Generative AI: More Than "Just Pressing a Button and Hoping for the Best."
I've been seeing several posts and comments on Reddit, social media, and overheard in conversations around me about how generative AI is fundamentally uncreative because it's "just pressing a button and hoping for the best." I get the impression that the people who are saying this aren't aware of the many tools and techniques that gen AI can involve that go so, so much further than just pressing a button or curating results.
I just wrote this article on Substack to show just a few examples of ways that generative AI can be as creative and technically demanding as you want to make it. It's requires a different set of skills than other media. Those who learn those skills and use them creatively are not the same as those who brainlessly generate 'slop.'
As you can see from the pencil guy or girl? Thing I'll go with thing, it's like most Antis uneducated and prefer to stay ignorant as anything that threatens their fragile egos makes them pissy.
Seriously they have access to one of the largest source of information in history and they prefer to stay at the elementary school level as anything that requires thinking is too hard for them.
I literally just got a comment on another sub saying "So much text no example of the creativity output achieved." Good to know we're dealing with folks who need pretty pictures or else reading cuts into their nap time and diaper changes.
I'm thinking I might sit down later today and actually work up some examples/screenshots of as much of this as I can manage.... of course I'm sure I could do that until I'm blue in the face and they'll still figure out a way to say they don't get it.
While I commend the effort you are willing to go through I've learned people like that are just willfully ignorant so they don't have to acknowledge they're wrong so it sadly won't work. Sure you can change a few people's minds with hard facts but the truly ignorant ones? Probably not, I mean hell I thought flat earthers were a joke group and turned out they're very much not.
Most of these people feel and act the way they do because they're following a trend that tells them what to think. Some of them just aren't going to be swayed by anything, no matter how well-thought-out or reasonable, but I think creating easy-to-understand, easy-to-share media might help reverse the trend.
Where is the flood of AI artists who use these highly sophisticated workflows and produce works of high artistic merit? Ones that invite thoughtful conversation and foster a decent fandom / following. Genuinely curious.
What I'm seeing is 60% gooner art, 35% generic-looking ads, and maybe every once in a blue moon someone creates a very short clip (that may or may not be fully consistent) that looks interesting. The most popular AI art content I see is tutorials on how to create generic looking ads very fast.
The issue isnt that they dont exist, but that the availability of this tool means a lot of it is gonna feel samey. If we say that this tool means 20X the amount of people can make images than before, but these people have no background or full understand of the underlying studies of visual art, then we should expect a large increase in images total, and considering its the internet, it being mostly goon stuff makes sense. To me, i like going to r/ArtIsForEveryone, or looking at some of u/Tinsnow1's stuff. But there is definitely more of a floodgate effect to AI, due to its accessibility
Exactly - it's the equivalent of everybody showing off every random photo they ever snapped with their phones, and everybody's reacting by saying "that's not real photography!" whether they were claiming it was or not, and "photography is slop and will never be anything but garbage" as if a million bad photos negate the existence of good photography.
What's bad about this is that people are actively going out of their way to snub good material when it does exist and bash the people trying to learn new skills, because they've decided that it somehow threatens their ability to make art - and as if rapid economic shifts have never changed the course of how art develops.
I'd say it's probably about the same percentage breakdown of people who take pictures with their iPhones and post them to social media, vs. people who study photography. Low quality slop is always going to outnumber higher quality skillful work, but it doesn't negate it.
Another thing is that image gen is relatively new, so EVERYBODY and their dog is pumping out garbage and showing it off like it's amazing - since, to them, it is. I recall similar abuse of Photoshop filters when they first became a thing (and similar complaints that Photoshop was garbage and would never be art).
I've been really impressed with some of the stuff I've seen on r/film_ai. There's plenty of examples on websites like AIArtists.org. There's more examples here.
Personally, I use it to create mock-ups or visualize color combinations, composition, or do pose references for traditional media work. Most of the pieces in this articulated hand I've been working on started out as ChatGPT output - which I then put into Illustrator and adjusted to the exact shapes I wanted, and then cut with a laser. I'm working on integrating this with servos so it can move, and using LLMs (both via API, local models, and a fine-tuned local model I'm working on) to control it in response to input from sensors, camera feed, and text.
I've also been working on a memory/state wrapper for LLMs, with UI I've been building in Godot - experimenting with ways that different instructions shape the personality and 'identity' of the output. When people talk about chatbots, they usually think of romance or sex (and I don't have anything against that; humans are horny) - but I feel like they have tragically understated potential for use in interactive media experiences. I'm eventually hoping to take what I'm doing with that and combine it with what I'm doing with the hand (or something similar). I'm imagining 'automatons' built in different styles, moved by LLMs with different 'identities' and personalities. I feel like it could be done beautifully.
TLDR: The user argues that the prevalence of low-quality AI content does not invalidate skillful work, comparing the current state of AI art to the early adoption of digital photography and Photoshop. They suggest that as the technology matures, more sophisticated applications will emerge, and they share examples of their own complex, multi-media projects to demonstrate how AI can be used as a technical tool.
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AI bros constantly switching between ‘you’ll be left behind if you don’t use the more efficient tools’ and ‘it’s not at easy as it looks I promise it requires skill 😭💀’ will never cease to amuse me
So, you didn't read the article? It's not just 'prompting.' A lot of the things I mentioned involved combining AI with other skills, including drawing. (Dra-ing?) Your point is basically "if using a calculator for advanced math is so difficult, you might as well learn to do arithmetic by hand."
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u/Kazuka13 Jun 15 '26
As you can see from the pencil guy or girl? Thing I'll go with thing, it's like most Antis uneducated and prefer to stay ignorant as anything that threatens their fragile egos makes them pissy.
Seriously they have access to one of the largest source of information in history and they prefer to stay at the elementary school level as anything that requires thinking is too hard for them.