LukeZaz@beehaw.org 2 weeks ago
The title and much of the way this is written suggests contempt for people who hate AI. Which leaves me wondering what this post is doing here, on a site that has a lot of people who hate AI? If I’m supposed to think it’s funny – or for that matter, meaningful – I don’t. This is a cheap gotcha used periodically by pro-AI types, who then pretend that GenAI output is somehow as good as human art just because people can’t instinctively recognize it on sight.
Mesa@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
I think this comment in this thread answers your question or, at least, other questions of a similar sentiment.
Arguing that AI art is bad by pointing out its material flaws is largely unproductive (I’d even argue that it’s counterproductive) because those flaws are theoretically surmountable. This post is a great example of that, and it highlights the reason I actually hate the presence of AI-generated work amidst the artistic world. It causes humans to hallucinate errors in normal artwork, and it normalizes this wack idea that perfection exists in art. It pollutes our intake of artwork and makes it exhausting to explore unfamiliar artists. As a personal anecdote, I used to love finding tracks on YouTube with less than 300 views and a weird thumbnail. It used to be an instant click. Now, it always feels like there’s an 80% chance that it was soullessly generated almost entirely with AI—and so I click those videos less.
It’s not because AI generated music sounds bad, or because AI generated images look bad. Sometimes they look great. But I don’t really give a shit that it looks great if there’s no human context behind it that I can ponder. AI work removes the value of discussion to me. Fuck that.
I’ve seen discussion about the idea of “the curtain is fucking blue,” as it relates to the crisis of thought-terminating cliches, and the scariest thing to me is that, with AI work, the curtains are actually just fucking blue.
This leads me into a whole rant about how “Death of the Author” is so frequently misappropriated, and how it relates to the role of AI in the art world, but this comment is long enough.
LukeZaz@beehaw.org 2 weeks ago
It’s worth clarifying that when I say “as good as human art,” I am not speaking to a purely material perspective. Broadly speaking, AI bros don’t care for that human context, so to them those theoretically-surpassable errors are all that’s left to solve for. In there lies the idiocy.
At any rate though, I agree, and I appreciate the thoughtful comment!