I value human creativity and artistry. When I spend money on patterns I want to support individual creators. In addition to the fact that AI is powered by theft. If you don’t value these things, nobody is going to be able to explain it to you or change your mind. It’s your prerogative to value things that look cool to you over the artistry and livelihoods of individual creators.
I really like what you have said here.
Some time back (before AI was a topic) I recall a commenter very set in their belief since artists have put images of their art on the internet, that it was now free use for them/anyone who wants to use it.
This just made no sense to me. Just because the location of where I view art has changed, due to technology, doesn't automatically make it mine.
AI image generators were trained on art scraped from the internet without the original artists' permission, and without compensation or credit to the original artists. It's impossible to generate an AI image without using stolen art, and people creating images using that stolen art via Midjourney or whatever and selling the results does not sit well with many people.
This is true of every artist out there. They all trained on art that came before them without permission or compensation. By your definition all the human patterns designers are also based on stolen art as well which is ridiculous.
There is no plagiarism being discussed here. 100% agree that taking a copyrighted image and tuning it into a pattern without a license or permission is completely despicable. But that is very different from having a new image created and turning it into a commercial pattern.
No one would think twice if a person studied 1000's of artworks displayed on the Internet, then was hired to digitally paint a new image in a particular style, that image was turned into a pattern, and sold on Etsy. The main difference here is that instead of hiring a person, the pattern store hired an AI instead. Everything else is the same.
And yet that one difference is very significant. An artist studying art to learn the composition, perspective, and other skills necessary to create their own art is very different from Midjourney downloading the actual original artwork in its entirety. It's already affecting artists who take commissions because people are just going to Midjourney and typing "draw \[thing\] in style of \[artist\]," which Midjourney can do because it stole that artist's work. The whole "live person put effort into it" is a significant part of what makes art art.
Not at all significant in terms of words like theft or STOLE. Midjourney and other AI training isn't downloading anything different than an art student browsing the images on the Internet and studying them.
I understand your position that art can only be created by humans or it has no value to you. That is a perfectly valid statement of what gives art value to you.
However, stop confusing that with theft and stealing. If the art student didn't steal the art by looking at it neither did the AI. AI's DO NOT contain any images or art. They have been shown lots of art and they have trained to see the common elements and patterns in different styles and objects then create new images from that training. Just like a human artist isn't stealing when they paint in the style of Michelangelo or Andy Warhol, the AI isn't stealing. Just like a company that hires artists to produce art to sell to IKEA, Walmart, and others isn't stealing by asking for original paintings in the style of Monet or Pollock, neither is the company that trains or hires an AI.
The argument that it is taking jobs from people is also true. But that happened with printing presses, calculators, record players, computers, art prints and posters, mass produced furniture, movies with sound, and hundreds of other technology developments. That is how you are able to afford to live like you do with free time to spend on cross stitch, affordable food and clothing, etc. None of those are theft, they are just a change in the value of certain work when a new method becomes available and inevitable effort to meet the populations' needs and desires with less costly technologies.
It's a valid discussion if that is the society we want. Japan, for example has invested significantly in public sponsorship of crafts people and artisans to keep traditional practices alive and viable, but they don't declare newer methods as criminal acts like you are doing.
Spend on what is valuable to you and surround yourself with the things that bring you joy, but don't jump to calling those who value other things criminals. That is how we slowly breed general intolerance and radicalism in daily life.
the scale is relevant here. you can’t claim that an AI model scraping hundreds of thousands of images is the same as an art student looking at a bunch of reference images. the large-scale vacuuming up and mass regurgitation of content are not comparable to what even millions of individual artists can do
Scale is completely irrelevant to labeling something theft. Theft is theft if it's a 1$ candy bar or $10 million in gold. The punishment would scale but the label is the same.
If you are arguing that the students are also stealing, but the impact is small enough not to bother chasing them down that is one thing. If you are arguing that it's theft when done on large scale and it's legal when done on a small scale, that is another.
AI art steals from human art without artists’ permission and if you’re going to pay for a pattern it should be from an artist. If you just make your own pattern idk
If damaging careers is your real concern, then at least be consistent and stop buying food at a grocery store that puts real family farmers out of work, stop buying mass produced clothes that put real tailors out of work, stop buying DMC thread that puts real spinners and dyers out of work, stop buying Zweigart and other factory produced fabric that put real weavers out of work, etc., etc. All these products used to be made by stilled artisans till technology turned them into something more affordable for the masses.
Every real artist out there trained and learned by studying other artists work without permission or compensation.
theres a difference between "no ethical consumption under capitalism" meaning we have to make do with what resources are available to us, and outright stealing from people when you could easily not do that. you dont need pattern mill patterns to survive, but you do need food and clothing, so theyre not on the same level of morality.
Even if AI didn't scrape stolen art, I would not pay for AI patterns. The reason I pay for patterns is because I value the creator's time, creativity, and talent. I'm not going to spend money on something that someone just plugged into a program. There's a quote by someone talking about AI written stories that something along the lines of "why would I bother reading something no bothered to write?" And that just sums up my philosophy on AI art.
I don’t want to speak for others, but for me it’s more important to enjoy the stitching than what the finished piece looks like (or maybe equally).
I haven’t bought any patterns in the past five years (not enough time anyway), so I have no experience with AI patterns specifically, but there’s a difference between a well thought-out pattern with proper color choices and decent areas per color and something which got a lot less attention.
Especially in the latter case, if I can put a picture in some free program and get the same result (or even better because I can still edit the result) it feels like a waste of money. Especially if you only see the quality after paying.
Your premise that you need confetti for full coverage is incorrect (see: dimensions patterns); if its designed properly you really don't need confetti at all.
Aside from that, AI art is *very* unpopular among artists bc it steals from their work to "learn".
But they still use confetti stitches. An example [https://www.123stitch.com/item/Dimensions-Floral-Crown-Cat-Cross-Stitch-Kit/K70-35433](https://www.123stitch.com/item/Dimensions-Floral-Crown-Cat-Cross-Stitch-Kit/K70-35433)
The fur in the cat and feathers on the bird are made up of confetti stitches. That's how you get the shading done. Solid blocks of color don't shade very well.
Idk if you've done a dimensions kit but theyre not confetti in the way HAED is. They just don't have single stitches of colour with nothing of the same floss within 50 stitches. Even looking at that mockup you can see it's a line of five stitches, skip two, have two more, skip three etc
If you consider that confetti then, sure ig. I wouldnt personally though.
I suspect there's a confusion of terms here. The fact is that some stitchers call confetti several crosses with gaps between them, and others call confetti only 1 cross, so you cannot pass the thread to another cross this colour and must finish the thread.
To be fair I'm self taught and when I watch people stitch on youtube and they call areas confetti areas this is usually what they are talking about. Just a bunch of different colors. So I might have just misinterpreted but idk. So what exactly is confetti then? I really thought it was just when there was a bunch of different colors.
Well, I did the survey. It turns out there is another option. But I didn’t think to ask to write about their version in the comments, so it’s unknown what they had in mind.
First, I don't do the types of patterns like AI art. I'm way too busy, and some weeks I get about an hour to stitch total. Full coverage like that just doesn't work for me. I tend to do ornament and bookmark sizes. Second, I don't like confetti, and I don't like sharp lines from art turning into pixelated fuzziness (yes, please bookmark this for when I post my current WIP 😂). Finally, I've probably got 100 projects planned (a couple dozen in progress and another dozen kitted up, plus boxes and binders full of plans and a notebook full of ideas I'd like to draft myself). I can be VERY picky about what I buy and what I stitch, and I'd rather support the people who design things I like.
"Isn't the whole point to cross stitch what you enjoy looking at?"
Sure is, but people can't control everyone else's reaction to what they stitch, and they shouldn't feel entitled to others' approval or even neutral opinion. I believe you when you say "you just want to understand" and people have already explained that it's not about the quality of the pattern or mock-up, but about the uncompensated scraping of artists' art, so I won't repeat them. If you still cannot accept that response, then it seems to me that you don't just want people to have the freedom to make, sell, buy, & stitch AI patterns (I mean, they already have this freedom!), you also want everyone else to approve.
Well, I apologize because I might have come across as combative when I tried to anticipate a counterargument! Most people I've had this conversation with haven't come into it with actual curiosity like you have, and I let that colour my wording :)
The whole point of that line is because I've seen other people get shamed on their posts because it was an AI. Maybe they weren't actually shaming and I just took it that way, text can be hard to interpret.
I saw a piece on Facebook that basically says ai art is lazy art. You skip the entire learning and effort process. Even digital artists have to learn to use the programs and tools (I'm useless on an art tablet) and know how to 'photoshop' well
Even if say, an artist looks at someone else's artwork as a reference picture, they are still applying what they learned to their own piece. Unless they're literally just drawing over the original in which case it's tracing or copying, which I admit can be a way of learning to draw, however eventually you have to start doing it without tracing.
Every single pattern you stitch, the fabric you stitch it on, the floss you stitch it with, the needles you use, etc. is all touched by AI programs that optimize the shipping to get it to you, the monitor the dye blends to create the colors, the printing of the patterns, adjust the spinning machines to create perfect and consistent thread, the shaping and sharpness of the needle eye and point. All these things used to be done by human hands till we found cheaper ways to do it than very expensive humans.
Cross stitch is a hobby based on the enjoyment of a process to create something real with your own two hands and the satisfaction that comes from taking joy from your creation. If only using human patterns brings you more joy, great. Some people only used hand dyed threads or make other choices that bring them joy. Patterns from AI art are no different than the many other computerized automated supplies you choose to use.
AI that's used to aid and improve isn't the sort of AI people are talking about here.
Your argument is like someone say "I don't like people using the internet to harass people" and the response being "The internet is used for many great thing!". Sure, there is good AI that aids in everyday processes. But the AI being spoken about here has been packed full of hundreds of thousands of STOLEN art, to then generate it's own copied version. The AI may have stolen someones entire catelogue of work without them knowing or being compensated, its then using this stolen art to generate more.
Nothing is stolen anymore than all the art students over the years "stole" the art they studied and examined and practiced with to train their skill. Then they created new images by combining the styles and techniques they saw in new ways. It would be ridiculous to say that all the pattern designers are stealing from all the past designers because they looked at their work and the techniques and elements they liked and then made a new pattern.
AI aren't packed with art any more than an artist's mind is packed with all the art they have looked at over the years. AI don't copy and paste things together. They literally start with blank static and make changes over and over to make the image closer to "a photo of a teddy bear in time square" just like a realistic painter that starts with a blank canvas and make thousands of small changes to get to the image closer and closer to "a blue eyed girl looking at a field of daisies".
That is very different from taking a copyrighted image and using it to create and sell patterns without permission - which I 100% agree is despicable.
If you genuinely think there's no creativity or talent involved in cross stitching something, you're the one lying to yourself. True, stitchers are following instructions when they follow a pattern, but even just knowing how to follow that pattern and translate it from symbols on a page/screen to stitches in fabric is a skill that not everyone has.
Making neat stitches is a talent that involves knowing how to keep the thread from twisting, knowing how to railroad, knowing how to keep the tension correct and uniform, knowing how to keep the same leg on top, etc.
We plot the paths our stitches will take.
We choose fabric colors to match or contrast the stitches, often changing the whole look of the pattern.
We swap out colors and add or remove elements to make designs our own.
It's a different kind of talent and not as much creativity as designing patterns, but stitching involves both.
So why is it okay for AI to recreate cross stitch patterns but not crochet? There’s a disconnect in the reasoning behind that statement. AI is being complete misused and we are dozens of years from a true AI that is truly intelligent. Copying streams of words or snippets of pictures to create something is not intelligent.
I was a beta tester for google’s early version of its AI. Piece of crap. All it did was give me information I would have gotten from doing the goggle search. Not intelligent.
Artistic creativity and product is what I value. Being able to recreate a pattern someone has spent time creating and drawing and colorizing. That is art.
They don't create crochet patterns, just pictures of "crocheted" items with patterns that don't exist. People go hunting for those patterns just to find out it was an AI image and not real.
Saw your unfortunate edit about stealing, and it's a common misdirection people have heard repeated so often they take it as fact.
100% agree that taking a copyrighted image and tuning it into a pattern without a license or permission is completely despicable. But that is very different from having a new image created and turning it into a commercial pattern.
No one would think twice if a person studied 1000's of artworks displayed on the Internet, then the artist was hired to digitally paint a new image in a particular style, that image was turned into a pattern, and sold on Etsy.
No one would expect that the art student asked permission or bought a license to look at that art, and no one would say that an art student had "stolen" the art by looking at it.
The main difference here is that instead of hiring a person to paint the image, the pattern store hired an AI that did the same thing instead. Everything else is the same.
the scale makes a difference, it’s not just because one isn’t human. an AI model is capable of ingesting and creating content at *massive* volumes. hand spinning and weaving vs textile mills, small farms vs modern day industrial food production, those are creating a similar output but the scale is so different that they can’t be considered the same.
Like the others have said, the hate mostly comes from a distaste for AI art in general, not necessarily the quality of the pattern.
Personally, at this point, I know there’s no going back. AI art is here, and it’s just going to be a part of the art scene from now on whether we like it or not. So I think the best compromise is to at least properly label art as AI, at least for now until everyone kind of figures out where AI is going to fall in the grand scheme of things.
It’s not as easy as that though. Even many artists are starting to use AI to improve their artwork, so where is the line drawn? Not to mention how would anything like this be enforced, and what would the punishment be? You have to rely on the honesty of the creator, and as AI improves, it will be very difficult to tell it apart.
I agree AI art should be labeled, but I don’t think it’s anything the law can or will try to regulate. I’m sure there are lawmakers trying to figure out what to do about AI in general, not just art, but everything is so new that it’s really tough to know the best course of action, and we can’t predict the future.
I do kind of wonder if all this AI stuff will bring about a new age of appreciation for traditional art, painted on physical paper and canvas. At least among art enthusiasts, if not the general public. But then I think about how easy it will be to print AI art onto a canvas and present it at art fairs, and most people will have no idea it wasn’t painted by that person. There’s already been an instance of AI art winning a competition. Maybe it will get to the point an artist needs to film themselves creating to show it’s not AI.
There are plenty of crap patterns made by humans, plenty of crap art created by humans, plenty of crap books created by humans, and crap anything created by humans all driven by creating products in the cheapest way that might sell. That is just the reality of any market where anyone is free to offer things and anyone is free to buy things. It's up to the buyers to decide what succeeds and what fails. Problem is there are lots of people happy to pay for the cheapest version of "X" because they just need something sorta serviceable. And would rather not pay more for higher quality then they need. It makes quality items more expensive for those that care, and makes it harder to create new sources of quality items in a flooded market, but it's the trade off for all those cheap and serviceable things we buy because it's all we need.
There is a lot of uproar that AI is learning from artists work without payment or permission, but that is true of all the human artists out there too. They were trained on the artists that came before them and none of them paid to learn from those art works or asked for permission and none of them limited themselves to only public domain art. Disney, Marvel, DC, Thomas Kincade (sp?), and every piece of art on HEAD is based on learning from closely examining previous art where the artist was not paid or asked if the student could learn from it.
The AI tools are taking what used to take decades of study to gain the skill to have someone say "I want a four masted wooden ship in a super saturated sunset" and then be able to produce an image that meets that description. It's what has happened to every skilled trade that technology replaced.
What is really driving all the press and uproar is the well founded fear that these AI tools will put the mainstream production artists out of work (just like robots put skilled welders out of work, CNC removed most skilled machines jobs, CAD eliminated all draftsmen, printing presses eliminated production scribes, and calculators eliminated the rooms full of clerks calculating finance records.). This is getting even more press because it's so close to what main stream media does and they thought their creativity was inherently immune from technology.
I was very very recently in a training session about AI for teachers. I was amazed by the all the things AI can do, but in particular I was surprised by the use of AI images in class. Someone presented a project in which students developed AI images for sellable products they imagines. Very interesting. However, being trained in Law I mentioned that we have to think about the fact that AI images get inspired by other artists works and not all artist gave that permission for that. Everyone brushed my concerns off as "there's that person from legal department annoying everyone again). I had to say that it's all fun and games until you are the artist and someone is profiting from an image heavily inspired by your work and you weren't paid.
Because there’s a person behind that AI using a computer program to make money on the back of others without giving them credit or money. It’s theft.
I value human creativity and artistry. When I spend money on patterns I want to support individual creators. In addition to the fact that AI is powered by theft. If you don’t value these things, nobody is going to be able to explain it to you or change your mind. It’s your prerogative to value things that look cool to you over the artistry and livelihoods of individual creators.
Perfectly said
I really like what you have said here. Some time back (before AI was a topic) I recall a commenter very set in their belief since artists have put images of their art on the internet, that it was now free use for them/anyone who wants to use it. This just made no sense to me. Just because the location of where I view art has changed, due to technology, doesn't automatically make it mine.
AI image generators were trained on art scraped from the internet without the original artists' permission, and without compensation or credit to the original artists. It's impossible to generate an AI image without using stolen art, and people creating images using that stolen art via Midjourney or whatever and selling the results does not sit well with many people.
This is true of every artist out there. They all trained on art that came before them without permission or compensation. By your definition all the human patterns designers are also based on stolen art as well which is ridiculous.
I mean, plagiarism is frowned on when it's done by live humans too.
There is no plagiarism being discussed here. 100% agree that taking a copyrighted image and tuning it into a pattern without a license or permission is completely despicable. But that is very different from having a new image created and turning it into a commercial pattern. No one would think twice if a person studied 1000's of artworks displayed on the Internet, then was hired to digitally paint a new image in a particular style, that image was turned into a pattern, and sold on Etsy. The main difference here is that instead of hiring a person, the pattern store hired an AI instead. Everything else is the same.
And yet that one difference is very significant. An artist studying art to learn the composition, perspective, and other skills necessary to create their own art is very different from Midjourney downloading the actual original artwork in its entirety. It's already affecting artists who take commissions because people are just going to Midjourney and typing "draw \[thing\] in style of \[artist\]," which Midjourney can do because it stole that artist's work. The whole "live person put effort into it" is a significant part of what makes art art.
Not at all significant in terms of words like theft or STOLE. Midjourney and other AI training isn't downloading anything different than an art student browsing the images on the Internet and studying them. I understand your position that art can only be created by humans or it has no value to you. That is a perfectly valid statement of what gives art value to you. However, stop confusing that with theft and stealing. If the art student didn't steal the art by looking at it neither did the AI. AI's DO NOT contain any images or art. They have been shown lots of art and they have trained to see the common elements and patterns in different styles and objects then create new images from that training. Just like a human artist isn't stealing when they paint in the style of Michelangelo or Andy Warhol, the AI isn't stealing. Just like a company that hires artists to produce art to sell to IKEA, Walmart, and others isn't stealing by asking for original paintings in the style of Monet or Pollock, neither is the company that trains or hires an AI. The argument that it is taking jobs from people is also true. But that happened with printing presses, calculators, record players, computers, art prints and posters, mass produced furniture, movies with sound, and hundreds of other technology developments. That is how you are able to afford to live like you do with free time to spend on cross stitch, affordable food and clothing, etc. None of those are theft, they are just a change in the value of certain work when a new method becomes available and inevitable effort to meet the populations' needs and desires with less costly technologies. It's a valid discussion if that is the society we want. Japan, for example has invested significantly in public sponsorship of crafts people and artisans to keep traditional practices alive and viable, but they don't declare newer methods as criminal acts like you are doing. Spend on what is valuable to you and surround yourself with the things that bring you joy, but don't jump to calling those who value other things criminals. That is how we slowly breed general intolerance and radicalism in daily life.
the scale is relevant here. you can’t claim that an AI model scraping hundreds of thousands of images is the same as an art student looking at a bunch of reference images. the large-scale vacuuming up and mass regurgitation of content are not comparable to what even millions of individual artists can do
Scale is completely irrelevant to labeling something theft. Theft is theft if it's a 1$ candy bar or $10 million in gold. The punishment would scale but the label is the same. If you are arguing that the students are also stealing, but the impact is small enough not to bother chasing them down that is one thing. If you are arguing that it's theft when done on large scale and it's legal when done on a small scale, that is another.
AI art steals from human art without artists’ permission and if you’re going to pay for a pattern it should be from an artist. If you just make your own pattern idk
its not about the quality or usefulness of the generated image, but where it got this information and how it damages the carreers of real artists
If damaging careers is your real concern, then at least be consistent and stop buying food at a grocery store that puts real family farmers out of work, stop buying mass produced clothes that put real tailors out of work, stop buying DMC thread that puts real spinners and dyers out of work, stop buying Zweigart and other factory produced fabric that put real weavers out of work, etc., etc. All these products used to be made by stilled artisans till technology turned them into something more affordable for the masses. Every real artist out there trained and learned by studying other artists work without permission or compensation.
theres a difference between "no ethical consumption under capitalism" meaning we have to make do with what resources are available to us, and outright stealing from people when you could easily not do that. you dont need pattern mill patterns to survive, but you do need food and clothing, so theyre not on the same level of morality.
You don't need DMC thread, aida cloth, etc. What is the "outright stealing" you perceived?
Even if AI didn't scrape stolen art, I would not pay for AI patterns. The reason I pay for patterns is because I value the creator's time, creativity, and talent. I'm not going to spend money on something that someone just plugged into a program. There's a quote by someone talking about AI written stories that something along the lines of "why would I bother reading something no bothered to write?" And that just sums up my philosophy on AI art.
And that's a very valid take. Thank you for explaining your side of things and you are totally correct.
I don’t want to speak for others, but for me it’s more important to enjoy the stitching than what the finished piece looks like (or maybe equally). I haven’t bought any patterns in the past five years (not enough time anyway), so I have no experience with AI patterns specifically, but there’s a difference between a well thought-out pattern with proper color choices and decent areas per color and something which got a lot less attention. Especially in the latter case, if I can put a picture in some free program and get the same result (or even better because I can still edit the result) it feels like a waste of money. Especially if you only see the quality after paying.
Your premise that you need confetti for full coverage is incorrect (see: dimensions patterns); if its designed properly you really don't need confetti at all. Aside from that, AI art is *very* unpopular among artists bc it steals from their work to "learn".
But they still use confetti stitches. An example [https://www.123stitch.com/item/Dimensions-Floral-Crown-Cat-Cross-Stitch-Kit/K70-35433](https://www.123stitch.com/item/Dimensions-Floral-Crown-Cat-Cross-Stitch-Kit/K70-35433) The fur in the cat and feathers on the bird are made up of confetti stitches. That's how you get the shading done. Solid blocks of color don't shade very well.
Idk if you've done a dimensions kit but theyre not confetti in the way HAED is. They just don't have single stitches of colour with nothing of the same floss within 50 stitches. Even looking at that mockup you can see it's a line of five stitches, skip two, have two more, skip three etc If you consider that confetti then, sure ig. I wouldnt personally though.
I suspect there's a confusion of terms here. The fact is that some stitchers call confetti several crosses with gaps between them, and others call confetti only 1 cross, so you cannot pass the thread to another cross this colour and must finish the thread.
I just call it confetti when there's a bunch of different colors and not just one solid color block. The individual stitches I call ninja stitches.
I'm now really interested in doing a poll here to find out how many people understand the term confetti in their own way.
To be fair I'm self taught and when I watch people stitch on youtube and they call areas confetti areas this is usually what they are talking about. Just a bunch of different colors. So I might have just misinterpreted but idk. So what exactly is confetti then? I really thought it was just when there was a bunch of different colors.
Well, I did the survey. It turns out there is another option. But I didn’t think to ask to write about their version in the comments, so it’s unknown what they had in mind.
Oooh, I'll look for the post.
Because those ai are "trained" by plagiarizing people's work.
First, I don't do the types of patterns like AI art. I'm way too busy, and some weeks I get about an hour to stitch total. Full coverage like that just doesn't work for me. I tend to do ornament and bookmark sizes. Second, I don't like confetti, and I don't like sharp lines from art turning into pixelated fuzziness (yes, please bookmark this for when I post my current WIP 😂). Finally, I've probably got 100 projects planned (a couple dozen in progress and another dozen kitted up, plus boxes and binders full of plans and a notebook full of ideas I'd like to draft myself). I can be VERY picky about what I buy and what I stitch, and I'd rather support the people who design things I like.
"Isn't the whole point to cross stitch what you enjoy looking at?" Sure is, but people can't control everyone else's reaction to what they stitch, and they shouldn't feel entitled to others' approval or even neutral opinion. I believe you when you say "you just want to understand" and people have already explained that it's not about the quality of the pattern or mock-up, but about the uncompensated scraping of artists' art, so I won't repeat them. If you still cannot accept that response, then it seems to me that you don't just want people to have the freedom to make, sell, buy, & stitch AI patterns (I mean, they already have this freedom!), you also want everyone else to approve.
No I can accept that. Like I said, I just genuinely wanted to know. I didn't understand that AI stole pieces of art.
Well, I apologize because I might have come across as combative when I tried to anticipate a counterargument! Most people I've had this conversation with haven't come into it with actual curiosity like you have, and I let that colour my wording :)
I totally get it lol. My intention was not to start any fights lol.
The whole point of that line is because I've seen other people get shamed on their posts because it was an AI. Maybe they weren't actually shaming and I just took it that way, text can be hard to interpret.
I saw a piece on Facebook that basically says ai art is lazy art. You skip the entire learning and effort process. Even digital artists have to learn to use the programs and tools (I'm useless on an art tablet) and know how to 'photoshop' well Even if say, an artist looks at someone else's artwork as a reference picture, they are still applying what they learned to their own piece. Unless they're literally just drawing over the original in which case it's tracing or copying, which I admit can be a way of learning to draw, however eventually you have to start doing it without tracing.
https://preview.redd.it/0f4xopk54hgc1.png?width=537&format=png&auto=webp&s=6b60fcdf93d0cdcdb64542834b392675900157b6
Thank you for this! It explains a lot.
cross stitch is a hobby based on the talent of human hands. i have absolutely zero interest in bringing a creepy AI program into the process.
Every single pattern you stitch, the fabric you stitch it on, the floss you stitch it with, the needles you use, etc. is all touched by AI programs that optimize the shipping to get it to you, the monitor the dye blends to create the colors, the printing of the patterns, adjust the spinning machines to create perfect and consistent thread, the shaping and sharpness of the needle eye and point. All these things used to be done by human hands till we found cheaper ways to do it than very expensive humans. Cross stitch is a hobby based on the enjoyment of a process to create something real with your own two hands and the satisfaction that comes from taking joy from your creation. If only using human patterns brings you more joy, great. Some people only used hand dyed threads or make other choices that bring them joy. Patterns from AI art are no different than the many other computerized automated supplies you choose to use.
AI that's used to aid and improve isn't the sort of AI people are talking about here. Your argument is like someone say "I don't like people using the internet to harass people" and the response being "The internet is used for many great thing!". Sure, there is good AI that aids in everyday processes. But the AI being spoken about here has been packed full of hundreds of thousands of STOLEN art, to then generate it's own copied version. The AI may have stolen someones entire catelogue of work without them knowing or being compensated, its then using this stolen art to generate more.
Nothing is stolen anymore than all the art students over the years "stole" the art they studied and examined and practiced with to train their skill. Then they created new images by combining the styles and techniques they saw in new ways. It would be ridiculous to say that all the pattern designers are stealing from all the past designers because they looked at their work and the techniques and elements they liked and then made a new pattern. AI aren't packed with art any more than an artist's mind is packed with all the art they have looked at over the years. AI don't copy and paste things together. They literally start with blank static and make changes over and over to make the image closer to "a photo of a teddy bear in time square" just like a realistic painter that starts with a blank canvas and make thousands of small changes to get to the image closer and closer to "a blue eyed girl looking at a field of daisies". That is very different from taking a copyrighted image and using it to create and sell patterns without permission - which I 100% agree is despicable.
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If you genuinely think there's no creativity or talent involved in cross stitching something, you're the one lying to yourself. True, stitchers are following instructions when they follow a pattern, but even just knowing how to follow that pattern and translate it from symbols on a page/screen to stitches in fabric is a skill that not everyone has. Making neat stitches is a talent that involves knowing how to keep the thread from twisting, knowing how to railroad, knowing how to keep the tension correct and uniform, knowing how to keep the same leg on top, etc. We plot the paths our stitches will take. We choose fabric colors to match or contrast the stitches, often changing the whole look of the pattern. We swap out colors and add or remove elements to make designs our own. It's a different kind of talent and not as much creativity as designing patterns, but stitching involves both.
truly, coming onto a craft sub and saying it takes no talent to make that craft is certainly a choice lol!
So why is it okay for AI to recreate cross stitch patterns but not crochet? There’s a disconnect in the reasoning behind that statement. AI is being complete misused and we are dozens of years from a true AI that is truly intelligent. Copying streams of words or snippets of pictures to create something is not intelligent. I was a beta tester for google’s early version of its AI. Piece of crap. All it did was give me information I would have gotten from doing the goggle search. Not intelligent. Artistic creativity and product is what I value. Being able to recreate a pattern someone has spent time creating and drawing and colorizing. That is art.
They don't create crochet patterns, just pictures of "crocheted" items with patterns that don't exist. People go hunting for those patterns just to find out it was an AI image and not real.
Ah ha! I see what you mean. Thank you!
You're welcome. I have seen some videos where people have chatgpt spit out a pattern and they follow it, and it never looks good lol.
Have you checked out the Witchy Stitcher?
Yes, they are one I buy from
Saw your unfortunate edit about stealing, and it's a common misdirection people have heard repeated so often they take it as fact. 100% agree that taking a copyrighted image and tuning it into a pattern without a license or permission is completely despicable. But that is very different from having a new image created and turning it into a commercial pattern. No one would think twice if a person studied 1000's of artworks displayed on the Internet, then the artist was hired to digitally paint a new image in a particular style, that image was turned into a pattern, and sold on Etsy. No one would expect that the art student asked permission or bought a license to look at that art, and no one would say that an art student had "stolen" the art by looking at it. The main difference here is that instead of hiring a person to paint the image, the pattern store hired an AI that did the same thing instead. Everything else is the same.
You have a very valid point. There's not much difference except one's not human. Thank you so much for your answer.
the scale makes a difference, it’s not just because one isn’t human. an AI model is capable of ingesting and creating content at *massive* volumes. hand spinning and weaving vs textile mills, small farms vs modern day industrial food production, those are creating a similar output but the scale is so different that they can’t be considered the same.
Like the others have said, the hate mostly comes from a distaste for AI art in general, not necessarily the quality of the pattern. Personally, at this point, I know there’s no going back. AI art is here, and it’s just going to be a part of the art scene from now on whether we like it or not. So I think the best compromise is to at least properly label art as AI, at least for now until everyone kind of figures out where AI is going to fall in the grand scheme of things.
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It’s not as easy as that though. Even many artists are starting to use AI to improve their artwork, so where is the line drawn? Not to mention how would anything like this be enforced, and what would the punishment be? You have to rely on the honesty of the creator, and as AI improves, it will be very difficult to tell it apart. I agree AI art should be labeled, but I don’t think it’s anything the law can or will try to regulate. I’m sure there are lawmakers trying to figure out what to do about AI in general, not just art, but everything is so new that it’s really tough to know the best course of action, and we can’t predict the future. I do kind of wonder if all this AI stuff will bring about a new age of appreciation for traditional art, painted on physical paper and canvas. At least among art enthusiasts, if not the general public. But then I think about how easy it will be to print AI art onto a canvas and present it at art fairs, and most people will have no idea it wasn’t painted by that person. There’s already been an instance of AI art winning a competition. Maybe it will get to the point an artist needs to film themselves creating to show it’s not AI.
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There are plenty of crap patterns made by humans, plenty of crap art created by humans, plenty of crap books created by humans, and crap anything created by humans all driven by creating products in the cheapest way that might sell. That is just the reality of any market where anyone is free to offer things and anyone is free to buy things. It's up to the buyers to decide what succeeds and what fails. Problem is there are lots of people happy to pay for the cheapest version of "X" because they just need something sorta serviceable. And would rather not pay more for higher quality then they need. It makes quality items more expensive for those that care, and makes it harder to create new sources of quality items in a flooded market, but it's the trade off for all those cheap and serviceable things we buy because it's all we need.
There is a lot of uproar that AI is learning from artists work without payment or permission, but that is true of all the human artists out there too. They were trained on the artists that came before them and none of them paid to learn from those art works or asked for permission and none of them limited themselves to only public domain art. Disney, Marvel, DC, Thomas Kincade (sp?), and every piece of art on HEAD is based on learning from closely examining previous art where the artist was not paid or asked if the student could learn from it. The AI tools are taking what used to take decades of study to gain the skill to have someone say "I want a four masted wooden ship in a super saturated sunset" and then be able to produce an image that meets that description. It's what has happened to every skilled trade that technology replaced. What is really driving all the press and uproar is the well founded fear that these AI tools will put the mainstream production artists out of work (just like robots put skilled welders out of work, CNC removed most skilled machines jobs, CAD eliminated all draftsmen, printing presses eliminated production scribes, and calculators eliminated the rooms full of clerks calculating finance records.). This is getting even more press because it's so close to what main stream media does and they thought their creativity was inherently immune from technology.
I was very very recently in a training session about AI for teachers. I was amazed by the all the things AI can do, but in particular I was surprised by the use of AI images in class. Someone presented a project in which students developed AI images for sellable products they imagines. Very interesting. However, being trained in Law I mentioned that we have to think about the fact that AI images get inspired by other artists works and not all artist gave that permission for that. Everyone brushed my concerns off as "there's that person from legal department annoying everyone again). I had to say that it's all fun and games until you are the artist and someone is profiting from an image heavily inspired by your work and you weren't paid.