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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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Everything you said about photography also applies to painting AND it requires the physical skill that you dismiss as trivial.
I'm not dismissing it, and that doesn't address the point at all compared to AI. It isn't that technique isn't important, it's just far less of what you learn as an artist compared to the theory. Photography has its own advanced techniques just like all artforms.
You did dismiss it by claiming it was a small part compared to what a photographer has to learn.
Ai doesn't do anything without prompting. You need all the same art knowledge to prompt an AI to create an image. In another reply here I compared it to a film director. Film directors don't say the lines, do the cinematography, create the sets, costumes, or anything else. They only prompt others do do what is in their mind until it satisfies their artistic viewpoint.
My experience with AI art is extremely limited. I got garbage out. I've seen good AI art so there is skill to prompting in the same way a photographer uses skill but has a machine that actually creates the art.
Repeating it does not make it so. There are no AI art colleges.
There were no photography art colleges 150 years ago either. Photography was widely derided by artists. Impressionism was created as a response to the increased use of photography. They wanted to show that art was a human interpretation, not a mechanical reproduction.
https://www.artinsociety.com/pt-1-initial-impacts.html#%3A%7E%3Atext=Some+painters%2C+such+as+Courbet%2Ctrained+discriminating+and+expressive+eye.
Edit: Looks like AI is being added to art classes in colleges. https://hyperallergic.com/944834/school-is-back-in-session-and-so-are-ai-art-classes/
So art school is already recognizing AI art as a medium.
Yeah I don't know if that source or that college make the point you think they do. AI art cannot exist without a constant feed of (non-consensual) human creativity. You can learn everything there is to know about AI "art" in a relatively short time span, because you have the plagiarism machine to do the composition for you. It isn't so for any other medium. This point isn't worth arguing, because it's so self-evident. The knowledge and skill of photography clearly set it apart as an art form, whereas AI does not. AI "art" requires the knowledge and skill of actual artforms to even exist.
Photography's genesis is fascinating and is taught about in art school. You conveniently left out the other side of that time, where the fledgling artform pushed back to prove its validity through multiple evolving forms and styles, which demonstrated that it is simply a new medium, not trying to replace or replicate any other style. That is explicitly what gen AI stands to do, and it even requires constant input of actual art to exist. Additionally , impressionism was far more a reaction to realism than it was to photography. Every new wave in art creates pushback from the other styles more popular at the time. Never before has every field of art so unanimously opposed what is clearly the cheapening and commoditizing of creativity through soulless reproduction. Gen AI can be fun to mess with, it can be interesting to explore the technology, but it is ultimately just a bubble being propped up by the exploitation of actual artists and consumers alike.
You clearly do not produce or understand the production of art, and why there is such a difference. Prompt engineering is not composition, and the only art that uses AI relies on human composition to give it any form of soul. This conversation isn't worth having, as you're still trying to argue that photography is analogous to AI art. Talk to artists.
It isn't self evident. Otherwise a movie director does not create art either because they only prompt.
Nor is AI art in college trivial because by you claimed the physical part of creating art isn't the important part. You need to know all the basics in exactly the same way a photographer needs to know the basics.
It is by definition. If you were an art director and told an assistant to move an apple a little to the left before you pushed a button, that's no different than telling an AI to move an apple a little to the left before pressing a button.
As to AI only regurgitating preexisting art, I refer you to the Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism and Dada. There is no difference between telling someone to draw a beard and mustache on the Mona Lisa and telling an AI.
Kids are learning AI art in college. It's no different than when kids started learning photography in college and actual artists opposed it.
“If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon supplant or corrupt it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.”
Charles Baudelaire, 1859
It's different because a camera didn't need to generate enough carbon to burn down an acre of rainforest to take a single picture, nor did it have to harvest the stolen artwork of millions of artists to generate a picture.
But, sure, "prompt engineering" is a creative process and can be artistic.
Absolutely false. You can run AI locally and measure the energy use yourself. It's the same as playing a 3d game.
Edit: It's literally the same energy use as playing MarioKart on a Switch for 20 minutes.
https://www.qt.io/blog/examples-of-local-llm-usage
Carbon emissions don't just happen at point of use, they have to train these chatbots. That takes billions of kWhs of electricity, there's a reason they want to build nuclear reactors to power their data centers.
Then there's the immense water demands, which can cripple the actual human access to drinking water.
So, sure, the energy isn't used when you generate a picture. I misspoke. It was already used, but by creating demand it only incentivizes further training with even higher energy and water demands.
Also, I noticed you just glossed over the fact that they're trained on stolen art.
Gpt 4 had a training cost of $78 million. Gta5 cost $300 million. 4000 developers each with the latest GPU burning hundreds of watts per employee to create the assets. A rough estimate of 750watt pc, 4,000 developers, 8 hour a day, 300 days a year, 5 years = 36 giga watt-hours. That's the energy to power 3.6 million homes for a year and I'm not even including the HVAC costs of the office space.
For 1 game.
I'm not a big fan of AAA development, so thanks for another reason to hate that shit. Retvrn to ASCII