I can’t get upset about this, as it’s pretty much the only acceptable use for this kind of generated imagery, as far as I’m concerned - doing it for a lark, where the whole point is that it’s a contextually appropriate novelty and no actual illustrators are being replaced.
There’s definitely a layer of “let’s pretend” in this case, though (unlike so many cases of “AI art” use, where people have simply deluded themselves).
Given the cultural significance of Shodan in fan art and illustrator portfolios, I wouldn’t be surprised if that wasn’t the primary source for the training art, even assuming they used generic keywords - but it’s also extremely possible they straight-out used “Shodan” as a keyword and it’s 100% based on existing fan art.
Not exactly the same thing - people didn’t use cameras to replace illustrators by taking pictures of existing illustrations and saying, “Oh this isn’t your illustration, it’s an entirely different photograph! I don’t owe you nothing!”
Oh, it definitely is. The Chinese game industry, for example, has lost a significant percentage of illustration jobs to “AI” in the last year (70%, by some counts). That the output isn’t great (and there’s little control over it) doesn’t matter, because there’s not a lot of concern for quality. Remaining workers have ended up with far crappier jobs cleaning up generated images, and working even more hours (because they feel like they have to, to keep their jobs).
Of course, this works particularly well in the game industry (and especially the Chinese game industry), because there’s a whole sector that’s hungry for lots of images in highly conventional styles (for which there’s a lot of prior art on which to train the systems). Doing more original work (or even work in less popular styles) is currently safe, as is most game asset work (modeling, texturing, even creating 2D sprites). But some of that is soon to be infringed upon by automated systems. (And there’s some interesting applications of “AI”-assisted tools that could help alleviate certain types of drudgework for artists, but the attention - and money - isn’t focused there.)
