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Sure but album cover art is already a Lindy anachronism, and this makes sense to be a place of resistance. Neither albums nor covers really exist anymore. It’s more obligatory ritual than anything else and I think someone faking a ritual is more taboo than someone participating lazily.
It’s like the difference sending a thoughtful thank you note and signing a card and having someone else sign the card for you.
Everyone can agree that the first is superior, but the autist mistakes the second and third for being equivalent.
I don't think that's an adequate comparison - in a context where people often straight-up use preexisting art for album covers, it's more like the difference between copying a stock message from the internet for a thank-you card and having someone else compose the message for you. I don't think it requires autism to believe they're both pretty much equivalent.
I can admit that it's not an adequate comparison, but the distinction I'm making is between repurposing existing art (signing a premade card) and outsourcing it to a computer (someone else signs the card for you). I don't think these are directly analagous. I'm not saying they belong in the same category, but the analogy is on the gradient down from personal touch to outsourced sentiment.
I'm not trying to make a generalized defense of lazy album covers. And I fully accept there's an argument as a soldier going on here to mask more utilitarian concern rather than an ontological one. Gun to their head, I'm sure a lot of people criticizing the AI album cover would prefer an interesting AI cover to a lazy repurposed image for a given instance, especially for a 2 bit band. But they are arguing for a moat around actually creative ablum art in general. With the repurposed picture, it can be lazy or unique, but not both.
This is analagous (but not categorically equivalent) to the moat of 'you at least have to sign the Hallmark card yourself'. OBVIOUSLY that's less meaningful than somethign unique and closer in practicality to nothing at all. But the ideosyncratic moat of 'signed card' has social signficiance that defends against a drift into nothing at all.
I would agree signing a premade card and someone else signing the card for you is not the same, and that the former is preferable. I don't believe this analogy, however, is appropriate for the situation of repurposing existing art vs outsourcing it to a computer.
In the former case, there is more effort involved in signing the card than there is in getting somebody else to sign it for you, and in addition signing a card yourself is indeed more personalised and you have more control over the output. In the latter case involving AI, it's not clear there is more effort invested when one takes preexisting art as opposed to prompt engineering so a generative model can spit out the correct output, and it's also not clear that the person taking preexisting art has exercised more personal control over the output than the AI-user. If anything, it's the opposite since the AI artist has a more fine-tuned set of controls over the output.
Again, the analogy might not be a very good one, but we’re getting hung up on technical comparisons. My analogy was supposed to focus on the social ritual nature of where dividing lines are that focus on discrete moats around the methodology, rather than comparisons of outcome quality.
Sure, and the reason why AI generation in specific is a unique violation of the social ritual is because of an innate, knee-jerk ick people get with AI that they don't with most anything else. It's not down to some evaluation of output quality or even effort invested. There's a distinct reason why the "moat" has been arbitrarily established here and at no other point.
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