I don’t even consider AI generated images to be art since there is no expression of skill, imagination, or feeling in them.

In general - yes. There is a flood of shitty and lazy “art” that has infected search results and creative spaces. I’m also deeply uncomfortable with it being trained on artists work without their consent - for all the talk about it being equivalent to human inspiration I’m pretty sure there have been examples where it’s started generating attempts at signatures.

It’s terrible in knitting and crochet spaces (I imagine woodworking and sculpture and architecture too) because there are lots of things generated which are physical impossible and just wrong to anyone who enjoys the crafts. It gives false understandings of what those art forms look like.

I think the entire point of art is the human intentionality aspect. Art is humans using materials to do things that don’t serve an immediate practical purpose. There has to be some element of “desire” on the part of the artist.

So it’s not that it is impossible to use AI tools to generate art (there’s stochastic computer generated pieces from the 70s that are lovely iirc) To me though, the way these tools are used is what is important - if you’re using an AI you’re training and adjusting yourself, if you’re spending hours tweaking prompts and perhaps sifting through hundreds of pictures to combine and really participate in “making” something.

The current trend is really just a bunch of content sludge. I don’t see the appeal in either the process of creation or in what can be appreciated from it. The best stuff is mostly memey topical political jokes, where it rests more on the symbols rather than the art itself.

Like, when I make art - my process is adding layers over weeks and weeks. It’s noticing that I don’t like the way this section looks, so I go back over it, come back to it later… it’s a process - I engage with and shape the work. I’m just a guy who glues trash to things and paints them, my art doesn’t really have external value - but it still feels like art in a way that getting Midjourney to make pictures of Gandolf with big honking naturals isn’t.

I’m not entirely against LLMs as a tool, but I especially despise the image-based LLMs. They are certainly neat for some fun things. I’ve used them a little bit here and there for a dumb profile picture or a “I’m kinda thinking about this…” Brainstorm, but even in those cases I noticed the capabilities of the LLM and its tendencies quite literally pidgeon hole my artistic vision and push me in other directions that felt less and less creative. (Sidenote: I feel the same way about coding LLM tools. The longer I use them at any given time, the less creative I feel and it has a noticeable impact on my interest in the code I’m writing. So I don’t really use them much. Also I consistently manage to point out coding LLM code in PR reviews because it’s always kinda funky)

I’ve avoided using AI art tools for a while now. I’ll consider some limited use if the cost, billionaire ownership, blatant theft of real IP without compensation, and environmental impact problems are solved. (No, an “open source” model doesn’t solve all of these problems, especially since nearly all open source models are not truly open source and are almost always benefiting from upstream theft)

You know what I do like about AI art? I like the older Google machine learning art experiments from the mid-2010s. They invoked a strange existential curiosity. But those weren’t done with LLM’s.

Outside of LLMs, I like that there are some newer tools for editing that can do a better “lasso” select, that can mix and match into brushes as an alternative to something more algorithmic, the audio plugin that uses a RNN to simplify or expand upon an audio technique. Things that are tools that can be chosen or avoided and have nothing to do with LLMs.

I honestly cannot wait for this bubble to burst and for these tools to return to a cost that they’d need to be for these companies to turn a profit. A higher cost would eliminate all this casual use that is making people worse at research, critical thinking, and creativity, as well as make the art tools less competitive to just paying artists, even for scumbags wanting to cut the artists out. And it’d incentivize non-LLM, non-insanely costly ML techniques again instead of the current “LLMs for everything” nonsense right now.

What I hate about AI art: How it’s based on stolen work. How it is purpose built to replace real, talented artists and devalue their labor. How it uses way more energy than it needs to and is pretty wasteful

What I love about AI art: Instant stupid shit for meme madness.

If AI art was all just stupid jokey shit like this that a friend of mine made when we were discussing how people were making Ghibli-fied versions of important moments in history, and we decided to go with “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” but make Mike Myers dressed as Austin Powers, I’d be okay with it entirely. It’s not for profit by devaluing artists and using this work instead of a real artists work, it’s just stupid shit that makes us laugh. Everything else aside, I can get behind stupid shit that makes us laugh. The rest of the issues with AI art suck though.

No, because I don’t have an irrational fear of AI. I don’t like when poor or unfitting AI art is used, but it isn’t AI who makes that decision to use it.

I’m not sure hate is the right word. When you’ve got someone stabbing you in the back multiple times, is it really hate you’re feeling toward them? Or is it anger, fear, and danger?

I “hate” it in the sense that it’s built on theft and requires the exploitation of underpaid workers to develop and maintain it. I “hate” it in the sense that we’re living on a burning cinder with dwindling fresh water resources and “AI” is adding fuel to the fire. I “hate” it in the sense that it’s being used to further undervalue artists and writers. I “hate” it in the sense that it fills our spaces with crap that so often looks like it was cribbed off of Rapunzel, Wreck-It-Ralph, and some other things.

I don’t hate AI art. I hate people who pretend they’re artists when all they do is writing prompts.

It’s ruined art for me. Someone posts something, and I don’t know if it’s real art or a theft of other people’s work.

Firstly, it’s not art. I already hate that OP called it that. It’s AI generated imagery. There is no art involved outside of art theft.

Secondly, it’s legal art theft created by those types of people that either never considered artists to have any value, or have a chip on their shoulder against artists.

Thirdly, at no point in history have artists ever been appreciated, despite art being the most important element of everything. Imagine right now what a user interface would look like without artistic design. Or a car. Or your toothbrush. AI gen shafts artists… again… with the absolutely ridiculously, flippant argument that it “democratises art”, as if it’s some sort of noble privilege rather than a skill literally anyone can practice.

Art is cool cos it’s like holy shit a person did that!?

If it’s just an algorithm it’s not very impressive.

Art is an attempt to communicate (usually to communicate something of the human condition). Current ‘art’ AI is too far away from intelligence to have anything to communicate. All it can do is mindlessly try to copy and blend what it’s seen before without understanding it.

I don’t hate it, but I also don’t value it.

As an artist who had her art stolen for usage in AI, I hate AI generated images for several reasons. I’ve personally had my art stolen to be used in a prompt without my permission, and said art got mangled so much that it looked terrible. AI image generators scrape the internet for art so they can amalgamate these pieces of art together to correspond to a prompt, and this art is taken without the permission of the artists. In some AI generated images, the mangled remnants of artists’ signatures are still visible. Beyond art theft, it’s instant gratification with zero effort. A huge part of why I appreciate art is because someone made it, someone spent potentially hours to create this beautiful picture! When I look at my old art, I can instantly get a feel for what vibes I had going through my mind at the time, like I could almost take a peek into my past self’s brain, and this applies to other artist’s work too!

Prompting an AI image generator, in my eyes, is like prompting an artist to draw something for you, except that artist turns out to be someone who traces bits of other people’s art without their permission, or copy and pastes it. Sometimes AI generated images aren’t immediately recognizable, so me and a lot of other artists have tried to make it a trend to post progress pictures and other receipts along with our art.

I feel old because I remember when this conversation was happening with airbrushing photographs and then Photoshop.

And now these days, really good Photoshop is invisible. We can remove people from backgrounds. We can improve the lighting. Movie CGI is just photoshooting stills.

AI will reach that stage too, where it will be so good, it’s scary that you can’t tell.

Not a fan. It admittedly can be an amusing toy - type something in and wow look what it did! But the costs are high, and our society isn’t a utopia where people don’t need to labor for survival.

Maybe if we were post scarcity it wouldn’t matter that much. But we’re not, and this AI stuff is going to hurt labor, benefit the ownership class, and probably be mildly bad for end users too.

I don’t hate it, some of the images generated look awesome. But that’s just an image that “literally anyone could do”. It’s the equivalent of instant lamen or cup noodles.

Afaik, it can’t come up with new styles and most of the stuff pumped out just wholesale copies existing stuff: the majority either looks like a Disney 3d animation, or fancy anime-esque render. Some try to look like realistic oil paintings, those look cool and pretty, but nothing worth making a poster.

I think the only people, besides tech bros, who are happy with this are those that hate giving art any value.