In general - yes. There is a flood of shitty and lazy “art” that has infected search results and creative spaces. I’m also deeply uncomfortable with it being trained on artists work without their consent - for all the talk about it being equivalent to human inspiration I’m pretty sure there have been examples where it’s started generating attempts at signatures.
It’s terrible in knitting and crochet spaces (I imagine woodworking and sculpture and architecture too) because there are lots of things generated which are physical impossible and just wrong to anyone who enjoys the crafts. It gives false understandings of what those art forms look like.
I think the entire point of art is the human intentionality aspect. Art is humans using materials to do things that don’t serve an immediate practical purpose. There has to be some element of “desire” on the part of the artist.
So it’s not that it is impossible to use AI tools to generate art (there’s stochastic computer generated pieces from the 70s that are lovely iirc) To me though, the way these tools are used is what is important - if you’re using an AI you’re training and adjusting yourself, if you’re spending hours tweaking prompts and perhaps sifting through hundreds of pictures to combine and really participate in “making” something.
The current trend is really just a bunch of content sludge. I don’t see the appeal in either the process of creation or in what can be appreciated from it. The best stuff is mostly memey topical political jokes, where it rests more on the symbols rather than the art itself.
Like, when I make art - my process is adding layers over weeks and weeks. It’s noticing that I don’t like the way this section looks, so I go back over it, come back to it later… it’s a process - I engage with and shape the work. I’m just a guy who glues trash to things and paints them, my art doesn’t really have external value - but it still feels like art in a way that getting Midjourney to make pictures of Gandolf with big honking naturals isn’t.
It’s soulless. A mere imitation.
I’m not sure hate is the right word. When you’ve got someone stabbing you in the back multiple times, is it really hate you’re feeling toward them? Or is it anger, fear, and danger?
I “hate” it in the sense that it’s built on theft and requires the exploitation of underpaid workers to develop and maintain it. I “hate” it in the sense that we’re living on a burning cinder with dwindling fresh water resources and “AI” is adding fuel to the fire. I “hate” it in the sense that it’s being used to further undervalue artists and writers. I “hate” it in the sense that it fills our spaces with crap that so often looks like it was cribbed off of Rapunzel, Wreck-It-Ralph, and some other things.
I don’t hate the “art.” The AI can’t do much about it.
What I strongly dislike is people who manage to draft literally 40 words or less and think they “created” something.
You didn’t. You a mathematical model to do something for you. You therw 175 tokens into a whirlpool and got am 87% what you wanted image out. If you even had an idea of what you wanted before hand.
Firstly, it’s not art. I already hate that OP called it that. It’s AI generated imagery. There is no art involved outside of art theft.
Secondly, it’s legal art theft created by those types of people that either never considered artists to have any value, or have a chip on their shoulder against artists.
Thirdly, at no point in history have artists ever been appreciated, despite art being the most important element of everything. Imagine right now what a user interface would look like without artistic design. Or a car. Or your toothbrush. AI gen shafts artists… again… with the absolutely ridiculously, flippant argument that it “democratises art”, as if it’s some sort of noble privilege rather than a skill literally anyone can practice.
i’m not only referring to images, but all kind of “art” that can be music, imagery, etc.
The same can be applied to all artistic mediums. But it’s arguably used most for generating text and images.
it’s arguably used most for generating text and images.
yeah i know, that’s why you hating on me by me, saying it’s “art” but supposed to be “AI generated imagery”. we can make “music” from AI now. thanks for your response anyway!
I don’t hate AI art. I hate people who pretend they’re artists when all they do is writing prompts.
It’s ruined art for me. Someone posts something, and I don’t know if it’s real art or a theft of other people’s work.
That’s the problem. We can’t tell the difference.
Art is cool cos it’s like holy shit a person did that!?
If it’s just an algorithm it’s not very impressive.
Yes, I hate it. I hate that it fills every image platform. It is not art at all.
It’s a fun toy thing and can make decent images but its not art and can never replace actual art. When you compare for example an anime art of someone who actually drew it and the AI image, the drawn art is 9 out of 10 times better.
It’s also petty pretty easy to spot whether an image is AI or drawn made.
It’s also petty pretty easy to spot whether an image is AI or drawn made.
Doubt. Most studies have shown that people are horrible at actually picking out AI art. You suffer from selection bias because you don’t realise which ones you didn’t spot.
its not art and can never replace actual art. When you compare for example an anime art of someone who actually drew it and the AI image, the drawn art is 9 out of 10 times better.
That implies it’s solely about quality? At the inevitable point where AI gen gets better than drawn art, is the AI gen image now art too?
No, because I don’t have an irrational fear of AI. I don’t like when poor or unfitting AI art is used, but it isn’t AI who makes that decision to use it.
As an artist who had her art stolen for usage in AI, I hate AI generated images for several reasons. I’ve personally had my art stolen to be used in a prompt without my permission, and said art got mangled so much that it looked terrible. AI image generators scrape the internet for art so they can amalgamate these pieces of art together to correspond to a prompt, and this art is taken without the permission of the artists. In some AI generated images, the mangled remnants of artists’ signatures are still visible. Beyond art theft, it’s instant gratification with zero effort. A huge part of why I appreciate art is because someone made it, someone spent potentially hours to create this beautiful picture! When I look at my old art, I can instantly get a feel for what vibes I had going through my mind at the time, like I could almost take a peek into my past self’s brain, and this applies to other artist’s work too!
Prompting an AI image generator, in my eyes, is like prompting an artist to draw something for you, except that artist turns out to be someone who traces bits of other people’s art without their permission, or copy and pastes it. Sometimes AI generated images aren’t immediately recognizable, so me and a lot of other artists have tried to make it a trend to post progress pictures and other receipts along with our art.
Not a fan. It admittedly can be an amusing toy - type something in and wow look what it did! But the costs are high, and our society isn’t a utopia where people don’t need to labor for survival.
Maybe if we were post scarcity it wouldn’t matter that much. But we’re not, and this AI stuff is going to hurt labor, benefit the ownership class, and probably be mildly bad for end users too.
Yes. It’s flooding places, and suddenly people decided that “smooth looking” was the absolute end goal of any drawing/music/creation/etc. It’s not. Some of the most famous art piece are completely wrong, some aren’t. That’s not the endgoal. Nobody’s gonna care that you can take that very simplified drawing and “generate” an extremely high-detail, fully shaded image that looks like it, as it was never the purpose.
Creative direction, intent, consistency (or absolute lack of consistency), execution, style, and a lot more goes into any creation, art or not. That’s what make a piece feel interesting. There’s a reason even now, with generated content being plausible as far as glaring mistakes go, we can still point out which image “feels” AI across a lot of different styles. At best, to remove that feeling of it being wrong, you’d have to spent a lot of time on the output of a model to touch it up everywhere and change details, which requires time and proficiency, which a lot of people jumping on that trend definitely lacks. Some of the worst results I’ve seen have been from people trying to make other “pay” for their output.
There’s also the issue of how these works. For decades, creative people (among other) have been sued by big companies, some very harshly, to protect IP from such overexploitation as “using a three second excerpt in a video” or “using the vague likeness of a character”. And now, these same targets are getting fleeced of their work by more big companies under the cheer of the people. That’s a gut feeling of disgust right there. Combined with the utter lack of creativity in these, we’re really watching the potential death of an activity (artistic creation), and that’s not a good place to be. If one wants to argue that “generated art” is also a form of creation, keep in mind that these models can’t be trained on generated pieces without extreme prejudice. Killing the very source they need to operate does not seem like a good long-term plan. But who cares about long-term when you can make a quick buck, right?
I’d also like to point out that all this rambling is about generated content that goes from “output of a model” to “final piece” with little to no afterthought. The “common” piece, where people will be happy to see twenty broken pieces because “well, there’s a lot of them, so it’s good”. AI and LLM models, as a tool, may or may not be useful in the long term, but I can see smaller applications, even for art. A lot of menial tasks can be improved, general posing, references, simple background that are marginally considered part of the product, guides, etc. Taking something you’ve drawn/created, and locally use an AI “filter” to remove an extra line cleanly or touch up a mistake you want out? Great. The tool carries the intent of the artist, the same way a pen do.
But AI generated content? Make a prompt, a stick-figure sketch, and call it a day? These, IMO, will always look and taste like garbage, no matter how pretty they look. Because it was never “pretty” we were looking for.
I don’t hate it, some of the images generated look awesome. But that’s just an image that “literally anyone could do”. It’s the equivalent of instant lamen or cup noodles.
Afaik, it can’t come up with new styles and most of the stuff pumped out just wholesale copies existing stuff: the majority either looks like a Disney 3d animation, or fancy anime-esque render. Some try to look like realistic oil paintings, those look cool and pretty, but nothing worth making a poster.
I think the only people, besides tech bros, who are happy with this are those that hate giving art any value.
As an art appreciator it just looks bad