people forget that what makes art impressive is also the skill of the artist in the respective medium

if someone creates a perfect color gradient fill in Photoshop nobody is going to be impressed but make it with colored pencils and people may regard it as stunning

the beauty is also in the effort it took to create, not only in what the result looks like - i don't need to take time to look at stuff people didn't take time to make

Typically, I don't find anything offensive about the images ai creates. What I do take issue with is the outlandish claims of artistic ownership because they strung some words together.

"I feel like a lot of the anti-AI people just... want there to be less beautiful art in the world," one Redditor replied in the same thread.

The beauty of, what, mutations caused by a nuclear accident?

Funny, just this morning I woke up to someone commenting on one of my pieces of art that I'd posted on Reddit that if I hadn't put in the comment how I did it, they'd have thought it was an AI generated picture.

It's super-painful to be a technologist and an artist at the same time right now because there are way too many people in tech who have no understanding of what it means to create art. There's people in the art community who don't really get AI either, of course, but since they are trending towards probably the right opinion based on an incomplete understanding of what the things we see as AI actually are, it's much easier to listen to them. If anything, the artists can labor under the misapprehension that the current crop of AI tools are doing more than they actually are.

In the golden age of analog photography, people would do a print and include the raw borders of the image. So you'd see sprocket holes if it's 35mm film or a variety of rough boundaries for other film formats. And it was a known artistic convention that you were showing exactly what you shot, no cropping, no edits, etc. The early first version of Instagram decided that those film borders meant "art" so of course they added the fake film borders and it grated on my nerves because I think it was the edges from a roll of Velvia, which is a brilliant color slide film. And then someone would have the photo with the B&W filter because that also means "art" but you would never see a B&W Velvia shot unless you were working really hard on a thing. So this is far from the first time that a bunch of clueless people on the tech side of the fence did something silly out of ego and ignorance.

The picture I posted is the result of a bunch of work on fabbing, 3D printing, FastLED programming, photographic technique, providing an interesting concept to a person and an existing body of work such that said person would want to show up to some random eccentric's place for a shoot, et al. And, well... captions on art exist for a reason, right? It adds layers to the work to know that the artist was half-mad when they painted it and maybe you can tell by the painting's brushwork or just know your art history really well but maybe you can't and so a caption helps create context for people not skilled in that particular art.

And, there's not really "secrets" in art. Lots of curators and art critics will take great pains to explain why Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko so if you are still wandering around saying "BUT IT LOOKS LIKE GIANT SQUARES" that's intentional ignorance.

Now, I've been exploring my particular weird genre of art for a while now. Before AI, Photoshop was the thing. Much in the same way as I could have thrown a long enough prompt into a spicy-autocomplete image generator, I also could have probably photoshopped it. Then again, the tutorials for the Photoshop version of the technique all refer back to the actual photographic effect.

Describing something as it's not has long been a violation of social norms that people who are stuck in a world of intentional ignorance, ego, and disrespect for the artistic process have engaged in. In the simultaneous heyday of Second Life and Flickr, people wanting to treat their Second Life as their primary life caused Flickr to create features so people could mediate this boundary. So, on one level, this isn't entirely new and posting AI art in the painting reddit is no different from posting filtered Second Life to the portrait group on flickr. It's simple rudeness of the sort that the unglamorous aspects of community moderation are there to solve for.

I have gotten quizzed about how I make my art, but I've never seen anybody go off and then create a replica of my art, they've always gone off and created something new and novel and interesting and you might not even realize that what got them there was tricks I shared with them it's so different. Artists don't see other art in the gallery and autocomplete art that looks like what they saw, they incorporate ideas into their own work with their own flair.

Thus, there's more going on than just mere rudeness. I've been doing this for a long time now and the AI companies have a habit of misrepresenting exactly what content they have stolen to train their image models. So it's entirely likely that the cool AI picture that someone thinks my art looks like is really just autocompleted using parts of my art. Except I can't say "no" and if there was a market for people making art that looks roughly like mine, I'd offer paid workshops or something.

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I like AI art. It can be fun and interesting, I play around with a couple engines myself. I occasionally use the imagery to kick-start my imagination or as inspiration for things I might be working on or thinking about. It’s useful to give your brain a “starting point.”

What I don’t like is people trying to pass off AI computer generated images as some form of accomplishment for themselves (excluding working out a good prompt or modifiers, that can be a bit of work) or trying to pass off the imagery as real in any way. Real IRL or like “I painted this.”

As far as the corporate models scraping content…yeah, they are definitely playing the usual game that it’s ok for them to fuck over the little guy but heaven help you if you’re a day late with a payment to them or torrent a movie.

If a computer auto generating music isn’t called a musician, or a robot tossing a football isn’t called an athlete, then a person making a picture with a computer isn’t an artist. No matter how badly that person wants to be called one.

AI art is like the speech synthesiser that came with Amiga’s Workbench. Amusing for yourself to make it say swears, but of no interest to anyone else.

AI art is, by very definition, average.

It's the best fit line. It's the most common. The mean or the median.

The best art is exceptional.

"I feel like a lot of the anti-AI people just... want there to be less beautiful art in the world"

I certainly don't want to speak for all "anti-AI people", but personally ...yeah.

Even before the generative AI boom, you could find an essentially limitless stream of artworks on the internet. If you exposed yourself to that for long enough, you'd eventually go numb to things just being beautiful for the sake of being beautiful.

Occasionally, you'd stumble over expressive art, which had a meaning beyond that, which conveyed an emotion, which was a labor of love and/or hatred.
Even before the generative AI boom, this expressive art was buried under heaps of profitable artworks, because artists were taking the second-best option for pursuing their passion.

So, while I would've preferred less profitable artworks and more expressive art, I was always perfectly fine with it, because I knew it was humans doing the necessary.

Now with generative AI, it's just yet another magnitude more artworks thrown on top, with even less meaning.
Where a missing finger might have been a powerful expression of the artist's struggles, now it's just an every-day-defect of the AI.

It just buries the expressive art even further, obstructs any meaningfulness and makes me even number to beauty. I absolutely do not care for a greater quantity of art. I want greater quality, and not in terms of beauty.

AI image tools are useful for one thing and one thing only.

Putting Godzilla in the most ridiculous situations possible.

https://forums.mst3k.com/t/dall-e-fun-with-an-ai/24697/7734

Start at the bottom. It doesn't start with Godzilla, but eventually we discovered the true meaning of AI image creation. Also because it's getting close to 8000 posts at this point.

We really like putting Godzilla in ridiculous situations.

The images.

Not terrible, usable as rough concept art but not nearly good enough to be reference. While the general likeness has consistency there's inconsistencies in the eybrows and ears and don't get me started on the costumes they're all plain different.

The main issue I have here, knowing that it's AI, is whether he's holding his blade by the, well, blade because he's just that kind of vampire or because the AI messed up and the human didn't notice.

Honestly, just pass a law saying you're not allowed to use a model that was trained using non public domain material.

Voila, AI can be permitted without robbing existing artists and artists still have a monopoly on new material.

If you read this thread closely, the problem isn't AI, it's capitalism and its extractive design.