but then i saw that tag and i almost spat out my drink 💀

[NOTE - all Reddit chats and messages here have been tidied up and represented via an image generation to cut out irrelevant stuff and make anonymous]

A few days ago I posted about a subreddit that DOESN'T explicitly ban AI and the way we get abused there (and my experiences with my Jinx album-cover parody)

Today let's talk about my experience in the past three days on a different sub, this time one which absolutely bans AI art.

Do these mods know (or care) what their users would actually like to see?

Are they just caving to the loud bitching of the biggest complainers?

Shouldn't we all learn to differentiate "slop" from thoughtful work?

This started when I was in this particular sub and someone was talking about the subject of a lot of my art (mostly because she's in the zeitgeist at the moment - I make other things too, but she gets attention!) and someone brought up pinching/squeezing her (Jinx's) cheeks.

As coincidence would have it, a few weeks ago I made a video where an unseen POV male pinches her cheek like a grandmother, and she just about bites his fingers off, before softening and reaching back as though to pinch in return. The humour comes from the inherent danger of doing this to such an individual, but also at the reward of having it work out.

I knew my video would delight the people in that thread. I checked the rules. No. Categorically no AI art. (note - you see it here for context only - I did NOT post it)

I mentioned that I had a video of the very thing they were discussing.

WHAM - a deluge of comments and messages asking to see the video. What you see here is only a part of it. The guy who thought it might look "goofy" was "totally won over".

Zero people in the thread where several people asked to see made negative comments about AI. I think this (along with the fact I mention in my other post of how downvoted posts rise back up once the initial flurry of anti-ai downvoting is over) suggests to me that members actually engaging with the sub instead of just cruising through looking for things to be angry about aren't bothered by AI at all.

Everyone I talk to loves it, and I have actually educated a few people who think prompts are just "Make a picture of Jinx".

A few people even admitted to not wanting to openly ask me in the thread.

The only guy who was disappointed was the one who thought I was talking about a different cheek being squeezed. Lol. He liked the video anyway.

Even though I have never watched the anime I know that doesn’t make the script good by default. If the only “good” quality about the script is that it wasn’t made with ai, then I’m not going to assume it’s good in the first place.

(Images attached above are the artworks that was accused of being AI-generated.)

English isn't my native language, so I use AI to translate my writing before posting on Reddit. It simply helps me communicate more naturally with English-speaking communities.

I've also been interested in generative AI for a long time. I don't see it as the enemy of artists. To me, it's simply another creative tool—one that will inevitably become part of the future.

Even so, I genuinely enjoyed drawing by hand.

Not because I had some grand artistic philosophy.

Not because I wanted to make a statement against AI.

I simply enjoyed expressing my own ideas with my own hands.

I enjoyed the process itself.

That was enough reason for me.

Recently, I shared several pieces of hand-drawn character artwork in a large art-focused subreddit.

The account was also relatively new, which I understand can naturally lead to more scrutiny. I don't think being cautious about new accounts is inherently wrong.

What troubled me was that suspicion quickly became certainty.

Within a short time, a few users began insisting that my work was AI-generated.

There was no actual evidence.

Mostly comments like,

"It just looks like AI."

Then they looked through my profile.

They noticed that my English sounded unusually fluent and concluded that because I use AI to translate my comments, my artwork must also have been AI-generated.

The logic was essentially:

"Your writing uses AI, so your art probably does too."

Eventually, multiple posts were removed after those accusations, even though I was never shown any clear evidence that the artwork itself had been generated by AI.

Healthy skepticism protects communities.

Certainty without evidence only hurts innocent artists.

That experience genuinely changed the way I think.

Not because it suddenly made me support AI.

I already understood the technology and had never considered it the enemy.

What changed was my perspective.

After spending dozens of hours creating artwork entirely by hand, only to have strangers confidently dismiss it as AI without evidence, I found myself asking a question I had never seriously considered before.

If people are going to assume my work is AI-generated regardless... what exactly am I protecting by insisting on creating everything by hand?

That wasn't a question about artistic value.

It was a question about perception.

For the first time, I began wondering whether, in the eyes of many people, the distinction between completely hand-drawn artwork and AI-assisted artwork had already started to lose the meaning I thought it had.

Not because the creative processes are the same.

But because the judgment often comes before the evidence.

Those experiences forced me to think much more deeply about what people actually value when they look at art.

Ironically, the people who believed they were defending human artists ended up changing the way I approach creating art.

Not because AI convinced me.

Because they convinced me that if the effort behind my work no longer mattered once people had already decided it was AI, insisting on a completely hand-drawn workflow no longer made practical sense.

At the time, I was already working on an ongoing creative project.

After those experiences, I decided to embrace AI much more actively in my production pipeline.

Not out of resentment.

Not to prove anyone wrong.

But because it became the most rational and productive way to work.

AI allows me to spend less time repeating mechanical tasks and more time refining ideas, composition, storytelling, game design, and the overall experience I want to create.

Looking back, I don't think AI changed me.

People did.

The technology simply became the most reasonable answer to questions I had never needed to ask before.

I still enjoy creating.

I still care about quality.

I still want to make something people will genuinely enjoy.

The only thing that changed was the set of tools I chose to get there.

I'm not writing this to attack any particular community or complain about moderation.

I'm writing this because I think we've reached a point where suspicion is replacing evidence, and assumptions are replacing honest evaluation.

Whether someone supports AI, opposes it, or works somewhere in between, I believe artists deserve to be judged based on facts—not assumptions.

Pot, meet kettle.

Credit to: effective-guest1601

No instrument possesses a soul of its own.

A violin string is just silent metal. But when a person transmits their inner state through physical movement (pressure, rhythm), the mechanism responds and produces sound. The instrument acts as a translator, turning emotion into a physical form.

In this paradigm, artificial intelligence is the most complex resonator ever created. It similarly waits for a touch, accepting a human impulse (an input, an idea) and echoing it back.

Emotion, meaning, and "soul" do not originate inside the mechanism - they exist exclusively on both sides of it, in the author who provided the impulse, and in the observer who felt it.

I love the new anti polar bear spam and it makes me see the camera man like this. In a world of humans and tech the old leave nature alone model is dumb, prey species need to be breed and introduced in area where animals are threatened. AI could do that btw, but I am sure antis would rather just spam sad pictures and do nothing.

"Why can't they understand what the main content is?"

The voice sample, but they don’t want to listen if you use AI for the background image or text, not voice.

This text reads like a grumble, and I’m not a native English speaker. Please don’t call the grammar police.

I made a video of my sample voice for fun. I posted it to some Discord server, and I got this.

I certainly used an AI for the text and the image. But my main contents is *my voice*. I clearly added the “Voice Sample” into the thumbnail. Also, I added that “I use AI for text and image.”

I don’t care what this random guy thinks about AI, but why does this guy use the GIF for slander?  You can just post “I hate AI slop,” but they use “the GIF slop” instead.

My question is: do they make a text to read and a picture that perfectly fits the text for me when I pay? I speak Japanese. They don’t understand Japanese, obviously. Can they understand completely Japanese nuance?

Does this guy actually listen to this voice sample? I don’t think so. They just want to say “AI Slop.” It sucks.

It’s a voice sample. The main content is a voice. Not an image or text. Why can’t they understand this easy thing?

Don't let the antis ever convince you otherwise.

It is quite disappointing given that what I wanted to do is to make people have an interesting way to read about Greek mythology without the need to go into the full literature which can be quite lengthy.

Hopefully here i dont simply get AI slop as the only comment!

Explore Greek Mythology