Interesting that I’m not the only one that remembers the days of digital artists being considered as “cheap”, “worthless” or “cheating”. I found an old reddit threads that discussed it roughly just before genAI became a thing, and I could see the exact same things being said for the more reasonable AI usage these days: reddit.com/…/is_there_a_stigma_around_photoshop_n…

It just ends up being a ‘well known secret’ among professionals, and capitalism will find a way to monetize the hatred of those not in the know (willingly, or unknowingly) anyways. It’s fueled a long history of the “I can pay artists very little because their work is incredibly easy with Photoshop anyways!” mentality too, which ends up harming artist’s wallets too.

Those who claims to be artists by sharing raw generated images will remain frauds, and those who manages to integrate gen AI in their artist pipeline will be able to create better art pieces.

This is just a great point imo. And it’s why we should encourage truthfulness. In my opinion, while there are roads to be an artist that uses AI in their process, just like picking up a camera can lead to becoming a photographer, that’s not a given just because you have access to it. You will still have to imprint the work with your artistic spirit, and if the AI does all the work for you rather than assist you in line with your creative decisions, you just don’t fit my definition of an artist, even if the result looks good.

I hope in a way that ZUN will have ended up making this topic more approachable by choosing to come out and explain them publicly. It’s hard to ignore or reject ZUN’s prior works without AI. Maybe it will cause Touhou to be among the first communities to move past absolutist stances fueled by hate into more understanding and productive nuanced stances.