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It’s not art, I’d argue. In the same scene that some long filmed things aren’t cinema.
My company recently hired some “AI expert” to help us slop the place up a bit more. He gave a presentation where he had an expressionless, dead-eyed, generated version of himself straight from the bottom of the uncanny valley introduce him, talked about how much he loves AI “art,” droned on about how AI helped him improve his golf game, then proceeded to give the most substanceless presentation for a good half hour rife with buzzwords and AI generated stock photos.
So anyway, employee morale is super high now that we had to sit through a presentation where a man making 3 times our salary demonstrated that his entire job is to tell the executives what they want to hear about AI every once in a while and play around with chatbots and AI image and video software the rest of the time.
At my job I’m so fucking tired of being told how to do my job with more AI. I use AI as I see fit to help with development, end of story. The manager of manual QA was told to use AI more, so what he figured out is that now we’re going to have manual testers generating code that we’ll have to look over I guess. Fun. Productive. Great.
We’re getting constant pressure from the management to use LLMs which, in our work, have so far only shown negative ROI. And the time and effort spent on them has been displacing some ML projects we were working on that actually looked like they’d give us some concrete, positive results.
I could triple my salary and scam CEOs out of their money at the same time? Damn… sign me up.
Something similar happened at my company, but it was a Google sales manager, she played a cringy slop video of her avatar introducing herself, talking about how she was so excited for the “new era of AI art”… I literally gagged.
I’m really curious how “AI” helped him golf, other than providing basic advice he could have found just as easily anywhere else.
He’s lucky his AI is not Mr Meeseeks from Rick & Morty.
I’m really curious how “AI” helped him golf, other than providing basic advice he could have found just as easily anywhere else.
No that’s literally it. Could have gotten the same result by trolling around a golf forum for 10 or 15 minutes.
…I mean, it seems to be working out for him.
“”“Art”“”
Yeah, art by definition requires intent. The slop hoses have no intent, just a pattern matching algorithm that matches a distribution of random noise to what the model has been trained that the words in the input prompt should look like.
Yeah, art by definition requires intent.
Aleatory art, going back to the Dadaists and John Cage, deliberately subverts intent. You can have art with high levels of randomness in its process as well, not just at the conceptual stage, like Jackson Pollock’s work. So no.
The problem with the AI generated art I’ve seen is that it’s lowest-common-denominator crap.
I love this so much. Every single photo in the alternatives to AI is so much better than the slop.
Yes, on an extremely technical level, the slop is more accurate, in the exact same way that blending a cheeseburger is more proficient than chewing it. I want the jagged edges and real creative choices.
Well put
As much as I agree with the author, I’m almost positive he’s wrong about the majority of people hating AI art. It’s ubiquitous at this point, and by its nature that means tons of people are using it themselves. And, as long as it remains free, people are going to keep doing so.
Maybe that will change when physical reality overtakes hype-driven economics. Until then I can only hope AI art gets looked at the same way clipart was in the early 2000s someday soon. It is unbearably cringe.
It’s ubiquitous at this point, and by its nature that means tons of people are using it themselves.
The fact that everyone is exposed to it doesn’t imply it’s by choice. Everyone in major cities used to be exposed to smog and other toxic shit, but most of it wasn’t directly generated by them. There were a few greedy sociopaths churning it all out.
As the occasionally prophetic and always contrarian FZ put it 53 years ago:
I may be vile and pernicious But you can't look away I make you think I'm delicious With the stuff that I say I'm the best you can get Have you guessed me yet? I'm the slime oozin' out From your TV setReplace “TV set” with “internet” and it could have been written last week.
The difference with AI art is that it’s not a byproduct of a moneymaking venture, it’s the product itself and it doesn’t get made unless someone prompts a generator to make something. Not saying the slop being generated for ads isn’t widespread, just that marketing slop existed way before AI art did. If the general population didn’t respond to AI art well, it wouldn’t be in ads (or at least not the ones targeted widely) because it wouldn’t make enough money to be worthwhile.
I don’t like AI art, but I also don’t want to frame it as a big conspiracy. It removes friction that artists used to benefit from, and the output is something most people are at worst neutral to (for now). Granted, that friction was removed by stealing hundreds of billions of dollars from artists to train the models, but your average consumer doesn’t care about that at all.
Yeah, there’s nothing in that article to back up this claim:
If your initial reaction to reading that and seeing that 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.
I suspect I (we) just surround ourselves with people that are likely to share our opinions on AI. But I keep hearing anecdotes about Facebook boomers, children, and corporate types just eating that shit up.
Yeah, it’s another symptom of the same malaise that led to widespread adoption of Facebook. Great stuff for those who don’t mind (or aren’t aware of) being disempowered.
Douglas Adams once said that one of the greatest pitfalls for an author is obviousness. LLM algorithms are based on choosing the most obvious output based on the prompts given, so by default, you’re always going to get Muzak instead of bebop. The middle-of-the-road path is bland, lukewarm, turgid soup.
I do feel like AI art has entered the boomer stage of the hype cycle, as in Trump et al use it prominently, so the kids start to think, it’s
.But I also feel like the blog post conflates two aspects. It’s not just about AI art, it’s also about every goddamn brainfart being turned into AI art.
No one needs to see a t-rex giving a thumbs-up or similar.That’s what people are tired of, for sure. In the before times, the person would’ve chuckled at the thought and then forgotten about it. It took long enough to create an image of it, that they had time to realize that no one cares.
That barrier is now removed, so you definitely see posts online with just the dumbest brainfart turned into pixels.
It’s anecdotal, but my top YT video on my channel is about training the algorithm to give you less AI slop.
That dude definitely masturbates.
In an article about money laundering, two hands shaking with a wad of cash between them. And three thumbs. 🤦♀️ (Whoever let that get posted on the website should be fired.)
I use Suno a fair bit from time to time. I spend a lot of time refining the lyrics and then I play around with music generation until I find the right vehicle for them. It really scratches an itch because I haven’t written poetry for decades and I’ve never been able to write songs.
The result is music I really enjoy listening to and is meaningful to me (“meaningful” in quotes because some of it is just pop fluff). But one else wants to listen to it. And that’s fine, I’m really just doing it for me.
I have yet to hear anyone else’s AI generated songs that I gave a shit about, either. I think it’s like the uncanny valley, except I can’t tell the difference between generated and real music. But there’s a je ne sais quoi that real music has generated music just… lacks. And it’s only in the process of working on a piece that it takes on that quality, but only for the individual — probably because they attach to their input rather than the generated quality of the rest.
Anyway, people will get away with AI stuff in the background where something real commands attention, but if you ever make it a focus, i think people will tune out. You can just feel the… soullessness.
I don’t mind some AI music, but that’s because my taste in music is absolute dog shit and I know it.
