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Comment by smolder | Hacker News Reader

The other day I recommended someone try out pixlr as a free image editor, as I remember it being a nice tool, and they told me "I don't want an AI tool. I hate AI." I was confused, went to the site, and saw it is plastered with adverts for some AI image generation features. The actual editor seems buried. People do NOT like having AI stuff shoved in their face. The investors out there pushing every company to develop an AI strategy or whatever are misguided.

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You say that but in my experience the same kinds of people who will say that are also the kinds of people who demonstrably don't actually even know what AI is.

They're the same types who'll insist that DALL-E is just making collages of other artists' work, for example.

It's a black box that takes human produced artwork without consent and spits out superficial mediocre content a dime a dozen. It also takes away developer time and focus from other aspects of the software. I don't think you need to understand the algorithms underneath to have a problem with that.

It's possible to be a reasonable, thoughtful person and disagree with aspects of what you just wrote.

Personally I dislike being morally steamrollered on complex, nuanced topics.

I think it's important to contextualize the situation. The Adobe TOS were updated, and people where understandably concerned over the rights Adobe now has over private customer data. The biggest issue was this part: "Licenses to Your Content. Solely for the purposes of operating or improving the Services and Software, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free sublicensable, license, to use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, and translate the Content."

People looked at this and immediately assumed this was added to allow Adobe to train models with people's private work.

Adobe has now updated their TOS, but this was a breach of trust.

Either way, in the end, this potential AI threat is just another reason to not store stuff in the "cloud".

> You say that but in my experience the same kinds of people who will say that are also the kinds of people who demonstrably don't actually even know what AI is.

Funny. In my experience AFK it is the people who use AI that have zero idea what it is and think answers can be blindly trusted. The ones who don’t like it can enumerate the drawbacks clearly.

The pro and anti sides of generative text and generative art seem to be completely separate, so I don't think they can be mixed up like this. On the generative art side, I find the users to be well-versed while the artists who worry about it are currently deleting years of posted work to reupload with questionable anti-AI tools like Glaze long after that art has already been scraped and trained on.

FWIW I'm on the pro-artist side and anti-the current state of things, and wish we could start over with a collaboration between technologists and artists rather than each side having nothing but sneering contempt for the other.

> People do NOT like having AI stuff shoved in their face

People don't like having bad or unhelpful AI features crammed into products but seeing the growth of ChatGPT, Midjourney, Adobe Generative Fill, Udio and Luma people definitely do like AI that actually works.

The ML-based similar sound search in Live 12 has been a huge help. It replaced searching for the right percussion sound with a button on the drum rack that moves through similar sounds at an instrument or rack level. I can also use it to search for similar Foley to add variety in the textures that tie the track together.

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