Your bad art is better than AI slop [Sophie Labelle]
Sophie Labelle | Instagram | Bluesky
::: spoiler Transcript four frame comic.
first frame shows a typical AI poster that says : All chatgpt flyers look the same, especially with this font! the text above it reads : I won’t go to your event if the poster was made by AI.
second frame shows a still frame from a Hank Green youtube video. text above reads : I won’t read your post or email and I won’t watch your video if they were made with AI.
third frame shows an AI restaurant poster of burgers and chicken in a window. text reads : I won’t patronize your shop or restaurant if it is advertised with AI.
last frame shows an MS paint window with badly written : Your bad art is better than AI slop. text reads : if you can’t take the time or make the effort to interact with me yourself, then why should I do it? :::
235 replies
The Hank Green bandwagon hate really fucking irritates me.
The man, and his brother, have done decades of charity work. Raised millions for all sorts of progressive causes (Pizzamas). Created completely free online educational course videos that I know a large percentage here used in highschool/college (Crash Course). Produced thousands of science videos and topics (SciShow). The pair of them spend their time trying to educate and improve lives in any way they can (VlogBrothers), and give back for everything they have.
Hank makes a video that appears to have AI assistance, and people are ready to drop them on the spot like none of that matters.
Hank even apologized for his reliance on it. Gave receipts that it was never used in any of his other works. Used his experience as a cautionary tale of how AI it take over a process, and promised to do better.
Doesn't matter..... his previous decades of charity. His lifelong commitment to education... irrelevant... people want to hang him out to dry.
The VlogBrothers stretch themselves over complex topics, educational materials, charity events... everything.... FOR FREE. I don't blame Hank for trying to streamline and organize things. I think the man has taken on way more than any one person should do. I think the people jumping on him to make him some kind of pariah are nothing but self-rightious douchebag fuckheads that haven't done even a fraction of good as those two brothers have, and they know it. They want to use this one thing as though it somehow makes them superior, like they ever did a goddamn thing for anyone. Like they could even begin to understand that level of work and charity to do all of that.
The man made a mistake doing too much and these cretins are tearing him down for clout. It's fucking disgusting. Decades of positivity without controversy and yet it has afforded him no grace from the people who readily consume his content.
It's easy to do nothing wrong, it's hard to do something right. Hank Green is a treasure. His brother too.
Yeah, the hate is unwarranted.
As always, there’s people who will basically take the it’s evil no matter what path. If they feel that heavily about AI, they probably shouldn’t be using anything that uses Linux. Which is basically just about everything on the web.
Hank was using it to create some games and do research for his videos. An AI is really good at creating code and for that purpose making a small game. AI can help you research things by finding and searching for things relevant to what you want, but then you need to rely on actually understanding what is being cited.
There are obvious downsides to AI and all the data centers and everything but going about and saying no matter why AI will never use is just a fool errand.
It’s worth push pushing back on data centers and what not And I am involved in several of those movements. But AI bad is just a stupid take, Especially when Hank is using it for all intents and purposes pretty responsibly compared to some people at larger companies.
I disagree with this statement but at the same time it's probably good enough for whatever he used it for tho, i usually hate vibe coding but in this case i don't care much, he overall did plenty of good and it's not like all his content is AI made, (would've more appreciated if he paid someone to do it tho)
The whole problem is because it wasn't good enough for whatever he used it for tho. It fried his brain and made his videos worse. That's not good enough, that's bad enough. Thankfully, Hank is smart and experienced, so he recognised the problem early enough. Hope it will be so.
Ooh i see, tbh i never saw his videos
Two things.
My code is garbage, but it's usually max around 50 lines of garbage and I learned something while doing it. That last part is the most important.
Again it’s more the way you use it, if you tell the agent to go out and create a large program by itself. That’s an issue. You’re just creating a ton of code without agency, leaving design decisions up to the AI is pretty terrible.
But if you know how to code, and you can guide it to make small metered changes based on your knowledge of coding and do it much faster than normal.
The main issue comes when junior developers aren’t getting the proper training on how to solve problems or coding issues. Or even how to properly architect things. Or for open source projects, not having the knowledge of the code base to be able to make changes or fixes to issues because of the spaghetti code they let the agent create.
Trust me when I say, every single developer at my very large company uses AI to code, it’s very good and very useful. But it’s just how you use it that determines its usefulness and longevity.
If you’re saying you disagree with me that AI is really good at making code, it’s obvious that you don’t code or that you’re using the tools incorrectly.
And that's not vibe coding then, vibe coding is when you either don't know a fuck or when you choose to make the AI do all the work without monitoring every action and guiding it
I said AI is good at writing code, nothing about vibe coding.
But I’d probably consider any code writing with AI to be vibe coding anyway. But there’s levels to it, one has you building large codebases you can’t hope to maintain without the knowledge of how it’s working. And the other has you architecting and planning the code properly to scale and work correctly.
He seems like good people to me. And Ai seems to be addicting like social media.
that's algorithm driven content platforms for you. youtube recommends to most people videos where people are raging, over the normal content of the channel. even people who don't know him get to see it, or otherwise hear about the rage. then, since many are not watching the new videos youtube will recommend them to fewer people than before. meanwhile the rest of the internet only gets to know about the rage, and decades of good work and charity does not matter at all, because that's the boring past nobody gets to know of. even the original viewer base gets reduced, because many see this fuckup but few remember what the creator is like actually. and the algorithm will surely not help to remember by showing the old videos.
100% agree. People are shitting on Hank because they have literally nothing going on. They've made a hobby out of being outraged, and as a result have nothing more meaningful to contribute.
If they took the time to look into it, they'd realize the line they're using to claim that AI writes his scripts was actually something he himself simply said. Not only did he not outsource his writing to AI, he's honest enough that when people incorrectly accused him of this he disclosed that he does at times use it to aid his research. Not that anyone blathering about it values honesty enough to care.
There is a difference between hating him and holding him accountable.
he has been held to account. He already spoke on it. Yet that's not stopping the outrage mob needing a villain to shovel out rage content for clicks.
Because at this point, with this comic, it's not about holding him to account. That's done. At this point, it's farming for clout. Tying to dunk on a man with decades of charity and education because it might get a few likes.
It is illogical to assume that making people aware of communicative failures in science is done for the sake of clout. Making people aware of a failure in public science communication is a good and responsible thing, even after the event.
It is reasonable to still share the comic because the overall point is valid—even if he already apologized—both because sharing knowledge is good, and because the choice of whether to still watch Hank after his apology is individual; just because you and I forgive him doesn't make it unfair not to trust him as a result of this (I take the stance that I will continue to watch his content as long as he does not repeat this mistake: forgiveness is not permission, after all).
To use his failing as an example of this negative behavior, or to make the choice not to watch his content because of his AI use, is fair. To assume sharing the fact that he did and a resultant choice of the comic author (to not watch that one tainted video, which I also will not watch) were for clout is not fair or reasonable.
K
To remix an old saying: "A controversy can travel halfway around the world before the apology has time to put on its shoes". Sadly most outlets who reported on Hank's AI accusations aren't rushing to say "oh yeah he apologized". Maybe they stick it in an update in the article without changing the headline.
The world sucks. So this will stick around much longer than it needed to.
I'm sorry, what does this comic have to do with this favorite YouTube guy of yours? Is he referenced in here somewhere?
Not the person you replied to, but the top right frame appears to be a reference to him.
Greens are treasures for humanity, and they did a lot of great. But previous achievements shouldn't make you immune to criticism. And this is exact topic that should cause harsh criticisms. Hank is an educator, and the only good educator is one that has absolute trust of his audience. Right now his reaction to a backlash is exactly ideal one so I have good hope for the future, and I'm afraid it might not be so if the backlash wasn't as harsh.
The whole reason Hank is so great is that his team does proper research, and they're not afraid of showing their mistakes and correct them. If they start relying on LLMs, all of that can be thrown out of the window, you couldn't trust anything anymore, LLM's whole thing is that it breaks your brain into relying on it, as evident. A pop science video isn't good at all, if the viewers will have to double check every point.
So this is exactly correct reaction that should be modeled for all such occasions in the future, from both parties actually. And in Green's case, their previous legacy gives them enough social credits, that I totally trust him to be smart enough to reevaluate his processes and come up with safeguards, and if he actually does it, this will award him more trust.
Don't conflate accountability with blind hate.
It doesn't matter what else you do or did, if you make something with AI, I don't want it. I won't say if he is a good or a bad man, but that was a bad video. Future videos may be good, if they are human constructed.
From my understanding only some research was done with Ai, no? Not any actual parts of the video
If that's the case, then as long as the "AI research" was thoroughly checked by a human, then I can't imagine how he'd have even been caught using AI. So, it's strange that he was caught.
If it wasn't thoroughly checked by a human, then that's a pretty big mistake... but if it was actually only done for one video, I would view this as something that could be a learning experience more than something that deserves cancellation. Still a huge mistake, though.
It was a very niche topic about crocheting or something, I think? The problem is that he didn't know about it, so he was researching it as part of the script. And because he didn't know about it, he didn't realize that some of the information was wrong. Well, the crochet community knew it was wrong, because of course they'd know more about the topic. So that got people questioning how Hank could have come to this wrong information which led to people further dissecting the video and concluding that it was AI assisted.
So, Hank, a human, looks to learn about a topic he wants to talk about it. He, a human, does check the material, but he's not really qualified to know if the material is right (hence wanting to learn about it).
I think what he should do (and I think he kind of touched on this, but I don't know where) is he should reach out to experts in that field to verify his scripts. Rather than just trying to verify them himself. Especially if its about a topic he's not super confident in.
But most importantly... none of that makes the man out to be some kind mega villain, AI-slop loving, earth killing hypocrite that people are making him out to be. Just a dude who wanted to talk about something and made a mistake. And yet people want to run him through some kind of humiliation ritual and penance. It's sad.
What you're describing doesn't count as checking the material to me. If I was tasked with double-checking AI research on a topic where I had zero knowledge, I would use a search engine to find some reliable-looking source that said the same thing as the AI.
If you find a second source, then you should be able to point at that page to day where you got it from.
If the fact is so esoteric that you can't find any reliable second sources, then you have to start questioning where did the AI get the information in the first place, and suspect that the facts were hallucinations.
To me, that's what you have to do to check AI. I do this process even if I am just googling something for myself and am presented with an AI summary that seems on-point.
Yea well, anyone can come in after the fact and be like "Well if it was me, I would have earned my honorary doctorates researching the topic beforehand to verify it"....
Not very helpful. And it's easy for you to say that because you're not a position to prove it. So... yay you, you sure would do that, good for you.
I'm not gonna play "move the goal posts" with you all day.
My original comment explicitly used the term "thoroughly checked" because I wanted it to be obvious what I meant. When you got the wrong idea, I simply explained it more clearly. That's not "moving the goalposts." I simply didn't think anybody would see the term "thoroughly checked" and imagine the sort of half-assed process you spoke of.
I just did a search on it and apparently someone said that a particular sentence in the video sounded like it was written by AI. He said that it wasn’t written by AI and in fact wasn’t written at all as it was ad-libbed during filming. He then confessed that he has been relying too much on Chat GPT for research and that his script did sound too much like AI.
Kotaku article
The more that people are exposed to generative AI, the more they're going to sound like it. Just like how kids pick up the mannerisms of their parents and of their friends.
One sentence sounding like AI might even be something you'd pick up from a friend who used AI and started talking like that, so it could even happen to a person who never used AI themselves.
I'm sure this sort of thing is already happening, and I'm sure it will only get worse.
It wasn't actually "bad" research that triggered it. It was the absolute INSANE fact that a single goddamn sentence of Hanks sounded like AI. Of course, Hanks videos trained all these models, so that's not actually surprising to anyone with a brain. Which most fervent AI haters lack.
He made the mistake of treating his audience like grown adults, and explained the situation honestly. He uses AI for some research, but the text in question was written by humans. Now the witch hunt was off to the races. Anything not entirely perfect he had done (like the crocheting thing) was ripe picking to pretend that no single human had ever made a mistake. Surely, it must be the evil AI. Surely, Hank must be lieing.
Ironically, Hank should've lied. He treated an online hate mob like grown adults, which is always a mistake. They never actually reward honesty or accountability or positive change. All they want is outrage and hate.
"so that's not actually surprising to anyone with a brain. Which most fervent AI haters lack."
Oh the irony.
If it's a single sentence, then you don't really have to explain anything about how it happened. There are countless reasons why a single sentence might sound like AI despite being written by a human.
I personally don't agree with the rabidly anti-AI people, but I do think their perspective is important, because there is a real possibility of some worst-case outcomes here. Without the zealots, I think a lot of people would simply ignore things right up until the point that they lost their jobs.
There is not much to interpret: in the video, he reads directly a prompt response.
But he says he didn't and he's built up enough good will for me to trust him.
If you cared enough to actually find out what happened instead of mindlessly parroting the Twitter mob, you would know that not a single word Hank said was written by AI.
So he claims. But at the least he was over-relying on AI for research, so the content was subpar. Like I said, it wasn't a good video. Future videos can be. I am not making a moral judgment.
Which specific aspect of "the content" do you believe to have been influenced by his use of AI to assist in research? What specific claims or rationales do you find to be faulty that you believe were influenced by AI?
People have been trained by social media to hate pretty much anything on command these days. It doesn't really matter what or who it is, there is always an audience to hate this or that. You'd think that at some point people would get that this is class warfare, but no.
If people go to you for answers, the trust will be heavily damaged if you are constantly using ai. So yeah it's really fucking stupid of him.
the hate is artificial
Trust takes a lifetime to build and a second to break. This is no different.
That's all I care about, though. admitting fault and bettering oneself. I'm not one to think using AI once taints you forever. It's just a slipperly slope to outsourcing your brain, and I don't think Hank is doing that.
I don't really mind him using AI. As long as he takes responsibility for the output the tool isn't something I really mind.
People (aka Russian and Republican propagandists) have been wanting to tear him down for years and now they've taken their chance. They did it to Sam Neill too (and it probably killed him).
Edit. I regularly attend international security conferences for my job. No, this is not a conspiracy theory. Russian interference will be the "wir haben es nicht gewusst" of this era.
There are those who still use quills. Quakers that use horse and buggy. But the vast majority of our decedents will use AI for the majority of tasks from this day forward.
What a terrible argument of false equivalence.
Why do AI advocates always assume the generative auto-complete machine is the future? The tech was made through theft of IP and forced on a public that doesn’t want it.
Isn't he just predicting the future, not advocating for it?
Imagine you're a 6-year-old right now. Someone tells you, yeah, you could spend the next 10 years of your life drawing 1000s of pages of art until you become an ok artist. Or you could dictate your desires into this prompt. Sure, some will still find joy in physically creating visual art. But the vast majority will take the easy way.
Same thing with pen->typewriter->computer. Same thing with horse->automobile. The easiest thing will always win.
Imagine you’re a 6-year old right now. Someone tells you, yeah, you could spend the next bullshit quantity of years learning to do basic math until you bitch about not knowing how to do taxes later in life. Or you could just use a fucking calculator that hands you the answers.
Same thing with pen -> calculator-> computer -> phone
Your argument is a shit one.
AI isn’t progress.
AI robs people of their ability to think critically and creatively.
If it was just you dumbing yourself down I wouldn’t care, but it’s not. It’s a machine that steals others hard work and mashes it all together while it demands land and precious resources to feed it all so you can feel better about your lack of ability. It’s a masturbation machine for the unmotivated.
I didn't say it was progress, I said it was easy. And I've never met an accountant or physicist who didn't use a calculator.
The difference is schools teach you how to get to the answer on your own and a calculator becomes a tool.
AI does not and just feeds you its best guess, passes it off as fact, and people take it at face value. It’s a glorified auto-complete machine.
I don't really see the difference. Calculators give wrong answers if they get the wrong inputs.
Sure, what's next? "Hey, also, we made this AI robot that can assemble all of your Legos for you, so you don't have to do that, either! Think of all the time you'll save!"
Drawing isn't some obstacle to making a picture. It's the point. People enjoy drawing.
Yes, but no one HAS to learn to draw any more. My entire life, if I couldn't figure out how to draw it, the picture stayed locked in my head. Now, I just dictate it into a prompt.
Nobody ever HAD to learn to draw, just like nobody ever HAD to learn to play the flute or how to make paper cranes.
Why, though? What motivates you to make the picture?
I had mandatory art classes.
It is nice that there is a vocal minority so against any form of AI.
But that isn't what the general trend is. More and more people, especially young ones, are using Gen AI for all sorts of tasks. And with the constant improvements, this number is only set to grow.
You may not like it, but that is how it is.
The vast majority hate ai.
On Lemmy, maybe
Not just Lemmy. A good numbe of people don’t want AI.
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I don't use anything Windows touches, not just AI. The last article is talking about how everyone is using it 😂
It isn't going to constantly improve, though. We're facing model collapse, and nobody has a solution for this problem.
the vast majority of our descendants will use rocks after AI-driven missile detection system thinks a bird is an incoming nuke during a period of extreme geopolitical tensions on the grounds that most people have to choose between buying food or paying water and electricity bills
Greetings, Professor Falkengood movie.
I could've also described how our descendants will be dragging their soft gelatin bodies across harsh rocky terrain in a torrent of neverending suffering, but I dont think ai is gonna get that smart
Fair enough
Yeah, go educate yourself a basic amount please.
Why? Education is what got us here.
What are you even saying? Are you drunk?
We spent 30 years trying to make these things. I remember a grad student talking to me about neural networks in 2005.
Machine learning is a tool that has been developed by educated people.
LLMs, not really.
And people using LLMs are doing it out of being uneducated because there is absolutely no good reason to use them
Radium is inevitable.
I had to look this word up.
Yup, sounds about right!
Autocorrect got me
The weirdest was when I was in a zoo and there were promotional AI posters of animals they have in that zoo.
Bro just take a picture and add some text, the animal is right there.
but the real animals are not as shiny and colorful! It's not addictive enough!
The place where I work had a big “IT Security Week” thing. One day it was “How many security risks are on this desk?” Instead of setting up a desk and taking a picture, it was all AI.
You have desks, hell just go around and find in-office violations lmao.
I included “Using AI for things that could easily be done by hand” as one of the security risks.
Like.. take 5 minutes to scratch out a shitty drawing on a post it before you make some AI slop. Your point can still get across and it’ll be appreciated more.
I replied to some AI post with the pic below and was blocked lol. Can’t pull the original because of that, sorry you’ll have to use your imagination to picture the slop.
Edit: just in case it wasn’t clear, I am not the author(?) of the original image. It was an AI slop graphic I just redrew on a post-it. In my opinion using AI harms the validity of any point you’re trying to make as it shows you’re unwilling to put forth effort to make your point and defend your position.
Good pic.
Thanks
Probably even sharper than with AI, because it looks cleaner and has less distracting elements
this belongs on ![email protected]
I like your drawing.
I understand the sentiment and feel somewhat similar about doing any drawings with AI, but I feel like a lot of people who say that you should draw even if it's bad, wouldn't pay attention to badly drawn things before AI slop became a thing. I definitely wouldn't have decided to visit a bar with a poorly drawn board just because intent is what's important, while sometimes I was tempted to visit a bar with artfully drawn board, that likely was commissioned from an artist. So when I hear people saying ‘do it yourself instead of slopping’ I can't shake off the feeling that it's rather being ‘do it yourself if you are good or commission from someone who is good’, because in competitive fields it is rather hard to achieve much when the only thing you have is intention
Oh man, I love good sandwich board art. That stuff is always my favorite. But yeah I get not every place has a creative employee who can spend time drawing that.
However clean text on a poster or sandwich board is far superior to AI slop (both in a moral and eye pleasing sense).
Also poorly drawn pictures can catch the eye just as well as well drawn pictures either because it can be humorous or because it’s eye catching (possibly in a bad way). But people do look either way, it’s why advertising works. I hate those stupid white billboards with black text that just say “Made you look”, because it works.
The restaurant AI slop is the worst.... even a shitty cell phone picture of your food is better using AI on your menu... i truly dont understand
I love the high effort approach I saw in Japan, where they make little models of the food and put them in display cases (of course not all restaurants but some)
I would take Word (or LibreOffice Writer) bullet point list with prices and ingredients list over "pretty" AI menu at this point
Online clothes shopping has been rendered completely unviable now.
On amazon, sometimes I want to see the four different colours something is available in, but it's the exact same image colourised four different ways, so you all you know is that it doesn't look quite like the picture.
I love this story.
Thank you, MS paint artist
It's never been more acceptable to post Microsoft Paint art in legitimate business spaces than it is now. Well, except for briefly in the late 1980s.
Except of course if your paint art is to abstract or surrealist,
then we must miscredit it and grill someone else for it being an out of context social commentary that holds the wrong opinion.
Such is the way.
If you're talking about those MAGA douchebags then yeah, fuck those guys.
Speaking as a hard left, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist anarchist, i cant believe we are speaking about the same people.
And yet we are.
Anyway sorry to bother you, i just wanted to check out the source of the current festivities in person and thought that comment was too ironic not to comment on.
how pitiful
This is what inspired me to start making star trek memes. (I post them all on c/tenforward :) Even the bad ones get attention because people can tell they were made by a human. It's a great time to be mediocre at anything and still choose to put it out in the world!
Keep it up. Looks like I’d liked several of your recent posts. OC is always appreciated.
Btw, on this one, shouldn’t Geordie have the superVISOR role? 😂
Yes definitely but my brain can only do so many meme layers at the same time!
This post may just inspire me to finally open Gimp and make some truly horrendous comics.
You should also check out Krita. David Revoy, artist of Pepper and Carrot, has a ton of great tutorials on using it.
What's the main difference between the two? Also I will likely be literally drawing stick figures, so this might just be academic at this point.
I actually used to have a lot of fun making art in Photoshop back in HS, but it's been a long time.
Krita is a powerful, free and open source, digital animation tool where Gimp is a mainly focused on image manipulation.
Check it out, it’s pretty cool and it’s got a huge community behind it. It’s also free.
I think krita classifies itself as a digital painting software. It does have animation tools in it.
Follow up question: I made something but when I try to post it here it fails with an error message of "too many pixels." I assume the file size is too big? I didn't really know what to set the dimensions to when I made the file. I tried making it a lower quality jpeg but it doesn't seem to be helping.
Any idea what's wrong or how to fix this on either Lemmy's end or in Krita?
So, I looked into it and .world uses the defaults for photo-rs. Looking at the default config file for photo-rs these appear to be the image hosting limits.
What unit is max file size? KB? MB?
Not sure. I’ll check and report back.
If you're used to Photoshop, Krita is way easier to use, the UI is almost exactly the same. Unlike Gimp, it doesn't try to re-invent the doorknob.
I think if you use a pen the dynamic controls work better, and brushes are less of a pain to set up. I prefer to draw in krita and then fuck around in gimp.
I love horrendous comics, if the premise is entertaining and you keep working on it then you'll get better at it too.
But then it wouldn’t be bad art anymore.
Truly the worst outcome
I can only upvote you once. But imagine I held down on the screen for a reaaally long time when I did it.
Do it. We want to see them.
I mean, we've had gimp for free for ages now ffs.
Just ask your nerdy cousin to make something already. You know, that thing they call human interaction? Come to think of it, if you had more human interaction you might also get laid so you don't have to rely on a shitty ai gf.
Don't try stuff with your cousin though ffs.
Can I try stuff with their cousin, or is that also off limits?
One man's trash, is another man's cousin?
So Alabama just doesn't get good graphics design then?
Yeah, I have tried explaining this to people. We have been able to do all of these things for decades with minimal effort (and without destroying the planet while handing it over to fascist billionaires)
The issue: non-nerds have never even heard of a gimp, and the majority of people now do not use a computer. Try finding one young person who does most computing on a laptop, let alone a desktop (no one uses desktops any more. Of my ~15 friends/acquaintances I can think of, I am the only one with desktops). It's all phonephonephone (a phone loaded with spyware, to boot).
This is the problem... people tried
"I need an icon for my twitch channel"
"I'm an artist, I don't work for free" /r/choosingbeggers
Nobody said that your nerdy cousin should do it for free. Give him/her $10 or something.
This is why AI art is so incredibly popular
Fuck my nerdy cousin, AI will do a bang-up job for free
AI art is currently free because it's subsidized by the AI companies who are spending investors' money to try to buy marketshare and mindshare. When that subsidy ends, you'll have to pay for it too.
Maybe, maybe not. Doesn't matter, it is currently free and people prefer it over your nerdy cousin because of that
There's the argument that despite what your nerdy cousin says, he doesn't actually like making art, he just think that if he can be an artist he won't have to have a real job. He doesn't want to draw a picture for you, otherwise he would have done it for free simply because it was fun
But... if that cousin is hot and pretty into it? Just asking for a cousin
Consider that normal people don’t think like us nerds. They choose the shiny-looking version, not the handmade one.
I think that's changing. Nerds are often the vanguards, but the rest of the culture catches up later.
This is why all these people are enjoying the smooth motion TVs. Shiny, not human and not better.
I sincerely hope you were omitting an /s there, because I haven't heard of people who like those.
All my friends parents think they're amazing. I wish I had a /s to throw in but its the bane of my existence.
Ouch. Glad I don't watch TV anymore. My sympathies.
Yup.
It's getting sickening isn't it.
Which is a good thing.
We shall indeed return to,
(as was put in that star trek movie, something like)
"We believe when you get a machine to do the work of a man you've taken something away from the man"
all the faster, having seen where that goes.
... Or we could build skynet and the matrix, 1984 and brave new world, a new, falling into unconscious farmed meatsacks, utterly atrophied of any ability, rendered completely dependent on your abuser. That's an option too.
How much poison, how fast? Enough to grow insensitive? Enough to get past how sickening it is? Well, many may keep believing it's all good productivity at their fingertips, at their lips even, upon mere utterances, wishes catered for. Oh, except that bit that was wrong. Oh, and then needing to mend the rest of it too, because none of it was right really. Oh, and then there's so much more that can be done. Oh, but then none of it is ever done quite correctly too. Oh lets just accept the slop, getting too exhausted by all the extra work. ... How soon before we're all out of the delusions, realising it's not even fulfilling its marketing's selling-point claims of helping our productivity.
I got an LLM to help me expedite an idea I had for a text editor written in fish with standard utils, and that was great, really exciting to see it come together, and what a great learning expedition too, as I was reading more lines of [bad] code per day than I had in the entire prior 10 years of using fish. I managed to wrestle the LLM to get it right enough, and incremented my way through it. Though, several times, I burned through over 30 back-and-forth with the LLM, just to get it to do simple things correctly. ... Long story short, I burned out, fast, deep, and hard, in a month (and stupidly pushed on for a month yet trying get one more feature completed... which it was even more stubborn on). ... How fast could I have accomplished similar, by just learning how to do it myself first, without the extra steps of seeing hundreds of ways not to do it? And how fast would it have felt? (answer: almost no time at all, engaged in the moment). Instead of a very long hard slog. And with all that wax-on, wax-off, I'd have it in muscle memory better too. And, it's fair progress when you already know how, and can indeed just expedite a tedious portion, and check it's done right, from your explaining how to do it right. It's much worse when trying to learn from a teacher who is constantly hallucinating and leading you astray.
And that's for code... that's one thing... where utility and correctness are typically easily in a greater ratio to creativity. But pure art...
I tried it once there too.
There's an image, an idea I've had, since around 1999, and have drawn several times in several forms... a sort of meek, mad, maker themed, where there's a body of a sheep (the meek), a tail of a wasp (the mad), and the wings of a butterfly (the maker)... for a sort of wise humility and gentleness, but with a powerful proactive protective aggressive potential, and a beautiful subtle creative proliferative bounty... idk, words, don't really do it justice... I'll just show you... so... Here's a crappy version I doodled in gimp:
and then, after trying (I think over) 30(?) "AI" image generator tools, several of which, trying again for another 30 times, and failing to get any of them to do the artwork anywhere near right, eventually getting to the point where I was feeding them that version of the image and they were still failing to get it right, so at least another 30 itterations yet, and it eventually, with a lot of bickering and rewording of prompts from me, produced:
... which I still had to lop off the 5th leg from.
And, for all that effort.... [remember, faffing through hundreds of completely wrong]
Where's the expressive nuance?
There's none.
It's dead.
It's so dead. Flat. Empty.
And it's killing us.
So yeah... [excuse the expressive language, but, vital to express:]
"PLAY FROM YOUR FUCKING HEART!"
and to paraphrase
"YOU'RE FUCKING RIGHT! NOT THOSE FUCKERS
ON TVRUNNING AI, TELLING YOU WHAT TO THINK! YOU'RE FUCKING RIGHT!"Thanks Bill Hicks.
We'll never find quality parity, and if it ever does, then the nightmare dystopia will have manifest itself fully, far beyond the alarm bell of the atrophying skill and beginning of the acceleration of degeneracy to total collapse, for so long as we chase the money and the reductive and the productive and believe the fairy tale lies of marketers trying to take every last thing from us.
How much already, known and unknown, is our expression curtailed by:
Computer says no.Time to relax into persistently thrusting ourselves into our own work of art.
(Interestingly, some significant overlap in this as from what I saw this morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaXNGyqgoMM (crap title, touches on far broader themes). Especially the clip from the writer, starting at 30:52 ... Beautiful insight, bolsters the point of the OP).
... Anyway... Let me leave this comment on that friendly rousing note...
PLAY FROM YOUR FUCKING HEART!!!!
:)
Yeah, your version looks cool, and the AI version looks hilarious. It's like some fever dream.
That isn't really the point, though. If somebody had the right prompt, they could make something that looked like yours. The point is that you created it. Having to pick up a stylus or a mouse and then drawing onto the screen aren't obstacles to making the image; they're part of the process that makes it worthwhile. It isn't the same experience as begging and cajoling an LLM to make the thing for you.
The process of drawing the version(s) I've drawn, deeply fulfilling, improved my abilities.
The process of wrestling an LLM to draw it for me, a Sisyphusian torment, atrophied my abilities.
Whaat? I didn't read it fully but what?
Something about using an LLM to make art and wanting people to appreciate them for that.
Intentional trolling by abusing cunningham's law?
So, how is therapy
Love how derpy they made Hank Green look
Seems like a bit of an overreaction to lump him in here tbh. Didn't he only use AI to help do research for a single video? And decided to not bother again because it sucked?
I think he was downplaying his use. He said he was getting addicted to the "dopamine" hit it gave him, which sounds like he was using it more than he claims. I don't believe his scripts weren't at least partly written by AI.
In my industry everyone is using AI for their logos and their advertising and they all look like absolute crap that is indistinguishable from the competition.
A company logo should look good in black and white at 1 square inch on the back of a golf card. These designs are cluttered hot messes.
That's probably the way things are going. All of the decoration on everything you get in a store will be AI generated. Personally, I would like it if the packaging looked little more than like what I imagine 1940 military food rations did: plain tin cans and brown paper packaging with nothing but a description of the contents in plain black lettering. You could have a photo of the contents but that's it. That might sound depressing, but is it more depressing than decoration meant to get you to buy, buy, buy? Alright, I guess the decoration is also for branding, but you can do that with black lettering too.
When I was a kid we would shop at the commissary and there was an entire row filled with nothing but labels with blue stripes. I need that to come back.
AI is good for prototyping stuff or creating dirty one-shot application for simple tasks. In this case, you can try to get inspiration on how the logo should generally look like and then you go to a professional with the concepts you like and work something out that is actually showable. People are using this stuff wrong - but i am not surprised anymore after reading the article where they middle/upper management of a business was burning stupid amounts of tokens to convert pdfs to slideshows instead of using a specialized tool for that.
If you tell workers they have to use AI they will use it as much as possible on things that it is not well suited to because there are dedicated tools that will do the same thing. Malicious compliance.
Note:
frames one and three should not exist anyway. They are advertising. It was already malign before generative AI.
And Hank Green, despite the morons trying to sound clever by saying he did, did not use an LLM to write the script for the insert segment in that interview. He used a phrase, which was already a common diplomatic phrase, in a completely normal way. The phrase has made its way into ShartGPT outputs because it was already common, and people desperate to seem like they aren't fooled by LLM output are grasping at straws to find things to point at as 'tells' and turning into anti-tech-priests, consulting auguries to check for demons in the words of strangers.
There are no nice, neat tells. There are dozens of models, each with dozens of versions, each with some things that MIGHT serve as a tell, but you can't keep track of them, and the right prompt will disrupt them enough to ruin the tell, so you can give up. You can't reliably tell. That's the whole point. Enjoy living in the derealized, boiling world our annointed leaders have made. Hug your loved ones.
Advertising as a concept is needed, though. Telling someone to come to your house on Friday is technically advertising.
We certainly need to regulate the shit out of mass advertising, but I always found the small flyer on a landline pole very homely.
Inviting someone over is not advertising.
Meets the definition. I just want to make sure we make distinctions between general ideas and why we actually hate the concept in the modern day.
An ad is an ad. It being a bad idea doesn't change that fact 🤷
You don't see the contradiction in those two concepts? I was hoping you'd take a look and figure it out but let me explain, and hope you get it.
'Telling someone to come to your house' specifies someONE to whom you are directing the invitation. Public communication is broadcast communication, not in the sense of radio waves but in the sense of 'casting' (throwing out) the media to a 'broad' (non-specific) audience. You are trying to combine two contradictory levels of specificity.
No, not really.
Why would I when you didn't give me the same grace? from what I said upstream
Well here we are arguing definitions and ideas and not the reasons within these modern ads are oppressive. Not talking about the algorithmic nature of mass surveillance and privacy breaches needed to power modern ads, but "no this ad is different" surface level thinking. But if you want to talk about it, so be it.
Okay. make it a group you're at. Throw a flyer on a telephone pole. Same deal. We had ads before the interet.
I don't think the levels change the intent and definition of an ad. You want to tell people about a thing, you use something to tell them thing.
I find it really hard to even read AI text. It's exhausting, like being on Zoom for too long.
It's something like decision fatigue. You're constantly having to criticize every word because you know it will make stuff up out of whole cloth. Reading something you've verified to have come from a trusted expert or even just a human being is far less stressful.
Yup. AI writing also tends to place emphasis in really weird places and use it waaaay too much. Every single point is the Biggest and Most Profound Thing EVER!!
It also tends to use rhetorical structures that have a flat distribution of importance, surprise, etc. across all sentences. Natural language flows, it knows how to lead you to its conclusion because it has a clear idea of what it wants to say. AI writing tends to be more like an easter egg hunt or a mr beast video in that each sentence changes the direction of the point that's being made. It kind of ends up jerking you around. I suspect this is because that type of writing has a very small chance of generating into a corner, because it can always pivot. Each individual point stays clear and coherent, but the overall structure ends up disjointed.
Never been more self-conscious of my language as I am right now lol, but I'm not going back to edit anything. It is how it isAlso web articles. The moment I see the obvious AI tells I leave and block the website from search results.
I hope I live long enough to see when the kids growing up today create whole artistic genres around humans imitating the cheap AI slop they're being exposed to these days. It might not be pretty but at least it'll be funny.
Artisan tung tung tung sahur paintings when
imagine a young persons "nostalgia" in the future...disgusting. I've never felt older than now. Truly horrible stuff.
I don't have to imagine.
I don't think i want to visit place that slap a banana with glue to board, put a million dollars price tag, and called that thing art either to be fair.
My point is your art must be good first, it is fine if it worse than ai though.
The idea is, id rather your band poster be made in msPaint than an AI.
Im not spending millions of dollars for the poster, but the music itself might be a different story
The global “art” scene is a money laundering scheme.
Specifically talking about so called “high art” rather than your typical social media or personal website artist
I know I will be in the minority - but I still believe AI has its place.
It should definitely not replace pictures taken of food items - but it can do a light retouch job on the pic.
The problem is, AI doesn't exist. The industry combined several different items under one umbrella, so they can sell you shit while talking about something useful.
There are many good applications for different "machine learning" systems, and we had them for decades, and they're evolving separately. But then there is LLM. And for LLM specifically, the inevitable unavoidable huge cost in computational power and in toll it takes on humanity makes it's not worth it, for any application, ever. It's essentially a toy, a chat bot that is designed to trick humans into believing they're reading a coherent speech.
There is no good application for LLM considering all what it does.
You can avoid using it. You can dislike it - but llms are here to stay for good.
Eventually they will figure out a better technology, but home run models not going to go away.
They do empower people who are not tech savvy to do things - and to make things nobody would ever paid a professional to do or make.
Some of that is obvious slop but there are things that deserve existing.
If we believe salespeople that is, and when did they lie amirite?
No, they wouldn't disappear completely, nothing that exists does. But I firmly believe that the second the bubble popps, this shit will go the way of nft.
Because this myth of usefulness and empowering is just it, myth. It makes some utter shit that nobody needs, and it wastes everyone's time making everyone's lives marginally worse.
Home run models never go away. Even if you have some basic knowledge - generating some pictures, then manually editing it can save you days of work.
Not everyone will give this up - and some people can't afford to pay for human labor to replace their missing skills.
If you want to make shit that is. Utter ugly shit from a butt. If you can edit a shit picture so it's not shit anymore, you'll be better starting from scratch. If you start with shit, you still have an unoriginal rot at the core of it, so it's still smells like shit no matter how much you polish it.
Sure, a bunch of people will continue doing so, but if humanity will preserve concept of beauty, this shit will never stick, and slopfuckers will fuck their slop in the quietness of their homes without pushing it everywhere, and that's their business.
Yes, it is fine to ad some simple images to a powerpoint. Those images would otherwise be stolen from google search.
Technically they totally were, and going to be...
I get it, and I do somewhat agree. But at the same time, AI helps me to execute creative tasks I couldn't normally do and some things I can, but AI saves time.
But I don't just accept slop. I take the time to polish to get the results I want. It's still my idea and my vision, I just need a bit of help. This allows me to get results fast and fail faster. I can spend weeks in blender in my spare time building what I want, and I still do for some things.
Why does it matter? Like I understand legitimately selling something as art and it's AI made is bullshit. But you're not selling your menu as art, or youkids birthday invitation, and you wouldn't have paid a graphic designer anything to make it either way. All it's doing in these cases is narrowing the gap between what a skilled artist can do an a random person. Even as someone who was a graphic designer, if I can spend 30 seconds typing prompts for my kids birthday vs an hour making invitations why wouldn't I? It isn't like a I'm screwing a client over by making my son's birthday invitations in AI. I'm just saving an hour of my day.
They use the shitty ai pics for food and it honestly looks so unappetizing
The real ego here is assuming you're going to be able to tell...
Pretty hard not to notice on posters. All the same vibe, font, colour scheme, layout. It's like a preset beat on a keyboard, instantly recognizable and soulless.
I'm not as good with recognizing Ai other stuff but with music but I've come to realize if the musak is making you angry, it's Ai.
The reason Ai music makes you angry, is because it never resolves properly. You're expecting to hear certain musical phrases all returning back to the tonic or root of the chord signature and it never does. Its like musical blue balls.
Same with all of it! Ai articles are the same! "Jesus, this guy just keeps saying the same thing! Get to the point!"
The blatant ones maybe, but you can be certain you have seen AI generated posters and didn't notice they were AI.
Well, sure. I use the Ai remove background thing. Or the Ai template but make it look good. Definitely it's the lazy ones that you notice and don't like.
I might not be able to tell every time something is AI. That's true.
But if a person has put zero effort making sure it doesn't look like AI, then I have every right to call that out.
If you cheat, at least be smart about it and not get caught.
If you can't tell, then that's even worse. Imagine spending money on a commission and the fucker just prompts it. You could've done that, and if that's what you wanted, you wouldn't be paying for it! That asshole just scammed you out of your hard earned money!
Thank you... heartfelt... Of course... Absolutely...
Sincere gratitude, dear Sophie Labelle, and @[email protected] ...
No words may express how awesome this artwork is... and the ending panel is a human-wise miracle...
What if I use AI to generate images that would be as bad as if I did it by hand?
Read the comic again, because the answer is clear.
As somebody that's absolutely human, "I appreciate the pushback on that"....
No lie though, I'll still eat at a place even if they use AI on their menu. Not because I don't notice or frown when I see it but it's specifically because I'm a fatty and love food.
Why not spend 5 minutes and find a place that has exact same meals, but doesn't use AI?
I spent a little bit but not too much time on this, I hope you enjoy it.
Every generation that decides a new image machine is rotten thinks it noticed first. It didn't, and there are receipts.
Grant Taylor's essay "The Soulless Usurper" walks through how the art world greeted early computer art, and the complaints are the same ones being made about generative images right now: mechanically sterile, nobody actually decided anything, a machine getting slipped into a chair reserved for the artist. This you?
Taylor documents sabotaged machines and physical attacks on artists in the late '60s and early '70s, plus a long tail of milder stuff — eye-rolling, flat refusal to call it art at all — running from the medium's start in the 1960s to the early '90s. His verdict: computer art was "possibly the most maligned art form of the twentieth century."
Two dates worth holding together. That period is half a century behind us, and the takes aged badly — the plotter drawings critics wouldn't call art hang in museums now. And the essay came out in 2012, a decade before Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. That's what makes it useful: Taylor isn't arguing about AI. He's describing the previous fight, written before anyone had a stake in how the comparison would land.
Source: Grant Taylor, "The Soulless Usurper: Reception and Criticism of Early Computer Art," in Mainframe Experimentalism, ed. Higgins & Kahn (UC Press, 2012), p. 18.
Thanks for taking the time to put together this viewpoint and sourcing your argument.
I disagree with the comparison to digital art. Computer generated art takes skill, effort, and an artistic eye to succeed. Not just anyone can pick up a stylus or mouse and make good art, though it is a bit more accessible than some traditional mediums.
AI on the other hand requires no effort or skill on behalf of the creator. Furthermore, any artistic style is just mimicry. AI models have scraped real artists work without permission and is being used to slap together plagiaristic content, no accreditation of any kind to the source.
It took less time than you think for exactly the reason you might guess. I guess I just see a different 'brush'.
I'm glad you disagree. I'm fortunately old enough to remember being told that digital art wasn't real art, and do be alive today where nobody cares, oil painting is cool, brushing up your oil painting in GIMP is also cool, using GIMP alone, still cool.
Just take your same argument and fast forward 30 years and you'll get ahead.
There are undiscovered art forms and new/reset expectations just around the corner. The first real artist (with real artistic genius) to adopt the tools is going to be in every MOMA around the world.
Your mistake is in positing that the MOMA is in any way relevant at this juncture.
Eh, when they're updating the teaching materials for art in the late 20th and early 21st centuries then. Whatever your flavor is.
You're conflating ideation with creation.
Critics disliked Van gogh in his time too. And he used all the traditional kit.
Art had a sort of schism once photography took off. Pro-ai art seems to get stuck on one side of it. Traditional art had a long, long run of 'good art' being well composed and skillful reproductions of realism: people, places, events—with a few visual metaphors for spice.
But then came photography. And all those people using art to look back in time had options, cheaper and accessible options. The demand for the skill to make precise replicas nearly collapsed.
What has sustained was not the technical method of making art, but the expressiveness of the artist. The spice becomes the meal. Things become more referential, abstract. It envokes states of mind often contextual to the times and circumstances the art was produced, and drawing on concepts outside of the image itself. It's not just about making pretty pictures from paint, charcoal, or photoshop.
Once you have the dadaists, Duchamps and Pollocks running around, arguments about 'correct' techniques to make art are always going to be shortlived. It's not the advancement of technology that people question. Longish ago most of us collectively decided method didn't really matter, intention did.
If you scrolled through your camera roll would you consider it art? Can you use ai to quickly copy a technique? Yes. Can it be applied critically to success? Maybe. But if you outsource the practical skill and contextual knowledge that makes good, deliberate art, what are the odds that happens?
I think it is very interesting, that because of photography (and later photo editing) the realistic art has indeed lost part of its core value. Now, if you see a fully photorealistic picture, you will assume it is just a photograph, unless you are told the story of, how some artist spend thousands of hours to make it, after perfecting their skills for years. The effort becomes the defining, important thing, not what the result looks like.
Walter Benjamin, nearly a century ago now, established a fundamental argument that most cultural critics of today have forgotten or simply gloss over: fascism twists art into a simple aesthetic rather than understanding art as a means to express change in the material conditions of the culture and its people. By relegating more and more to the machine, the machine gives us a false sense of expression without ever actually affecting our own material conditions. We are in the era of mass creation of the simulacra that Jean Baudrillard warned about.
Gen AI "art" is certainly bad but it's not as bad as the babyfur diaper fetish pedo slop produced by Sophie Labelle
Counterpoint to AI YouTube: this shit is fucking awesome
https://youtube.com/@gossip.goblin
The market is saying something different. To the outside, you look like an old man screaming at the kids on your lawn.
Is it tho? The data says otherwise.
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From my "outside", you look like a tech bro pushing the new NFT's.
uh, i'm not an AI fan but I couldn't care less if mom and pop diners or volunteer ran orgs are using ai to generate posts for their causes. getting huffy over it is dumb af. If I see a multimillion dollar corp using it then yeah, get wrecked. They have the resources and the means to pay an actual artist.
Not a huge fan of Ai either but this behaviour is silly to me. Who cares if a flyer was made using AI.
Memes in niche communities I follow on Lemmy get hundreds of votes (and like 30 people complaining in the comments) when they're obviously AI made. Like this one here. Others don't even though they are also Ai made.
It's just stupid to think you can always tell or that someone who does a bad photoshop is am amazing artist.
I think it's fine to use anywhere where people would use stock footage before. Not in art and music but for a flyer or a quick internet meme why the hell not.
It's not as though the technology will disappear if I don't like it.
Lots of people care, what kind of an ignorant statement is that? No one is saying that bad art is amazing art, we’re saying that bad art is still art and Ai slop isn’t art at all. And just like music where the artist turns out to have been hiding how shit they are, it’s possible that a lot of people will like something until they get new information and the go “ew, no thanks, actually.”
The technology will definitely struggle to survive if we don’t buy into the bullshit “inevitability” argument. Why is capitalism always “the market drives the innovation” until it’s something stupid that a billionaire wants and then it’s “too bad, fuck you”?
It’s so tiring having to explain colour to grey people.
People give art meaning . Remove the people, remove the meaning.
Ads were always disgusting, but now they are rancid too.
Just remember it's the high art of small fast food fliers and corporate emails we're talking about here.
People used to get paid to do that. Artists drawing a wage that allowed them to make real art.
Most people don't care if the chicken shop owner used Ai for their fliers or not.
The flier is not really the product anyway.
For starters...
So, it's definitely what I'd call a "Red Flag" when gauging whether a vendor will be overpromising and underdelivering.
It's more an issue of effort and intent. AI is a signal that the vendor is going to do things in the laziest and cheapest manner possible. A hand-drawn flyer down with crayons and love indicates the person running the event put some god damned elbow grease into it. Slop ad-copy is a clear indication that they're just hustling.
AI charlatans who want fame and success with none of the effort.
Oh my god. THIS is what that image came from? Amazing.