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this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2025
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Fuck AI
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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.