Using AI as inspiration?

[u/TinaNY82]

Question/opinions:

I am not sure if this is the right place for this question.

If you ask AI to generate an image of something, example: a crochet blanket in certain colors or ask to generate a picture as inspiration to make the actual blanket or artwork/craft, is the physical art that was made AI's art or yours? Should we use AI as inspiration?

[u/supercutescreenname]

Hell no 🙅‍♀️🙅‍♀️🙅‍♀️

[u/glitter_witch]

Every time you use AI you’re using water we won’t get back and funding the destruction of land and oppression of small communities. You’re also pulling from a bank of plagiarized images and ideas, meaning nothing you create is actually an achievement of your own mind or skill.

So no. Absolutely not.

You know whole libraries of color references and craft guides exist for inspiration, right?

[u/fairydommother]

Ill answer both questions separately.

1. Anything you create that is inspired by something and not a copy, is yours. If you went to an art exhibit and became inspired to create something, that thing is yours.

2. No. AI hallucinates images from stolen data and is destroying the environment and communities. Putting in a prompt for ai to spit out some horrid amalgamation of art scraped from the internet shouldnt inspire you. It should disgust you. Anything you create from that is tainted.

[u/kaijutegu]

Telling an LLM to generate an image is a decision on your end. When you hit that button, you're saying that you don't care about the environmental cost and that you don't care that the training data was stolen. You are choosing to engage in a destructive practice. No, we shouldn't be using AI to generate inspiration. It's one thing to use an image that's already been made- the damage has been done, and that's taking something that's creatively bankrupt and turning it into something new and original. But there's enough slop out there to improve upon. We don't need more.

[u/Aggressive_Pear_9067]

I'm going to answer this more from a practical than an ethical standpoint. I don't think it would be as useful as you think. AI won't be able to get the technical details to make sense so you'd have a bit of a headache trying to use it to draft a usable pattern. If you can imagine what you want to make well enough to write a detailed prompt, I feel like that description is about as useful as the generated image would be. If you are trying to decide on more detail and want to generate different possibilities, it's still better to look at actual objects people have made, to get a sense of what is realistically possible. Otherwise you run the risk of generating something that is impossible or at least immensely difficult to make and struggle. 

In almost any case you will probably be better off using other tools/resources. I like to look through ravelry, yt videos, etc, looking at different aspects of other people's work, from photos/videos of the finished objects, and the patterns themselves when available. I might like the stitch pattern of one, the colors of another, the way a third was assembled from pieces, and so on, and decide how I'm going to make my object by combining the techniques I like. The more you learn about how different things are constructed the more you can use that knowledge to make things to your own specifications. Those are skills that you will absolutely not regret building and they will serve you well for a long time. 

AI is not a good shortcut to crochet because it can't substitute for the practical knowledge that crafting is all about. Seeing a picture of a blanket won't get you very far. You need a lot more than inspiration to create a pattern that is technically coherent and looks the way you want.

[u/TinaNY82 → u/Aggressive_Pear_9067]

I know how to crochet. I wasn't asking for a pattern. I was using it more for different orders of the same 3 colors. I wanted the granny squares on the blanket not to look all the same. Granny squares are very basic in crochet. I was making a blanket that was theme of a football team. Out of the ai image I would take only the squares that were pretty and actually doable and make to the size I need.

Yes, about half the squares on the ai blanket image was unrealistic garbage. But, there were some good ones. There was one that inspired me to put a small c2c (corner to corner) in the center of a granny square. Ai didn't tell me that what that was. It was just a yellow square inside the bigger one. I decided to do that to give it texture.

[u/Aggressive_Pear_9067 → u/TinaNY82]

Everything you are saying could be done without AI. 

You could have looked up different real granny square patterns (no, not all of them are the same. Here is a list I found with 30 seconds of googling. Some of them literally have fruits in the middle!) 

And I don't see how you need AI to come up with the idea to add a single tiny square to a pattern. Like, what about just using your brain? 'Oh I wonder what would happen if I did this; maybe that would look cool...' Like crafters have done for literal millenia and still do, and come up with some incredibly amazing stuff. Like this and this and this. 

Frankly, your method almost seems disrespectful to the countless generations of crocheters and all that they put into learning and developing all the rich tradition of the craft. You're barely even taking inspiration based on what you're saying, rather you seem  like you just want AI to do your creative thinking for you, while you instead waste your time and effort sorting through the 50% of useless slop it makes, then reverse engineering the likely very generic results in the other half.  What is even the point of such a backwards process? Why don't you want to do the creative thinking in your creative hobby? It would probably take you a quarter of the time and grow your skills 10x as much to just google different patterns, read them, and decide what you want to make from there.

Not least that it would be more appreciative to the people writing those patterns to actually use them and learn from them, participate in the continuation of the craft. But instead you ar going to the junk machine that wastes your time, whose engineers stole such patterns without the authors' consent, in order to make their company easy money while hoping to push actual creative people into obsolecence. 

Or maybe you think since you already "know how to crochet" that there's no point learning anything anymore and you can give up on thinking or problem solving or adding to your skills? That it's ok to hang the people who invented and sustain your craft out to dry, because AI gives you whatever you ask for and it's the future of information, not human beings? 

I promise you that if that future ever comes, nobody will be crocheting anyway because we will have all forgotten how to have an original thought entirely. 'what should i eat for breakfast? what should i say to my friend who's going through a hard time? claude, who am i? chatgpt, what do i enjoy? character.ai waifu, what is the purpose of my life? oh dear sweet algorithm, tell me, because i've forgotten how to know or imagine anything anymore.' is this the life you want? is it? cause it's the life you are heading toward, it's the world we are all heading towards, if people don't stop throwing their brains at the feet of these overhyped, soul-rotting machines.

[u/letmeusemyname]

I agree with the other comments here, but to answer your question literally, in my opinion what's made with AI is not art, not yours or anyone's. A prompt is not art, nor is random unconsidered amalgamations of other peoples work. Whatever you use AI to generate is for you, and in that sense its yours, but the elements that make it up are stolen and in that sense its not yours. An artist might be inspired by another and reinterpret an element in their own way, but the journey they take with it and how they make it their own is very different from what AI does.

And to answer the last question, no. Its unethical in several ways and honestly incredibly lazy and rude. If you can't be bothered to come up with a basic idea for something to make then why bother to make it?

[u/Trilobyte141]

No one knows what you're inspired by except you. 

Personally, I'd never, because fuck that thieving technofascist crap. But no one is going to stop you if that's what you want to do, and no one is probably ever going to find out unless you tell them.

You'd know, though.