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  • I think it substracts from everything but itself. That is on its own, its pretty cool. But it's gross when it's used as part of a bigger project.

  • 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.

  • 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'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.

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

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

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

    • I'm with you on this one. I have no issues with AI being used for shit posting and memes, other than the ecological impact I guess.

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

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

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

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

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • of course! aside from detracting from artists with actual talent and creativity, there is one example i’ve seen in my school that makes me hate it even more: teachers deciding to print out posters, flyers, etc. with obviously ai generated images, despite the fact that we have an entire art department in the school, full of students who’d be very much interested in making something up for them. even then, tools like canva and the sort are always available, hell, even mspaint could work! i’d rather see 10 poorly made posters than have to see one more ai image used in the school.

  • Art is an attempt to communicate (usually to communicate something of the human condition). Current 'art' AI is too far away from intelligence to have anything to communicate. All it can do is mindlessly try to copy and blend what it's seen before without understanding it.

    I don't hate it, but I also don't value it.

  • I prefer real people and real artwork hand painted or hand drawn. Yes, doing it digital with your hand and mouse count as hand made.

  • Almost all of the images generated by AI models are just eye candy and not art. It can be eye candy based on a bunch of art, but it still isn’t artistic. It’s often just an image aimed at farming engagement. “Here’s a picture so that your algorithms don’t ignore my post. Do I have your attention now?”

  • i'm utterly bored by it and annoyed that it mucks up all the places I'd usually steal images for my TTRPG games.

  • Hate is too strong of a word. AI art is sometimes freaky to look at, sometimes it's pretty. It is usually devoid of a certain intangible thing that you can get from human art, even shitty human art. But it's occasionally a fun toy too? I can't conjure up any strong feelings for AI images unto themselves.

    I do have intense loathing for the capitalists who want to use that AI art to replace human work. And for the AI "Artists" who are enabling them by acting like this is the next evolution of art and anyone with concerns is just holding back "DA FUTER".

    I also have concerns about the environmental/energy costs of AI -- Just in general. Not just AI Images or Chatbots or whatever. AI can be a good thing, a tool to help us. And even when it's useless, it's kinda fun to mess about with. But the energy and environmental costs of all that computing, especially the amount of it that is wasted because even if AI ultimately becomes a part of our lives, it is DEFINITELY a wasteful investment bubble right now -- THAT sucks. And THAT seems to have no obvious solution.

  • 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.

  • low effort crap is low effort crap no matter how it's made, that said, there is plenty of high quality, high effort AI art out there that has a lot of prompt engineering put into it; it is merely drowned out in a sea of sludge. It's just about as easy for someone to put in zero effort and churn out AI sludge as it is for them to scribble in MSPaint, the difference being scribbling in MSPaint usually has some level of charm to it for its simplicity. That doesn't mean the guy who spends a lot of time tweaking their prompt to get it exactly right isn't an artist, it means they create art with different tools. Whether you use a rattlecan and stencils, or pencils and paper, or paint and canvas, or a wacom tablet and stylus, or type in carefully crafted prompts, art is art is art is art. But if you don't spend the time required to get good at it, your art will be shit.

    Also, watching the artist crowd melt down again saying "that's not real art!" is absolutely hilarious. Those who weren't around at the time may not remember, but when digital art was starting to become a thing, there were plenty of people who firmly attested that if it was digital, it wasn't "real" art. Watching the same set of creatives having the same meltdown ~30 years later, "REEEEE YOU CAN'T JUST USE TECHNOLOGY TO MAKE THE PROCESS EASIER", is extremely funny.

  • I don't consider it Art, but the specific reason I hate it is because it is meant to be an illusion of something that it's not, and it's crafted that illusion off the blood sweat and tears of people whom it treats as a line item in a database by people who don't respect it. It is fundamentally a bastardizarion of the creative soul and rather purposefully at that.

    I mean, every highly contrasted media we've ever watched, just about, is about someone with a modicum of empathy struggling against a fascist with no empathy to their cause, and what is more fascist than diminishing or dilluting the perceived value of art to the public? Art is the only language allowed to those who are repressed.

  • Yes, because It's not art. I have a very liberal definition of art. I'd call John Cage's 4′33″ art. Art requires concious effort, an AI has no conciousness.

    Edit: I thought the question was do you like AI art? I can't read apparently. I wouldn't say hate. I just don't respect it from an artstic standpoint.

  • It is not art.

    Ai is capitalism maximizing productivity and minimizing labour costs.

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

    It’s an insult to life itself.

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

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

    • Just playing devil's advocate here. Let me lay out some counter points .. (it'll take me an edit or two to format this right, btw.)

      1. Instructing a machine to assemble bits in a specific way takes creativity. My prompt to AI is that creativity and without it, you can't even get much of a copy of anything. Even though AI is generally assembling stolen bits, the end result (ignoring copyright law) can be original.
      2. Music has been mostly "figured out" and many songs we have heard over your lifetime use many of the same exact chord progressions. I-V-vi-IV being one of the most common and used in the following songs:

      Journey -- "Don't Stop Believing"

      James Blunt -- "You're Beautiful"

      Black Eyed Peas -- "Where Is the Love"

      Alphaville -- "Forever Young"

      Jason Mraz -- "I'm Yours"

      Train -- "Hey Soul Sister"

      The Calling -- "Wherever You Will Go"

      Elton John -- "Can You Feel The Love Tonight" (from The Lion King)

      1. Musicians may use patterns or progressions from other songs. Painters may use the same colors and brushes designed by other artists. In both cases, techniques that have been known for thousands of years are being used in self-expression.

      I assert that given the correct instructions, you can still give someone plenty to analyze, via prompt, that has enough detail to extract a deeper meaning:

      FWIW, I am extremely fed up with this AI hype now. "AI" is just a tool, and that is it. I could go on for hours about this mess, but I am trying to make a valid point: Regardless of how you interpret copyright, art is just self-expression.

      There are endless examples I could give about technique re-use when it comes to creating art with machines. From my perspective, a particular brush stroke might be the same as using a specific bit at a particular depth of cut on a CNC. The art theft for AI training is one aspect, for sure. The biggest issue I see is that many people don't understand how to create original art and the AI just spits out a copy of something it was trained on and something the user already saw.

      Edit: After reading many of the other comments here, many people have a strange definition of "art". Yes, art can be about communication, it can be about sending a message, it can express a style of creativity or hundreds of other things.

      Art is just.. art. It's something a person sketches, composes, speaks, signs or farts. You don't have to like it or agree with it. Hell, you don't even need to recognize something as art for it to be art. Art is just self-expression. It's a feeling that is converted into some kind of other medium that others might happen to see, feel or hear, smell, taste or a combination of all of those things.

      As much as I hate to admit it, a banana taped to a wall is art. Someone eating said banana is also art. I think it's fucking stupid, but who am I to not call it someone's self-expression?

      • That some, most or all art is partly or wholly derivative of other art is not relevant because the process used by 'AI' does not resemble the artistic process. When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet (a work derived from an older play, itself derived from an older myth which itself had been through countless retellings, variations and translations), he did not do what an LLM does, which is approximately to say: 'It's statistically likely that the phrase "to be" will be followed by the phrase "or not to be"'. Putting together statistical likelihoods is not creativity. This alone shows that AI 'art' is not creative and therefore not art at all.

        Additionally, instructing a machine to make things from prompts does not require creativity. Creativity is not 'having ideas'; it's an ongoing process. When you tell an image generator to make an image, you're not asking it to create something, because it cannot do it. You're saying 'Show me the statistically likely output for this input'. Again, this statistical generator is not the same as, nor is it comparable to, the human imaginative process.

      • based on your points (2 and 3), do you think there are no more "original art" in this world?

  • I can't say that I am a fan.

    AI siphons the end result from the process involved to get there - a very human process. Scraping loads of work from artists to mimic a signature style or pop culture trends in art doesn't exactly scream innovation. Using AI to aide a creative process is one thing, but using it to generate imagery, claiming originality, and using it for internet clout is farcical, lazy, and an insult to artists.

    Art is a skill honed over time and given life through the human experience - and the beautiful part is that when others interact with it, it connects them through their own experiences. I really do think AI cheapens that.

  • Bad for artists, but for the environment, low quality, low effort, and the most annoying people in the world love it.

188 comments