It makes them create stuff that looks like shit to the trained eye, but is good or good enough for them, thus they don't have to pay money to an actual professional. That doesn't only relate to art, but to IT stuff as well. If you want it done right, hire a professional.
It's the same with the "but my nephew can do it for a tenth of the price"-folks.
Just an anecdote, but recently, there have been many "crochet" 3D models posted to 3D printing sites. (Many of those are marked as AI-generated, too) Those look nothing like a crochet toy would look like. These models have a yarn-looking "V" pattern applied to every surface of 3D model, but this pattern comes not from crochet, but from hand-knit blankets (as far as I can tell).
This is exactly what my friend who was a copywriter told me several years ago; now he manages the company's AI production pipeline. They mostly do b2b. But essentially, the AI even then could produce stuff that was 80% good for 10% of the money, and infinitely quicker and scalable. And that's plenty good for what they're doing. So several people lost their jobs, the content quality drops, but the C suite makes money and nobody cares about the "craftsmanship" of the work.
Putting effort in it is what makes it art. You as an artist has decided making this piece is worth your time. ”Art” without effort is just disposable slop.
For one, power causes brain damage which renders rich people literally incapable of knowing what is best for others:
“Subjects under the influence of power, he found in studies spanning two decades, acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view.”
“And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, “mirroring,” that may be a cornerstone of empathy.” ―Power Causes Brain Damage, by Jerry Useem for The Atlantic.[16]
I greatly enjoyed your essay and found it thought-provoking. I dug through the references regarding power and its effect on the brain (and loss of empathy), and it was both surprising to find it was researched/established scientifically and not-so-surprising in that it explains so much of these people's behavior.
Indeed. For me, realizing the cause of problems continues to be instrumental to keep things in perspective when solutions are often too complex to contemplate. However, in this case the conclusion is clear: a wealth/power cap has to become normalized. The inverse of vaccinations, you take money away so the indefinite growth mind virus doesn't grab hold to infect or impact society.
Thank you for having invested time and thought into my essay, it makes it all worthwhile, truly.
I kind of had that realization the other day. Art is just people taking time to make something, good or bad. What makes it valuable is the time + their ability. It is effectively a monetary battery of your time, charge it up with time, sell it for money.
Yeah I think people like this see a book written by a human that took them a year to write and sold 1,000 copies and an AI that farts out 500 books in a day and sells 1,000 copies in total as essentially the same thing, except that the AI one is superior to them because it happened faster. Never mind that now Amazon is flooded with the 500 books the AI just made so nobody else can get seen, tomorrow we'll just just make 1,000 books.
I read the phrase "dictatorship of the wealthy" for the first time the other day. It always seemed obvious but, to see it put that way struck me as novel.
But because they are hoarding money instead of toilet paper, pokemon cards or empty soda cans, they are somehow smart and we should worship them, instead of locking them in an institution.
Without the greed mindset we just couldn't possibly comprehend the benefits of turning our limited drinking water into more "art" than an artist ever wanted to create in the first place.
Love that he thinks "if you know how to tell a great story you will love AI." The whole point of AI is to cut out the telling a story part. In reality it's "if you think you have a good idea for a story but don't know how to tell one you'll love whatever the AI spits out." People who know how to do creative things don't need AI to do it for them.
Proof once more, as if we needed it, that the people who have traded their humanity for buying into the capitalist mindset, only ever think of things as if they were marketable products, and in terms of outcomes and productivity.
Fuck the creative process, the journey it takes you on, and the necessary introspection and connection to the world that needs to occur for it. Fuck the joy you can find in effort, failure, and in finally having an epiphany. Fuck being able to hone your skills without depending on a corporate tool that can be taken away from you at a minute's notice. All of it be damned, you can now (allegedly) get to the same end result quicker without the effort (or pleasure, or self-discovery, or personal growth). We all know that the end result is what counts, and nothing else.
But yeah, people be mad because meanie artists gatekeep poor ol' Mark, and nothing says "democratising" art like "automating the process out of your hands with corporate approved tools and ideology".
Fuck the creative process, the journey it takes you on, and the necessary introspection and connection to the world that needs to occur for it. Fuck the joy you can find in effort, failure, and in finally having an epiphany. Fuck being able to hone your skills without depending on a corporate tool that can be taken away from you at a minute’s notice. All of it be damned, you can now (allegedly) get to the same end result quicker without the effort (or pleasure, or self-discovery, or personal growth). We all know that the end result is what counts, and nothing else.
Is anyone claiming you can't do that? The use case for most AI slop is soulless corporate graphic design that's about as worker bee as it gets and the rest is mostly people using it in place of hiring an actual artist for their weirdly specific niche pornography. And the guy wanting you to draw him something involving dolphins with a foot fetish isn't deeply concerned what your personal journey regarding the nature of creatures without feet who are obsessed with them sexually looks like.
At it's heart, the non-environmentalist AI hate is mostly people who thought their jobs were impossible to automate trying to protect those jobs from being automated.
In this post, no. And? The problem is less about forbidding creation with other means than it is about pushing the idea that the outcome is the only thing you are after in creative endeavours.
most AI slop is soulless corporate graphic design [...] and [...] niche pornography.
I understand where you come from, and agree on that front, except this can still represent revenue for (some) artists which allows them to do their art, whilst being able to practice (to a degree) and being paid for it. Also, do you have a source regarding that or is it from what you experience online?
At it's heart, the non-environmentalist AI hate is mostly people who thought their jobs were impossible to automate trying to protect those jobs from being automated.
I am entitled to hate it for reasons that are mine. This includes, but isn't limited to, a push towards equating art with a product and taking the process out of the equation. Of course we did not have to wait for AI for these people to already think like that, but it's now being pushed much harder.
Also, just in case, I don't earn my income through art, and my job isn't (yet) threatened by AI.
except this can still represent revenue for (some) artists...whilst being able to practice (to a degree) and being paid for it.
...which is just another way of saying that that work should be protected from automation. That's what arguing that tools that automate doing a thing will make people doing that thing less valuable as a paid labor is doing, it's arguing for protection from automation.
Also, do you have a source regarding that or is it from what you experience online?
Experience and a bit of hyperbole. Ask anyone who takes art commissions how often they get asked to do lewd to outright pornographic images though and you'll be surprised by the answer. But commissioned art/graphics for very specific carefully described things is all AI image generation is ever really going to replace, if only because that's the core of what it does - take a prompt and a big block of white noise and sort of digitally chisel away the bits that don't look like prompt until the result looks enough like prompt. The other obvious productive use case would be for rapid prototyping of visual design.
But then I'm old enough to remember people complaining that photoshop was destroying art. I'd be shocked if we couldn't find record of people back when it was new claiming photography was going to destroy art likewise.
I feel like we don't understand each other here. I don't want to appear combative, but I also don't like being misunderstood so:
My point was not "AI is an actual threat to all arts". My point was "equating the creative and artistic process with rapidly producing outcomes is something I profoundly disagree with, and I am truly afraid that it will take hold in people's minds".
Because, speaking also from experience, I know a few people with no AI agenda to push, who use AI as a substitute for a creative outlet. I think that they are being cheated out of a fantastic experience, because they buy into that kind of speech.
Your photography and digital arts equivalences, which I don't necessarily agree with, could also imply elitism, as in looking down on AI users. I assure you this does not come from a place of thinking people who use AI are inferior or not creative. This comes from a place of wanting them to experience their creativity truly. This means, in particular, outside the bounds of a tool which can be tuned and censored at the whims of a corporation (one big difference with photography and digital arts). This is a necessary condition for free self-expression.
So yes. I am afraid. Not that I'll lose my job, but that many people will believe this shit, settle for that, and be robbed of a wonderful human experience.
I fucking hate the unquestioned assumption that speed and efficiency are always better and that everyone should strife for them. Maybe i like the process, maybe i like taking things slow and not rushing stuff, be that programming or art or whatever.
Plus in most cases, efficiency doesn't reflect in your bottom line anyways, just the share holders, but we've been so brainwashed to see it as a virtue
It's because of the commodification. They don't recognize art, only content and units of sellable culture. And because of the implication that they expect a cut, unearned.
This is in fact an insidious form of gatekeeping. It is shutting out people who are excited to learn new skills and become the next generation of creative people by collaborating with other talented humans, receiving apprenticeship, and being rewarded for their labor. Their opportunities and newfound capabilities are being thwarted by the slop machines, and it stinks.
There is no gatekeeper like a Capitalist trying to convince you that Yet More Automation™ is good for everybody!
It's hard to see it as anything other than an effective PR campaign for his personal brand. Which likely benefited more than the users of the service. There's a fine line between not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good and also not letting a money hoarding swindler rehabilitate their actions with token gestures. Idk.
The creative iterations part is funny to me. Sure, it cuts the time-span of each iteration down, potentially, if you are not proficient with what you are doing. However, because of the wild innaccuracies and lack of context of a physical world, you are also doing 5-10x more iterations than you otherwise would have, except you don't get to learn and grow along the way.
Literally turns everything into worker-bee level stuff. Usual shareholder mentality to go for quantity over quality.
I mean they were talking about the McDonald's commercial recently and how everybody is throwing a fit over the fact that it's AI in McDonald's actually finally pulled the advert. The company that created it said that it took three or four times as long to create because they kept having to go back and reprompt and recreate and fix an accurate season errors and issues. And then ended up costing more money and more man hours than utilizing actual actors and creatives to make it happen.
With the amount of energy put into GenAI and the sheer bulk of content generated, why don't advocates have at least one example of something artistically interesting, unique, or beautiful to showcase their claims? Has it yet made anything of cultural importance that will illicit more than a chuckle and a 'like'?
It seems to me I keep hearing non-artists assert that this will be a great thing for art, while real artists who disagree are labeled Luddites or not genuinely creative in some way. It's frustrating to watch them openly say easily disprovable things. This isn't speculative anymore these systems have been in production for years at this point. Let's look at the actual results.
Can the people advocating for AI art provide any examples of anything human-generated that is artistically interesting? I suspect not and that's a big part of why they're impressed with AI art.
Like, they'd probably say "The Mona Lisa" because it's well known to be Great Art, and then their AI can draw them in the style of the Mona Lisa, ergo it has generated Great Art.
And resorting to The Mona Lisa just because it's widely considered a masterpiece by everyone else shows how little they think about art and consider it themselves. If that's your first and especially only example, you've already failed the test lol
No. They were, universally, the dumbest mother fuckers on campus. I had to take a computers & networking class to satisfy some arcane requirement and it was mostly business majors. The teacher had some easy multiplication problem on one of the tests and they were all wandering around the halls afterwards moaning about how hard the test was and comparing the answers they got.
I have a buddy that's a professional singer/song writer & producer. He went out of town a few weeks ago to collaborate for a day or two with another producer. I don't think he knew in advance but it turns out this other guy is pretty into AI music production. My friend (again: a professional artist and indie music producer) was really impressed with how useful it was. Sorry that this is an anonymous anecdote and not data but yeah some people have found ways to use AI to help them make art.
Thanks for following up. I am glad your friends still made their own song. I think AI as a conceptual tool is a more constructive application of the technology than AI as a direct generator of art.
Personally, I make things and am an artist as well. I don't think AI can directly replace what I do or what others in my field do with any satisfaction, but it can devalue the market in which I produce substantially and increase entropy and imitations to the point where signal from noise becomes harder to discern.
I can ask him more about it when I see him at bowling on Thursday. But please understand I'm not claiming AI is good, I'm just reporting that some artists find it useful. I'm not sure that their final cut has any ai sound in it, they may have just used it to workshop their idea.
I've seen demos of software that uses AI to split a song into multiple tracks, one for each instrument. THAT is pretty cool. It's not lossless, you're going to lose some of the human performance because the AI has to reconstruct the sound for each instrument and it's not going to be 100% perfect, but it's a really neat (and useful) tool.
Notably, it's not the kind of thing you generally see when tech bros are touting AI.
Creative iteration is hard work. if it is only taking minutes, it is because it is not creative. Sure, it is hard to sit down and draw or write or do any work, but the best ideas happen during that process
Ai conceptual art is still scraped from artists who physically made the art in the first place . Without humans building art by hand it wouldn't have existed.
I literally saw the word Disney plastered in a language learning ‘AI’ story on YouTube. It wasn’t even Disney related material. That’s how bad and lazy it is at scraping. It’s even scraping the logos from the creators it’s stealing from.
It’s not AI. It hasn’t created anything. So we should stop calling it that.
It’s just plaigerism. Just call it plaigerism. “I plaigerized a story. I plaigerized all the concepts for it” stop pretending you created a damned thing. You’re fooling nobody
(Directed at the original post, not the OP who posted it here)
Ai makes it more obvious why very rich people don't deserve their wealth but they will say some of the dumbest shit and act enlightened.
Dear shitheads, creative people don't hate ai because it create what they create, they hate it because it is build with stolen labor and used to push them out of the market. People like new tools that make their life easier... people don't like when big companies steal their labor and push them out of the market.
Are you kidding me? AI doesn't make creative people more creative. Actually picking up a crayon or a pencil or whatever your jive is, and actively creating more, makes creative people more creative.
Also, lol, a former Shark Tank host pushing a grift, the jokes write themselves.
Also also, if you want to make art fast, cutting up some construction paper and playing with that is better, and more fun, than using AI by a longshot, and construction paper cutouts are the most basic form of art and one of, if not the first forms of art, that everyone in here has probably ever done.
My fave thing about creativity is raw efficiency. When I sit down to paint, I've already mapped out the most efficient way to create a completed painting (i.e. a product).
It's to put the paintbrush down and immediately Google what I was going to paint and just print out a picture of that instead. WAY quicker. I can do that in minutes as opposed to what used to take months!
I feel vindicated. A few months/years? ago, everyone was saying Mark Cuban was the exception to the rule "all billionaires suck". I always claimed otherwise, fuck Mark Cuban, he also sucks. And here we are, the guy is just as hated nowadays...
Creativity is fundamentally an exercise in brain plasticity. Enjoy your early onset dementia/Alzheimer's when you don't learn a damn thing for years on end.
Why would I want to create some soulless approximation of my creative idea, when I could use my own brain, hands, and heart to create my idea exactly the way I imagine it?
Putting work into art can be a cathartic labor of love. I enjoy making things with specific people, music, or senses & imagery in mind. There’s also a distinct sense of accomplishment that comes from completing a work and saying, “I made this.” Putting a prompt into a machine can’t give me that.
It's true in the sense that it's fantastic at laying down a template for your ideas, which you can then refine and finesse yourself.
The only issue is what capitalism is doing with it. I use AI a lot for my daily job, but it fills me with dread knowing how limited my future is because of it.
The Luddites didn't smash all those machines because they were afraid of them. They were more than happy to use the fancy new tools to make them more efficient. They just didn't want to sacrifice their standard of living to do it.
I don't need AI to replace my creativity and imagination. This is what someone writes when they only care about the end product, and not about the actual creative process.
But the AI also tells stories. So even if your story is great, it will be drowned in thousands of AI slop stories. Publishing houses can already not screen new novels anymore because they are getting flooded with hundreds of AI generated books every day (complete with AI generated, fake authors).
even i, the uncreative one, understood that art is about the creating part. How you do it. The finished work can give a hint on what creating might have looked like.
If someone spends hours fighting an LLM to get some results, hey that's art too. Good luck on telling an interesting story though.
No one needs to "LOVE Ai" though. It is generally pretty shitty. Sit back down, Mark!
Lol wut. The people who have proven with their actions consistently that they are willing to fuck everyone else over to get ahead, again and again? Would switch sides as they're about to make the winning dunk on the underclass?
Artistic mastery isn’t gatekeeping, but I understand the sentiment. It’s nice to have the ability to do rapid prototyping, but I’m against AI being used in place of craftsmanship. “The art advances but the artisan recedes.”
Those AI folks need to see it as the journey taken, not the destination. Until that happens the AI "Art Kit" for adults will always be a balloon floating towards a pin.
The number of gatekeepers drops because AI people are desperate to keep the ship afloat. Why worry about drowning when you have a built-in buoy, your natural brain, effort, and human perseverance?
All of the inadequacies and personal failures that prevented you from doing what GenAI does for you now are still there. Those things are why you were a failure before AI, and why you will be a failure after AI. The quicker you recognize that, the less time you'll spend being an obnoxious asshole and making a fool of yourself by larping as the artist you've always fantisized of being. You were nothing before, you are nothing now. Get over yourself, otherwise you will continue to be nothing until the day you die. Once you truly understand this, maybe you'll be able to fix it. Not before.
I have issues with these LLMs but what he is saying here isn't wrong. If people can use photoshop to create art, this is fundamentally no different.
I think people mistake the llm image generators as capable of generating a final output. They are a playground and shouldn't be consider the final product anymore than amateur developers using it to write an entire program. Peole that have tried to shipping the LLM output as a final product have face the level of ridicule it deserves.
The more I see these discussions and the way everyone seemingly talked past each other, the more clear it seems these LLMs will create a measurable divide between those who can use them to improve productivity and those who refuse.
Each side of the divide will point at the other side's extremists as proof for why their side is the correct side. But as with most things, the path is somewhere down the middle.
You had me until the very end. I agree with most of what you wrote. But saying that each side points to the other side's extremists smells like a very "centrist" take. What are the "extremist" views that the ultra pro-AI people are pointing to?
The massive issue is your first paragraph. The rest makes sense.
You should have found a different comparison. Photoshop, at least before they added Ai, was a tool that required competence and learning to use. You became better using and failing at it over time.
Llm as a bank of stolen work from great artists has its uses, like for initial concepts, which before I would do with Google images, looking at other people's works. And like that, it just requires that I know what I'm looking for, not that I have any competence nor did it teach me anything other than learning what other people do.
The radicalism is bad but it's inevitable since most people are trying to sell it as something that it is not.
Specially the employers. They don't care if I'm getting better or learning anything, but that I'm outputting something faster and costing them less. It works for them, but it's causing a great damage.
You seem to be ignoring some stuff specific to llms, but anyway I'm curious; which graphical llm is not based in other people's work?
Perhaps stolen was a strong term, but they are all based on other people's work right? When I used it I could clearly see the styles of some artists it was trained on.
I'm curious about that but even if it's magically original to me that's is still only useful to look at someone else's work, even if is a computer work. It's not a tool in itself I can master and improve my work.
Like fluid simulation for instance. You can light and render it well, but you can't fully control it, because you're not the one making it. When I need a very specific splash for a render I need to manually model it. And then llm is even worse because it controls the whole thing by itself.
You appear to be downvoting each of my comments as I attempt to reply to your questions. Therefore I see no need to engage further with you on then topic.
"I hate AI like everyone else … but let me make a specious reference to a completely different technology that makes it sound like I'm actually a user being defensive."
AI makes uncreative people pretend to be creative.
It makes them create stuff that looks like shit to the trained eye, but is good or good enough for them, thus they don't have to pay money to an actual professional. That doesn't only relate to art, but to IT stuff as well. If you want it done right, hire a professional.
It's the same with the "but my nephew can do it for a tenth of the price"-folks.
Just an anecdote, but recently, there have been many "crochet" 3D models posted to 3D printing sites. (Many of those are marked as AI-generated, too) Those look nothing like a crochet toy would look like. These models have a yarn-looking "V" pattern applied to every surface of 3D model, but this pattern comes not from crochet, but from hand-knit blankets (as far as I can tell).
I hate those people with a passion. Don't flood my printables, you idiots!
This is exactly what my friend who was a copywriter told me several years ago; now he manages the company's AI production pipeline. They mostly do b2b. But essentially, the AI even then could produce stuff that was 80% good for 10% of the money, and infinitely quicker and scalable. And that's plenty good for what they're doing. So several people lost their jobs, the content quality drops, but the C suite makes money and nobody cares about the "craftsmanship" of the work.
Wait until they find out they can replace management even better
creating something yourself also feels way more satisfying cause you can see your own progress in those creations
Putting effort in it is what makes it art. You as an artist has decided making this piece is worth your time. ”Art” without effort is just disposable slop.
It actually does cause brain damage. I mentioned it in an essay (What if I paid for all my free software?):
I greatly enjoyed your essay and found it thought-provoking. I dug through the references regarding power and its effect on the brain (and loss of empathy), and it was both surprising to find it was researched/established scientifically and not-so-surprising in that it explains so much of these people's behavior.
Cheers
Indeed. For me, realizing the cause of problems continues to be instrumental to keep things in perspective when solutions are often too complex to contemplate. However, in this case the conclusion is clear: a wealth/power cap has to become normalized. The inverse of vaccinations, you take money away so the indefinite growth mind virus doesn't grab hold to infect or impact society.
Thank you for having invested time and thought into my essay, it makes it all worthwhile, truly.
The point of art isn't getting it done quickly. It's the journey, the painstaking hours and the satisfaction of the finished piece.
The only people who think making art faster is good are marketing ghouls.
Well said. I mean, the thing produced is literally called a WORK (of art).
I kind of had that realization the other day. Art is just people taking time to make something, good or bad. What makes it valuable is the time + their ability. It is effectively a monetary battery of your time, charge it up with time, sell it for money.
The value is also partly the literal structure that you've built into your brain to have the skill set necessary to do that work.
Building skill in art is as profoundly impactful on your neurology as learning a new language or sciences.
Yeah I think people like this see a book written by a human that took them a year to write and sold 1,000 copies and an AI that farts out 500 books in a day and sells 1,000 copies in total as essentially the same thing, except that the AI one is superior to them because it happened faster. Never mind that now Amazon is flooded with the 500 books the AI just made so nobody else can get seen, tomorrow we'll just just make 1,000 books.
Financial obesity is neurotoxic.
"Financial Obesity" is definitely a term I'm going to use now, thanks.
I read the phrase "dictatorship of the wealthy" for the first time the other day. It always seemed obvious but, to see it put that way struck me as novel.
Wealth hoarding. It’s a mental illness.
But because they are hoarding money instead of toilet paper, pokemon cards or empty soda cans, they are somehow smart and we should worship them, instead of locking them in an institution.
The answer is simple. Wealth makes others serve you and diminshes or sometimes outright removes consequences.
Without the greed mindset we just couldn't possibly comprehend the benefits of turning our limited drinking water into more "art" than an artist ever wanted to create in the first place.
Love that he thinks "if you know how to tell a great story you will love AI." The whole point of AI is to cut out the telling a story part. In reality it's "if you think you have a good idea for a story but don't know how to tell one you'll love whatever the AI spits out." People who know how to do creative things don't need AI to do it for them.
Proof once more, as if we needed it, that the people who have traded their humanity for buying into the capitalist mindset, only ever think of things as if they were marketable products, and in terms of outcomes and productivity.
Fuck the creative process, the journey it takes you on, and the necessary introspection and connection to the world that needs to occur for it. Fuck the joy you can find in effort, failure, and in finally having an epiphany. Fuck being able to hone your skills without depending on a corporate tool that can be taken away from you at a minute's notice. All of it be damned, you can now (allegedly) get to the same end result quicker without the effort (or pleasure, or self-discovery, or personal growth). We all know that the end result is what counts, and nothing else.
But yeah, people be mad because meanie artists gatekeep poor ol' Mark, and nothing says "democratising" art like "automating the process out of your hands with corporate approved tools and ideology".
Fuck sake.Fuck's sake.
It's actually fuck's sakes. Try to get an AI to be that pedantic.
Thank you! I'd take that over the sycophancy to be honest.
Is anyone claiming you can't do that? The use case for most AI slop is soulless corporate graphic design that's about as worker bee as it gets and the rest is mostly people using it in place of hiring an actual artist for their weirdly specific niche pornography. And the guy wanting you to draw him something involving dolphins with a foot fetish isn't deeply concerned what your personal journey regarding the nature of creatures without feet who are obsessed with them sexually looks like.
At it's heart, the non-environmentalist AI hate is mostly people who thought their jobs were impossible to automate trying to protect those jobs from being automated.
In this post, no. And? The problem is less about forbidding creation with other means than it is about pushing the idea that the outcome is the only thing you are after in creative endeavours.
I understand where you come from, and agree on that front, except this can still represent revenue for (some) artists which allows them to do their art, whilst being able to practice (to a degree) and being paid for it. Also, do you have a source regarding that or is it from what you experience online?
I am entitled to hate it for reasons that are mine. This includes, but isn't limited to, a push towards equating art with a product and taking the process out of the equation. Of course we did not have to wait for AI for these people to already think like that, but it's now being pushed much harder.
Also, just in case, I don't earn my income through art, and my job isn't (yet) threatened by AI.
...which is just another way of saying that that work should be protected from automation. That's what arguing that tools that automate doing a thing will make people doing that thing less valuable as a paid labor is doing, it's arguing for protection from automation.
Experience and a bit of hyperbole. Ask anyone who takes art commissions how often they get asked to do lewd to outright pornographic images though and you'll be surprised by the answer. But commissioned art/graphics for very specific carefully described things is all AI image generation is ever really going to replace, if only because that's the core of what it does - take a prompt and a big block of white noise and sort of digitally chisel away the bits that don't look like prompt until the result looks enough like prompt. The other obvious productive use case would be for rapid prototyping of visual design.
But then I'm old enough to remember people complaining that photoshop was destroying art. I'd be shocked if we couldn't find record of people back when it was new claiming photography was going to destroy art likewise.
I feel like we don't understand each other here. I don't want to appear combative, but I also don't like being misunderstood so:
My point was not "AI is an actual threat to all arts". My point was "equating the creative and artistic process with rapidly producing outcomes is something I profoundly disagree with, and I am truly afraid that it will take hold in people's minds".
Because, speaking also from experience, I know a few people with no AI agenda to push, who use AI as a substitute for a creative outlet. I think that they are being cheated out of a fantastic experience, because they buy into that kind of speech.
Your photography and digital arts equivalences, which I don't necessarily agree with, could also imply elitism, as in looking down on AI users. I assure you this does not come from a place of thinking people who use AI are inferior or not creative. This comes from a place of wanting them to experience their creativity truly. This means, in particular, outside the bounds of a tool which can be tuned and censored at the whims of a corporation (one big difference with photography and digital arts). This is a necessary condition for free self-expression.
So yes. I am afraid. Not that I'll lose my job, but that many people will believe this shit, settle for that, and be robbed of a wonderful human experience.
What the fuck would Mark Cuban know about creating art?
People let these business ghouls way the fuck out of their lane.
I don't trust anyone who talks about 'creators' instead of artists.
I fucking hate the unquestioned assumption that speed and efficiency are always better and that everyone should strife for them. Maybe i like the process, maybe i like taking things slow and not rushing stuff, be that programming or art or whatever.
Plus in most cases, efficiency doesn't reflect in your bottom line anyways, just the share holders, but we've been so brainwashed to see it as a virtue
It's because of the commodification. They don't recognize art, only content and units of sellable culture. And because of the implication that they expect a cut, unearned.
This is in fact an insidious form of gatekeeping. It is shutting out people who are excited to learn new skills and become the next generation of creative people by collaborating with other talented humans, receiving apprenticeship, and being rewarded for their labor. Their opportunities and newfound capabilities are being thwarted by the slop machines, and it stinks.
There is no gatekeeper like a Capitalist trying to convince you that Yet More Automation™ is good for everybody!
The number of gatekeeper will never hit zero. The model owners become the new gatekeepers.
It's the reason why we've moved to data centers over physical hardware for people. Control.
I also wonder what he would think about right wing chuds "gatekeeping" their fandoms by being absolutely toxic pieces of shits to everyone.
Oh like this weirdo? 😬
https://www.404media.co/anthropic-exec-forces-ai-chatbot-on-gay-discord-community-members-flee/
Said by someone who is as creative as a rock.
He is very creative when it comes to swindle money out of people
This is the guy who did Cost Plus Drugs, right? Afaik that's helped a lot of people.
It's hard to see it as anything other than an effective PR campaign for his personal brand. Which likely benefited more than the users of the service. There's a fine line between not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good and also not letting a money hoarding swindler rehabilitate their actions with token gestures. Idk.
The creative iterations part is funny to me. Sure, it cuts the time-span of each iteration down, potentially, if you are not proficient with what you are doing. However, because of the wild innaccuracies and lack of context of a physical world, you are also doing 5-10x more iterations than you otherwise would have, except you don't get to learn and grow along the way.
Literally turns everything into worker-bee level stuff. Usual shareholder mentality to go for quantity over quality.
I mean they were talking about the McDonald's commercial recently and how everybody is throwing a fit over the fact that it's AI in McDonald's actually finally pulled the advert. The company that created it said that it took three or four times as long to create because they kept having to go back and reprompt and recreate and fix an accurate season errors and issues. And then ended up costing more money and more man hours than utilizing actual actors and creatives to make it happen.
Relevant clip from Silicon Valley: https://youtu.be/u3o8Cygx1EU
As an artist, I LOVE being told what i should like and not like by an out-of-touch never-been-cool rich asshole. Thanks, dickwad!
So smart, thank you for blessing us with your words of wisdom, Mr. Rich Person who is also an expert in art!
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler Creating this slop caused a home in Wisconsin to lose power for 2 minutes. Please send them your thoughts and prayers! :::
With the amount of energy put into GenAI and the sheer bulk of content generated, why don't advocates have at least one example of something artistically interesting, unique, or beautiful to showcase their claims? Has it yet made anything of cultural importance that will illicit more than a chuckle and a 'like'?
It seems to me I keep hearing non-artists assert that this will be a great thing for art, while real artists who disagree are labeled Luddites or not genuinely creative in some way. It's frustrating to watch them openly say easily disprovable things. This isn't speculative anymore these systems have been in production for years at this point. Let's look at the actual results.
Can the people advocating for AI art provide any examples of anything human-generated that is artistically interesting? I suspect not and that's a big part of why they're impressed with AI art.
Like, they'd probably say "The Mona Lisa" because it's well known to be Great Art, and then their AI can draw them in the style of the Mona Lisa, ergo it has generated Great Art.
I like this mini thread, yeah I agree. It seems like most AI advocates do not understand the difference between graphics and art.
Computers make graphics, and art is the human experience (often) expressed through a visual medium.
And resorting to The Mona Lisa just because it's widely considered a masterpiece by everyone else shows how little they think about art and consider it themselves. If that's your first and especially only example, you've already failed the test lol
Business majors run everything. If you went to college, did you ever have an interesting conversation with a business major?
FTFY
No. They were, universally, the dumbest mother fuckers on campus. I had to take a computers & networking class to satisfy some arcane requirement and it was mostly business majors. The teacher had some easy multiplication problem on one of the tests and they were all wandering around the halls afterwards moaning about how hard the test was and comparing the answers they got.
This is real human art generated by real humans (real art 2025 online free)
https://youtu.be/5E_ntdYfMng
I have a buddy that's a professional singer/song writer & producer. He went out of town a few weeks ago to collaborate for a day or two with another producer. I don't think he knew in advance but it turns out this other guy is pretty into AI music production. My friend (again: a professional artist and indie music producer) was really impressed with how useful it was. Sorry that this is an anonymous anecdote and not data but yeah some people have found ways to use AI to help them make art.
🤷 Let's hear it.
Update: they used AI to develop the song in a few different directions then picked the direction they liked best and did it manually.
I didn't ask for a copy of the song, I don't think it's released yet.
Thanks for following up. I am glad your friends still made their own song. I think AI as a conceptual tool is a more constructive application of the technology than AI as a direct generator of art.
Personally, I make things and am an artist as well. I don't think AI can directly replace what I do or what others in my field do with any satisfaction, but it can devalue the market in which I produce substantially and increase entropy and imitations to the point where signal from noise becomes harder to discern.
Yeah definitely
I can ask him more about it when I see him at bowling on Thursday. But please understand I'm not claiming AI is good, I'm just reporting that some artists find it useful. I'm not sure that their final cut has any ai sound in it, they may have just used it to workshop their idea.
I've seen demos of software that uses AI to split a song into multiple tracks, one for each instrument. THAT is pretty cool. It's not lossless, you're going to lose some of the human performance because the AI has to reconstruct the sound for each instrument and it's not going to be 100% perfect, but it's a really neat (and useful) tool.
Notably, it's not the kind of thing you generally see when tech bros are touting AI.
Creative iteration is hard work. if it is only taking minutes, it is because it is not creative. Sure, it is hard to sit down and draw or write or do any work, but the best ideas happen during that process
Ai conceptual art is still scraped from artists who physically made the art in the first place . Without humans building art by hand it wouldn't have existed.
I literally saw the word Disney plastered in a language learning ‘AI’ story on YouTube. It wasn’t even Disney related material. That’s how bad and lazy it is at scraping. It’s even scraping the logos from the creators it’s stealing from.
It’s not AI. It hasn’t created anything. So we should stop calling it that.
It’s just plaigerism. Just call it plaigerism. “I plaigerized a story. I plaigerized all the concepts for it” stop pretending you created a damned thing. You’re fooling nobody
(Directed at the original post, not the OP who posted it here)
Ai makes it more obvious why very rich people don't deserve their wealth but they will say some of the dumbest shit and act enlightened.
Dear shitheads, creative people don't hate ai because it create what they create, they hate it because it is build with stolen labor and used to push them out of the market. People like new tools that make their life easier... people don't like when big companies steal their labor and push them out of the market.
They say this dumb shit to promote it. They have a ton on money invested in this newest scam.
Bingo!
Ah yes of course, the ITERATIONS! Thats all art ever is, it’s all just ITERATIONS!
And at Iteration X, the universe gains sentience.
Are you kidding me? AI doesn't make creative people more creative. Actually picking up a crayon or a pencil or whatever your jive is, and actively creating more, makes creative people more creative.
Also, lol, a former Shark Tank host pushing a grift, the jokes write themselves.
Also also, if you want to make art fast, cutting up some construction paper and playing with that is better, and more fun, than using AI by a longshot, and construction paper cutouts are the most basic form of art and one of, if not the first forms of art, that everyone in here has probably ever done.
My fave thing about creativity is raw efficiency. When I sit down to paint, I've already mapped out the most efficient way to create a completed painting (i.e. a product).
It's to put the paintbrush down and immediately Google what I was going to paint and just print out a picture of that instead. WAY quicker. I can do that in minutes as opposed to what used to take months!
I feel vindicated. A few months/years? ago, everyone was saying Mark Cuban was the exception to the rule "all billionaires suck". I always claimed otherwise, fuck Mark Cuban, he also sucks. And here we are, the guy is just as hated nowadays...
mark has a vested interest in the success of AI. anything he says is for the enrichment of his investments.
don't listen to mark, he's a shill.
Creativity is fundamentally an exercise in brain plasticity. Enjoy your early onset dementia/Alzheimer's when you don't learn a damn thing for years on end.
If AI increases productivity, where's the shovelware? Why haven't we seen a hockey stick graph of code commits/lines/repos?
https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
Why would I want to create some soulless approximation of my creative idea, when I could use my own brain, hands, and heart to create my idea exactly the way I imagine it?
Putting work into art can be a cathartic labor of love. I enjoy making things with specific people, music, or senses & imagery in mind. There’s also a distinct sense of accomplishment that comes from completing a work and saying, “I made this.” Putting a prompt into a machine can’t give me that.
It's true in the sense that it's fantastic at laying down a template for your ideas, which you can then refine and finesse yourself.
The only issue is what capitalism is doing with it. I use AI a lot for my daily job, but it fills me with dread knowing how limited my future is because of it.
The Luddites didn't smash all those machines because they were afraid of them. They were more than happy to use the fancy new tools to make them more efficient. They just didn't want to sacrifice their standard of living to do it.
Just goes to show it wasn't intelligence that made them rich.
I hate upvoting these things but they’re in a f AI community so it’s appropriate
I don't need AI to replace my creativity and imagination. This is what someone writes when they only care about the end product, and not about the actual creative process.
But the AI also tells stories. So even if your story is great, it will be drowned in thousands of AI slop stories. Publishing houses can already not screen new novels anymore because they are getting flooded with hundreds of AI generated books every day (complete with AI generated, fake authors).
even i, the uncreative one, understood that art is about the creating part. How you do it. The finished work can give a hint on what creating might have looked like. If someone spends hours fighting an LLM to get some results, hey that's art too. Good luck on telling an interesting story though.
No one needs to "LOVE Ai" though. It is generally pretty shitty. Sit back down, Mark!
Cuban used AI to prepare to go on Pablo Torre's podcast and made an ass out of himself, so I don't trust his evaluation of AI's capabilities.
It's definitely a pathology.
To be fair, I have used AI to write the story for my Pathfinder campaign, but it usually goes something like this:
So basically AI doesn't provide anything useful but helps getting the idea process going. Maybe that's some variation on Cunningham's Law?
This sounds similar to my usage. I ask AI to write something it gives some BS while reading that I come up with different things and use them.
A good collection of random tables does the same thing with minimal amounts of enviromental destruction. Here's a bunch of them : https://chartopia.d12dev.com/collection/293/
I'm using local LLMs so I don't think my local usage is destroying environment more than anyone's internet usage.
I dunno, to me that just sounds like relying on AI but with extra steps.
Lol wut. The people who have proven with their actions consistently that they are willing to fuck everyone else over to get ahead, again and again? Would switch sides as they're about to make the winning dunk on the underclass?
Artistic mastery isn’t gatekeeping, but I understand the sentiment. It’s nice to have the ability to do rapid prototyping, but I’m against AI being used in place of craftsmanship. “The art advances but the artisan recedes.”
Was this written by an LLM?
curious that every single artist i know hates this shit
I'm not sure, they didn't say whether I'll LOVE AI enough...
Those AI folks need to see it as the journey taken, not the destination. Until that happens the AI "Art Kit" for adults will always be a balloon floating towards a pin.
Ah yes I too love it when I get results with none of the actual creative process, because the end result is all that matters
Signed a fellow human
"Why use your brain when you don't have to?" Mark has had some surprisingly good takes for a billionaire but way off on this one.
AI is a new financial gatekeeper, we're just not paying for it yet because they're trying to get us hooked.
It's not useful enough yet. But when it's the only way to interface with the new Internet, it will be by default.
The number of gatekeepers drops because AI people are desperate to keep the ship afloat. Why worry about drowning when you have a built-in buoy, your natural brain, effort, and human perseverance?
All of the inadequacies and personal failures that prevented you from doing what GenAI does for you now are still there. Those things are why you were a failure before AI, and why you will be a failure after AI. The quicker you recognize that, the less time you'll spend being an obnoxious asshole and making a fool of yourself by larping as the artist you've always fantisized of being. You were nothing before, you are nothing now. Get over yourself, otherwise you will continue to be nothing until the day you die. Once you truly understand this, maybe you'll be able to fix it. Not before.
I have issues with these LLMs but what he is saying here isn't wrong. If people can use photoshop to create art, this is fundamentally no different.
I think people mistake the llm image generators as capable of generating a final output. They are a playground and shouldn't be consider the final product anymore than amateur developers using it to write an entire program. Peole that have tried to shipping the LLM output as a final product have face the level of ridicule it deserves.
The more I see these discussions and the way everyone seemingly talked past each other, the more clear it seems these LLMs will create a measurable divide between those who can use them to improve productivity and those who refuse.
Each side of the divide will point at the other side's extremists as proof for why their side is the correct side. But as with most things, the path is somewhere down the middle.
You had me until the very end. I agree with most of what you wrote. But saying that each side points to the other side's extremists smells like a very "centrist" take. What are the "extremist" views that the ultra pro-AI people are pointing to?
I hope so! I am literally suggesting a centrist take. Don't go all in but also don't ignore its benefits.
There are a lot of people hyping it and a lot of people hating on it. There is value to them. Some over overstating it, others are understating it.
This does not mean that overstating delta is equal to the understating delta. The sentiment on LLMs isn't a bell curve.
Refusing to use it to their own detriment.
Convincing others to not use it to their own detriment.
The massive issue is your first paragraph. The rest makes sense.
You should have found a different comparison. Photoshop, at least before they added Ai, was a tool that required competence and learning to use. You became better using and failing at it over time.
Llm as a bank of stolen work from great artists has its uses, like for initial concepts, which before I would do with Google images, looking at other people's works. And like that, it just requires that I know what I'm looking for, not that I have any competence nor did it teach me anything other than learning what other people do.
The radicalism is bad but it's inevitable since most people are trying to sell it as something that it is not.
Specially the employers. They don't care if I'm getting better or learning anything, but that I'm outputting something faster and costing them less. It works for them, but it's causing a great damage.
This is what I'm talking about. Not all LLMs are based on stolen works. Pick the worst and pretend that's all of it.
But we all (most of us) know what they are selling doesn't exist. We know they are full of shit.
There is no reason to bring it up for this discuss other than the glee from beating a dead horse.
This is true of any shit employer. LLMs isn't the cause of this behavior.
You seem to be ignoring some stuff specific to llms, but anyway I'm curious; which graphical llm is not based in other people's work?
Perhaps stolen was a strong term, but they are all based on other people's work right? When I used it I could clearly see the styles of some artists it was trained on.
I'm curious about that but even if it's magically original to me that's is still only useful to look at someone else's work, even if is a computer work. It's not a tool in itself I can master and improve my work.
Like fluid simulation for instance. You can light and render it well, but you can't fully control it, because you're not the one making it. When I need a very specific splash for a render I need to manually model it. And then llm is even worse because it controls the whole thing by itself.
You appear to be downvoting each of my comments as I attempt to reply to your questions. Therefore I see no need to engage further with you on then topic.
Good day.
I downvoted the first one and justified why. I didn't downvote the second, but okay.
I hate AI slop like everyone else but the technology is here now. I wonder what artists said when photographs were invented...
Thing is the photographs were better than the paintings at capturing the subject.
AI slop is always worse. It has neither the perfected consistent realism of photographs nor the artistic value of the paintings.
pretty sure there have been many bad photos taken and bad painrings made in human history
And there have been comparatively bad AI outputs to the "good" ones which are still inferior products themselves.
So... What's your point? We need to give up and start using it even though it's worse?
worse than what?
Art.
Worse than real art and writing, obviously. What kind of stupid question is that?
"I hate AI like everyone else … but let me make a specious reference to a completely different technology that makes it sound like I'm actually a user being defensive."