this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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Fuck AI
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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!