[visarga]

If these creations inspire such violent disgust, then it's likely that you perceive them as authentic art. If AI images were devoid of meaning or value, they wouldn't have sparked such passion.

You cannot claim ownership over culture, nor can AI. Culture is a collaborative process, and no one can barricade themselves from the input of others. Artists using AI are simply exercising their right to contribute to the collective creative pool. Art flourishes in an open environment where it can stimulate other artistic endeavors. The only art off-limits to AI is the art that remains unpublished.

[__loam]

This is, imo, an extremely naive take. You claim culture is a collaborative process, yet AI only takes from the communities that produce art. It gives nothing back. You claim AI produces culture, but all it does is atomize our society, promising personal yet meaningless experiences for everyone. There's no shared culture if everyone is just consuming individualized streams of content. It's simultaneously homogenizing too, producing uninteresting torrents of homogenous images from the same model. This also harms culture, stamping out uniqueness under the weight of thousands of meaningless images flooding online art spaces. You claim the only art that's off limits to AI is that which remains unpublished, yet you continue to use the labor of others without permission, discouraging people from publishing their work in the absence of any protection for that work. You claim AI will make art more open, yet most of these models are built and operated by massive corporations with closed source code. They steal from the public and cry out fair use while trying to build walled gardens they can monopolize.

So I'm sorry but there's an argument to every point you're making. I trust the artists I speak to far more than the proponents of this technology. At least they're striving for something genuinely instead of making disengenuous claims about "democratization".

[visarga]

I don't try to swim against the current. But you're welcome to do it.

What do you mean AI doesn't give back? It serves everyone and gives back everything it can create. Artists are the number one users here, and they will unlock the AI skills better than regular people playing around.

What individualized streams? you mean like imagination, where everyone of us has their own "individualized stream"? AI art is augmented imagination. No obstacle in sharing, in fact it's easier now. You don't need to be an artist to create depictions of your imaginations, and sharing a generated JPG is much easier than drawing it by hand.

> yet you continue to use the labor of others without permission

That's how culture works. The artist who never took inspiration from the cultural environment should throw the first stone. Pablo Picasso is widely quoted as having said that “good artists borrow, great artists steal.”

[kmeisthax]

I think you (and possibly __loam) are talking past one another.

You're assuming that artists are just being elitist. While that's not entirely untrue, artistic skill is not merely a gatekeeping exercise. "Just prompt what you're thinking" is great until you need at least a little bit of control over what the AI generates, upon which the whole process disintegrates into banging your head at the model until you get something you want. Furthermore, art skills don't transfer to prompt engineering very well - that's more the realm of SEO keyword stuffers.

What __loam is imagining is that the best use of generative AI right now would be to create content slurry. If you've ever used TikTok or YouTube shorts you know what I mean - the vast majority of videos there are very cheaply made dopamine traps. And while AI can sorta kinda do art if you ask it politely and fight it a bit, it's really good at generating statistically plausible imitations of existing images[0]. Being able to generate lots of normal looking images for little effort is a grifter's best friend, and there's loads of people on YouTube bragging about how they make lots of money by spamming up art marketplaces with artistically meaningless pablum.

It doesn't matter how you make your art. You will be competing with the people who are shitting out spam art, and losing.

[0] To be clear, this is not the same thing as a photo mashup. I would actually be impressed by an AI that could take images and mash them up at inference time.

[visarga]

Yes, the vast majority of AI images so far are surprising but not better than human made art, and same for LLM generated text. Maybe they are a new kind of AI slurry, but that's just a phase. If you compare generative art one year ago vs today, or even six months ago vs today you know I am right. It won't be slurry forever. In fact I believe the internet will become an AI feedback system, and much of it will be built with AI.

[__loam]

That sounds completely horrible.