others of like mind around them and misinterpret this as meaning that most people in general actively agree with them. The EQD comments are the same: most people who collect loads of pictures of Applejack or whoever never go near EQD, and certainly never go to the trouble of creating a Disqus account and actually commenting on posts.

We often congratulate ourselves in this fandom about how creative we are, and to an extent I think that's justified. 150,000 fanfics of a kids' cartoon about magical talking horses is a remarkable achievement. Nevertheless, the majority of people are fairly passive consumers. Most of us creators are a lot of the time, too. And most people are not like the ones who hammer out screeds every time an AI post turns up insisting that AI art has absolutely no worth.

I remember a book I read years ago, a book of imagined letters to and from great figures of history. There's one addressed to William Caxton from an abbot complaining about how Caxton's newfangled printing press is ruining the job prospects of the monkish calligraphers at the monastery. And how much did this stop the, well, soulless printing press displacing the monks in the end? Not at all. As I've said before, AI art is out of the bottle and it's not going back in. However much you complain, however justifiable you feel those complaints, it's still not going back in.

I do think that there will always be a place for human art, and that there will always be people who do care enough to want it. As a music industry analogy, these are the people who expend time and energy on attending live gigs. They're admirable people and musicians love them. But ever since the advent of recorded sound, they have never been the largest group. They'll be the equivalent of the people who go to conventions and commission art. Most people, though, will grab gratefully at that flawed but adorable picture of Apple Bloom created by AICaPone or whatever.

tl;dr? Creators can say "Keep AI out!" as much as they want. The fandom, as a group, isn't likely to listen.