Ask Lemmy

It's not art. Expanding the sense of the word to all kinds of nonsensical phenomena is both damaging art and artists as well.

I take the liberty of a personal definition of art, or if not definition, at least prerequisites for something to be considered art, and that is that art must be made by the hand of the artist and that it's conception must include deliberate thought/mental process of the artist. It may not be the best definition, but I consider it to be good enough to draw a definite line between Michelangelo and the internet lady who vlogs about the art of tying your shoelaces or some similar shit.

There's nothing interesting about it. It's a waste of storage space and computational power. It makes the world worse

I think it substracts from everything but itself. That is on its own, its pretty cool. But it's gross when it's used as part of a bigger project.

It looks so detached from reality.

I hate that it’s built on theft. The idea of AI art is fine, but so much of it is just art theft. “Picture of A in the style of artist B.” That kind of shit really makes me hate AI art.

No. It’s useful when you need a quick picture for something or help visualizing something. A huge timesaver. I haven’t seen it generate anything good enough to be hung in an art museum, so I don’t really understand why anyone would hate it. It’s not really competition for actual art. Also, I want to say that I don’t think anyone’s art was “stolen”. That’s the same ludicrous argument the RIAA uses against online file sharing. Any images used in the training was downloaded, mathematically analyzed, and deconstructed. “Stolen” would require a heist at the museum.

I don't hate AI art. I hate AI art being passed off as "traditional" art.

low effort crap is low effort crap no matter how it's made, that said, there is plenty of high quality, high effort AI art out there that has a lot of prompt engineering put into it; it is merely drowned out in a sea of sludge. It's just about as easy for someone to put in zero effort and churn out AI sludge as it is for them to scribble in MSPaint, the difference being scribbling in MSPaint usually has some level of charm to it for its simplicity. That doesn't mean the guy who spends a lot of time tweaking their prompt to get it exactly right isn't an artist, it means they create art with different tools. Whether you use a rattlecan and stencils, or pencils and paper, or paint and canvas, or a wacom tablet and stylus, or type in carefully crafted prompts, art is art is art is art. But if you don't spend the time required to get good at it, your art will be shit.

Also, watching the artist crowd melt down again saying "that's not real art!" is absolutely hilarious. Those who weren't around at the time may not remember, but when digital art was starting to become a thing, there were plenty of people who firmly attested that if it was digital, it wasn't "real" art. Watching the same set of creatives having the same meltdown ~30 years later, "REEEEE YOU CAN'T JUST USE TECHNOLOGY TO MAKE THE PROCESS EASIER", is extremely funny.

I don't hate it, I think it has its uses, just like text generation. They're great for brainstorming ideas or quick unimportant stuff like RPG campaigns, so for example an in-game fake company logo or a poem to contain hints for the players.

However trying to use it for anything serious and final is stupid and dangerous. IMO any artist that had their art used to train a model should be able to claim royalties on anything created with that model, regardless of whether they can prove their art was used for the piece. And if the data used to train the model is not made public or can't be verified, then ANY artist can. Maybe just 1% of the profits direct or indirect of that art, so for example you used AI to generate part of an invitation for a party, 100 artists could start a lawsuit and take every single cent you earned from the party. After all you indirectly hired them, it's only fair they get paid, had you hired a single artist you could negotiate the price with them.

If I see a obviously AI generated picture as a thumbnail on youtube, I immediately block that creator. If I hear those awful AI voices reading text, same. If you want to share something with the world, put some effort into it.

Use case seems to just be dicking around, and that is just not worth the resources we pour into it.

Bad for artists, but for the environment, low quality, low effort, and the most annoying people in the world love it.

I like it quite a bit. Le chat mistral does a good job

Good for memes, bad for the environment.

Most of it reminds me of that tacky clip art that got bundled with word processors and Corel Draw in the 90s. It’s just all got this “uncanny valley” sheen to it.

Yes. It's flooding places, and suddenly people decided that "smooth looking" was the absolute end goal of any drawing/music/creation/etc. It's not. Some of the most famous art piece are completely wrong, some aren't. That's not the endgoal. Nobody's gonna care that you can take that very simplified drawing and "generate" an extremely high-detail, fully shaded image that looks like it, as it was never the purpose.

Creative direction, intent, consistency (or absolute lack of consistency), execution, style, and a lot more goes into any creation, art or not. That's what make a piece feel interesting. There's a reason even now, with generated content being plausible as far as glaring mistakes go, we can still point out which image "feels" AI across a lot of different styles. At best, to remove that feeling of it being wrong, you'd have to spent a lot of time on the output of a model to touch it up everywhere and change details, which requires time and proficiency, which a lot of people jumping on that trend definitely lacks. Some of the worst results I've seen have been from people trying to make other "pay" for their output.

There's also the issue of how these works. For decades, creative people (among other) have been sued by big companies, some very harshly, to protect IP from such overexploitation as "using a three second excerpt in a video" or "using the vague likeness of a character". And now, these same targets are getting fleeced of their work by more big companies under the cheer of the people. That's a gut feeling of disgust right there. Combined with the utter lack of creativity in these, we're really watching the potential death of an activity (artistic creation), and that's not a good place to be. If one wants to argue that "generated art" is also a form of creation, keep in mind that these models can't be trained on generated pieces without extreme prejudice. Killing the very source they need to operate does not seem like a good long-term plan. But who cares about long-term when you can make a quick buck, right?

I'd also like to point out that all this rambling is about generated content that goes from "output of a model" to "final piece" with little to no afterthought. The "common" piece, where people will be happy to see twenty broken pieces because "well, there's a lot of them, so it's good". AI and LLM models, as a tool, may or may not be useful in the long term, but I can see smaller applications, even for art. A lot of menial tasks can be improved, general posing, references, simple background that are marginally considered part of the product, guides, etc. Taking something you've drawn/created, and locally use an AI "filter" to remove an extra line cleanly or touch up a mistake you want out? Great. The tool carries the intent of the artist, the same way a pen do.

But AI generated content? Make a prompt, a stick-figure sketch, and call it a day? These, IMO, will always look and taste like garbage, no matter how pretty they look. Because it was never "pretty" we were looking for.

Environmental impacts 🤷

i'm utterly bored by it and annoyed that it mucks up all the places I'd usually steal images for my TTRPG games.

As an artist I'm conflicted. I like new technology and methods and mediums, but it's entirely unethical to make models on unconsenting artists with no compensation or recognition.

A lot of reasons, but the most straightforward one is that it looks like shit.

I don't hate it, in fact I use it a lot for my D&D game nights - not being an artist myself.

of course! aside from detracting from artists with actual talent and creativity, there is one example i’ve seen in my school that makes me hate it even more: teachers deciding to print out posters, flyers, etc. with obviously ai generated images, despite the fact that we have an entire art department in the school, full of students who’d be very much interested in making something up for them. even then, tools like canva and the sort are always available, hell, even mspaint could work! i’d rather see 10 poorly made posters than have to see one more ai image used in the school.

If it came from stealing actual artists' work then I hate it. If they somehow generated it using all fairly sourced data then I don't care. Still would prefer an actual artists work and I'd certainly never knowingly pay for something generated by AI.

Hate is too strong of a word. AI art is sometimes freaky to look at, sometimes it's pretty. It is usually devoid of a certain intangible thing that you can get from human art, even shitty human art. But it's occasionally a fun toy too? I can't conjure up any strong feelings for AI images unto themselves.

I do have intense loathing for the capitalists who want to use that AI art to replace human work. And for the AI "Artists" who are enabling them by acting like this is the next evolution of art and anyone with concerns is just holding back "DA FUTER".

I also have concerns about the environmental/energy costs of AI -- Just in general. Not just AI Images or Chatbots or whatever. AI can be a good thing, a tool to help us. And even when it's useless, it's kinda fun to mess about with. But the energy and environmental costs of all that computing, especially the amount of it that is wasted because even if AI ultimately becomes a part of our lives, it is DEFINITELY a wasteful investment bubble right now -- THAT sucks. And THAT seems to have no obvious solution.

AI “art” has made me realize how important part human behind art is to the point where I will never pay for any AI “art”. AI “art” is worthless and I would even say it devalues rest of the thing, if its part of some bigger whole like game for example. I do not want to see it, I dont want even glimpse. When I see AI “art”, its only a reminder to me of theft that has been done to make it happen and of some smarmy slimy techbro behind it. Whenever I see AI “art” only thing I feel is either sad or angry depending on day.

If I was religious type, Id even go as far as say I believe in soul now because how soulless AI “art” is.

I am fucking sick of it and deeply despise AI “art” in its entirety with every fiber of my being.

I am sure I will get downvoted to deepest depths by techbros and people who dont care and simply consume whatevers brought in front of them, use every AI filter they get their hands on. But hey, I was asked, I gave my answer.

I prefer real people and real artwork hand painted or hand drawn. Yes, doing it digital with your hand and mouse count as hand made.