29
What's the deal with AI art?
(lemmygrad.ml)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
29 points (91.4% liked)
Ask Lemmygrad
1006 readers
3 users here now
A place to ask questions of Lemmygrad's best and brightest
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
What people are really upset with is the way this technology is applied under capitalism. I see absolutely no problem with generative AI itself, and I'd argue that it can be a tool that allows more people to express themselves. People who argue against AI art tend to conflate the technical skill and the medium being used with the message being conveyed by the artist. You could apply same argument to somebody using a tool like Krita and claim it's not real art because the person using it didn't spend years learning how to paint using oils. It's a nonsensical argument in my opinion.
Ultimately, the art is in the eye of the beholder. If somebody looks at a particular image and that image conveys something to them or resonates with them in some way, that's what matters. How the image was generated doesn't really matter in my opinion. You could make a comparison with photography here as well. A photographer doesn't create the image that the camera captures, they have an eye for selecting scenes that are visually interesting. You can give a camera to a random person on the street, and they likely won't produce anything you'd call art. Yet, you give the same camera to a professional and you're going to get very different results.
Similarly, anybody can type some text into a prompt and produce some generic AI slop, but an artists would be able to produce an interesting image that conveys some message to the viewer. It's also worth noting that workflows in tools like ComfyUI are getting fairly sophisticated, and go far beyond typing a prompt to get an image.
My personal view is that this tech will allow more people to express themselves, and the slop will look like slop regardless whether it's made with AI or not. If anything, I'd argue that the barrier to making good looking images being lowered means that people will have to find new ways to make art expressive beyond just technical skill. This is similar to the way graphics in video games stopped being the defining characteristic. Often, it's indie games with simple graphics that end up being far more interesting.
Comrade, I'll have to disagree. I enjoy your posting a lot, but I'll have to agree with comrade USSR Enjoyer.
How? I always see this argument, but I never see an explanation. Just how can it allow more people to express themselves?
Let's look at the recent Ghibli AI filter debacle. What exactly in that trend is allowing people to better express themselves by using AI art? It is merely just another slop filter made popular. There's nothing unique about it, it just shows that people like Ghibli, that's it. It would be infinitely more expressive for people to pick up a pencil and draw it themselves, no matter their skill level, since it would have been made by a real person with their own intentions, vision and unique characteristics, even if it turned out bad.
What can a gen AI do that an artist can't? In this specific use case you talked about, why would the artist want to do that in the first place? It doesn't take into account the whole creative process involved in making an art piece, doesn't take into account the fact that, for artists (from what I read), making it from scratch is in itself satisfying. It isn't just about the final product, but about the whole artistic process. Of course this can vary from artist to artist, and there will be people that don't enjoy the process itself, and only the final product of their creative labor, but that's not the opinion I see from the majority of artists that are being impacted right now by gen AI.
I can totally see artists using very specific AI tools to automate parts of that creative process, but to automate creativity itself like what we are seeing right now? I can't.
So, what purpose does gen AI serve? If the argument is about how it enables non-creatives to create, or about how it "democratizes" art, like I have seen tossed around by pro-gen AI people, wouldn't advocating for the proper inclusion of art in schools be the correct approach? Making art is a skill like any other, and if it was properly taught since little, wouldn't people be creating, drawing and painting all the time, also making gen AI not a necessity?
What we are seeing right now is capitalists fucking over artists, designers, and a bunch of other workers to save money. Coca-cola is already using AI generated videos for advertising here in Brasil (I don't know about the rest of the world), alongside other big, medium and small brands.
I can see the use in text AI like ChatGPT and Deepseek, but not in gen AI to make art, and I'm yet to see a compelling argument in favor of it that doesn't just fucks over artists that already were a struggling category of workers.
I suck at using tools with my hands but I'm great at imaging stuff. I can now make art that some peope like where before I was stuck because my nervous system suck...
That's how.
That's a good point, I can't and won't argue against the use of gen AI by disabled people. But I gotta ask, wouldn't the development of tools that can help your specific disability mitigate the need for such AI tools?