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"Why AI Images Suck" (Art by Flu Hartberg)
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this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025
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Fuck AI
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"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
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Yes.
So does passing a kidney stone.
I don't care about effort, I want to know what you have to say. I want to see what you've learned. I want you to show me something about your life.
If this were math, I want you to show me your work.
In the things you've made, you are the only thing I give a shit about. You've made things with AI? Show me where you are in them, then. Are you even real? Do you exist? Should I care you were ever even here?
If you think photography doesn't achieve these things, boy, let me tell you about AI then.
To onlookers: if you're wondering why I'm not addressing the lazy and uninteresting hypocrisy arguments, it's because they don't mean anything.
Painters used to be mad at photographers? Okay. They get along now, why is that? Does anyone even care? Did they simply forget they were pissed at each other? Was Mercury in retrograde?
The only purpose of these arguments is to make you doubt yourself. They don't advocate for anything. They don't suggest a goal, or a resolution, or a compromise, they're just rhetorical chess moves---"neener neener" and tongue wagging.
Does that mean movie directors aren't artists? Because all they do is prompt people into doing what's in their mind until it's either close enough or the actor does something unexpected and they keep it because it was better than their idea.
Credit for this would go to the actor, Morpho.
I am intentionally leaving you room to impress me, and you are still just calling out alleged hypocrisy.
It should go to the actor yet often it's the director who gets the Oscar without the actors also getting an Oscar despite improvisation on the set. Then there's the entire crew of set design, artists, cinematographers, costuming, and who also do work based on loose prompts from the director. Sometimes they will be acknowledged along with the director but often the director gets an award without everyone else on the set also getting acknowledged.
The supposed beef between painters and photographers is weird, painters were often interested in photography so that they could continue paint the scene when the scene did no longer exist, it also opened up new areas for painters to explore, like impressionnism because an exact copy is kind of boring! Tedious work was offloaded onto the machine.
People use AI to create art, but not in the way that they just do a prompt and "hop" here is art! No, it's just easier to ask the machine to generate scenery and stuff than walking around trying to find a suitable one (for example) to help out, to try to find that elusive thing you want to capture, and then you paint. For example.
Photography has also evolved into its own art form, maybe AI will too one ~~say~~ day, who knows?
People doesn't seem, as you suggest, to understand what art is or what it's all about. To be fair, it's a complex subject, but having a machine generating something is always going to be just a tool, like the painters brush is one.
One can hope.
The key difference here between this and photography, though, is that photography only displaced painters. You can tell by looking whether something is a photograph or not. Usually.
AI is very good and will only get better. When the machine can replicate any style, any subject, 3,000 times a minute: what is left for people to even do? How will you ever know a person was there?
If these tools were built to be honest, such that you always knew when something was generated and when something wasn't, I wouldn't have nearly as much of a problem with it.
I'd argue that hyperrealism isn't art in itself, I mean you just cosplay as a printer. It's just technique.
An artist must know the tools of its trade, only then can he or she make art. If you only have one technique, then you can't express yourself, because expressing yourself is to chose between all that you know and can do and select the techniques that expresses the thing you want to express.
Art is about expressing yourself, expressing something, AI will never take that away. The masters artworks won't becone non-art just because a machine could paint similar paintings.
I also doesn't subscribe to the idea that art must be appreciated by someone, I think you can make art all by yourself (it is of course nice to be appreciated, but it's not an obligation, again IMO), so let that AI machine produce photographs and paintings all day long, it won't stop my struggles producing, maybe one day, a honorable painting.