I don't hate AI art. I hate AI art being passed off as "traditional" art.

Yes. It's flooding places, and suddenly people decided that "smooth looking" was the absolute end goal of any drawing/music/creation/etc. It's not. Some of the most famous art piece are completely wrong, some aren't. That's not the endgoal. Nobody's gonna care that you can take that very simplified drawing and "generate" an extremely high-detail, fully shaded image that looks like it, as it was never the purpose.

Creative direction, intent, consistency (or absolute lack of consistency), execution, style, and a lot more goes into any creation, art or not. That's what make a piece feel interesting. There's a reason even now, with generated content being plausible as far as glaring mistakes go, we can still point out which image "feels" AI across a lot of different styles. At best, to remove that feeling of it being wrong, you'd have to spent a lot of time on the output of a model to touch it up everywhere and change details, which requires time and proficiency, which a lot of people jumping on that trend definitely lacks. Some of the worst results I've seen have been from people trying to make other "pay" for their output.

There's also the issue of how these works. For decades, creative people (among other) have been sued by big companies, some very harshly, to protect IP from such overexploitation as "using a three second excerpt in a video" or "using the vague likeness of a character". And now, these same targets are getting fleeced of their work by more big companies under the cheer of the people. That's a gut feeling of disgust right there. Combined with the utter lack of creativity in these, we're really watching the potential death of an activity (artistic creation), and that's not a good place to be. If one wants to argue that "generated art" is also a form of creation, keep in mind that these models can't be trained on generated pieces without extreme prejudice. Killing the very source they need to operate does not seem like a good long-term plan. But who cares about long-term when you can make a quick buck, right?

I'd also like to point out that all this rambling is about generated content that goes from "output of a model" to "final piece" with little to no afterthought. The "common" piece, where people will be happy to see twenty broken pieces because "well, there's a lot of them, so it's good". AI and LLM models, as a tool, may or may not be useful in the long term, but I can see smaller applications, even for art. A lot of menial tasks can be improved, general posing, references, simple background that are marginally considered part of the product, guides, etc. Taking something you've drawn/created, and locally use an AI "filter" to remove an extra line cleanly or touch up a mistake you want out? Great. The tool carries the intent of the artist, the same way a pen do.

But AI generated content? Make a prompt, a stick-figure sketch, and call it a day? These, IMO, will always look and taste like garbage, no matter how pretty they look. Because it was never "pretty" we were looking for.

I hate that it’s built on theft. The idea of AI art is fine, but so much of it is just art theft. “Picture of A in the style of artist B.” That kind of shit really makes me hate AI art.

As an artist I'm conflicted. I like new technology and methods and mediums, but it's entirely unethical to make models on unconsenting artists with no compensation or recognition.

It's not art. Expanding the sense of the word to all kinds of nonsensical phenomena is both damaging art and artists as well.

I take the liberty of a personal definition of art, or if not definition, at least prerequisites for something to be considered art, and that is that art must be made by the hand of the artist and that it's conception must include deliberate thought/mental process of the artist. It may not be the best definition, but I consider it to be good enough to draw a definite line between Michelangelo and the internet lady who vlogs about the art of tying your shoelaces or some similar shit.

Environmental impacts 🤷

It looks so detached from reality.

Good for memes, bad for the environment.

i'm utterly bored by it and annoyed that it mucks up all the places I'd usually steal images for my TTRPG games.

Bad for artists, but for the environment, low quality, low effort, and the most annoying people in the world love it.

Most of it reminds me of that tacky clip art that got bundled with word processors and Corel Draw in the 90s. It’s just all got this “uncanny valley” sheen to it.

There's nothing interesting about it. It's a waste of storage space and computational power. It makes the world worse

I don't hate it, I think it has its uses, just like text generation. They're great for brainstorming ideas or quick unimportant stuff like RPG campaigns, so for example an in-game fake company logo or a poem to contain hints for the players.

However trying to use it for anything serious and final is stupid and dangerous. IMO any artist that had their art used to train a model should be able to claim royalties on anything created with that model, regardless of whether they can prove their art was used for the piece. And if the data used to train the model is not made public or can't be verified, then ANY artist can. Maybe just 1% of the profits direct or indirect of that art, so for example you used AI to generate part of an invitation for a party, 100 artists could start a lawsuit and take every single cent you earned from the party. After all you indirectly hired them, it's only fair they get paid, had you hired a single artist you could negotiate the price with them.

If I see a obviously AI generated picture as a thumbnail on youtube, I immediately block that creator. If I hear those awful AI voices reading text, same. If you want to share something with the world, put some effort into it.

Use case seems to just be dicking around, and that is just not worth the resources we pour into it.

I like it quite a bit. Le chat mistral does a good job

What I hate about AI art: How it's based on stolen work. How it is purpose built to replace real, talented artists and devalue their labor. How it uses way more energy than it needs to and is pretty wasteful

What I love about AI art: Instant stupid shit for meme madness.

If AI art was all just stupid jokey shit like this that a friend of mine made when we were discussing how people were making Ghibli-fied versions of important moments in history, and we decided to go with "George Bush doesn't care about black people" but make Mike Myers dressed as Austin Powers, I'd be okay with it entirely. It's not for profit by devaluing artists and using this work instead of a real artists work, it's just stupid shit that makes us laugh. Everything else aside, I can get behind stupid shit that makes us laugh. The rest of the issues with AI art suck though.

In general - yes. There is a flood of shitty and lazy “art” that has infected search results and creative spaces. I’m also deeply uncomfortable with it being trained on artists work without their consent - for all the talk about it being equivalent to human inspiration I’m pretty sure there have been examples where it’s started generating attempts at signatures.

It’s terrible in knitting and crochet spaces (I imagine woodworking and sculpture and architecture too) because there are lots of things generated which are physical impossible and just wrong to anyone who enjoys the crafts. It gives false understandings of what those art forms look like.

I think the entire point of art is the human intentionality aspect. Art is humans using materials to do things that don’t serve an immediate practical purpose. There has to be some element of “desire” on the part of the artist.

So it’s not that it is impossible to use AI tools to generate art (there’s stochastic computer generated pieces from the 70s that are lovely iirc) To me though, the way these tools are used is what is important - if you’re using an AI you’re training and adjusting yourself, if you’re spending hours tweaking prompts and perhaps sifting through hundreds of pictures to combine and really participate in “making” something.

The current trend is really just a bunch of content sludge. I don’t see the appeal in either the process of creation or in what can be appreciated from it. The best stuff is mostly memey topical political jokes, where it rests more on the symbols rather than the art itself.

Like, when I make art - my process is adding layers over weeks and weeks. It’s noticing that I don’t like the way this section looks, so I go back over it, come back to it later… it’s a process - I engage with and shape the work. I’m just a guy who glues trash to things and paints them, my art doesn’t really have external value - but it still feels like art in a way that getting Midjourney to make pictures of Gandolf with big honking naturals isn’t.

It's soulless. A mere imitation.

I don’t hate AI art. I hate people who pretend they’re artists when all they do is writing prompts.

Yes, I hate it. I hate that it fills every image platform. It is not art at all.

It’s a fun toy thing and can make decent images but its not art and can never replace actual art. When you compare for example an anime art of someone who actually drew it and the AI image, the drawn art is 9 out of 10 times better.

It’s also petty pretty easy to spot whether an image is AI or drawn made.

I'm not entirely against LLMs as a tool, but I especially despise the image-based LLMs. They are certainly neat for some fun things. I've used them a little bit here and there for a dumb profile picture or a "I'm kinda thinking about this..." Brainstorm, but even in those cases I noticed the capabilities of the LLM and its tendencies quite literally pidgeon hole my artistic vision and push me in other directions that felt less and less creative. (Sidenote: I feel the same way about coding LLM tools. The longer I use them at any given time, the less creative I feel and it has a noticeable impact on my interest in the code I'm writing. So I don't really use them much. Also I consistently manage to point out coding LLM code in PR reviews because it's always kinda funky)

I've avoided using AI art tools for a while now. I'll consider some limited use if the cost, billionaire ownership, blatant theft of real IP without compensation, and environmental impact problems are solved. (No, an "open source" model doesn't solve all of these problems, especially since nearly all open source models are not truly open source and are almost always benefiting from upstream theft)

You know what I do like about AI art? I like the older Google machine learning art experiments from the mid-2010s. They invoked a strange existential curiosity. But those weren't done with LLM's.

Outside of LLMs, I like that there are some newer tools for editing that can do a better "lasso" select, that can mix and match into brushes as an alternative to something more algorithmic, the audio plugin that uses a RNN to simplify or expand upon an audio technique. Things that are tools that can be chosen or avoided and have nothing to do with LLMs.

I honestly cannot wait for this bubble to burst and for these tools to return to a cost that they'd need to be for these companies to turn a profit. A higher cost would eliminate all this casual use that is making people worse at research, critical thinking, and creativity, as well as make the art tools less competitive to just paying artists, even for scumbags wanting to cut the artists out. And it'd incentivize non-LLM, non-insanely costly ML techniques again instead of the current "LLMs for everything" nonsense right now.

I'm not sure hate is the right word. When you've got someone stabbing you in the back multiple times, is it really hate you're feeling toward them? Or is it anger, fear, and danger?

I "hate" it in the sense that it's built on theft and requires the exploitation of underpaid workers to develop and maintain it. I "hate" it in the sense that we're living on a burning cinder with dwindling fresh water resources and "AI" is adding fuel to the fire. I "hate" it in the sense that it's being used to further undervalue artists and writers. I "hate" it in the sense that it fills our spaces with crap that so often looks like it was cribbed off of Rapunzel, Wreck-It-Ralph, and some other things.

I don't hate the "art." The AI can't do much about it.

What I strongly dislike is people who manage to draft literally 40 words or less and think they "created" something.

You didn't. You a mathematical model to do something for you. You therw 175 tokens into a whirlpool and got am 87% what you wanted image out. If you even had an idea of what you wanted before hand.

No, because I don't have an irrational fear of AI. I don't like when poor or unfitting AI art is used, but it isn't AI who makes that decision to use it.

It's ruined art for me. Someone posts something, and I don't know if it's real art or a theft of other people's work.

Art is cool cos it’s like holy shit a person did that!?

If it’s just an algorithm it’s not very impressive.

I hate those who call themselves artists when they're just commissioning a computer to make a picture for them. I also hate it when those same people deny the unethical aspects of AI generation.

Edit: to add more, I also hate the AI images themselves. They are filling up the internet with slop. This is very annoying, and the same goes for LLMs. I don't want to get AI generated results when I didn't search for them specifically.

Art is about expressing one emotion from one person to another.

We have a word for fake pictures: advertising.

Yes, as it conveys nothing more than the prompt it was given. Art is a means of communication, but when all it does is chop up pictures it’s seen to match a prompt there just isn’t anything to analyze.

It may look pretty in the moment, but lacks all substance and will be forgotten as quickly as it was generated.

AI art is fine being used as a tool. What I have a problem with is it's users calling themselves "artists".

A person who types a prompt into an AI is no different than a person who hires a painter and describes what he wants them to paint.

Just because that "painter" in the first case happens to be a computer, that doesn't mean that by default the title of "artist" defaults back to the person who wrote the prompt. That person is still just someone telling someone (or something) what to draw.

In other words, you don't become the artist just because you eschew paying an actual artist and instead have your computer do it for you.

As an artist who had her art stolen for usage in AI, I hate AI generated images for several reasons. I've personally had my art stolen to be used in a prompt without my permission, and said art got mangled so much that it looked terrible. AI image generators scrape the internet for art so they can amalgamate these pieces of art together to correspond to a prompt, and this art is taken without the permission of the artists. In some AI generated images, the mangled remnants of artists' signatures are still visible. Beyond art theft, it's instant gratification with zero effort. A huge part of why I appreciate art is because someone made it, someone spent potentially hours to create this beautiful picture! When I look at my old art, I can instantly get a feel for what vibes I had going through my mind at the time, like I could almost take a peek into my past self's brain, and this applies to other artist's work too!

Prompting an AI image generator, in my eyes, is like prompting an artist to draw something for you, except that artist turns out to be someone who traces bits of other people’s art without their permission, or copy and pastes it. Sometimes AI generated images aren't immediately recognizable, so me and a lot of other artists have tried to make it a trend to post progress pictures and other receipts along with our art.

Hate it? Yes. Respect people who use it? No.

Not a fan. It admittedly can be an amusing toy - type something in and wow look what it did! But the costs are high, and our society isn't a utopia where people don't need to labor for survival.

Maybe if we were post scarcity it wouldn't matter that much. But we're not, and this AI stuff is going to hurt labor, benefit the ownership class, and probably be mildly bad for end users too.

Art is an attempt to communicate (usually to communicate something of the human condition). Current 'art' AI is too far away from intelligence to have anything to communicate. All it can do is mindlessly try to copy and blend what it's seen before without understanding it.

I don't hate it, but I also don't value it.

As an art appreciator it just looks bad