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I don’t trust anyone who talks about ‘creators’ instead of artists.
I fucking hate the unquestioned assumption that speed and efficiency are always better and that everyone should strife for them. Maybe i like the process, maybe i like taking things slow and not rushing stuff, be that programming or art or whatever.
Plus in most cases, efficiency doesn’t reflect in your bottom line anyways, just the share holders, but we’ve been so brainwashed to see it as a virtue
It’s because of the commodification. They don’t recognize art, only content and units of sellable culture. And because of the implication that they expect a cut, unearned.
It’s true in the sense that it’s fantastic at laying down a template for your ideas, which you can then refine and finesse yourself.
The only issue is what capitalism is doing with it. I use AI a lot for my daily job, but it fills me with dread knowing how limited my future is because of it.
The Luddites didn’t smash all those machines because they were afraid of them. They were more than happy to use the fancy new tools to make them more efficient. They just didn’t want to sacrifice their standard of living to do it.
Ai conceptual art is still scraped from artists who physically made the art in the first place . Without humans building art by hand it wouldn’t have existed.
I literally saw the word Disney plastered in a language learning ‘AI’ story on YouTube. It wasn’t even Disney related material. That’s how bad and lazy it is at scraping. It’s even scraping the logos from the creators it’s stealing from.
It’s not AI. It hasn’t created anything. So we should stop calling it that.
It’s just plaigerism. Just call it plaigerism. “I plaigerized a story. I plaigerized all the concepts for it” stop pretending you created a damned thing. You’re fooling nobody
(Directed at the original post, not the OP who posted it here)
curious that every single artist i know hates this shit
AI makes uncreative people pretend to be creative.
It makes them create stuff that looks like shit to the trained eye, but is good or good enough for them, thus they don’t have to pay money to an actual professional. That doesn’t only relate to art, but to IT stuff as well. If you want it done right, hire a professional.
It’s the same with the “but my nephew can do it for a tenth of the price”-folks.
This is exactly what my friend who was a copywriter told me several years ago; now he manages the company’s AI production pipeline. They mostly do b2b. But essentially, the AI even then could produce stuff that was 80% good for 10% of the money, and infinitely quicker and scalable. And that’s plenty good for what they’re doing. So several people lost their jobs, the content quality drops, but the C suite makes money and nobody cares about the “craftsmanship” of the work.
Wait until they find out they can replace management even better
Just an anecdote, but recently, there have been many “crochet” 3D models posted to 3D printing sites. (Many of those are marked as AI-generated, too) Those look nothing like a crochet toy would look like. These models have a yarn-looking “V” pattern applied to every surface of 3D model, but this pattern comes not from crochet, but from hand-knit blankets (as far as I can tell).
I hate those people with a passion. Don’t flood my printables, you idiots!
creating something yourself also feels way more satisfying cause you can see your own progress in those creations
Putting effort in it is what makes it art. You as an artist has decided making this piece is worth your time. ”Art” without effort is just disposable slop.
As an artist, I LOVE being told what i should like and not like by an out-of-touch never-been-cool rich asshole. Thanks, dickwad!
This is in fact an insidious form of gatekeeping. It is shutting out people who are excited to learn new skills and become the next generation of creative people by collaborating with other talented humans, receiving apprenticeship, and being rewarded for their labor. Their opportunities and newfound capabilities are being thwarted by the slop machines, and it stinks.
There is no gatekeeper like a Capitalist trying to convince you that Yet More Automation™ is good for everybody!
The number of gatekeeper will never hit zero. The model owners become the new gatekeepers.
It’s the reason why we’ve moved to data centers over physical hardware for people. Control.
I also wonder what he would think about right wing chuds “gatekeeping” their fandoms by being absolutely toxic pieces of shits to everyone.
It actually does cause brain damage. I mentioned it in an essay (What if I paid for all my free software?):
For one, power causes brain damage which renders rich people literally incapable of knowing what is best for others:
“Subjects under the influence of power, he found in studies spanning two decades, acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view.”
“And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, “mirroring,” that may be a cornerstone of empathy.” ―Power Causes Brain Damage, by Jerry Useem for The Atlantic.[16]
I greatly enjoyed your essay and found it thought-provoking. I dug through the references regarding power and its effect on the brain (and loss of empathy), and it was both surprising to find it was researched/established scientifically and not-so-surprising in that it explains so much of these people’s behavior.
Cheers
it explains so much of these people’s behavior
Indeed. For me, realizing the cause of problems continues to be instrumental to keep things in perspective when solutions are often too complex to contemplate. However, in this case the conclusion is clear: a wealth/power cap has to become normalized. The inverse of vaccinations, you take money away so the indefinite growth mind virus doesn’t grab hold to infect or impact society.
Thank you for having invested time and thought into my essay, it makes it all worthwhile, truly.
The point of art isn’t getting it done quickly. It’s the journey, the painstaking hours and the satisfaction of the finished piece.
The only people who think making art faster is good are marketing ghouls.
Well said. I mean, the thing produced is literally called a WORK (of art).
I kind of had that realization the other day. Art is just people taking time to make something, good or bad. What makes it valuable is the time + their ability. It is effectively a monetary battery of your time, charge it up with time, sell it for money.
The value is also partly the literal structure that you’ve built into your brain to have the skill set necessary to do that work.
Building skill in art is as profoundly impactful on your neurology as learning a new language or sciences.
Yeah I think people like this see a book written by a human that took them a year to write and sold 1,000 copies and an AI that farts out 500 books in a day and sells 1,000 copies in total as essentially the same thing, except that the AI one is superior to them because it happened faster. Never mind that now Amazon is flooded with the 500 books the AI just made so nobody else can get seen, tomorrow we’ll just just make 1,000 books.
But the AI also tells stories. So even if your story is great, it will be drowned in thousands of AI slop stories. Publishing houses can already not screen new novels anymore because they are getting flooded with hundreds of AI generated books every day (complete with AI generated, fake authors).
Cuban used AI to prepare to go on Pablo Torre’s podcast and made an ass out of himself, so I don’t trust his evaluation of AI’s capabilities.
With the amount of energy put into GenAI and the sheer bulk of content generated, why don’t advocates have at least one example of something artistically interesting, unique, or beautiful to showcase their claims? Has it yet made anything of cultural importance that will illicit more than a chuckle and a ‘like’?
It seems to me I keep hearing non-artists assert that this will be a great thing for art, while real artists who disagree are labeled Luddites or not genuinely creative in some way. It’s frustrating to watch them openly say easily disprovable things. This isn’t speculative anymore these systems have been in production for years at this point. Let’s look at the actual results.
Can the people advocating for AI art provide any examples of anything human-generated that is artistically interesting? I suspect not and that’s a big part of why they’re impressed with AI art.
Like, they’d probably say “The Mona Lisa” because it’s well known to be Great Art, and then their AI can draw them in the style of the Mona Lisa, ergo it has generated Great Art.
Business majors run everything. If you went to college, did you ever have an interesting conversation with a business major?
No. They were, universally, the dumbest mother fuckers on campus. I had to take a computers & networking class to satisfy some arcane requirement and it was mostly business majors. The teacher had some easy multiplication problem on one of the tests and they were all wandering around the halls afterwards moaning about how hard the test was and comparing the answers they got.
Business majors ruin everything
FTFY
I like this mini thread, yeah I agree. It seems like most AI advocates do not understand the difference between graphics and art.
Computers make graphics, and art is the human experience (often) expressed through a visual medium.
And resorting to The Mona Lisa just because it’s widely considered a masterpiece by everyone else shows how little they think about art and consider it themselves. If that’s your first and especially only example, you’ve already failed the test lol
This is real human art generated by real humans (real art 2025 online free)
I have a buddy that’s a professional singer/song writer & producer. He went out of town a few weeks ago to collaborate for a day or two with another producer. I don’t think he knew in advance but it turns out this other guy is pretty into AI music production. My friend (again: a professional artist and indie music producer) was really impressed with how useful it was. Sorry that this is an anonymous anecdote and not data but yeah some people have found ways to use AI to help them make art.
I’ve seen demos of software that uses AI to split a song into multiple tracks, one for each instrument. THAT is pretty cool. It’s not lossless, you’re going to lose some of the human performance because the AI has to reconstruct the sound for each instrument and it’s not going to be 100% perfect, but it’s a really neat (and useful) tool.
Notably, it’s not the kind of thing you generally see when tech bros are touting AI.
🤷 Let’s hear it.
I can ask him more about it when I see him at bowling on Thursday. But please understand I’m not claiming AI is good, I’m just reporting that some artists find it useful. I’m not sure that their final cut has any ai sound in it, they may have just used it to workshop their idea.
Proof once more, as if we needed it, that the people who have traded their humanity for buying into the capitalist mindset, only ever think of things as if they were marketable products, and in terms of outcomes and productivity.
Fuck the creative process, the journey it takes you on, and the necessary introspection and connection to the world that needs to occur for it. Fuck the joy you can find in effort, failure, and in finally having an epiphany. Fuck being able to hone your skills without depending on a corporate tool that can be taken away from you at a minute’s notice. All of it be damned, you can now (allegedly) get to the same end result quicker without the effort (or pleasure, or self-discovery, or personal growth). We all know that the end result is what counts, and nothing else.
But yeah, people be mad because meanie artists gatekeep poor ol’ Mark, and nothing says “democratising” art like “automating the process out of your hands with corporate approved tools and ideology”.
Fuck sake.Fuck’s sake.
It’s actually fuck’s sakes. Try to get an AI to be that pedantic.
Thank you! I’d take that over the sycophancy to be honest.
Fuck the creative process, the journey it takes you on, and the necessary introspection and connection to the world that needs to occur for it. Fuck the joy you can find in effort, failure, and in finally having an epiphany. Fuck being able to hone your skills without depending on a corporate tool that can be taken away from you at a minute’s notice. All of it be damned, you can now (allegedly) get to the same end result quicker without the effort (or pleasure, or self-discovery, or personal growth). We all know that the end result is what counts, and nothing else.
Is anyone claiming you can’t do that? The use case for most AI slop is soulless corporate graphic design that’s about as worker bee as it gets and the rest is mostly people using it in place of hiring an actual artist for their weirdly specific niche pornography. And the guy wanting you to draw him something involving dolphins with a foot fetish isn’t deeply concerned what your personal journey regarding the nature of creatures without feet who are obsessed with them sexually looks like.
At it’s heart, the non-environmentalist AI hate is mostly people who thought their jobs were impossible to automate trying to protect those jobs from being automated.
Is anyone claiming you can’t do that?
In this post, no. And? The problem is less about forbidding creation with other means than it is about pushing the idea that the outcome is the only thing you are after in creative endeavours.
most AI slop is soulless corporate graphic design […] and […] niche pornography.
I understand where you come from, and agree on that front, except this can still represent revenue for (some) artists which allows them to do their art, whilst being able to practice (to a degree) and being paid for it. Also, do you have a source regarding that or is it from what you experience online?
At it’s heart, the non-environmentalist AI hate is mostly people who thought their jobs were impossible to automate trying to protect those jobs from being automated.
I am entitled to hate it for reasons that are mine. This includes, but isn’t limited to, a push towards equating art with a product and taking the process out of the equation. Of course we did not have to wait for AI for these people to already think like that, but it’s now being pushed much harder.
Also, just in case, I don’t earn my income through art, and my job isn’t (yet) threatened by AI.
except this can still represent revenue for (some) artists…whilst being able to practice (to a degree) and being paid for it.
…which is just another way of saying that that work should be protected from automation. That’s what arguing that tools that automate doing a thing will make people doing that thing less valuable as a paid labor is doing, it’s arguing for protection from automation.
Also, do you have a source regarding that or is it from what you experience online?
Experience and a bit of hyperbole. Ask anyone who takes art commissions how often they get asked to do lewd to outright pornographic images though and you’ll be surprised by the answer. But commissioned art/graphics for very specific carefully described things is all AI image generation is ever really going to replace, if only because that’s the core of what it does - take a prompt and a big block of white noise and sort of digitally chisel away the bits that don’t look like prompt until the result looks enough like prompt. The other obvious productive use case would be for rapid prototyping of visual design.
But then I’m old enough to remember people complaining that photoshop was destroying art. I’d be shocked if we couldn’t find record of people back when it was new claiming photography was going to destroy art likewise.
I feel like we don’t understand each other here. I don’t want to appear combative, but I also don’t like being misunderstood so:
My point was not “AI is an actual threat to all arts”. My point was “equating the creative and artistic process with rapidly producing outcomes is something I profoundly disagree with, and I am truly afraid that it will take hold in people’s minds”.
Because, speaking also from experience, I know a few people with no AI agenda to push, who use AI as a substitute for a creative outlet. I think that they are being cheated out of a fantastic experience, because they buy into that kind of speech.
Your photography and digital arts equivalences, which I don’t necessarily agree with, could also imply elitism, as in looking down on AI users. I assure you this does not come from a place of thinking people who use AI are inferior or not creative. This comes from a place of wanting them to experience their creativity truly. This means, in particular, outside the bounds of a tool which can be tuned and censored at the whims of a corporation (one big difference with photography and digital arts). This is a necessary condition for free self-expression.
So yes. I am afraid. Not that I’ll lose my job, but that many people will believe this shit, settle for that, and be robbed of a wonderful human experience.
So smart, thank you for blessing us with your words of wisdom, Mr. Rich Person who is also an expert in art!
Tap for spoiler
Creating this slop caused a home in Wisconsin to lose power for 2 minutes. Please send them your thoughts and prayers!
The creative iterations part is funny to me. Sure, it cuts the time-span of each iteration down, potentially, if you are not proficient with what you are doing. However, because of the wild innaccuracies and lack of context of a physical world, you are also doing 5-10x more iterations than you otherwise would have, except you don’t get to learn and grow along the way.
Literally turns everything into worker-bee level stuff. Usual shareholder mentality to go for quantity over quality.
I mean they were talking about the McDonald’s commercial recently and how everybody is throwing a fit over the fact that it’s AI in McDonald’s actually finally pulled the advert. The company that created it said that it took three or four times as long to create because they kept having to go back and reprompt and recreate and fix an accurate season errors and issues. And then ended up costing more money and more man hours than utilizing actual actors and creatives to make it happen.
Relevant clip from Silicon Valley: https://youtu.be/u3o8Cygx1EU
