I think yall are mistaken. I have really tried to be polite about this up until now, but we need to talk.
There, okay, here's the thing. Nobody wants to be part of your stupid little club of self-aggrandizing snobs and aspirational know nothings who make "actual art."
I'm sorry, but it's true.
You're sort of a running joke at this point.
Nobody in their right mind wakes up and says, "gosh, I think I'm going to go trace photography for a living, and then lie about how hard I worked without photo references on twitter."
Nobody thinks all the bullying and hate speech yall do is cute or sexy. Nobody likes your ableism, your racism, your transphobia, your applied classism, your convenient rebranding of replacement theory ("you will not replace us!"), or the way yall routinely target women for harassment more than any other single demographic.
In short, nobody likes you, and for good reason. And we (the larger art community, not just the AI folks) respect you less with every day that passes.
Rest assured, nobody wants to emulate you.
If you are the keepers of art
If you're the keepers of art, the ones who have the historical honor and responsibility of being able to define it for others fine... fuck art. Fuck art, and fuck you. Because you've robbed the word of any meaning it might have had.
You're not an artist if you react to your own fear with violence. The only valid response to fear is creation, and if you idiots knew anything about art to begin with, you would fucking start there.
I don't give a shit what your images look like, how much "soul" you mixed into your latest commercial copyright infringing fan art commission, or how hard you worked, toiling away in the art mines of mediocrity.
None of that matters.
Is it a surprise that no real creativity ever seems to come from a fringe community that depends on conformity to maintain its very existence?
You march in lockstep.
You demand loyalty like a sadistic cult.
You punish those in your ranks that have the audacity to speak righteously against your unending abuses of power and platform.
I think you're the last people who have any right to talk about "ethics." That word is meaningless too.
In all of it, your untold secret is that you know this already, and well. None of what I have just said should be a secret to you.
Now, this is where, I would normally say something like, "You've been indicted by Dada, for high crimes of smugness against ART! quack quack, expect us."
But I don't need to.
The truth is the most damning thing of all, and you get to live with it.