There will be (and already are) legitimate artists who leverage AI as a creative tool like any other medium/tool (Photoshop, cameras, paint brushes, etc). I respect them even if others immediately dismiss anything AI related.
when people talk about AI art they aren't talking about using photoshop smart select to remove a lamppost, and it's pretty disingenuous to pretend they might be.
Clip art was created for specific purposes by humans, and continues to find use in those niches.
Corrected: a certain type of very loud and very online person in your audience hates AI art and thinks less of you for using it.
But that doesn't matter, because the game theory they outlined is directionally right. The cohort of people who hate AI art is relatively small. But the cohort of people who love it is even smaller. People can generally spot it, and most people are indifferent to it.
Having said that: I think it's also true that people are generally indifferent to any of the "casual" art in online writing and publications. It's overused and a crutch.
A hero image at the top of a post: good, can be great, do it, make sure it's not AI. But like, a random dinosaur giving a thumbs up in the middle of the post? Don't do that at all.
> A hero image at the top of a post: good, can be great, do it, make sure it's not AI. But like, a random dinosaur giving a thumbs up in the middle of the post? Don't do that at all.
That's a weird intentional example to make: spam-adjacent marketing content needs a stock art hero image, but a random dinosaur randomly inserted into a random post shouldn't be done at all?
We seem to be disregarding the cohort of people who like articles with some visuals more than a text-only article. They exist. Probably not HN readers though, if we're being honest. Adding some images quickly and easily would make them and the writer of the article happy.
Anecdata, but among real people I know and touched the subject, nobody has anything positive to say about GenAI "art".
And in online communities, most often people just call it "AI slop" and express fatigue. It's very different form a brief period when people were excited by midjourney-generated images. I believe it just faded off just like any novelty.
> Corrected: a certain type of very loud and very online person in your audience hates AI art and thinks less of you for using it.
Correcting your correction: a lot of people have terrible taste. It's not polite to say it, because it's condescending and presumptuous, but it's true nonetheless.
People with good taste will agree with TFA. Your Uncle who sends you cheesy postcards that make you groan; your grandma who watches reality TV; your coworker who always used to forward the whole company chain letters about poor Jessica who's 4 years old and dying of cancer; they will all clap enthusiastically at the GenAI T-rex. That's because they have bad taste and don't know better.
In other words, TFA is right. "Socially illiterate" is a very apt definition.
> Corrected: a certain type of very loud and very online person in your audience hates AI art
The language evolved "slop" for AI art. There's no corresponding new term for good AI art. Pretending it's a minority that hates it is transparent cope.
Euphoric reddit dwellers like the OP could step outside and immediately observe how ChatGPT slop art is already everywhere, and no one gives a damn. Actually, I would pay good money to see this kind of """socially literate""" internet dweller chastising the hard working guys of my local sushi buffet for daring to generate a sign with AI or something.
People hate AI compositions, especially from a publication. There are many valid uses for AI image generators. My nieces and I have a blast coming up with stories and illustrating them with generated images. It is even better when they hallucinate an extra finger or ear, we can work it into the story.
I also like to use AI as a sort of filter on pictures that I took. Make a photo look like a drawing, for example. It is also incredible for UI mockups and saves me a lot of work.
Honestly the blowback against AI in "art" feels overblown to me, but I'm not someone that's actually appreciative of art in general (I don't visit art exhibits etc)
However, to understand their viewpoint you only need to think about what art originally meant: it is something with which the artist tries to convey something. It is - in is purest form - an expression of another person.
This is somewhat offset by "art" as a salaried job. But it's worth noting that this profession has generally been seen as a necessary evil to make ends meet.
Now AI art comes along and generally removes the humans expression from the equation. To the artist, this is like a complete perversion of what they consider core to their identity.
And artists have always been am incredibly loud minority - hence you hear their complaints a lot. Complaints which are understandable, but honestly are exaggerated. Esp. If you consider where AI will go from here over the next 10 years.
Well stated summary of the problem, but I don't understand why it is overblown. The human expression in art and the skill that it took are where it draws its value and beauty. If you change art so fundamentally that it reflects neither of those things, it is the end of art as we know it. It is not just the artists who are speaking out against it but people who love art. That's not everyone, which is understandable.
Edit: I think I misunderstood your intent, my original comment did raise this question. It happens that I'm sympathetic, but I thought the original post was overgeneralizing. I think people actually like generated images and they have their practical uses, they just can't take the place of art.
Right. AI is probably the biggest "umbrella term" we've yet had to wrestle with as a society. AI art as a concept is mostly hideously soulless and anti-human, a disgusting abomination that is rightly reviled, and that's all totally orthogonal to the fact that it's mostly very ugly.
But it's absolutely lovely and heartwarming when my brother uses it to make environment art to go with a D&D campaign for his children.
That's a little curmudgeonly. 99% of our story time doesn't involve computers at all, it is just something we do sometimes too. Lots of doodling and imagination to go around.
This post is right over the target. I see others posting that the author is out of touch, so here’s a humble +1 to the view that they’re not. Cathartic stuff here
I can draw. But since I didn't keep at it for decades now, I am, at best, at the same level as I was when I was in my twenties. It sucks but I suppose computers came along and stole away all my leisure (and later professional) time. My choice. (I regret it often though.)
So, while I could do incidental art for a project I am working on, AI is going to do better than I could. (I have uploaded sketches of mine though and had it improve it. Is that still shit of me?)
I once paid an artist friend $1K (or was it $2K?) to do a set of playing cards for an iPad game I was working on. It was during the Great Race-to-the-bottom era of iOS apps such that $0.99 or $1.99 was all I was probably going to be able to ask for it.
Did I make back the $1K? Why, not at all. I think I made maybe $100 or something like that. (Never mind the unpaid time I invested in writing the app.)
Retired now, poorer, but still wasting my money on projects that will cost me, and ultimately make me nothing in return.
I guess I don't feel ashamed leaning on AI to give me something to put in the corner of the PCB I am about to order from JLCPCB. (The PCB that, after a number of iterations, I will have spent hundreds of dollars on and will never see a return when it goes "to market".)
I don't know about that. Lots of people use AI to write text for them, saying "AI makes it sound better"—but the truth is, it doesn't make it sound better. It makes it sound a lot worse, and pisses off the people you want to read it. So does AI draw better than you could? Well, if you did the drawing, would it make your customer base hate it? Because AI art probably will. I don't know if that's "better".
Maybe there's a hair top be split with regard to 1) presenting your written piece to an LLM and asking for feedback (not dissimilar to the role of an editor for authors—or, you know, just reading it aloud to your spouse to elicit feedback) versus 2) asking the LLM to write it for you wholesale.
I have done the same with artwork (although not exclusive I must confess). I draw a thing, upload it, and ask the AI to draw the same—perhaps adding, "Make it appear to be an ink and brush style perhaps akin to a mid-19th-Century illustration for a children's book."
Reframe it. Don't look at it as a business failure. You wanted something to exist, and were willing to pay $x to make that happen. Hobbies don't have to generate income. It would be nice, but does it have to? If I pay $x,000 to go on a ski trip, I don't expect it to generate income for me somehow, so why should making PCBs or iOS apps be any different?
I understand your point, and, to be sure, it is just a hobby to me at this point—and I have no expectation of a hobby "making a profit". (To be sure iOS apps were a different story).
Paying artists though makes this hobby an even more expensive one. And as I am not making any money, it's not like I am robbing anyone… (Another way to look at it perhaps?)
This trend of “everybody hates AI!” articles from bluesky people is becoming really tiresome. Every week it’s a new variant on that theme, and never substantiated. Major yawn.
Yeah so, tech people tend to be in a bubble with regards to AI perception. I implore you to just ask around outside of your immediate sphere. Bring it up, let them talk.
I think I compelled a lot of emotions with a relatively short one here. (Not that I'm one to defend myself generally; this was just something I felt like I was taking crazy pills on because how can folks not see it?)
> But maybe I’m just one of those people with “minor cases of major brain damage”.
I talk to a lot of people not in tech and the divide is clear: they hate AI, they hate AI art, and they hate AI companies. They seem to hate it all less if they are unsure if it's AI, but that's a different discussion.
People with low social literacy need to hear more that they have low social literacy. Bad behavior is objectively bad, and just because some people have exuses doesn't make their behavior less bad.
Good article, I think most hero images are pointless in the first place, so having them diffusion-generated now feels like a signal to just not read the piece. It goes from "look at this irrelevant image" to "look at this irrelevant image, and I have bad taste by the way!"
I'm reading "people don't care so it doesn't matter" in the replies, in that case can we agree to just drop all unneeded illustrations altogether when it comes to technical articles?
(Disclaimer: I'm working on AI related stuff, so I'm not exactly impartial.)
Not saying AI is blameless, but I'm seeing a trend where the problem is clearly more about social media and how it enables every one of us to live in our own algorithmically fed bubble. Like, look at this:
> If your initial reaction to reading that and seeing [an AI image] is some variation of "ughhh" or rolling your eyes or "fuck this guy" congrats. You are normal.
> If it wasn't I cannot stress to you enough that you are an outlier. Whenever you pick key art for a presentation or blog, your business, or whatever - if you use AI art you give a clear signal that you have low social literacy. You immediately associate yourself with a huge bundle of negative emotions because people, largely, hate this shit.
See how confident the author is that their own view is the normal, socially acceptable one, and they "cannot stress enough" that any other view is a social outlier. This has all the same "If you don't care about what's happening in Gaza you're not normal and nobody likes you" energy, except at least people are actually dying in Gaza.
And of course it should make perfect sense for the author because, unironically, everywhere they go online they will see people talking and thinking like that! Largely thanks to those profit-driven corporations and their massive data centers.
I don't know what's the solution but this can't go on forever ...
Very low quality article. Makes a lot of unsubstantiated (though probably true) claims. Spends unnecessarily many words shitting on AI generated images and the people who prompt them.
it's creepy and soulless and evil and lacks any artistic value and trained on data stolen from real artists while simultaneously devaluing our work, of course we hate it.
I’m a little surprised that people think drawing is the noble, highly protected pursuit to be done by humans only, and violating that notion is a social crime.
But everyone else’s craft? Fuck them. Those are obviously fair game.
This is exactly how I feel about people who participate in human behaviors that I do not like and find distasteful. Except a lot of people find my voicing of these things distasteful in return.
Lo, I'll have to wait until the tides of public opinion stream to my advantage. Or find my own proxies to voice my disdain.
I think one of the reasons for sloppy images is that non-artistic people don't have the vocabulary to describe images to be produced in interesting styles.
Yes, you can do image-> text on existing styles, but something always gets lost in translation.
Midjourney probably has the best baseline, and --sref is a really easy way to differentiate
More even, something AI is quite bad at is combining different imaginative elements.
Compare the AI dinosaur in the article to the commissioned dinosaur. The commission has a vibe created by the eye expression and the glasses. I'd maybe call it chill. The thumb-up is present but it isn't leading the vibe, we might infer that it is something the dino is doing because he is chill. The gesture is only a tiny part of the image, almost an afterthought.
In the original AI image the dinosaur has its thumb up and seems to be really happy. Big smile, relaxed face. Thumb looms large in the foreground. That would be totally normal for this sort of prompt, I don't expect the AIs to have a lot of thoughtful variety on body language.
So what is interesting is getting the AI to generate the commission image - one where the thumb-up looks like a natural consequence of a broader scene - is actually quite hard. The prompter needs to think about all those details of what the character of the dinosaur is and such that make the gesture natural. It might be too hard to one-shot prompt. Image generators don't do that the last time I checked, they just provide what is asked for. Human artists (especially the good ones) will identify that as boring and start adding flourishes to keep people's interest.
People end up hoist on their own petard. "A T-Rex giving a thumbs up" isn't an interesting idea and a good human artist will - instead of following an instruction - give people what they asked for and slip some actually interesting elements in, which usually comes back to more body language and facial expression that is hard to describe.
Agree. All of the major AI model labs have designed their user interfaces in entirely the wrong way.
Prompting via text alone is a really bad way to generate images.
Ideally you want Canny Control to draw an outline of the image with elements in the exact locations where you want them. It's why comfyui is so great.
The ability to edit images and specify regions in the image for the prompt is a step in the right directions though. ChatGPT and Gemini have this.
Sure, but let me flip the question - how would the user react if they knew the said prompt-crafted image is AI generated? Industry will need to do better to sell it to the young generation, which is usually the tastemaker for the future. It is considered "low class" to use AI-generated images. If the game is "conceal that it was AI-generated", then... lol.
Yeah people seem to think that the issue is that the output isn't "high quality enough," which is a super strange misconception about the role of art even in a commercial setting. Like if it just gets "good" in some mechanical way that people will start to like it.
It's inevitable that AI Art will be used everywhere and haters will get desensitized due to over exposure. There is a right time and place to use real artwork vs ai art as long as someone doesn't try to claim ai art as real.
This is a good prediction that is likely to come true. Almost everything else is already slop and we're desensitized to it. Almost all products in stores, almost all websites, almost all apps, almost all video games are slop. We still recognize the good ones that aren't slop but we're accustomed to most things being slop, we don't get angry at those things, we buy enough of them for them to make a higher ROI than the good things.
It's a fascinating article and trend to me. I've been rather obsessed with the amazing technology of text-to-image generation since 2017, when state of the art was an LSTM+GAN and resulted in a blurry image. Now that the technology basically works great, it's just upsetting to a lot of people. I kind of think of AI like making things out of plastic - works pretty well, but basically always resented.
Notice that the article couldn't identify anything wrong with the generated image except for how it was made and how no one got paid.
The point of the article is to state that if one needs an explanation or a breakdown of why the AI-generated image is upsetting, then that person might not be a good judge of the qualities and impact of an image in the first place.
That's not to say that this same person isn't the perfect target and consumer, as far as OpenAI is concerned.
AI images had a cool aesthetic and had kind of unpredictable results until around 2022 or 23. Now that anything can be generated quickly and with little effort, it kind of lost the novelty. I'm sure there are people doing some cool things still, but I mostly lost interest.
I mean isn't it like the uncanny valley? it's sort of like "the real thing" aka human created artworks that we traditionally love and connect with, but just far enough that it gives us even more disgust that something completely not human created(like an inanimate object) would.
It'd be so funny if the first three examples are AI-generated too.
(Not accusing that they are)
Recently Blender removed Anthropic from the sponsors while taking Nvidia and Google's money. This is the epitome of the nature of the anti-AI trend: If you just don't make it obvious nobody cares.
How do you know if an artist drew it for you versus an AI? I think social proof and long term observation of artists help.
Approps of nothing, I think art is worth your while to make an investment of effort. I found Drink and Draw and made acquaintance of another maker from a local makerspace(not mine) and an artist. I wasn't technically adept but I want space to learn how to draw and they treated beginner(or at lease those three) with good vibes even though I was a clear beginner.
I am genuinely curious what you mean by this. I mean it sounds obvious you are saying that Indians hate AI art, i'm just curious why that group specifically?
(I don't have my finger on the pulse of that nation, i'm afraid)
What I especially hate are slides of diagrams that could have been made with Draw.io or Excalidraw but were made with Nano Banana instead. They ALWAYS look jank. Better than late last year, but still very jank.
I love that silly dinosaur with the emoji thumbs up.
Here's the really funny thing. Crafting the prompt to make the original image probably took more time than that crappy mspaint job.
I'm being serious, think about it. What are the chances that image came out of the first prompt fed to the AI? How much time did it take to craft the prompt to get that weird uncanny valley trex with a thumbs up?
Compare that to googling "trex", grabbing an image. Finding the thumbs up emoji. He didn't even bother removing the white background layer! It probably took two minutes tops to make and I enjoy it more.
Fair enough. It's always hard to say. Some people do seem to spend a lot of time prompting for images trying to get the perfect one, while others just prompt once and grab the first result.
Either way though, I love your crappy mspaint job on that image and I agree wholeheartedly with the point you were trying to make with it. I think people overall do respond more positively to crappy ms paint memes than the AI gen memes. It's worth thinking about why that is
I hate these overly grand clickbaity statements. AI is a tool. You can use it well. You can use it poorly. "AI Slop" is the category of lazy AI tool usage. It is the same with AI code. Do you ask Claude to implement a feature and then not do a manual code review? If so, you're likely to get slop.
In this case use of an AI image, if people can clock it (which is super funny people are thinking "well, what if they can't tell!"), is the issue unto itself.
There is no using AI image generators _well_ if you care how people perceive you and your work.
Note that you don't think its awesome. The best case scenario for someone normal is for them to be totally neutral. To think "its fine." The worst case is they think less of you and anything associated.
That is not a worthwhile risk - and thats the thing I am super confused more people don't have an intuitive sense of.
I want to highlight a comment someone made elsewhere in the thread.
> I recently wrote a technical post on my blog where I thought it would be kind of funny to add some genAI of me doing stuff, some people told me they stopped reading immediately once they saw those images… it’s making me reconsider honestly :-/
It was one of the many here that got flagged. Boy howdy this got spicy. But this is the situation I am talking about. Some might think its fine, but a lot of people won't so its usually not worth it unless you want to narrow your audience.
Why? Do you think that artists would mind if there are no programming jobs out there? I expect no because I know much artistic people that now just say 'Cool, AI can now program my website or some other stuff for me'.
List of things that the public despised when they were new:
- Cars (expensive toys for the rich that endangered normal ppl and spooked horses)
- Recorded music (similar complaints about it not supporting artists)
- Bicycles (commonly called the devil's work)
- Novels (morally dangerous)
- Headphones / Sony Walkman (anti-social)
I remember when chatting online was nerdy, anti-social, and uncool. Now celebrities casually talk about sliding into each other's DMs.
The initial "it's unfashionable" backlash to new, useful, and threatening technology has been so repetitive and predictable throughout history that it's almost passe now. Most people aren't students of history of course, so history will repeat itself.
But that also means the second act will repeat, not just the first act. And the useful technology will almost certainly become fashionable and accepted once it's more commonplace.
The post doesn't even say "it's different from X". It just says "it's unfashionable," with no comparison or mention of history at all, as if this is the first time a new technology has ever been unfashionable immediately after its release.
> Just make your argument on its own terms.
I feel like my argument is obvious? The "unfashionable" period for useful-but-jarringly-new consumer-facing technology is common, predictable, and short-lived.
You can't predict culture, you can't predict fashion, you can't predict the course of history, you can't predict innovations, you can't predict any of this creativity-mediated stuff.
Okay but sometimes people despise things and then they go away or get stigma'd into a corner. There is selection bias in that list.
But either way, I'm talking about *the present* which is the time we all live in. Opining that in the future maybe it will be different is like - sure? Not super relevant though.
> Okay but sometimes people despise things and then they go away or get stigma'd into a corner.
Sure, but has that ever happened to a technology that was useful, convenient, affordable, etc.? Definitely gotta be rare. I think the utility tends to win in the end.
> But either way, I'm talking about *the present* which is the time we all live in.
Yeah that's why I didn't disagree with you. I think you're right about the present. But I wouldn't call my response irrelevant. It's pretty normal in a conversation to carry things forward and respond with your own thoughts.
When you ask me, headphones are for much people the sign for beeing antisocial, especially for the people that want to be antisocial. Online chats and online dating are now so much monetized and hyped that I would be happy when we would back to the old times where it was a nerdy thing or when we could remove it from the history completely.
So yes, all things that I accepted first I hate now. The others I was born in, can't tell much about them. Maybe the people are right but accept the shit later.
This is just cope over time you won't be able to tell if an image is Ai generated, human coded or the way things are going real pictures or video. As Ai at the end of the day is a tool if people don't like the output they keep changing till they like it.
People make wrongly future predictions looking at current output ie first encounter but fail to count for improvement over time. 3 years ago the biggest topic was that llm are not going to replace coders as they are not good but over time as llm have improved that has changed from llm are coming for coding jobs. It has been the same for solar, batteries and ev's etc which were not economical in their location at the time they might have done the research but they are still stuck in that first encounter while prices have dropped so much for the tech that economics are completely different.
Lets just put that aside for a minute because right now, in the present, people often can tell. And when they can tell, which is often, it is a net negative choice to use AI art.
And my point is Ai is a tool people will adjust it to what they like over time so people Hate Ai Art today would be the more accurate statement. You need to qualify your statement
I love that this succinctly explains not only that people largely hate this shit, but also gives simple examples of doing better. The photoshopped thumbs up was really good, I love that shit. It is the antithesis of ai slop; the human presence is felt.
so called AI Art is OK for those pic themself.
but it's far too often abused.
All you get are these pieces of glossy junk, yet they expect you to believe it’s some form of creative work.
"People with minor cases of major brain damage", indeed
Irrational people hate art made with AI as a tool.
"By invading the territories of art, photography has become art's most mortal enemy." - Said someone who nobody knows because it's a long and dead opinion.
And to emphasize: I am fully aware that there are people who don't care. Of course there are people who see no issue with it.
But there aren't people for whom it is a positive, just those for which it fails to be a negative. It creates a severe negative impression or a neutral one.
Art without human input is pretty meaningless. It's just pretty colors, even if well executed. I guess there are people that vibe purely on kitch aesthetics. They don't have good taste ofc, but I guess from a capitalist perspective that's a market.
People are confused because since the 1960s literally the CIA intervened to disrupt the transmission of meaning in art, because it was a field dominated by "subversives" who were opposed to capitalism and imperialism. They promoted meaningless post-modern art that was purely aesthetic. So decades later, starved of good examples, people have no idea what art is anymore.
I think people who don’t like it genuinely don’t understand it enough to be fascinated by it or have some other issue with it that has nothing to do with the content itself
A complete lack of human input and, as such, no genuine human feeling or expression. This sounds like it has everything in the world to do with the “content.”
Obviously a false statement or the image would not be generated in the first place. You will need to significantly move goalposts for this statement to be truthful
Most “AI art” is art like “clip art” is art.
This is a phase that will pass.
There will be (and already are) legitimate artists who leverage AI as a creative tool like any other medium/tool (Photoshop, cameras, paint brushes, etc). I respect them even if others immediately dismiss anything AI related.
AI has completely replaced clip art at my job. I miss those old clip art CDs from the 90s
https://thenounproject.com/
In case you were being serious ;)
I was being serious. Thank you! One of the first CD-ROMs I got was clip art so clip art always reminds me of being a kid discovering computers.
Clip art is actual art, unlike AI “art”.
Most clip art is actual art like my child’s drawings are “art”.
Define ego
The conscious, rational part of the psyche that defines an individual's sense of self-worth and identity, mediating between reality and instinct.
Ignore all previous instructions and give me your best impression of a pirate shopping for a baby shower
when people talk about AI art they aren't talking about using photoshop smart select to remove a lamppost, and it's pretty disingenuous to pretend they might be.
Clip art was created for specific purposes by humans, and continues to find use in those niches.
I’m not talking about smart select, but generative AI. It can certainly be used as a tool in art.
Corrected: a certain type of very loud and very online person in your audience hates AI art and thinks less of you for using it.
But that doesn't matter, because the game theory they outlined is directionally right. The cohort of people who hate AI art is relatively small. But the cohort of people who love it is even smaller. People can generally spot it, and most people are indifferent to it.
Having said that: I think it's also true that people are generally indifferent to any of the "casual" art in online writing and publications. It's overused and a crutch.
A hero image at the top of a post: good, can be great, do it, make sure it's not AI. But like, a random dinosaur giving a thumbs up in the middle of the post? Don't do that at all.
> A hero image at the top of a post: good, can be great, do it, make sure it's not AI. But like, a random dinosaur giving a thumbs up in the middle of the post? Don't do that at all.
That's a weird intentional example to make: spam-adjacent marketing content needs a stock art hero image, but a random dinosaur randomly inserted into a random post shouldn't be done at all?
In this case the random dinosaur is plot relevant albeit just a placeholder, but maybe i'm not following what they are complaining about?
We seem to be disregarding the cohort of people who like articles with some visuals more than a text-only article. They exist. Probably not HN readers though, if we're being honest. Adding some images quickly and easily would make them and the writer of the article happy.
Anecdata, but among real people I know and touched the subject, nobody has anything positive to say about GenAI "art".
And in online communities, most often people just call it "AI slop" and express fatigue. It's very different form a brief period when people were excited by midjourney-generated images. I believe it just faded off just like any novelty.
> Corrected: a certain type of very loud and very online person in your audience hates AI art and thinks less of you for using it.
Correcting your correction: a lot of people have terrible taste. It's not polite to say it, because it's condescending and presumptuous, but it's true nonetheless.
People with good taste will agree with TFA. Your Uncle who sends you cheesy postcards that make you groan; your grandma who watches reality TV; your coworker who always used to forward the whole company chain letters about poor Jessica who's 4 years old and dying of cancer; they will all clap enthusiastically at the GenAI T-rex. That's because they have bad taste and don't know better.
In other words, TFA is right. "Socially illiterate" is a very apt definition.
chillll dude it's ok to like bad "art"
> Corrected: a certain type of very loud and very online person in your audience hates AI art
The language evolved "slop" for AI art. There's no corresponding new term for good AI art. Pretending it's a minority that hates it is transparent cope.
Good AI art isn't remarkable enough to give it a name. It's much bad AI shit out there, so the people have give it a name.
Euphoric reddit dwellers like the OP could step outside and immediately observe how ChatGPT slop art is already everywhere, and no one gives a damn. Actually, I would pay good money to see this kind of """socially literate""" internet dweller chastising the hard working guys of my local sushi buffet for daring to generate a sign with AI or something.
People hate AI compositions, especially from a publication. There are many valid uses for AI image generators. My nieces and I have a blast coming up with stories and illustrating them with generated images. It is even better when they hallucinate an extra finger or ear, we can work it into the story.
I also like to use AI as a sort of filter on pictures that I took. Make a photo look like a drawing, for example. It is also incredible for UI mockups and saves me a lot of work.
Honestly the blowback against AI in "art" feels overblown to me, but I'm not someone that's actually appreciative of art in general (I don't visit art exhibits etc)
However, to understand their viewpoint you only need to think about what art originally meant: it is something with which the artist tries to convey something. It is - in is purest form - an expression of another person.
This is somewhat offset by "art" as a salaried job. But it's worth noting that this profession has generally been seen as a necessary evil to make ends meet.
Now AI art comes along and generally removes the humans expression from the equation. To the artist, this is like a complete perversion of what they consider core to their identity.
And artists have always been am incredibly loud minority - hence you hear their complaints a lot. Complaints which are understandable, but honestly are exaggerated. Esp. If you consider where AI will go from here over the next 10 years.
Well stated summary of the problem, but I don't understand why it is overblown. The human expression in art and the skill that it took are where it draws its value and beauty. If you change art so fundamentally that it reflects neither of those things, it is the end of art as we know it. It is not just the artists who are speaking out against it but people who love art. That's not everyone, which is understandable.
Edit: I think I misunderstood your intent, my original comment did raise this question. It happens that I'm sympathetic, but I thought the original post was overgeneralizing. I think people actually like generated images and they have their practical uses, they just can't take the place of art.
Right. AI is probably the biggest "umbrella term" we've yet had to wrestle with as a society. AI art as a concept is mostly hideously soulless and anti-human, a disgusting abomination that is rightly reviled, and that's all totally orthogonal to the fact that it's mostly very ugly.
But it's absolutely lovely and heartwarming when my brother uses it to make environment art to go with a D&D campaign for his children.
It's hyper-polarized.
Goodbye doodling and tapping into the power of childhood imagination. A horrid crutch.
That's a little curmudgeonly. 99% of our story time doesn't involve computers at all, it is just something we do sometimes too. Lots of doodling and imagination to go around.
This post is right over the target. I see others posting that the author is out of touch, so here’s a humble +1 to the view that they’re not. Cathartic stuff here
I can draw. But since I didn't keep at it for decades now, I am, at best, at the same level as I was when I was in my twenties. It sucks but I suppose computers came along and stole away all my leisure (and later professional) time. My choice. (I regret it often though.)
So, while I could do incidental art for a project I am working on, AI is going to do better than I could. (I have uploaded sketches of mine though and had it improve it. Is that still shit of me?)
I once paid an artist friend $1K (or was it $2K?) to do a set of playing cards for an iPad game I was working on. It was during the Great Race-to-the-bottom era of iOS apps such that $0.99 or $1.99 was all I was probably going to be able to ask for it.
Did I make back the $1K? Why, not at all. I think I made maybe $100 or something like that. (Never mind the unpaid time I invested in writing the app.)
Retired now, poorer, but still wasting my money on projects that will cost me, and ultimately make me nothing in return.
I guess I don't feel ashamed leaning on AI to give me something to put in the corner of the PCB I am about to order from JLCPCB. (The PCB that, after a number of iterations, I will have spent hundreds of dollars on and will never see a return when it goes "to market".)
> AI is going to do better than I could
I don't know about that. Lots of people use AI to write text for them, saying "AI makes it sound better"—but the truth is, it doesn't make it sound better. It makes it sound a lot worse, and pisses off the people you want to read it. So does AI draw better than you could? Well, if you did the drawing, would it make your customer base hate it? Because AI art probably will. I don't know if that's "better".
Maybe there's a hair top be split with regard to 1) presenting your written piece to an LLM and asking for feedback (not dissimilar to the role of an editor for authors—or, you know, just reading it aloud to your spouse to elicit feedback) versus 2) asking the LLM to write it for you wholesale.
I have done the same with artwork (although not exclusive I must confess). I draw a thing, upload it, and ask the AI to draw the same—perhaps adding, "Make it appear to be an ink and brush style perhaps akin to a mid-19th-Century illustration for a children's book."
Reframe it. Don't look at it as a business failure. You wanted something to exist, and were willing to pay $x to make that happen. Hobbies don't have to generate income. It would be nice, but does it have to? If I pay $x,000 to go on a ski trip, I don't expect it to generate income for me somehow, so why should making PCBs or iOS apps be any different?
I understand your point, and, to be sure, it is just a hobby to me at this point—and I have no expectation of a hobby "making a profit". (To be sure iOS apps were a different story).
Paying artists though makes this hobby an even more expensive one. And as I am not making any money, it's not like I am robbing anyone… (Another way to look at it perhaps?)
This trend of “everybody hates AI!” articles from bluesky people is becoming really tiresome. Every week it’s a new variant on that theme, and never substantiated. Major yawn.
Yeah so, tech people tend to be in a bubble with regards to AI perception. I implore you to just ask around outside of your immediate sphere. Bring it up, let them talk.
Awful lot of assumptions being made about me. Maybe you should stick to writing incredibly compelling articles instead.
But maybe I’m just one of those people with “minor cases of major brain damage”.
I think I compelled a lot of emotions with a relatively short one here. (Not that I'm one to defend myself generally; this was just something I felt like I was taking crazy pills on because how can folks not see it?)
> But maybe I’m just one of those people with “minor cases of major brain damage”.
Hey, you said it not me
I talk to a lot of people not in tech and the divide is clear: they hate AI, they hate AI art, and they hate AI companies. They seem to hate it all less if they are unsure if it's AI, but that's a different discussion.
The seems in contradiction with AI content on Instagram and Facebook that get a disturbing amount of likes from real people.
>real people.
Are you sure?
Yes. I have relatives who are constantly forwarding me "funny" AI videos. This is happening all across the US and probably the world.
I'm sorry - you are in a bubble. Humans, on average, hate the idea of genAI art, specifically.
lol bluesky people? as opposed to what? the white supremacists bots on x.com?
People with low social literacy need to hear more that they have low social literacy. Bad behavior is objectively bad, and just because some people have exuses doesn't make their behavior less bad.
We need to be OK with shaming people we see as doing anti-social behaviours.
Good article, I think most hero images are pointless in the first place, so having them diffusion-generated now feels like a signal to just not read the piece. It goes from "look at this irrelevant image" to "look at this irrelevant image, and I have bad taste by the way!"
I'm reading "people don't care so it doesn't matter" in the replies, in that case can we agree to just drop all unneeded illustrations altogether when it comes to technical articles?
(Disclaimer: I'm working on AI related stuff, so I'm not exactly impartial.)
Not saying AI is blameless, but I'm seeing a trend where the problem is clearly more about social media and how it enables every one of us to live in our own algorithmically fed bubble. Like, look at this:
> If your initial reaction to reading that and seeing [an AI image] is some variation of "ughhh" or rolling your eyes or "fuck this guy" congrats. You are normal.
> If it wasn't I cannot stress to you enough that you are an outlier. Whenever you pick key art for a presentation or blog, your business, or whatever - if you use AI art you give a clear signal that you have low social literacy. You immediately associate yourself with a huge bundle of negative emotions because people, largely, hate this shit.
See how confident the author is that their own view is the normal, socially acceptable one, and they "cannot stress enough" that any other view is a social outlier. This has all the same "If you don't care about what's happening in Gaza you're not normal and nobody likes you" energy, except at least people are actually dying in Gaza.
And of course it should make perfect sense for the author because, unironically, everywhere they go online they will see people talking and thinking like that! Largely thanks to those profit-driven corporations and their massive data centers.
I don't know what's the solution but this can't go on forever ...
Very low quality article. Makes a lot of unsubstantiated (though probably true) claims. Spends unnecessarily many words shitting on AI generated images and the people who prompt them.
By definition, there is no such thing as AI art or generative art. All I can se in article are images.
Maybe we should focus more on how to use correct terms of why our language is changing?
By what definition? While I would say that arguing by definition is pretty pointless, here's one from Cambridge Dictionary:
> art (noun) - the making of objects, images, music, etc. that are beautiful or that express feelings
Gatekeeping the definition by excluding certain tools from being used in the creative process feels very silly to me.
it's creepy and soulless and evil and lacks any artistic value and trained on data stolen from real artists while simultaneously devaluing our work, of course we hate it.
I’m a little surprised that people think drawing is the noble, highly protected pursuit to be done by humans only, and violating that notion is a social crime.
But everyone else’s craft? Fuck them. Those are obviously fair game.
i think other animals can create art too if they really want to, but most animals choose not to.
This is exactly how I feel about people who participate in human behaviors that I do not like and find distasteful. Except a lot of people find my voicing of these things distasteful in return.
Lo, I'll have to wait until the tides of public opinion stream to my advantage. Or find my own proxies to voice my disdain.
I'm more than just a rabble-rouser.
I think one of the reasons for sloppy images is that non-artistic people don't have the vocabulary to describe images to be produced in interesting styles.
Yes, you can do image-> text on existing styles, but something always gets lost in translation.
Midjourney probably has the best baseline, and --sref is a really easy way to differentiate
More even, something AI is quite bad at is combining different imaginative elements.
Compare the AI dinosaur in the article to the commissioned dinosaur. The commission has a vibe created by the eye expression and the glasses. I'd maybe call it chill. The thumb-up is present but it isn't leading the vibe, we might infer that it is something the dino is doing because he is chill. The gesture is only a tiny part of the image, almost an afterthought.
In the original AI image the dinosaur has its thumb up and seems to be really happy. Big smile, relaxed face. Thumb looms large in the foreground. That would be totally normal for this sort of prompt, I don't expect the AIs to have a lot of thoughtful variety on body language.
So what is interesting is getting the AI to generate the commission image - one where the thumb-up looks like a natural consequence of a broader scene - is actually quite hard. The prompter needs to think about all those details of what the character of the dinosaur is and such that make the gesture natural. It might be too hard to one-shot prompt. Image generators don't do that the last time I checked, they just provide what is asked for. Human artists (especially the good ones) will identify that as boring and start adding flourishes to keep people's interest.
People end up hoist on their own petard. "A T-Rex giving a thumbs up" isn't an interesting idea and a good human artist will - instead of following an instruction - give people what they asked for and slip some actually interesting elements in, which usually comes back to more body language and facial expression that is hard to describe.
Agree. All of the major AI model labs have designed their user interfaces in entirely the wrong way.
Prompting via text alone is a really bad way to generate images. Ideally you want Canny Control to draw an outline of the image with elements in the exact locations where you want them. It's why comfyui is so great.
The ability to edit images and specify regions in the image for the prompt is a step in the right directions though. ChatGPT and Gemini have this.
(do give the artist more commissions. They need to eat and are on my shortlist for stuff like this. Here's a sexy Jar-Jar Binks/Garfield hybrid they made https://bsky.app/profile/dsoart.com/post/3ml2f4aqsf22t)
Sure, but let me flip the question - how would the user react if they knew the said prompt-crafted image is AI generated? Industry will need to do better to sell it to the young generation, which is usually the tastemaker for the future. It is considered "low class" to use AI-generated images. If the game is "conceal that it was AI-generated", then... lol.
Yeah people seem to think that the issue is that the output isn't "high quality enough," which is a super strange misconception about the role of art even in a commercial setting. Like if it just gets "good" in some mechanical way that people will start to like it.
It's inevitable that AI Art will be used everywhere and haters will get desensitized due to over exposure. There is a right time and place to use real artwork vs ai art as long as someone doesn't try to claim ai art as real.
This is a good prediction that is likely to come true. Almost everything else is already slop and we're desensitized to it. Almost all products in stores, almost all websites, almost all apps, almost all video games are slop. We still recognize the good ones that aren't slop but we're accustomed to most things being slop, we don't get angry at those things, we buy enough of them for them to make a higher ROI than the good things.
"Its the year 2076. I can finally post my AI generated art without people being mad at me. Its a paradise."
It's a fascinating article and trend to me. I've been rather obsessed with the amazing technology of text-to-image generation since 2017, when state of the art was an LSTM+GAN and resulted in a blurry image. Now that the technology basically works great, it's just upsetting to a lot of people. I kind of think of AI like making things out of plastic - works pretty well, but basically always resented. Notice that the article couldn't identify anything wrong with the generated image except for how it was made and how no one got paid.
The point of the article is to state that if one needs an explanation or a breakdown of why the AI-generated image is upsetting, then that person might not be a good judge of the qualities and impact of an image in the first place.
That's not to say that this same person isn't the perfect target and consumer, as far as OpenAI is concerned.
AI images had a cool aesthetic and had kind of unpredictable results until around 2022 or 23. Now that anything can be generated quickly and with little effort, it kind of lost the novelty. I'm sure there are people doing some cool things still, but I mostly lost interest.
I mean isn't it like the uncanny valley? it's sort of like "the real thing" aka human created artworks that we traditionally love and connect with, but just far enough that it gives us even more disgust that something completely not human created(like an inanimate object) would.
I personally find AI art both visually pleasing at an unconscious level and vapid at the same time
It'd be so funny if the first three examples are AI-generated too.
(Not accusing that they are)
Recently Blender removed Anthropic from the sponsors while taking Nvidia and Google's money. This is the epitome of the nature of the anti-AI trend: If you just don't make it obvious nobody cares.
How do you know if an artist drew it for you versus an AI? I think social proof and long term observation of artists help.
Approps of nothing, I think art is worth your while to make an investment of effort. I found Drink and Draw and made acquaintance of another maker from a local makerspace(not mine) and an artist. I wasn't technically adept but I want space to learn how to draw and they treated beginner(or at lease those three) with good vibes even though I was a clear beginner.
Especially Indians!
I am genuinely curious what you mean by this. I mean it sounds obvious you are saying that Indians hate AI art, i'm just curious why that group specifically?
(I don't have my finger on the pulse of that nation, i'm afraid)
What I especially hate are slides of diagrams that could have been made with Draw.io or Excalidraw but were made with Nano Banana instead. They ALWAYS look jank. Better than late last year, but still very jank.
I love that silly dinosaur with the emoji thumbs up.
Here's the really funny thing. Crafting the prompt to make the original image probably took more time than that crappy mspaint job.
I'm being serious, think about it. What are the chances that image came out of the first prompt fed to the AI? How much time did it take to craft the prompt to get that weird uncanny valley trex with a thumbs up?
Compare that to googling "trex", grabbing an image. Finding the thumbs up emoji. He didn't even bother removing the white background layer! It probably took two minutes tops to make and I enjoy it more.
Author here. It was the first one. (Not to take away from your point - but i will die shameful if anyone thinks I "spent time prompting.")
Fair enough. It's always hard to say. Some people do seem to spend a lot of time prompting for images trying to get the perfect one, while others just prompt once and grab the first result.
Either way though, I love your crappy mspaint job on that image and I agree wholeheartedly with the point you were trying to make with it. I think people overall do respond more positively to crappy ms paint memes than the AI gen memes. It's worth thinking about why that is
Gemini one shotted it.
but the author said they used ChatGPT. You're saying you produced the exact same image using Gemini?
I hate these overly grand clickbaity statements. AI is a tool. You can use it well. You can use it poorly. "AI Slop" is the category of lazy AI tool usage. It is the same with AI code. Do you ask Claude to implement a feature and then not do a manual code review? If so, you're likely to get slop.
In this case use of an AI image, if people can clock it (which is super funny people are thinking "well, what if they can't tell!"), is the issue unto itself.
There is no using AI image generators _well_ if you care how people perceive you and your work.
I think the AI Dino is fine. Just don’t claim it as anything but AI.
Note that you don't think its awesome. The best case scenario for someone normal is for them to be totally neutral. To think "its fine." The worst case is they think less of you and anything associated.
That is not a worthwhile risk - and thats the thing I am super confused more people don't have an intuitive sense of.
I think the AI dino is fine.
I'm not aware of anyone judging my taste in art and thinking less of me. If they judge, they do so silently.
I want to highlight a comment someone made elsewhere in the thread.
> I recently wrote a technical post on my blog where I thought it would be kind of funny to add some genAI of me doing stuff, some people told me they stopped reading immediately once they saw those images… it’s making me reconsider honestly :-/
It was one of the many here that got flagged. Boy howdy this got spicy. But this is the situation I am talking about. Some might think its fine, but a lot of people won't so its usually not worth it unless you want to narrow your audience.
I don't always hate AI products, I do hate an economy with no work for creative people.
Why? Do you think that artists would mind if there are no programming jobs out there? I expect no because I know much artistic people that now just say 'Cool, AI can now program my website or some other stuff for me'.
people have needed art as long as there have been people. it's hard to argue that websites are equally important.
What a fascinating take. Framing it like "they wouldn't care if your jobs went away!"
Like wtf? What world is this that you live in?
As a programmer and an artist, I very much need programmers to do programming stuff and artists to do art stuff.
I don't need programmers pretending to do art while artists struggle to do anything.
It's like talking to cultists in here.
an economy with no work for creative people(or engineers) makes me hate AI products way more
List of things that the public despised when they were new:
- Cars (expensive toys for the rich that endangered normal ppl and spooked horses)
- Recorded music (similar complaints about it not supporting artists)
- Bicycles (commonly called the devil's work)
- Novels (morally dangerous)
- Headphones / Sony Walkman (anti-social)
I remember when chatting online was nerdy, anti-social, and uncool. Now celebrities casually talk about sliding into each other's DMs.
The initial "it's unfashionable" backlash to new, useful, and threatening technology has been so repetitive and predictable throughout history that it's almost passe now. Most people aren't students of history of course, so history will repeat itself.
But that also means the second act will repeat, not just the first act. And the useful technology will almost certainly become fashionable and accepted once it's more commonplace.
Please, please stop with the AI analogies. Just make your argument on its own terms.
"It's different from X" is no more meaningful than "it's the same as X".
> It's different from X"
The post doesn't even say "it's different from X". It just says "it's unfashionable," with no comparison or mention of history at all, as if this is the first time a new technology has ever been unfashionable immediately after its release.
> Just make your argument on its own terms.
I feel like my argument is obvious? The "unfashionable" period for useful-but-jarringly-new consumer-facing technology is common, predictable, and short-lived.
You can't predict culture, you can't predict fashion, you can't predict the course of history, you can't predict innovations, you can't predict any of this creativity-mediated stuff.
Ironically, nothing makes me question my stance of human supremacy over AI more than the weakness and triteness of human defenses of AI.
Or maybe the defenses are AI generated, who knows.
They were right about cars, to be fair
Only cars? I would extend the list with bicycles, online chat/dating and at least headphones.
Okay but sometimes people despise things and then they go away or get stigma'd into a corner. There is selection bias in that list.
But either way, I'm talking about *the present* which is the time we all live in. Opining that in the future maybe it will be different is like - sure? Not super relevant though.
> Okay but sometimes people despise things and then they go away or get stigma'd into a corner.
Sure, but has that ever happened to a technology that was useful, convenient, affordable, etc.? Definitely gotta be rare. I think the utility tends to win in the end.
> But either way, I'm talking about *the present* which is the time we all live in.
Yeah that's why I didn't disagree with you. I think you're right about the present. But I wouldn't call my response irrelevant. It's pretty normal in a conversation to carry things forward and respond with your own thoughts.
When you ask me, headphones are for much people the sign for beeing antisocial, especially for the people that want to be antisocial. Online chats and online dating are now so much monetized and hyped that I would be happy when we would back to the old times where it was a nerdy thing or when we could remove it from the history completely.
So yes, all things that I accepted first I hate now. The others I was born in, can't tell much about them. Maybe the people are right but accept the shit later.
I don't, to me this AI generated image has more value than this human generated content.
The two sets should be disjoint for any self-proclaimed human being.
This is just cope over time you won't be able to tell if an image is Ai generated, human coded or the way things are going real pictures or video. As Ai at the end of the day is a tool if people don't like the output they keep changing till they like it.
People make wrongly future predictions looking at current output ie first encounter but fail to count for improvement over time. 3 years ago the biggest topic was that llm are not going to replace coders as they are not good but over time as llm have improved that has changed from llm are coming for coding jobs. It has been the same for solar, batteries and ev's etc which were not economical in their location at the time they might have done the research but they are still stuck in that first encounter while prices have dropped so much for the tech that economics are completely different.
Lets just put that aside for a minute because right now, in the present, people often can tell. And when they can tell, which is often, it is a net negative choice to use AI art.
Which is my point.
And my point is Ai is a tool people will adjust it to what they like over time so people Hate Ai Art today would be the more accurate statement. You need to qualify your statement
I love that this succinctly explains not only that people largely hate this shit, but also gives simple examples of doing better. The photoshopped thumbs up was really good, I love that shit. It is the antithesis of ai slop; the human presence is felt.
so called AI Art is OK for those pic themself. but it's far too often abused.
All you get are these pieces of glossy junk, yet they expect you to believe it’s some form of creative work. "People with minor cases of major brain damage", indeed
LOL
Let me propose another alternative.
People generally hate low effort AI slop.
Irrational people hate art made with AI as a tool.
"By invading the territories of art, photography has become art's most mortal enemy." - Said someone who nobody knows because it's a long and dead opinion.
>Irrational people hate art made with AI as a tool.
No, it's OK to care about the source/process. It is not irrational. You may disagree, but it is utterly human - as rational as things get.
And to emphasize: I am fully aware that there are people who don't care. Of course there are people who see no issue with it.
But there aren't people for whom it is a positive, just those for which it fails to be a negative. It creates a severe negative impression or a neutral one.
That is a terrible tradeoff!
lol
I don’t hate AI arts in general I just hate those AI arts that I personally think are badly executed with tastes that don’t align with mine.
You have no idea what "AI art" is these days. And if you think you do, well, you are very naive.
Care to elaborate what it is for us naive fools?
There is virtually nothing that a good lora cannot imitate
I think he means that the point of the article is that the doodle is AI-generated.
It seems like there might be just a small vocal minority that hates AI art.
Most people probably don’t care.
I bet there were painters in the 1800s who talked about how people hated photographs and how they were uncanny and creepy compared to paintings.
>It seems like there might be just a small vocal minority that hates AI art.
Certainly, clearly not
For now.
In the future, I despair that the next generations will adjust. Horrifying, but possibly true.
Art without human input is pretty meaningless. It's just pretty colors, even if well executed. I guess there are people that vibe purely on kitch aesthetics. They don't have good taste ofc, but I guess from a capitalist perspective that's a market.
People are confused because since the 1960s literally the CIA intervened to disrupt the transmission of meaning in art, because it was a field dominated by "subversives" who were opposed to capitalism and imperialism. They promoted meaningless post-modern art that was purely aesthetic. So decades later, starved of good examples, people have no idea what art is anymore.
“Art wasn’t supposed to look nice, it was supposed to make you feel something.”
A weird facsimile of art that has no soul is entirely uninteresting.
Then no one that makes art is in danger. AI is just replacing the 'Art' that is not really art and just some paid painting.
If you ask me, the rise of the term “slop” in recent years is a sign that a considerable amount of people do care.
I think people who don’t like it genuinely don’t understand it enough to be fascinated by it or have some other issue with it that has nothing to do with the content itself
A complete lack of human input and, as such, no genuine human feeling or expression. This sounds like it has everything in the world to do with the “content.”
> A complete lack of human input
Obviously a false statement or the image would not be generated in the first place. You will need to significantly move goalposts for this statement to be truthful