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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24304 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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Another social experiment regarding AI art: A Twitter user posts a real Monet painting and says it's AI. The results are about what you'd expect. A few people say they can't tell the difference, but a lot of people arrogantly claim the "AI-generated" image is complete trash. Lots of very confident-sounding nonsense about "composition", color theory, brushstrokes, random little details about the plants, etc. Reddit discussions are here and here. The response afterwards seems to mostly center around a motte-and-bailey that pretends nobody made any claims about how AI does on the formal qualities of artwork, but that human art is still vastly better due to vague notions of "artistic intent".

The Left's antipathy towards AI art is well-known by this point. I did a small experiment to see if the Right was as susceptible and can report that at least some users are. It seems like the Right is split with some users being open to AI art on pragmatic grounds, some liking it simply due to the Left hating it, and some are just as opposed as the Left and let it cloud their judgement. I posted some modded AI artwork for Slay the Spire 2 on /v/ and had a decent chunk of users saying the usual "ugh this looks terrible". Then I started including official card art from the game for comparison while still implying it was all AI-generated, and the response got even worse. The card art for Abrasive, Squash, and Secret Technique attracted particular scorn. Again, this is human-made art that revealed preferences show nobody really has a problem with, yet the responses they got when people thought they were AI included the following:

You're posting stuff your average pixiv prompt jockey would consider low quality.

That genuinely looks like MSPaint quality.

This looks like shit doe. But I guess AIjeets don't have taste.

By "this good" do you mean like cheap clip-art? Or do you think that's actually good art?

Restating and extending this:

In theory I have no qualms with AI art, in practice I’ve yet to see a (knowingly) AI-assisted work I consider decent.

I suspect because (at least to me) originality and relatability (i.e. taste) are important in art; language and diffusion models especially lack both, and they lack the (predictable, easy) control necessary for the artist to infuse theirs.

An artist with taste can make incredible art in B&W, pixel, low-poly, etc. The medium is less important, and those being easy mediums to control, allow the artist to express themselves more accurately.

I think, like how AI for code is another abstraction, AI for art is another medium. Some people disagree, partly because today’s AI is a poor abstraction; likewise, today’s AI is a poor medium, because of the aforementioned lack of control.

Art requires a huge degree of specificity to create its effects, so trusting AI prompts to get what you want is like trying to wield a giant mallet to repair a delicate wristwatch. To give an example of the specificity often required, in this image, the artist chose to highly stylize the bars in the way he did to create an effect of solidity and imperviousness, in order to convey the extent to which the character on the other side was locked there, and that's just one detail among many for just one comic frame among many in a very long manga book. Zeroing in on the bars in particular while also controlling all the other details and framing with AI would be incredibly difficult and arduous. It would probably be faster for a skilled artist just to draw them himself, not even counting the superior quality (especially in terms of exactness) he would undoubtedly achieve. Furthermore, while there are many non-artists who claim they have 'ideas in their head' just as good as the man who drew this scene, the truth is that in order to conceive this scene in its full panoply of detail, you need to have a highly developed artistic skillset in the first place. That is to say, to even know that you ought to stylize the bars in a given way to achieve a particular effect, you need to already be fairly well trained in this kind of art, what its potentials are and how they are craft-wise achieved, because the art is more in its buildup of details and controlled effects than any central, floating idea. So the notion that AI would allow non-artists to get those ideas out of their heads and onto the page through bypassing the actual need to learn the foundations of a craft ends up being inert.

So the notion that AI would allow non-artists to get those ideas out of their heads and onto the page through bypassing the actual need to learn the foundations of a craft ends up being inert.

Why would that be the case?

It won't allow them to get their ideas in same detail as a trained artist but it's worlds better than getting nothing onto the page which is the remaining option when you take away AI.

I am not an art expert or anything, I've been to the Art Institute a few times and they have Monets. That looks a lot like a real Monet to me, albeit the resolution on my computer appears really bad so I could see someone thinking it was something like a scan of a copy of a picture of a Monet.

And most of these people were probably viewing the image on their phones

That Monet painting might be operating along extremely fine and subtle principles, and so be highly opaque to the large majority of people who view it in terms of any brilliance it may hold.

My favorite painter is Max Ernst. The genius of his paintings is quite a bit louder and more flamboyant. Even to relative laypersons like myself, it's easy to distinguish his paintings against AI, as AI cannot match him for creativity, intricacy, etc.

This is to say, there might be situations where AI art cannot be separated from masterful human work because the human work operates on principles potentially no one besides the master who created it understands, but for masterful works which are more scrutable, which do exist, it is easy to see that no AI can compare against them.

And the distinction should be made between the creative effort required to conceive a painting and configure it, versus the technical effort required to reproduce one. AI is fully theoretically capable even now of producing identical or near identical copies of works it has seen. The only reason it doesn't, during the course of casual prompting, is that its designers for copyright reasons sought to inhibit that behavior. What AI can't do is create wholly original works, or even to composite existing works at a high level. Anyone saying AI cannot reproduce existing works is wrong. Anyone saying AI can produce good original works is also wrong.

Max Ernst

I've never seen anyone mention him in the wild -- The Entire City is one of my favorite paintings, it's haunted me since I saw it in an art book when I was 10 years old. And yeah, AI could never.

Surrealism in general doesn't have a good reputation these days, and wasn't much beloved even in its time.

Magritte and Dali are fairly popular I'd say. Dali is googled about half to a third as often as Picasso, which is really not bad.

To latch on to this with another recent minor CW-related kerfuffle, I've seen some speculate that this segment from the climax of recently-released video game Mixtape (note that the game footage is real and unedited; the only addition is the guy reacting to it on the left side) was based off an AI-generated script. For me, the negative parallelism "this ain't a catastrophe, it's a warning" feels AI, but I worry that it's become such a commonly known AI "tell" that it's just a false positive. But also, the phrase "this will only be the beginnings of my wicked ways" just feels AI-ish to me in a way that I can't put my finger on. Something about how elaborate and almost forced-poetic it feels, particularly given that it's a teenager in a highly emotionally charged moment. But that could just be bad writing.

Season 5 of Stranger Things was also speculated as having been partially written using AI (apparently the making-of documentary included a shot of the writers having ChatGPT as one of their browser tabs, but the speculation started before, AFAICT), with people making compilations like this one, but beyond the negative parallelisms - which could be false positives - I'm not sure how the other parts feel AI. Again, there's a bit of forced-poetic feel in a lot of it, especially given, again, these are mostly teenagers. But also, awful writing of teenagers that seem way too sophisticated or mature has plagued this series since at least season 4, probably at least season 3.

Does anyone better with words than me have any opinions on this?

Part of the reason language models spit out so much cringe is precisely because they’ve been overtrained on Ao3, fanfiction.net etc human written slop. This seems bad but is it worse than cringe games ostensibly written by humans (Borderlands 3)? No.

Exactly. Redditors and their adjacencies have produced a ton of the sample size of 'organic dialogue' that AI is parsing. Therefore AI dialogue is gonna skew in that direction.

My first and immediate question upon learning of the whole Mixtape kerfuffle - how does a small indie company get funds to license 20-something actual songs from I imagine what are pretty fucking big labels? My schizo theory (I know even the wiki article now mentions the industry plant accusations but idc, I thought of it first) is that Mixtape is extremely formulaic, soulless corposlop, made with bare minimum of effort and - yes - some AI for dialogues, then intentionally and skillfully dolled up to look like an artsy indie game.

I agree that dialogue - not all of it, but definitely a lot of it - stinks of AI beyond the tryhard teenage edge factor, especially the way they directly title drop songs along with little summaries or related quips, which starts as Rockford's supposedly endearing quirk (because she's a music nerd ofc) but quickly degenerates into whoppers like

As we continue our mission for booze on the way to Camille Cole's party, I require something that fills every possible spectrum of sound, causing the brain to super-aneurysm and explode and die.

This is Love by The Smashing Pumpkins.

Alternatively, in a rather jarring delivery from otherwise (seemingly) the most "normal" and grounded character of the game,

Under this floor we will find, not only a heinous stash, but an only slightly expired cask of Debortolini's premium pinot grigio.

These kind of out-of-place awkward sentences lace more or less the entire game. You either see it or you don't.

Really, the whole game is ripe for Straussian readings once you get your tinfoil hat on:

  • the cassette bit is memetic at this point - when selling nostalgia, some actual familiarity with the subject helps; in this case the supposed teenage past the vat-grown creators may or may not have had

  • many Steam reviews point out the blatantly incongruous PC behavior and fashion sense of designer-dressed hipster MCs compared to actual 90s underground enjoyers, though I can't strongly comment on this due to lack of familiarity (but wouldn't be surprised)

  • the kissing scene feels deliberately weird/off-putting to stir some waters, but just short and safe horny innocuous enough to not really offend anyone very much (I cannot imagine the restraint it took to not make it a F/F kiss)

  • the disjointed episodic flashback narration is naturally suited to LLMs' limited context windows, generating plot/dialogues is simple since no continuity is required

  • the big expense/premise of the game (lots of "relatable" licensed songs) makes a lot more sense if you consider that recordings of "gameplay" containing licensed songs can be struck off YT or muted on Twitch with impunity, reducing undesirable exposure to opinions of actual players. Why would you watch a muted raw Twitch VOD, silly? The whole point is in the music! Here, maybe the review of this curated influencer (who knows how to play the DMCA game and can skirt copyright) is more up your alley...

Et cetera. I hope I'm looking into it too much but ehhh... I also had a faint hope that I've finally lived until the second coming of gamergate, but judging by >80% reviews on Steam I'm not holding my breath. Journolist won. Consume product, be excited for next products, etc.

Another theory is that after ungodly amount of years of "writers" marinating in the fanfic cesspool of AO3 this is what they consider normal and appropriate.

My first and immediate question upon learning of the whole Mixtape kerfuffle - how does a small indie company get funds to license 20-something actual songs from I imagine what are pretty fucking big labels?

I've heard people hypothesize that this was a pet project of Megan Ellison, who is founder/owner of Annpurna, the publisher of Mixtape (developed by a different Australian company). She is also the daughter of Larry Ellison (a hectobillionaire). I did some basic research, and it seems true, according to what I would consider credible sources, that Megan Ellison owns Annapurna, Annapurna did publish Mixtape, and Megan Ellison did inherit a large trust from her hectobillionaire dad.

Megan Ellison turned 40 this year so she's an elder millennial, though I'd guess that her upbringing wasn't what one would consider typical of a California millennial in the 90s. The narrative I've seen hypothesized is that she wanted a power fantasy where she could live out the stereotypical cliche teenage rebellion that she never could due to her immense wealth and privilege, but that's very much speculative.

EDIT:

As we continue our mission for booze on the way to Camille Cole's party, I require something that fills every possible spectrum of sound, causing the brain to super-aneurysm and explode and die.

This is Love by The Smashing Pumpkins.

I'm a musical philistine, so I didn't quite understand why this was a whopper. Having listened to the song on YouTube just now, it does seem rather repetitive and hitting the same sort of "sound" for the entirety of the song compared to something like, say, Bohemian Rhapsody. Is that why you'd consider it a whopper, possibly generated by an LLM that has no actual understanding of the song and was just putting words together that seem fitting?

I would call it a whopper because it sounds like a music blurb written by Patrick Bateman. That's supposed to be dialog from a teenager?

I mean I think it's just a by-redditors, for-redditors kinda deal where it's also the passion project of somebody with a lot of money behind them and might have had some soft astroturfing/aligned nicely with the kind of stuff that videogame journalists liked. 'We're in the past but the protagonists somehow land on every social value of a medium-woke 2025 Westerner' barely even merits mentioning as a thing any more. It's dumb, it will always be dumb and yet there's never gonna be a great way of extricating it from media. Atleast weird punk kids being a bit more adventurous sexually is less incongruous than Red Dead Redemption 2's 'I may be a murdering 1800s outlaw but I draw a hard line at racism'

It's not like Mixtape is gonna do COD or Madden sales numbers even if it's the Indie darling, and there's no real glory in chasing a VGA the same way there is in an Oscar or whatever.

  • Atleast weird punk kids being a bit more adventurous sexually is less incongruous than Red Dead Redemption 2's 'I may be a murdering 1800s outlaw but I draw a hard line at racism'

I don't know if it's really that incongruous. The average outlaw was probably quite racist, but the average outlaw was also unlikeable in tons of ways that don't apply to Arthur Morgan. One thing about stories is that even if you take the world they're set in as real, they're a selection effect of the world they tell.

You don't hear about all the heroes who set off on their quest to slay the dragon, only to get eaten by a troll hiding under the bridge. You don't get the guy who is just farming all his life except for the one day the dragon came to his town and he hid in some hay until it flew away and then went back to farming. You get the hero who has a likeable personality, interesting relationships both in friendships and rivalries, and fights an intense but ultimately winnable battle against the dragon.

There could be tons of really racist and otherwise unlikeable outlaws in the RDR2 world. Their stories aren't being told. Arthur Morgan, the rare (but still possibly existing!) generally caring, decently although gray in complex ways moral, fair treating outlaw cowboy with an interesting life is the one that gets told.

  • Arthur Morgan, the rare (but still possibly existing!) generally caring, decently although gray in complex ways moral, fair treating outlaw cowboy with an interesting life is the one that gets told.

Yeah but this is retarded since having all of those values at roughly the degrees that makes them equivalent to your 2020s medium-Left player makes him a massive outlier from the social norms of his day. Plus completely overlooks the whole 'there are reasons why historical people had the views they had, they didn't just wake up one morning and decide to be dicks by overriding their natural, god-given 2020s medium-left moral instincts'.

You could have an open-minded, fairness-driven Arthur Morgan by the standards of his day who was a 'good guy', but he's still going to have a vocabulary and assumptions that are still going to shock and appall the playerbase.

Yeah but this is retarded since having all of those values at roughly the degrees that makes them equivalent to your 2020s medium-Left player makes him a massive outlier from the social norms of his day

Let's say in the heroes story, over the course of a thousand years we have one million people who tried to fight against the dragon and failed. Is it an outlier that our story has the one guy who wins? Yes. His story gets told because he's the outlier of the world. And of all of the potential worlds with stories to tell, this world was done because the hero is likeable and had an Epic Quest with Adventure and Challenges, rather than just an easy time beating the dragon and then living a normal life. This potential story world is may be an outlier of worlds, but it is the one being told.

That is the selection effect of storytelling, and complaints about "oh but that's rare or unlikely!" just fundamentally doesn't get that basically every good story, even realistic ones, falls into that. Even the ones that try to be about normal everyday people in everyday situations are typically more interesting lives than the typical everyday person actually has.

You could have an open-minded, fairness-driven Arthur Morgan by the standards of his day who was a 'good guy', but he's still going to have a vocabulary and assumptions that are still going to shock and appall the playerbase.

Now it's true that he'll probably be going around saying some words that were considered normal at the time that we in the modern era now consider to be slurs, but vocabulary changes and RDR2 is not unique. Stories about the far future don't have an English (if they even speak it millions of years from now) completely unrecognizable from ours. A story set in 1500s France will still inexplicably have them speaking modern English (or whatever the dub language is in) and stories about the past like RDR2 also do this.

It's not just things like slurs and swears, tons of words shift in meaning overtime. "awful" means bad now instead of "full of awe" so characters mean it to use something is bad. "Gay" of course meant to be happy or carefree. "Artificial" used to have a more positive nuance to it. "Propaganda" didn't gain the negative connotation to it till after the world wars. There are tons and tons of other examples you can find, because vocabulary shifts naturally like that. Writers aren't going to accurately portray how people really talked back then, they're going to portray how the character would seem to be talking in modern dialects transposed onto the time period.

You aren't going to hear "He was a silly, awful, and gay man who regularly engages in intercourse" to mean "He was a harmless, inspiring and happy man who regularly partakes in social conversations" in most modern dialogue.

I mean I guess your argument is that 'John Marsden is a fairly liberal guy relative to the other characters of RDR2, meaning that since we're transposing the language into the modern lens that he should become a fairly liberal guy in the modern context and therefore be pushing a bunch of social stuff that'd be absolutely alien to his period'.

I find that kind of absurd. Whilst Marsden isn't a historical figure, I feel equivalently about if somebody had say Martin Luther King Jr attending a pride parade or William Wilberforce enthusiastically encouraging his daughter to date a black person. You can be overwhelmingly progressive by the standards of your milieu but you're not going to automatically leap through time to 2020 mores. I'm not even saying this from some sort of torrid desire to 'cancel' historical progressive figures

and therefore be pushing a bunch of social stuff that'd be absolutely alien to his period'.

Uncommon and niche is not the same thing as "absolutely alien". There are known real life examples of people who spoke up against the mainstream views of their time, like Thomas Paine. He was anti slavery and generally pro egalitarian as a founding father even further back than the setting of RDR2.

Humans are not hiveminds even back in the past and while significantly rarer then, good non racist (and even some explicitly against racism) views and people did exist. There is this general ahistorical vibe that the dominant viewpoints of a given time period and/or society is the only viewpoints to have existed.

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they're going to portray how the character would seem to be talking in modern dialects transposed onto the time period

Yes, but what they're doing is also transposing modern attitudes onto the time period, and that's the problem. Okay, it's a silly, fun game that makes no pretensions to historical accuracy, so having a bunch of thieves and swindlers who would never do a bad, awful thing like use a slur is fine. Shoot a guy dead for the fifty cents in his pocket? Sure! Call him a [bad no-no name]? Heavens to Betsy, no nay never!

Yeah. Like I'm pretty sure if the average 2020 moderate-left Woke person met people they literally idolized like Martin Luther King or Lincoln or Mansa Musa or anybody from Palestine they'd rather quickly run into a wall of 'wait this person has their own moral compass and cultural context and is saying no-no things'.

You could have an open-minded, fairness-driven Arthur Morgan by the standards of his day who was a 'good guy', but he's still going to have a vocabulary and assumptions that are still going to shock and appall the playerbase.

Obviously, because the goal is not to be a past-simulator but to hit moral and emotional valence. If the message is that he is a good guy, it has to register to the player as being a good guy. "He is saying evil stuff but back then being evil was considered good actually, hence you should feel positively towards his evil behavior and should respect and like him for it" just doesn't work. Either he's good and then he has to be good regardless of whatever circumstances, or he's not. This is how it shows that moral relativism isn't really internalized by woke. There indeed is a universal moral standard that applies across time and space, which is a Christian-inherited idea, but they don't really reflect upon where that comes from, it's just self-evident, as the bill of rights also says.

I just want to latch on to THIS to say that I don't get the deal with Mixtape at all. Did you see that bit with the cassette tape that makes it really obvious that no one at the studio ever handled a cassette tape in real life before? But it licenses songs from the eighties Transformers animated movie and things like that. Who the hell is there that knows The Touch but doesn't know what an audio tape looked like? I'll bet they had an AI shit out a list of nostalgia songs.

I don't think it's implausible that it was made by 'DAE Born in le wrong generation' redditors in their mid-thirties for fellow people of that class. It's pandering and seems to have received a ton more funding than you'd otherwise expect due to some rich connections, but that's hardly atypical in art terms. Even if it's astroturfing there's no huge pot of gold that comes with launching an indie darling videogame.

But those in their mid-thirties today would have handled cassettes at least occasionally in the late 90s as kids, even if CDs were already popular.

I'd get doing AI for like a serious open world game where you need content on a macro scale that's gonna be broadly samey regardless, but surely you'd think simple output of script/dialogue isn't a gating factor in an experience that's pretty linear and self-contained like a TV show with a massive budget or a visual novel like Mixtape.

I'm fascinated that you've labeled this as a left/right thing. Is that true? Have there been studies? Am I the only one that was unaware of this dynamic?

Anyway, the whole thing I think requires two components that we see with AI content discourse: (1) a deep distrust in the systems involved and (2) a belief that you have seen behind the curtain and can discern what's actually true. It's not just art, people are very quick to call out writing as AI when it's not. It turns out that actually most people are really not good at telling the difference unless it's particularly egregious. There are many who are alarmed by this state of affairs and are overcompensating by declaring everything AI.

But the thing is, we are right to distrust the systems! As AI imagery and content gets better and better, there will be no reliable way to tell real from fake. Whether it's marketers hyping a product, trolls being troll-y, or political actors spreading messaging and propaganda for whatever reason, it's happening at a scale that's never been seen before due to how easy it is to churn out content. The news publishers and aggregators are no longer gatekeepers and haven't been for a long time. Someone says something is or is not fake and you have no way to verify it or to know whether you can trust this internet rando (if they even are a real person). Eventually what you will probably see is just more motivated reasoning where everything that supports your side is true and everything that goes against it is clearly shitty AI slop from propaganda machines, and the "two screens" phenomenon is just going to accelerate.

So there are some skills that you need to practice heavily while producing mid content before you can get really good. Fine arts, music.

People doing that tend to lean auth left because they think that in a communist system they'd be able to focus on their art full time.

AI is a real threat to them because it kills their dream of working for an ad agency for a decade to hone their skills before breaking out as real artists.

Note that the dream wasn't as crazy as it sounds. Banksy was a successful commercial illustrator before his big switch.

There are a lot of leftist spaces where you would get a better response saying, “I think the West takes in too many immigrants,” than you would saying, “I think AI art is good.”

Some leftists think the technology itself is intrinsically evil, but almost all of them think that the people building the tech are evil oligarchs who can’t wait to banish 99% of the population to the permanent underclass (or worse).

Tax AI -> UBI

Easy. As long as you wait until if/when this massive and perpetual unemployment actually happens. People have adapted to massive job replacements before by finding new productive things to do and raising standards of living. But if they don't then UBI decreasing the number off people seeking employment is a win win. And massive unemployment would make this politically trivial to gather support for as well.

I just had people get mad at me for saying that a shower curtain having intentionally generic flower pattern made by AI should be a complete non-issue because it’s a fucking shower curtain, not anything that even pretends to be art.

Another data point I discovered today: There are multiple videos of university commencement speakers getting booed every time they bring up AI.

https://x.com/LuizaJarovsky/status/2054654622367977967

https://x.com/ProudSocialist/status/2055773442549407938

I'm fascinated that you've labeled this as a left/right thing. Is that true? Have there been studies?

Only vibes for now. If I had to guess it's something like 55% of people don't care as long the end-product is high quality, 30% are anti AI with some being very loud, and 15% are explicitly pro AI. This is pretty uniform across the political spectrum from the far right to the center left, and then there's a discontinuity at the far left where it's closer to 30% don't care, 65% anti AI, and maybe 5% pro AI.

I also get the feeling that there is a cloud of issues that get mushed together because the internet promotes having sharp delineations and lines. AI has many uses, chat and companionship, solving homework, replacing the search engine, automating desk jobs, automating some parts of software dev, generating image art, doing image editing, generating music etc. Each of these have quite different aspects but they are collapsed in the discourse as pro- or anti-AI. Not to mention the more technical applications that the average user isn't exposed to, like math theorem proving, protein folding, industrial applications like steel cracking prediction and factory quality control or whatnot.

It seems to me that the only ones who like it are gray tribe nerds, "shape rotators" who don't see art in a high regard and consider it as too high-prestige in society, undeservedly, compared to tech which is more meritocratic and measurable and has real effects and practical usefulness. This is somewhat moderated by the fact that AI is getting too good at writing software so middling software devs feel danger, and also see the dollar signs pop up in the eyes of their bosses who push for more and more AI adoption, tech debt be damned.

But actual right wing conservatives or far right people also don't like art being relegated to this role, and would talk about the human spirit, the soul of the work, the effort, the sacrifice etc. The same people typically also don't like mega capitalism and skyscrapers as opposed to cathedrals and so on. The American-style right, which is quite different from the original pro-aristocratic meaning of the term may like it as a form of economic line-go-up thing, but that's quite different. The far-right also doesn't like the power concentration aspect, but they'd frame it less about capitalism and more about Jews.

The only place I see the left right distinction is in online spaces where right adjacent ai enthusiasts claim the distinction is there.

In real life every conservative I know is very AI skeptical and the people least skeptical are your tech savvy blue tribers (like programmers) and those folks seem split between enthusiastic or doomers

Blue tribe conservatives seem to love AI. Red tribe conservatives seem to see it as an interesting new technology that has future applications, but which isn't ready for prime time.

Again, I don’t see this anywhere except people on the internet saying this is so.

It's not just art, people are very quick to call out writing as AI when it's not.

People are quick to call out writing as AI when the writer won't admit it is AI. This isn't apophenia — it's distrust.

Are you doing a bit here?

I'm suggesting that the most likely reason someone is calling out writing as AI "when it's not" is that the person saying it is not is not telling the truth. How many times has one particular poster here been accused of using AI, denying it, and then sheepishly admitting that he "polished" it with AI? And yes, I'm making a little joke by doing it with one of the most obvious AI patterns.

How many times has one particular poster here been accused of using AI, denying it, and then sheepishly admitting that he "polished" it with AI?

On the off-chance that you're referring to me, I'd appreciate evidence that I've ever denied using AI when asked (when I've actually used it, which isn't most of the time). Au contraire, I make it a point to admit that I have, if asked, including being painfully specific with proof-of-work when I have it.

Here is a specific example:

https://www.themotte.org/post/3690/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/434542?context=8#context

I can't think of who else you might be referring to, barring perhaps our dear friend @BurdensomeCount, and even he had the grace to admit to it when specifically challenged. By me. With my mod hat on. I suppose we have had our share of bad-actors who try to get away with AI spam, but that's the kind of thing that gets caught by the moderation filter or explicitly warned/banned.

If you mean someone else entirely, then please disregard, though preferably not before you clarify things.

There's AI-adversity on both sides of the political debate but I'd say the Left Wing tends to be more vocal since it hits on more of their chosen political angles outside of the tackiness/non-tackiness of AI content itself.

Environmentalism with the 'data centers using water' thing, wealth inequality, the vast majority of compensated creative roles in society tend to lean left-wing and it's a direct pressure on that as a line of work.

Has anyone coined AI Derangement Syndrome (AIDS) yet? Because this is just typical AIDS.

A song from South Park comes to mind. :)

Everyone has AIDS! AIDS AIDS AIDS!

Edit: Team America.

There is an actual South Park reference one could make. "I lost so much weight because I have AIDS! I want to give everyone AIDS, even kids!"

Hah, I was thinking of that, too.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=JizzeERcZjg

Holy YouTube URL nominative determinism, Batman.

Did they use that song in South Park, like the montage song? I thought that was written for Lease, the Rent parody in the Team America film.

The montage song is easily one of my favorite comedy gags of all time.

I think you are right. Edited.

I think a couple people have arrived at it independently, too good to leave on the table.

It's funny to watch people squirm, yes, but plebes making a bad argument for their position doesn't mean there aren't good arguments for it. The bottom line is "Well, you can't tell the difference" is not actually an acceptable criterion for an ersatz, and AI is not even related to this principle.

If you walk into an artisan coffee shop and the baristas correctly sniff you out as an unwashed peasant, that in no way justifies them replacing your high-altitude Kenyan light roast with Folgers ash and sniggering at you as you blissfully drink up. If a nearby patron looks over to see who's smoking and gracefully informs you that you may have been bamboozled, you'd be rightly upset. If the baristas respond with "Look, we assumed you couldn't tell the difference and decided to save money. But if you insist, we'll do a proper double-blind test, and if we can reject the unwashed peasant hypothesis at p=.05, you get your money back, but if not, sorry," you'd be justified in being incensed at them at never returning to that establishment again, despite the fact that they're correct. This is basically the AI scenario above, just without any AI, which shows that the argument has nothing to do with AI (you just gotta add AI to everything nowadays and pretend it was relevant). The same principle applies everywhere: a jeweler selling quartz instead of diamond, a luthier giving you a street cat instead of a Strad, etc.

Now, as this is a rationalist forum, I have to assume at least half of people are going to be like "um, but I personally am totally fine with drinking ash, decorating my home with pyrite, and listening to my daughter summon the street cats, so what's the big deal?" Well, I'm glad you asked:

First, just because you can't tell the difference doesn't mean there isn't a difference, and being consistently exposed to correct labeling is how you learn to tell the difference! You can, in fact, with relatively little effort, learn to tell the difference between a good Kenyan coffee and Folgers ash, but you can only do this if these are honestly labeled in the first place. Having a malicious barista exploiting your lack of culture inhibits you from learning the difference and becoming cultured.

Second, quality is usually grounded in general principles that actually make a lot of sense. For example, good coffee beans are largely a matter of exploiting stress responses in bean development, and bad coffee beans are basically fat beans (much like the People of Walmart buying them, incidentally), which is why high-quality beans often come from high-altitude plantations -- it's difficult for the coffee to grow there! -- and why they tend to be expensive. The fact that there is a pretty real correspondence between "good/poor quality human" and "good/poor quality coffee bean" and that this is basically consistent with other interesting trends in agriculture is the kind of thing you never notice if your worldview just stops at "Well I couldn't tell the difference."

Third, provenance is an essential form of discrimination for learning about the world. I can fabricate a bunch of Egyptian artifacts and sell them to you under the logic "well, you clearly can't tell the difference, so what's the big deal?" The big deal is by studying my fraudulent artifacts, you will likely come to false conclusions about what was actually going on in ancient Egypt. And yes, this is a constant source of trouble in fields like anthropology and paleontology, which often gives these fields a bad name, but the problem isn't the fields themselves: it's that polite society prevents dealing with fraudsters at the level of violence required to actually prevent fraud. Fraud of this sort is destruction of knowledge about the past, in the sense that information can be destroyed by burying it in enough noise (aka, "Is the Library of Babel full or empty?" Well, it contains zero information entropy!)

Anyway, part of the reason progressives have such difficulty articulating their case is that being concerned with authenticity and provenance is not at all compatible with the rest of what they do. Concern with authenticity and provenance lands one squarely at "Ok, then transwomen aren't women, Africans with German passports aren't German, and fresh agitprop from Disney released under the Star Wars brand they bought isn't Star Wars." You can't whine about the value of artists and faithfully representing their intent, then march off and re-release Classic WoW with the male and female genders removed.

This is mixing two different issues. You're arguing against fraud, as in the buyer was promised one thing and was given another (e.g. quartz vs diamond). Provenance matters in that case because the transaction is explicitly about provenance.

That's not what happened here. Nobody was sold a counterfeit Monet. The problem was that people claimed they could identify AI art by looking at the image, then confidently condemned a real Monet as obvious AI slop. The lesson is that many people are laundering provenance anxiety as aesthetic expertise. When they think something is AI they suddenly "see" flaws that don't exist.

"Ok, then transwomen aren't women, Africans with German passports aren't German, and fresh agitprop from Disney released under the Star Wars brand they bought isn't Star Wars."

I was with you until then. Rogue One, the first two seasons of the Mandalorian and Andor were some of the best Star Wars stuff since the 80s. And as much as the sequels were soulless derivative nonsense, you can’t say “only the good shows/films are Star Wars” otherwise you’d have to discard 90% of the franchise including the prequels too.

otherwise you’d have to discard 90% of the franchise including the prequels too.

I rather liked the first season of Mandalorian (never got around to watching the second) but discarding the prequels would be a complete no-brainer. Jar Jar Binks, anyone?

otherwise you’d have to discard 90% of the franchise including the prequels too.

Your terms are acceptable.

Rogue One bored me shitless. I don't even remember anyone's name. The kind of thing that would have been a comic book or something back in the day.

Rogue One, the first two seasons of the Mandalorian and Andor were some of the best Star Wars stuff since the 80s.

Well, yes, relatively speaking, they were best among the class of "Star Wars stuff", but they were ultimately just ... okay, not particularly amazing. And make no mistake, creators of Andor were intentionally packing it with liberal-leftist agit-prop. People just have forgot propaganda can be done well.

Sure but how is that not in line with what Star Wars is all about? George Lucas wasn’t exactly shy about the leftist political messaging, he admitted being influenced by the Vietnam war with the rebellion being the Viet Cong and the Galactic Empire the US, he compared the Emperor to Nixon. Imagine if he’d made the films while Trump was president.

Like c’mon, the main arc of the prequels is about democracy being willingly handed to an evil strongman dictator over a manufactured threat!

I think political messaging in the original Star Wars is mostly in visual design. Aside "the indigenous tribesmen rise up" plotline of the 3rd installment, most of the drama is interpersonal and operatic. Protagonist literally starts out to rescue a royal princess who also happens to be a leader of the rebellion. Bit uncertain which vibes are stronger, running on the fumes of WW2 Allied imaginary (where constitutional monarchs and left-wing rebels found themselves allies of convenience) or tapping into a half-fairytale half-Shakespearen logic of righteous and popular monarchs. Protagonists are important because they are princes of magical blood.

Andor is the first installment of Star Wars I've seen where acts of rebellion are presented as a political mass uprising of city-dwelling people of industrial society the leftists have liked to imagine. There is a speech that literally spells out the theory of compounding individual action resulting in unstoppable mass action. Initial organized insurrectin is spearheaded by politically aware revolutionary vanguardists, nearly rhyming with the Leninist theory.

George Lucas wasn’t exactly shy about the leftist political messaging,

I think it is more "Democracy, Fuck Yeah" than left-wing - the aesthetics of the OG Empire are generically evil rather than distinctively Nazi* and the reading of the original trilogy where the Empire is the USSR works just as well (hence Reagan using it in his famous speech), and Lucas moved between endorsing and not endorsing it depending on the political winds. The Empire of the prequels is a consolidating dictatorship following an autogolpe, again with generically evil aesthetics - Lucas cited Napoleon and Caesar (who are not obviously left or right-coded in 2026) as inspiration as well as Hitler. The First Order is obviously fascist, but that is just lazy filmmaking. Lucas gets the thing Orwell gets in a way the makers of the sequels don't - that it is the nature of tyranny and not the political rhetoric used to justify it that matters.

If "Democracy, Fuck Yeah" comes across as a left-wing political message to you, that says more about the right-wing in your country than it does about George Lucas.

* The only scene in the original trilogy directly ripped off from Triumph of the Will is the finale of ANH where the Rebels put on an awards ceremony with aesthetics that Hitler would have approved of.

The aesthetics of the Empire in SW:ANH were definitely Nazi; of course, that was (and remains) an American's conception of "generic evil". What they didn't have is the Nazi's signature Jew thing; the Empire was human-supremacist but they didn't really play that up.

Democracy isn't really a big thing in ANH either. We hear the Empire dissolved the Senate, but the Senate contains aristocrats and royalty (like Princess Leia). The whole elective royalty thing in the prequels is a total retcon.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the human supremacist thing is mostly an EU thing, it wasn't really part of the movies?

Agree that the original trilogy at least was basically apolitical and the empire is portrayed as 'generic ruthless tyranny' with Nazi aesthetics being there mostly because they look cool.

It wasn't an explicit part of the scripts, but they did pointedly only have humans as Imperial officers, never any aliens. I don't know if that was a worldbuilding decision, so much as wanting the dour totalitarians to all look alike while the plucky ragtag goodies come in all shapes and sizes because it's useful visual shorthand; but it was by no means a retcon.

More comments

If you walk into an artisan coffee shop and the baristas correctly sniff you out as an unwashed peasant, that in no way justifies them replacing your high-altitude Kenyan light roast with Folgers ash and sniggering at you as you blissfully drink up.

That's because paying money imposes an obligation to not cheat you regardless of how good your reasons are. Reading reddit is free.

First, just because you can't tell the difference doesn't mean there isn't a difference

It isn't absolute proof, but that's a general problem with proving anything that's hard to measure. Widespread enough inability to tell the difference is certainly evidence that there's no difference.

And yes, provenance matters, but where do you draw the line between "they can't articulate their reasons but they are good" and "their reasons are bad"? (Ignoring for the moment the issue of Monet losing his eyesight.) You can't just indefinitely steelman bad reasons. At some point you have to be able to say that someone's reasons are bad and not make up better ones.

(I also think your examples aren't provenance. Even for transwomen, if we had Culture-level technology or magic that could completely change someone's sex so that the only difference was that transwomen had different provenance, the trans issue would be very different.)

(I also think your examples aren't provenance. Even for transwomen, if we had Culture-level technology or magic that could completely change someone's sex so that the only difference was that transwomen had different provenance, the trans issue would be very different.)

What about psychology? The male brain is very different from the female brain, in multiple ways. At the level of transhumanism we are talking about, you could give transwomen a female brain as well, I guess, but could they still be meaningfully said to be the same person after that?

From "Changing Emotions" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:

What about sex? (Somehow it’s always about sex, at least when it’s men asking the question.) Remapping the connections from the remapped somatic areas to the pleasure center will… give you a vagina-shaped penis, more or less. That doesn’t make you a woman. You’d still be attracted to girls, and no, that would not make you a lesbian; it would make you a normal, masculine man wearing a female body like a suit of clothing.

What would it take for a man to actually become the female version of themselves?

Well… what does that sentence even mean? I am reminded of someone who replied to the statement “Obama would not have become President if he hadn’t been black” by saying “If Obama hadn’t been black, he wouldn’t have been Obama” i.e. “There is no non-black Obama who could fail to become President”. (You know you’re in trouble when non-actual possible worlds start having political implications.)

The person you would have been if you’d been born with an X chromosome in place of your Y chromosome (or vice versa) isn’t you. If you had a twin female sister, the two of you would not be the same person. There are genes on your Y chromosome that tweaked your brain to some extent, helping to construct your personal identity—alleles with no analogue on the X chromosome. There is no version of you, even genetically, who is the opposite sex.

And if we halt your body, swap out your Y chromosome for your father’s X chromosome, and restart your body… well. That doesn’t sound too safe, does it? Your neurons are already wired in a male pattern, just as your body already developed in a male pattern. I don’t know what happens to your testicles, and I don’t know what happens to your brain, either. Maybe your circuits would slowly start to rewire themselves under the influence of the new genetic instructions. At best you’d end up as a half-baked cross between male brain and female brain. At worst you’d go into a permanent epileptic fit and die—we’re dealing with circumstances way outside the evolutionary context under which the brain was optimized for robustness. Either way, your brain would not look like your twin sister’s brain that had developed as female from the beginning.

So to actually become female...

We’re talking about a massive transformation here, billions of neurons and trillions of synapses rearranged. Not just form, but content—just like a male judo expert would need skills repatterned to become a female judo expert, so too, you know how to operate a male brain but not a female brain. You are the equivalent of a judo expert at one, but not the other. You have cognitive reflexes, and consciously learned cognitive skills as well.

If I fell asleep and woke up as a true woman—not in body, but in brain—I don’t think I’d call her “me”. The change is too sharp, if it happens all at once.

Transform the brain gradually? Hm… now we have to design the intermediate stages, and make sure the intermediate stages make self-consistent sense. Evolution built and optimized a self-consistent male brain and a self-consistent female brain; it didn’t design the parts to be stable during an intermediate transition between the two. Maybe you’ve got to redesign other parts of the brain just to keep working through the transition.

What happens when, as a woman, you think back to your memory of looking at Angelina Jolie photos as a man? How do you empathize with your past self of the opposite sex? Do you flee in horror from the person you were? Are all your life’s memories distant and alien things? How can you remember, when your memory is a recorded activation pattern for neural circuits that no longer exist in their old forms? Do we rewrite all your memories, too?

Well… maybe we could retain your old male brainware through the transformation, and set up a dual system of male and female circuits… such that you are currently female, but retain the ability to recall and empathize with your past memories as if they were running on the same male brainware that originally laid them down...

Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? It seems that to transform a male brain into someone who can be a real female, we can’t just rewrite you as a female brain. That just kills you and replaces you with someone re-imagined as a different person. Instead we have to rewrite you as a more complex brain with a novel, non-ancestral architecture that can cross-operate in realtime between male and female modes, so that a female can process male memories with a remembered context that includes the male brainware that laid them down.

To make you female, and yet still you, we have to step outside the human design space in order to preserve continuity with your male self.

And when your little adventure is over and you go back to being a man—if you still want to, because even if your past self wanted to go back afterward, why should that desire be binding on your present self?—then we’ve got to keep the dual architecture so you don’t throw up every time you remember what you did on your vacation.

Assuming you did have sex as a woman, rather than fending off all comers because because they didn’t look like they were interested in a long-term relationship.

But then, you probably would experiment. You’ll never have been a little girl, and you won’t remember going through high school where any girl who slept with a boy was called a slut by the other girls. You’ll remember a very atypical past for a woman—but there’s no way to fix that while keeping you the same person.

And all that was just what it takes to ranma around within human-space, from the male pole to the female pole and back again.

What if you wanted to move outside the human space entirely?

In one sense, a sex change is admittedly close to a worst-case scenario: a fixed target not optimized for an easy transition from your present location; involving, not just new brain areas, but massive coordinated changes to brain areas already in place.

It might be a lot easier to just add one more emotion to those already there. Maybe.

In another sense, though, a sex change is close to a best-case scenario: the prototype of your destination is already extensively tested as a coherent mind, and known to function well within a human society that already has a place for it (including companions to talk to).

It might be a lot harder to enter uncharted territory. Maybe.

I’m not saying—of course—that it could never, ever be done. But it’s another instance of the great chicken-and-egg dilemma that is the whole story of present-day humanity, the great challenge that intelligent life faces in its flowering: growing up is a grownup-level problem. You could try to build a cleanly-designed artificial grownup (self-improving Friendly AI) to foresee the pathway ahead and chart out a nonfatal course. Or you could plunge ahead yourself, and hope that you grew faster than your problems did.

That post is a bit funny when you remember that HRT is a thing that already exists, and although it’s not anywhere close to a fantasy trans humanist gender swap, it really does push you a decent % of the way towards the opposite sex in terms of physiology and psychology.

There’s a few studies out there studying the changes in brain structure pre and post-HRT, and there’s also measurable personality differences and differences in traits like verbal and spatial fluency.

I can easily imagine a sophisticated futuristic treatment that drastically increases neuroplasticity in the brain and fully rewires it over a few months. No weird mind uploading necessary.

You’d still be attracted to girls, and no, that would not make you a lesbian; it would make you a normal, masculine man wearing a female body like a suit of clothing.

At first yes, but you’ll quickly notice a massive drop in libido from the lack of testosterone. Then over the course of many months, maybe years, your sexual desires will likely start changing, you won’t be attracted to women the same way, you might even start to find men attractive. Going from 100% straight man to 100% straight woman is pretty rare but at least a point or two on the Kinsey scale is expected. And of course you’ll find the way you experience emotions is going to be quite different.

What happens when, as a woman, you think back to your memory of looking at Angelina Jolie photos as a man? How do you empathize with your past self of the opposite sex? Do you flee in horror from the person you were? Are all your life’s memories distant and alien things?

I think I can answer that one. No, you will most likely not empathise with your past self. Maybe the closest thing would be remembering things you did while drunk that you’d never do sober?

then we’ve got to keep the dual architecture so you don’t throw up every time you remember what you did on your vacation.

Is it really that disgusting for a straight man to think about having sex with a man?

Is it really that disgusting for a straight man to think about having sex with a man?

I think that's generally a comorbidity with being straight, yeah (complaints about miscegenation have a similar root back when race was a purity thing). I get that the enterprise world has tried to tamp down expressions of 'yeah that's disgusting', and it's not, uh, PC to say it- but(t) in places that don't care about that you'll still hear expressions of it.

It's definitely a queer thing to even consider much less actively pursue; hell, if most women take it as an active cost to have sex with men [and I'm pretty sure most men understand this to some degree], why would a man want to do it if he's not getting the other stuff women are, traditionally, supposed to get out of sex? At least with women you usually get wine'd and dine'd, men just hear the Grindr ping and proceed straight to the bath house (or whatever- I get that's a simplification but, like, is the stereotype that inaccurate?).

The only time it's not gay for a straight man to think about it is if they're 2D and pulling off the female uniform well, but that's also purpose-built superstimulus. Most men don't look or act like that (outside of the rare femboy, and attraction to those is generally waved off as "anything that makes my dick hard is a woman"- like, we get it, that's why it's funny to fluster each other over "traps are gay")[1].

it really does push you a decent % of the way towards the opposite sex in terms of physiology and psychology.

This is where you lose me, because of the people that I know that are on HRT, none have changed in this way. Now, I guess you could say that "well, doesn't that just prove they have female brains all along?", but their general mannerisms do not suggest that was true to begin with. (Which is why I generally tend to think of them as, well, ex-men.)

[1] Though I will point out that, especially if they're tall, easily-flustered, and have a cute face... I mean, it's not like I wouldn't consider it (and I suspect that the emotions I feel when considering it are closer to what women [are supposed to] feel about men, though I am suspicious enough of the "euphoria boner" effect that I'm unwilling to say the mental pathways being activated here are not just projection). Not like I haven't been exposed to it from some other ostensibly-straight guy being attracted to me for what in hindsight may have been similar reasons, either, but then again most LGBT discourse/definition is so incredibly selfish and destructive that the categories have no explanatory power beyond a means to justify the same so I can't in good faith claim any of this fits the bill.

hell, if most women take it as an active cost to have sex with men [and I'm pretty sure most men understand this to some degree], why would a man want to do it if he's not getting the other stuff women are, traditionally, supposed to get out of sex? At least with women you usually get wine'd and dine'd

Seeing it in those transactional terms is a bit sad. But I’m sure you get that it’s not like wine and dining, or romance in general, is the reward while sex is the cost, it’s more like it sets the scene for sex to actually mean something and be enjoyable.

because of the people that I know that are on HRT, none have changed in this way.

In what sense, they haven’t noticeably changed at all, both physically and mentally? Or just their mannerisms/personality? Because unless they’ve got a terrible endocrinologist (unfortunately quite common though) or are terribly unhealthy, there should be obvious differences like a deeper voice and facial hair for trans men, soft skin and different fat distribution for trans women.

they haven’t noticeably changed at all, both physically and mentally?

Yes. To be fair, he was pretty girly (and pretty big) before. I guess she smells the part now, though that's complicated by failing to take regular showers and living in a house that has a strong natural odor, and the transition isn't as clear moobs to boobs.

it’s more like it sets the scene for sex to actually mean something and be enjoyable.

Hmm, I guess the collaborative model should suggest men are supposed to do that as well. (At the risk of doubling down on a poor argument), maybe I'm just thinking the setup for the sex is what's doing the getting off if the partner is themselves not particularly attractive/somewhat obnoxious during the sex.

(It also reminds me that hookup culture is probably better seen as a low-risk way to have a bunch of different glimpses into how this works and not "just a step up from masturbation". I guess that requires nuance or something.)

Is it really that disgusting for a straight man to think about having sex with a man?

Scientific study from year 2017 (news article):

  • 120 male participants viewed photographs in six categories: neutral items (e. g., a binder clip); disgusting items (e. g., a bowl full of maggots); man+woman public displays of affection; man+woman kissing; man+man public displays of affection; and man+man kissing. Afterward, their disgust was measured through levels of a digestive enzyme that appears in the saliva of a stressed human.

  • A statistically significant increase in enzyme level was found only when comparing man+man kissing to neutral items (p < 0.2 %), comparing man+man kissing to man+woman public displays of affection (p < 2.0 %), and comparing disgusting items to neutral items (p < 3.6 %). This result was obtained among all participants, not just among the ones who self-reported as disliking homosexual men in an online survey that was administered prior to the experiment.

Presumably, actual sex would prompt an even greater response than mere kissing.

Is it really that disgusting for a straight man to think about having sex with a man?

Generally, yes.

At first yes, but you’ll quickly notice a massive drop in libido from the lack of testosterone. Then over the course of many months, maybe years, your sexual desires will likely start changing, you won’t be attracted to women the same way, you might even start to find men attractive. Going from 100% straight man to 100% straight woman is pretty rare but at least a point or two on the Kinsey scale is expected. And of course you’ll find the way you experience emotions is going to be quite different.

This is really fascinating. I've heard similar commentary online, but it's hard for me to imagine "finding the way you experience emotions to be quite different."

I think you could write down a list of assumptions about what people would expect a magically perfect gender swap to include. And I think this list would be reasonably consistent from person to person, even if Eliezer can't compress that list of assumptions into an algorithm which says "for every gender-specific trait no matter what it is, do X".

I think the problems are deeper than you suggest, even in the presence of gender swapping surgery that actually works (which is a fantasy for the foreseeable future). For one, I'm told "lived experience" is important: even if I change my gender to female and get a functioning uterus, I still know what it's like to jerk off, to piss on the toilet seat while sleepy, etc., and as a woman, I'm not supposed to know that.

But it gets thornier than this: when you gender swap, your phenotype is now a dishonest presentation of your genotype, which messes up the dynamics of sexual selection. Rather than dating a beautiful woman who is content as she is, you're dating a synthetic facade: the actual selection effect at play now is not "beautiful woman", but "mentally-unstable person who spent lots of money to try to convince others they're a beautiful woman." Not the same at all!

I don't see how magitechnology helps you escape this. Provenance really does matter.

A perfect impossible change would change your genotype as well.

I'd also imagine that if sex changes truly worked perfectly, they wouldn't be a magnet for mental instability. People who got them wouldn't have to fool themselves into believing that the inaccuracy doesn't matter, since there would be no inaccuracy.

The writer imposes the cost of attention on the reader, just as the barista imposes a cost of money onto the customer. These costs aren't the same but is not sufficient to brush that analogy off with, "Well, they are a paying customer!" There are more ways to pay than with money. There is still some level of duty a writer has not to defraud their reader, commensurate with this cost the writer imposes.

The cost would really only be relevant if there was some reasonable expectation for honesty or accuracy on the internet - especially on social media - like there is in a paid transaction, though. And there is no such expectation. In fact, it's such a cliche that the internet is filled with lies that the one thing Abraham Lincoln is loved for, the very reason he was iconic enough to be put on the penny, is that he warned us not to believe everything you read on the internet over a century before the internet even existed.

Everything imposes some trivial cost. The cost for viewing a reddit post made up of mostly a picture is negligible, even if it's nonzero.

People aren't interested in AI media just like people aren't interested in watching chess bots over Magnus Carlson. The reasoning is post hoc and doesn't really matter. AI "art" (I use quotes because that term is used too loosely, not because it's AI) will only really be popular when people use AI to build their own ideas.

Issue with this discussion is that there's different ways of "appreciating" art to begin with. AI can definitely replace functional art uses like for corporate advertising or fetishes or as someone else mentioned game modding.

But fine art can't be replaced by AI. Not because it lacks the human element (most humans can't make it in the fine art world!) but because fine art is personal. Monet is a talented artist sure but half the draw of owning a piece is that you own a Monet. John from Ohio can not make a Monet. AI can not make a Monet. Only Monet himself could make a Monet. They can do his style, they might even be technically better than Monet himself. Doesn't really matter.

It's the same thing that happens with other fine art pieces. It's often not the what as it is the who. Anyone can tape a banana to a wall. No one but Maurizio Cattelan can make a Maurizio Cattelan banana on wall. His reputation and fame in the world as a satirist is the value. That's why his sold for 6.2 million and your art sells for nothing.

You can see this even in how we ordinary folk still say things like "It's a Monet", even we recognize the fame is the main value. And also important it needs to be the real original. People aren't paying 10 million for replica Action Comics #1. Most people aren't hanging a replica Mona Lisa on their wall. It's not the human value, it's the personal value. AI art can not do this. It is not exclusive enough and it is not personal enough. Because everyone can have a Midjourney, no one really can.

Most people aren't hanging a replica Mona Lisa on their wall.

What they say is that a print of the Mona Lisa wouldn't be like the real thing because the eyes wouldn't track you round the room. I have seen the painted replica Mona Lisa (by one of Leonardo's students) at Leonardo's home in Amboise, and the eyes on that did track me round the room (much more effectively because the room wasn't rammed), so I am suspicious that this claim would turn out to be false if you had a high-quality giclee print.

That said, the class of people who want to put large quantities of fine art on their walls but can't afford decent paintings buy modern, signed limited-edition prints and not giclees of Old Masters. I think this is straightforwardly snobbery-driven, but I don't really understand the mechanism (although I realise I have unthinkingly done the same thing decorating my own house).

I think this is a complex class based thing. There are probably seven or eight clearly defined social sub-classes of upper middle class people; the home of two childless widely published academics and the home of an investment banker - big law lawyer couple with three kids and the house of two doctors who live in a second-tier city but consider themselves to be particularly cultured and the home of the chair or chief executive of a major arts or humanities nonprofit and the country home of an insurance executive and a veteran homemaker in local county life descended from the minor gentry will all be vastly different in nevertheless predictable ways.

In general, prints of old masters were for a long time considered somewhat trashy as a hangover from the Trumpian 80s, following which new money Essex types in the UK and white ethnics in the US decorating their homes in sort of gold leaf rococo or baroque pastiche complete with titanic gold-framed prints was considered the thing to distance oneself from if one wanted to be more respectably PMC (even if one was from, or only one generation removed from, the very same background) by the early-mid ‘90s. Today I think that’s changing, since 2018 or so when the Deano and McMansion types had for some years adopted a twisted version of 2000s beige Scandi minimalism the upper-middle class meta has clearly returned to full-on maximalism complete with a lot of (even in dreary London) very dark 19th century living rooms and antique shop clutter.

Today I think that’s changing, since 2018 or so when the Deano and McMansion types had for some years adopted a twisted version of 2000s beige Scandi minimalism the upper-middle class meta has clearly returned to full-on maximalism complete with a lot of (even in dreary London) very dark 19th century living rooms and antique shop clutter.

You have seen through me. We were at the leading edge of the trend when we redecorated our Victorian terrace (rowhouse for Americans) in the original coffee-and-crimson colour scheme in 2017. The stated reason is that the reflections when direct sunlight shines on beige walls cause various autistic family members to have sensory issues.

I think it can work in those late georgian / regency terraces with high ceilings on the first or raised ground floor. And, with enough care taken, in very modern apartment buildings with a nice contrast if they have floor to ceiling glass windows (some people consider this trashy, I will accept their judgment).

Scandi minimalism with off-white colours is a costly signal of cleanliness - it looks awful if cluttered, messy, or grubby. So if you can pull it off either you are very zen about material possessions, or you are very careful about tidiness and can probably afford a SAHM and/or servants.

Victorian maximalism copes much better with mild dirt and mess. (For the OG Victorians, mostly coal smoke - it was impossible to keep anything clean in smog-era London). We have two boys.

Not a fan of Scandi minimalism at all, it reminds me of middle age Dutch iconoclasm. Coffee is just a much nicer colour scheme if you want to actually live in your home (I reserve judgment on crimson, to me if you overdo it you risk your house looking like a bordello).

In a specific house, I defer to the judgement of the lares, who have been there before me and will remain after me. And the lares of my current home like crimson.

Laying this bare is how AI destroys the mystique of art.

If Picasso's last act on earth was to prompt an AI to make him an image then he immediately died, I'm sure somebody would be interested in licensing/buying that image on some level as an expression of his life's output. Which obviously an absurd hypothetical but how is AI not just another tool?

Which obviously an absurd hypothetical but how is AI not just another tool?

It absolutely is a tool, but I think that the amount of microdecisions made per artistic subunit matters to a lot of people.

In a human made novel, there are hundreds of microdecisions per page. Choices to use one word and not another.

With AI stories, the nature of prompting is that there end up being far fewer human microdecisions per page. I would guess 10:1 is a good conservative estimate of the typical case in both instances.

Some people want to know that a human being might have consciously or unconsciously used this word in this sentence, which works as foreshadowing for this section later in the book. With an AI assisted story, most such cases are going to be complete serendipity with no greater intention or meaning added by the human author of the piece.

Depends on the level of editing prowess I'd say. Something like the Will Stancil show involves a ton of storyboarding and curating generations per my understanding. It's hard not to point at the Will Stancil show and say that it isn't art even if it is derivative.

https://x.com/i/status/1922851901084672173

I also unironically agree with this take. That aigen is unequivocally art in the expression of trolling and a point of view.

A slight tangent. About a year back, I made a Rimworld mod. Minuscule in scope: a handful of infantry-grade railguns, designed to work exclusively with Combat Extended, a popular and (depending on who you ask) deeply contentious mod.

CE is something I refuse to play without. It transforms vanilla Rimworld's ranged combat from "two blind, drunk, concussed gangbangers shooting airsoft pistols at each other" into something resembling tactical depth and realism. Every self-respecting gun nut has it installed.

(Sorry Zorba. Rimworld combat is dogshit. I've been on CE since at least Alpha 14.)

The trouble with adding weapons is that they require art. Sprites, at the bare minimum. I am not an artist. For years, going back to early Stable Diffusion, I had been trying to coax AI image generators into producing decent guns in the Rimworld style, with results ranging from "comically bad" to "merely embarrassing". I gave up several times. That changed with GPT Image 1 and Nano Banana, which, after a fair bit of prompting and selection, finally produced passable output.

I should specify that the vanilla artwork for Rimworld is also awful. Nobody plays it for the graphics. The guns are particularly egregious; they look like plastic goop, especially if you use mods that let you zoom the camera in. Most self-respecting modders make their art to substantially higher standards, even if the game itself doesn't reward photorealism.

(Sorry again Zorba, but it's true.)

What I ended up with was decent. Probably well above the average amateur human artist-modder, though not as good as the best.

I also tried to get the AI of the day to write the code for me. This did not go well. Rimworld code is niche, Combat Extended code is niche-squared, and the available models simply weren't up to the task. It also might have been a skill issue on my end.

In the end, I wrote the code myself, asking for guidance on the Discord and lifting scaffolding from open-source and permissively licensed mods. The result wasn't perfect, but it worked.

Then came the part I was actually dreading. I posted the finished product, AI-generated art included, for feedback. I expected a shitstorm and I got one, though smaller than feared, and largely confined to one reasonably famous modder. He is best known (or most notorious) for using what can be charitably described as fetish art for the thumbnails of his mods, regardless of their actual content. To my pleasant surprise, the majority of the other modders were either neutral or supportive (one of them, I believe, lurks here, hi). I told him to get bent and stick to the fetish art. I explained that I was making free content, in my spare time, and that his gatekeeping was somewhere between unwarranted and retarded. I even said that I fully expect my own profession, the one that pays the bills, to get automated eventually. I can't stop that. I'm just enjoying the newfound ability to work around my utter lack of talent at the visual arts. The reception of this position was, again, better than I had any right to expect. Most Rimworld modders work for free, and they understand that even a small mod represents real opportunity cost.

The mod went up. It was unabashedly niche, but over a hundred people downloaded it and a dozen favorited it.

That was almost a year ago. Recently, bored, I considered making a better version with the new tools at my disposal. In hindsight, I should have used my Claude Max plan for the code, but I now know enough to bumble through. I made new art assets and posted them for feedback. Enough time had passed that most people had forgotten the original controversy and were appreciative. Then, on cue, that same jerk-off showed up, and we had our usual sparring match. I was expecting it. What I wasn't expecting was that, even after the AI-generated nature of the new assets was disclosed, the majority continued being supportive.

That included some seriously talented modders, ones known for producing high quality art. It warms the cockles of my heart to see people being reasonable, or at least on my side. Their verdict was that the art was now better than average, up to the standards of the best human work being done in Rimworld. The guns even made sense from a design/realism standpoint, GPT-Image 2 in particular is remarkably intelligent, and it knows what distinguishes a near future but plausible railgun from a standard firearm in Hollywood furniture. Prompting it is a piece of cake.

I'll probably get to a proper version after my exam. The interesting thing is the trajectory: making the art itself went from impossible, to a PITA, to nearly trivial. Maybe I'll tackle something more ambitious. I have thoughts about Rimworld's medical system and its approach to mental health and psychology. I've helped on a mod that fixes some of the issues, though my role there is best described as "local doctor you can ping for advice on trauma medicine". I've done freelance consulting on much larger projects, including some tactical shooters. A few systems in Gray Zone Warfare (a Tarkov competitor) made it in on my recommendation. Good times.

The best part of the anti-AI controversy is how easy it is to ignore the detractors, particularly when you aren't trying to make money off any of this. All I want is the opportunity to make cool things, for my own enjoyment and that of others. If someone isn't cool with that, that is their problem.

Interesting story. I've played a ton of modded Rimworld, though I've not made any mods for it myself. I have made mods for games like Vic 3 (here's one of my mods) and AoW4, and have used AI for the art. Nobody said anything, though granted my mods don't have a ton of users or anything. But still, it seems like there's a weird parallel world going on where all you might get is a snide comment here and there, while on the other hand are threads like this excoriating AI use in mods in pretty harsh terms. If anything it seems like the anti-AI hysteria has only gotten worse over the past few years.

I've had the displeasure of seeing that Reddit thread. The takes in it are so bad that they're known to the state of California to cause cancer.

Fortunate, the people chimping out in public are not the same people who make mods. I don't know about the VIC 3 modding community, but the CE discord is chill. My mod didn't get much backlash while published, and there are plenty of mostly AI made mods that do way more in terms of mechanics of depth, all without popular outcry. The people on the subreddit can cry away, they have no real power over things.

I did a post a while back about how slop has always existed and AI slop doesn't change that. Slop art has existed since at least the 50s, and you've probably seen more of it in real life than you have actual art. They're called decor paintings and they're mass produced in Asia. You buy them at places like Hobby Lobby or those starving artist exhibitions they have in ballrooms of chain hotels. They may have a dozen paintings that are almost identical, all organized based on general style and color scheme so they'll match the rug and upholstery. They could have done the same experiment 50 years ago to prove that the guy on the street couldn't tell the imitation Winslow Homer from a cheap motel wall from the real thing.

If you want to get highbrow about the whole thing, watch the Orson Welles documentary F for Fake. It's about hoaxes in general, but he focuses on an art forger named Elmyr de Hory, who would fake the style of recognized (and deceased) artists and pass them off as works that were newly discovered. He ended up getting caught and spent time in jail, but it raises questions about the nature of what we value in art. The same can be said about the desire to have an original. If the only thing you care about is the immediate aesthetic impact, then the going rate for a Monet should be about $250, which is the price the Met sells reproductions for. Cheaper if you get a print. The frame will cost more than the painting. But that's obviously not the case, and it never has been the case, and nothing about AI will change that.

I agree with this take, and predict that AI will disrupt marketing and stock imagery a lot, but fine art relatively little.

AI has already essentially destroyed stock imagery. Both in terms of being able to make any meaningful money from stock images but also from the other side by polluting stock image sites so badly that it’s becoming harder and harder to find suitable non-AI-slop images.

but also from the other side by polluting stock image sites so badly that it’s becoming harder and harder to find suitable non-AI-slop images.

To be fair, stock images were AI-slop before there even was AI.

Yes but no. Many were sloppy but now they've been flooded with very specific looking slop and it's not just stock clipart but also stock photo sites that have been the target where the difference is much worse.

Interesting, I would have expected people just to go to the AI directly, rather than through a stock image site. I used to do marketing assistant work, and the AIs can even now do 80% of that job, but the finding and getting licensing bundles on stock images part of it was significantly more annoying than writing prompts.

People don’t go to stock image sites for AI. The problem is ”creators” flood the sites with AI images that then drown out ”manual” images while being almost entirely slop with a few very similar looks.

If they want AI images, they’ll just prompt AI themselves.

"Fine" art is culturally irrelevant and has been for generations.

Agreed. My rough prediction of the future is that even if Musk's utopian future happens, people will still compete on status due to human nature. An almost certain measure of competition will be through the production, collection and presentation of human made 'bespoke' goods (even if they are of less quality than the AI produced stuff).

Its Barbershop poles all the way down.

I've mentioned it before but this is part of the premise of Diamond Age. With easy nanotechnological manufacturing most consumer goods are free or practically free. So of course the wealthy only wear hand made clothes and write with ink pens on hand pressed paper. Sheets of diamond are practically free, so they have genuine glass unlike poor people.

Fine art will almost certainly survive if only to continue serving as a defacto entry point to money laundering.

To just repeat myself:

Real art is made by an artist, and involves creative decisions. Algorithms can't do that. People hate that sense that the image is inauthentic or 'not real', and if the AI art is curated well enough that they don't notice it's AI, then they were fooled, and people hate being fooled. If I say I hate AI art, you show me a picture, I like it, and you reveal afterwards that it was made by an AI, I don't conclude that maybe I'm wrong and AI art is fine. I conclude that you tricked me. You're a liar, and I condemn you.

Why yes, if you lie to people, you can trick them into thinking that AI art was made by humans, or that human art is made by AI. It's a complicated world and that's possible. But you shouldn't be surprised when people respond to that with extreme hostility.

People are frequently bad at understanding the reasons for their convictions. In this case, the conviction that it's important for art to be made by humans, or that the social context of art matters to how it's received, is being muddled up with the idea of abstract quality.

However, underneath that, I think people do value knowing that such-and-such picture is the result of a real human being exercising skill. Effort and creativity are things that we can and do value. It's acceptable to care about these things in themselves, for their own sake.

On a last note, in my experience there hasn't been any particular valence to opposition to AI art? I don't think it's that 'the Left' with a capital L hates AI art. I think everyone hates AI art. There are very, very few people who like this technology. Consider, briefly, that the people who like this technology are themselves the unrepresentative freaks.

Real art is made by an artist, and involves creative decisions. Algorithms can't do that.

All this seems perfectly cromulent, but this doesn't seem to address the difference in AI generated imagery versus, say, a painting. Whether the algorithm is a diffusion model, an LLM, or the physics of molecules of paint, brushes, canvas, etc., the algorithm itself can't make creative decisions. But humans can and do make creative decisions in terms of how to direct those above algorithms to generate images.

I've seen this exact line of thinking brought up many times in discussion about AI art, and I'm confused why people seem to think that that means (modern) AI-generated images (and songs and poems, etc.) aren't the results of human creative decisions. Even putting in a blank or a randomly generated prompt into the first diffusion model one encounters is a creative decision. Even if we take away the AI and posit that the images were just sitting on the floor, poofed into existence by God or aliens or random chance of nature, the decision to share it with others is a creative decision. Until we get to truly agentic AI, any media that's shared is necessarily the result of a human making a creative decision somewhere.

If I were arguing against myself, actually, I might have used the example of found art, or perhaps animal art, which I think people are often more generous toward?

In this case I think the sense that no skill or taste has been exercised is important. Drawing a picture seems to require some level of effort or skill, which a person has acquired over years of practice. There may be an incoherent feeling that 'resistance' is important to art.

In this case I think the sense that no skill or taste has been exercised is important. Drawing a picture seems to require some level of effort or skill, which a person has acquired over years of practice. There may be an incoherent feeling that 'resistance' is important to art.

I'm not sure if that's incoherent, but it seems perfectly cromulent to believe that "art" requires some minimum effort and skill, and that base ai generations don't reach that bar, and likewise something like 4'33", which took neither to write and takes neither to perform. But that's a very different and completely orthogonal point from the notion that AI generated media doesn't reflect human creative decisions.

Humans can take credit for AI art to the extent I can claim to be an artist when I pay a human artist to "make me a picture of grapes and some flowers and a skull". If I specify the picture extremely specifically then I start to be able to claim a fraction of the authorship, but it takes a lot for us not to intuit that the dude holding the paintbrush deserves most of the credit. Most ai artists are more like commissioners.

(Relatedly the question of credit is separate from the question of whether something is art. It might be a defensible position to say that AI art is indeed art, it's just not art by the prompter. It's art by humanity. The prompter made an infinitesimal contribution to the process.)

Humans can take credit for AI art to the extent I can claim to be an artist when I pay a human artist to "make me a picture of grapes and some flowers and a skull". If I specify the picture extremely specifically then I start to be able to claim a fraction of the authorship, but it takes a lot for us not to intuit that the dude holding the paintbrush deserves most of the credit. Most ai artists are more like commissioners.

I don't particularly care about "credit," or what "art" means, but the part of this analogy that I find wrong is that a generative AI tool lacks agency like a human, and I don't see a way to bridge the gap until we've got scifi-level AI. A diffusion model or an LLM is "making decisions" in the same way that a bristle of a paintbrush "makes decisions" on where to place the paint on the canvas, i.e. by following the laws of physics, compelled by the human that's actually controlling the tool (whether through typing in a prompt or waving the paintbrush).

A diffusion model or an LLM is "making decisions" in the same way that a bristle of a paintbrush "makes decisions" on where to place the paint on the canvas, i.e. by following the laws of physics, compelled by the human that's actually controlling the tool (whether through typing in a prompt or waving the paintbrush).

Just to try and prise apart these two types of case, what would you say about putting a penny into an art robot like Maillardet's automaton? It's hard to say that the person who activates the automaton has really created art by themselves. Maillardet did most of the decisionmaking, even if he died two centuries ago. I find myself wanting to say a similar sort of thing about AI, only a lot of people's decisions were involved in training it rather than just one.

I'm not sure what "created art by themselves" would mean specifically, but someone putting in a penny into that robot would certainly have made a creative decision by deciding to use that particular machine or to use any machine at all to create a drawing. He could have inserted the penny into a different machine, or taken that penny and scratched markings onto a piece of paper to create some "art," or, at possibly the most trivial case, he could have also just decided to frame that penny and present it as "art" in itself, and all of those would have involved some level of creative decisionmaking. In each case, the way the final result reflects his decisionmaking would be somewhat different. I.e. if he actually etched onto a piece of paper using the penny, he would have made decisions on where and how hard each marking was, whereas if he just framed the penny, he would have decided which penny to present, but he didn't make any decision on the angles of the curves that form Lincoln's portrait on the penny.

I find myself wanting to say a similar sort of thing about AI, only a lot of people's decisions were involved in training it rather than just one.

Certainly, I'd agree that many people's decisions went into any diffusion model-based AI-generated image, not just that of the person who typed in the prompt. Much like many people's decisions went into a photograph, such as that of the lens manufacturer and the city engineer who deemed that some building's awnings had to be a certain way and the businessman who spit his gum out on the sidewalk one day which turned into a black mark and the kid who decided to throw rocks at a flock of birds seconds before the photographer pressed the shutter.

I think people generally do think photography is different to painting (less artful even). Obviously there's a lot of creative decision-making involved in a given photo, but not as much as for a given painting. Across a photographer's oeuvre, you start to see more and more evidence of intentionality, and it takes collections and curation to establish your bona fides as a photographer to a greater extent than as a painter. What I'm saying is that density of micro decisions is a relevant criteria for assigning credit. I'm not suggesting that an ai prompter deserves no credit. They do deserve some, they could earn a lot depending on the details of their project. It seems clear to me though that they are also typically drawing substantially on how other artists would decide (not just the result of their decisions) as embodied in the AI. The decision-making patterns and tendencies of previous artists are captured in the model in a way that's different from making a paintbrush or lens, which relies on a craftsperson's decisions but doesn't typically preserve their decision-making as a living force.

I think people generally do think photography is different to painting (less artful even). Obviously there's a lot of creative decision-making involved in a given photo, but not as much as for a given painting.

I'm not sure what "less artful" means, but certainly no one would claim that ai generated images aren't different from paintings, even when they explicitly use painting styles. Much like how photorealistic photographs are different from photorealistic paintings which are different from photorealistic collages which are different from photorealistic CGI renderings, in non-trivial ways. Same would go for any AI generated images.

Whether it's "as much," I'm not sure how it's possible to quantify the amount of creative decisionmaking in a way that can be meaningfully compared like that.

Across a photographer's oeuvre, you start to see more and more evidence of intentionality, and it takes collections and curation to establish your bona fides as a photographer to a greater extent than as a painter.

This phenomenon is quite evident to exist in people who use AI generated images from following anyone who has posted AI generated images for a long time as well. It applies just as well when you take the AI generated part out of it; even Twitter accounts that merely share pre-existing images of any provenance inevitably establish a pattern of intentionality in terms of the images they deem worthy to share, ie curate. I don't know if a curator is an "artist" who deserves "credit" for their "art," but certainly a curator is someone who makes creative decisions.

What I'm saying is that density of micro decisions is a relevant criteria for assigning credit. I'm not suggesting that an ai prompter deserves no credit.

Again, this seems perfectly cromulent to me, but also, I really don't think "deserving credit" is a particularly meaningful thing. People subjectively credit various things for their works, like God or their family, or only their hard work and effort, or their 5th grade teacher, or the barista whose off-hand comment triggered something in their brains, etc. and I don't really have an opinion on that, other than that it doesn't seem worth having an opinion on. My point is just that "creative decisionmaking" isn't a line that cuts between AI generated images and paintings/sketches/etc. and this applies for any other analogous media.

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Real art is made by an artist, and involves creative decisions. Algorithms can't do that.

If somebody spends an hour refining the perfect prompt and parsing through attempts at AI-gen isn't that still room for creative decisionmaking?

In this case the prompt is the real human creation and should ideally be posted before the picture.

Why wouldn't the result of the AI generation also be the human creation? Saying that the prompt is the "real human creation" is analogous to claiming that "waving a brush in front of you is the real human creation" in a painting, the painting is just the artifact that results from the paint, brush, and canvas atoms interacting with each other as a consequence of that waving. It'd certainly be cool if we got to see that with every painting, though.

The prompt is where the creative decisionmaking is, as the poster above said. And no, the waving of the brush would be the analogy for the movements of fingers on the keyboard while typing the prompt.

And waving the brush is where the creative decisionmaking is in painting, which is why it's analogous to the prompt (waving the brush would be analogous to the movements for the fingers when we're talking about typing out a poem or essay or somesuch). The painting is merely an artifact that remains as the result of that creative decisionmaking. And that artifact is what people generally consider the actual creative work or "art," not the decisionmaking itself.

waving the brush would be analogous to the movements for the fingers when we're talking about typing out a poem or essay or somesuch

I disagree, it applies just as well to typing the prompt. Why wouldn't it be? Both are processes that aren't really legible if you watch them without witnessing the result, with the result as its output.

Ultimately, what the AI outputs based on that result just doesn't interest me, empirically. It works as pure visual illustration/stimulation, sure. Art isn't really about that for me.

I disagree, it applies just as well to typing the prompt. Why wouldn't it be? Both are processes that aren't really legible if you watch them without witnessing the result, with the result as its output.

Because the text prompt isn't the actual result, unlike in the case of a poem. It's merely a conduit by which the final result is created, transferring the human's creative decisions to the final artifact. Most accurately, the waving of the hand would be analogous to the finger movements AND the prompt, as ephemeral things that exist momentarily in order to transfer the human's intents to the final piece.

Art has a functional component of looking nice or representing something, and the social component of representing the author or a time period. The vast majority of art in the world is aiming to do well at the former, while only a tiny percentage of high art is for the latter and ends up as museum pieces or in private collections. Oh, and there's the "my friend/child/GF made this".

If there could be a clean split in the conversation between one component and the other, then I think things would be mostly fine. But anti-AI advocates really really want to try to convince you that AI is utterly inferior at the functional component when this is just demonstrably not true. Then when another round of evidence comes up that, no really, most people can't tell the difference, the conversation shifts motte-and-bailey style to "oh the problem is AI art doesn't have the social meaning", which is true in a small sense, but then they again try to imply that means all AI art is garbage. So there's a nugget of truth in that argument, but it's almost always presented in a bad-faith way.

On a last note, in my experience there hasn't been any particular valence to opposition to AI art? I don't think it's that 'the Left' with a capital L hates AI art. I think everyone hates AI art. There are very, very few people who like this technology. Consider, briefly, that the people who like this technology are themselves the unrepresentative freaks.

You're living in a bubble if you think even close to "everyone" hates AI art. What I've seen is that most of the political spectrum has people who DGAF along with many loud complainers that AI art is evil. So you can find people opposed to AI art basically anywhere, although it's clearly not universal. But on the far-left specifically (mostly the woke Bluesky types) the opposition to AI art is monolithic.

If there could be a clean split in the conversation between one component and the other, then I think things would be mostly fine. But anti-AI advocates really really want to try to convince you that AI is utterly inferior at the functional component when this is just demonstrably not true.

I have heard this a lot, but I would hold, I think, that even though you can find edge case exceptions if you stack the deck a bit, most AI 'art' has a very noticeable, identifiable style? And that style tends to be both repetitive and cheap? Maybe you can avoid that if you can spend hours slaving away over prompts, but that is quite rare.

At least part of the conversation is about status, right? AI art is perceived as cheap and nasty. Like the microwave, it might be useful, but it's also fundamentally low-class, because using it signifies that you could not afford a real human artist.

You're living in a bubble if you think even close to "everyone" hates AI art. What I've seen is that most of the political spectrum has people who DGAF along with many loud complainers that AI art is evil.

Obviously 'everyone' is hyperbole and I do not mean every single person, since there are people here who like it. There are a handful of people like Scott Alexander who defend it. Still, as far as I can tell it's genuinely unpopular? Searching for polls, well, I'll spare you all the results from artists themselves or from art galleries (both those groups passionately, overwhelmingly, hate AI art), but as far as I can tell, ordinary people feel less positive toward AI in art that they do in other fields. This seems consistent with the generally skeptical if not outright negative view of AI most people have (and the Pew poll is just Americans, who are one of the most pro-AI national groupings). Here there is apparently widespread opposition to AI music.

In general, I think my hot take on AI is that this is the most hated major technological innovation in my lifetime, and I don't think I can really overstate it. There are very enthusiastic AI boosters on the internet, but as far as I can tell in the real world, people are mostly either ignorant of AI, or they dislike it to various degrees of intensity.

most AI 'art' has a very noticeable, identifiable style?

If you don't specify a style then some image generators like the one chatGPT uses can default to a few particular styles that are either cartoony or overly elaborate. But you can also tell it to do a specific style that's not one of the defaults and then that problem goes away. And the default styles only look "repetitive and cheap" because people associate them with AI now, and there's a vocal contingent that wants to make people think AI = bad.

ordinary people feel less positive toward AI in art that they do in other fields.

Yes, it's been noted that people are far more hostile towards AI art then they are towards AI programming. But as a programmer I'm quite contemptuous of that view, as it implies art has this mystical, almost supernatural property that software never could, when in reality the vast majority of both software and art are purely functional.

Americans, who are one of the most pro-AI national groupings

You have it backwards: Westerners (including Americans) are the most anti-AI grouping, especially compared to Asians.

my hot take on AI is that this is the most hated major technological innovation in my lifetime

This is a pretty cold take.

I posted some modded AI artwork for Slay the Spire 2 on /v/ and had a decent chunk of users saying the usual "ugh this looks terrible".

You would think 4chan users would have learned from the Sonic AI Art pwnage incident.

This one always seemed sus to me, because I'm not sure if 2022 midjourney was able to generate a correct grid background. Might be a double troll.

Those experiments sound somewhat like what C.S. Lewis describes in "An Experiment in Criticism" when trying to establish criteria for what makes good or bad taste, and he describes the different kinds of dealing with art/reading:

The ‘few’ whom we are seeking cannot be identified with the cognoscenti. Neither Gigadibs nor Dryasdust is necessarily among them.

Still less is the status seeker. As there are, or were, families and circles in which it was almost a social necessity to display an interest in hunting, or county cricket, or the Army List, so there are others where it requires great independence not to talk about, and therefore occasionally to read, the approved literature, especially the new and astonishing works, and those which have been banned or have become in some other way subjects of controversy. Readers of this sort, this ‘small vulgar’, act in one respect exactly like those of the ‘great vulgar’. They are entirely dominated by fashion. They drop the Georgians and begin to admire Mr Eliot, acknowledge the ‘dislodgement’ of Milton, and discover Hopkins, at exactly the right moment. They will not like your book if the dedication begins with To instead of For. Yet, while this goes on downstairs, the only real literary experience in such a family may be occurring in a back bedroom where a small boy is reading Treasure Island under the bed-clothes by the light of an electric torch.

The people, Right or Left, who have become aware that it is now in the fashion, and safe, to disparage AI art are like this. They're not recognising good or bad art, human or AI art, they're attuned to the Zeitgeist and demonstrating that attunement.

Even I'm a little (pleasantly) surprised at how vehement the anti-AI-art backlash is. During the early days of DALL-E 2, there were people on this very forum swearing that the only people who could possibly care about whether art was made by a human or not were professional artists themselves who were worried about losing income. Or maybe ideologically motivated leftists; but certainly no one else. But even on forums that have nothing whatsoever to do with AI, art, or politics, I commonly see people expressing their disdain for AI art, scrutinizing any art that does get posted for signs of AI use, etc. AI is simply not "cool". At least some people do care about how art gets made. (Others don't, of course. It's an issue that people at large are genuinely split on.)

I fully acknowledge that experiments like the twitter experiment you linked to do make the anti-AI crowd look silly. But I'm willing to bite the bullet and say that it doesn't matter in the end. If you take two pixel-by-pixel identical artworks, one made by a human and one made by an AI (or at least, the kinds of AI we have today, using the methods that today's AI systems use -- this isn't a simple chauvinism in favor of carbon over silicon as an underlying substrate), the AI image is simply worse, because (very briefly and roughly) human effort has intrinsic value, connecting with other humans has intrinsic value, the total historical and social context of an artwork has intrinsic value, etc. So it's perfectly fine for people to update their assessment of a given artwork when they learn more about its provenance.

There's a certain type of mind, over-represented among the singulatarians, that's deeply uncomfortable with the entire notion of power relations and social status on a fundamental level. You can see this on full display in Scott's recent posts about artistic taste, and how uncomfortable he was that anyone would allow themselves to be blinded by extraneous (social) factors that are unrelated to "the intrinsic properties of the artwork itself". If it can't be codified in a system of clear and repeatable rules, then it should be extinguished by the light of reason. If the AI can do exactly what Monet does, then the AI should be held in exactly the same level of esteem as Monet, whatever level that ultimately works out to be; continuing to ascribe a special aura to Monet that is not extended to the AI would be arbitrary and irrational. You would just be saying that Monet is "cool" because he's already cool, basically. But status games are eternal. You can redistribute wealth, you can redistribute opportunities, you can democratize access to the means of production; but you can't redistribute coolness. Not until we develop the ability to directly control people's minds, I suppose. Maybe we will soon enough.

I mean keep in mind that no one is buying this art. I’ll say this about most art whether literary or visual: unless you’re buying it to be an “art snob” in the sense that you only want it to show off your good taste to others, most people don’t really care. If the “trashy” genre fiction book you’re reading turns out to be written by ChatGPT and maybe has a passing edit by a human, I don’t think most people would care. Looking at my own reads, I don’t recognize most of the names, so I don’t see why I’d care all that much that my book was written by AI. And if I’m buying art and not looking for a high end piece, I wouldn’t care. The point in either case is my own enjoyment. And if you add in the very likely outcome of paying a significant premuim for “real human created” books, paintings, and sculptures most people would not pay it. It adds no value.

if you take two pixel-by-pixel identical artworks, one made by a human and one made by an AI (or at least, the kinds of AI we have today, using the methods that today's AI systems use -- this isn't a simple chauvinism in favor of carbon over silicon as an underlying substrate), the AI image is simply worse, because (very briefly and roughly) human effort has intrinsic value, connecting with other humans has intrinsic value, the total historical and social context of an artwork has intrinsic value, etc.

Let's talk about color! No, not artistic color theory. I mean an obligatory link to the relevant: what Color are your bits?. Interestingly, the author has added a short preamble that mentions generative AI! Albeit mostly from a copyright perspective, which was one of the original reasons for thinking about Bit Color.

There's a certain type of mind, over-represented among the singulatarians, that's deeply uncomfortable with the entire notion of power relations and social status on a fundamental level.

The 'fundamental level' is that they cause a lot of human misery to those who find themselves on the bottom end.

the AI image is simply worse, because (very briefly and roughly) human effort has intrinsic value, connecting with other humans has intrinsic value, the total historical and social context of an artwork has intrinsic value, etc.

Outside of the objections others have provided, does this apply when the AI imagegen process involves those features?

If you take two pixel-by-pixel identical artworks, one made by a human and one made by an AI (or at least, the kinds of AI we have today, using the methods that today's AI systems use -- this isn't a simple chauvinism in favor of carbon over silicon as an underlying substrate), the AI image is simply worse, because (very briefly and roughly) human effort has intrinsic value, connecting with other humans has intrinsic value, the total historical and social context of an artwork has intrinsic value, etc. So it's perfectly fine for people to update their assessment of a given artwork when they learn more about its provenance.

This is a leap in logic that I see so often, and I don't quite get it. It almost seems so natural to them that they don't even notice it.

Because, given that human effort has intrinsic value, all context has intrinsic value, connecting with other humans has intrinsic value, etc. - which I subjectively agree with - it doesn't actually imply anything about the value of the artwork in question. Yes, effort has some ineffable intrinsic value - but, by no means, does that imbue the outcome of that effort with any value. Likewise with context.

In terms of human connection (and human effort as well, actually), pretty clearly any claims of some grid of pixels "connecting" the viewer to the placer can be applied just as easily to AI (of the modern sort, not scifi agentic AI) generated grids as to manually generated grids.

Right, but I have no interest in being connected to the AI.

I think you misunderstood my statement. To clarify, here's an edited version of the last paragraph of my previous comment:

In terms of human connection (and human effort as well, actually), pretty clearly any claims of some grid of pixels "connecting" the viewer to the placer can be applied just as easily to AI (of the modern sort, not scifi agentic AI) generated grids in how it connects the viewer to the human who used the AI to generate the grids as to manually generated grids.

The point is that, whether a human uses an AI or a paintbrush to generate the grid of pixels, if the latter connects the viewer of the grid of pixels to the human who generated the grid, then certainly the former does as well.

there were people on this very forum swearing that the only people who could possibly care about whether art was made by a human

We don’t know those comments were made by “people”.

Some contemporary discussion here and here and here.

I am pretty sure hydroacetylene is a person, and I'm not even sure his predictions were unreasonable so much as missing the cultural influence of porn artists on the left. TheAntiPopulist..., uh, not gonna make a bet on that one.

You're correct, 'the cultural influence of porn artists on the left' is something which teaches me the true meaning of ignorance being bliss.

I can’t remember any specific names now, but many of the comments I’m referring to would have been made between mid 2022 and early 2023, when ChatGPT was brand new (or even prior to it). I don’t think we have much of a problem with bot posts on this forum anyway. Many accounts here are longtime users who were posting years before modern LLMs existed.

We can at least be sure that they were proximally caused by people, even if people didn't actually make the comments.

human effort has intrinsic value, connecting with other humans has intrinsic value, the total historical and social context of an artwork has intrinsic value, etc

Come now. I'm confident it would take me, who has two left hands, at least ten times as much effort to paint or carve a great work compared to a great artist. Does the work become more valuable because it's hard for me? No, nobody cares. As long as there's some minimum effort involved, this seems to satisfy that requirement. How low is the minimum? Presumably it's arbitrarily set somewhere above "repeated workshopping of an image with an AI" and somewhere below "tape a banana to a wall". The astute reader may notice that the latter is plausibly less than the former.

The rest might work as arguments against art generated entirely autonomously with zero or minimal human input, but clearly fall apart if the prompter has a vision that he uses the AI to realize. Or do you think that AI art has no historical and social context? Surely you of all people would agree that you can't do anything entirely outside of your context.

I'm confident it would take me, who has two left hands, at least ten times as much effort to paint or carve a great work compared to a great artist.

This is obviously not the case. The effort the great artist took was the tens of thousands of hours perfecting his craft and his artistic taste. Even with ten times the amount of effort on a single work of art, you wouldn't come close to what the great artist produces.

I'm counting that as part of the effort, naturally.

Or do you think that AI art has no historical and social context?

It’s a valid point and I recognize that these things operate on a sliding continuum. All we can really do is exercise our judgement in each individual case.

This is simply the Marxist error of the labor theory of value. The difficulty of producing something raises its value indirectly by reducing its supply, but people do not demand things simply because they're in short supply. A great work of art is not great because of all of the effort that went into producing it; all of the effort that went into producing it was commendable because it had the goal of producing a great work of art. If it worked the other way around, then the most beautiful paintings and statues would pale in comparison to efficiently hiring teams to dig and fill ditches pointlessly.

It's entirely likely that AI will contribute to the end of the world and bring about unprecedented evil, but getting angry at it for making it easier to produce art is fundamentally similar in kind to getting angry at old computers, printers, or any other tools for making it easier to produce art. When people first started making AI art, it was novel and incredible and worthy of applause on that basis alone. Now AI art is very common, and it's rapidly raising the floor for how cheap decent-looking art can look, lowering its value. People feel threatened because if they can't make art that looks better than that, no one will value the labor of traditional artists remotely as much anymore. But their getting angry at that dynamic does not substantially change that dynamic.

There are relative ways said value can be determined. Artificially rigging market conditions is something multinational firms mutually collaborate with one another in doing, and have been for a long time. You see it when Google pays out $X billions each year to Apple to bribe them not to go into the search business. There was a time in industry when the value of aluminum was worth more than gold. The value came from the difficulty of extracting the former relative to the material input costs of extracting the latter.

Maybe artists will shift to becoming programmers and that’ll become the new frontier of artistic elegance and taste. The average person I imagine is completely indifferent to it all and barely notices anything.

I think people should be open about the social and contextual reasons they like a piece of artwork without having to pretend there’s something intrinsically special about the piece itself.

Humans just don’t like seeing replicas and care about authenticity, and it has nothing to do with the aesthetic value of the piece - that’s a red herring. If you’re in a museum looking at, let’s say, Palaeolithic stone axes, you might feel certain emotions or a sense of connection to humanity’s distant past. Then if you learned the collection was made by a boomer in the 90s in the Palaeolithic style, you’d be disappointed, regardless of whether the axes looked “good” or not, since they’re literally just crude chipped stones with hardly any aesthetic values on their own.

AI art is a replica of human creativity, it feels hollow because there’s no one to connect to, but it has nothing to do with the quality of the output itself.

Humans just don’t like seeing replicas and care about authenticity, and it has nothing to do with the aesthetic value of the piece - that’s a red herring.

I think this is culturally contingent.

I have personally cultivated an aesthetic appreciation for imitation and replicas, because I want to feel beauty in my life, and if you cultivate the joy of copies you can always cheaply and non-rivalrously enjoy art. What you lose in the ability to be a snob, you gain in the ability to be content with enough and what you have at hand.

Why not have a print of a beautiful piece of art that you love? Why not get a cheap but beautiful study of a famous piece done by an art student?

If you’re in a museum looking at, let’s say, Palaeolithic stone axes, you might feel certain emotions or a sense of connection to humanity’s distant past. Then if you learned the collection was made by a boomer in the 90s in the Palaeolithic style, you’d be disappointed, regardless of whether the axes looked “good” or not, since they’re literally just crude chipped stones with hardly any aesthetic values on their own.

If you cultivate an appreciation that leads to the causal chain of a replica, then you can get almost the same "big" feelings from a copy of something. I went to the Nashville Parthenon, and I was blown away by it. It may be a copy, but with the right attitude it can be just as mind blowing and interesting as the real Parthenon, since it is causally downstream of the builders of the original Parthenon. It just happens to not share any of the matter of the original Parthenon, but who cares about a silly little detail like that?

Incredible worldview, thank you for sharing

Humans just don’t like seeing replicas and care about authenticity…

People find it difficult to appreciate things they don’t pay for. Pay close attention sometime to an office or cafeteria setting at work on days where free food and drinks or a highly discounted menu is available. People will leave half drank soda bottles on the table, won’t recycle, chips fall on the floor; and none of it comes at any cost or with any responsibility to those being served. If I tell you this option comes along once a year, most people be much more measured and let nothing go to waste.

Or if you want another example, recall how kids collected Pokémon cards back in the day. If I told you I had a foil Charizard card that’d be quite impressive. If the guy next to me had a foil, “1st edition” stamp on a Charizard card, the “limited edition” factor makes it much more valuable because of its scarcity.

In my own life I’m a huge fan of horror cinema. I’ve loved the Halloween franchise for as long as I can remember watching it as a kid. And I have quite a lot of horror memorabilia. I have a signed John Carpenter kitchen knife, several autographed items, and other rare collectibles that practically make a shrine I’ve got dedicated to the genre itself. The cinematic masterpiece of all these franchises and aesthetics and the historical “link” it has to the items I own gives me a great sense of feeling attached and connected to the things I enjoy that I wouldn’t otherwise have.

Or if you want another example, recall how kids collected Pokémon cards back in the day. If I told you I had a foil Charizard card that’d be quite impressive. If the guy next to me had a foil, “1st edition” stamp on a Charizard card, the “limited edition” factor makes it much more valuable because of its scarcity.

I actually think most trading cards aren't far off from Bored Ape NFTs at the end of the day. Companies love to put gambling in everything these days from mobile apps, to the random toy boxes that take up an entire aisle at my local Walmart. I think gambling was the first supernormal stimulus that humans discovered - randomness that our brains desperately want to find patterns in.

But like other supernormal stimuli, I think they are best avoided. Play LCGs instead of TCGs, or proxy your TCG cards (or buy singles and play cheaper formats like pauper if you really must buy in to the ecosystem.) They should be game pieces, not another supernormal stimulus like all the phone apps or porn sites try to be these days.

Yeah the current arc of the TCG market feels sufficiently mature that it's gotta be close to another big correction, but I don't think that necessarily renders the whole thing valueless. Even NFTs haven't like literally gone to zero even if you've obviously gotten absolutely fucked if you got in anywhere near the top.

Exactly, you’d probably feel cheated if it turned out the autographs were all done on auto pen by an assistant even if the signature was indistinguishable. The reason art is valuable is generally much closer to the reason memorabilia is valuable.

And actually people try to make the same kind of arguments about the “1st edition” having some special property or unique trait, like saying a Stradivarius has a magical sound modern violins don’t have, even though no one can actually distinguish between them in a blind test. Isn’t it enough to say that a Stradivarius is valuable because it’s a high quality 300 year old instrument made by the most famous luthier in the world, without having to resort to nonsense about no one else being able to reproduce the sound?

If you’re in a museum looking at, let’s say, Palaeolithic stone axes, you might feel certain emotions or a sense of connection to humanity’s distant past. Then if you learned the collection was made by a boomer in the 90s in the Palaeolithic style, you’d be disappointed, regardless of whether the axes looked “good” or not, since they’re literally just crude chipped stones with hardly any aesthetic values on their own.

You thought you were looking at legitimately ancient stone axes, but discover they're fake. That has nothing to do with the visual impression of the axes in an artistic way. This is orthogonal to the labor theory of value wrt to AI art though. The boomer making the replica may very well work twice as hard at it than the stone age man. It's still worse. Its value is lower, despite the labor.

because (very briefly and roughly) human effort has intrinsic value, connecting with other humans has intrinsic value, the total historical and social context of an artwork has intrinsic value, etc.

It just doesn't, though.

Ever seen the movie Holes? Or read the book? The work describes a juvenile detention facility on a dry lake bed where the inmates 'develop character' by digging deep holes and then filling them in again. Imagine, the plot of the Holes long past and the facility demolished, you're considering purchasing some land on the dry lake bed. Do you think the land where all those pointless holes were dug and filled in is worth more than the next plot over, identical in every measurable way, where they weren't? This is not a small amount of human effort! In total, I bet it's more than 99.9% of paintings. There's a human connection, not merely to a single artist, but to a story that, in our world, makes for an OK movie, and same for the historical and social context.

I think if you're trying to sell this land and promote it on that basis, you'll get laughed at. Not only will most buyers not be willing to pay more, I doubt you'll find even one single one who would. Maybe if there were more history -- the site of some politically relevant atrocity, say -- you'd find someone somewhere who wants to build a museum there or whatever. But for a moderately shitty juvie location? Not likely.

Imagine they didn't fill the holes in. This is land that was actually altered by a huge amount of human labor! Unfortunately, that alteration wasn't landscaping or gardening or a pool, it was a bunch of pointless holes. Bet you couldn't sell this land for anywhere close to what you could get for the unaltered plot next door.

This is the just the labor theory of value, and it's false. The value of a person's labor is not measured in sweat, it's measured by how much someone is willing to pay for the result. Now, (some) people are (currently) willing to pay more for the same pixels produced by a human, though I suspect that number is smaller than it seems. First, most people aren't willing to pay for (static, visual) art period. But mainly, I think people who buy art are willing to pay more for human-made pixels because the AI actually can't generate the same pixels. AI art can be good and god knows human art can be awful, but if you want the highest quality art, commissioning a 99th percentile human is your best bet. And if they're buying the art to include in project, because they're scared of luddite backlash.

But sure, there's some number of people who do genuinely value the human effort that went into it... but that's still not intrinsic value. There's literally no such thing. Value doesn't exist outside of a market context (defined broadly: any system in which one or more people exchange things for other things). Value is inherently subjective, so those people aren't wrong. But they're not right either.

Do you think the land where all those pointless holes were dug and filled in is worth more than the next plot over, identical in every measurable way, where they weren't?

With all sincerity, yes. That would be quite an interesting backstory!

So how much you think they should mark up the listing for that?

If you take two pixel-by-pixel identical artworks, one made by a human and one made by an AI (or at least, the kinds of AI we have today, using the methods that today's AI systems use -- this isn't a simple chauvinism in favor of carbon over silicon as an underlying substrate), the AI image is simply worse, because (very briefly and roughly) human effort has intrinsic value, connecting with other humans has intrinsic value, the total historical and social context of an artwork has intrinsic value, etc.

I am a hobbyist writer (100% human-made), and I have also dabbled in adding AI art to my stories. I can tell you that trying to add art almost doubled the time it took me to craft a story, and if anything I got less engagement on the stories I added carefully curated AI art to. Frankly, I don't think people can "see" the human effort that goes into something, even AI art.

I'm honestly sad that most of the large D&D subreddits have banned anything with a whiff of AI, because I think it would be nice if there was a space for non-slop AI-assisted products for D&D. Instead we have r/dndai which is 50% sexy elf girls, and 100% slop.

I'm honestly sad that most of the large D&D subreddits have banned anything with a whiff of AI, because I think it would be nice if there was a space for non-slop AI-assisted products for D&D. Instead we have /r/dndai which is 50% sexy elf girls, and 100% slop.

It's always entertaining to me when the large D&D subreddits are so hostile to AI character portraits... apparently everyone forgot that the truly virtuous way to get a character portrait was to google some vague traits and grab the first thing on image search that was kind of like what you had in mind.

At least some people do care about how art gets made. (Others don't, of course. It's an issue that people at large are genuinely split on.)

To be cynical, how many of them only care because it's become somewhat polarized? If it had instead gone the route of "AI is left-aligned, because it allows the poor and underprivileged without money or time for training to create art and collaborate", and anyone against AI was getting pilloried on social media in certain circles, I have a hunch that there'd be some (but not all) reversing their dtance.

I've wondered about the reception of AI art compared to hip hop in the 80s. Similar claims were made then, about plagiarism, the dilution of musical art, electronic instruments merely aping the real thing etc. I think what's different this time, or why the democratization idea doesn't go far, is because AI is a development given to us by a small number of wealthy nerds, and deeply corporate. Hip hop was DIY, and welled up from poor neighborhoods populated by people who are considered the antithesis of nerds.

I think the key point is that AI art is hitting the business of relatively low-skill commission artists.

I'm active in TTRPG subreddits and periodically see people post commissions of their characters: sometimes they have some neat stuff going on but the artistic merit is almost always lacking (the first result I found was this), and slapping a vague description into an image generator is going to produce something way more impressive pretty much every time. Yeah it might not hit the exact note you were looking for, but that's true of commissions too, and you can't tell the artist to go back and try again for free.

Porn is another example where the bottom's getting cut off: AI struggles with details and you have to use weaker models to generate any sort of adult stuff, but the bottom end is really bad, and you get to customize it as much as you want and churn out as many attempts as you want for free on a local model.

These people are often trying to do this as their job, which means their workday involves sitting around and posting on the Internet a lot, and they're often doing that for hobbies too. They also saw AI coming before most people did, because the early adopters playing around with Stable Diffusion would have been visible in their corners of the Internet. So they're initially the only ones who care about it, and being extremely online (and as artists, overwhelmingly left-wing) they know how to leverage progressive terminology to make their points. By the time it propagates out to the normies, the claim's been staked.

Porn is another example where the bottom's getting cut off: AI struggles with details and you have to use weaker models to generate any sort of adult stuff, but the bottom end is really bad, and you get to customize it as much as you want and churn out as many attempts as you want for free on a local model.

I have an online friend who briefly became 'the guy' for a fetish in the furry community since he started as just kinda doing very-vanilla art, then one time included something that wasn't the fetish he became known for but was like adjacent enough that his DMs started getting filled with people looking for that kinda content. Then, despite not particularly liking the fetish in question, he eventually folded after somebody offered him about 5x his going rate for something low-key in that space.

6 months later he's making like a good middle-class professional income for his developing country essentially being a fulltime fetish artist since it had kinda snowballed from there. And like his art skills are fine but we're not exactly talking a Renaissance Master. I haven't asked him, but I'd be shocked if the rise of AI hadn't absolutely nuked that line of art production even if some purists complain since you can knock together SOMETHING a lot quicker/cheaper, and AI has a lot more patience for infinite re-do requests than a human artist with limited time. Porn's also just uniquely suited to be hit by AI since it's either 'vanilla stuff tends to be super formulaic and there is an infinite sample basis' or 'more exotic stuff having an AI you can endlessly dictate your very particular desires to is more practical than having an artslave'

I'd be a little interested to know what the current situation is, for your friend. From what I've seen, the overall velocity and pay structure is still looking pretty healthy, with maybe some minor impact that could be holistic economic trends. Admittedly, most of the public data is about the Big Name Popufurs, and imprecise at that, so info from the selling side of the market would say more.

Some of that missing update is because almost all of the 'legitimate' sites ban the stuff and furry is a social environment as much as just a plain kink, but there are Discords and boorus where it's allowed, and it's not too hard to spin up alternative hosts... and those haven't been that badly flooded, either. E621 average around 900 posts per day, to E6AI's 120ish, for example, and that's with a lot of mainstay kinks getting very little focus.

I think part of it's the difficulty of the tools, and another are limits of AI-generator user creativity. You can prompt a ten thousand images overnight of <your favorite artist> doing <your favorite kink> with <your favorite species>, even if the artist doesn't even draw your preferred kink or even sexual orientation. AIgen's definitely beaten prima's test for simple sex in almost any gender combination and hole, and it only takes a little bit of work to get into threesomes or foursomes. But like my experiment three years ago with buff werewolf dudes, the fifth gigabyte doesn't have anything the first four didn't.

There are ways to get novelty or at least 'surprise' out of these tools, but it takes enough effort that most people would probably rather see their own ideas instead. To do that, though, you need to seriously think about what makes those ideas good, or work, and artists have a significant advantage actually breaking things into their components and drives. Even if it's just how poles go into holes.

I believe his stuff's slowed down a bit in recent years due to a combination of some other big artists popping up in the same fetish-scene and him taking a few hiatuses. Still got a backlog of commissions, but it's not what it was relative to the 2020-21 kinda peak (which goes for most digital jobs, realistically)

Didn't someone post that Monet was losing his eyesight at the time and the painting thus may contain deficiencies for real?

Probably; it's known that after he had cataract surgery he noticed that his recent paintings had been painting the flowers more yellow than they should be, because he'd been seeing them more yellow than they should be (cataracts make things appear more yellow, in addition to being more blurry).

I find that strange. You’d think that if he saw the flowers as more yellow than they are, he’d see the paint as yellower too, so the two would cancel each other out.

There are multiple ways of getting the human eye to see yellow. Cadmium yellow and chrome yellow (which Monet used) are yellow mostly because they absorb strongly in the shorter (bluer) wavelengths. Natural yellow pigments have a more complicated multi-peak spectrum. So cataracts (which also absorb strongly in the shorter wavelengths) wouldn't much change the appearance of his paints, but would change the appearance of the flowers much more.

Fantasy/Sci Fi art is one of those things that was already commodified before AI, whatever you imagined, some Filipino or Colombian or Chinese hobbyist on DeviantArt had already drawn something pretty close even in the old days with a budget tablet and could do something specific for another $30.

In my experience working on an indie game, trying to commission art pre-AI was extremely hit-or-miss. Artists were extremely flaky and sometimes had weird hangups with stuff like "commercial use". Maybe you could find consistent high-quality artists willing to work for $30, but I was trying to pay well above that ($50 for a basic 2D character, $100 for more complicated 2D background images) that I was told was on the lower end of the market rate, and still found it extremely difficult to find anyone that wouldn't randomly ghost me for months at a time.

I mean the most likely longterm outcome here is that in a decade or two AI art will just be accepted as another genre/medium and people will move onto the next thing to criticize as being too artificial or easy. Maybe AI-Cubed Art where AI-prompts are used which take all the soul and skill out of the original generation of AI art?

I mean, photography is the OG method of cheating at art, and even though photography has long been accepted as a "legitimate" medium, it never achieved the same level of prestige as painting.

I agree. As I'm fond of pointing out, in 1989 The Abyss 1982 Tron was deemed ineligible for the Oscar for best visual effects because it used CGI. Eventually generative AI will come to be seen as just another creative tool that can be used well and used poorly.

The Abyss was deemed ineligible for the Oscar for best visual effects because it used CGI.

Did it not win?

What happened with that notion. I'm pretty sure once the 90s arrived James Cameron DID win awards with CGI. Terminator 2 iirc

You are correct, I was thinking of Tron. Will amend.

I imagine something more like professional sports developing: you'll have a large group of people augmenting their abilities artificially, stridently condemning the act of doing so, while society keeps a polite fiction that they aren't. The role of the artist becomes to hide their tracks well so they can perform without the stench of hypocrisy.

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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