[ancillary]

I found this bit interesting:

> Basically, one reason I’ve lost a lot of will to do anything is because of AI’s existence, and I don’t want to use it. Because I have zero personal time, zero time whatsoever to do anything, so sometimes I’m thinking, “Oh, I could do this task or that task so much faster if I used AI,” but I don’t want to use AI, so then I don’t want to do the task at all. So I don’t have the time to sit down and model something because I know there is a faster way, but I don’t want to use the faster way, so the thing doesn’t get done.

I'm not completely sure, but I think her reasoning is that AI made it a lot easier for random people to just have the idea and translate it into an image in a minute or two, and this cheapens the whole experience for her, to the point that it no longer seems worth doing.

It's sort of a funny point. I think most painters are happy that they don't have to go out and grind up snails to make their own purple pigment, but are perhaps less happy if somebody can produce a painting indistinguishable from their own effort with no manual handwork skill at all. It's like there's a minimum threshold of human skill and investment for an object to be interesting beyond its pure functionality, and functionality has little to do with art (but a lot to do with, say, software).

[simonbw]

I actually don't think her reasoning has to do with other people at all. I think it's that given she wants to make an image of a poorly designed object, she knows she could either do it herself, or she could do something that takes 99% less effort but produces a result that's 90% as good. Her brain says "the easier way is obviously more efficient, clearly that's what you should do". But using AI isn't actually a satisfying process so even though it's way easier, she doesn't have a desire to do it. Of course the option to do it the way she's always done it is still there and would be just as satisfying in the end. The difficulty is that now there's a little part of her brain that would be going "you're acting inefficiently/irrationally", which just makes the process less pleasant and harder to convince herself to continue with. To me it seems like

I know I have experienced this, and I bet a lot of people here have experienced this, with writing code by hand vs having Claude do it. I genuinely enjoy writing code, but now to get that joy, I have to commit to writing code _for the sake of writing code_, since it's no longer necessary to do it to achieve the end goal I have.

[dalmo3]

That's how I read it too, and how I relate to it.

I have the exact same feeling as you towards coding AI for hobby projects. Though this sentiment isn't new, and AI is just a detail.

I'm not a musician, but I'm attracted to synthesizers and bought a couple in the past just for fun. I immediately get caught in a quicksand of DAWs and plugins and whatnot, which kill the fun for me (it's too similar to work), but at the same time I can't ignore the tools because now the synth is too "bland".

It's a weird kind of FOMO paralysis.

[alsetmusic]

I am a musician and electronic music is my primary jam. I once bought way too many plugins on Black Friday because there were so many incredible deals. The next day, I opened my preferred DAW and I was just overwhelmed with options. It caused my creativity to short-circuit. I didn't make music again for months because of the sheer sense of drowning in new tools.

Of course, every time I've ever added just one tool I've been fine. I explore it and learn it and figure out the limitations and how to make it do what I want (or decide I don't like it).

The brain is funny. It's not always possible to rationally explain our motivations and blockers in a way that feels satisfying. I'm a big believer that words help us understand feelings / reality. Not being able to articulate the things that are blocking us satisfactorily makes it harder, or possibly impossible, to work through them or try to tackle them or work around them.

And then there are the times when we can perfectly explain our feelings in a way that accurately represents the inner turmoil but it's just a crappy new reality. I think that's a lot of what people are feeling wrt coding agents.

[DANmode]

> The brain is funny.

The brain is inefficient - at least, in regard to planning work.

There’s so many feelings etc getting in the way - when the real thought should only be:

“what’s next to properly fulfill my chosen goal?”.

[throw4847285]

I think you are incorrect in assuming that the reason she doesn't want to use AI is because of democratization. She is pretty clear about her reasoning; she enjoys the effort of her work, and removing the effort removes the joy.

In fact if we're being honest, there is some weird unprompted bitterness in your response that is pretty common in the AI space. Creatives who don't like AI are always haughty elitists who don't like that the peasants can now create works as brilliant as them.

In reality, most artists I know wouldn't use AI because the friction is part of the joy of creation for them. Or maybe they want to feel like the work truly emerged from their own brain. Or they find their art practice both productive and meditative, and those are equally important to them. Or numerous other reasons, mostly compelling.

I'm not an artist, or even particularly creative, but the only reason I would undertake any hobby is because I enjoy the process. I like building Gunpla models, which seems irrational if you are only thinking about output. If someone were to say to me, "You know, they sell plastic toys of the RX-78-2. You could just buy one if you wanted it," I would stare at them blankly.

[ancillary]

> In fact if we're being honest, there is some weird unprompted bitterness in your response

Politely, I suggest that prefacing a claim about a stranger's emotions by saying that the claim is "fact" and "honest" is presumptuous.

But I do think you're right about the "friction [being] part of the joy". I think a better version of my comment is that enjoying those frictions isn't completely straightforward, and the temptations of a frictionless (and maybe subpar) alternative make those frictions less enjoyable still, as simonbw's comment observed.

[throw4847285]

Yeah I think we basically agree.

And yet, I can't leave well enough alone. I want to clarify that I wasn't assuming anything about your emotions. I was being even ruder. I was assuming underlying psychological motivations.

Though, to be fair, I was trying to diagnose a trend, not accuse you individually of anything. There seems to be a lot of resentment directed towards artists that bothers me. It predates the AI boom, but it's been supercharged. People seem gleeful about artists being taken down a peg by AI. It's hard not to read into that. Again, to be clear, as a broader trend and not reflective of you as a person, who like you said, I don't know at all.

[curl-up]

It is one thing to not use AI because you enjoy the process, or because you believe that art is inseparable from the act of creation.

But she claims that the fact that AI exists decreases her drive to create. That is a much stronger and less obvious argument, and something that doesn't apply to you if you're still building those models.

If she simply "enjoys the effort", as you claim, she would do the same as you - continue enjoying it. But she is not.

[throw4847285]

It's the instant gratification problem, and I suspect it's dependent on temperament. Some people are more sensitive to having their tolerance for distress eroded by instant gratification. Once I start looking up answers to crossword puzzle clues, I can't stop, and then I don't consider that I've really solved that crossword.

Maybe you aren't like this, but I suspect that the artist in question is. She is self-aware enough to know that she would have a hard time drawing boundaries, and eventually it would be all AI and very unsatisfying. That's why she specified that she would consider using the technology in a very circumscribed way.

[userbinator]

As someone who is not a professional artist but has played with AI image generation: AI definitely does not remove effort. It only changes the effort from "attempt to output what's in your mind" to "prompt, generate, compare, edit prompt, generate, ...". Once you get something close enough to what you want, you often still have to edit it manually.

[alwa]

> the friction is part of the joy of creation for them

I’d extend that to suggest—based on conversations with the artists in my life, anyway—that for many, the friction along the path from an idea to a work is where the art happens in the first place. That the art happens in the additions and subtractions and judgments the artist makes along the way as they bring the artifact into being. That without that, it’s something closer to manufacturing.

I’m reminded of how we around here grumble at piles of vibe-coded slop, even if they notionally solve the users’ problems at hand. It’s not strictly that “it’s insufficient at satisfying the problem brief,” it’s that it’s missing all the other latent considerations—structure, coherence, legibility, maintainability, determinism, good judgment—that a skilled code craftsperson would have worked in along the way almost without thinking.

Depressing for artists of code itself—liberating for the people whose artistic practice is maybe one level of abstraction up—whose obsession is iterating through “finished” products til they fit just so, til they reflect the high-level intention just right. For whom the code part was always an annoying-but-necessary slog, akin to, as another commenter said, grinding the snails for pigment…

“I dread what it means for the code base at work, but damn if I’m not cranking out every single side project I’d never gotten around to…”

[egypturnash]

I am a pro artist and you have it exactly. There are many, many decisions along the way from a rough sketch to a finished work, and making them is a lot of the fun. Part of making these decisions is also turning a lot of your brain off while you draw, and vaguely thinking about where to go once you finish what you've done so far.

Serendipity's part of it too, like I could see the "waterfall teapot" starting with just idly modeling a teapot with no particular goal in mind, then accidentally stretching the mouth too wide, laughing at the result, and deciding to experiment with a bunch of absurdly-wide teapots until arriving at the final result.

[burningChrome]

I've repeatedly told people you ignore AI at your peril.

I had the same experience when I was a front-end dev and all the JS frameworks were getting big. I didn't want to use them, I tried to stay away from them as much as I could. I reluctantly learned Angular after being put on a project where they were using it. After 5 years, I wanted to leave my company and started looking around for dev openings. Whoops. Literally every front-end dev role was now "full stack role" and unless you knew ReactJS or one of the other now common JS frameworks in depth, you had no options. I was able to pivot into a few other roles that were essentially front-end related, but have yet to get back to doing dev work unless its on my own hobby time at home.

I completely removed myself from an industry because I didn't want to change with the industry I spent ten years making a career from. Now with this new wave of AI, I know better. I don't like AI, I think companies are already using it recklessly to pad their bottom lines, but I've seen this movie before. Now I keep pace, I use it at work, I vibe code at home, I create agents and use MCP servers, I work constantly on learning to create better prompts.

Maybe she hasn't been sidelined by a technology yet in her career, but someone told me recently, "AI may not replace YOU? But someone who can use and know AI very possibly could replace you." This same thing is happening in the art world. Unfortunately, either you figure out how to leverage it to stay in the industry, or get passed up by people who are using it to do what you used to do and find yourself too far behind to ever catch up.

[Aurornis]

A similar thing happened in the early days of 3D printing. When hobbyist 3D printing started you needed to be skilled and tenacious enough to build a 3D printer and tune it well enough to print.

Then as companies like Prusa and later Bambu made 3D printing more and more accessible to the masses there was a subgroup of 3D printing fans who were unhappy about the change. They lost interest in the hobby. Some became bitter and spent their time finding things to complain about on Reddit and other forums instead of enjoying their printing.

Logically, enabling other people to produce something shouldn’t subtract from others’ enjoyment of their own hobbies. Many still do woodworking with hand tools even though we can buy factory furniture now.

I think some people are more interested in seeking status and doing things for personal branding reasons than the joy of the hobby itself. For that group, any advancement that makes it easier for other people to do something similar to what they do (even if lesser quality, as is often the case with AI) it interferes with their ability to use that hobby for status. They carved out a niche as the person who did something rare or semi-unique, but making that thing accessible to more people took that away. So their motivation wanes.

[HeWhoLurksLate]

It's also interesting to note that there's a distinct delineation in "before Bambu" and "post-Bambu" in communities with a DIY part to them - there's been a humongous explosion in creativity and functional, valuable output ever since the cost of entry went from "you gotta own a metal shop or a wood shop" to "buy this one $1000 machine and a hardware kit".

For example, I remember frequenting the NerfHaven forums back in the day, and people were designing Nerf blasters in Solidworks, printing drawings out, gluing them to polycarbonate, and using scroll saws to build their own blasters capable of 150fps. Nowadays, I can buy a printer, a hardware kit, and build my own 200fps capable blaster in an afternoon, and there's probably 5-10 new interesting, fleshed out concepts a month.

The explosion in depth, detail, and accessibility in DIY cosplay designs is also incredible.

[SoftTalker]

When the hobby devolves to "load this file and click 'print'" then the people whose reward was found in the actual creation of the thing get disillusioned. Not sure why, because they can still do things the hard way, but I guess it seems pointless.

[taneq]

This reminds me of the time I really wanted an FT-86 (Toyota low end sports car). I spent ages researching them and reading reviews and stuff. Then they started to get popular and I’d see them everywhere and I kinda didn’t want one anymore.

I described this to a friend and he turned to me, shocked, and said “you’re a sports car hipster!” And I’ve never been quite the same since.

[angiolillo]

> I think most painters are happy that they don't have to go out and grind up snails to make their own purple pigment

People who loved mixing colors enough to become experts may have been disappointed when their hard-won skills were rendered obsolete by the march of progress.

There are some aspects of my work that are enjoyable on their own and others that I only do because they're necessary overhead to achieve a desired result. I appreciate technology that eliminates the latter but lament technology that eliminates the former.

So when AI obsoletes yet another human skill I suspect a lot of the wildly different emotional responses are dependent on whether someone considers the skill being obsoleted more "enjoyable" or "necessary overhead".

[secondcoming]

My first thought is that this is a sign of burn-out.

[xboxnolifes]

I think the problem is more the knowledge of an information hazard combined with her just not liking AI.

She doesn't like AI, so she avoids using it, fine. But she's also aware that using AI would make doing the task very easy. Because she is aware of AI's ability to complete the task, she would have to consciously avoid using it, and doing that us the problem itself. Having to consciously avoid the action you know is more efficient.

You see the same effect in video games. Being aware of a powerful item or meta tends to compel one to take that path, even if its less enjoyable. And sometimes it can bring the enjoyment low enough that one doesn't want to play anymore. If one were left unaware, they could keep playing blissfully unaware.

[phainopepla2]

> I think most painters are happy that they don't have to go out and grind up snails to make their own purple pigment, but are perhaps less happy if somebody can produce a painting indistinguishable from their own effort with no manual handwork skill at all.

This might sound pedantic, but I think it's very meaningful when it comes to art: AI's cannot (yet) produce paintings anywhere near the quality of a human painting. What they can produce are images of paintings, and those are not the same thing.

[heliumtera]

You assumed it is about effort, and not quality.

Are you aware that without explanation you just assumed things can be achieved with less effort without quality degradation?

[sigbottle]

That quote is so relatable lol.

[PaulHoule]

There's a certain kind of bad taste that goes with AI art like there was with NFTs.

Oddly a few months ago somebody who was a few years too late DMed me on Tumblr to say he wanted to make NFTs of my photos. I played it cool and eventually asked him "which ones do you want?" which got him to pick the last 5 I posted which proves he isn't even looking.

Nextdoor for a nearby city lately has been spammed my somebody who makes AI slop videos with senseless motion like a bad Instagram Reel about our police department (he's black but seems to love the blue) -- at least he has some sense of praising vs dissing people but to people like that there is not difference between beautiful and ugly, good and bad, just ceaseless motion that never stops.