Don't applaud fake "creativity" in AI-generated garbage. You're applauding a parody of creativity, and

[highplainsdem]

86. I've said on DU that I sympathize with people forced to use AI for work or school...though I hope they

can get out of that situation soon.

And I sympathize with your desperation to make more money to make house payments. Whatever legal way you choose to do it, I wish you the best of luck with it.

However. You'll be competing with thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of wannabe T-shirt designers flooding platforms with AI-designed T-shirts, burying original work by real artists.

And often copying work by real artists, knowingly (probably most often) or unknowingly (no matter how good their intentions).

The AI users steal other AI users' designs, too, since nothing created by AI can be copyrighted. You might think the AI you're using came up with the greatest design in the world, something no one else has ever done. But the minute other AI users are aware of it, they'll rip you off - and if their online reach is greater than yours, they'll make the money off it, while you'll be lucky to make a fraction of what they're making. People will also believe it was their design. And there won't be a damn thing you can do about it, because you don't have a copyright. Because it wasn't your work.

And while I can kind of feel sympathy for AI users in that situation, most of my sympathy is with the real artists doing real T-shirt designs using their own real talent. Because they're the ones who really deserve the attention and the income.

And every T-shirt sold by a wannabe designer using AI cuts into possible sales by real artists who put real effort into honing their creativity.

Since people can buy only so many T-shirts. A thousand wannabes using AI to design T-shirts when they don't have that talent themselves do not also create a thousand times the demand for T-shirts.

They just dilute the value of T-shirt designs. Especially T-shirt designs by AI.

Designs by real artists usually will have more value, and they should. A lot of people don't want anything to do with AI slop.

Maybe - just maybe - your joining a tsunami of AI slop peddlers will lead you to develop skills of your own and stop using AI. To offer something of more value than AI slop. To find customers who value YOUR work. That's the best case scenario.

And then you'll also have the satisfaction of knowing it was your work. And if it's good, it can not only make you part of what you need to make house payments, but enough to pay for a house with a single piece of work. And that's a sense of satisfaction and pride that telling AI to spit something out for you can never match.