Daring FireballMatthew Inman of The Oatmeal: ‘A Cartoonist’s Review of AI Art’
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/10/16/oatmeal-ai-art
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/10/16/oatmeal-ai-art
Mutesplash@daringfireball Brainless art appreciation. If the choice is "this art doesn't exist" and "the creation mechanism must to involve unacceptable behavior" and you're given an option to enable the behavior by patronage, how is that not "ends justifying the means?"
billyok@Mutesplash @daringfireball a lot of us believe that art not made by an artist doesn’t need to exist. Filling the internet to the brim with crap made by language model is an end without any justification or need.
~@daringfireball I think I’m more upset that he doesn’t seem to respect writing as a craft. Have we just gotten used to computers spitting often-useless text at us over the years, that it somehow seems less threatening to writers? Because it is still threatening writers, the same way it’s threatening humans being in most crafts: taking out all the support for people who haven’t gotten good at it yet.
@daringfireball anyway, on the central question, I think I agree with him: it isn’t a choice. Fundamentally I engage with art as an expression of intention. I don’t know if I think effort or suffering matter, but intention certainly does. Recognizing and questioning artistic choices in art is the same skill as knowing that “did you break that vase?” “I didn’t knock it off the table!” this answer didn’t address the question, and why someone might have given that answer to this question anyway.
@daringfireball AI art therefore fails for me in exactly the same ways AI writing does: a lack of intention. Mimicking creative choices, like the structure of a third act twist, without intending to say anything by it. It’s genuinely just sad!
Do I think it’s doomed forever? Kinda, yeah! I don’t see how something derived from the current tech is ever going to get there.
@daringfireball perhaps this is just a lack of vision on my part. Perhaps, as well, I’m missing out on innovations by avoiding as much of this as I possibly can. I don’t think I’m going to regret that, though lol, I’m going to enjoy human art while we still have it, cause the sludge will be here forever regardless.
Marc Etienne@daringfireball I felt by saying that finding out how a certain work was created, like Matthew states, can evoke an involuntary reaction. It is his own personal reaction that he cannot control, thus it is not a choice.
It's not different from finding out that seemingly inoffensive painting was done by Hitler. Or some "cheap" painting is an original Rembrandt.
The source has a reaction independent of the work itself.
Michika"I think most 'AI art' today completely sucks. But not because it was made using AI generation tools."
The tools are built on trillions of dollars of theft, so for me AI art is fundamentally bad as their training method is illegal and immoral.
tripleman, a 🇨🇦 in 🇩🇪@daringfireball Can't wait for Daring Airball, the scraped version of his site.
Pete Nicholson@daringfireball "If your opinion of a work art changes..."
This ignores the fact all generative AI content is a remix. Sometimes a remix is valuable.
I don't have access in my head to all the art that goes into training AI data, so I might get a moment of joy when I see it, thinking it's original. But when I learn it's AI, the joy is gone because I know the original pieces - the layout, the colours, etc are all ripped off from existing things and mashed together by a computer.
Christopher Griffiths@daringfireball @gruber You often cite Sinclair’s quote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” Your support of AI feels like you wrapping yourself in knots to show you “get it” and its potential. The value of human creation is iterating from the most fragile idea and considering it from all sides. Look beyond the flashiness to what humans have made with our hands, hearts, and minds. AI isn’t a tool. It’s a substitution.
John Gruber@cjgyt Humans made these AI systems.
Delric
Raouf Dool@gruber It's not about what species created AI systems, it's where it leaves human ingenuity and the people who have pushed us forward in art, literature, and the foundations that have helped societies flourish. Those have never been through shortcuts. Tools have been refined and simplified, but never under this kind of banner of figuring things out on our behalf. AI systems are trained on us and it will be at your expense and mine, from how we make a living to what entertainment we enjoy.
Jason Cabassi@daringfireball If one's judgment about a piece of art changes when one finds out it's AI-produced, that's somewhat a choice. If one's feelings about it change, that's less of a choice. Maybe not at all. Feelings are pretty automatic.
David Kocher 
@daringfireball "Never meet the artist“ applies here as well.
@daringfireball @gruber do you consider yourself a filmmaker when you generate those AI videos of yourself you linked earlier? if so, holy fuck. if not, then you are agreeing with the premise — By not doing the work, you aren’t making art.
Todd Heberlein (social)@daringfireball For me, the flood of AI photos and videos have taken the joy out of online media.
I used to enjoy the amazing photos or videos people posted because they were real, rare, and amazing, like an animal playing on a trampoline.
Now, there are so many fake versions, my default position is everything is fake. Kind of sad.
Art may become the same. Part of what I enjoy about art is seeing the artist's skill being displayed.
adamrice@daringfireball There’s a great moment in The Truman Show where we see Truman sleeping, there’s emotionally evocative music playing over it, and we, the members of the audience, are having an emotional response. Then the camera pulls back and we see that Christof is directing the music, the camera angle, whatever, and we realize how easily we can be played. In the movie, it’s making a point.
It’s the same thing with AI art. Nobody wants to be told that their emotions can be manipulated so easily.
@daringfireball “…you’re no longer judging the art. You’re making a choice not to form your opinion based on the work itself, but rather on something else.”
If I read something, like it, and then find out later it was plagiarized and think less of it as a work, that’s pretty valid and I’m judging the work and not the writer, right?
I think that’s a better analogy than the bizarre Woody Allen one you jumped to. We’re never not talking about the work when dissecting how it was made.
Ted Todorov@billyok @daringfireball Welcome to humanity. You do realize that everything from most of Shakespeare to Led Zeppelin by today's copyright standards was "plagiarized"?
Everything is copy. From the greatest writers to the greatest composers beg, borrow of steal from all the art that preceded them. If you love a Shakespeare play or a Led Zeppelin song and then suddenly stop liking it because its origins are demonstrated to you in detail that's on you.
Everything is copy. From the greatest writers to the greatest composers beg, borrow of steal from all the art that preceded them. If you love a Shakespeare play or a Led Zeppelin song and then suddenly stop liking it because its origins are demonstrated to you in detail that's on you.
@TedTodorov @daringfireball plagiarized and inspired are not the same thing. What an idiotic, 8th grade level response.
@billyok @daringfireball Take Dazed and Confused - compare to the original Jimmy Page copied - https://music.apple.com/us/album/dazed-and-confused/1100453959?i=1100454021 a song from Led Zeppelin 1 which, couldn't be more blatant plagiarism from the Jake Holmes original. "Inspired" it ain't. Plant didn't even bother changing the name of the song. He didn't add Holmes' name to the songs credits until very recently.
Nonetheless this knowledge in no way diminishes enjoying the Zeppelin version.
@billyok @daringfireball If you are remotely interested, here is good detail is what Plant copied, stole or actually wrote himself the appeared in Led Zeppelin's first two albums: https://500songs.com/podcast/song-180-dazed-and-confused-by-led-zeppelin-part-two-inspiration-is-what-you-are-to-me/
Song 180: “Dazed and Confused” by Led Zeppelin, Part Two — “Inspiration is What You Are to Me”
For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted, songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a two-episode look at the song “Dazed a…
@TedTodorov @daringfireball cherry-picking a song that is famously stolen as the basis for “everything is copied, welcome to humanity little boy,” which is your basis for justifying the suffocation of the web in artless crap. Absolute nonsense.
Dustin Westphal@daringfireball This might be the grossest thing you've ever written, which is really saying something after the last year's worth of posts.
Andrew H — № 2025@daringfireball AI art won’t ever cite its references or “choose” something over another thing based on lived experience. Like others have said, it’s fundamentally a plagiarism factory used by directors. Like most stolen things, our relationship with the creator should change when we see the assumed blood and sweat transform into “I asked someone to steal it for me”
Philip Dhingra@daringfireball I wouldn't be surprised if we end up in a world where "hand-made" or "hand-crafted" become labels applied to art in the same way they are with consumer goods. There was a time when all consumer goods were hand-made.
@daringfireball Completely disagree with you here. Appreciation and the feeling a work of art provokes is based on everything I know about it. An average tv series where whole episodes are shot in one take can be amazing, just because of that. Creative works made using a computer are fine, but delegating the creativity to the computer, is not.
@daringfireball Be an adult and just accept that you can like Sora and it’s also shitty
This thing you’re doing where you bend over backwards to come up with a defense of this viscerally disgusting and humiliating slop doesn’t work
SouprMatt@daringfireball I really enjoyed this edition of The Oatmeal! I didn’t like this take on it.
The worst part to me is the belief that AI will just keep getting better. Uh… it’s getting WORSE. Look at it. And now it’s gonna be “training” on its own slop.
I thought for sure Gruber would be skeptical of the AI hype. But maybe it’s mandatory for tech journalists to buy into the scam now?
Herb Bowie@daringfireball Took me a day or two to compose a reply.
Short take:
"Once we learn that a work has been generated by AI, this initial interest — this potential beginning of a human relationship with the work and its author — is suddenly replaced by a hideous void, as we realize we have been duped, have been presented with what purports to be a human communication but is now revealed as having come from a source that is profoundly inhuman and, perhaps, even anti-human."
Find the whole thing (5-minute read) here:
Fuzen@daringfireball I actually agree with everything he said.
AT Hayes@daringfireball Curious how you consider, say, finding out a work of art you were appreciating was plagiarized. I suspect your opinion of it would indeed change pretty immediately, and that it would not be a choice. Say, looking at Roy Lichtenstein’s worst examples, which were effectively direct tracings.
Art is not devoid of the circumstance of its creation. This would come a lot closer to how Inman and others consider generative AI.
Kit Paul@daringfireball That’s why I liked Wired’s article https://www.wired.com/story/the-future-of-ai-media-parody-of-the-apocalypse-guy-named-josh/ on a guy making cool AI videos.
@daringfireball You really don’t understand LLMs, huh? Nor art, to be honest, but the latter’s never been your strong point.
The fact that your LLM takes are this uncritical is making me question my long-held assumption that you understand software better than I do.