- cross-posted to:
- StopAI
- cross-posted to:
- StopAI
Lime Bar @limebar@mastodon.social
I am a little shocked at the lack of solidarity I see between artists working in different mediums wrt genAI.
Musicians who would never use it to make music use it to make cover art
Graphic artists reach for it to make music over their videos
Writers use it to illustrate their articles
And, considering software development an art, many use it to create web sites or apps to host their art.
None of this is necessary. All of this is harmful to the other artists.
Collaborate ffs.
Stop it.
Aug 09, 2026, 12:17 AM
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Seen this myself.
I just semi-retired after 10 years of writing My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fanfiction. It was a nice little side hustle that brought in 1-2k a year and I enjoyed learning how to write stories.
In the past I would write a story and then either commission an artist for some cover art, or find some that suited the story on one of the many MLP art databases and ask permission to use it. In 10 years of writing over a million words I was never once refused my request to use someone’s art, and I always made sure the artist was credited.
But, in the past year or so the primary website for MLP fanfictions (fimfiction.net) started allowing AI art for covers which like the OP, I feel to be a betrayal of our fellow creatives. We definitely need to stand together against the tide of AI slop, no matter its genre.
No slop on my clop!
And yeah, I’ve contributed more than my share of clop, but if you are looking for good non-clop stories check out:
The Dresden Fillies series - Dresden Files crossover
White by Crimnar - short horror story
Changeling Space Program - a riff on the Kerbal Space Program game
Celestia vs Garble - pure comedy in Monty Python style
It Sleeps Beneath Foal Mountain - Lovecraftian horror
Parlous - some of the best uses of archaic words and phrases I’ve ever read.
None of these are by me. Just some of my favorites
I think a big part of the problem is that most people just can’t afford each other.
Sure, you can do “paid in kind” (which has it’s own complexities) but mainly there’s so many overheads in life, as well as middlemen extorting out their cut that hiring a creative is cripplingly expensive.
It’s something only affordable to either those with a lot of disposable income, or those who are planning to make a hefty profit from it (and won’t be worrying about money in the meantime either).
Even in times when I was making the same income as a plumber, the idea of hiring one was deeply financially intimidating. Even an independent one. The way it’s stacked, you can only afford to hire people in a lower class/caste/tax-bracket than yourself.
100% this. They couldn’t afford each other before. Just because AI options are cheap and fast doesn’t make them able to afford real work suddenly.
Yep. And people want to work on something they’re passionate about. So unless you’re actively collaborating all through the creative process, it’s mostly going to be one person’s creative vision. You can say that the music video is a collaboration between the animator/effects artist and the musician, but if the musician has something specific in mind that they want to make, that’s not going to feel like a collaboration for the video artist,it’s going to feel like a commission. Which no one wants to do for free.
I’m just going to take a moment to appreciate that they considered software development an art. It’s a rare moment.
It’s funny how many non-programmers see programming as a repetitive and boring task… Like, the whole point of it is to take boring repetitive tasks and automate them away. And the bits that are really well understood are the bits you don’t need to deal with, because there’s already libraries for that. Definitely an art (or a craft at least).
One of my favourite things is to watch a programmer wax poetic about the beauty they see in good code.
It tangentially reminds me of “clocking screws”, a practice in which one screws in flathead screws such that the slots are all aligned . It’s easy to do, but a lot of faff; manufacturing variances means that each screw will require a slightly different number of turns to be sufficiently tight, so you need to:
" Line up the screw so the slot is aligned vertically- Screw it in until it’s tight
- If the slot is not aligned vertically, estimate how far off from ideal it is (i.e. if the slot ended up horizontal, then that’s around 90° off from what you want)
- Unscrew the screw, and line it up again, accounting for the angle you estimated in the previous step
- Screw the screw back in and repeat the process if necessary.
It takes a lot of skill to reliably gauge how to do, especially because repeated screwing and unscrewing the screw can loosen the hole enough that it affects the process. Even for skilled craftsmen, it’s an absurd level of work for something that, even when flathead screws were more common, most people would never notice. Nowadays, the only place I’m likely to see clockable screws are at old churches or similar
It’s so persnickety and silly, but that’s why I love it. I imagine that the craftspeople who care(d) about this stuff were a lot like today’s programmers who wax poetic about elegance in their code. It makes me so happy whenever I peer underneath a century old pew and see clocked screws, because it makes me think about the person who put such care into a part of their work that next to no-one would even see, let alone appreciate. It is especially nice because I imagine that many of these craftspeople were of a socioeconomic class that were thought unable to appreciate Beauty and Art.
No matter the field, people will find ways to impart Beauty and Art into their craft.
Hah, for sure, that’s crazy, and I’d never be bothers, but I’d be very impressed of I saw someone else do it!
Same to mathematics then again the relationship most people have with math is a far cry from the hopefully ingenious, and creative labor of what mathematicians do. Most just remember suffering to learn rules discovered by others and themselves never getting the chance to do the discovering.
I love maths, did a major in it (plus a summer project). But its also one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and I never did anything that felt remotely like discovery or like creativity (though I agree it is creative). It’s in a league of it’s own in terms of dedication required, IMO.
What branch of math did you study (assuming you got a graduate degree)? I was more so in CS so had a heavy discrete math background. I particularly love graph theory. I think with applied math in CS you’re often asked to do something new-ish with designing algorithms. That said I also didn’t discover anything.
It was in a science degree, so I could just choose any topics, as long as they were at the right level. I think third year I did topology and number theory, and a mix of stuff in lower years.
It’s funny how many programmers see it the same way. Actually bugs the shit outta me, haha.
Realistically a lot of the people who are using AI for these were previously just ripping them off the internet and hoping nobody would notice…
The reality is that almost no self sustaining artists can afford each other’s work. Instead artists are forced to charge prices other artists would consider their entire grocery bill. Instead they have to hope they can either get patronage from the wealthy or some sort of corporation.
AI is churning out low quality products at a high rate. artists i see offer commissions around 20 bucks at a significantly higher quality than AI. while you won’t get the mona lisa anywhere for 20 quid, it is about the same price as chat gpt go costs you per month.
usually you don’t need the magnum opus of an artist for supporting art. you need good quality, which for an experience artist is achievable in reasonable time and money. support eachother!
I’m in a band and we drew our first art and logo, sold merch and albums, now we pay local artists for commissioned art. We plan on never using AI for anything. It’s really not hard if you respect other artists as much as you respect yourself.
Everyone thinks AI can do everyone else’s job except their own.
I personally don’t think so, and will not disrespect people by using it. It’s just amazing how the fad at work went with everyone posting how they were going to automate away every other job responsibility but theirs. The crazy part is how eager they shared their concepts with the very people they were basically saying were obsolete.
To be fair, they said that about mechanization/ automation too. Yet here we are. Artisans will always talk finesse, and skill, while thinkers will speak of logic and higher order thinking. Both are right.
AI can do any job. Doing the job with finesse and originality, not so much. But it will do it adequately, expediently, and repeatably. It will never get bored, (so long as that is not programmed into it) and does not require rest, food, or recuperation time. If a robot breaks, it can either be repaired and be back to work in hours or days or be replaced instantaneously with no troublesome moral entanglements regarding ending a person’s lively hood.
You can hate them all you want, but from a purely CBA perspective, it’s plain to see why there’s’ a move to it.
As CGP Grey put it in his fantastic video on the subject: Not everyone wants a triple press fair trade soy macchiato with oat milk foam; most just want a decent cup of coffee.
AI can do any job.
It can’t do every job, or else it would have happened. There’s a lot of limitations that prevent it from accomplishing even the most basic facets of some jobs.
Ironically, especially the manual labor jobs not already replaced by robots are some of the toughest nuts to crack with AI. For example, any task where a human starts to have a hard time just by putting on some gloves, we don’t have ways to feed the AI the usual set of inputs that the human is acting on that is needed to properly imitate the behavior.
On the front of dealing in fact based work, LLMs don’t really deal in ‘facts’ but facts are very highly correlated to the narrative, so it can frequently do a passable job, but it is factually incorrect a fair amount of time and if the facts actually matter, then it’s a tricky scenario. If you can hook it up to a feedback loop where mistakes are both harmless and fed back into the model for a retry, then you can significantly mitigate this drawback, but it’s not always feasible to do this.
Now perhaps it can ‘do’ every purely fictional output of text, audio, images, and video, which would be the topic of the post. The stuff we were kind of hoping to be freed up to do as fun and rewarding art. Instead, it’s the first thing that is ‘nailed’ by AI as far as corporates are concerned freeing up people to be those plumbers and HVAC technicians instead of doing art, and we get stuck with the most milquetoast slurry of slop to consume instead.
What I mean when I say “AI can do any job” is that it is “Plausible for AI to learn and do the job.” That this or that job in particular is not currently AI completable is not the point I’m making. This is akin to the “Batman can defeat every enemy with enough prep time” argument.
But it will do it adequately, expediently, and repeatably.
LLMs have a key weakness in that they aren’t repetitive. They come up with a new solution to the job every single time they’re prompted. Sometimes it can do the job adequately and expediently, sometimes it produces nonsense, and you’ll never know when.
The c-suite have convinced themselves that LLMs don’t have this flaw and that they can be treated like any other automation, that they can be relied on to do the same thing over and over, and then reality intrudes when they find out these are probability engines.
The chatbots can’t actually do any job.
I’m not talking about chatbots. AI can be tailored to suit the need. You wouldn’t expect a receptionist to do the job of the engineer anymore than you’d expect Excel spreadsheets to operate a CNC machine.
Cnc is numerical data. Excel can do numerical data very well, and can export cad files that will control cnc machines.
Source: i do this sort of automation as part of my work, and have seen excel run pacman in the spreadaheet using the cell background colors as pixels.
Its more a matter of people in outside fields not understanding the work people do and the tools people use.
Sorry. Had to put that in there.
The OP is obviously about chatbots, so, I’m not sure why you aren’t talking about chatbots.
I’m talking about ALL AI. Narrowly defining them to just chatbots skews the scope of the discussion on the matter, IMHO.
The human brain always picks convenience.
We simply cannot help ourselves.
I’ve grown immensely cynical about that this past decade. Like, literally every chance we get to take a less destructive path, I observe people skip it because it’s slightly less convenient… that’s why they use AI.
They could give another artist $20 for something important, but our monkey brain is tired and picks the 5 second solution instead. I bet they don’t even look outside ChatGPT.
…So yeah, I think we’re in trouble. As this is not going to stop.
IMO the drive to convenience is a product of the pressure of living under capitalism (as you mentioned, tired, but also fearful), and our society’s abdication of nearly all forms of responsibility (of which looking out for each other is one).
As much as I love to blame capitalism for most things, I think this one does just boil down to human psychology. It’s probably fair to say it’s exacerbated by capitalism though.
There are things we could do to mitigate it; that’s what regulations are for. But yeah, if left alone, people will tend to do whatever spends the fewest calories.
Unions. We need 'em. Great episode on unions in a TrueAnon ep (podcast) about a week ago.
Could it be a symptom of everybody being broke af and not wanting to ask someone to work for exposure? Because a lot of artists are lucky enough to make enough money to cover their expenses for doing the art, let alone anything else.
I would love to see more collaborations and rejection of AI for everything but the tasks that are actually a decent use case (preliminary searches and compiling massive pools of data) and I think one of the best way to start is to just pay people a living wage.
With how bad AI art is, I kind of wish that artists would be ok letting their work stand on its own. Like does an album need a cover or an article graphics if it’s just the equivalent of visual static. It’s not really elevating the piece any, it’s just there to fill a void. Make it ok to have stand alone pieces again!
Yeah i mean ive seen some straight dogshit album covers for good music. Its not like the cover sells the thing anyways.
Royalty free music is pretty cheap to come by and coding isnt that difficult.
If you need a thing and cant pay for a thing, then learn to do the thing. A shit job is better than ai generated imho
coding isnt that difficult.
What programs have you written?
Bro stop, it’s literally my career because it was the only thing that felt easy to me (I tried a bunch of stuff before), like it’s a lot easier and cheaper to learn on your own than most crafts and imo it should be even easier. I don’t take this as offense, I take it as a compliment that we are one of the few careers where people still have enough power over their tools to genuinely improve them and enough solidarity to put in the effort of making it more and more accessible to others, be it by making simpler tools, or writing tutorials and guides for free, or taking the time to answer even the noobiest questions. I want to see more and more comments like this.
I was triggered by that statement too and about to throw a rant, but I think they mean it like “creating a webpage”, using stuff like wordpress and the like, because they’re an artist who wants to show off their portfolio or something.
There’s a lot of “DIY” that abstracts away the actual programming part, so others can just build what they need easily.
Im a software developer by trade. Originally for a msp combining several companies’ backups and Outlook info (locally hosted and 365) into a single SQL backed dashboard, now under an NDA.
Seriously! I yearn for the old days of really crappy photoshop album covers! They’re at least an earnest expression of what the band is trying to convey
The existence of AI art is currently the most convincing proof I have ever seen of the existence of the human soul.
You can literally take a photo on your phone and add some text in gimp. No one buys music for the cover art (I do acknowledge that good cover art adds something, but it’s not usually make or break).
Exactly. The Beatles released an album with a blank white cover. It was brilliant. There’s really no need to fill every space with slop.
I’ve had CDs in the past that were just one color with the name of the artist/band and the album name. Nothing else. No one cared either because it would just be thrown into the CD zip up case or a cd holder attached to the sun vizer.
ehh. i sort of do use cover art as a filter tho, especially when i am looking for things like death metal or crust on bandcamp, a hand-drawn or collaged cover that looks very grotty and possibly by others’ standards “not very good” is something i will click on and probably end up buying. i have found a lot of bands i like that way, generally if they are using that style of artwork they will be my jam. it’s not pointless visual static to me, it’s additional information about how the album will sound.
My dream is to be a published author. I would sooner release a book with no art than use genAI art.
Can also be that people react badly to AI in areas where they have some knowledge and taste, but are too ignorant to care in other areas. I’m a prolific reader and (imho) an ok writer, so I’m revolted by AI slop in written text. But I’m a moron when it comes to art, so I’m I haven’t been too bothered by AI art per se. Of course that it comes from chewing up and spitting out human artists’ work is revolting too, but that’s separate and more distant.
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That is some serious mental gymanstics just to get around outright saying “Well actually, I think there are a few things we SHOULD use slave labour and scorch the earth for…”
“GPTs as a technology have real, practical, beneficial uses for large-scale data analysis; we should prune our usage back to those.”
“Wow, so you think SLAVERY is OKAY and we should DO SLAVERY??”
In two years on this utterly grassless threadiverse I don’t think I’ve said this yet:
Touch grass.
Slave grass???!!!??? From grass slaves???!??
solidarity brother! im a visual artist, and i deleted spotify in solidarity with musicians. i download from bandcamp now.
it’s interesting how many creatives and professionals see ai as being perfectly able to replace anyone’s work who isn’t theirs, but unable to replace them. i remember seeing a post about storyboarders thinking ai was unfit for storyboards, but good for concept art, and concept artists thinking ai was unfit for concept art, but fine for storyboards.
everyone sees the value in their work, but many can’t see the value of other people’s work, and think an ai-generated approximation that’s “good enough” is fine to replace it… it’s kinda sad, really
the exception is software developers, who are more than eager to replace their own work with ai-generated garbage. i don’t know why so many software devs have so little respect for themselves and their work, but i can’t say i’m surprised honestly.
Nah there’s a lot of propaganda going around about LLMs and programmers. There’s some real die-hard advocates who think their own experiences project to the whole industry. It’s fucking awful at specialised domains with large proprietary codebases. Even if you get past needing a complete lack of moral backbone it just doesn’t make any sense to use in a lot of codebases - not that companies aren’t about to learn an expensive lesson about why.
Was going to post the same thing. It’s not just the arts either, all branches of academia seem to be suffering from this.
i don’t know why so many software devs have so little respect for themselves and their work
A lot of the dev process is tedious as fuck. I’ve never met a developer who enjoys writing tests, for example. That plus Agile/kanban long since totally dehumanized the development process by treating devs as fungible engineering units.
Also like every 5 minutes there’s a new framework and tool that will become obsolete 5 years later and people don’t want to keep learning all of them while every project does their own thing. Programming slop started long before AI took over (looking at you JavaScript)
Software developers are used to basically making themselves obsolete, just to then be more productive. Inevitably, it always ends with non-developers not actually wanting to understand the new fancy tool, and developers just now using that new tool to be more productive.
I think with software dev, most current devs with some years of experience will end up fine. It’s the juniors that are fucked, because AI is genuinely better than them in most ways a suit cares about.
Everyone knows the nuances of their own work because they are closer to it
As a software dev, most of the devs I know hate AI like everyone else. Perhaps more so since many of us took AI classes and understand what AI’s are actually useful for.
Vibe coders are the ones ive seen love LLMs since now they cam be software developers too.
Also a software engineer that did NLP research projects in university (pre-LLM days). You can imagine how hair-pullingly stupid I think all of this is as someone that is very familiar with how these models work and are trained.
It should be blindingly obvious that this shit shouldn’t be trusted with anything important, yet here we are. A little while ago I watched as one of our senior devops guys was using an LLM to execute scripts/commands for migrating a legacy production environment to a new environment, which was something that we had been meticulously planning for months as it was very complicated. But here he was, cowboying his way through it with an LLM that could have easily done a ton of damage with a single mistaken command. And we were watching this happen over a screen share.
Things did go wrong, but fortunately the problems were minor enough that we could fix it easily enough. It could have been so much worse though.
I hate the pyramid scheme feeding money into billionaire pedo cults of AI and have tried to use local models without getting them working properly yet.
But a job steals my time. In there I must use AI tools to get what I need or I won’t have a home or food.
Outside of it, I know the creative skills but simply don’t have the resources after they’re depleted by the system. So I build with agents. It’s not perfect but my projects shouldn’t be, they just need to progress. Human time is left for QA, and whatever leftover creative energy remains, I can spend offline.
All in all it’s a bummer and also circumstances
“I’m an artiste, machines shouldn’t do what I do, those other folks have it easy.” repeat for every group thinking of every other group.
I’m struggling with this as a software dev. I don’t think writing software is “art”, but it is creative.
Why should it be acceptable for me to use it and other fields not?
This is after coming to terms that LLM’s are here to stay for the tech industry. Despite all the very real and valid negatives of it, it writes decent code if you babysit it well enough. Even after OpenAI and Anthropic collapse I don’t see it going away.
Artist spoiler : art is work and work needs pay. We don’t have any money. Wanna see your favorite artists make human collabs? Pay them, back them or stfu.
Came here to ask who TF is paying for time to make album cover art.
The one who ordered the work?
Or does the RIAA have a $10 a pop deal with the artists’ guild?
How about an artist cooperative? That way they can collaborate and share profits.
If everyone were angels we wouldn’t need money and the issue is that struggling artists have none to spread around. Collaboration is not the answer. Ending the oligarchic kleptocracy so we can afford to pay artists their worth is.
How do we do that without collaboration?
That’s a different kind of collaboration. You were talking about artistic collaboration, not political activism.
If I see an AI image for a song on spotify, there’s a 90% the music is too.
