#506

Feels like they want the praise of making Art, because being a capital A Artist has some sort of value, but they don't want to like... "waste their time on it" being bad/getting better/or the "want to want to". They want the praise with none of the effort.

At least that's how some of the over-defensiveness/calling artists Elitists scans to me. They see Artists being put on a pedestal of some sort, the praise, the Engagement on social media, and they want it, but don't want to give up the hobbies they actually care about.

Honestly, after reading this I think I get it. I too have ideas I'd like to see made actual art in the world; I don't want to draw them, I've tried to learn how to draw before and it's just not my thing, but I want to have drawn them. It also must be really cool to have people liking your art.
But, of course, if you don't enjoy the process it's pointless to go through all the work, but instead of coming to peace with that part of yourself and save money to commission the ideas you can't get rid off, "AI art" has the appearance of being the cheap/free no effort solution to this dilemma.
I just want to take their hands and tell them that it's okay to do shitty art for fun, if the idea of getting good at it is too daunting. And that it's okay to recognize our time is finite and to enjoy other things you actually want to do.

[Cooper watches you walk away] "Joe's path is a strange and difficult one..." - and I agree 1000% with your thoughts here.

I think part of this is about accepting the finiteness of the self. I am almost certainly well more than halfway through my time on this planet. There are a lot of things I wished I could have done, things I could have learned. And I will manage to do some of them, hopefully the ones that I feel would most fulfill and enrich me as a human being. But the stuff I don't get around to, I can't get too sad about. That's a nearly infinite reservoir of possible regret, and unlike so many of the regrets fate saddles us with, these you can usually simply opt out of.

And it's certainly not worth pretending that I did actually get around to those things, when I didn't. That would be like lying that I speak a language or play some instrument that I can't really... to, what? Impress someone at a party? I want them to be impressed with (well, I'd settle for just "like" / "tolerate") the person I actually am, not some fabrication.

So I think AI generators are mostly things that help you pretend, pretty unconvincingly, that you are infinite, did everything, knew everything. But the beauty of a life is in its finiteness, its specificities, its utterly unique rainbow scribble across time and space.

I wish I enjoyed drawing, but I don't. It sucks every time and it never becomes fun or easy. But I do have ideas I want other people to see. So I pay artists to draw for me. Its ethical and surprisingly affordable.

But I totally get it, I get why someone would say "I don't care about the process, I just want to be seen". I wish 'AI art' wasn't built on an ethics nightmare or else I'd probably support it just for that one use case.

i mean im not gonna lie. i wouldn't make text-to-image model art, because on the important hand there seems to be no ethical implementation of it and on the less important hand it gives me headaches, but like. i'm not very good at art and i don't have the energy to make art. i have plenty of ideas- but not enough money to pay people to articulate them as often as i'd like, not enough skill to begin the work of portraying them nearly as well as i'd like, and not enough energy to gain the skill. i DO want a shortcut, i suppose, because i'm not making art for the sake of finishing a piece (if i even finish a piece!) and going "damn, that's not nearly as good as i wanted it to be"

i really hate playing devils advocate, but for people with a similar dynamic to art like me, i can understand occasionally getting lulled with the siren song of easy art. i dont want to be an artist, i'd say i already am one, even if i'm bad at it. and yet im so very frequently frustrated with my art for it not coming out the way i want. that doesnt justify utilizing AI art, let alone claiming that youre an artist for doing so, but i can see the appeal of that shortcut. i want to bring the ideas i have in my head out onto the page, and the idea art isnt for me has genuinely haunted me for years. i want to want to make art, but i constantly feel roadblocked and incapable of doing so.

i'm still going to keep trying, and no shortcut is worth the harm of AI art, but that doesn't really change my frustration

I've regularly felt the frustration of the images in my head not translating to the page, because I'm just not a details-oriented thinker and visualize more in the broad strokes

though using AI does not appeal to me in that way at all. even if it was something theoretically capable of directly copying what is in my brain to the canvas, the process by which one physically makes something (and not the thing that comes out of the other end) is the actual art, so skipping that is removing the part where you yourself interface with life

even if I never climb the mountain, being instantly taken to the peak would not convey the feeling of having gotten there

This is incredibly insightful, but I think it's missing that the majority of people that I have the displeasure of seeing don't really think that much beyond they want something to masturbate to. Like really. There's so many people that really just want an infinite masturbation machine. It's sad and a little terrifying. I feel like most breakdowns of the AI art thing don't take into account there's a uncomfortably massive chunk of people that don't give a shit about ethics or anything other than a nihilistic self-pleasure.

I think there's a lot of people who think that just having a good idea makes them something special or unique somehow.
The challenge of making something is a huge barrier to them, denying them their RIGHT to their amazing idea - and AI represents a way where only having an idea is enough for them to make something reality. No real work required!

How many times have you heard someone say "I had that idea first" as if they should be credited with simply thinking about it.

This thread is honestly one of the most motivational things I've read on art and creation.

Big props to everyone here. Wish I'd read and understood it ten years ago

on the whole bit on "I think the foundation of "artists are elitists for gatekeeping art" is just a smoke screen by actual nefarious people who are using this technology for its true purpose, which is to flood the world with middling, cheap labor. But capitalist globalization is another topic entirely."

I'd agree if this last 10 years or so wasn't full of discourse about gatekeeping and how its bad and how people are bad for doing it and etc.

Things don't need to be a "meanwhile at the fortress of evil" Capitalist boogeyman plot. It can just be a bunch of stupid people, doing stupid people things, and you just happen to be on the other side of the, "how dare you stop people from participating in the thing" for once.

Occam's Razor, man.

i think both of these posts are overanalyzing something that's fundamentally very simple. someone wants to depict an idea they have in their head. learning to draw well enough to execute it takes multiple years. using an AI generative model doesn't. (not to say that there isn't skill involved, but making this character portrait with my local copy of stable diffusion took me far less of a skill investment than it would take to draw it.)

like, i saw a photo of a tiny figure of someone's FFXIV character. they didn't make the model themselves, it's just ripped assets from the game. they didn't hand-sculpt it, it was 3d printed. but at the end of the day, they can look at their figure and go "that's my blorbo :)". similarly, i take screenshots of my own character in outfits using models other people made (that are sometimes ripped from other games!), using a rendering engine i didn't write, with shaders that someone else coded. is that "art"? am i an "artist"? i don't care. it makes me happy, so i do it. if i could get the same results by typing "my ffxiv character, smiling, in [description of her outfit], drinking tea" into stable diffusion, i would, because i care about the end result of seeing her in various poses more than i care about the process itself.