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> People outside of tech seem to think that AI creation is just "fat finger a prompt -> take output and claim to be an artist on the interwebs" Probably becau

> People outside of tech seem to think that AI creation is just "fat finger a prompt -> take output and claim to be an artist on the interwebs" Probably because that's the predominant experience of people encountering AI art on the Internet. I have no doubt whatsoever that there are people out there using AI to do interesting things, but like with basically every technology, the vast, vast majority of the output you're going to see is people who see a labor saving device that can make doing... something, at scale, brain-dead easy. Be that generating shitty coloring books and selling them to overworked parents, generating shitty books on niche, dumb topics like the crystal healing woo shit and selling them to uncritical audiences, or just generating page upon page of boring, shitty artwork and uploading it to DeviantArt and paywalling it. And that's just individuals. Many online businesses are actively enshittifying themselves too, adding AI generated content alongside (or in place of) human created content. On the note of DeviantArt, they built an AI generator into the damn site so people can fill it with even more low-effort garbage than was already getting uploaded. And of course Google now headlines your search results with a shitty LLM summary that runs the gamut between "dull, uninteresting summary of somewhat relevant information" to "complete nonsense that actively endangers lives" while also depriving even more websites of even more traffic that gave them whatever information in the first place. Like, again, I have no problem envisioning some people and some orgs some place are doing interesting stuff with this tech. However I cannot overemphasize how utterly, completely, totally dog-shit my experience personally has been with it and how harshly I now tend to judge any project parading around AI integration. I'm open to being wrong... but I'm usually not. There was that Vaudeville game that made the rounds that I felt was at least trying to do something interesting with LLMs, but like... the tech just wasn't there yet. You're talking to characters and can say basically whatever you want, and then an LLM generates an answer based on the context of that character and it's read back to you by text-to-speech. It's... neat? For like ten minutes, and then you're just playing a detective game with impressively bad writing and zero-effort VO, and the fact that the entire game was built of pre-built, unchanged assets made it feel incredibly cheap and low-effort. The only thing it's really good for is as streamer fodder, weird garbage for people to overreact to and fuck with for an audience.

Ukv 2y ago
I think this is mostly just Sturgeon's law (ninety percent of everything is crap) opposed to anything unique to ML tools. The vast majority of photographs you see on the Internet have also likely been quick phone-camera snaps, with comparatively very little "high art" photography. Lower entry barriers result in more works total, but with disproportionately many at the lower end. There is still a lot of interesting work making use of ML tools. Maybe I'm biased towards art that embraces experimentation and new technology, but I found even images like https://i.imgur.com/Jybvj0r.png https://i.imgur.com/Jybvj0r.png (zoom out) far more interesting than most of what I see in galleries.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  > I think this is mostly just Sturgeon's law (ninety percent of everything is crap) opposed to anything unique to ML tools. I think the unique point to ML tools is the sheer volume that, IMHO, vastly outpaces 90%. And I think that's partially down to the fact that image generators are themselves, by their existence, low-effort easy-to-use tools to create images. It's not as though there wasn't already a vast and comprehensive existing tool-set for aspiring artists, even ones with not a penny to their name, to use. Tons of open source art programs exist, and if you are ready to jump to paying for your tools, you have an incredibly diverse set of options over all manner of capabilities, price points, and focuses. The notion that these tools "democratize" art has been silly to me from the beginning; there were already tons of tools available to anyone who wanted to learn the skills to use them. These tools, instead, seem directly aimed at people who don't want to learn those skills, and like... unskilled artisans don't make good things. Sorry not sorry. If you lack the interest in the subject to learn the skills of how to make a thing, you probably also lack the interest to learn what constitutes a good version of that thing, and even if your AI is very well made, you won't know what to really ask it for. Which I think is the reason behind so many prompts including stuff like "octane render, unreal engine, featured on artstation." So while yes I agree in principle that Sturgeon's law is definitely at work here, I think it's important to note that the tools themselves are largely just... not really going to fit into a creative's workflow who has the skills already, not even just the literal skill to put a pencil to paper, but the skill to know what a good version of whatever they want would look like. It's the same reason I don't really use copilot all that much, because it's easier to just write the stuff I know needs writing than asking it to generate it, and then modify it to suit my code-style and existing environment. I don't find that a compelling time saver, it's more like a time cul-de-sac. Yes I'm spending the time writing the prompt instead of writing the code, but I'm frankly pleased as punch to just write the code. I guess to TLDR my own comment here: if you knew how to make the things, you'd just make the things. Image generators are explicitly for people who don't know how, and that reflects in the quality of what's made.

Ukv 2y ago

I think this is mostly just Sturgeon's law (ninety percent of everything is crap) opposed to anything unique to ML tools. The vast majority of photographs you see on the Internet have also likely been quick phone-camera snaps, with comparatively very little "high art" photography. Lower entry barriers result in more works total, but with disproportionately many at the lower end. There is still a lot of interesting work making use of ML tools. Maybe I'm biased towards art that embraces experimentation and new technology, but I found even images like https://i.imgur.com/Jybvj0r.png https://i.imgur.com/Jybvj0r.png (zoom out) far more interesting than most of what I see in galleries.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
> I think this is mostly just Sturgeon's law (ninety percent of everything is crap) opposed to anything unique to ML tools. I think the unique point to ML tools is the sheer volume that, IMHO, vastly outpaces 90%. And I think that's partially down to the fact that image generators are themselves, by their existence, low-effort easy-to-use tools to create images. It's not as though there wasn't already a vast and comprehensive existing tool-set for aspiring artists, even ones with not a penny to their name, to use. Tons of open source art programs exist, and if you are ready to jump to paying for your tools, you have an incredibly diverse set of options over all manner of capabilities, price points, and focuses. The notion that these tools "democratize" art has been silly to me from the beginning; there were already tons of tools available to anyone who wanted to learn the skills to use them. These tools, instead, seem directly aimed at people who don't want to learn those skills, and like... unskilled artisans don't make good things. Sorry not sorry. If you lack the interest in the subject to learn the skills of how to make a thing, you probably also lack the interest to learn what constitutes a good version of that thing, and even if your AI is very well made, you won't know what to really ask it for. Which I think is the reason behind so many prompts including stuff like "octane render, unreal engine, featured on artstation." So while yes I agree in principle that Sturgeon's law is definitely at work here, I think it's important to note that the tools themselves are largely just... not really going to fit into a creative's workflow who has the skills already, not even just the literal skill to put a pencil to paper, but the skill to know what a good version of whatever they want would look like. It's the same reason I don't really use copilot all that much, because it's easier to just write the stuff I know needs writing than asking it to generate it, and then modify it to suit my code-style and existing environment. I don't find that a compelling time saver, it's more like a time cul-de-sac. Yes I'm spending the time writing the prompt instead of writing the code, but I'm frankly pleased as punch to just write the code. I guess to TLDR my own comment here: if you knew how to make the things, you'd just make the things. Image generators are explicitly for people who don't know how, and that reflects in the quality of what's made.