Focusing on "copying" seems like missing the forest for the trees. There's the copyright angle, but copyright laws are unnatural obstacles designed to give the original author some control over what happens after publishing. They're not fundamental, we made the laws.
What is fundamental is this: every artist starts out by copying the works of others. It's how you learn.
And in that framing, once you publish your derived work, there is only one question that arises - if you don't credit the original author but sign your own name, you're fundamentally misleading your audience. Your audience implicitly assumes you made the thing. Maybe you made 95% of it, but if you don't give due credit, it looks bad once your audience discovers that.
On more than one occasion my perception of an artist has shifted once I discovered the "brilliant work" they created was actually a remake of somebody else's brilliant work. It's a feeling of being misled. It's never a feeling of "wow, this guy is a total hack and has no ability of their own".
They wouldn't copy each other for copyright infringement as much as it was a mark of respect. They carried each other's arts as an evolution and respect towards each other rather than copying; all bringing a small twist on what was before.
> On more than one occasion my perception of an artist has shifted once I discovered the "brilliant work" they created was actually a remake of somebody else's brilliant work. It's a feeling of being misled.
The spirit of the famous - cited in the TFA as well - quote "great artists steal" is exactly that. If you don't know that the inspiration came from somewhere and believe that what an artist did was created in a vacuum, you will certainly think much higher of said artist.
This sounds so insane to me. If I own land and grow a tree on it, the tree and its fruits are private property forever (mine until I die, then inherited by my children, then their children, or sold, transferred, etc ad nauseam). At no point does the tree become "public", that would be utter nonsense. It is property. Why should my ideas then be anything different? They come from my head. I own myself, including my head, thus I should own the fruits of my head like I own the fruits of my tree and they should remain property forever. The fact that copyright expires is one of the great tragedies of modern life, though at least I can take solace in knowing I own my ideas until I die.
Copyright law exists exactly because it is universally accepted that ideas are not property: Copying an idea or expression of it does not deprive you of your ideas.
The entire notion of "intellectual property" is the creation of an artificial monopoly rooted in very distinct and separate goals from physical property that requires separate laws if you want to restrict copying or exploitation, because property law explicitly does not cover them.
Most copyright laws are also justified implicitly or directly in the legal texts allowing them as creating an incentive for the advancement of the arts and sciences - a temporary monopoly right granted by the state as a deviation from perceived "natural right" - on the belief that granting that right creates more benefits for the public than not having them, by encouraging the creation of more works.
And no copyright law protects your ideas. They protect the specific expression of them. Patents - which do protect ideas - are by design far more restricted and limited exactly because they are far more invasive in depriving the public of use of the very idea for the duration.
Did you spend your entire life in isolation from the rest of human society? Because if not, then you have been influenced throughout your life in a multitude of subtle and not-so-subtle ways by the works of others. In what way, then, are the fruits of your head entirely yours? We're all standing on the shoulders of giants.
Unlike the tree, nobody can take your idea away from you. You retain possession of your idea even if somebody copies it. It sounds insane to me to think you should get permanent control over other people's communication just because you had the idea before them.
Perhaps, but that is your tree, if someone takes a cutting from your tree and grows it into their own tree you shouldn't own that tree, your tree is still there.
Eventually you get to the point where someone asks why the tree is theirs and they say it's because someone in history planted it, they were a relative, so it is mine now. It is hard to assert a moral justification for long term hereditary ownership without inviting investigations on how it was those ancestors came to have the resources that caused the ownership to begin.
Such a weird take. What are the similarities between your fantasies and land that to you make the philosophical convictions involved in private property laws applicable to those fantasies? Why isn't it good enough for you to fantasise about land and a tree, and why doesn't the answer to this undermine your reasoning?
Personally I'm not convinced by the arguments for private property, which makes your comparison even weirder than you likely intended.
> I should own the fruits of my head like I own the fruits of my tree and they should remain property forever.
You're blindly assuming that in owning a thing now, you must naturally own it forever; that you can live forever in an eternal "now," like a child or an animal. But that's not how the natural world works, nor is it how the human world works. Supposing you own a particular tree; if you let the fruit from that tree fall to the ground and rot, you mustn't complain if someone else, picking up that fruit, saves it from rot.
Compare Schopenhauer, "The World as Will and Representation," IV.62:
> Take the case of an object that has been worked on, improved, or guarded and protected from mishap through someone’s efforts, however small, even if they amounted to no more than plucking or picking up some wild fruit from the ground: someone who seizes this object clearly deprives the other of the results of the energy he has expended on it; he is making the other’s body serve his will instead of its own [...] i.e. he is doing wrong. — On the other hand, simply enjoying something without doing any work on it or safeguarding it against destruction gives us as little right to the thing as the declaration of our will to be its sole owner. Thus, when a family has hunted by itself in a district for even a hundred years without having done anything towards its improvement, then this family cannot keep out a newcomer who wants to hunt there too without morally doing wrong. There is absolutely no moral ground for the so-called right of preoccupation, which holds that simply by virtue of having enjoyed a thing you can demand the exclusive right to its further enjoyment as an additional reward. The newcomer would have much more of a right to tell anyone whose claim rests merely on this right (the right of preoccupation): ‘the very fact that you have been enjoying it for so long makes it right that others should enjoy it now.’
Compare also Aesop:
> A Dog asleep in a manger filled with hay, was awakened by the Cattle, which came in tired and hungry from working in the field. But the Dog would not let them get near the manger, and snarled and snapped as if it were filled with the best of meat and bones, all for himself. The Cattle looked at the Dog in disgust. "How selfish he is!" said one. "He cannot eat the hay and yet he will not let us eat it who are so hungry for it!"
It's not a "should" -- ideas simply are fundamentally different from physical materials, and the norms we use to deal with the inherent qualities of one don't automatically translate over to the other without a suitable rationale.
Physical materials qualify as property because they are economically rival: one party possessing and using them inherently excludes others, meaning that competing claims to the same thing must be resolved by one party surrendering their claims to the other. There's no agree-to-disagree mechanism available, so we need a way to resolve disputes in favor of one party or another.
There is no clear application of this to non-rival intangibles: there is no conflict between two people using similar ideas independently of each other in the first place. Someone copying your idea isn't analogous to them picking fruit off of your tree, it's analogous to them learning from what you're doing, and then going off and planting their own tree on their own land.
Modern "intellectual property" is a contrivance by people desiring to artificially incentivize certain categories of activity by attempting to replicate one of the downstream effects of the inherent exclusivity of goods, namely commercial markets. So you wind up with a positive-law intervention to create artificial scarcity in order to produce similar second-order consequences to what comes about when scarcity exists naturally.
That's why property rights have been recognized in all civilizations in human history -- and are likely a prerequisite for organized civilization to exist in the first place -- whereas copyright laws in their modern form date to the 18th century.
In fact, artificial "intellectual property" conflicts with natural property rights, in that in claiming a universal monopoly on arranging any bits of matter into particular patterns, you are actually claiming the right to stop people from using their own actual property as they please.
Was required back in the early 2000s already, but that’s not really what the article is about. It’s talking about derived work created by recreating another artist’s existing work in a different medium. Being able to provide WIP material is only evidence that the technical labor is yours, not that the artistic concept is original.
> Theft from the outside world, however, is often taken lightly - especially when it comes to graphics.
One should not forget where the demoscene is coming from: crackers. The whole point of "intros" was to show off the skills of whoever cracked a piece of software. So obviously, the views demoscene held on intellectual property are not mainstream, if we can say it like that.
The shift to a more creative and law abiding art scene, led by adults and not rebellious teenagers is more recent development.
I think very initially it was indeed so, crackers were the ones doing the intros. But very quickly the efforts got split, most of the time, the person doing the intro was a different person, the person doing the music was another person and finally another person was the one doing the actual crack. I don't think it took very long for this split to be the norm, even though very early I'm sure there was individuals doing all three pieces alone.
As it happens I'm just on a train to Airbnb with large group of demoscene and fractal art friends, full week ahead of the Revision[0] demoparty! Hells yeah
My top pick for pixel art would be anything by Made of demogroup Bomb, don't have a good link to hand sorry and need to change trains etc. Also check this amazing pixel art book: https://www.themastersofpixelart.com/
Let's not forget that most of these pictures were made by teenagers, doing the best they could (and hoping others didn't know about Boris Vallejo). The demoscene was very young back then. Copying is generally considered pretty lame in the demoscene these days.
I grew up in the era of the Amiga and got into computing in some part due to demoes like Technological Death and Unreal. Not sure if 10 years is too new to be considered 'retro', but "Intrinsic Gravity" by Still is my favourite demo ever. It's lots of different scenes that transition beautifully from one to another: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZxPhDC-r3w
> Farting around with Amigas in 2026 means actively choosing to make things harder for the sake of making things harder. Making that choice and still outsourcing the bulk of the craft and creative process is like claiming to be a passionate hobby cook while serving professionally catered dinners and pretending they're your own concoctions.
People wanting to explore the use of generative AI for vintage computers is happening not just for graphics but for code too.
I think in the case of code though, it's still interesting because I don't believe there's been any success yet. I hear of people having success with Claude in contemporary settings but it seems to fare less well when working for older computing platforms. There's a reason for that of course and it's worth exploring.
However, it will cease to be interesting as soon as the first person manages to create something substantial. At the point, the scene should probably shun it for the reasons stated in the quote.
Man, this really brings one back to discovering https://gfxzone.planet-d.net/ sometime around 1999 (when this was already fading into the past because the scene was dying, PC with 24bit graphics and painting software pushing out DPaint andAmiga palette stuff etc), reading all the old interviews where "No Copy!/?" was a core issue and looking at the galleries.
"Danny leaves the scene" (because it's just a bunch of kids with scanners and he's got a job at Eidos now) never forget!
These people literally gods to me growing up. My parents were poorer than others so we never had any computer better than an acorn electron but the demos my friends with amigas and Atari ST’s showed my blew my mind.
I like the case of video editing. This is a situation where oftentimes zero percent of the source material is your own creation. Most would still consider this an artform. Shaping the overall meaning of a pile of raw assets is usually way more valuable than any one asset in isolation.
Successfully integrating many disparate parts has always been the big ticket item. Dealing with the rough edges and making different ideas play together nicely is where all the value lives in most businesses.
I don't think anyone was selling demos commercially or trying to pass off the creative ideas as their own work. With this in mind, we should set aside ideas of plagiarism, copyright, etc. It was a showcase of technical prowess/creativity. People knew what Death Dealer looked like & if they saw it pop up in a demo, they wouldn't think the demogroup was passing it on as their original idea (I would assert this was a given). As such, it was meant to be a reference. People thought they knew the limitation of their computer. They would play Lemmings, or whatever, and think that's as good as the graphics on the Amiga can get. The point of the demo was to blow those conceptions away.
The creative part in a demo wasn't the the art itself, the subject, the composition, etc., no, it was representing something thought impossible. Eventually, kinda like how photography changed painters' relationship with realistic representation, more powerful tech did the same with these types of demos, so the medium moved on.
Not sure I agree with the final takeaway point. At least from a personal standpoint anyway. I used AI images in a couple of Amiga intros, but actively admitted to using them. At the time there wasn't quite the backlash against their use, so now would completely steer clear, but not having access to a graphic artist is reflected in the output I've managed in the recent times (zero).
> Pixel artist Lazur's 256 colour rendition (left) of a photo by Krzysztof Kaczorowski (right). A masterful copy showcasing the sharpness, details and vibrancy achievable with pixel techniques.
Well - the edited image looks clearer in the rendition, but also more fake. So unless that was the goal, I prefer the more blurred image, simply because it is more authentic than that digital edit. Many AI images have a similar problem; they look very out of place. I noticed this in some games where AI generated images are used. The images look great but they simply don't fit into the game at hand or they have a style that looks alien. Case in point was mods for the game Baldur's Gate 2 EE, where these images are great but they look very outside-ish. And that's a problem that seems to be hard to get rid of from such generated images, at the least for most of those I saw so far.
Nice video from the Ahoy channel on his recreation of a pixel art burger that I think offers a really nice insight into the process for creating images like these
It's hard to get in the era of ubiquitous 32 bit color depth, but back in the day, part of the show was making merely your hardware output picture very close to the reference in as many colors as possible and good resolution too. This was where Amiga's special video modes could really shine.
Thus, some demos, like the one where Lazur's image came from [0] were just slideshows of very colorful images that were more than likely traced from something.
That's was a great read and I agree with the author. Though to be honest, I don't particularly like the type of Amiga pixel art in the article. That is, pixel art with relatively high resolution and relatively high color depth. Everything looks too smooth and hyperrealistic in my opinion.
I think things can look much better for pixel art that is either very low resolution (e.g. the small characters and objects in a SNES game, which would usually be just a few pixels wide, so every pixel has to be placed deliberately) or has a very low color depth (a pallette between two to ~16 colors, like the backgrounds in a PC-88 game), or both (like the sprites in a Game Boy game).
An example where higher color depth can ruin the visuals is "Snatcher" by Kojima. The backgrounds for the original PC-88 and MSX versions were relatively detailed (200x100 pixels perhaps), while the color depth was very low (8 colors?), which greatly accentuated the pixel-art look. However, the later re-releases added more and more colors and smooth gradients, which only made it look worse, like a mediocre comic book.
Well-balanced, well-written article. It linked to a site called demozoo that used Cloudflare bot detection to block me at least 6 times from my home IP that CF had heretofore permitted, which is damn nice of them considering nothing nefarious ever originated from this address.
So, no way to tell if the illustrations were illustrative.
This is a great examination, and I think reminds me of why I'm not so panicky about AI art -- there was pretty much the same kind of panic around the invention of photography.
It will change, but craft and "look what I did" won't go away.
constraints are what make demo scene art so good imo. when you have 64k to work with every single pixel has to earn its place. compare that to AI image gen where you can produce alot of variations at zero cost and somehow everything ends up looking less intresting. theres something about working within tight limits that forces real creative decisions instead of just iterating until somthing looks ok
It would be so awesome to make a cartoon today using original techniques with hand-drawn scenes, multiplane cameras, and most importantly jazz music :)
>It's a place of refuge from the constant churn of increased efficiency
Increased efficiency also seems to be part of its appeal. The limitation is you can't increase efficiency by just upgrading computer specs, but instead have to find innovating ways to use the existing resources as efficient as possible to make something great. These kinds of optimization or compression problems seems like something AI would be very helpful for, so I think it is premature to try and ban its usage.
If only the demoscene wasn’t so horrible culturally. It’s absolutely full of old sceners who have “earned” being dicks to people, and unfortunately many newbies who think that the way to be a real scener is to copy that behaviour. The constant flamewars on pouet.net are embarrassing. It is a good reminder that the internet did not used to be a nicer place though
I would contest that choosing not to reveal the use of AI is due to an agreement of the nature of the behaviour. In an ideal world that could maybe be the case, but I think the driving force behind secrecy is harassment.
There are those who use AI as part of their process proudly, but secretly, because they know they will receive abuse.
I really wonder how some people think of themselves as artists while simultaneously attacking another persons choice of self expression.
93 comments
What is fundamental is this: every artist starts out by copying the works of others. It's how you learn.
And in that framing, once you publish your derived work, there is only one question that arises - if you don't credit the original author but sign your own name, you're fundamentally misleading your audience. Your audience implicitly assumes you made the thing. Maybe you made 95% of it, but if you don't give due credit, it looks bad once your audience discovers that.
On more than one occasion my perception of an artist has shifted once I discovered the "brilliant work" they created was actually a remake of somebody else's brilliant work. It's a feeling of being misled. It's never a feeling of "wow, this guy is a total hack and has no ability of their own".
They wouldn't copy each other for copyright infringement as much as it was a mark of respect. They carried each other's arts as an evolution and respect towards each other rather than copying; all bringing a small twist on what was before.
> On more than one occasion my perception of an artist has shifted once I discovered the "brilliant work" they created was actually a remake of somebody else's brilliant work. It's a feeling of being misled.
The spirit of the famous - cited in the TFA as well - quote "great artists steal" is exactly that. If you don't know that the inspiration came from somewhere and believe that what an artist did was created in a vacuum, you will certainly think much higher of said artist.
> if you don't credit the original author but sign your own name, you're fundamentally misleading your audience
Even that has its limitations, because otherwise nobody would be able to draw references. The challenge is always where to draw the line.
The entire notion of "intellectual property" is the creation of an artificial monopoly rooted in very distinct and separate goals from physical property that requires separate laws if you want to restrict copying or exploitation, because property law explicitly does not cover them.
Most copyright laws are also justified implicitly or directly in the legal texts allowing them as creating an incentive for the advancement of the arts and sciences - a temporary monopoly right granted by the state as a deviation from perceived "natural right" - on the belief that granting that right creates more benefits for the public than not having them, by encouraging the creation of more works.
And no copyright law protects your ideas. They protect the specific expression of them. Patents - which do protect ideas - are by design far more restricted and limited exactly because they are far more invasive in depriving the public of use of the very idea for the duration.
Eventually you get to the point where someone asks why the tree is theirs and they say it's because someone in history planted it, they were a relative, so it is mine now. It is hard to assert a moral justification for long term hereditary ownership without inviting investigations on how it was those ancestors came to have the resources that caused the ownership to begin.
Personally I'm not convinced by the arguments for private property, which makes your comparison even weirder than you likely intended.
> I should own the fruits of my head like I own the fruits of my tree and they should remain property forever.
You're blindly assuming that in owning a thing now, you must naturally own it forever; that you can live forever in an eternal "now," like a child or an animal. But that's not how the natural world works, nor is it how the human world works. Supposing you own a particular tree; if you let the fruit from that tree fall to the ground and rot, you mustn't complain if someone else, picking up that fruit, saves it from rot.
Compare Schopenhauer, "The World as Will and Representation," IV.62:
> Take the case of an object that has been worked on, improved, or guarded and protected from mishap through someone’s efforts, however small, even if they amounted to no more than plucking or picking up some wild fruit from the ground: someone who seizes this object clearly deprives the other of the results of the energy he has expended on it; he is making the other’s body serve his will instead of its own [...] i.e. he is doing wrong. — On the other hand, simply enjoying something without doing any work on it or safeguarding it against destruction gives us as little right to the thing as the declaration of our will to be its sole owner. Thus, when a family has hunted by itself in a district for even a hundred years without having done anything towards its improvement, then this family cannot keep out a newcomer who wants to hunt there too without morally doing wrong. There is absolutely no moral ground for the so-called right of preoccupation, which holds that simply by virtue of having enjoyed a thing you can demand the exclusive right to its further enjoyment as an additional reward. The newcomer would have much more of a right to tell anyone whose claim rests merely on this right (the right of preoccupation): ‘the very fact that you have been enjoying it for so long makes it right that others should enjoy it now.’
Compare also Aesop:
> A Dog asleep in a manger filled with hay, was awakened by the Cattle, which came in tired and hungry from working in the field. But the Dog would not let them get near the manger, and snarled and snapped as if it were filled with the best of meat and bones, all for himself. The Cattle looked at the Dog in disgust. "How selfish he is!" said one. "He cannot eat the hay and yet he will not let us eat it who are so hungry for it!"
> Why should my ideas then be anything different?
It's not a "should" -- ideas simply are fundamentally different from physical materials, and the norms we use to deal with the inherent qualities of one don't automatically translate over to the other without a suitable rationale.
Physical materials qualify as property because they are economically rival: one party possessing and using them inherently excludes others, meaning that competing claims to the same thing must be resolved by one party surrendering their claims to the other. There's no agree-to-disagree mechanism available, so we need a way to resolve disputes in favor of one party or another.
There is no clear application of this to non-rival intangibles: there is no conflict between two people using similar ideas independently of each other in the first place. Someone copying your idea isn't analogous to them picking fruit off of your tree, it's analogous to them learning from what you're doing, and then going off and planting their own tree on their own land.
Modern "intellectual property" is a contrivance by people desiring to artificially incentivize certain categories of activity by attempting to replicate one of the downstream effects of the inherent exclusivity of goods, namely commercial markets. So you wind up with a positive-law intervention to create artificial scarcity in order to produce similar second-order consequences to what comes about when scarcity exists naturally.
That's why property rights have been recognized in all civilizations in human history -- and are likely a prerequisite for organized civilization to exist in the first place -- whereas copyright laws in their modern form date to the 18th century.
In fact, artificial "intellectual property" conflicts with natural property rights, in that in claiming a universal monopoly on arranging any bits of matter into particular patterns, you are actually claiming the right to stop people from using their own actual property as they please.
The Revision demo party is soon. From the competition rules for "Oldskool Graphics" [0]:
> Include exactly 10 (ten) working stages of your entry. All entries without plausible working stages will be disqualified.
Yikes...
The rules for "Modern Graphics" [1] and "Paintover" similarly also require work stages, but fewer.
[0]: https://2026.revision-party.net/competitions/oldskool/#oldsk...
[1]: https://2026.revision-party.net/competitions/graphics/#moder...
> Theft from the outside world, however, is often taken lightly - especially when it comes to graphics.
One should not forget where the demoscene is coming from: crackers. The whole point of "intros" was to show off the skills of whoever cracked a piece of software. So obviously, the views demoscene held on intellectual property are not mainstream, if we can say it like that.
The shift to a more creative and law abiding art scene, led by adults and not rebellious teenagers is more recent development.
My top pick for pixel art would be anything by Made of demogroup Bomb, don't have a good link to hand sorry and need to change trains etc. Also check this amazing pixel art book: https://www.themastersofpixelart.com/
[0] https://2026.revision-party.net/
> Farting around with Amigas in 2026 means actively choosing to make things harder for the sake of making things harder. Making that choice and still outsourcing the bulk of the craft and creative process is like claiming to be a passionate hobby cook while serving professionally catered dinners and pretending they're your own concoctions.
People wanting to explore the use of generative AI for vintage computers is happening not just for graphics but for code too.
I think in the case of code though, it's still interesting because I don't believe there's been any success yet. I hear of people having success with Claude in contemporary settings but it seems to fare less well when working for older computing platforms. There's a reason for that of course and it's worth exploring.
However, it will cease to be interesting as soon as the first person manages to create something substantial. At the point, the scene should probably shun it for the reasons stated in the quote.
"Danny leaves the scene" (because it's just a bunch of kids with scanners and he's got a job at Eidos now) never forget!
Successfully integrating many disparate parts has always been the big ticket item. Dealing with the rough edges and making different ideas play together nicely is where all the value lives in most businesses.
The creative part in a demo wasn't the the art itself, the subject, the composition, etc., no, it was representing something thought impossible. Eventually, kinda like how photography changed painters' relationship with realistic representation, more powerful tech did the same with these types of demos, so the medium moved on.
> Pixel artist Lazur's 256 colour rendition (left) of a photo by Krzysztof Kaczorowski (right). A masterful copy showcasing the sharpness, details and vibrancy achievable with pixel techniques.
Well - the edited image looks clearer in the rendition, but also more fake. So unless that was the goal, I prefer the more blurred image, simply because it is more authentic than that digital edit. Many AI images have a similar problem; they look very out of place. I noticed this in some games where AI generated images are used. The images look great but they simply don't fit into the game at hand or they have a style that looks alien. Case in point was mods for the game Baldur's Gate 2 EE, where these images are great but they look very outside-ish. And that's a problem that seems to be hard to get rid of from such generated images, at the least for most of those I saw so far.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4EFkspO5p4
Thus, some demos, like the one where Lazur's image came from [0] were just slideshows of very colorful images that were more than likely traced from something.
[0] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3715 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmhffwhGiK0
I think things can look much better for pixel art that is either very low resolution (e.g. the small characters and objects in a SNES game, which would usually be just a few pixels wide, so every pixel has to be placed deliberately) or has a very low color depth (a pallette between two to ~16 colors, like the backgrounds in a PC-88 game), or both (like the sprites in a Game Boy game).
An example where higher color depth can ruin the visuals is "Snatcher" by Kojima. The backgrounds for the original PC-88 and MSX versions were relatively detailed (200x100 pixels perhaps), while the color depth was very low (8 colors?), which greatly accentuated the pixel-art look. However, the later re-releases added more and more colors and smooth gradients, which only made it look worse, like a mediocre comic book.
e.g. I zoomed in to view the matchbox texture described in the article, and found it a blur. (Clicking loads the uncompressed PNG.)
Personally, I think for this page, loading full res images inline is warranted. The resulting 3MB page size would be more than justified :)
https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/ejsb22/micha...
So, no way to tell if the illustrations were illustrative.
It will change, but craft and "look what I did" won't go away.
>It's a place of refuge from the constant churn of increased efficiency
Increased efficiency also seems to be part of its appeal. The limitation is you can't increase efficiency by just upgrading computer specs, but instead have to find innovating ways to use the existing resources as efficient as possible to make something great. These kinds of optimization or compression problems seems like something AI would be very helpful for, so I think it is premature to try and ban its usage.
There are those who use AI as part of their process proudly, but secretly, because they know they will receive abuse.
I really wonder how some people think of themselves as artists while simultaneously attacking another persons choice of self expression.