Ask Lemmy

No, quite the opposite.

Honestly, I find the vast majority of the arguments against it to be be made from a point of ignorance, propagated by a rabid sub-set of artists looking to generate clicks for their sensationalist YouTube videos.

Some pertinent reading/watching:

https://youtu.be/gWmEXCJIIZ4

https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatgpt-use

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54271-x

https://craigboehman.com/blog/in-defense-of-ai-art

https://www.fxhash.xyz/article/in-defense-of-ai-art

https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-defense-of-ai-art

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-art-turing

https://i.redd.it/ch5wpbz7tkje1.jpeg

I think it's fascinating. I don't think it holds the same reverence as man-made art by any means, but I still find it impressive.

I like it for fun, memes, silly stuff, and inspiration to create something original.

I hate it for professional use. It all looks the same. And the kind of person using it professionally is 100% insufferably annoying and also so uncreative that whatever literal slop they put on marketplaces for Easy Money just falls flat and only makes pocket change from kids who don't know any better. And the kids deserve better, actual media with nuance and depth, things they can learn from and remember later on in life, not shallow meaningless slop to get them to look at car and phone ads while exposing them to sex, gore, pregnancy, and other things they aren't ready for.

Yes. It can only exist through stealing the creative work of others.

Also, it looks terrible.

Hate is such a strong word. Some bad, some good.

Bad:

• Copyright infringement and other unethical practices in acquiring training data
• Unimaginative AI art flooding the graphics market and the Internet
• Taking work from actual artists that might generate something new
• So much energy used on pointless, quickly forgotten "single-use art" in the middle of a climate crisis

Good:

• Okay starting point for logos for eg. small associations or clubs, preferably treated as version 0.1 and later worked on, but still an affordable option, and more personalised than clipart
• Creative visual outlet for people with no interest in developing their graphical skills, but who have an urge to get a small number of specific images out of their system
• Probably a good media for some commentary on the relationship between real a unreal, familiar and alien cognition, and such, but that itself is such a cliche
• Simply a fun toy

I'm not entirely against LLMs as a tool, but I especially despise the image-based LLMs. They are certainly neat for some fun things. I've used them a little bit here and there for a dumb profile picture or a "I'm kinda thinking about this..." Brainstorm, but even in those cases I noticed the capabilities of the LLM and its tendencies quite literally pidgeon hole my artistic vision and push me in other directions that felt less and less creative. (Sidenote: I feel the same way about coding LLM tools. The longer I use them at any given time, the less creative I feel and it has a noticeable impact on my interest in the code I'm writing. So I don't really use them much. Also I consistently manage to point out coding LLM code in PR reviews because it's always kinda funky)

I've avoided using AI art tools for a while now. I'll consider some limited use if the cost, billionaire ownership, blatant theft of real IP without compensation, and environmental impact problems are solved. (No, an "open source" model doesn't solve all of these problems, especially since nearly all open source models are not truly open source and are almost always benefiting from upstream theft)

You know what I do like about AI art? I like the older Google machine learning art experiments from the mid-2010s. They invoked a strange existential curiosity. But those weren't done with LLM's.

Outside of LLMs, I like that there are some newer tools for editing that can do a better "lasso" select, that can mix and match into brushes as an alternative to something more algorithmic, the audio plugin that uses a RNN to simplify or expand upon an audio technique. Things that are tools that can be chosen or avoided and have nothing to do with LLMs.

I honestly cannot wait for this bubble to burst and for these tools to return to a cost that they'd need to be for these companies to turn a profit. A higher cost would eliminate all this casual use that is making people worse at research, critical thinking, and creativity, as well as make the art tools less competitive to just paying artists, even for scumbags wanting to cut the artists out. And it'd incentivize non-LLM, non-insanely costly ML techniques again instead of the current "LLMs for everything" nonsense right now.

No, I enjoy how it democratises image creation and allows me to create a vision in my head without training at art for years.

Don't know about "art", but I use it sometimes to generate contextual imagery for blog posts and videos. I would've never hired an artist so the only real difference is that it looks a lot better than when I used to try to draw something myself.

Yes, I hate it. I hate that it fills every image platform. It is not art at all.

It’s a fun toy thing and can make decent images but its not art and can never replace actual art. When you compare for example an anime art of someone who actually drew it and the AI image, the drawn art is 9 out of 10 times better.

It’s also petty pretty easy to spot whether an image is AI or drawn made.

I feel old because I remember when this conversation was happening with airbrushing photographs and then Photoshop.

And now these days, really good Photoshop is invisible. We can remove people from backgrounds. We can improve the lighting. Movie CGI is just photoshooting stills.

AI will reach that stage too, where it will be so good, it's scary that you can't tell.

I don’t hate AI art. I hate people who pretend they’re artists when all they do is writing prompts.

I do, but not for the reasons you think.

What makes a Jackson Pollock painting so valuable? I've heard time and again people saying "I could do that too", "it's just paint thrown at canvas" etc. But it's not the actual paint on the canvas that makes the painting. It's Pollock's aesthetic sense that chose that color, that pattern, and that's what you get to see when you look at his paintings. It's an image that said something to him, and we have decided to put value on that.

The vast majority of AI generated imagery is not art just like the vast majority of people throwing paint at canvas won't get a Jackson Pollock painting. It might become art if used by an artist with purpose and intention. Which at the moment is pretty hard, given that small, iterative adjustments are really hard to do with AI. But in the end, AI is yet another tool that would allow humans a bit more freedom of expression.

It used to be that a painter had to literally prepare his palette from raw ingredients. Then he could buy pre-made paints. When digital art came along, we gave up paints entirely. Now we skip the painting part. The one common thread though is the honest expression of intent, and the feedback loop given by the artist's aesthetic sense. If either is missing, you get kitschy garbage. And that's most AI generated imagery these days.

No, because I don't have an irrational fear of AI. I don't like when poor or unfitting AI art is used, but it isn't AI who makes that decision to use it.

AI is just a fun toy. It can't make "art." There are CEOs out there fucking thirsty at the idea of a 59% unemployment rate because everyone else is cut out of their business, but AI can't do the job and they will learn that the hard way after fucking over a bunch of people.

Even the success stories seem skeptical. I use AI all the time at work to assist with coding, and beyond that I use it all the time for fun—my job is safe because AI is fucking awful at it.

So anyway I don't hate it per se, but I don't like it other than jokey shit. But I don't want to see it everywhere, either.

As someone pointed out, do you like ads ? Because AI content feel the same, it's annoying stuff I need to skip to access real content and on top of that it's an ecological disaster.

When I open an image or a page and realise it's AI, I feel the same as when I download a movie and it turns out I got a dot exe.

I don't consider it art either but not hating it since it offers you a different view on realism while trying to be realism. With silly results like pouring a mug of hot coffee out of the fingers 🤌, or carrying a shield backwards.

For me it's on the same level as memes - not intended to be consumed as art, but merely as a form of posting. It's trash and that's fine.

But it shouldn't be elevated above that. It's derivative and stilted and lacks character, and worse, it might be depriving amateur artists the chance to flex their creative muscles and actually create art themselves.

Also draining cities dry of municipal water to generate a picture of a bored ape is probably a bad use of resources.

The easy answer is: Yes, because it's mostly bad.

The Long answer is: Like everything in art and life, If you can set it in right context it could also work. If you cannot, it's just bland and bad in the classic artistic craftmanship standard and modern art and Action Art.

It is not art.

Ai is capitalism maximizing productivity and minimizing labour costs.

Ai isn’t targeting tedious labour, the people building these systems are going after art, music and the creative process. They want to take the human out of the equation and pump out more content to monetize at ever increasing rates.

It’s an insult to life itself.

Art is about expressing one emotion from one person to another.

We have a word for fake pictures: advertising.

In general - yes. There is a flood of shitty and lazy “art” that has infected search results and creative spaces. I’m also deeply uncomfortable with it being trained on artists work without their consent - for all the talk about it being equivalent to human inspiration I’m pretty sure there have been examples where it’s started generating attempts at signatures.

It’s terrible in knitting and crochet spaces (I imagine woodworking and sculpture and architecture too) because there are lots of things generated which are physical impossible and just wrong to anyone who enjoys the crafts. It gives false understandings of what those art forms look like.

I think the entire point of art is the human intentionality aspect. Art is humans using materials to do things that don’t serve an immediate practical purpose. There has to be some element of “desire” on the part of the artist.

So it’s not that it is impossible to use AI tools to generate art (there’s stochastic computer generated pieces from the 70s that are lovely iirc) To me though, the way these tools are used is what is important - if you’re using an AI you’re training and adjusting yourself, if you’re spending hours tweaking prompts and perhaps sifting through hundreds of pictures to combine and really participate in “making” something.

The current trend is really just a bunch of content sludge. I don’t see the appeal in either the process of creation or in what can be appreciated from it. The best stuff is mostly memey topical political jokes, where it rests more on the symbols rather than the art itself.

Like, when I make art - my process is adding layers over weeks and weeks. It’s noticing that I don’t like the way this section looks, so I go back over it, come back to it later… it’s a process - I engage with and shape the work. I’m just a guy who glues trash to things and paints them, my art doesn’t really have external value - but it still feels like art in a way that getting Midjourney to make pictures of Gandolf with big honking naturals isn’t.

I don't even consider AI generated images to be art since there is no expression of skill, imagination, or feeling in them.

Yes, as it conveys nothing more than the prompt it was given. Art is a means of communication, but when all it does is chop up pictures it’s seen to match a prompt there just isn’t anything to analyze.

It may look pretty in the moment, but lacks all substance and will be forgotten as quickly as it was generated.

What I hate about AI art: How it's based on stolen work. How it is purpose built to replace real, talented artists and devalue their labor. How it uses way more energy than it needs to and is pretty wasteful

What I love about AI art: Instant stupid shit for meme madness.

If AI art was all just stupid jokey shit like this that a friend of mine made when we were discussing how people were making Ghibli-fied versions of important moments in history, and we decided to go with "George Bush doesn't care about black people" but make Mike Myers dressed as Austin Powers, I'd be okay with it entirely. It's not for profit by devaluing artists and using this work instead of a real artists work, it's just stupid shit that makes us laugh. Everything else aside, I can get behind stupid shit that makes us laugh. The rest of the issues with AI art suck though.

In my understanding, art is made of

1. creativity

2. craftsmanship

If one of them is lacking, then the outcome is either just a copy, or even a bad copy.

Current AI is lacking both.

So whenever anyone calls generated pictures "art", then you know something about that one.