Feels like approximately 80-90% of AI generated art, writing, games, tools, etc come under that category now. Very few people seem willing to come out and say "yeah, I got Claude/ChatGPT/Codex/Gemini to make this".
Or if they do, they'll try and downplay by saying they used AI for some elements, but not most of them.
I can imagine that being a reaction to the negativity and backlash from a substantial (or very active) part of the audience, to anything built with AI. I don't imagine that shame for using AI for something, or fear of disclosing it, is self-imposed.
Ideally, how you create something and what tools you use should be nobody's business, and all it matters would be if they like it or not. But inherent value / merit is a thing, and concern for the provenance of what you buy is also a valid position for the public to take. It's gonna be a while before the balance settles on either AI = bad or AI = who cares.
Art was never separate from the person and the culture that created it. It was its soul. Now our lives are flooded with soulless creations night and day--the product of lazy minds and an amalgamation of stolen already-bland cultural works.
This is such a lazy "gotcha" argument, and a prevalent one at that. Some people seem to think that anyone who is upset about the massive deluge of garbage AI has enabled was somehow perfectly happy with the previous status quo. "Things were already bad so who cares if we make them worse?" is a sentiment that seems does have some wider acceptance in the software world, but not everyone feels this way.
I would argue that modern art has none. Further, I would argue that art is what speaks to people.
That means that an AI generated image which makes people laugh has more soul than whatever the top selling modern artists was in 1995. By my estimation, that makes a lolcat a better piece of art than most modern art.
That is something that I actually think is true. Of course there are great artists who can show us much, much more than what is inside a lolcat. Its just that I haven't seen one of those in a while.
Artists are concerned for their jobs; That I get. Trying to defend art by claiming magical things like it doesn't have any soul is just cope. And frankly, the more I see of that, the less I care about artists and their real problems.
Art is a form of expression and/or communication. It's interesting because it shows us different perspectives, as well as things that overlap with ours. When you see a smiley face on your lawn and think it's a sign by the person you just fell in love with, and then find out the exact same artifact was in fact created by wind sweeping some branches together, you'll feel different about it. Similar for art. Or take jokes. A friend might find a joke of yours funny they might not find funny from a person they dislike. That's not "unfair" or "objectively wrong", just like rejecting the same artifact depending on source. If you don't understand this, you talking about "magic" is the cope.
> Its just that I haven't seen one of those in a while.
So that's the argument for making sure of that? Heh.
> Artists are concerned for their jobs; That I get.
The article isn't about artists being concerned for their jobs. This is about people rejecting slop.
To me it means more that art is a window into its creator. I am more interested in exploring how and why a piece of art is being communicated, why certain details were used, how constraints were incorporated. AI is usually boring to me. By generating so much peripheral and extreme detail it removes rather than enhances expression in many cases. I think that's what people mean by missing a soul. It becomes difficult to tell what was intentional expression or a choice of the artist.
For 3 years now, I've gotten into arguments with both AI bros and artists about this. The main point of art is its cultural space (its creator, the zeitgeist etc.).
A human premium, and an elevation of human made art was always inevitable. Most "AI art" token spend is TPS reports, and explainer slides, maybe educational materials on the fringes. Maybe there is a chance some forms of AI art becomes its own new medium (like theater vs "the talkies") but it was never going to be a replacement.
Just 3 years of pointless hand-wringing, headlines and breathless interviews for nothing.
"Aaron Sorkin says he will never use AI".
Yes. No one asked him to! But alas, clickbait rules all.
This kind of snobbery sucks. You give the same reason for art created by humans without interacting with AI being unreachable as you do for AI created art being bad. Human made art is "not separate from culture" while AI made art is "amalgamation of already bland cultural works".
Overall, the perspective espoused here is bad for art. Art isn't hidden inside effort, you don't find it by saying "don't be lazy", and if it's inseparable from where it came from (which I think is pretty debatable, art travels through time and the world and can find interest), this is as true for what humans make as what AI makes.
I think the last bit gives the game away. This perspective is an otherwise content free way of saying "some art is interesting to me, and some isn't".
That last part is what I just said. The original post is saying nothing aside from something that's already true of everyone, and has nothing to do with whether AI can or does make interesting things.
I'm also not sure that art is actually a way that humans talk to each other. That assumes that the point is delivering some information, but a lot of artists talk about it as a compulsion, or something they do for themselves, or as being about understanding the world. I would actually say that many would say that it's definitively not about audience reception. Simultaneously, audiences interpret things of their own accord all the time. Unlike when sending a message, art is often most fully interacted with when you're engaging with things that weren't put there explicitly.
>That last part is what I just said. The original post is saying nothing aside from something that's already true of everyone, and has nothing to do with whether AI can or does make interesting things.
Well, your post, following your own logic, just says that you like AI-generated stuff. You cannot judge what's good or bad for art, you can't call someone preference "snobbery" because the only property of art is that someone likes it. Interesting things is also then completely subjective.
There are several cases of people saying they hate gays and being caught in a gay brothel, people saying they never watched porn and caught on camera with their phone open to trans porn, etc.
Arguing that the artist's own hardwork, and through that their personality and soul, is integral to art is not snobbery: snobbery is stating that "ordinary" art is beneath you.
You didn't make that argument at all. You said our lives are flooded with soulless creations night and day--the product of lazy minds. You called people you dont like lazy.
You insult people and then lie about what you said.
If I read an interesting story, it might lead to some sort of moral or dramatic tension or experience that sticks with me. It could be years later when I live some particular experience and the author's intent becomes clear, or I get some insight into why they had a certain character act in a certain way, or maybe that I missed the point entirely and I am seeing the subtly now.
All of which are impossible with AI. It has no intent, it fulfulls the ask from the prompt. If the prompt is so detailed to imbue the work with deeper meanings, then the author is the person that wrote the prompt, not the LLM which becomes something of a translater.
If LLMs get so good at architecting stories that they can whip up some conceptual layer of understand that feels like communication then we will have achieved a higher form of literary remixing. LLMs are still a series of weights,they still operate in a stateless way and have no initiative besides our prompt. Unless we change that, the value of what an LLM can produce remains limited.
To think otherwise is like a tribesman finding a radio and thinking they are hearing the voice of God. Because you aren't following where the words come from you invent a persona for something that is fundamentally a vehicle of transport.
All of this line of reasoning in the second half is predicated on the idea that there's nothing besides the prompt, but that's an architectural decision that labs optimize for, not something inherent to the field or methods. It's actually fairly trivial to allow for unprompted or accumulated work, except that many people then get mad at it because "I didn't ask for it to do XYZ!"
Your insight years later is still something you constructed, it's a new story that you've told yourself, presumably without any new input from the writer, all of which you can do with any given piece of media. You can do that without the intent having been there on the writer's part at all, even, something which is fairly common to do.
So you think art is overwhelmingly for interpretation. I'm trying to put your comments together and get a handle on this viewpoint. You said elsewhere that artists aren't in it to communicate to the audience. So the artist uses communication media and tropes to do something cryptic and personal, which everybody then misunderstands but enjoys using as a vehicle for their own, how did put it, "story that you've told yourself" about an imagined artist. With the result that a completely phony artificial* artist will suffice. Right?
* Once a synonym for "artistic", but that's a distracting coincidence
The point is that human-created work has more meaning, because it's the product of a real life. Writing is a reflection of the writer.
Computer code can replicate rhetoric and prose. It can even create meaning the user didn't anticipate. This is as much a reflection of the 'author' as any hallucination.
The kind of essentialism people hold between the object and the meaning of the object is effectively inseparable, and it's pointless to argue that it's not or shouldn't be. I write in the golf space. There have been many, many replica golf courses built, and they have been largely unsuccessful, except one that is barely open to the public. The have been mostly unsuccessful not because they don't replicate the originals well, but that the vast majority of folks don't want a facsimile, even if it's fine.
I don't live like that, you don't live like that, but most people do, and they have ever right to. Humans aren't analytical engines. Evolutionary biology has pushed us strongly towards caring deeply about meaning, identity, and respect. This is normal and has to be unlearned. Good luck with that. Other people don't have to like and respect art for you to.
Except AI art is not a exact copy of existing art, it may sometimes occur, but most AI art is people who are not artists expressing themselves. Its a specific personal vision of a golf course only for themselves in most cases. Its irrelevant who else likes it. Previously even the lowest tier of contract artists on websites like DeviantArt would ask 20-40 dollars for such a thing, and that's after you first searched around for an artist who does your specific idea/genre/subject. Then there's the back and forth, waiting in a queue, and potentially taking money and ghosting and so on. And finally how few people have 30 dollars spare cash to blow on a throwaway idea?
If you want to have a discussion about "what art is" I think I would end up arguing that people creating AI art are artists.
My point is it doesn't matter. All art ultimately boils down to is doing something cool, and then pointing at it. The vast, vast, vast majority of "art" is not paid and never was. Even the art that is called "art" has little-to-nothing to do with effort. Duchamp's "readymades" are basically less effort that typing a prompt into AI.
That said, nobody has to like Duchamp's readymades. Nobody has to like anyone's art. The point of art is that you can like it or not. It's not objective, but the vast majority of people are going to pretend that it is, but that's fine because it's actually not.
Under that premise we would consider a photography by my 6-year old a greater achievement than a detailed realistic painting, which we still marvel at.
I think that, as with photography and painting, there will be a place for all types of art, also machine generated, but under different umbrellas.
To think that they compete in the same category is a mistake.
I must admit the prevalence of AI generated images has challenged me to be more attentive to detail, I even started looking for small artists I can commission for stuff on my walls, been going to expos a little more... I'm happy if this gives artists a small lifeline away from the more mercantile aspects that AI is conquering.
While there is a lot of slop, it is possible to create art with AI that does not look like slop and is as creative as a human creation. That's really the main cool thing about AI is you can create things you otherwise couldn't, and the better you are the higher the ceiling for the ai art is. It is a bit of a struggle though, as in prompting and finding the right references is difficult to get good results
Why would you want to? These are advertising for a luxury goods company. You have to include the actual goods in the picture, not a hallucination, and you can afford to do it properly.
That's fair but there is a lot of creativity in prompting and finding the right image because on the way to those images there is a lot of experimentation and I came up with the ideas for the images not the AI.
The issue isn’t the quality or the visual result. It’s not just slop because it looks bad. It’s the friction of someone going through each detail, making a choice. It’s the artist taking time to figure out how they want to convey what they’re feeling and thinking.
The reduction of this friction culminates in the reduction of the piece’s essence.
Yeah I understand your point because I've made music and design for 25 years the old "manual way", and there is definitely less friction with AI than there is the manual way.
But what interests me about AI is that it is possible to do things that you couldn't do before particularly in processing images. For these images I took photos of the bottles myself and used other images and the AI can place the camera anywhere in a scene and place objects anywhere in the scene, and things like that. You can create almost any image you can imagine with the right sources and the right prompt, and even here there is some friction because many images do end up looking like slop and you have to prompt it right to get something non-slop like out of it (though not always).
This ability to manipulate and process information is what makes AI interesting to me, although I'm not sure I adequately explained it. It feels like a new tool like Photoshop except across a different dimension. I feel like we've barely scratched the surface of what's possible to create.
Another area where prices have increased due to AI because a bunch of soulless chronically online people can feel better about themselves.
Mind you, human-painted artwork is a niche beyond expensive art. Not everyone buys the equivalent of Monet paintings. I've been eyeing a painting by a local painter just to realize the prices jumped from $500 to something like $3000 on average. Sucks.
I'm not sure what you're saying. Is the claim that the artist raised the cost of his work 6x because he's getting less work, because people are using AI instead? Maybe I'm in a bubble, but that doesn't seem credible. I'm trying to imagine the person that was thinking that they would hire a local artist to paint them a painting and then discovered AI and instead asked Gemini to do it. Those just seem like two completely separate use cases.
There's one thing worse than "designed by AI" and it's "designed by committee".
I wish more buildings were designed by AI. There's so much depressing architecture.
I’ve started to see (and react negatively) to a kind of “Claude design”. Apps, slides, images share the same aesthetic, and even after aggressive prompting it reverts to a the mean.
I even create these things. But that aesthetic has started to imply a kind of throwaway, low value thing
What will be interesting is if models can create more diverse styles than the neutral Claude default we see everywhere
I think that this is also a matter of organisation that people can get better at if they understand a bit of how things come into place. If you start by creating a stable theme, with the spacings you want, the colors you want, fonts, sizings, etc, even using an AI, then you can "customise" in full the look of a web-app.
The html there's not really many places to be creative, a navbar with 3 sections, 5 links, a text card, a hero image, etc, all those are the same across thousands of projects - they're structured, there's not really many ways you can be creative about it. So in part seeing that "middle ground" design is indeed a filter for the lowest of the low effort (or not understanding how to prompt properly, or how the final thing comes together).
If you just want to prompt models and have them come up with more diverse styles that's also quite, or more, lazy - it would help if you understood (not you in particular) how the look of a web page comes together, because then you can direct the model properly - and if needed tweak the lose ends because at some point it's just easier and faster to edit the output yourself but you need to know what needs change and how. If you know how an html page comes together into the thing you see in the browser you can spec the model properly.
We should just admit that human created art is dead. Just like hand coded code. Same thing. AI will soon beat any human in quantity and quality. Just accept it. It is over for humans.
Code has always been seen as purely utilitarian by most people, art is different.
I suspect use of AI to "realize one's artistic vision" will get increasingly more normalized, but I don't know how people will react to end-to-end AI art (which generally doesn't exist yet), things are going to be a really strange once/if human taste gets fully mapped and demystified.
Similar trajectory to "human premium" for human-authored text (when we started using synthetic AI-generated text in pre-training, around 2023 for maybe llama-3?). AI text is OK (kind of like a low nutrient content food) but labs still pay a premium for high quality domain-specific data silos. As far as the consumer, pattern-breaking media will always have a place, slop videos follow a similar distribution and so there's naturally pushback against seeing the same thing, over and over even if it's not inherently crap (just as in AI-authored text).
A lot of us saw this one coming a while ago. Many, many artists of all kinds have already put up "AI-free" (or similar) badges on their work. I think it will be more significant in the fine arts world, however local art fairs could be affected as well.
I say the more the merrier, but artists who use AI in their workflows are going to be pressed about it - with negative connotations - for a while. Transparency is the best solution in my opinion.
People trying to use AI in their creative process but not as their creative process might be the biggest losers for a while. Right now there are a lot of negative gut reactions to having any AI associated with art at all
Losing implies that there was something to lose to begin with. AI as a tool for art is new and there hasn’t been an artist who has managed to do something with it to break the internia.
Art is not ‘supposed’ to be easy to do, if one believes that they see something important they can express via AI — they are free to do so and try to say smth to the world, AI tools are relatively accessible. It’s not guaranteed that the world will listen now, but that has always been the case — many great artists never got recognition during their lifetimes including those who worked in novel paradigms.
So no, they’re not losing anything. If the absence of the immediate mass approval of their art is the obstacle, well, then they don’t need to make that art.
Why does how hard something was to make have anything to do with how good the art is? Three chord punk bands were in my view artistically superior to a lot of rock music from before as they made a structural innovation with the power chord.
It doesn’t. Art isn’t ‘supposed’ to be easy or hard, it is also not ‘supposed’ to be economically
viable or non-viable. Creating art was all of these things (hard, easy, profitable etc) in different places and different times. Art is still very hard because art is an expression of a human finding something true about the world they want to pass on. The tools don’t matter. Public recognition, largely, also doesn’t matter for good art (as long as it speaks to someone.) AI tools are easy but public recognition is hard to obtain. Both of these things have nothing to do with the quality of art.
If an artist has something to say with AI, they can just say it, no one is going to imprison them. Artists did that throughout the entire history (sometime even with the threat of being jailed), nothing changed in this regard with AI.
Art is hard not because of the tools but because you have to have something worthwhile to say (most people don’t) and you have to figure out a way how to get another human to listen, and also you have to hope that someone some day will listen because what you’re saying is true, even if it doesn’t sell today or ever.
The software part is quickly being solved but I honestly believe the more creative aspects will still see large demand. LLMs have a certain stink to their UI, being creative is a hard skill, which AI has yet to master.
Most of what gets called creative isn't creative at all. Often it means "Produce a content product which approximately matches commercial genre expectations with just enough of a twist to stand out a little."
A lot of people can do that. A lot more people could do it if they tried to.
People who are genuinely out of the box creatives, with a unique blend of original vision, technical skill, emotional and psychological insight, and genre-changing taste, are not common.
There will always be problems to solve with building software, regardless of the way it is written.
From code to no-code to vibe-code, to even more code. What we are seeing here is more of the same being built.
An example of this is "sandboxes". Everyone was writing "sandboxes" until it there was 1 vulnerability needed to break them and we will keep seeing this with developers vibe-coding infrastructure.
A reply quite some time later, but you are definitely on point, I rescind my previous statement. At least, I do think you are correct about always needing software or having problems to solve in it. Still undecided on the creativity stuff.
Because that's not the point. Before you could waste, without kidding, hours in meetings discussing css alignments, flows that didn't make sense but the upper levels were pretty serious about it - "Our QA and test groups say this is of the utmost importance", even when the QA and test groups were the same, 3 or 4 people that insisted on it.
I think most people, but at least I, could always deliver things inside schedules (not even set by myself) without a problem, even with those "adjustments" and changes of mind, and doubly so if I could just have the same leeway that now seems to be in place.
Nonetheless, if there's going to be a premium it has to be discernible in any particular way because software for business is always considered a cost. But what really shows this industry is half a joke, is that now there's no issue in giving 3rd party agents full access to inner code and logic, many times credentials too because these systems are being deployed in CIs. And because there's really no enforcement or punishment for leaks, or endangering users in most areas there's no reason for a premium. There's people pushing thousands of lines / min (and I think even the most professional people out there can't honestly keep up with it) although that isn't in itself meaning the overall security is worse than before, it just means that for the most part it's now un-auditable in any meaningful way.
Because code is not art and the corporate culture doesn't care about artisan code, neither do the users. As long as the software sells, they are happy.
In fact executives demand the opposite: token max to get the features out of the door faster, all in the same of closing that one last sale.
I do prefer OSS over proprietary software because to me, at least prior to GenAI, OSS was the label that was "software made by Humans" where proprietary was "made by corporations". It didn't make OSS win commercially, of course, and I personally don't think that human-made art will win commercially.
I discuss it a lot with my wife who happens to be a painter.
For years we have perceived my work (swe) as a safe harbor. With AI boom, tides have changed and now I perceive her work as a much, much more future-proof activity
While I agree that people _want_ art by humans, they mostly buy the cheapest possible thing that fits their taste and intention. Take furniture as an example of art component pushed to the premium segment
For 3 years now, I've gotten into arguments with both AI bros and artists about this. The main point of art is its cultural space (its creator, the zeitgeist etc.).
A human premium, and an elevation of human made art was always inevitable. Most "AI art" token spend is TPS reports, and explainer slides, maybe educational materials on the fringes. Maybe there is a chance some forms of AI art becomes its own new medium (like theater vs "the talkies") but it was never going to be a replacement.
Just 3 years of pointless hand-wringing, headlines and breathless interviews for nothing.
"Aaron Sorkin says he will never use AI".
Yes. No one asked him to! But alas, clickbait rules all.
As a human artist/film director/animator/musician etc I view "AI" as just another tool in my toolbox and what a tool it is!
In animation/film production- studios would have a "TD" on hand- a technical director- a programmer on staff to tweak workflows for artists, build new tools etc-
Now my TD chills in VsCode waiting and working for me 24/7 in the form of Claude Code, Kimi Code etc
I can also have my TD embed another TD(Deepseek flash 4.1) into the new tools(making them smarter and more useful) my TD builds for me while I am in active production on the same PC
All of this allows savvy creatives to dream bigger as a single person is capable of anything a "big studio" can do-
So artists need to leverage these new tools and be more ambitious.
After reading multuple discussions in this thread and a bunch of others, I feel like people on HN think about art skills in the same way as they think of their software skills.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but skills that allowed one to make software largely made one pretty employable in the last few decades.
Now, art skills do not make you employable. There are narrow industries where you can make money but throughout the entirety of human history, being an artist rarely provided any sort of economic security. Some artists did and do make money. Sometimes it was prestigious but the barrier of entry was insanely high. And yes, getting to their level of skill and sometimes even getting access to the tools (look up how much a decent harp costs) was yet another enormous obstacle. Out of the entire pool of people who had artistic abilities, very few got access to tools and resources to be able to express their abilities. Out of those, even fewer could make money off of it while also doing artistic work that was deeply fulfilling and aligned with their talent. Occasionally, the stars would align and you would be lucky to be born in a time and place where you could get the schooling, the tools, the job that paid well enough and that didn't makwe your soul die because it alined with your natural creativity.
There are a lot of people who (I think) speak of AI as if democratizes access to the tools and therefore in their mind it should follow that there must be some market for their newlyfound creative expression. But if you ever seriously considered art as a career, you know that you will likely not have a market for your skills. It is difficult to make money even as a traditonal artist (as in a painter) or, say, a musician, god help you if you want to do mixed media, if you want to play avant garde jazz, prog rock, or Barocco music, if you want to be an actor, a playwright or a ballet dancer.
Some people (I assume those who are excited about the idea of being able to express themselves) seem to be bummed that the world rejects AI art as 'slop'. I am not going to say anything about effort, laziness, etc, I believe anything can be used to make art, even a toilet put in an exhibition hall (I like Duchamp, I like modern art, I like post-modern art, I like whatever-the-paradigm-we're-in-now-art -- metamodernism? I love art, I did see early pre-ChatGPT experiments with neural networks that moved me), but I have to say something that any aspiring artist must know -- you will not make money off your art. The people who will be making the 'human premium' that the article talks about, will be few, just like there are few of them now. AI artists will not make money of their art. Art is a terrible career choice, now and tomorrow.
It's still worth pursuing, in my opinion (as I said -- I love art), but there is little point of talking about its commercial viability. It will always be shit.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 37.0 ms ] threadOr if they do, they'll try and downplay by saying they used AI for some elements, but not most of them.
Ideally, how you create something and what tools you use should be nobody's business, and all it matters would be if they like it or not. But inherent value / merit is a thing, and concern for the provenance of what you buy is also a valid position for the public to take. It's gonna be a while before the balance settles on either AI = bad or AI = who cares.
I would argue that modern art has none. Further, I would argue that art is what speaks to people.
That means that an AI generated image which makes people laugh has more soul than whatever the top selling modern artists was in 1995. By my estimation, that makes a lolcat a better piece of art than most modern art.
That is something that I actually think is true. Of course there are great artists who can show us much, much more than what is inside a lolcat. Its just that I haven't seen one of those in a while.
Artists are concerned for their jobs; That I get. Trying to defend art by claiming magical things like it doesn't have any soul is just cope. And frankly, the more I see of that, the less I care about artists and their real problems.
Art is a form of expression and/or communication. It's interesting because it shows us different perspectives, as well as things that overlap with ours. When you see a smiley face on your lawn and think it's a sign by the person you just fell in love with, and then find out the exact same artifact was in fact created by wind sweeping some branches together, you'll feel different about it. Similar for art. Or take jokes. A friend might find a joke of yours funny they might not find funny from a person they dislike. That's not "unfair" or "objectively wrong", just like rejecting the same artifact depending on source. If you don't understand this, you talking about "magic" is the cope.
> Its just that I haven't seen one of those in a while.
So that's the argument for making sure of that? Heh.
> Artists are concerned for their jobs; That I get.
The article isn't about artists being concerned for their jobs. This is about people rejecting slop.
A human premium, and an elevation of human made art was always inevitable. Most "AI art" token spend is TPS reports, and explainer slides, maybe educational materials on the fringes. Maybe there is a chance some forms of AI art becomes its own new medium (like theater vs "the talkies") but it was never going to be a replacement.
Just 3 years of pointless hand-wringing, headlines and breathless interviews for nothing.
"Aaron Sorkin says he will never use AI".
Yes. No one asked him to! But alas, clickbait rules all.
Overall, the perspective espoused here is bad for art. Art isn't hidden inside effort, you don't find it by saying "don't be lazy", and if it's inseparable from where it came from (which I think is pretty debatable, art travels through time and the world and can find interest), this is as true for what humans make as what AI makes.
I think the last bit gives the game away. This perspective is an otherwise content free way of saying "some art is interesting to me, and some isn't".
>saying "some art is interesting to me, and some isn't".
That applies to every single human being, including you, except maybe for art scholars.
I'm also not sure that art is actually a way that humans talk to each other. That assumes that the point is delivering some information, but a lot of artists talk about it as a compulsion, or something they do for themselves, or as being about understanding the world. I would actually say that many would say that it's definitively not about audience reception. Simultaneously, audiences interpret things of their own accord all the time. Unlike when sending a message, art is often most fully interacted with when you're engaging with things that weren't put there explicitly.
Well, your post, following your own logic, just says that you like AI-generated stuff. You cannot judge what's good or bad for art, you can't call someone preference "snobbery" because the only property of art is that someone likes it. Interesting things is also then completely subjective.
You insult people and then lie about what you said.
All of which are impossible with AI. It has no intent, it fulfulls the ask from the prompt. If the prompt is so detailed to imbue the work with deeper meanings, then the author is the person that wrote the prompt, not the LLM which becomes something of a translater.
If LLMs get so good at architecting stories that they can whip up some conceptual layer of understand that feels like communication then we will have achieved a higher form of literary remixing. LLMs are still a series of weights,they still operate in a stateless way and have no initiative besides our prompt. Unless we change that, the value of what an LLM can produce remains limited.
To think otherwise is like a tribesman finding a radio and thinking they are hearing the voice of God. Because you aren't following where the words come from you invent a persona for something that is fundamentally a vehicle of transport.
Your insight years later is still something you constructed, it's a new story that you've told yourself, presumably without any new input from the writer, all of which you can do with any given piece of media. You can do that without the intent having been there on the writer's part at all, even, something which is fairly common to do.
* Once a synonym for "artistic", but that's a distracting coincidence
Computer code can replicate rhetoric and prose. It can even create meaning the user didn't anticipate. This is as much a reflection of the 'author' as any hallucination.
I don't live like that, you don't live like that, but most people do, and they have ever right to. Humans aren't analytical engines. Evolutionary biology has pushed us strongly towards caring deeply about meaning, identity, and respect. This is normal and has to be unlearned. Good luck with that. Other people don't have to like and respect art for you to.
My point is it doesn't matter. All art ultimately boils down to is doing something cool, and then pointing at it. The vast, vast, vast majority of "art" is not paid and never was. Even the art that is called "art" has little-to-nothing to do with effort. Duchamp's "readymades" are basically less effort that typing a prompt into AI.
That said, nobody has to like Duchamp's readymades. Nobody has to like anyone's art. The point of art is that you can like it or not. It's not objective, but the vast majority of people are going to pretend that it is, but that's fine because it's actually not.
I think that, as with photography and painting, there will be a place for all types of art, also machine generated, but under different umbrellas.
To think that they compete in the same category is a mistake.
Edit: here are some examples for those wondering what I mean: https://imgur.com/a/mK3Iuzq
You can sort of tell they are AI because of the composition stuff but I think they are aight.
The reduction of this friction culminates in the reduction of the piece’s essence.
But what interests me about AI is that it is possible to do things that you couldn't do before particularly in processing images. For these images I took photos of the bottles myself and used other images and the AI can place the camera anywhere in a scene and place objects anywhere in the scene, and things like that. You can create almost any image you can imagine with the right sources and the right prompt, and even here there is some friction because many images do end up looking like slop and you have to prompt it right to get something non-slop like out of it (though not always).
This ability to manipulate and process information is what makes AI interesting to me, although I'm not sure I adequately explained it. It feels like a new tool like Photoshop except across a different dimension. I feel like we've barely scratched the surface of what's possible to create.
Mind you, human-painted artwork is a niche beyond expensive art. Not everyone buys the equivalent of Monet paintings. I've been eyeing a painting by a local painter just to realize the prices jumped from $500 to something like $3000 on average. Sucks.
I even create these things. But that aesthetic has started to imply a kind of throwaway, low value thing
What will be interesting is if models can create more diverse styles than the neutral Claude default we see everywhere
The html there's not really many places to be creative, a navbar with 3 sections, 5 links, a text card, a hero image, etc, all those are the same across thousands of projects - they're structured, there's not really many ways you can be creative about it. So in part seeing that "middle ground" design is indeed a filter for the lowest of the low effort (or not understanding how to prompt properly, or how the final thing comes together).
If you just want to prompt models and have them come up with more diverse styles that's also quite, or more, lazy - it would help if you understood (not you in particular) how the look of a web page comes together, because then you can direct the model properly - and if needed tweak the lose ends because at some point it's just easier and faster to edit the output yourself but you need to know what needs change and how. If you know how an html page comes together into the thing you see in the browser you can spec the model properly.
I suspect use of AI to "realize one's artistic vision" will get increasingly more normalized, but I don't know how people will react to end-to-end AI art (which generally doesn't exist yet), things are going to be a really strange once/if human taste gets fully mapped and demystified.
I say the more the merrier, but artists who use AI in their workflows are going to be pressed about it - with negative connotations - for a while. Transparency is the best solution in my opinion.
Art is not ‘supposed’ to be easy to do, if one believes that they see something important they can express via AI — they are free to do so and try to say smth to the world, AI tools are relatively accessible. It’s not guaranteed that the world will listen now, but that has always been the case — many great artists never got recognition during their lifetimes including those who worked in novel paradigms.
So no, they’re not losing anything. If the absence of the immediate mass approval of their art is the obstacle, well, then they don’t need to make that art.
If an artist has something to say with AI, they can just say it, no one is going to imprison them. Artists did that throughout the entire history (sometime even with the threat of being jailed), nothing changed in this regard with AI.
Art is hard not because of the tools but because you have to have something worthwhile to say (most people don’t) and you have to figure out a way how to get another human to listen, and also you have to hope that someone some day will listen because what you’re saying is true, even if it doesn’t sell today or ever.
A lot of people can do that. A lot more people could do it if they tried to.
People who are genuinely out of the box creatives, with a unique blend of original vision, technical skill, emotional and psychological insight, and genre-changing taste, are not common.
There will always be problems to solve with building software, regardless of the way it is written.
From code to no-code to vibe-code, to even more code. What we are seeing here is more of the same being built.
An example of this is "sandboxes". Everyone was writing "sandboxes" until it there was 1 vulnerability needed to break them and we will keep seeing this with developers vibe-coding infrastructure.
Nonetheless, if there's going to be a premium it has to be discernible in any particular way because software for business is always considered a cost. But what really shows this industry is half a joke, is that now there's no issue in giving 3rd party agents full access to inner code and logic, many times credentials too because these systems are being deployed in CIs. And because there's really no enforcement or punishment for leaks, or endangering users in most areas there's no reason for a premium. There's people pushing thousands of lines / min (and I think even the most professional people out there can't honestly keep up with it) although that isn't in itself meaning the overall security is worse than before, it just means that for the most part it's now un-auditable in any meaningful way.
In fact executives demand the opposite: token max to get the features out of the door faster, all in the same of closing that one last sale.
For years we have perceived my work (swe) as a safe harbor. With AI boom, tides have changed and now I perceive her work as a much, much more future-proof activity
Some open source projects have already banned AI contributions. I think this trend will continue (in stark contrast to the corporate world).
A human premium, and an elevation of human made art was always inevitable. Most "AI art" token spend is TPS reports, and explainer slides, maybe educational materials on the fringes. Maybe there is a chance some forms of AI art becomes its own new medium (like theater vs "the talkies") but it was never going to be a replacement.
Just 3 years of pointless hand-wringing, headlines and breathless interviews for nothing.
"Aaron Sorkin says he will never use AI".
Yes. No one asked him to! But alas, clickbait rules all.
In animation/film production- studios would have a "TD" on hand- a technical director- a programmer on staff to tweak workflows for artists, build new tools etc-
Now my TD chills in VsCode waiting and working for me 24/7 in the form of Claude Code, Kimi Code etc
I can also have my TD embed another TD(Deepseek flash 4.1) into the new tools(making them smarter and more useful) my TD builds for me while I am in active production on the same PC
All of this allows savvy creatives to dream bigger as a single person is capable of anything a "big studio" can do-
So artists need to leverage these new tools and be more ambitious.
Aesthetics are dead- original ideas are it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but skills that allowed one to make software largely made one pretty employable in the last few decades.
Now, art skills do not make you employable. There are narrow industries where you can make money but throughout the entirety of human history, being an artist rarely provided any sort of economic security. Some artists did and do make money. Sometimes it was prestigious but the barrier of entry was insanely high. And yes, getting to their level of skill and sometimes even getting access to the tools (look up how much a decent harp costs) was yet another enormous obstacle. Out of the entire pool of people who had artistic abilities, very few got access to tools and resources to be able to express their abilities. Out of those, even fewer could make money off of it while also doing artistic work that was deeply fulfilling and aligned with their talent. Occasionally, the stars would align and you would be lucky to be born in a time and place where you could get the schooling, the tools, the job that paid well enough and that didn't makwe your soul die because it alined with your natural creativity.
There are a lot of people who (I think) speak of AI as if democratizes access to the tools and therefore in their mind it should follow that there must be some market for their newlyfound creative expression. But if you ever seriously considered art as a career, you know that you will likely not have a market for your skills. It is difficult to make money even as a traditonal artist (as in a painter) or, say, a musician, god help you if you want to do mixed media, if you want to play avant garde jazz, prog rock, or Barocco music, if you want to be an actor, a playwright or a ballet dancer.
Some people (I assume those who are excited about the idea of being able to express themselves) seem to be bummed that the world rejects AI art as 'slop'. I am not going to say anything about effort, laziness, etc, I believe anything can be used to make art, even a toilet put in an exhibition hall (I like Duchamp, I like modern art, I like post-modern art, I like whatever-the-paradigm-we're-in-now-art -- metamodernism? I love art, I did see early pre-ChatGPT experiments with neural networks that moved me), but I have to say something that any aspiring artist must know -- you will not make money off your art. The people who will be making the 'human premium' that the article talks about, will be few, just like there are few of them now. AI artists will not make money of their art. Art is a terrible career choice, now and tomorrow.
It's still worth pursuing, in my opinion (as I said -- I love art), but there is little point of talking about its commercial viability. It will always be shit.