musician, image maker, BBS sysop, game boy user, pretend meteorologist, baseball watcher...
Was (@)yiffpolice on twitter (RIP 2013-2023)
Will always be @nicky from cohost (2022-infinity)
is there some force preventing people from picking up a pen? where is this art dictator that we need to overthrow? i've never had to get a ballot measure passed to write a song. why does this line keep getting thrown around as if it means anything?
if you think having to learn a new skill through practice & patience is some unforgivable tyranny, then maybe art isn't for you
i was always suspicious of ai art enthusiasts but what's really giving away the game is tools going around the let you make fake timelapse sketch videos. basically the only thing they're good for is faking credibility!
"Democratizing art" is just a soundbite to try and justify their pre-existing positions and the decisions they were already going to make. Most of them were never going to pick up a pen, a pencil, a paintbrush etc and see doing so as a show of embarrassing naivety, even for the already "technically skilled" to continue to do.
I mean I can already show people a piece of art that I didn't create and say "look how talented I am!" It's not really a different situation whether the entity who created it was human or computer; either way it sure wasn't me.
is there some force preventing people from picking up a pen?
i totally agree with your overall point, but I do think the system we live under makes it really hard to pick up new skills. especially ones that are unlikely to be profitable
not that I agree with the folks writing prompts like "big titty boob girl anime titty long hair stepping on me anime mommy." i would never want to deprive myself of the joy of actually writing code or some other thing i'm already good at. but like, i sure do wish i had the time/energy/motivation to learn to draw well
it's just an opportunistic mislabeling of a real anxiety people have, imo
The one (1) example ive seen that actually supports this idea is a friend of mine who developed severe RSI from making a webcomic. They struggle to do visual art now as a result - I remember them doing some experiments with Ai image generation and being excited at the possibilities.
That said, they've also been able to do some pixel art stuff lately, so idk if ai generation is the answer. But, its the example that always comes to mind when I see this point brought up.
I have had to stop making comics because of RSI and other issues but AI art is sure as hell not a suitable replacement for drawing things myself. My hot take is that anything that can be easily replicated by AI (be it programming, drawing, making music, etc.) isn't worth doing to begin with.
ah fuck that's a really good point, kinda short-sighted of me to not think of things like RSI. regretting my word choice
💯
i think it's almost axiomatically true that if you believe ai can replicate the thing that's valuable about an art form, you do not really understand it
“ai is democratizing art” rhetoric is pretty silly, but there are a lot of disabilities where people can’t pick up pens, so the rhetorical question is kinda insensitive.
yeah i'm realizing that part is jsut completely off-base, i feel bad about it as someone who struggles with joint pain
In the spirit of AI in general, if they throw enough nonsense phrases out there you'll waste a ton of time trying to manually unpack why each one is garbage while they and their marks have already moved on to the next buzzword
ai is democratizing square aspect ratio images of wet, thematically incoherent anime girls in soft lighting 🙌
one of the meanings of "democratize" is "make widely available"; see e.g. https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/democratize or https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/338866/whats-the-meaning-of-democratize-in-this-context
i am aware, i was being slightly facetious. the opportunity to make art was widely available well before LLMs and machine learning so even with this definition, it doesn't really mean anything
