Mastodawn

The bit I don't get about AI art is that what I chase after in my own work is the *doing*.

Finding a -flow- where I can kind of see a thing in my head, start working towards it, and it changes continuously as I tell myself a narrative behind what I'm making.

AI art is like instead of going out for an evening with friends, talking, and a great meal followed by dessert then lazing about in a park swearing at bats - you press a button and suddenly you're so full you could burst and have rabies.

Nanoraptor Dec 8

You miss out on all the GOOD bits. the company, the conversation, the great food, and accusing wildlife of being lazy daysleeper upside downy fuckers.

@NanoRaptor It's like having a drunkenness pill, but all it does is knock you out and you wake up with a hangover and a bad tattoo.

Roger BW 😷Dec 8

@NanoRaptor The people pushing AI art are people who don't understand that. They assume being creative must be easy and boring, because if it were fun and challenging they would be good at it. (Same way Elon Musk dismissed chess as trivial because he wasn't an instant grand master.)

Emily Velasco Dec 8

@NanoRaptor I think that's because the people who do AI art don't get art. I know some of them enjoy the iterative process of refining the work through additional prompts, but it seems like the general vibe is that AI boosters see art as a product, not an activity, and if it's a product, its production should be streamlined.

It's not you, it's them!

Slash909uk Dec 8

@MLE_online @NanoRaptor 💯 this!

Art for me is an expression of emotion and thoughtfulness through your talent. Other people experiencing your art will form their own emotional reaction to it and perhaps be moved to think about the subject or even repond to you. It is a form of social conversation.

This AI plagerism seems to be simply a way to try and get clout in the sad and broken social media ecosystems without any real effort.

@NanoRaptor @MLE_online I think that’s exactly right. Relatedly, I’m kind of baffled by my fellow engineers adopting it to write code. I have no interest myself, and I’m realizing with some horror that I don’t understand them the way I thought I did. I program computers because I find genuine joy in finding the solution. Apparently they don’t.

Emily Velasco Dec 8

@bytex64 If I wasn't so opposed to AI on principle, I might use it to help me write code. I am bad at coding, and even after years if playing with it, I'm still bad at it.

@MLE_online The secret to programming is everyone’s bad at it. 😆 That’s why AI coding assistants are even valuable. It doesn’t produce better code, it just produces code faster, so it can replace lower level programmers pretty effectively. :[

And yeah, I wouldn’t even really blame you for using it to skip the tedious parts, except for all the other issues with the corporations and culture surrounding it.

Emily Velasco Dec 8

@bytex64 I have friends who know how to code, and i've seen them code and it seems to come naturally to them. They write code quickly and it works well. Then there's me. If everyone is bad, then I am dreadfully awful.

It's not a matter of tediousness. It's just that I can't wrap my brain around parts of it and make it work

@MLE_online Yeah. I guess what I mean is, based on the state of what I’ve seen, everyone could be doing better. But also don’t let other people’s seeming lack of effort trick you into thinking it should be easy.

In art class I had a friend who could just freehand illustrations with a sharpie. Genuinely made me think I was bad at drawing, and it took me years to realize most people start with pencil sketches and refine step by step (our art teacher was also maybe not the best…). I’m still not good, but at least now I understand it’s not fundamentally about my lack of skill. :)

Emily Velasco Dec 8

@bytex64 I don't expect it to be easy. I just don't seem to get much better at it. It is always a huge struggle and I just don't 'get' it a lot of times. I think I'm just not built right in the brain to be good at coding

@MLE_online Maybe, maybe not. But the people you’re comparing yourself to have probably been doing it every day for a decade or more. I struggled. They struggled too, I guarantee it. But if it’s not your bag, that’s fine. There’s plenty of humans willing to help so you don’t have to lean on AI. :)

(At least for me, guided instruction helped a lot. I didn’t understand a *lot* of things before going to college.)

(🖬🖫). ₍^. .^₎⟆Dec 8

@NanoRaptor microsecond distractions for microsecond lives.

Miko Blissful [he/fae]Dec 8

@NanoRaptor The result of AI is not art. It is an approximation of art. It's what the AI thinks it's art. At best it can only guess; at worst, it creates a clusterfuck.

And even at best, it still gets it wrong.

Because AI is not human.

For art to be art, it must need a human factor. And only a human can do that.

A human can use AI, but ultimately it will not be art. Because you can't truly say it's yours.

Because the materials the AI uses isn't yours.

The style isn't yours.

The method isn't yours.

AI art is like taking a sleeping aid, going to bed, and suddenly waking up in a room full of 'shrooms and permanent ink all over you. And whales in the sky. Odd-numbered clocks.

A clusterfuck. At best.

I agree. Art is an impression of your unique physiology, consciousness, and life experiences upon the physical world. Creating art is a journey of self-discovery and improvement as it engages all these things that make up a person. Whereas AI art bypasses the process and you're depriving yourself and the world of your authentic self

I think AI defenders who attack artists are avoiding the process because it reveals their own limitations which hurts egos. They have too much pride to overcome these limits or to accept them outright. Can't blame them, people are conditioned to fear failure and to rely on external validation, b/c capitalism creates the problem of low self-esteem and profits off selling solutions. Also, AI generation is like a slot machine, you put tokens into it and keep hitting the generate button until you get a good result which gives you a dopamine hit. It's an addictive substance marketed as a productivity tool

@NanoRaptor i mean it _can_ be about that. most of the stuff i see online is just "push button receive image" but when running local tools there's brushes, layers, local fill tools... it's like a clunkier photoshop. i liken it more to cut-and-paste op art, or paperdolls.

i can spend hours on a single thing, drawing in details manually and pasting in different images for body parts or landscape features, then running a generation step to merge them together, then going back to filling in details with a brush tool.

i never put the stuff i do online because it's still copyright infringement so i won't give an example, but for me it does work as an outlet. i've had art supplies around me my whole life, and 30 years to learn, but i never could due to motor issues (painful finger cramps when gripping things). this at least gives me some of the fun of the process. and i never use online resources, only local, so i know it's green electricity.

penguin42 Dec 8

@NanoRaptor You're lucky to have the artistic skills to be able to draw what you want - not everyone does; but they may still have the vision in their mind of a cute idea; for them an AI allows them to fulfil that idea even if they don't have the drawing skills.

Sven Slootweg, low-spoons mode ("still kinky and horny anyway")Dec 8

@NanoRaptor The sense I get from "AI art" folks is that they don't actually care about art itself, they just want to experience the social appreciation by others of having done it. For that the process is not necessary, only the appearance of it is (or so they think, at least).

Edit: It's the same motivation as plagiarists, I suppose?

@NanoRaptor
And not just art. You just described how I feel about AI in programming.

For me, in programming, the actual physical activity of punching the keys is a large part of the enjoyment. I even love the sound the keyboard makes.

Another important part is the feeling of accomplishment when I look at the beautifully structured, well optimized code I typed in by my own hands.

AI would deprive me of everything I enjoy in programming.

Maypop the Dragon Dec 8

@NanoRaptor YOOO I WAS JUST WRITING SOMETHING ABOUT THIS THAT I WON'T FINISH!

i'll add that it's also the sharing in the doing! robots can play card games, scale mountains, and bake potato knishes, but people do these things themselves because they want to and they connect over that shared interest and appreciation for the other person's passion.

the title of the article if i ever finish it will be "art is a hobby." by calling it a hobby i don't mean to devalue it—quite the opposite! capitalism indoctrinates people to value "productivity" over actually living, but in truth humans do things because they want to. in all the bustle of optimizing and surviving and being made to do so much out of fear instead of joy, it's possible to lose sight of that.

Maypop the Dragon Dec 8

@NanoRaptor ok sorry to spam but i have more to say.

i think this is the true reason "ai art" is bad (other than environmental impact and its only real use-case being disinformation and it "taking jobs" and profiting off our labor without consent or compensation). not everybody cares about the art hobby, and in theory, that's fine. it's even fine if they only care about the completion of the task. but they flood our spaces with fake media that had no creator to connect with. before, we (artists and art appreciators) could take it for granted that if you see a painting you can be impressed and appreciate that someone painted it. we barely had to organize communities like most other hobbies do—art was obvious and could passively exist after the creator left to go somewhere else.

aryl ⌬⌬⌬⌬Dec 8

@NanoRaptor well because the process doesn't matter to those who look for art purely in commodity-form, which sadly constitutes most of the economic base of the art market. the margins are much higher in producing bulk amounts of low quality art used in advertising and such than for artisans types doing self expression

tranarchy_a_genderqueer

@NanoRaptor it's not meant to create "art" it's meant to create slop like this so called "corporate" art.

Someone very close to me was stuck in a "Corporate Art" job and it got so bad that they almost successfully tried to kill themselfe.

If "AI" can take over the "creation" of soul suckers that's fine by me but that stuff isn't art.

It's basically me doing a mockup for an UI glyph back in '98 for prototyping before the Designers got that thing and had to make it look "corporate".

And yes those mokups ended in production releases because creatives are expensive and corporate doesn't give a shit. /rant

UpLateGeek Dec 9

@NanoRaptor to me, AI images are like the Mr Creosote scene in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. I’m just out here enjoying a nice dinner at a fancy restaurant, when this impossibly obese rich man waddles in and starts vomiting all over the place. I didn’t ask for this, it’s not fun or enjoyable or good in any way, and yet this bile is fired at me at any moment, usually trying to get me to buy something I never will because they’re using AI to sell it.

Jeff Zugale - Z Factory Jan 3

@NanoRaptor it’s made to create commercial assets, not art.