> One thing I've noticed - artists view their own job as more valuable, more sacred, more important than virtually any other person's job.
> They canonize themselves, and then act all shocked and offended when the rest of the world doesn't share their belief.
You could've written this about software engineers and tech workers.
> Obviously the existence of AI is valuable enough to pay the cost of offsetting a few artists' jobs, it's not even a question to us
No, it's not obvious at all. Current AI models have made it 100x easier to spread disinformation, sow discord, and undermine worker rights. These have more value to me than being able to more efficiently Add Shareholder Value
> I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously.
Yeah, no. It's presumptuous to say that these are the only reasons. I don't think you understand at all.
> So if I produce something art, product, game, book and if it’s good, and if it’s useful to you, fun to you, beautiful to you and you cannot really determine whether it’s AI. Does it matter? Like how does it matter?
Because to me, and many others, art is a form of communication. Artists toil because they want to communicate something to the world- people consume art because they want to be spoken to. It's a two-way street of communication. Every piece created by a human carries a message, one that's sculpted by their unique life experiences and journey.
AI-generated content may look nice on the surface, but fundamentally they say nothing at all. There is no message or intent behind a probabilistic algorithm putting pixels onto my screen.
When a person encounters AI content masquerading as human-made, it's a betrayal of expectations. There is no two-way communication, the "person" on the other side of the phone line is a spam bot. Think about how you would feel being part of a social group where the only other "people" are LLMs. Do you think that would be fulfilling or engaging after the novelty wears off?
> When you're young you don't really think about it much, health comes for "free."
I can't stress this enough. So many of my peers have complained about back pain and other physical ailments, as if it was an unavoidable part of turning 30.
No, it didn't just suddenly appear the moment you turned 30, it's the symptom of accumulated damage from a sedentary lifestyle.
For what it's worth, I've managed to get a lot of them into fitness, and they're doing much better now
I think you fundamentally misunderstand what people use "slop" to describe.
> Most human made art is slop too.
I'm assuming you're using the term "slop" to describe low-quality, unpolished works, or works where the artist has been too ambitious with their skill level.
Let me put it this way:
Every piece of art that is made, is a series of decisions. The artist uses their lived experience, their tastes and their values to create something that's meaningful to them. Art doesn't need to have a high-level of technical expertise to be meaningful to others. It's fundamentally about communication from artists to their audience. To this point, I don't believe there's such a thing as "bad art" (all works have something to say about the artist!).
In contrast, when you prompt an image generator, you're handing over the majority of the decisions to the algorithm. You can put in your subject matter, poses, even add styles, but how much is really being communicated here? Undoubtedly it would require a high level of technical skill to render similarly by hand, but that's missing the forest for the trees- what is the image saying? There's a reason why most "good" AI-generated images generally have a lot of human curation and editing.
As a side note, here's a human-made piece that I appreciate a lot. https://i.imgur.com/AZiiZj1.jpeg
The longer you explore it, the more the story unfolds, it's quite lovely. On the other hand, when I focus on the details in AI-generated works, there's not much else to see.
> I think you fundamentally misunderstand what people use "slop" to describe.
I don't think I do, actually. It's not a term with a technical definition, but in simple terms it means art that is obviously AI, because it has the sheen, weird hands, inconsistencies, weird framing or thematic elements that are hard to describe without an art degree but which we instinctively know is wrong, or is just plain bad.
I used the term slop to describe bad humans art too, but I meant something subtly different. It's a term that has been used to describe bad work of all kinds from humans since long before there was AI.
In this case, it's art from humans who are learning what makes good art. You say there's no bad art, and it's a valid viewpoint, but I'd say bad art is when the artist has a clear goal in their mind, but they lack the skills to realize it. Nonetheless, they share it for feedback and approval anyway, and by doing that on a site like DeviantArt they learn and grow as artists. But meanwhile, to me or anyone else who is visiting that site to find "good", meaningful art made by skilled artists, this is slop. Human slop, not AI slop.
> here's a human-made piece that I appreciate a lot
I like your art. I'm glad you made it. What I like most is that it's fun to look at and think about which is what you say you intended. I hope I get to see more of your art.
> To this point, I don't believe there's such a thing as "bad art" (all works have something to say about the artist!).
As a classically trained oil painter, I know for sure there is bad art especially because I've made more than enough bad art for one lifetime.
Bad art begins with a lack of craftsmanship and is exemplified by a poor use of materials/media and forms, or a lack of knowledge of those forms (e.g. poor anatomical knowledge, misunderstanding the laws of perspective), or an overly literal representation of forms (a photograph is better at being literal, for example).
> Here's an example of some "slop" from the AI Art Turing Test […] But it's very clearly AI-generated. Can you figure out why?
It's only "clearly AI-generated" because we know that AI is capable of generating art. If you saw this without that context you wouldn't immediately say "AI!" Instead, you'd give it a normal critique that you'd give a student or colleague: I'd say:
- there's too much repetition of large forms.
- there's an unpleasant hierarchy of values and not enough separation of values.
- The portrait of the human is the focus of the image yet it has been lost in the other forms.
- The composition can improve with more breathing room in the foreground or background which are too busy.
- Here look at this Frazetta!
However, my rudimentary list could just as easily be turned into prompts to be used to refine the image and experiment with variations. And, perhaps you'd consider that to be a human making decisions?
> I like your art. I'm glad you made it. What I like most is that it's fun to look at and think about which is what you say you intended. I hope I get to see more of your art.
I don't think they disagree with not adding AI features. I think they disagree with the moral posturing. It would have been different if the devs simply said "We aren't adding AI features since we don't think it's actually that useful."
You're really underestimating how much the folding helps with handling.
The shortened length makes it extremely easy to handle with a single hand, and fits much better inside a pocket (a lot less cumbersome to pull out of a tight spot!)
Depending on how long my device lasts, I might make the move permanently to folding phones.
If somebody can't be fucked taking the time to write out their thoughts, why should they expect me to waste my time reading generated text? It's insulting.
> They canonize themselves, and then act all shocked and offended when the rest of the world doesn't share their belief.
You could've written this about software engineers and tech workers.
> Obviously the existence of AI is valuable enough to pay the cost of offsetting a few artists' jobs, it's not even a question to us
No, it's not obvious at all. Current AI models have made it 100x easier to spread disinformation, sow discord, and undermine worker rights. These have more value to me than being able to more efficiently Add Shareholder Value