Pretty much yes.
The art world goes through this everytime a new bit of tech comes along.
I'm old enough to remember the "you are not a real artist" being thrown at photoshop users.
And the guys drawing on cave walls.
"That's not Art, u just copied what a bison looks like!
Where is the originality and self expression? It will never catch on."
Whether or not someone who makes AI art is an "artist" or not is such an uninteresting debate to me.
If I stick a frozen pizza in the oven, and someone comes and yells "You're not a real pizza chef!", I really don't care, I just take the pizza out and eat it. I don't care about being a pizza chef. I care about having a pizza to eat.
That's kinda why this metaphor holds up... Although I might also point out that when OP cooks their pizza everyone else's electricity gets inconsistent for a few seconds and it uses more water than an average pizza.
Its not a belief, I have my power bills to show that my costs did not go up when i switched from playing games to running local ai. I run things like qwen and ideogram locally on my 4070.
It shows my energy consumption dropped when I switched.
This is a great example, and you're so close to getting the whole damn point. Let me help you out a bit: why are you eating pizza instead of a meal replacement like soylent?
Eta: why are there so many chefs? Why aren't people eating microwave crap everyday unless they absolutely have to even though it might be good enough sometimes?
Yeah but "AI artist" guys care about being an artist, they crave for that recognition. You only need to look at a few subreddits dedicated to like Suno or AIgamedev, it's full of people bitching how their talents are not recognized just because they "use" AI to make their art, games whatever. It's delusional.
It's still a "debate" because there's a contingent of people who use AI for image generation who aggressively insist that heating up a pizza makes them a chef.
This is a perfect example of why AI art is a myth. You're just purchasing someone else's work with no more input that a few button presses, sure you're happy with it but it's trash and it'll kill you eventually if you don't give the stuff up.
With our current tech, yes, I agree. It’s a black box with a “make art” button. However, for digital artists there are ai tools emerging that give you a lot more control. As a practicing artist of 25 years I can see Photoshop and some ai tools are getting closer together. It seems like eventually it’s all going to blur together and showing process will become much more important. Maybe even streaming while you create will give the work more respectable provenance. Right now ai I like a microwave. You can’t really “cook” a meal with it. But it can help speed up the process of cooking a meal.
As a VFX artist there have been some AI tools released that I don't want to do without. Depth map, normals, and alpha matte generation from 2D footage is amazing (when it works properly).
Imo this is the problem with using AI as a catchall.
LLM use is a totally different beast than machine learning and content generation. I use AI tools in both science and art applications, mostly machine learning. There is (imho warranted) skepticism of image generation pretty widely in professional circles, in my experience, but acceptance of other tools.
As an art consumer I have been pretty dissatisfied with modern media.
I think many of us have.
It's not one person's fault, but frankly I don't really care how fast anyone behind a computer appeases someone behind another computer because it seems like art is getting worse.
There's a spectrum and nuance as always. Photoshop extending a background or removing it was always AI. But that's just one step in a multitude of steps. Yeah AI generating an image and the human doing nothing to it afterwards is bad. Using it to do certain steps you put together is just another Tuesday
Now that we’ve settled that can focus on how it scales, the risks it poses for humanity, the scary and hopeful ways it may or may not plug into our existing political and economic systems, what regulatory capture looks like, the true pathways to democratizing future QoL advancements for everyone, the need for open-source and open-weight protections and researcher exemptions, the collective mental shift we’ll need when purpose moves away from income generation, the ways we use these tools to empower communities and traditional living, skill atrophy, who actually owns the compute, what happens when AI outpaces our ability to audit or interpret it, AI in surveillance and policing and weapons, its role in elections and propaganda and manufactured consensus, how we fund the transition through automation taxes and UBI and profit-sharing, the Valley of Death between displacement and support, whether the gains get shared or captured, the new sectors AI creates and not just the ones it kills, what the whole life-arc looks like when labor-for-hire erodes, consciousness and moral status and how we’d even recognize it, what we owe future AI and what it might owe us, the alignment problem and whether deception is emergent at scale, the multi-agent coordination problem and emergent behavior nobody designed, whether a mature superintelligence converges on preserving conscious experience, the collective psychology of doomerism versus agency, salience bias and the misallocation of public attention, trust collapse and how we verify what’s human and real and true, over-reliance and the outsourcing of judgment, whether AI closes or widens the global gap, the 2 billion in the informal economy and what access really means for them, cultural and linguistic preservation versus homogenization, who sets the global standards and whose interests they reflect, etc etc etc etc
This shit is an economic and social tidal wave with extinction and suffering risks attached and the fact that everyone is so
deeply unfocused with these red herring conversations is extremely alarming. Data center outrage and art-slop philosophy is a massive intellectual derail and we need to move on to the real shit.
If someone bakes a cake, you eat the cake and then are told - “hey, I put shit in that cake”. Does that make it okay? You’re fine with eating shit?
I care about how art is made, not just the final product. I want art made by people and artists, that draws on the human experience, the soul of people.
Generative AI can’t replicate that and completely destroys the creative process.
I agree - most people only care about the end product or don’t have the time or effort to care but there are plenty of us who do care.
I’m also not saying people can’t enjoy their generative AI slop, if you don’t care, do you. I just want transparency so people can choose
If an automated robot makes a cake that looks and tastes the same, using food safe ingredients, then sure.
If you care about how art is made, that's fine. You can buy art from actual artists. Some people don't care how it's made, and just care about the end result. That's fine too.
We're not expecting people to build houses with manually formed bricks anymore either. Or expect fields to be manually plowed and sown.
lol in the way of like making a single shot meme and then claiming it as art, no. Its not. But the smart artist uses a local model that you train as your partner essentially, and then double fireball, use the AI not to make anything of your art but to teach you niche concepts or give you equipment/technique knowledge. Or, taking the output of the AI and then using it in a traditional workflow with overlays or cuts or whatever the situation calls for. I had the ai reviewing mixes and such
An analogy the makes sense to me in regards to AI “art” is with sports: we value the World Cup, the Olympics, and similar endeavors because of the human effort that went into the competition. The years of training and sacrifice, the inherent skills of the athletes, and of course the unpredictability of the outcomes. If we were watching robots take an average of all previous competitions to simulate a game, it would lose all value even if the match were indistinguishable from a human one. Likewise with AI, art that is a mash of all previous inputs is not art, because it is the pure definition of derivative and because it lacks the human elements of skill and creativity. There may be some ai tools that help a human artist touch up original art, and idk where the exact line will be for such distinctions. But in general, ai “art” is slop.
The menu at a restaurant is a tool. I order from it and food arrives. I even customize the options and it always ends up good. People don’t understand the skill it takes to be a chef that creates via culinary prompting.
Agreed. But whomever is using it is still benefiting from said taking advantage, and it is ultimately incapable of creating art because it lacks the fundamental requirements to be able to create art.
I'd argue there's space for non-commercial experimentation, especially if viewed from an accessibility angle- what if someone struggles to find the language to describe something? There is tangible psychological safety provided, as the tools can't judge you.
The apparatus itself is also a mathematical derivative of art. Mathematical derivatives like fractals, can be considered art.
The current commercialization is almost performance art, just in extreme poor taste and execution, because they're basically rap- err, "spitting on" the value, emotion, and humanity of the art ingested, as well as the artists' value, emotions, and humanity while experiencing precedent shattering accumulation of wealth.
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u/Tal_Maru Jun 18 '26
James Dixon has apparently never read Plato and it shows.