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Consequences
(pawb.social)
Source (Bluesky)
This reminds me so much of the HDR photo craze. I remember seeing booths just like this!
Going to local restaurants/attractions and seeing shitty "art" with price tags starting over $200. They were all bad digital photos, taken with no comprehension or awareness of lighting, perspective, composition, etc. Cloddishly fiddle with various sliders, maybe delete the entire green color channel for some reason, hey I discovered this filter called Posterize, hit print.
A third of them were angle shots of the photo-takers modded Subaru. I'm trying to paint a picture here, don't take it literally.
I am sincerely hoping, despite my positions against AI for most applications, that there will be some positive effects in the end from this AIArt baloney.
I think the same-y-ness of what the visual generators are outputting will wear so thin on people, so quickly. Because in a broad sense they're all drawing from the same "averaging out". And maybe there will be a bit of a cultural backlash, if you will, where people unconsciously become attracted back to hand made things. I don't think we as a huge collective blob of humanity will be able to stand hearing the same note over and over.
Maybe I'm deluding myself, hell I probably am to a degree.
This reminds me of an old story I heard about how a very talented pottery artist got a lifetime ban from the handcraft fair for selling molded products (pottery made with molds, not by hand).
It was interesting because his quality items actually were handcrafted, he just had molded basic stuff on the side that I guess was selling decently well.
Would be funny if an AI booth did the same.
I have no problem with people selling AI art, it's just.... Tell people that's what you're doing.
Finding cool images and printing them off to sell to people is a thing people do. Print services have been selling the same thing, more or less. They're printing the images and that's worth something.
But don't lie to me about it. Be upfront about what's going on, and let the buyer decide. Also, be aware of your surroundings. Don't go to an art expo and try to sell AI slop. That's just disrespectful. Maybe do it on a street corner or something idk. Set up a kiosk at the mall.
Context matters.
I mean, I wouldn't pay for a print of AI slop, but I imagine there are people who see cool pictures and just want to pick them up... That's not me, but I'm sure that's someone.
They don't want to disclose that's AI art because people won't buy it or at least not for the same price as art made by people. AI "artists" mislead for a reason.
I agree, and the picture in the original post is the outcome of that.
If they charge printing fees plus a modest markup, and disclose that it's AI generated, they'd make fewer sales per hour and less money per sale, but they would be able to operate for more hours and likely go home with more money.
The math on this isn't hard, but it requires thinking more long term/economically than I've ever seen from selfish/capitalistic people who would do this kind of thing.
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Perhaps don't call it "art" either since it's just the result of one's and zeros spewing out data.... those people are not "artists" just talentless hacks....
if a banana taped to a wall is art than processing millions of images, finding correlation between said images and their captions and using the vectors to find those patterns in noise is art too
A banana taped to the wall has more human expression than any AI generated image
No it's a scam for money laundering.
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it’s just… Tell people that’s what you’re doing.
and sell at the appropriate TEMU pricing.
Eh. They can try selling at whatever price they want. As long as they disclose its AI art then people should be able to make the evaluation for themselves. I'm not convinced selling at lower prices makes things any better. If anything that might backfire and people expect real artists to compete with the ai low prices.
They can generate thousands of slop in hours. So <$1 is fair.
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I mean Thomas Kinkade built an empire on basically the same bullshit so like, a lot of people will do it. Although at one point he was selling his own brand of slop as an investment.
It's possible for 'AI art' to not be crap.
One can use sophisticated tools, like depth maps and controlnet, to compose an image/video in all sorts of ways. One can spend hours touching up a generation in photoshop, like, you know, an artist that actually cares about what they're presenting. One can use models that don't feed blood sucking corporations. And like you said, one can disclose the whole process, upfront.
It's just that the vast majority is crap from a few keywords mashed into ChatGPT, with zero deliberate thought in the work and that full 'tech bro quick scam' vibe.
So I guess what I'm saying is this:
Tell people that’s what you’re doing.
Is an unlikely scenario.
"AI artists" seem to be scammers. They will lie about their process. That's who will attend things like this.
Meanwhile, the few hobbyist artists with diffusion in their creative pipeline would never dare show up to a place like this, because of the scammers ruining any hope of a civil reception.
It's also important to remember these models are trained by sampling (imitating aspects of) images they don't have the rights to use directly. I think it's justified being angry about someone using your work -insignificantly mashed together with millions of other people's work- without your permission, even if it's to extend a background by 10 pixels lol
It’s also important to remember these models are trained by sampling (imitating aspects of) images they don’t have the rights to use directly.
So is basically every human artist. Basically any artist out there has seen tons of other art prior and draws on that observed corpus to influence their own output. If I commissioned you to draw something you didn't know what was, you'd go look up other depictions of that thing to get a basis for what you should be aiming at.
The way AI does it is similar, except that it's looked at way more examples than you but also doesn't have an understanding of what those things actually are beyond the examples themselves. That last bit is why it used to have so many problems with hands, and still often has problems with writing in the background or desk/table legs.
Not all them. Some are trained on pure public domain data (though admittedly most folks running locally are probably using Flux or Stable Diffusion out of convenience).
And IMO that’s less of an issue if money isn’t changing hands. If the model is free, and the “art” is free, that’s a transformative work and fair use.
It’s like publishing a fanfic based on a copyrighted body. But try to sell the fic (or sell a service to facilitate such a thing), and that’s a whole different duck.
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Whoever thinks they could get away with such tripe at Dragon Con, full of the most rabid fans of the characters they’re “arting”. Not to mention the copyright issues.
This one too, I love the "look how easy it is to make real art" sign lol
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You love to see it!
Now penalize all corporations for using it and boycott any you catch doing so. Its nearly impossible. But we can try. Fuck the theft of art and humanity.
Damn, I wish I had seen that in person. (I barely visited that part of the con -- I made a beeline to Bil Holbrook's booth to congratulate him on 30 years of Kevin and Kell, and then left again because I was in a hurry to get to a panel.)
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this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2025
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