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Has anyone noticed how much vitriol there is towards AI-generated art? Over the past year it's slowly grown into something quite ferocious, though not quite ubiquitous. I'm starting to feel (almost) as if it's outside the overton window to admit to using or liking AI art. Like I said, it's not ubiquitous, but maybe it's getting there. Pretty much any thread I ever see that features AI art (outside of specialty groups devoted to AI interest) has many vocal detractors accusing AI art of being trash and stealing from real artists.
While my mind is not fully made up on the issue of whether AI art is "good", if you ask me, I wouldn't say that it's bad that AI learns from "stealing" from artists. Honestly, ask absolutely anyone who's learned anything creative: learning art is all about learning how to steal from people. I know it's not completely analogous, but I don't personally believe that it should be bad for AI to learn by stealing while it's okay for human artists to learn by stealing.
More than anything, I'm kinda surprised there's this strong sentiment, and willingness to call out AI art and its proponents as being some sort of evil in the world. Maybe it's mostly because people get off on being judgy these days, and believing they have some sort of moral high ground, and less that they actually care about artists? I'm not sure, but I would have thought the Butlerian Jihad would have started for something more severe than art.
I am not an artist, so I don't really care about how much AI art will destroy their livelihood, but I dislike it for the same reason I dislike autotune or social media photo filters.
Everyone uses autotune and filters, and the best examples are "transparent". But obvious usage of autotune, photo filters and AI art simply floods my attention with noise. Just as I don't want every company to have an anthem sang by a warbling voice that used to be Sarah from HR's before autotuning, I don't want every blogpost to have an AI-generated hero image.
Agree with this entirely. AI is going to lead to a new inundation of total slop. My positive-to-neutral attitude shifted to slight hostility (though still feeling that a lot of the complaining is pure entitlement) when I saw printouts of shitty AI art at a county fair that some teenager cobbled together in a presentation. I would have respected childish crayon drawings more.
This makes me think of Clip Art and Comic Sans, and that Brian Eno quote about the desire to replicate the flaws of old media as soon as newer media eliminates them.
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