So, while I could do incidental art for a project I am working on, AI is going to do better than I could. (I have uploaded sketches of mine though and had it improve it. Is that still shit of me?)
I once paid an artist friend $1K (or was it $2K?) to do a set of playing cards for an iPad game I was working on. It was during the Great Race-to-the-bottom era of iOS apps such that $0.99 or $1.99 was all I was probably going to be able to ask for it.
Did I make back the $1K? Why, not at all. I think I made maybe $100 or something like that. (Never mind the unpaid time I invested in writing the app.)
Retired now, poorer, but still wasting my money on projects that will cost me, and ultimately make me nothing in return.
I guess I don't feel ashamed leaning on AI to give me something to put in the corner of the PCB I am about to order from JLCPCB. (The PCB that, after a number of iterations, I will have spent hundreds of dollars on and will never see a return when it goes "to market".)
I also like to use AI as a sort of filter on pictures that I took. Make a photo look like a drawing, for example. It is also incredible for UI mockups and saves me a lot of work.
But it's absolutely lovely and heartwarming when my brother uses it to make environment art to go with a D&D campaign for his children.
It's hyper-polarized.
This is a phase that will pass.
There will be (and already are) legitimate artists who leverage AI as a creative tool like any other medium/tool (Photoshop, cameras, paint brushes, etc). I respect them even if others immediately dismiss anything AI related.
Clip art was created for specific purposes by humans, and continues to find use in those niches.
Lo, I'll have to wait until the tides of public opinion stream to my advantage. Or find my own proxies to voice my disdain.
I'm more than just a rabble-rouser.
It turns into a long tirade about how AI has made the median person's life worse and how they associate generated images with that. It could also be a short tirade.
But the point is more that it is that way, its not important (for the purposes of choosing whether to use AI art in a thing you distribute) _why_ people feel this way though, just that they do.
But that doesn't matter, because the game theory they outlined is directionally right. The cohort of people who hate AI art is relatively small. But the cohort of people who love it is even smaller. People can generally spot it, and most people are indifferent to it.
Having said that: I think it's also true that people are generally indifferent to any of the "casual" art in online writing and publications. It's overused and a crutch.
A hero image at the top of a post: good, can be great, do it, make sure it's not AI. But like, a random dinosaur giving a thumbs up in the middle of the post? Don't do that at all.
That's a weird intentional example to make: spam-adjacent marketing content needs a stock art hero image, but a random dinosaur randomly inserted into a random post shouldn't be done at all?
Correcting your correction: a lot of people have terrible taste. It's not polite to say it, because it's condescending and presumptuous, but it's true nonetheless.
People with good taste will agree with TFA. Your Uncle who sends you cheesy postcards that make you groan; your grandma who watches reality TV; your coworker who always used to forward the whole company chain letters about poor Jessica who's 4 years old and dying of cancer; they will all clap enthusiastically at the GenAI T-rex. That's because they have bad taste and don't know better.
In other words, TFA is right. "Socially illiterate" is a very apt definition.
The language evolved "slop" for AI art. There's no corresponding new term for good AI art. Pretending it's a minority that hates it is transparent cope.
Not saying AI is blameless, but I'm seeing a trend where the problem is clearly more about social media and how it enables every one of us to live in our own algorithmically fed bubble. Like, look at this:
> If your initial reaction to reading that and seeing [an AI image] is some variation of "ughhh" or rolling your eyes or "fuck this guy" congrats. You are normal.
> If it wasn't I cannot stress to you enough that you are an outlier. Whenever you pick key art for a presentation or blog, your business, or whatever - if you use AI art you give a clear signal that you have low social literacy. You immediately associate yourself with a huge bundle of negative emotions because people, largely, hate this shit.
See how confident the author is that their own view is the normal, socially acceptable one, and they "cannot stress enough" that any other view is a social outlier. This has all the same "If you don't care about what's happening in Gaza you're not normal and nobody likes you" energy, except at least people are actually dying in Gaza.
And of course it should make perfect sense for the author because, unironically, everywhere they go online they will see people talking and thinking like that! Largely thanks to those profit-driven corporations and their massive data centers.
I don't know what's the solution but this can't go on forever ...
Yes, you can do image-> text on existing styles, but something always gets lost in translation.
Midjourney probably has the best baseline, and --sref is a really easy way to differentiate
Compare the AI dinosaur in the article to the commissioned dinosaur. The commission has a vibe created by the eye expression and the glasses. I'd maybe call it chill. The thumb-up is present but it isn't leading the vibe, we might infer that it is something the dino is doing because he is chill. The gesture is only a tiny part of the image, almost an afterthought.
In the original AI image the dinosaur has its thumb up and seems to be really happy. Big smile, relaxed face. Thumb looms large in the foreground. That would be totally normal for this sort of prompt, I don't expect the AIs to have a lot of thoughtful variety on body language.
So what is interesting is getting the AI to generate the commission image - one where the thumb-up looks like a natural consequence of a broader scene - is actually quite hard. The prompter needs to think about all those details of what the character of the dinosaur is and such that make the gesture natural. It might be too hard to one-shot prompt. Image generators don't do that the last time I checked, they just provide what is asked for. Human artists (especially the good ones) will identify that as boring and start adding flourishes to keep people's interest.
People end up hoist on their own petard. "A T-Rex giving a thumbs up" isn't an interesting idea and a good human artist will - instead of following an instruction - give people what they asked for and slip some actually interesting elements in, which usually comes back to more body language and facial expression that is hard to describe.
Prompting via text alone is a really bad way to generate images. Ideally you want Canny Control to draw an outline of the image with elements in the exact locations where you want them. It's why comfyui is so great.
The ability to edit images and specify regions in the image for the prompt is a step in the right directions though. ChatGPT and Gemini have this.
That's not to say that this same person isn't the perfect target and consumer, as far as OpenAI is concerned.
Approps of nothing, I think art is worth your while to make an investment of effort. I found Drink and Draw and made acquaintance of another maker from a local makerspace(not mine) and an artist. I wasn't technically adept but I want space to learn how to draw and they treated beginner(or at lease those three) with good vibes even though I was a clear beginner.
People make wrongly future predictions looking at current output ie first encounter but fail to count for improvement over time. 3 years ago the biggest topic was that llm are not going to replace coders as they are not good but over time as llm have improved that has changed from llm are coming for coding jobs. It has been the same for solar, batteries and ev's etc which were not economical in their location at the time they might have done the research but they are still stuck in that first encounter while prices have dropped so much for the tech that economics are completely different.
Which is my point.
But maybe I’m just one of those people with “minor cases of major brain damage”.
> But maybe I’m just one of those people with “minor cases of major brain damage”.
Hey, you said it not me
(hallucinated) ai hard at work
(Not accusing that they are)
Recently Blender removed Anthropic from the sponsors while taking Nvidia and Google's money. This is the epitome of the nature of the anti-AI trend: If you just don't make it obvious nobody cares.
There is no using AI image generators _well_ if you care how people perceive you and your work.
That is not a worthwhile risk - and thats the thing I am super confused more people don't have an intuitive sense of.
Here's the really funny thing. Crafting the prompt to make the original image probably took more time than that crappy mspaint job.
I'm being serious, think about it. What are the chances that image came out of the first prompt fed to the AI? How much time did it take to craft the prompt to get that weird uncanny valley trex with a thumbs up?
Compare that to googling "trex", grabbing an image. Finding the thumbs up emoji. He didn't even bother removing the white background layer! It probably took two minutes tops to make and I enjoy it more.
All you get are these pieces of glossy junk, yet they expect you to believe it’s some form of creative work. "People with minor cases of major brain damage", indeed
People generally hate low effort AI slop.
Irrational people hate art made with AI as a tool.
"By invading the territories of art, photography has become art's most mortal enemy." - Said someone who nobody knows because it's a long and dead opinion.
No, it's OK to care about the source/process. It is not irrational. You may disagree, but it is utterly human - as rational as things get.
But there aren't people for whom it is a positive, just those for which it fails to be a negative. It creates a severe negative impression or a neutral one.
That is a terrible tradeoff!
For me it's contextual. In the case of engineering presentations in particular, I'll live with some AI art if it means less reading off of fifteen-bullet-point wall-to-wall text slides. But I always prefer and appreciate non-AI art – even stock art, if employed judiciously.
If, say, a consultant or outside speaker brings in a dripping-with-AI-art slide deck to talk about AI – now that I consider the height of cringe.
Funnily, I only apply this logic to AI-generated images for the masses. If someone does it in one of my group chats, I'd think of it as "ok you spent some time for a small audience, i respect that, here's your well-deserved chuckle". It might be my age speaking out, as I grew up in "organic free range internet, full of ridiculous under construction gifs". But I really struggle to imagine a future where most adults would say AI-generated art can generate any emotions.
Most people probably don’t care.
I bet there were painters in the 1800s who talked about how people hated photographs and how they were uncanny and creepy compared to paintings.
Certainly, clearly not
For now.
In the future, I despair that the next generations will adjust. Horrifying, but possibly true.
People are confused because since the 1960s literally the CIA intervened to disrupt the transmission of meaning in art, because it was a field dominated by "subversives" who were opposed to capitalism and imperialism. They promoted meaningless post-modern art that was purely aesthetic. So decades later, starved of good examples, people have no idea what art is anymore.
A weird facsimile of art that has no soul is entirely uninteresting.
- Cars (expensive toys for the rich that endangered normal ppl and spooked horses)
- Recorded music (similar complaints about it not supporting artists)
- Bicycles (commonly called the devil's work)
- Novels (morally dangerous)
- Headphones / Sony Walkman (anti-social)
I remember when chatting online was nerdy, anti-social, and uncool. Now celebrities casually talk about sliding into each other's DMs.
The initial "it's unfashionable" backlash to new, useful, and threatening technology has been so repetitive and predictable throughout history that it's almost passe now. Most people aren't students of history of course, so history will repeat itself.
But that also means the second act will repeat, not just the first act. And the useful technology will almost certainly become fashionable and accepted once it's more commonplace.
"It's different from X" is no more meaningful than "it's the same as X".
The post doesn't even say "it's different from X". It just says "it's unfashionable," with no comparison or mention of history at all, as if this is the first time a new technology has ever been unfashionable immediately after its release.
> Just make your argument on its own terms.
The argument is incredibly simple and obvious: the "unfashionable" period for useful but jarringly new consumer-facing technology is common, predictable, and short-lived.
Or maybe the defenses are AI generated, who knows.
But either way, I'm talking about *the present* which is the time we all live in. Opining that in the future maybe it will be different is like - sure? Not super relevant though.
Sure, but has that ever happened to a technology that was useful, convenient, affordable, etc.? Definitely gotta be rare. I think the utility tends to win in the end.
> But either way, I'm talking about *the present* which is the time we all live in.
Yeah that's why I didn't disagree with you. I think you're right about the present. But I wouldn't call my response irrelevant. It's pretty normal in a conversation to carry things forward and respond with your own thoughts.
So yes, all things that I accepted first I hate now. The others I was born in, can't tell much about them. Maybe the people are right but accept the shit later.
Obviously a false statement or the image would not be generated in the first place. You will need to significantly move goalposts for this statement to be truthful