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this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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Fuck AI
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I've always been confused about this train of thought, because it seems to justify the opposite of what it's trying to say.
I mean, if the argument is people will use whatever garbage they have on hand to make art... presumably that includes generative AI? Look, I lived through four decades of people making art out of ASCII. My bar for acceptance for this stuff is really low. You give people a thing that makes pictures in any way and you'll get a) pictures of dicks and b) pictures of other things.
I don't think GenAI will kill human art for the same reasons I don't think AI art is even in competition with human art. I may be moved or impressed by a generated image, but it'll be for different reasons and in different scales than I'm... eh... moved and impressed by hot dragon rock lady here. Just like I can be impressed by the artistry in a photo but not for the same reasons I'm impressed by an oil painting. Different media, different forms of expression, different skill sets.
In the absence of needing to use skills to make a living, I have no problem with AI art. In a hypothetical anarchist mutual aid society, people could make art with whatever methods they prefer. Some might create AI models to make art because they're interested in that sort of thing. Others will make art in the traditional ways, also because they're interested in that sort of thing. There doesn't have to be tension between the two, and their basic needs are all there.
When people have to use their skills to make a living, though, then there's a problem. So many of the places that were paying artists are now whipping something out with an AI model. That leaves artists without a way to cover their basic needs at all.
I don't know how much that logic tracks, at least long term. And I don't know that I'm going to be more inclined to be on the side of human labor over automation now when I wasn't for garments, car manufacturing and other commodities. The John Henry of visual arts I am not.
I do have a couple of seemingly opposing but not contradictory points to add to that, though. One is that historically anti-automation, anti-industrialization movements have a pretty bad track record at succeeding. The other is that I think you're giving "AI art" way too much credit. Small and medium-sized commissions may get impacted (I am on record saying that AI is the new "cousin who knows Photoshop" and I stand by it). For anything an actual professional needs to book and hire based on quality? Nah.
There may still be an impact on that high end, because I expect that generated elements will become a tool in an artist's toolset more than anything else. That may speed work up and require fewer people, but not "leave artists without a way to cover basic needs" necessarily. Just like photography, just like CG, just like Photoshop and so on. There was doom and gloom around all of those as well, and hyperbolic claims from tech peddlers, too. Go look up some of the claims of early photography entrepeneurs about what the technology would eventually be able to do, some are hilarious.
I also expect sooner or later people will get good at spotting telltale machine-generation quirks and put additional value in organic, human-looking creative products. People are already misidentifying human art as AI art, artists will likely lean into that. Think vinyl into CDs back into vinyl or the premium on less processed foods more than... I don't know, cars that don't have rattling doors or whatever.
That's a guess or a forecast, though. We'll see where it goes.
Progress leaves many professions behind. It's lamentable, but a price worth paying.
Which is nice to say when your profession isn't the one on the chopping block.
I'm a programmer. It is.
I'm also a programmer. No, we're not at risk.
The thing is, an AI 'artist' isn't making art. They are generating images with no real meaning or effort put into them.
That depends on what they're doing. If they're entering a prompt and rolling with what they get out of it, then sure.
If they're inputting a prompt and refining it with solely AI tools then meeeh, that starts to fade a little. I'd ask why someone is spending hours going back and forth with an AI instead of doing some of it manually, but it's hard to tell one way or the other from the final output.
If they're inputting a prompt, refining it with AI tools and heavily editing what comes out in image editing software that's approaching some strange digital mixed media weirdness I don't think we have particularly good intuitions for.
If they're inputting a prompt and using the output as some building block like a texture on a 3D model or for a content aware fill in photo editing or for a brush or a stamp I genuinely have no mental model for what impact that has in my assessment of the "meaning" or "effort" going into a piece, if I'm being perfectly honest.
Reductionism isn't serving us particularly well on this one. Makes the pushback feel poorly informed and excessively dogmatic.
if you hire a graphic designer to make you a thing, and keep rejecting designs and saying “do it a little more like this” “change this part though” for hours, would that make you an artist?
this is exactly the same only the graphic designers who really made it aren’t getting paid.
riding in a plane doesn’t make you a pilot. driving a car doesn’t make you a mechanic. sitting next to an band and saying “more cowbell” doesn’t make you a musician…. brushing your teeth doesn’t make you a dentist….
ai could be used by artists, as one of many tools, to make art, but just generating a picture from a prompt doesn’t make you an artist.
but fraudulent, compulsive liars and narcissists will do anything to pretend like they have talent short of actually developing talent in anything (because you need to accept failures and learn from them to improve)
I mean... you just described the process of making films, TV and videogames pretty much exactly, so... yeah?
Did you think George Lucas made all those Tie Fighters in a shed with a bunch of glue and sticks? Spielberg didn't design the look of Indiana Jones. We know who did it. We've seen all the iterations in the concept art. Movie nerds are obsessive like that. Peter Jackson famously had a literal approval stamp for things in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, or so the DVD extras will tell you.
Collaborative art is all over the place, and people in hands-off coordination roles that are merely guiding the work of other artists get credit all the time.
But again, you're missing the point and not reading the post you're responding to. You literally repeat my exact point as if it was a counterpoint. This entire conversation is built on a single preconceived idea and people literally can't see past that, even when the things they're responding to are entirely unrelated to the responses they're giving.
funny how you completely miss my point and say i’m doing that….
being a director and directing actors doesn’t make you an actor, so no… you’re stupid and you’re not an artist.
maybe you could call yourself an “AI image generator prompt writer”… but not an “ai artist”
Oh, so it's a nomenclature problem that you have?
I mean, I do get it, because the word "artist" is horrifically confusing in English. In most languages "artist" is just someone that engages in an artistic endeavour of any kind. This is true of English, too, but their default artist is a painter or illustrator, and that is the default "art", so people get weird about it. Fun fact, in Spanish the default "artist" is an actor or a performer instead. Weird, that.
But if that's your problem, that people who use AI are makes-artistic-things-artists and not makes-visual-art-artists I don't think anybody is gonna get particularly belligerent about it. Photographers don't draw pictures, either, and you don't see anybody complaining that they don't get the same word as painters. I don't mind. Call them "AI directors", it's all the same to me. We can be friends. If you're saying that you're A-OK with people crapping out images from prompting all day as long as they don't call themselves "AI artists" you're actually way more lenient than I am about these things.
You're still missing the point that the use of AI to generate specifically images isn't limited to "feed a model a prompt, share whatever comes out", and there are multiple layers of interaction and application from... well, that, to fairly minor automation tools. Putting all of them in the same boat is reductive and I'd argue outright incorrect.
and blocked
This is unrelated, but since it's (I believe) the first time I've been blocked here this is a good spot to point out that blocking on this platform sucks ass and this person probably doesn't realize that I can still post in response to them in a very visible way and they've barely even muted me from their own client views and notifications.
Fedi really needs a better solution for this, I'm not cool with this being taken as a worthwhile tradeoff for distributed hosting. This is exactly the setup Musk was proposing to use when he threatened to remove blocking from Twitter.
Speaking of nuanced points.
Jesus Christ, dude got dunked so hard he had to block lmao 🤣
i did not miss your point. i entirely understand it and i’m arguing against it.
but you’re too diluted to understand that you could be wrong, so you have to lie to yourself….
you’re not an artist
I am, in fact, not a makes-pictures-artist.
I have, in fact, been a makes-artistic-things-artist hiring and collaborating with makes-pictures-artists before, it should be said.
Not with AI, though. I don't typically mess with AI image generators.
I just don't like demagoguery of any kind.
Typing a prompt still isn't making art. If you look at art, everything has intent behind it, nothing is random, everyone has their own style that evolves. Like if you're drawing a meadow, there are lots of choices you make in the progress, like what plants you draw, in what style, in what stage, are any of them damaged for example. Art isn't just about the end result, it's the process itself.
Typing a prompt is describing an image, not making it.
Dragging a mouse isn't making art. Dragging a live mouse could be, PETA wouldn't like it though.
You did not read the whole post you're responding to, did you?
It's not often that you can see the exact moment an actual human brain ran out of token space, but here we are.
Finish Him!
Nothing will kill art itself, GenAI will simply be incorporated as another tool
Killing the ability to make money from art AND the bs that corporations are pulling in regards to AI, profit and making line go up is what people are mad about, but that anger is constantly misplaced leading to lines of thought like this lol
I believe this states the take many have - much like nobody batted an eye about auto-contrast, content-aware fill, or line smoothing. They weren't trying to replace humans with programs, weren't causing huge environmental impact, and weren't trained on stolen content. It's the ham-handed implementation that most are opposed to, combined with the obnoxious techbro mentality.
I think the argument is that an AI "artist" is incapable of creating art. Their "tool" does the work for them. Whereas other artists use digital tools but as just that - tools. The art comes from the artist.
This pretty well encapsulates my feelings, except for the issue of training the models. AI is cool tech, but the fact remains that people are making money off of scraped content. Not to mention the environmental aspect.
Honestly I find it difficult to reconcile.
In a perfect world, we would have open source models trained on public domain and properly licensed content.
I don’t think AI is going to replace artists any time soon. On the personal side, people create for the joy of it, whatever that means to them. On the professional side, people have a hard enough time communicating what they want to an actual person, much less a computer.
As someone that likely has moderate aphantasia, I really struggle with describing what I want. Being able to tell an image gen to make so many variations of X, and then commission a friend to take inspiration from Y and Z to make something original is really freeing for both sides, imo.
I’ve never gotten exactly what I’m looking for, but it almost always gives me something to point to, without doing a bunch of test drafts. I suppose that’s technically taking work away from the artist, but so does having an ‘undo’ button in procreate.
Idk, it’s a more complex issue than many make it out to be. I’m still further on the fuck ai side than not, just due to its current implementations.
End rant.