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this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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Depends on the artist. Shitty at drawing but got skills on the comp? Ill take the art you used AI for.
Plenty of AI slop out there sure, but there is also plenty of drawn/painted/sculpted/whatever slop out there as well.
Hating on new tools is some dumb shit.
This has never been what the issue is. The issue isn't the tool, but how it's made and how it's used.
AI gen programs are almost to a fault created using art without permission with the express purpose of then using said programs to put the workers whose skills were stolen out of a job. Without artists, gen AI would have nothing to train on. They are basically the definition of wage theft in their current form.
You might as well be arguing that Temu brand fast fashion is just as good as any other kind of clothing.
And the other end that gets hate is the people who consider themselves to be better than artists because the prompt they put into an LLM created an image that they consider to be better than what artists make. They're jealous of people creating something and want the reward without putting in the effort so they can hold it over others.
Every artist does this all the time. The actual problem is "IP" - a system of capitalist control whereby the rich control everything and workers are still exploited.
Nobody can steal another person's skills. If people are losing their jobs, the problem is being forced to serve capital in order to survive. That's a much bigger and more important problem than "AI slop".
Without artists, artists would have nothing to train on. But in reality artists will always exist.
This is the biggest form of theft under capitalism but somehow people only complain about it in terms of "AI". Again this is a direct result of the exploitation of worker by capital. There is nothing inherently exploitative about making art on a computer (apart from the manufacturing of the computer which is extremely exploitative).
If this is even real? It seems like two completely difference category. And more importantly who cares? Petty AF.
AI bros fall into 2 categories in my experience, the "who cares, picture making machine go brrr" group and the "I can make works that rival the great artists like Da Vinci with just a few words, thus making me the winner and better than any so-called artist" group.
As for your argument about artists doing the same thing all the time, there's a fundamental difference between artists and AI: a person learns the rules/reasons behind something while AI merely generates a statistical average. An AI is incapable of understanding concepts like perspective and lighting, nor can it learn anatomy. It's much closer to tracing art than it is to going "I really like the way that guy does hands, I'm gonna learn to do that." If you write a haiku, you're not stealing your poem from other writers. You know the rules that make a poem a haiku. But an AI, asked to write a haiku, doesn't know what makes a haiku a haiku, it just knows that its statistics say that x number of syllables is followed by a line break, etc.
If artists can't exist without having artists to train on, then where did the first artist come from? Where did Impressionism come from? It hasn't always existed as an art form. Who created the art that the Mona Lisa was generated from? I can tell you: the actual person that Da Vinci was drawing and the years upon years of study of things like anatomy and lighting that he had. The cavemen who drew stick figure horses on cave walls didn't train on other stick figures, they drew what they saw in nature through the lense of their own interpretation and creativity.
Look at your own words here: Nobody. No person. AI isn't a person stealing the skills of another, it's a tool using patterns and schematics created by people to make knockoffs. And just because this is a problem of capitalism stealing from workers doesn't mean that it's not a problem that we should address.
This is what I'm saying. Making art using digital tools? Totally fine, I do it myself and even have a side business from the stuff I make in Blender. Using the tools created by companies committing wage theft rather than paying artists a living wage because it's cheaper and easier for you? Not okay. It's like buying stuff from Temu. You don't have to subscribe to Netflix and watch all the latest shows. You don't have to use Stable Diffusion to make memes any more than you have to use Reddit.
If 2 things were to change, nobody except for the stupid "photography will kill painting" people would care: people using AI to avoid paying people a living wage, and people who think that using AI makes them better than others.
"yes but have you considered i wanna and you're being a killjoy? i'm gonna ai twice as hard now"
To me, it's more that I get a glimpse of the human behind the art, even or especially if they're shitty at drawing. That's why I also like memes which are thrown together haphazardly. If it's pixel-perfect imagery, I don't see much from that at all.
Not referring to the Adobe model that compensates artists in the training set, but besides them there has been great debate on the ethics of ingesting & regurgitating. (“but small humans do it” etc)
Which is to say of course it could be the best art in the world and it wouldn’t be beautiful in those eyes.
These heroes act like they’re patrons of actual artists, or do anything with actual art other than ignore it, or do anything with creative works that would require art but don’t have it. They don’t seek out prototypes of games (board or video) they just sit back and consume and then have the nerve to whine about what’s produced for them.
The algorithms are beautiful, revolutionary, a true achievement of humanity.
The way the corporations have used those algorithms is unethical, inartistic, a true embarrassment of humanity.
This is true of everything under capitalism. And it doesn't mean the art is slop.
For example our phones are made by slave labor but nobody is posting memes about how all phones are slop. Maybe they should do. It would be a better cause than crying about generated art.
I'm not sure I'm convinced by your argument. It seems to boil down to:
System A is bad
System A produced Product 1 and Product 2
Product 1 and Product 2 are therefore bad because they were produced through System A
Criticizing Product 2 without criticizing Product 1 is an incomplete analysis; and criticizing either Product is foolish because System A is the cause of the issue
System A must be destroyed in order to prevent it from creating new Products that will be bad, and to undo the badness of the existing Products.
System A is capitalism
It's less a tool and more a short cut. and short cuts are a disservice to the artest and the art appreciater.
Ok yeah. That's what they said about the hammer. It's a disservice to the fine artisans using rocks.
... No, they didn't.
Yes they did. And all of this is the same as what was said about photography and the invention of the camera and its utilization as art.
Photography is art. Film is art. Digital media is art. CGI is art. AI art is art.
You may not like it. But most people didn't like those other new forms at first either. And they stopped being afraid of change and new things and learned to love it. The same will occur here. It is inevitable and impossible to oppose or resist
This is progress. And it will continue to accelerate regardless of whether or not you approve of it
One of those things is not like the others. AI "art" is just feeding an AI a prompt until it spits out something you like. Some people may do a touch up to hide the hallucinations, but they aren't actually creating the image.
Coming up with the idea is the art, as is transposing that idea into reality. If ai can transpose your idea into reality more effectively than any other artform then it should be utilized for such purpose
No AI will ever turn an idea into a picture better then taking pencil/paintbrush/pen in hand doing it yourself. The best you can get is "yeah that's close enough to what I was Invisioning" the computer doesn't know what you are thinking, and a description, no matter how in depth, can ever take what you have in mind and perfectly create it. AI is doing it's interpretation of what you ask for. And plus, the AI isn't an art tool, if anything, it's the artist. The prompt whiter is just the one commissioning it.
If you aren't artistically talented, whether through lack of ability or through disability, then AI is significantly better at turning an idea into existing art than using a pencil/paintbrush/pen
Stop with the excuses. art is a skill that requires practice. if you don't put In the practice you won't be very good, but that doesn't mean you can't get good and gain that artistic ability. And go into any art community and ask about doing art with a disability. Half the artist probably have a disability. (If one has a disability the that makes it hard for them to hold a more conventional job, art can actually be a great source of income.) It may be more challenging, but with enough determination and practice, anyone can get good at art.
It's not like I'm very good at art either, the best I can do is sketch simple things I can see.
Mechanical skill at manipulating a tool like a brush is not in any way correlated with artistic talent. Creating and imagining the meaningful concepts and transposing them into reality to convey emotional and intellectual meaning is a reflection of artistic quality. Not how good someone is at drawing. If AI can empower person's to transposing their ideas into reality then it should be encouraged and widely adopted
Ok, creativity is also something you can practice and get better at. I funny that in the first part, you mention creating art with "emotional and intellectual meaning" and then still support AI "Art" that lacks much of that.
Creativity isn't the same thing as drawing or painting or whatever. Being mechanically gifted at manipulating an instrument to produce certain output isn't reflective of one's creativity. There are plenty of very creative people who are bad at drawing etc. Ai art empowers those people to transform their ideas into reality
Now you are just arguing in circles. All it takes is practice. And if they truly don't want to do the work themselves, working with an artist can be a very rewording experience. Will hiring an artist cost money? Yes, but then you get to directly support the people making your idea come to fruition. Instead of using AI that steals those artists work to train it's algorithm and does nothing to support artist.
But being able to mechanically draw well doesn't make you an artist. Imagining the ideas and transposing those ideas into reality makes you an artist. Which AI enables people to do
High technical skill in utilizing writing/drawing/painting implements is not equivalent to art. That's a very STEM view of things which demonstrates a lack of emotional connection with life or art
Yes, that is also something you can practice and get better at. Every aspect of Art is something you need to practice at to get better at. im not arguing that skill with an art tool is important to being an artist. I'm only arguing that AI isn't a tool, it's a shortcut that tarnishes artistic integrity at best. And at worst, it takes the place of an artist and the user becomes nothing more then the commissioner. (Hence why you can't copy write AI "art", it legally not something you made.)
I'm sorry, how is a favorable view on AI "art" not the "STEM view" of things? It literally lacks all connection between life and art. It's just a fucking algorithm. I'm the one saying a connection between life and art is important for it to be art.
The idea that AI art “isn’t art” because it’s a shortcut or because it uses an algorithm misunderstands both what art is and what tools have always been.
Art has never been defined by the medium or method — it’s defined by intent, vision, and expression. A camera didn’t make photography “not art.” Digital tablets didn’t make digital painting illegitimate. And AI doesn’t erase artistic vision — it channels it through a new tool. The artist is still choosing the concepts, crafting the prompts, refining outputs, experimenting with style, tone, and feeling. The AI doesn’t create meaning — the human behind it does.
Calling AI a “shortcut” implies that ease diminishes value. But would you say that a poet using a thesaurus is cheating? Or that a sculptor using power tools is less of an artist than one using only a chisel? Artistic integrity isn’t about how labor-intensive the process is — it’s about what’s communicated, and why.
Also, this notion that AI art “lacks a connection to life” is projecting a fear onto the medium. An AI image born from someone’s grief, curiosity, memory, joy, or political message carries that emotional weight — not because the AI feels anything, but because the human behind it does. That’s no different than paint, marble, pixels, or film. All of those are just lifeless materials until a human gives them meaning.
As for copyright — that’s a legal framework lagging behind the technology, not a moral judgment. Copyright law also initially didn’t know what to do with photography, collage, or digital art. Legal ambiguity doesn’t mean it isn’t art — it means the system hasn’t caught up.
AI is a tool. If someone’s using it to chase trends or mass-produce content, sure — maybe that’s shallow. But if someone’s using it to explore ideas they couldn’t draw or paint by hand, to tell stories, to reflect identity or dreamscapes — then it’s art. Full stop.
The fear that AI replaces artists comes from a zero-sum mindset. In reality, it opens doors for people with vision but without traditional training. And that, ironically, makes art more human — not less.
This is Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap.
I thought Sturgeons law was that 98% of everything on the internet is crap?
It is explicitly "90 percent of everything is crap," emphasis on "everything."
Fortunately (or unfortunately, if you prefer), the Internet is indeed included in everything.