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.

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.

It looks so detached from reality.

I’m not a fan of AI generated stills, but I’ve seen a number of AI generated music videos that are kind of fun to watch. It’s not so much the art itself, but the way it collapses from hallucination to hallucination repeatedly that just goes well with some music I guess. Theres obviously still a lot of work from actual artists to make it into a video and time it with music, and the music itself of course is still human (afaik). Here’s a few examples I’ve seen, I’d love to know what people think of this style specifically, as opposed to the AI slop photos we are getting bombarded with. Especially if you hate it, I want to hear about why!

Mormaid - Wet Summer

Probass Hardi - Polonyna

Elgrandetoto - Dinero

Die Antwoord - Age of Illusion

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.

I see them mostly as fun toys now but eventually someone will use them to create something we have never seen or even considered before. I don’t think that makes them artistic but a tool of an artist.

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.

I like playing around with it myself but I never upload it I just keep it on my computer cuz it’s neat so I don’t get why anyone else would upload AI generated stuff online

I don’t hate AI art. I hate AI art being passed off as “traditional” art.

Depends on what it’s used for. Looks tacky when used by big businesses, but looks fine if used by small independent people. Like dbzer0.com just uses them for blog thumbnails. But coca cola AI adverts? Ai bots spouting stuff on Facebook? Entirely AI generated websites (although that’s moreso text)? Awful.

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.

As someone pointed out, do you like ads ? Because AI content feel the same, it’s annoying stuff I need to skip to access real content and on top of that it’s an ecological disaster.

When I open an image or a page and realise it’s AI, I feel the same as when I download a movie and it turns out I got a dot exe.

I feel old because I remember when this conversation was happening with airbrushing photographs and then Photoshop.

And now these days, really good Photoshop is invisible. We can remove people from backgrounds. We can improve the lighting. Movie CGI is just photoshooting stills.

AI will reach that stage too, where it will be so good, it’s scary that you can’t tell.

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

I art. I do love ai for the lulz, however, actual commercial art? Absolutely not. It’s not an end product. It’s fun, it’s inspiring.