As someone with the fine motor control of someone made of all elbows, who couldn’t hope to ever draw anything and who leaves that up to people with talent and work ethic for money, all of the cool things in my head that die there because they’re better in my imagination than I could ever express through words or art.

I feel seen.

It's why it's so so so popular with conservatives (and fascist now). There is something about having skill in art that makes you a lot less likely to be conservative. It's about the material circumstances that lead people to become artists, I'd guess.

So now all these Nazis can make Trump memes by typing something stupid into a prompt. It's ugly. It's not intelligent or creative but it's just enough to spread their hateful propaganda. AI art is awful. But it's 100x better than what these fascist could ever hope to create.

Seriously. I feel like the only real use case for AI art right now is making awful fascist propaganda. At least it's the only area of "art" that is actually seeing "improvement" from it.

Which tells you a lot about how these fascist idiots complain about "culture" so much but have actually no culture or art of their own.

If you need a gross example just search for the AI Trump Gaza video. The purpose isn't art. But it's still serving the role that art plays in propaganda.

IDK. I don't like AI for commercial applications. But for frivolous things? That's it's critical application. I'm not taking food from the mouth of any artist if I post some AI meme image I generate onto a social media site. There is no universe where I'm paying an actual professional artist to make meme images for me to post to social media. I'll sometimes use AI slop, but only in slopworthy applications. Screwing around on fediverse and other sites is such a slopworthy application.

I don't feel like that's actually an argument against it. Why would everyone need to learn to draw? Why if I need some random background asset or prop should I spend months or years learning to do something I don't enjoy? The alternative is to pay an artist, but in many cases it literally doesn't make sense to waste that kind of money on a trivial thing. It can have its uses.