I don’t hate the “art.” The AI can’t do much about it.

What I strongly dislike is people who manage to draft literally 40 words or less and think they “created” something.

You didn’t. You a mathematical model to do something for you. You therw 175 tokens into a whirlpool and got am 87% what you wanted image out. If you even had an idea of what you wanted before hand.

I don’t hate AI art. I hate AI art being passed off as “traditional” art.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

I’m not sure hate is the right word. When you’ve got someone stabbing you in the back multiple times, is it really hate you’re feeling toward them? Or is it anger, fear, and danger?

I “hate” it in the sense that it’s built on theft and requires the exploitation of underpaid workers to develop and maintain it. I “hate” it in the sense that we’re living on a burning cinder with dwindling fresh water resources and “AI” is adding fuel to the fire. I “hate” it in the sense that it’s being used to further undervalue artists and writers. I “hate” it in the sense that it fills our spaces with crap that so often looks like it was cribbed off of Rapunzel, Wreck-It-Ralph, and some other things.

Firstly, it’s not art. I already hate that OP called it that. It’s AI generated imagery. There is no art involved outside of art theft.

Secondly, it’s legal art theft created by those types of people that either never considered artists to have any value, or have a chip on their shoulder against artists.

Thirdly, at no point in history have artists ever been appreciated, despite art being the most important element of everything. Imagine right now what a user interface would look like without artistic design. Or a car. Or your toothbrush. AI gen shafts artists… again… with the absolutely ridiculously, flippant argument that it “democratises art”, as if it’s some sort of noble privilege rather than a skill literally anyone can practice.

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.

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.

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.

Art is cool cos it’s like holy shit a person did that!?

If it’s just an algorithm it’s not very impressive.

Environmental impacts 🤷

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