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this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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Fuck AI
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I've always been confused about this train of thought, because it seems to justify the opposite of what it's trying to say.
I mean, if the argument is people will use whatever garbage they have on hand to make art... presumably that includes generative AI? Look, I lived through four decades of people making art out of ASCII. My bar for acceptance for this stuff is really low. You give people a thing that makes pictures in any way and you'll get a) pictures of dicks and b) pictures of other things.
I don't think GenAI will kill human art for the same reasons I don't think AI art is even in competition with human art. I may be moved or impressed by a generated image, but it'll be for different reasons and in different scales than I'm... eh... moved and impressed by hot dragon rock lady here. Just like I can be impressed by the artistry in a photo but not for the same reasons I'm impressed by an oil painting. Different media, different forms of expression, different skill sets.
Nothing will kill art itself, GenAI will simply be incorporated as another tool
Killing the ability to make money from art AND the bs that corporations are pulling in regards to AI, profit and making line go up is what people are mad about, but that anger is constantly misplaced leading to lines of thought like this lol
I believe this states the take many have - much like nobody batted an eye about auto-contrast, content-aware fill, or line smoothing. They weren't trying to replace humans with programs, weren't causing huge environmental impact, and weren't trained on stolen content. It's the ham-handed implementation that most are opposed to, combined with the obnoxious techbro mentality.
I don't understand why generative AI will kill making money from art. As you said, it's just a tool.
If an artist can make a web comic in a fraction of the time they used to, they can multiply their output and thus possibly sell to more. A good gen AI artist would also be a good prompt engineer, which would also mean an expanded skillset. Game developers, architects, engineers, could also speed up their work to hit the ground running instead of doing a bunch of repetitive stuff.
Everybody has to adapt to AI. Adapt or die, it's quite simple.
You're thinking of art in terms of a product. It's not. Art is an expression of creativity. People drawn to it will do it just because they can. They make money from it because capitalism doesn't give them many other opportunities to provide a basic living.
"Adapt or die" is a cute phrase when it's not being applied to yourself.
Using AI to generate the things that are in my head is still an expression of creativity, is it not? Some people use paintbrushes, some people use computer aided design and let it be printed or built by others, some people use AI. Why aren't those expressions of creativity?
Adapt or die is a fact of life. We all have to adapt to change, if I didn't have to, I'd be perfect. I'm nowhere near perfect. Neither are artists.
Yes. Not at the expense of other forms of art, though.
Because you decided it is. Society does not have to be built that way.
We do decide that. Because progress will not be stopped. If we'd let people's jobs stand in the way of progress we'd still be picking berries naked in the woods.
Progress does not at all require an "adapt or die" mindset. Not at all. And it'd still be barbaric if we did. More barbaric than picking berries naked in the woods.
You're right, it doesn't need to be die, but saving jobs isn't the way. Universal basic income is.
Which art forms are dying because of AI?
I didn't decide anything, it's just life. Move or get left behind. It's how nature works. That's just evolution. You don't have to like it, but it's a fact.
Maybe ask artists who have their work stolen to feed AI models that then take their job. Again, this is a problem because capitalism made it one.
We are not nature. We can make different decisions besides brutal evolutionary pressure.
Does the death of an artist kill an art form? As you said, art is an expression of creativity. That is expressed in many ways. People have created art before AI and they will continue creating art after. Art isn't just painting, or drawing, or acting, of sculpting, it can be found in sports, in engineering, in science, in the kitchen, on the playground, in our words, in our expressions, in fact it is everywhere around us. Attributing the death of creative expression to AI is misrepresenting the infinite ways it can be expressed.
I disagree, it's a problem because people don't want to evolve.
We are a part of nature, or you claiming we are unnatural? What even is unnatural? Viruses modify host cells and subvert them to become virus factories, is that unnatural? Monkeys, crows, turtles, dolphins, ants, and a host of other animals use tools to achieve myriad goals.
Everything is constantly changing. Everything is "evolutionary pressure". We are in no way unique in our existence. As a species, we aren't special.
All of which would be great in a society that isn't capitalist. While we still have a capitalist society, artists are having their livelihood taken away.
Which is a brutal opinion to have.
We are not slaves to nature. We can make decisions that are healthy for humanity. Killing people's livelihoods so that billionaires can become trillionares is not healthy.
That's complete bullshit. Evolution cares about your ability to reproduce and nothing else. The fact that we have things that do not help this goal is proof that our society is something beyond mere evolution.
Ah, the cursing starts when there is nothing of value left to say. Just reproduction? Survival of the fittest isn't part of it? Also, do you really think evolution is only biological? We do not evolve as a society?
Did posting this somehow increase your chances of reproduction?
Oh. So you're a social darwinist that believes that they are special enough that they'll never be in the crosshairs. Great. Here's hoping that you gain some empathy and a better understanding of human evolutionary and societal history (hint: altruism and caring for others who are unable to provide for themselves is the rule, not the exception).
Selective quoting. Love it. Forgot to quote this
If your reading comprehension allows, you'd understand that I don't think I'm special or unaffected by AI. What I do understand is that progress stops for no one. Not for you, not for me, nobody.
We should be working towards solutions like universal basic income instead of crying about AI taking jobs or whatever. Pandora's box has been opened and the only way we're putting AI back in the box is by eliminating tech or ending the human race. The latter might be a possibility with how we're messing up the environment, which would bring the former with it.
You're presenting the scenario of an artist using a tool to create more art. I think the concern is someone who would have hired an artist uses the tool themselves to make art instead of hiring the artist. Hence the comment @[email protected] made that GenAI won't kill art, but it will kill the ability to make money from art.
This isn't a new thing that just started with GenAI though. Entire professions of commercial art evaporated with the introduction of computers. How many typesetters were employed by major newspapers around the world 50 years ago? With the introduction of computers the number has drastically reduced. This is also true of graphic artists that used to work all day over a light box, waxer, and Exacto knife. Now all of that is done with far fewer people in a computer. I don't see how GenAI different from those technologies and how they impacted artist jobs.
If 1 person can make 10x the art, then 1 person can do the job of 10, meaning 9 people are out of work.
and means lower costs, see: "reasons people like the march of progress for 100"
Objectively incorrect. The actual costs of AI "art" are astronomically higher than the costs of hiring artists. When was the last time an artist needed a fission reactor and enough potable water to supply a moderately sized city over the course of their lives, much less for the completion of a project?
The corpos running the scam just haven't made the financial costs to end users align with reality yet. They're trying to destroy livelihoods and get businesses stuck in vendor lock-in first so that they have no competition when they open the valves of the real costs. Generative AI under this hyper-capitalist regime is a net negative for the species.
Or it means 10x the art in the world.
If a process that takes 10 weeks for producing an animated movie/show now only takes 1 week, that's a significant reduction in production timeline meaning more can be produced, or that time can be used to improve other production tasks
In the absence of needing to use skills to make a living, I have no problem with AI art. In a hypothetical anarchist mutual aid society, people could make art with whatever methods they prefer. Some might create AI models to make art because they're interested in that sort of thing. Others will make art in the traditional ways, also because they're interested in that sort of thing. There doesn't have to be tension between the two, and their basic needs are all there.
When people have to use their skills to make a living, though, then there's a problem. So many of the places that were paying artists are now whipping something out with an AI model. That leaves artists without a way to cover their basic needs at all.
I don't know how much that logic tracks, at least long term. And I don't know that I'm going to be more inclined to be on the side of human labor over automation now when I wasn't for garments, car manufacturing and other commodities. The John Henry of visual arts I am not.
I do have a couple of seemingly opposing but not contradictory points to add to that, though. One is that historically anti-automation, anti-industrialization movements have a pretty bad track record at succeeding. The other is that I think you're giving "AI art" way too much credit. Small and medium-sized commissions may get impacted (I am on record saying that AI is the new "cousin who knows Photoshop" and I stand by it). For anything an actual professional needs to book and hire based on quality? Nah.
There may still be an impact on that high end, because I expect that generated elements will become a tool in an artist's toolset more than anything else. That may speed work up and require fewer people, but not "leave artists without a way to cover basic needs" necessarily. Just like photography, just like CG, just like Photoshop and so on. There was doom and gloom around all of those as well, and hyperbolic claims from tech peddlers, too. Go look up some of the claims of early photography entrepeneurs about what the technology would eventually be able to do, some are hilarious.
I also expect sooner or later people will get good at spotting telltale machine-generation quirks and put additional value in organic, human-looking creative products. People are already misidentifying human art as AI art, artists will likely lean into that. Think vinyl into CDs back into vinyl or the premium on less processed foods more than... I don't know, cars that don't have rattling doors or whatever.
That's a guess or a forecast, though. We'll see where it goes.
Progress leaves many professions behind. It's lamentable, but a price worth paying.
Which is nice to say when your profession isn't the one on the chopping block.
I'm a programmer. It is.
I'm also a programmer. No, we're not at risk.
I think the argument is that an AI "artist" is incapable of creating art. Their "tool" does the work for them. Whereas other artists use digital tools but as just that - tools. The art comes from the artist.
The thing is, an AI 'artist' isn't making art. They are generating images with no real meaning or effort put into them.
That depends on what they're doing. If they're entering a prompt and rolling with what they get out of it, then sure.
If they're inputting a prompt and refining it with solely AI tools then meeeh, that starts to fade a little. I'd ask why someone is spending hours going back and forth with an AI instead of doing some of it manually, but it's hard to tell one way or the other from the final output.
If they're inputting a prompt, refining it with AI tools and heavily editing what comes out in image editing software that's approaching some strange digital mixed media weirdness I don't think we have particularly good intuitions for.
If they're inputting a prompt and using the output as some building block like a texture on a 3D model or for a content aware fill in photo editing or for a brush or a stamp I genuinely have no mental model for what impact that has in my assessment of the "meaning" or "effort" going into a piece, if I'm being perfectly honest.
Reductionism isn't serving us particularly well on this one. Makes the pushback feel poorly informed and excessively dogmatic.
Typing a prompt still isn't making art. If you look at art, everything has intent behind it, nothing is random, everyone has their own style that evolves. Like if you're drawing a meadow, there are lots of choices you make in the progress, like what plants you draw, in what style, in what stage, are any of them damaged for example. Art isn't just about the end result, it's the process itself.
Typing a prompt is describing an image, not making it.
You did not read the whole post you're responding to, did you?
It's not often that you can see the exact moment an actual human brain ran out of token space, but here we are.
Finish Him!
Dragging a mouse isn't making art. Dragging a live mouse could be, PETA wouldn't like it though.
This pretty well encapsulates my feelings, except for the issue of training the models. AI is cool tech, but the fact remains that people are making money off of scraped content. Not to mention the environmental aspect.
Honestly I find it difficult to reconcile.
In a perfect world, we would have open source models trained on public domain and properly licensed content.
I don’t think AI is going to replace artists any time soon. On the personal side, people create for the joy of it, whatever that means to them. On the professional side, people have a hard enough time communicating what they want to an actual person, much less a computer.
As someone that likely has moderate aphantasia, I really struggle with describing what I want. Being able to tell an image gen to make so many variations of X, and then commission a friend to take inspiration from Y and Z to make something original is really freeing for both sides, imo.
I’ve never gotten exactly what I’m looking for, but it almost always gives me something to point to, without doing a bunch of test drafts. I suppose that’s technically taking work away from the artist, but so does having an ‘undo’ button in procreate.
Idk, it’s a more complex issue than many make it out to be. I’m still further on the fuck ai side than not, just due to its current implementations.
End rant.
I mean Adobe firefly addresses the properly licensed dataset issue and afaik it's all viewable (though I'd much prefer something anyone could use offline locally). Environmental impact will always be an issue unless we see some evidence of mitigation either from direct green energy use or at least creating additional green energy generation from any organization doing the base model training.
Environmental impact of gen AI pales in comparison to the environmental impact of alternatively making all the generated pieces manually. Let's say Shutterstock switches purely to genAI images trained on their own licensed stock images. Do you think their total carbon output will go up or down now that they've stopped doing photoshoots of people and objects in seemingly random situations?
There's a good amount of research going into reducing the compute needed for training and inference, as well as a ton of R&D going into making far more energy efficient hardware for training and inference
Just like how 3D rendering has gone from dedicated $40,000 workstations and render farms to something that's just done for funsies on your phone, the capabilities of these really powerful models will eventually be squished onto the cheapest, lowest power mass market computers of the day
The biggest long term challenge will be the training data and licensing of outputs. If AI outputs are stuck in a legal state where you simply can't use them commercially, the whole industry will collapse and return to the most ignored corners of university computer science programs. If models aren't required to get licensing for all training data we'll probably just keep seeing companies hoovering up data in the most unethical possible ways to train their big models