Overall, the perspective espoused here is bad for art. Art isn't hidden inside effort, you don't find it by saying "don't be lazy", and if it's inseparable from where it came from (which I think is pretty debatable, art travels through time and the world and can find interest), this is as true for what humans make as what AI makes.
I think the last bit gives the game away. This perspective is an otherwise content free way of saying "some art is interesting to me, and some isn't".
I don't live like that, you don't live like that, but most people do, and they have ever right to. Humans aren't analytical engines. Evolutionary biology has pushed us strongly towards caring deeply about meaning, identity, and respect. This is normal and has to be unlearned. Good luck with that. Other people don't have to like and respect art for you to.
My point is it doesn't matter. All art ultimately boils down to is doing something cool, and then pointing at it. The vast, vast, vast majority of "art" is not paid and never was. Even the art that is called "art" has little-to-nothing to do with effort. Duchamp's "readymades" are basically less effort that typing a prompt into AI.
That said, nobody has to like Duchamp's readymades. Nobody has to like anyone's art. The point of art is that you can like it or not. It's not objective, but the vast majority of people are going to pretend that it is, but that's fine because it's actually not.
So do you think AI is OK for throwaway stuff but not OK for "production" so to speak?
There is also the generational factor. Digital art, printing press etc all of it had a generational factor to it before gaining acceptance. So who knows what the future holds.
All of which are impossible with AI. It has no intent, it fulfulls the ask from the prompt. If the prompt is so detailed to imbue the work with deeper meanings, then the author is the person that wrote the prompt, not the LLM which becomes something of a translater.
If LLMs get so good at architecting stories that they can whip up some conceptual layer of understand that feels like communication then we will have achieved a higher form of literary remixing. LLMs are still a series of weights,they still operate in a stateless way and have no initiative besides our prompt. Unless we change that, the value of what an LLM can produce remains limited.
To think otherwise is like a tribesman finding a radio and thinking they are hearing the voice of God. Because you aren't following where the words come from you invent a persona for something that is fundamentally a vehicle of transport.
Your insight years later is still something you constructed, it's a new story that you've told yourself, presumably without any new input from the writer, all of which you can do with any given piece of media. You can do that without the intent having been there on the writer's part at all, even, something which is fairly common to do.
* Once a synonym for "artistic", but that's a distracting coincidence
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Well you're not replying, so I'll respond to my own "story" about what you meant, as if I guessed right. I think art can be lots of things, and this (interpretation of cryptic output) is indeed one of the things it can be. The aesthetic movement in the 19th century opposed didactic art, such as deliberate allegories, hence they coined "art for art's sake". But this shows that art as deliberate communication evidently existed too, since they rejected it. Then, looking somewhere much more modern, pop music artists frequently surf atop of fictional images of the star that are largely invented by the audience. Mystique is quite enjoyable. But wanting to be fooled, wanting to misunderstand, is perverse. Milli Vanilli's fraud pissed people off, and rightly so.
There was probably some pomo shit about completely interpretable art, but I doubt anybody really liked that.
So I think the popular preference is for art that is inexplicit, somewhat mysterious, certainly not a plain communication, but art that is an effective inexplicit communication and has a genuine artist's mind invested in it.
I could add that this is somewhat preserved in art even after it's been digested by AI, but that's hardly ideal.
>saying "some art is interesting to me, and some isn't".
That applies to every single human being, including you, except maybe for art scholars.
I'm also not sure that art is actually a way that humans talk to each other. That assumes that the point is delivering some information, but a lot of artists talk about it as a compulsion, or something they do for themselves, or as being about understanding the world. I would actually say that many would say that it's definitively not about audience reception. Simultaneously, audiences interpret things of their own accord all the time. Unlike when sending a message, art is often most fully interacted with when you're engaging with things that weren't put there explicitly.
Well, your post, following your own logic, just says that you like AI-generated stuff. You cannot judge what's good or bad for art, you can't call someone preference "snobbery" because the only property of art is that someone likes it. Interesting things is also then completely subjective.
What do you see in AI art that you love or find interesting so much?
A human premium, and an elevation of human made art was always inevitable. Most "AI art" token spend is TPS reports, and explainer slides, maybe educational materials on the fringes. Maybe there is a chance some forms of AI art becomes its own new medium (like theater vs "the talkies") but it was never going to be a replacement.
Just 3 years of pointless hand-wringing, headlines and breathless interviews for nothing.
"Aaron Sorkin says he will never use AI".
Yes. No one asked him to! But alas, clickbait rules all.
If you filled your day with brainrot slop - does it matter the origin. Does it matter if Instagram thirst traps are so with surgery and filters or if the whole meat puppet stuff is skipped
So far it seems like AI video generation will vastly multiply the quantity of crap like this and enable it to be even worse while being cheaper and easier to produce, while not meaningfully improving the status quo for higher quality works.
"Does it matter which you watch?" Well, who said that was the most interesting question in the first place? Who makes slop is not the only way the situation is changing.
I would argue that modern art has none. Further, I would argue that art is what speaks to people.
That means that an AI generated image which makes people laugh has more soul than whatever the top selling modern artists was in 1995. By my estimation, that makes a lolcat a better piece of art than most modern art.
That is something that I actually think is true. Of course there are great artists who can show us much, much more than what is inside a lolcat. Its just that I haven't seen one of those in a while.
Artists are concerned for their jobs; That I get. Trying to defend art by claiming magical things like it doesn't have any soul is just cope. And frankly, the more I see of that, the less I care about artists and their real problems.
The public is underexposed to beautiful and interesting art, but who is to blame?
Art is a form of expression and/or communication. It's interesting because it shows us different perspectives, as well as things that overlap with ours. When you see a smiley face on your lawn and think it's a sign by the person you just fell in love with, and then find out the exact same artifact was in fact created by wind sweeping some branches together, you'll feel different about it. Similar for art. Or take jokes. A friend might find a joke of yours funny they might not find funny from a person they dislike. That's not "unfair" or "objectively wrong", just like rejecting the same artifact depending on source. If you don't understand this, you talking about "magic" is the cope.
> Its just that I haven't seen one of those in a while.
So that's the argument for making sure of that? Heh.
> Artists are concerned for their jobs; That I get.
The article isn't about artists being concerned for their jobs. This is about people rejecting slop.
For years we have perceived my work (swe) as a safe harbor. With AI boom, tides have changed and now I perceive her work as a much, much more future-proof activity
Some open source projects have already banned AI contributions. I think this trend will continue (in stark contrast to the corporate world).
I say the more the merrier, but artists who use AI in their workflows are going to be pressed about it - with negative connotations - for a while. Transparency is the best solution in my opinion.
Art is not ‘supposed’ to be easy to do, if one believes that they see something important they can express via AI — they are free to do so and try to say smth to the world, AI tools are relatively accessible. It’s not guaranteed that the world will listen now, but that has always been the case — many great artists never got recognition during their lifetimes including those who worked in novel paradigms.
So no, they’re not losing anything. If the absence of the immediate mass approval of their art is the obstacle, well, then they don’t need to make that art.
If an artist has something to say with AI, they can just say it, no one is going to imprison them. Artists did that throughout the entire history (sometime even with the threat of being jailed), nothing changed in this regard with AI.
Art is hard not because of the tools but because you have to have something worthwhile to say (most people don’t) and you have to figure out a way how to get another human to listen, and also you have to hope that someone some day will listen because what you’re saying is true, even if it doesn’t sell today or ever.
P.s. Pop art actually directly talked about this relationship with the market and it’s interesting because of that, not only because the colors and shapes were fun to look at (but that too).
Nonetheless, if there's going to be a premium it has to be discernible in any particular way because software for business is always considered a cost. But what really shows this industry is half a joke, is that now there's no issue in giving 3rd party agents full access to inner code and logic, many times credentials too because these systems are being deployed in CIs. And because there's really no enforcement or punishment for leaks, or endangering users in most areas there's no reason for a premium. There's people pushing thousands of lines / min (and I think even the most professional people out there can't honestly keep up with it) although that isn't in itself meaning the overall security is worse than before, it just means that for the most part it's now un-auditable in any meaningful way.
In fact executives demand the opposite: token max to get the features out of the door faster, all in the same of closing that one last sale.
A lot of people can do that. A lot more people could do it if they tried to.
People who are genuinely out of the box creatives, with a unique blend of original vision, technical skill, emotional and psychological insight, and genre-changing taste, are not common.
EDIT: And AI is also pretty terrible at being consistent too, you have to work quite hard to get a level of "consistency" that you're happy with.
There will always be problems to solve with building software, regardless of the way it is written.
From code to no-code to vibe-code, to even more code. What we are seeing here is more of the same being built.
An example of this is "sandboxes". Everyone was writing "sandboxes" until it there was 1 vulnerability needed to break them and we will keep seeing this with developers vibe-coding infrastructure.
I even create these things. But that aesthetic has started to imply a kind of throwaway, low value thing
What will be interesting is if models can create more diverse styles than the neutral Claude default we see everywhere
The html there's not really many places to be creative, a navbar with 3 sections, 5 links, a text card, a hero image, etc, all those are the same across thousands of projects - they're structured, there's not really many ways you can be creative about it. So in part seeing that "middle ground" design is indeed a filter for the lowest of the low effort (or not understanding how to prompt properly, or how the final thing comes together).
If you just want to prompt models and have them come up with more diverse styles that's also quite, or more, lazy - it would help if you understood (not you in particular) how the look of a web page comes together, because then you can direct the model properly - and if needed tweak the lose ends because at some point it's just easier and faster to edit the output yourself but you need to know what needs change and how. If you know how an html page comes together into the thing you see in the browser you can spec the model properly.
In animation/film production- studios would have a "TD" on hand- a technical director- a programmer on staff to tweak workflows for artists, build new tools etc-
Now my TD chills in VsCode waiting and working for me 24/7 in the form of Claude Code, Kimi Code etc
I can also have my TD embed another TD(Deepseek flash 4.1) into the new tools(making them smarter and more useful) my TD builds for me while I am in active production on the same PC
All of this allows savvy creatives to dream bigger as a single person is capable of anything a "big studio" can do-
So artists need to leverage these new tools and be more ambitious.
Aesthetics are dead- original ideas are it.
What you really need is more people willing to pay a premium to live/work in a unique or famous building like the empire state building, and then more such buildings will be built.
Hopefully with AI we will make things like stonework and indoor plasterwork, hell, even indoor statues, that much cheaper, and we can start creating beautiful places to live.
Or if they do, they'll try and downplay by saying they used AI for some elements, but not most of them.
Ideally, how you create something and what tools you use should be nobody's business, and all it matters would be if they like it or not. But inherent value / merit is a thing, and concern for the provenance of what you buy is also a valid position for the public to take. It's gonna be a while before the balance settles on either AI = bad or AI = who cares.
On my site, we started asking artists to disclose their use of AI starting ~2 years ago. Turns out roughly 1 in 3 lied.
So, I developed an AI detector. It's working pretty well for that. But it's a schlep having to keep up with all the new models. We're processing ~60,000 songs a day at this point, kinda crazy!
1. How often do you encounter false positives, and does that change things?
2. Have you considered outright prohibiting/banning vs disclosure?
Just want to hear from someone running a platform how they deal with this since I imagine it's very hard to get right.
What’s your site?
Edit: here are some examples for those wondering what I mean: https://imgur.com/a/mK3Iuzq
You can sort of tell they are AI because of the composition stuff but I think they are aight.
Art is as much about the journey as it is about the destination. It’s the friction of someone going through each detail, making a choice. It’s the artist taking time to figure out how they want to convey what they’re feeling and thinking.
The reduction of this friction culminates in the reduction of the piece’s essence.
But what interests me about AI is that it is possible to do things that you couldn't do before particularly in processing images. For these images I took photos of the bottles myself and used other images and the AI can place the camera anywhere in a scene and place objects anywhere in the scene, and things like that. You can create almost any image you can imagine with the right sources and the right prompt, and even here there is some friction because many images do end up looking like slop and you have to prompt it right to get something non-slop like out of it (though not always).
This ability to manipulate and process information is what makes AI interesting to me, although I'm not sure I adequately explained it. It feels like a new tool like Photoshop except across a different dimension. I feel like we've barely scratched the surface of what's possible to create.
Mind you, human-painted artwork is a niche beyond expensive art. Not everyone buys the equivalent of Monet paintings. I've been eyeing a painting by a local painter just to realize the prices jumped from $500 to something like $3000 on average. Sucks.
In fact if your old price was already 500 dollars then its already a useless luxury. People think a lot before paying 500 even for actual tools, anyone who has 500 to spend on a non-essential luxury is already doing something most people don't have any need to.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but skills that allowed one to make software largely made one pretty employable in the last few decades.
Now, art skills do not make you employable. There are narrow industries where you can make money but throughout the entirety of human history, being an artist rarely provided any sort of economic security. Some artists did and do make money. Sometimes it was prestigious but the barrier of entry was insanely high. And yes, getting to their level of skill and sometimes even getting access to the tools (look up how much a decent harp costs) was yet another enormous obstacle. Out of the entire pool of people who had artistic abilities, very few got access to tools and resources to be able to express their abilities. Out of those, even fewer could make money off of it while also doing artistic work that was deeply fulfilling and aligned with their talent. Occasionally, the stars would align and you would be lucky to be born in a time and place where you could get the schooling, the tools, the job that paid well enough and that didn't makwe your soul die because it alined with your natural creativity.
There are a lot of people who (I think) speak of AI as if democratizes access to the tools and therefore in their mind it should follow that there must be some market for their newlyfound creative expression. But if you ever seriously considered art as a career, you know that you will likely not have a market for your skills. It is difficult to make money even as a traditonal artist (as in a painter) or, say, a musician, god help you if you want to do mixed media, if you want to play avant garde jazz, prog rock, or Barocco music, if you want to be an actor, a playwright or a ballet dancer.
Some people (I assume those who are excited about the idea of being able to express themselves) seem to be bummed that the world rejects AI art as 'slop'. I am not going to say anything about effort, laziness, etc, I believe anything can be used to make art, even a toilet put in an exhibition hall (I like Duchamp, I like modern art, I like post-modern art, I like whatever-the-paradigm-we're-in-now-art -- metamodernism? I love art, I did see early pre-ChatGPT experiments with neural networks that moved me), but I have to say something that any aspiring artist must know -- you will not make money off your art. The people who will be making the 'human premium' that the article talks about, will be few, just like there are few of them now. AI artists will not make money of their art. Art is a terrible career choice, now and tomorrow.
It's still worth pursuing, in my opinion (as I said -- I love art), but there is little point of talking about its commercial viability. It will always be shit.
Around 2010 I made music videos for a Vocaloid producer. Back then, people sometimes said Hatsune Miku songs were worth less because a machine was singing. I didn't think so, and in the end the songs were accepted because they were good.
Of course, Vocaloid songs were still written by people, which is different from AI making the whole song. Even so, I think what matters to listeners is the quality.
(I wrote this in Japanese and used AI to translate it.)
I suspect use of AI to "realize one's artistic vision" will get increasingly more normalized, but I don't know how people will react to end-to-end AI art (which generally doesn't exist yet), things are going to be a really strange once/if human taste gets fully mapped and demystified.