Finally, I just want to clear up, in case the context is misinterpreted. This poster was not requested or commissioned in any way. There is no intrinsic need for us to have a movie poster. I think for me, if the price for having a movie poster is AI imagery, I think I'd just rather not have one

It doesn't have to *look* good. It doesn't have to take time or effort. It just has to say something from you. Everything further is simply articulation of that which you have to say, but not the art itself

It cannot democratize its means of production either because everyone can make meaningful art as it is. That's everyone. Yes, even you, dear reader. The only thing that might stop you is a culturally distilled belief that you can't

Because of this, diffusion models cannot liberate art from exploitation, it can only commoditize it further because it carries inherent an ethos that art is only its aesthetics. It is corpo art by any another name

I also want to point out on the value of art, it is not the output aesthetics of art that gives genuine value it's the story which the artwork tells. Much of that story is built through the journey art takes through its creation as well as it's journey after

I also don't think it's correct to look at an AI model as just a tool. It is more like a non-sentient entity which acts as an agent of behalf of it's curator. In the case of Sora, that would be OpenAI which conducted the filtering and training of the model. Tools have constraints. Agents have biases

The more small communities like mine who reject AI content, the more we resist its normalization and preserve our creative authenticity. For communities like furries who express primarily through art, that really matters because the art shapes so so much of our identities and who we are

Small communities like mine at are the substrate which collectively give rise to larger cultures and movements. We exert some small, definite, yet immeasurable influence upon the larger communities which we are a part of. For us, that's the Furry, MOGAI, and Alterhuman communities and their auxilia

You can imagine why I don't want the voice of OpenAI/Microsoft speaking on behalf of my community even for something as small as a poster for a once-a-month movie night attended by a few dozen furries. I think such a place is, actually, vitally important to reject the use of AI-gen content

Such content can only communicate the voice, biases, and beliefs of OpenAI and Microsoft. It can never be fully excised from the work. Ever. Any time you use content produced from a generative model you are letting the curator of that model speak for you, visually, lingually, or otherwise

However, my issue is specifically with the imagery portion of the poster and in that any voice Teefa has spoken there is secondary to, and hidden by, the primary content which was generated by OpenAI's Sora diffusion model

I'm not going to downplay the effort that Teefa did do for this poster and that she does have some of her own voice within it in terms of its composition. Moreover, the fact that Teefa wanted to make something for our movie nights is really genuinely awesome

I believe the first one is more widely understood and discussed, so I'm gonna talk more about the second one here. What makes art intrinsically valuable is that it has something to say. It carries with it the beliefs, ethos, values, and ideals of the artist and communicates them within a community

This decision comes from two beliefs. One, I believe it is more important than ever to support the work of creatives in a time where their work is being undermined co-occurring with a rise in anti-intellectualism. And two, artistic voice really fucking matters a hell of a lot