This sounds quite a bit like the RIAA’s “how many musicians will stop producing music because it can be shared for free online.”

I don’t bring up my ties to the furry fandom here all that much because…well, why would I? But I’m gonna do it here and now because I feel like it will be instructive of my position on genAI in a number of ways. This consists of two different examples, both lengthy, so stick with me.

Back when I first got into the fandom, I found plenty of artists whose work I liked for the content as I much as I admired their work for the style. One in particular (whom I won’t name out of respect, though oldhead furries like me might know who I’m referencing) had a rather fun toon-like style. They’re still around and still posting, thankfully⁠—but many, many years ago, they stopped posting after at least two artists did their best to imitate his style without really adding any kind of stylistic flair of their own to their works. It’s not that the artist in question didn’t stop drawing; it’s that they stopped posting. You can think “oh well that’s just silly”, and sure, maybe it is. But the fandom lost out on years of that artist’s potential contributions because someone else tried imitating him and he didn’t like it.

That’s what I find frightening about genAI imagery: With the right set of models, anyone could replicate just about any artist with a recognizable style if they have enough images on which a model could be trained. At that point, why should anyone go ask the artist themselves for an image when an AI image generator can make the image in the desired style at a much quicker pace than the artist could?

And before you or anyone else says “well that just means human-produced work will be a premium purchase” or something like that: It kind of always has been. People give away works, yes. People produce works with no thought towards monetizing them. But some people do that because they don’t necessarily need the money. The “starving artist” trope/stereotype exists for a reason, and it’s because art⁠—for all the good it does our souls in this world⁠—doesn’t tend to pay the bills if you’re not treating it like a business. Lots of furries do commissions because they live in 2026 CE instead of a year where some rich asshole would pay an artist to work year-round on their art. And now they have to compete with genAI, which can generate numerous images in a fraction of the time an artist would need to create merely one. “Democratizing creativity” might seem like a noble goal, but if you really want to help artists, universal basic income would be a better idea than genAI.

Now I said there were two examples. This is the second: Some of the artists I found when I first got into the fandom are still around today⁠—which means that, like me, they’re oldheads who are at least in their 40s, if not their 50s. With any luck, they’ll be around for another decade or two to give us more art. But I recognize that life is what happens when we’re busy making plans, and an idle Tuesday can turn into the last day of one’s life out of nowhere. If one of the oldhead artists I follow happens to drop dead or otherwise retire from making art, that means I’ll never again see a new image from them. Their art, their style, their tastes in content⁠—all gone in the blink of an eye. That will absolutely suck.

And yet, because those artists are oldheads who still have significant followings, their art is widely available. An AI model could easily be trained on the totality of their work and made to replicate their style and their original characters. Once that’s done, that model can be plugged into an AI generator and made to create images in that artist’s style using characters that artist made. I could, theoretically, create works in that artist’s style forever.

But it wouldn’t be their art, would it? Oh, it would look like their art. It might even fool a moron in a hurry if there are no obvious flaws like fucked-up watermarks or extra limbs. But I would know that it isn’t their art, made their way, because they’re dead. And all I’d be doing is having a computer imitate that artist to an absurdly frightening degree because I couldn’t stand the fact that said artist is gone. When I talk about AI-generated “art” having no “soul”, this is, in part, what I’m talking about: It’s all imitation without meaning or process or anything that makes an artist do what they do. There’s no compulsion for a genAI model to make art in a given style; it’s an order to a mindless machine that the machine tries to follow it based only on its programming. A dead artist can’t produce any more; an AI model can produce, and produce in that artist’s style, so long as there’s a computer powerful enough to run it. And when we use genAI to “resurrect” the art of a person who is no longer with us, it feels like old depictions of zombies as people raised from the dead to work as slaves. (The same could be said of holograms of dead musicians trotted out to “perform” their songs.)

And while this isn’t necessarily connected to the fandom, I feel like I have to say this because it’s a deeply personal admission. I used genAI in the past to create images⁠—and I did it for longer than, say, a cutesy one-hour experiment to see what genAI is capable of. I’m talking weeks. Hundreds of images. And when my time experimenting was over, I looked back over the images I’d saved and felt…pretty much nothing. Oh, I genned some images that depicted ideas in my head in a way that was satisfying, but…well, to quote the most downvoted post on Reddit, there was no “sense of pride and accomplishment” to it. I didn’t make any of that “art” through toil and ache and learning and experimentation⁠—a machine made it because I told it to. It made me feel empty inside to know that I had these ideas, but the only way I could make them was with genAI. I deleted most, if not all, of those images. (My folders are in such disarray that there could be a handful of them still in there somewhere.)

The eponymous “Emptiness Machine” from the Linkin Park song is a metaphor for empty promises and false hope that lead to disillusionment. That makes it a perfect phrase to use for genAI: For all its promises of “democratizing creativity”, it does more to destroy the creative spark within people because the process is the art is the process. When you can get what you want all the time, you end up getting tired of getting it all the time. It makes you feel empty inside. And again, that’s all before we get to the very real⁠—and on Techdirt as of late, often overlooked and understated⁠—consequences of genAI that stretch beyond that soul-crushing emptiness.

There’s an episode of the classic Twilight Zone series called “A Nice Place to Visit”. In it, a middling thief is shot and killed, and he wakes up in the afterlife. A strange man greets the thief and gives him money and food, and the thief eventually figures out that he’s dead. When the strange man tells the thief he can have anything he wants, the thief figures that he’s in Heaven. A month later, after having everything he’s ever wanted⁠—and only that⁠—the thief begs the strange man to send him to Hell…only for the strange man to reveal that the thief was already there. After my own experiences, I think about genAI in a similar way to that Twilight Zone episode: The promises sound so heavenly, but the reality is much more hellish than one can imagine.