[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.