On Reddit, an artist was banned from an art forum with 22 million members because moderators believed his painting had been generated by an AI. According to the moderators, the painting had many similarities to one generated by Artificial Intelligence. The forum had to be closed after “heated” debates and accusations went viral about “artificial” art. Ben Moran was the digital artist who was voted out by the r/Art moderators. They understood that the rule that no AI-generated art should be posted on the forum had been violated.
The image called “a muse in a war zone” was removed and the artist banned from the subreddit. Moran posted a screenshot of the message thread with the ban appeal. The artist understands that it was stated therein that he was not using the aforementioned AI. “I don’t believe you” was the response from the r/Art moderators. To them, it was an AI-driven work of art and was called to “find” a different style.
Speaking to Motherboard magazine, Moran said the piece was a commission for his Vietnam-based studio. The style of the work is characteristic, according to experts, to the pieces made by Moran and Kart Studio. We are talking about pictorial representations of Renaissance style. They are dominated by female figures in warrior attire in the style of a video game.
Artist banned on Reddit, concerned about AI.
In the aftermath of what happened to him, Moran laid out his own concerns about the impact of AI art on artists. “With the development of AI art, we can easily learn how to do it in a day or a week, no theory, just type in a keyword and we get what we want,” the art generator left captured. The development of art, around AI, has had some kind of concern around the passion for the creation of painting.
For more than a year, a moderator of r/Art raised the rule of art without AI. In this regard, they stated that “we don’t necessarily have anything against Al Art”. In any case, they did not overlook the fact that “people can produce it so quickly and easily if it is allowed, the sub becomes nothing more than Al Art fairly quickly.”
AI-generated art
AI-generated art applications have been gaining popularity for several years. Here we find apps such as DALL-E, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, along with sites that host this type of content. Platforms such as Newgrounds, Inkblot or Fur Affinity have raised their bans in relation to generative systems. There, subreddits such as r/Dune, r/Illustration and r/DigitalArt have appeared.
One of the hottest debates of the last year is what constitutes “art”. Here the eye is placed on the processes and ethics that artists must have in the originality of the works. In addition to this, there are the applications that build the data sets that will carry out the respective work.
