i think the ai art thing is really about, people aren't comfortable with their own disinterest in things. they don't want to make art but they want to want to. they can't make themselves want to. but that's not ok with them. but they imagine it would feel good to have made art
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.
There is one "valid" target for this kind of stuff, and it's not just people who have been tricked into thinking they should be generating art (aka "product" or "content"). This comes from my own twitter thread, but I think it's kind of people like me. People who developed some amount of artistic skill through decades of constant practice, but never reached the place they were aiming to get to.
I came up during the rise of the anime boom and my skills at proportions never got good enough to draw like that. But I desperately wanted to. Around the mid-to-late 2000's I ended up entering several art contests, and got snubbed so badly I didn't even make it into the honorable mentions. I had worked so hard on those entries that I injured my hands with RSI, and it eventually developed in to slowly worsening carpal tunnel syndrome. I was so frustrated with what happened (on top of developing new creative interests) I basically gave up drawing entirely for many years. Almost any time I'd try, it would result in a barely-coherent sketch that made me too upset to finish.
Eventually, at some point, I realized this was stupid. I needed to force myself to try again. So I came up with little ways to get me drawing again, under the mantra that it didn't really matter if it was good, as long as it was finished. I couldn't let my talents go to waste. So I started doing artwork for my Youtube videos. Whether it was traditional pencil-drawn art that was colored digitally...
Or turned into pixel art...
Now I've looped back around and reached a kind of understanding and acceptance of my artistic ability (including my limits). I've even occasionally started drawing for fun again. But there was a large window of time where I was deeply unhappy with where I was artistically, and felt like I'd never finish climbing that mountain (because that's the wrong way to look at art, for one).
And I can see a lot of real would-be artists, people who feel inadequate about their talent, who think it's slipping through their fingers like it was for me, look at this AI art stuff and think: "Finally, my shortcut. I've been studying art for ten years, but I don't need to spend the rest of my life working and failing at it. I'm savvy enough that I can just have the machine fill in my blanks."
It's still that crisis of identity, and perhaps an even worse one: because these aren't people being fooled into doing something they're not good at, they're being fooled into giving up. That this technology can "fix" them.
It can't. You can only fix yourself. How you view yourself, and your work, and how much you value what you produce. All this tech does is flood art channels with muddy sewage until you can't see anything anymore. You are hurting yourself and the entire artistic community.
i feel like non artists view art really weirdly for some reason .. like its so widespread? ive met so many people in my life who "want" to draw but see no value in learning and they just settle on the opinion that the universe gave me a secret special power that they cant have bc theyre not the chosen one. maybe im forgetting or just unaware. but i really dont think ive seen ppl do this with other interests? like theres this OBSESSION with creating art omg i Wish i could draw!!! what do u mean i could learn. fuck off thats not worth my time. omg i wishhh i could drawwww. ive had people get angry at me for just having a skill bc i "get to draw" like theyre not allowed. like its my fault they dont wanna practice
I cut ties with friends who are incredible artists for their support of these machine learning image generators, and got called selfish for it. That this is "just like the printing press putting scribes out of business, get over it" and that "everyone deserves to be an artist if it makes them happy". Such a devaluing of what art is and can do for the human spirit - as if most of us create for status and a title? As if it is only about being a creator, and not the creation (complete, noun) and definitely not about creating (ongoing, verb)?
This elite artist rank coexists with the snarky looks and comments that we are used to getting. The way the temperature of the conversation shifts to mocking when you reveal what you do. The way you can't get a mortgage and the way people go from interest to amusement and pity when you tell them your academic research career is about art.
I'm not an artist, I work in children's publishing, because I need my tenancy renewed. I'm not an artist, I run my own business, because I need the medical specialist I've waited five years to see to take my disability seriously and not infantilise me. I am proud of being an artist, but I have to be so careful about how I present it. I am far more open about my queerness to strangers than my line of work.
Being an artist (job) takes years and years and years of hard work, frustration, little steps both back and forth, sacrifices of all sorts, chronic pain from repeated use injuries, amongst other things, and it most usually gives you a life of struggling to make rent and taking six months to decide whether that £19.99 essential item or tool that would majorly improve your quality of life is actually really that essential.
Being an artist is usually not luxurious, and it definitely isn't easy. It's not even just about the art side. Want to work in a studio with the crunch culture and mistreatment and complete lack of acknowledgement? Or want to do your own thing, with all the legal, marketing, website building, social media skills you need to learn too?
I think this is the kind of artist these people picture when they want to play at being an artist using their little software. The one that sprouted one day on their Twitter feed with perfectly rendered artwork and everyone left all this praise on their post! A celebrity! Beloved! With the full reel of everything they did to get here removed.
Being an artist is cool on the internet, and it is cool in chic wealthy circles where people can afford to pursue any quirky whims. Everyone wants to be an artist in the spotlight, before they go back to their other job that keeps that light on.
But making art? Anyone can make art. Making art is about how you feel. It's about engaging your body and brain in a satisfying little ritual. It is about learning endless new skills and becoming a little more of yourself. It's about self growth, about understanding the world, about communicating with others, about not being afraid to play and to dream up things. It's about making decisions based on your own individual tastes and experiences. The process of making art is so beautiful and so human. Each artwork is unique like the artist who made it, and yet so many other people can connect with it, and they can understand.
Perhaps this is too sincere for some, so they want to remove that whole part of the art thing. It's hard to be seen. It's harder to believe you even have something worth showing.
Don't even get me started on "think of the disabled artists!" We've always existed. We come up with a million creative ways to make art - that's what we do, we create.
I am so tired of all these cheap, thoughtless, soulless mass produced things around us, designed to be discarded. Things where the hard work and passion and love of their maker never matters. We cannot keep letting such human things as expressing ourselves through creativity become capitalist commodities.
I am sometimes glad to be so disabled. I will die before I can work an office job in a drab box with a drab skyline, if I am lucky for a window. I thought the AI was meant to do away with these jobs so we can all do what makes us fulfilled?
