[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.