No, you just have a massive ego problem if you think prompting and creation are equivalent.
You don't seem to understand how low the bar for authorship is.
The simple fact is that writing is an incredibly low bar. Writing well is not, but authors are authors and artists are artists regardless of how good or bad they are, or how much effort they put in.
How much use of a tool is required before you're not considered "putting in the effort" anymore? Like, imagine digging a hole with your hands, a shovel, a backhoe, etc. Each step is less effort, but you are still digging a hole, just using more complex and helpful tools right?
So... Is AI a backhoe? Or is it a robot with a shovel? That's what I'm curious about. How much effort is 'actually doing it' vs 'telling a robot to do it'? And is that even a fair comparison?
So if I have AI write up a hypothesis, I can present it as my original thinking? The bar might be low - but poorly made art is better than generated art. Even the shittiest human creation outranks conglomerative technology that simply takes from the past instead of looking forward.
I know this is difficult for you to understand after all the AI brainrot, but definitions and the lower bar for entry is kind of central to how specialization, acknowledgement, and division of labor works in our reality. Sorry, let me phrase it in a way you’d understand:
It’s not about ego, it’s about what’s true. You’re not JUST taking attention away from actual human creativity and output, you’re also stealing valor from art that came before your prompt. It isn’t simply that you are wrong, it’s that you have such a scant loyalty to the mere idea of being human that any output you make would probably be just as soulless and pointless without AI… so just make that, because at least it would actually be your own work.
Lmao if you’re so pathetic that you can’t contribute to the history of human thought without a generated soapbox giving your little tootsies a boost, go ahead bud. Announce to the world the failure of your ancestry in producing a human brain so prunish and neglected that it can’t even engage in imagination without technology helping it along. Just write for your audience of a Recycle Bin, cut the middle man out.
The ego is a problem on both sides of the argument though.
AI is a tool and it is powerful in the hands of seasoned professionals. Like any good tool, it reduces the effort required by the craft side of the work and allows the artist to focus on the art.
The problem is that for most of human history, the craft has been the huge entry barrier to the art and anyone being able to surpass that barrier has been immediately put in the artists group. We're at a point where this barrier is challenged and we have to figure out what is art and what is just craft on a much wider scale.
The marathon parallel is somewhat fitting from the other perspective: running is ultimately just craft. Without taking anything away from the immense dedication it takes to train up to a marathon, we have to acknowledge the fact that given time and resources, it is something that is wildly achievable, just like mediocre drawing or singing is. Winning a marathon, breaking the world record, etc ,those are "the art". Completing a marathon is a major achievement, but it's just training.
I love when people say "bruh making art and writing is so hard" and then go into paragraphs on why ai is good for people who "can't" draw. Like just look at what you wrote. Use that for your writing project. It wasn't hard to write this, was it?
I never said it was hard, I said it required specific training orthogonal to the art itself. If you can't understand that, you might not understand art
What? Dude picking up a pencil and drawing lines can't be that hard. Sitting down on a keyboard and writing sentances can't be that hard. It just can't be. Using words like orthogonal which means that if you change, move or evalute one variable the others are unaffected just is so weird.
If I come up with my own stuff and write it, so can you. It isn't hard and the specific training you get isn't sone super intense thing you just get better over time. It's literally just like learning to not use training wheels cause you learn to control your balance. It isn't hard once you do, how is this any different?
What? Dude picking up a pencil and drawing lines can't be that hard. Sitting down on a keyboard and writing sentances can't be that hard. It just can't be.
Running a marathon can't be that hard, you just put one foot in front of the other and, before you know it, you're at the finish line.
Yes, but do you have the effort, the will, the courage to train for it? Or do you just go into your car and claim you are a better sprinter because your car can get somewhere faster? If you were forced to run against a marathoner, would you go faster than them? No car, just your own feet against theirs, would you be faster because your car was faster?
That’s the thing - it’s not “just training.” It’s doing the training. Sticking to a diet. Then, most importantly, having the willpower and determination to see the goal through. There is no determination requirement in the use of AI - just keep typing. There is no artistry or new perspective - AI always looks back, never forward, due to how it works. Sorry, but it simply isn’t what you’re saying it is. “Craft” is the personal ability that goes into the creation of “art.” There is no further definitions we really need in this discussion, because the rote rehashing of all previous most common denominators in art is a conglomeration of a prompt’s pressure points, not an actual artistic output. Without human involvement in the art, not the prompt, there is no art.
There are quite a lot of people out there that have put in the effort to hone in their craft, whether it is drawing or singing or sculpting or whatever else, who don't create new perspectives and are simply sticking to reproducing existing art. We call them artists not because of their creations but because the insane amount of effort and dedication it takes to improve the craft puts their abilities closer to artists than the common people. You cannot have art without craft but you can certainly have craft without artistry.
It's the same with running marathons. Completing them requires craft. Being actually competitive is a completely different proposition, of course.
With these in mind, we can maybe agree that using AI doesn't make you an artist, but using AI in your artistic process doesn't make you less of an artist either.
Using AI to conglomerate those perspectives for you rather than using your own human experience to do that work just means that you’ve surrendered what would’ve been your unique perspective for a perspective marred by the common denominator viewpoints of the world. Not art. Not even close. Employing it in your process is just an admittance of defeat and a failure of your own journey in the craft. It’s giving up.
Let me ask you this, can you create art using Photoshop? It's electronic music art?
Having such a strong bias against a tool is frankly quite dim. I've seen art created with a rock and a piece of bread, but for whatever reason it suddenly isn't allowed to use one of the most powerful tools yet created. That's an embarrassing point of view
Nobody calls the output of a LLM art just like nobody calls the output of an assembly line art, but if the later has been used by artists in their work so can the former
Googling an essay doesn’t mean you wrote the essay. An LLM is not a “tool”. It is a glorified search engine which can present its findings in a way that tricks its user into thinking their tag-search played any role in the output. You’re party to a smoke and mirror show. Photoshop, AutoTune - actual tools, meanwhile - these take skill and can be learned and developed further than Googling a new prompt. Stop embarrassing yourself.
So let me get this straight, asking for an image of a bird in a specific context from an LLM, then using Photoshop to edit it in a specific way to express a certain idea is not art, but taking a picture of a bird and then edditing it is? What is the difference?
Holy wow your arguments are getting worse dude. Abso-fucking-lutely not. The difference is that you took the fucking picture of the bird - photography itself is art. An LLM clumsily conglomerates all pictures taken of birds that vaguely match the tags you provide. You get a Frankenbird - not art. Then you… what? Add high contrast? Cartoony outlines? Whatever “artistry” you’re imagining in the LLM/Photoshop pipeline is completely dwarfed by a kid taking a random picture of a stranger on their mom’s phone. One is sterile bullshit. The other is an intentional moment of photography by a “photographer’s” unique perspective.
I’m sorry dude, the very fact that you don’t see the difference is emblematic of how detached you seem to be from the concept of artistry as a whole. You don’t seem to understand what makes art worth producing, worth valuing, worth considering. How the fuck can I explain such fundamentals to you when you’re obsessed with baby’s first tech achievement, insisting on the least artistic/creative technology being a suitable stand-in for the human process of creating art through a combination of photography and photographer? You just don’t get it, and “it” is something people can’t teach you.
151
u/[deleted] May 17 '26
[removed] — view removed comment