Redditors Vent and Complain When People Mock Their "AI Art"

if someone creates a perfect color gradient fill in Photoshop nobody is going to be impressed but make it with colored pencils and people may regard it as stunning

Funnily enough, that was what Mark Rothko was doing with paint. Exploring color to get the perfect shade of something. Looking at color at its most basic. That's why those of us who understand what Rothko was going for often really love his paintings while most other people say, "I don't get it, it's just rectangles."

Respectfully disagree. There's a plethora of artists with exceptional skills that create photorealistic art in several mediums. While the process takes an inordinate amount of time it is completely devoid of any creative input. These are essentially human xerox machines that match color values from a photo using the naked eye. The skill is impressive, the art: not so much.

people forget that what makes art impressive is also the skill of the artist in the respective medium

I bet you don't like it when people put urinals on a pedestal.

Agreed. Consider this absolutely batshit take from the reddit post linked in the article.

Your art looks pretty good, so most people wouldn't be able to tell it's AI unless you told them it's AI.

Generally it's always best to just lie and tell everyone you made it yourself, just to avoid all the toxic people that hate AI, because not having to read hateful comments from people like that is reason enough to lie. Don't need to provide any evidence or go into details, just tell everyone you made it yourself and ignore anyone that question it.

"Your art". I'm sure clicking the "regenerate" button on mid journey for 5 hours took lots of work. It's hard not to feel real hate for these people.

Theres a lot of nuance that exists here.

There are many consumer apps based on stable diffusion where people just type what they want “astronaut sitting on a horse” most work is below the hud and therefor i agree with your sentiment, asking something isn't a creative process. The results is usually decent but rarely amazing but anyone can recreate it with the right prompt and seed

But things change quickly when you use proper tools like comfyui where you get full control of what the tech can do. Not all models play well with plain descriptions and prompts start to resemble a lengthy magical spell of keywords that become unreadable to a human being. Some keywords perform consistently but are highly counter-intuitive but they only work with some models and settings.

Then there are all the modifiers that change the weights and interpretation of the prompt, latent information, customize noise generations. Mix/matching multiples models iterating on the same picture, using custom or native vae, clip skip 0, 1 or 2…

During the process of changing things the results are usually utter crap but the more you understand what your doing the closer you will get to a workflow that can consistently output good images.

A last step is taking the parameters/seed that generated best pictures from a batch and editing the prompt/settings further to fix the last details.

The process is a creative one and the result is impossible to recreate without someone knowing exactly all the steps involved so here i would say artistic ownership can be applied.

Everyone who has written a book: "HEY!"

This was the craziest quote to me:

"I hope someday being anti-AI is seen as ableist," another mused.

WHAT.

Just…FUCKIN WHAT.

Well now I want to see some of your work. It sounds interesting as hell

Art is a key branch of human endeavour that can be described as "the study of choice". That's what so many people misunderstand in modern art, is that it's often more focused on the choices themselves rather than trying to be a skillful representation or depiction of some kind. "That's just a ___, my kid could do that."

What is missing from every conversation about AI art is what contribution to "the study of choice" can be made here. There are a thousand variables in the choices made along the way, from which AI and training data was used, to the myriad of prompts used. I am certain that if you were thoughtfully making these choices along the way with a clear idea in mind, you'd be able to make incredibly impactful art that actually enriches us in the usual sense that good art can.

My complaint about AI here, if we will set the enormous scale of theft to one side, is simply that it is being used to create art that doesn't mean anything, which is inimical to the pursuit of art itself.

Depends on the workflow, in my opinion. There are people who just type "1girl lol" into a text box and there are some people who set up workflows with hundreds of steps including significant manual work done in Photoshop or GIMP.

Similarly nearly all music these days is made with a DAW, which enables you to selectively edit and combine performances that otherwise you wouldn't be able to achieve. Drummer off beat? Quantize it. Want a string section but don't know how to play violin? Use a synth. And certainly there are people who are overly reliant on those tools because their core music abilities aren't very strong.

If you think any amount of computer assistance means that something isn't art, then basically all music made since the 90s would also not be art. It's not a binary. Any tool can be used tastefully or be used to mask an underlying lack of talent.

I just call the people in my Discord who generate AI images AI Handlers because to me it's like getting a half trained unruly animal to do what you want. That being said when they take requests for character art for tabletop games they put out some good stuff. It's just a tool to be used and it often takes an experienced handler to get what you want out of it.

How does this argument not also apply to photography? A modern camera is a computer, you fiddle with the settings, press a button and it automatically makes a picture for you. People produce billions of shitty photographs a day which aren't art, but that doesn't mean someone working in photography as a medium can't be an artist.

In my experience it's only non-artists who make this argument, because in their heads they're comparing AI to painting. But for visual artists there are tons of mediums and disciplines where you don't physically make the marks yourself and it's the concept and composition that's important.

There was an exhibition of AI generated art at the big local gallery here last year and I expected artist friends to be against it, but they were just like "oh, that's interesting". They just see AI generation as another way of creating an image and whether a particular image is or isn't art depends on the intention not the process.

Ok so edm and electronic music isn't music...ok buddy. Nice definition.

I think there are interesting aspects of AI art. It takes a real artist to properly instruct an AI to create something new, different, and interesting. When I think of modern art, a lot of art snobs were dismissive of it because "it's not art." I think we will see the same opinions of AI art change as new, different, and interesting artwork is made.

Average AI art is average. Exceptional AI art is exceptional.

People who use AI as the tool it is, rather than just feeding it a single prompt and taking a few good results, can make art just like any other artist using a tool. Some of that art is exceptional. Most of it is average. Just like any other tool.

The best AI art is often the result of multiple passes with inpainting and refining, and touchups in other tools. But that takes time, effort, and skill. Just like any other tool.

What your link points me to. Do i need an account to see them?

This just in: thieves realize law means that they aren't supposed to steal, theft rate collapse to 0%.

Also those signs at school campuses saying they are a "no gun zone" means school shootings are officially a thing of the past. Phew, why didn't we think of this earlier?

You should check out this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF, and this one by Katherine Klosek, the director of information policy and federal relations at the Association of Research Libraries.

Using things "without permission" forms the bedrock on which artistic expression and free speech as a whole are built upon. I am glad to see that the law aligns with these principles and protects our ability to engage openly and without fear of reprisal, which is crucial for fostering a healthy society.

I find myself at odds with the polarized argumentation about AI. If you don't like it, that's understandable, but don't make it so that if someone uses AI, they have to defend themselves from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment. Those accusations are often times incorrect or made without substantial evidence.

I'm open to that conversation, as long as we can keep it respectful and productive. Drop a reply if you want, it's way better than unexplained downvoting.

I think AI art looks neat

Have you just woken up from a year long coma? AI can create stunning pictures now.

let us look at music.

real art = zero to none listeners

popmusic = ppl love it

from what i understand most humans like popular things so they can align with a herd.

while artists will keep making art, ppl will keep ignoring it.

Despite what people with no knowledge of the field will tell you, Machine Learning and LLMs fall under the category of AI. What you're looking for is a very specific type of AI. If AI art doesn't exist, it would be because the art usually doesn't have meaning or effort, not because AI doesn't exist.

“Art is whatever the artist chooses it to be.” And I’d also call art whatever the beholder chooses it to be. If Dog Art is something that exists, AI Art is something that exists.

Whether you think in the case of AI the artist is the LLM or the prompter, that’s irrelevant.

Agi doesn't exist, saying ai doesn't exist is like saying physics doesn't exist because unified field theory isn't a thing yet.

The analogy doesn't work. The difference is that this "printing press" is stealing massive amounts of creative work and calling it its own, and using massive amounts of energy to do so.

Going to be honest with you, your art is fine.

Just fine.

Not great though. Not exceptional. Not really new or exciting.

Just what anyone with a weak prompt and an llm can do.

It's ok.

I'm glad you are enjoying making it.

I'm pretty sure that artists are pissed because techbros have taken the artists' creations without permission and used them to train computers to mimic the artists. This is bad for a host of reasons. One obvious reason is that the thieves can then use this to make money, using the artists' work but without paying them - ever. Another reason is that since the AI can make work using the 'style' of an artist but without the creative direction of the artist, it devalues the style that the artist has worked to create. The new AI created work looks similar, but is not of consistent quality. Another reason is people generally think of art as a creative outlet; where someone's thoughts and efforts go into creating something. But if the work is done effortlessly, and primarily through the lens of what the AI sees rather than what a person sees - then it just devalues art and artistic creation itself. Art creation is basically the very worst thing to automate; economically, morally, and philosophically.

Your comparison of taking inspiration and literally generating something from someone elses image is the most braindead take on ai I've read. As a human you can't replicate someone's style to the extent that ai does. And if you are drawing from reference and trying to make something as close to the original as possible then it's normal to give credit (with digital art at least).

I try to learn how to use AI

And exactly which part of this process could not be done by AI too?

Which part will still require hiring a human?

I feel ya. They complain a lot about something being better than them. Aren't humans supposed to adapt and overcome or did we forget that skill a long while ago?