You will notice that when you purposefully misrepresent positions, put up strawmans, and generally treat others like shit, you will be treated in kind. you reap what you sow. you can cry about me not being civil, but do you seriously expect me to be civil and friendly with you when you come at me with "Just don’t pretend your opinion is some moral absolute the rest of us need to bow to. I certainly won't." or "But telling me it's "not my place" to say when reactions go too far? Who are you to decide what is or isn't my place?", don't expect me to be civil when you open like this. might be a useful tip for the future.
so, since you've doubled down on being illiterate and brachially stupid, let me explain things to you as if you're 5 years old. 
> "You're judging others for judging!" Classic deflection. I critiqued extremism, not people having opinions. I questioned knee-jerk outrage, not personal taste. If you’re unable to hold a coherent conversation, why bother showing up in a discussion forum?
YOU are the one who is out here claiming people who don't want to watch AI slop videos are extreme. YOU are the one judging others on their personal opinion on if they want to watch slop or not. and YOU are the one who's trying to tell others they're extreme for not wanting to listen to things that have any input by AI. This is YOU being judgemental, wrongfully claiming these people to be extreme, and this is YOU opening up the judging of others in the first place. it is not your place, nor your concern what others choose to consume in terms of music videos and music. you're entitled to an opinion, but writing off anyone who doesn't want to listen to, or watch sloppy AI garbage as "extreme" is insane. 

> "Tools have intent!" No, tools don’t. Try having a debate with a hammer—it might make more sense than this take. Tools do what humans make them do. AI isn’t a villain—it mimics input. If it's misused, blame the hand, not the handle.
1. AI is not a neutral tool like a hammer, because AI is not a passive, single-purpose tool. A hammer's purpose is to hit nails into things, and that's about it. AI is a very complex net of systems that are shaped by intentional design choices. Ai is trained on stolen data and thus inherits those ethical issues. it doesn't "mimic input" like you claim, it completely reproduces it, while cutting out the artist. AI is inherently designed to prioritize certain outcomes (e.g. minimizing costs), those are intents of the companies that made these AI models that are directly baked into the model itself.
2. Again, generative AI is explicitly designed to replace human labor. I genuinely don't know how you can believe that any artist with an ounce of self respect can introduce a tool into their creative process that is meant to replace the creative process as a whole. it just doesn't track and you not engaging this point is very telling. 
3. AI doesn't help the creative process in that it enhances any portion of it, it doesn't offer anything new to the artist, if anything, the data it has is heavily diluted by it training on its own output, which would harm the creative process of an actual artist long before offering anything of value for it. 
4. A hammer's misuse is limited to the individual user, but AI's harms are systematic and highly scalable. for example mass-theft of art made by real artists. or bias amplification where AI-driven facial recognition overwhelmingly harms marginalized groups. this isn't about a "bad user", it's about fundamentally harmful intent in design.
5. Starset using generative AI to replace aritsts (say what you will, they have done this), the blame shouldn't be on the fans for "misusing criticism" or "being extreme", like you are claiming, it's on the band for choosing a tool designed to devalue labor in the first place.
6. Tools always reflect the needs and values of their makers. a hammer reflects a need to build things. generative AI reflects a desire to extract value cheaply at the expense of real artists. any artist engaging with this is again, hypocritical by definition, assuming they don't want their own art to be stolen. and since Starset copyright strikes unauthorized usage of their songs, this applies to them as well.
your dismissal of my critique is a cheap cop-out that ignores the systematic issues inherent to AI. the issue isn't the user, it's the system. individuals willingly participating in it are part of the broader problem, not individual case studies.

> "AI has no value to artists!" That’s your opinion stated like gospel. Meanwhile, countless artists are experimenting with AI without being replaced—just as photography didn’t kill painting. This tired “only corporations benefit” line conveniently erases the creatives actually using it to make art.

1. yet another false equivalence. photography isn't AI. photography was a new medium that expanded artistic expression and created it's own niche of art. there was no replacement here, as painters adapted by looking into abstraction, surrealism and other artstyles that photography can't mimic. We can see this historically btw.
AI art is different as it mimics and mashes together already existing human art to create cheap derivatives. 
Where photography was there to open up a new field of artistic expression, AI art is here for replication. where photography decimated certain areas in traditional painting, it opened up for other artstyles to rise instead, simply because it couldn't mimic them. AI CAN and will mimic all artstyles, no matter if we're talking realism, impressionism, cubism, whatever else you will.
2. there's a fundamental power imbalance at play here. midjourney, adobe, openAI and all these different companies that own the AI tools have a monopoly on them. individual artists that include AI into their creative process (in whatever way you think that's productively possible), feed into the systems that will one day replace them. it's like praising coal miners for using company-owned shovels while ignoring black-lung disease. like it or not, this uncritical stance on AI art will be part of the reason why starset will have to deal with heaps of cheap copies of their own music, created by the very AI tools you're defending right now. 

> "BNW cover was AI!" Speculation parading as fact. Got proof? Post it. Otherwise, it's just noise.

decent post that boils it down, found it with a google search that took me less than 5 seconds. let's assume the cover isn't AI generated; Starset still never put out a proper statement, announcement or anything else. you also conveniently ignored this point, but they're ignoring their own message. if this cover wasn't AI generated, they would have an easy time opening up and saying it isn't, no? yet they don't do this. neither is the valid criticism they receive ever acknowledged in a non-snarky and bitchy manner. this just very clearly shows their lack of care on this topic, and instead of improving, they're doubling down on the slop by shitting out even more garbage MV's.

> The environmental card. A valid concern, badly applied. If AI’s carbon cost makes it evil, then so is gaming, streaming, even this subreddit. Funny how outrage always finds a convenient flag to wave.

1. yet another false equivalence. training AI models emits hundreds, if not thousands of tons of CO2 in short bursts. data centers for streaming or gaming or video editing or whatever else does use energy, but the emissions are spread across millions of users consuming content over time. aside from that, yet another point you conveniently ignored, AI's usage offers essentially 0 public benefit. 
this isn't whataboutism, this is about prioritizing the most egregious offenders, which currently happens to be AI models and their data centers.
2. the power required to run and grow AI models doubles every 3-4 months. if gaming, streaming, whatever else, energy use grows linearly, AI models grow exponentially. 
3. companies push AI into everything while disregarding actual use cases, efficiency or care for the enviornment. this is planned obsolescence for human labor in favor of short-term profits.
4. streaming, gaming, whatever else serves a clear demand, while AI solves no problems. companies push it to artificially create demand. the vast majority of AI's output is redundant and low-value, which makes its monumental emissions even harder to justify.
5. all tech should be powered by renewables, but AI energy demands are simply outpacing existing green infrastructure. 
6. gaming, streaming, whatever else companies are increasingly pressured to switch to renewable energy sources. AI companies lobby for deregulation while greenwashing. good example here is google's "AI for good" campaigns that are meant to distract from their AI models emissions rising dramatically.
7. the real convenient flag here is you deflecting criticism. dismissing valid critique as "hypocritical" is a typical corporate strategy to shut down dissent. you're basically saying "you criticize oil companies but you drive a car!". the goal isn't to eradicate AI, it's to demand transparency and improving current conditions on energy sources, prioritizing smaller, better adjusted models instead of brute-force computation, regulations to prevent AI from becoming the next crypto, and atleast morally most importantly, proper regulations that protect creatives from theft and replacement. 

if you're more offended by my tone instead of the actual exploitation and systematic issues that AI brings to the planet, congrats, you mastered the art of missing the point. but by all means, keep polishing your beard. it's clearly your most compelling argument. i'm not gonna engage with this absolute brainrotting discussion anymore than this.