Okay ykw usually I try to be a pretty calm person but the whole thing with the angbang art that was fed to AI really pissed me off and it’s been a long day. so.
As an artist AND a writer, I hate AI so much. To me, there’s absolutely zero worth in a piece made by something that can’t even think or decide for itself. I’d rather see a million crappy MSpaint doodles than one AI image masquerading as someone’s creativity, because, at least with crappy MSpaint doodles, you know that someone out there used their own brain and body to create something, that someone put effort into something and believed that something was worth putting effort into. Human-made art, *real* art, was at least given time, was at very least given 10 minutes of thought as the artist worked it into a shape from their own thoughts.
I don’t look at art just because I want to see an image, I look at art because I want to learn a little something about the artist. I want to see what their process was, where their interests are, what parts of their expertise I can learn from. Even art I don’t like can inform me, teaching me what I want to avoid and why.
AI “art” feels hollow to me. The only direct human input was the prompt, and that’s not even as much effort as commissioning someone to make it for you. The rest is from real art stolen to train the model, real pictures and videos of so many people and so many works that there’s no way all of them could consent.
And the worst part? It doesn’t even look good. The videos are jerky, the movements are weird as hell and so uncanny, the style is either ripped from one artist’s corpus or mashed together from millions until it all masses into a homogenous blob. In the case of what happened to the angbang art made by @tired-art-bitch and posted by @mhevarujta, I could have gotten a more enjoyable result by just imagining what I wanted to see. Thousands of times less computing power spent, and thousands of times quicker.
But if I couldn’t imagine it, or if I wanted something more solid, I could have just made something myself. Every artist I know would be honored, not offended, to have another person inspired by their work, whether that be art, writing, cosplay, or hell, even a heroforge model or picrew. You could use your love of somebody else’s work, somebody else’s lines drawn by their hands and thought of by their mind, to fuel your own desire to make something with your own. You could take a kind of control over the final product that AI could never give you, because AI can’t read your mind, but you can.
You, as a person, are capable of being inspired and letting that inspiration connect you to a vast web of other people, something that spans further back than the advent of modern humanity, who have all seen someone else’s love for their art and decided to let it spark their own. But instead you fed it to a machine, and missed out on an activity that engaged the same people who spoke the first human languages.
I can’t say I’m impressed.
