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AI image generation is an expressive tool for everyone, and it's not going away. [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-04-08

I’m sure a catch a ton of hate for this, but I feel like we need a counterpoint to the “git rid of all AI images on DailyKos” post.

I’m a software engineer. I’ve spent the last 30 years of my life refining my programming skills. A number of AIs now have trained on a bunch of programming code from github, some of which is my own, and it’s starting to get really good at programming, in a way that’s likely to have an effect on programmer salaries, and in a way that a regular person who knows which AI to use could just sit down, tell it to write the program they want, and have it done entirely for them.

It is absolutely amazing that the things I’ve been able to do that are hard for most other people are now available to everyone. It’s absolutely amazing that I can now do in 10 minutes what used to take hours (or literally days, at this point). It would be extremely selfish and shortsighted of me to try to deny this to other people, because frankly the ability of regular people to do more on such a large scale is worth more than my individual career. I’m sure medieval scribes wanted to ban the printing press, too.

Yes, rich people can use it to write programs, but so can I, and so can you, and you can use it to do so much more than I ever could, so much faster. And no, you don’t have to pay rich people for the privilege of using it — there’s plenty of open source AI out there that you can use for free that rich people would love to use your anger to help make illegal.

I could say things like “it’s stealing my code”, but that that would be dishonest of me because I’ve studied it (actual scientific papers, not angry articles and angry tweets), and I know that AI learns by generalization, which is to say that it trains on a large amount of material and picks up broad concepts and styles, which aren’t something anyone can own.

If you want to pervert copyright law in a way it was never intended so that you can own concepts and styles, you might succeed in denying the benefits of AI to yourself and to other regular people like you, but what you won’t do is take it away from the wealthy who can afford to either pay for the training data or absorb the lawsuits.

If you want to ban AI images from DailyKos, you’ll succeed at stopping regular people like yourself from being able to post it here on this website, but you won’t stop people like Elon Musk or large media conglomerates from training it on the volumes and volumes of material they own and eliminating artist jobs. In other words, all you’re doing is chilling the political expression by people on your own side because you’re angry at the other side.

P.S. I’m not interested in debating whether it’s art. Whether we call it art or not isn’t relevant to whether people should be allowed to use it.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/8/2315301/-AI-image-generation-is-an-expressive-tool-for-everyone-and-it-s-not-going-away?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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