To me it's not so much about drawing skills. Technical drawing ability is not as necessary as it once was.
It's about aesthetic taste. You will end up with lots of art looking like the AI generated aesthetic. E.g. overly impressive looking at first glance, but lacking any real "character" or human element.
Time and time again we see that impressive looking art does not always translate into good art. Keith Haring's simple line art characters or Van Gogh's big brushstrokes were visually very original and very human, even if they weren't as complex and technically impressive as AI generated art.
I like to assume people are smart. And what will always stand out in art is originality and humanness. Even crappy looking MS Paint drawings can have charm to them, like the NBA Paint guy on Twitter.
I don't really think this feature is all that worrisome, it's more that it'll add unnecessary bloat to a program that's supposed to be very simple and just for making quick pictures. If I want to make something more composited I'm going to use Photoshop, not MS Paint.
In the same way that photoshop meant that people didn’t have to learn how different brushes and mediums work on different surfaces?
People have been worrying about this since the time Socrates thought that books would make people dumb because they wouldn’t need to memorise anything.
I’m an artist and I’m excited to see how people learn to use these new tools in creative ways.
b) an expensive prosumer tool with a UI that rivals airplane instrument panels in terms of density. Most kids would be turned off by that as soon as they open it.
MS Paint OTOH is free and has been built into Windows for decades, so it's often the first drawing app kids use (may be different now because of mobile apps). Either way, the 'loss-of-skills' concern here is correlated with the dumbing-down of computing in general, from Gen Z's confusion about file managers and directory structures, to using Grammarly and ChatGPT to write papers.
When I was growing up, my parents would say "You won't always have a calculator in your pocket". Well, they were wrong, but that doesn't mean I don't still benefit from being able to do math in my head for general life stuff (and back of the napkin calculations at work).
I wouldn't be that dismissive - image generation is steadily building crufts and becoming multimodal in input side for marginal returns. Rather I think it's working as a gateway drug into drawing.
Worrying about this is a bit like your middle school math teacher saying “you won’t always have a calculator in your pocket”. But then we did! Basic arithmetic is no longer a needed skill.
It’s less about need and more about discovering hobbies and interests. Art is a creative outlet. People should still look to have some kind of creative outlet.
It's about aesthetic taste. You will end up with lots of art looking like the AI generated aesthetic. E.g. overly impressive looking at first glance, but lacking any real "character" or human element.
Time and time again we see that impressive looking art does not always translate into good art. Keith Haring's simple line art characters or Van Gogh's big brushstrokes were visually very original and very human, even if they weren't as complex and technically impressive as AI generated art.
I like to assume people are smart. And what will always stand out in art is originality and humanness. Even crappy looking MS Paint drawings can have charm to them, like the NBA Paint guy on Twitter.
I don't really think this feature is all that worrisome, it's more that it'll add unnecessary bloat to a program that's supposed to be very simple and just for making quick pictures. If I want to make something more composited I'm going to use Photoshop, not MS Paint.