Can’t say I agree with glorifying toxicity as the basis of what makes art or artists “better.” I also don’t agree with the implication of promoting ideas that other’s self expression (or your own) is inferior because of less technical understanding or execution. Art is simply the genuine desire to create and express yourself, and that should always be innately positive and rewarding. That doesn’t mean you won’t learn new things as you keep going, but I will tell you that I am far more interested in the emotion than any final result. I remember my stories and why I chose to create, and hold my past expressions with the same appreciation that I do for my current artwork. I am simply happy that I chose to create, and feel the same way when others do too.

Honestly I tend to value the people with lower experience more, because I know they are choosing to open up and share their stories even when it’s clear they don’t do so frequently or comfortably yet. Everyone should feel like they can participate and be who they are without being shredded alive for technical performance. It was daunting to get over my anxieties and share anything a long time ago, and if I was met with such vitriol then, there is absolutely no chance I would’ve continued to express myself and gain more self confidence as a person and an artist. I would’ve simply accepted that I was inferior. Why would we want to promote that culture, to crush the vulnerable?

Not good arguments imo. Art can be this ‘blood, sweat and tears’ thing if you are into it, but art also can be an activity you do because you enjoy doing it, without a single fuck given that the result looks like the wet fart of a 3yo. I mostly don’t care how people make art. Scratch your art into rock with a baguette if you feel that’s the level of pain needed, or paint with your period blood if that floats your boat.

But use AI? It is incredibly bad for the environment, uses other people’s work without their consent, and it’s being owned by fascist fucking tech bros who want to drown the world in doom. You wouldn’t kick a puppy and call it art, same goes for AI.

When I first learned about generative AI, I thought it was really cool. I used it to make portraits for NPCs in my D&D games, and it was tons better than what I could make myself (lacking training and practice)

Then I learned about the millions of giants whose shoulders GenAI treads on without permission, credit, or compensation. Never used it since

people who love ai 🤝 people who don’t understand or care about consent

You don’t need an uncritical belief in the Labour Theory of Value to think that human labour has a special value and dignity to it. The people who want AI to replace many kinds of intellectual labour just don’t believe that there’s a value to human labour, and I do think this is fundamentally an antihuman, misanthropic way of looking at the world.

AI bros don’t care about art or being able to draw. They only care about money

It’s a coin toss as to who’s more douchey. The person who thinks the output of their prompt is a reflection of their own creativity, or the cartoonishly pretentious “artist” who wants to lecture you about their blood, sweat, and tears.

Replace “AI bro” with photographer and “AI art” with photographs here and you have a very tired argument more than a century old at this point. Same with drum kits, autotune and production software in music, any time a technology comes along that makes making art easier a lot of “OG” artists will say it’s the “blood sweat and tears” that make art.

Don’t get me wrong, the VAST majority of ai images are slop, just like the vast majority of photographs are shit. When you make creating images that easy and accessible a lot of people with no concept of aesthetics or creativity will make garbage, but that doesn’t mean that some can be good and true expressions of creativity.

People being brutal, people crying over critique isn’t “just how art goes”, and isn’t a universal experience. I would actually call it “abuse” instead.

I have a hypothesis: Art requires creativity and other skills that are inherently irrational/emotional, so AI bros want to believe that art can be produced with AI running on a cold hard deterministic machine, because that would mean society doesn’t need artists and other “irrational” people, and then their TESCREAL “rationalist” dream of a perfect society would be viable.

I mean, isn’t making stuff easily kind of the whole point? I doubt AI bros suck OpenAI cock due to their passion for the arts.

IMHO, creativity is also not about coming up with an idea, but the implementation of it. Drawing isn’t about the initial idea, but how the end result looks, which could take a lot of time. GenAI shortcuts the idea to the implementation, that’s also why they look awful.

The thing is people who generate images likely never would do “real art” by hand anyway. They are two different categories of people doing completely different things. They can both do their own thing, it’s not as big of a deal as many of you make it out to be.

Cue that video where an aitechbrodude said that people don’t like creating… (music in that case, but still).

True that