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this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2025
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Fuck AI
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this is clear proof that AI art is soulless and real artists will always outperform AI
What about the very famous equivalent that happened like a year ago where someone won an art competition with an AI generated photo?
poor judges I suppose
As long as progress continues and humanity survives, computer generated art will eventually outperform humans. It's pretty obvious, as far as science knows you could just simulate a full human consciousness and pull images out of that somehow, but able to run that in parallel, never deteriorating, never tiring. It's not a matter of if "AI" can outperform humans, it's a matter of if humanity will survive to see that and how long it might take.
Explain art performance, chief.
You are not judging what is here. The tech you speak of, that will surpass humans, does not exist. You are making up a Sci-Fi fantasy and acting like it is real. You could say it may perhaps, at some point, exist. At that point we might as well start talking about all sorts of other technically possible Sci-Fi technology which does not exist beyond fictional media.
Also, would simulating a human and then forcing them to work non-stop count as slavery? It would. You are advocating for the creation of synthetic slaves... But we should save moral judgement for when that technology is actually in horizon.
AI is a bad term because when people hear it they start imagining things that don't exist, and start operating in the imaginary, rather than what actually is here. Because what is here cannot go beyond what is already there, as is the nature of the minimization of the Loss Function.
The difference is, this isn't a warp drive or a hologram, relying on physical principles that straight up don't exist. This is a matter of coding a good enough neuron simulation, running it on a powerful enough computer, with a brain scan we would somehow have to get - and I feel like the brain scan is the part that is farthest off from reality.
That's an unnecessary insult - I'm not advocating for that, I'm stating it's theoretically possible according to our knowledge, and would be an example of a computer surpassing a human in art creation. Whether the simulation is a person with rights or not would be a hell of a discussion indeed.
I do also want to clarify that I'm not claiming the current model architectures will scale to that, or that it will happen within my lifetime. It just seems ridiculous for people to claim that "AI will never be better than a human", because that's a ridiculous claim to have about what is, to our current understanding, just a computation problem.
And if humans, with our evolved fleshy brains that do all kinds of other things can make art, it's ridiculous to claim that a specially designed powerful computation unit cannot surpass that.
So... Sci-Fi technology that does not exist. You think the "Neurons" in the Neural Networks of today are actually neuron simulations? Not by a long shot! They are not even trying to be. "Neuron" in this context means "thing that holds a number from 0 to 1". That is it. There is nothing else.
Sorry about the insulting tone.
That is the reason why I hate the term "AI". You never know whether the person using it means "Machine Learning Technologies we have today" or "Potential technology which might exist in the future".
Yeah... you know not every problem is compute-able right? This is known as the halting problem.
Also, I'm not interested in discussing Sci-Fi future tech. At that point we might as well be talking about Unicorns, since it is theoretically possible for future us to genetically modify a equine an give it on horn on the forehead.
Also, why would you want such a machine anyways?
The link between Nazis, Fascism and AI 'art'
Reminds me of AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism by Gareth Watkins.
Excellent read, thank you for sharing.
People seem to be assuming that... But no, it's not that I want it, it's that, as far as I can tell, there's no going back. The first iterations of the technology are here, and it's only going to progress from here. The whole thing might flop, our models might turn out useless in the long run, but people will continue developing things and improving it. It doesn't matter what I want, somebody is gonna do that.
I know neurons in neural networks aren't like real neurons, don't worry, though it's also not literally just "holds a number from 0 to 1", that's oversimplifying a bit - it is inspired by actual neurons, in the way that they have a lot of connections that are tweaked bit by bit to match patterns. No idea if we might need a more advanced fundamental model to build on soon, but so far they're already doing incredible things.
I don't quite share the hatred, but I agree. The meaning stretches all the way to NPC behavior in games. Not long ago things like neural network face and text recognition were exciting "AI", but now that's been dropped and the word has new meanings.
Yup, but that applies to our brains same as it does for computers. We can't know if a program will halt any more than a computer can - we just have good heuristics based on understanding of code. This isn't a problem of computer design or fuzzy logic or something, it's a universal mathematical incomputability, so I don't think it matters here.
In this sense, anything that a human can think up could be reproduced by a computer, since if we can compute it, so could a program.
Sure, we absolutely could talk about unicorns, and could make unicorns, if we ignore the whole whimsical magical side they tend to have in stories 😛
I don't think anything I'm saying is far off in the realm of science fiction, I feel like we don't need anything unrealistic, like new superconductors or amazing power supplies, just time to refine the hardware and software on par with current technology. It's scary, but I do hope either the law catches up before things progress too far or, frankly, a major breakthrough doesn't happen in my lifetime.
Edit: Right, I also didn't fit that in my reply - thanks for being civil, some people seem to go straight to mocking me for believing things they made up because I'm not sitting in the bandwagon of "it'll never happen", it's pretty depressing how the discourse is divided into complete extremes
No, because the best art isn't measured in skill, but in relevance to lived experiences
Until you can upload a bunch of brains and simulate them in full you can't capture that experience accurately, and you'll still have a hard time keeping it up to date
No, he's got a point. AI already scores, on average, at least 8.7 kilo-arts on the quantitative art scale we all use already (and have, ever since the Renaissance gave us all that pesky realism), and line always go up, as we know.
Not sure if I need the /s but here it is.
Tell me you don't understand how generative AI works.
That did it!
Current generation generative AI is mapping patterns in images to tokens in text description, creating a model that reproduces those patterns given different combinations of input tokens. I don't know the finer details of how the actual models are structured... But it doesn't really matter, because if human brains can create something, there's nothing stopping a sufficiently advanced computer and program from recreating the same process.
We're not there, not by a long shot, but if we continue developing more computational power, it seems inevitable that we will reach that point one day.
Real regrettable take, come back in 5 years for a nice snack
To the many, many, downvoters...you're completely insane if you think AI art which has been a thing for like 18 months won't improve to the point that it's better than flesh bag artists ever.
You clearly don't understand how these things work. AI gen is entirely dependent on human artists to create stuff for it to generate from. It can only ever try to be as good as the data sets that it uses to create its algorithm. It's not creating art. It's outputting a statistical array based on your keywords. This is also why ChatGPT can get math questions wrong. Because it's not doing calculations, which computers are really good at. It's generating a statistical array and averaging out from what its data set says should come next. And it's why training AI on AI art creates a cascading failure that corrupts the LLM. Because errors from the input become ingrained into the data set, and future errors compound on those previous errors.
Just like with video game graphics attempting to be realistic, there's effectively an upper limit on what these things can generate. As you approach a 1:1 approximation of the source material, hardware requirements to improve will increase exponentially and improvements will decrease exponentially. The jump between PS1 and PS2 graphics was gigantic, while the jump between PS4 and PS5 was nowhere near as big, but the differences in hardware between the PS1 and PS2 look tiny today. We used to marvel at the concept that anybody would ever need more than 256MB of RAM. Today I have 16GB and I just saw a game that had 32GB in its recommended hardware.
To be "better" than people at creating art, it would have to be based on an entirely different technology that doesn't exist yet. Besides, art isn't a product that can be defined in terms of quality. You can't be better at anime than everybody else. There's always going to be someone who likes shit-tier anime, and there's always going to be parents who like their 4 year old's drawing better than anything done by Picasso. That's why it's on the fridge.
So your argument, if I'm understanding it correctly, is that:
It sounds like we're on the same page, but you have a reason (which you've been unable to coherently represent) you think AI generated art will never improve to the point of being good.
AI art isn't bad because of its inherent quality (though tons of it is poor quality), it's bad because it both lacks the essential qualities that people appreciate about art, and because of the ethics around the companies and the models that they're making (as well as the attitude of some of the people who use it).
AI has no concept of the technical concepts behind art, which is a skill people appreciate in terms of "quality," and it lacks "intent." Art is made for the fun of it, but also with an intrinsic purpose that AI can't replicate. AI is just a fancy version of a meme template. To quote Bennett Foddy:
Adam Savage had a good comment on AI in one of his videos where he said something like "I have no interest in AI art because when I look at a piece of art, I care about the creator's intent, the effort that they put into the piece, and what they wanted to say. And when I look at AI, I see none of that. I'm sure that one day, some college film student will make something amazing with AI, and Hollywood will regurgitate it until it's trash."
But that's outside the context of your original post, in which you said that AI art would someday be better than what humans can make. And this is where my point about video game graphics comes in. AI is replicating the art in its training set, much like computer graphics seeking realism are attempting to replicate the real world. There's no way to surpass this limit with the technology that powers these LLMs, and the closer they get to perfectly mimicking their data and removing the errors that are so common to AI (like the six fingers, strange melty lines, lack of clear light sources, 60% accuracy rate with AI like ChatGPT, etc.), the more their power requirements will increase and the more incremental the advancements will become. We're in the early days of AI, and the advancements are rapid and large, but that will slow down and the hardware requirements and data requirements are already on a massive scale to the tune of the entirety of the internet for ChatGPT and its competitors.
I generally agree with you, AI can't create art specifically because it lacks intent, but: The person wielding the AI can very much have intent. The reason so much AI stuff is slop is the same reason that most photographs are slop: The human using the machine doesn't care to and/or does not have the artistic wherewithal to elevate the product to the level of art.
Is this at the level of the artstation or deviantart feeds? Hell no. But calling it all bad, all slop, because it happens to be AI doesn't give the people behind it justice.
(Also that's the civitai.green feed sorted by most reactions, not the civitai.com feed sorted by newest. Mindless deluge of dicks and tits, tits and dicks, that one).
That's a bit reductive: It very much is able of abstracting over concepts and of banging them against each other. Interesting things are found at the fringes, at the intersections, not on the well-trodden paths. An artist will immediately spot that and try to push a model to its breaking point, ideally multiple breaking points simultaneously, but for that the stars have to align: The user has to be a) an artist and b) willing to use AI. Or at least give it a honest spin.
That fundamentally assumes the exact model used today for, and let's be clear on this, picking a 16-bit integer, will never be improved upon. It also assumes that even though humans are able to slap two things together and sometimes, often by accident, make it better than the sum of its parts....a machine manipulating integers cannot do the same. It is fundamentally impossible for ai to synthesize anything...except that's exactly what it's doing.
There seems to be some other argument going on up above which is about how the actual computation itself can't compete but that also doesn't hold water. Ok, a computer is xor-ing things rather than chemical juice and action potentials. But that's super low level. What it sure appears to be doing is taking things it's seen as input data and generating variations on that...which humans also do. All art is theft. I just listened to a podcast from an author saying they hadn't realized this children's book from when they were 8 impacted their story design when they were 35, and yet now that they've reread it they immediately see that they basically stole pieces from the children's story wholesale.
Finally you have this intent thing in here. Can't argue that at present there isn't an intent. But that has never before been a restriction on whether something is art. Plenty of soulless trash is called art. Why is the fruit bowl considered art? But even past that there's an entirely opposing view where you shouldn't care what the author thought, making something. What matters is what you think, consuming that thing. If I look at an AI drawing and it sparks some emotional resonance, who is anyone else to say it isn't important art to me?
I'm not going to argue that there are no issues with ai art today or that the quality is low, but folks in the Lemmy echo chamber are putting human-produced art in an inconceivably high pedestal that cannot possibly stand the test of time.
Their explanation was wasted on useless people like you.
So... first you say that art is subjective, then you say that a given piece can be classified as "good" or "bad". What is it?
Your whole shebang is that it [GenAI] will become better. But, if you believe art to be subjective, how could you say the output of a GenAI is improving? How could you objectively determine if the function is getting better? The function's definition of success is it's loss function, which all but a measure of how mismatched the input of a given description is to it's corresponding image. So, how well it copies the database.
Also, an image is "good" by what standards?
Why are you so obsessed with the image looking "good". There is a whole lot more to an image than just "does it look good". Why are you so afraid of making something "bad"? Why can you not look at an image any deeper than "I like it."/"I do not like it.", "It looks professional"/"It looks amateurish"? These aren't meaningful critiques of the piece, they're just reports of your own feelings. To critique a piece, one must try to look at what one believes the piece is trying to accomplish, then evaluate whether or not the piece is succeeding at it. If it is, why? If it isn't, why not?
Also, these number networks suffer from diminishing returns.
Also:
In the context of Machine Learning "Neuron" means "Number from 0 to 1" and "Learning" means "Minimize the value of the Loss Function".
Youve gone off the rails here, I don't know what argument you're trying to make.
Looks like op used the phrasing "outperform" but that has the same definition problems.
In any case the argument I'm making is simple
For a given claim "computers will never 'outperform' humans at X" I need you to prove to me that there is a fundamental physical limitation that silicon computing machines have that human computing machines dont. You can make 'outperform' mean whatever, same fundamental issue.
You have stated that AI will improve. Improvement implies being able to classify something as better than something else. You have then stated that art is subjective and therefore a given piece cannot be classified as better than another. This is a logical contradiction.
I then questioned your standards for "good". By what criteria are you measuring the pieces in order to determine which one is "better" and thus be able to determine if the AI's input is improving or not? I then tried to, as simply and as timely as I could, give a basic explanation of how the Learning process actually works. Admittedly I did not do a good job. Explanations of this could take up to two or three hours, depending on how much you already know.
Then comes some philosophizing about what makes a piece "good". First, questioning your focus on the pieces of output being good. Then, inquiring what is the harm of a "bad" image? In the context of "Why not draw yourself? Too afraid of making something that is not «perfect»"? Then I asked why is it that you refuse, on your analisys of the "goodness" of an image, to go beyond “I like it.”/“I do not like it.”, “It looks professional”/“It looks amateurish”. Such statements are not meaningful critiques of a piece, they are reports of the feelings of the observer. The subjectivity of art we all speak of. However, it is indeed possible to create a more objective critique of a piece which goes beyond our tastes. To critique a piece, one must try to look at what one believes the piece is trying to accomplish, then evaluate whether or not the piece is succeeding at it. If it is, why? If it isn’t, why not?
Then, as an addendum, I stated that these functions we call AI have diminishing returns. This is a consequence of the whole loss function thing which is at the heart of the Machine Learning process.
The some deceitful definitions. The words "Neuron" and "Learning" under the context of Machine Learning do not have the same meaning as they do colloquially. This is something which causes many to be fooled and marketing agencies abuse to market "AI". Neuron does not mean "simulation of biological neuron", it means "Number from 0 to 1". That means that a Neural Network is actually just a network of numbers between 0 and 1, like 0.2031. Likewise, learning in Machine Learning is not the same has biological learning. Learning here is just a short hand for Minimizing the value of the Loss Function”.
I could add that even the name AI is deceitful, has it has been used as a marketing buss word since it's creation. Arguably, one could say it was created to be one. It causes people to judge the Function, not for what it is, as any reasonable actor would, but for what it isn't. Instead judged by what, maybe, it might become, if only we [AI companies] get more funding. This is nothing new. The same thing happened in the first AI craze in the 19's. Eventually people realized the promised improvements were not coming and the hype and funding subsided. Now the cycle repeats: They found something which can superficially be considered "intelligent" and are now doing it again.
Dehumanization. Great. What did the artists do for you to have them this much?
Also, do you have any idea of how back propagation works? Probably never heard of it, right?
We're all flesh bags, what are you talking about? Explain to me how you are not a bag full of flesh (technically a flesh donut, if you consider the sphincters).
I've heard of the neural net back propagation, but I've just now learned that it's called that based on flesh bag neural nets. What about it?
So, in your eyes, all humans are but flesh with no greater properties beyond the flesh that makes up part of them? In your eyes, people are just flesh?
That is false. Back propagation is not based on how brains work, it is simply a method to minimize the value of a loss function. That is what "Learning" means in AI. It does not mean learn in the traditional sense, it means minimize the value of the loss function. But what is the loss function? For Image Gen, it is, quite literally, how different the output is from the database.
The whole "It's works like brains do" is nothing more than a loose analogy taken too far by people who know nothing about neurology. The source of that analogy is the phrase "Neurons that fire together wire together", which comes with a million asterisks attached. Of course, those who know nothing about neurology don't care.
The machine is provided with billions of images with accompanying text descriptions (Written by who?). You the input the description of one of the images and then figure out a way to change the network so that when the description is inputed, it's output will match, as closely as possible, the accompanying image. Repeat the process for every image and you have a GenAI function. The closer the output is to the provided data, the lower the loss function's value.
You probably don't know what any of that is. Perhaps you should educate yourself on what it is you are advocating for. 3Blue1Brown made a great playlist explaining it all. Link here.
Correct, humans are flesh bags. Prove me wrong?
I'm not sure what the rest of the message has to do with the fundamental assertion that ai will never, for the entire future of the human race, "outperform" a human artist. It seems like it's mostly geared towards telling me I'm dumb.
I is my attempt at an explanation of how the machine fundamentally works, which, as an obvious consequence of it's nature, cannot but mimic. I'm pretty sure you do not know the inner workings of the "Learning", so yes... I'm calling you incompetent... in the field of Machine Learning. I even gave you a link to a great in depth explanation of how these machines work! Educate yourself, as for your ignorance (in this specific field) to vanish.
Human is "A member of the primate genus Homo, especially a member of the species Homo sapiens, distinguished from other apes by a large brain and the capacity for speech. "
Flesh is "The soft tissue of the body of a vertebrate, covering the bones and consisting mainly of skeletal muscle and fat. "
Flesh does not have brains or the capacity for speech
Therefore, Humans are not flesh
I supposed I should stop wasting my time talking to you then, as you see me as nothing more than an inanimate object with no consciousness or thoughts, as is flesh.
It's proof of nothing really. Just because a drawn picture won once means squat. Also, AI can be used alongside drawing - for references for instance. It's a tool like any other. Once you start using it in shit ways, it results in shit art. Not to say it doesn"t have room to improve tho
Also, imagine if the situation were reversed and an AI drawing was entered instead to a drawing contest. People would be livid, instead of celebrating breaking the rules.
Except that already happened, and people were livid. Your correct assessment of such a scenario says a lot more than your half hearted defences for AI art.
Wat?
Yeah, so people were pissed off when AI art has been entered into a drawing contest, why are people celebrating someone cheating and putting a drawing into an AI contest?
The only people I've ever heard say AI is good for "references" are people who aren't artists.
Because AI makes for LOUSY references. (Unless your art style specifically involves clothing pieces melding into each other without rhyme or reasons and cthonic horrors for hands and limbs.)
True, a sample of one means nothing, statistically speaking.
Why would I want a function drawing for me if I'm trying to draw myself? In what step of the process would it make sense to use?
AI is notorious for not giving the details someone would pick a reference image for. Linkie
No they are not "a tool like any other". I do not understand how you could see going from drawing on a piece of paper to drawing much the same way on a screen as equivalent as to an auto complete function operated by typing words on one or two prompt boxes and adjusting a bunch of knobs.
Also, just out of curiosity, do you know how "back propagation" is, in the context of Machine Learning? And "Neuron" and "Learning"?
I don't do this personally but I know of wildlife photographers who use AI to basically help visualize what type of photo they're trying to take (so effectively using it to help with planning) and then go out and try and capture that photo. It's very much a tool in that case.