Sophie Labelle | Instagram | Bluesky
Transcript
four frame comic.
first frame shows a typical AI poster that says : All chatgpt flyers look the same, especially with this font! the text above it reads : I won’t go to your event if the poster was made by AI.
second frame shows a still frame from a Hank Green youtube video. text above reads : I won’t read your post or email and I won’t watch your video if they were made with AI.
third frame shows an AI restaurant poster of burgers and chicken in a window. text reads : I won’t patronize your shop or restaurant if it is advertised with AI.
last frame shows an MS paint window with badly written : Your bad art is better than AI slop. text reads : if you can’t take the time or make the effort to interact with me yourself, then why should I do it?
It’s never been more acceptable to post Microsoft Paint art in legitimate business spaces than it is now. Well, except for briefly in the late 1980s.
Except of course if your paint art is to abstract or surrealist,
then we must miscredit it and grill someone else for it being an out of context social commentary that holds the wrong opinion.
Such is the way.
If you’re talking about those MAGA douchebags then yeah, fuck those guys.
Speaking as a hard left, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist anarchist, i cant believe we are speaking about the same people.
And yet we are.
Anyway sorry to bother you, i just wanted to check out the source of the current festivities in person and thought that comment was too ironic not to comment on.
I spent a little bit but not too much time on this, I hope you enjoy it.
Every generation that decides a new image machine is rotten thinks it noticed first. It didn’t, and there are receipts.
Grant Taylor’s essay “The Soulless Usurper” walks through how the art world greeted early computer art, and the complaints are the same ones being made about generative images right now: mechanically sterile, nobody actually decided anything, a machine getting slipped into a chair reserved for the artist. This you?
Taylor documents sabotaged machines and physical attacks on artists in the late '60s and early '70s, plus a long tail of milder stuff — eye-rolling, flat refusal to call it art at all — running from the medium’s start in the 1960s to the early '90s. His verdict: computer art was “possibly the most maligned art form of the twentieth century.”
Two dates worth holding together. That period is half a century behind us, and the takes aged badly — the plotter drawings critics wouldn’t call art hang in museums now. And the essay came out in 2012, a decade before Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. That’s what makes it useful: Taylor isn’t arguing about AI. He’s describing the previous fight, written before anyone had a stake in how the comparison would land.
Source: Grant Taylor, “The Soulless Usurper: Reception and Criticism of Early Computer Art,” in Mainframe Experimentalism, ed. Higgins & Kahn (UC Press, 2012), p. 18.
Critics disliked Van gogh in his time too. And he used all the traditional kit.
Art had a sort of schism once photography took off. Pro-ai art seems to get stuck on one side of it. Traditional art had a long, long run of ‘good art’ being well composed and skillful reproductions of reality: people, places, events—with a few visual metaphors for spice.
But then came photography. And all those people using art to look back in time had options, cheaper and accessible options. The demand for the skill to make precise replicas nearly collapsed.
What has sustained was not the technical method of making art, but the expressiveness of the artist. The spice becomes the meal. Things become more referential, abstract. It envokes states of mind often contextual to the times and circumstances the art was produced, and drawing on concepts outside of the image itself. It’s not just about making pretty pictures from paint, charcoal, or photoshop.
Once you have the dadaists, Duchamps and Pollocks running around, arguments about ‘correct’ techniques to make art are always going to be shortlived. It’s not the advancement of technology that people question. Longish ago most of us collectively decided method didn’t really matter, intention did.
If you scrolled through your camera roll would you consider it art? Can you use ai to quickly copy a technique? Yes. Can it be applied critically to success? Maybe. But if you outsource the practical skill and contextual knowledge that makes good, deliberate art, what are the odds that happens?
Thanks for taking the time to put together this viewpoint and sourcing your argument.
I disagree with the comparison to digital art. Computer generated art takes skill, effort, and an artistic eye to succeed. Not just anyone can pick up a stylus or mouse and make good art, though it is a bit more accessible than some traditional mediums.
AI on the other hand requires no effort or skill on behalf of the creator. Furthermore, any artistic style is just mimicry. AI models have scraped real artists work without permission and is being used to slap together plagiaristic content, no accreditation of any kind to the source.
It took less time than you think for exactly the reason you might guess. I guess I just see a different ‘brush’.
I’m glad you disagree. I’m fortunately old enough to remember being told that digital art wasn’t real art, and do be alive today where nobody cares, oil painting is cool, brushing up your oil painting in GIMP is also cool, using GIMP alone, still cool.
Just take your same argument and fast forward 30 years and you’ll get ahead.
There are undiscovered art forms and new/reset expectations just around the corner. The first real artist (with real artistic genius) to adopt the tools is going to be in every MOMA around the world.
Your mistake is in positing that the MOMA is in any way relevant at this juncture.
Walter Benjamin, nearly a century ago now, established a fundamental argument that most cultural critics of today have forgotten or simply gloss over: fascism twists art into a simple aesthetic rather than understanding art as a means to express change in the material conditions of the culture and its people. By relegating more and more to the machine, the machine gives us a false sense of expression without ever actually affecting our own material conditions. We are in the era of mass creation of the simulacra that Jean Baudrillard warned about.
You’re conflating ideation with creation.
I find it really hard to even read AI text. It’s exhausting, like being on Zoom for too long.
It’s something like decision fatigue. You’re constantly having to criticize every word because you know it will make stuff up out of whole cloth. Reading something you’ve verified to have come from a trusted expert or even just a human being is far less stressful.
Yup. AI writing also tends to place emphasis in really weird places and use it waaaay too much. Every single point is the Biggest and Most Profound Thing EVER!!
It also tends to use rhetorical structures that have a flat distribution of importance, surprise, etc. across all sentences. Natural language flows, it knows how to lead you to its conclusion because it has a clear idea of what it wants to say. AI writing tends to be more like an easter egg hunt or a mr beast video in that each sentence changes the direction of the point that’s being made. It kind of ends up jerking you around. I suspect this is because that type of writing has a very small chance of generating into a corner, because it can always pivot. Each individual point stays clear and coherent, but the overall structure ends up disjointed.
Never been more self-conscious of my language as I am right now lol, but I’m not going back to edit anything. It is how it is
The market is saying something different. To the outside, you look like an old man screaming at the kids on your lawn.
From my “outside”, you look like a tech bro pushing the new NFT’s.
I mean, we’ve had gimp for free for ages now ffs.
Just ask your nerdy cousin to make something already. You know, that thing they call human interaction? Come to think of it, if you had more human interaction you might also get laid so you don’t have to rely on a shitty ai gf.
Don’t try stuff with your cousin though ffs.
Yeah, I have tried explaining this to people. We have been able to do all of these things for decades with minimal effort (and without destroying the planet while handing it over to fascist billionaires)
The issue: non-nerds have never even heard of a gimp, and the majority of people now do not use a computer. Try finding one young person who does most computing on a laptop, let alone a desktop (no one uses desktops any more. Of my ~15 friends/acquaintances I can think of, I am the only one with desktops). It’s all phonephonephone (a phone loaded with spyware, to boot).
Can I try stuff with their cousin, or is that also off limits?
One man’s trash, is another man’s cousin?
Don’t try stuff with your cousin though ffs.
So Alabama just doesn’t get good graphics design then?
This is the problem… people tried
“I need an icon for my twitch channel”
“I’m an artist, I don’t work for free” /r/choosingbeggers
Nobody said that your nerdy cousin should do it for free. Give him/her $10 or something.
This is why AI art is so incredibly popular
Fuck my nerdy cousin, AI will do a bang-up job for free
AI art is currently free because it’s subsidized by the AI companies who are spending investors’ money to try to buy marketshare and mindshare. When that subsidy ends, you’ll have to pay for it too.
uh, i’m not an AI fan but I couldn’t care less if mom and pop diners or volunteer ran orgs are using ai to generate posts for their causes. getting huffy over it is dumb af. If I see a multimillion dollar corp using it then yeah, get wrecked. They have the resources and the means to pay an actual artist.
Consider that normal people don’t think like us nerds. They choose the shiny-looking version, not the handmade one.
I think that’s changing. Nerds are often the vanguards, but the rest of the culture catches up later.
This is why all these people are enjoying the smooth motion TVs. Shiny, not human and not better.
I sincerely hope you were omitting an /s there, because I haven’t heard of people who like those.
All my friends parents think they’re amazing. I wish I had a /s to throw in but its the bane of my existence.
Yup.
It’s getting sickening isn’t it.
Which is a good thing.
We shall indeed return to,
(as was put in that star trek movie, something like)
“We believe when you get a machine to do the work of a man you’ve taken something away from the man”
all the faster, having seen where that goes.
… Or we could build skynet and the matrix, 1984 and brave new world, a new, falling into unconscious farmed meatsacks, utterly atrophied of any ability, rendered completely dependent on your abuser. That’s an option too.
How much poison, how fast? Enough to grow insensitive? Enough to get past how sickening it is? Well, many may keep believing it’s all good productivity at their fingertips, at their lips even, upon mere utterances, wishes catered for. Oh, except that bit that was wrong. Oh, and then needing to mend the rest of it too, because none of it was right really. Oh, and then there’s so much more that can be done. Oh, but then none of it is ever done quite correctly too. Oh lets just accept the slop, getting too exhausted by all the extra work. … How soon before we’re all out of the delusions, realising it’s not even fulfilling its marketing’s selling-point claims of helping our productivity.
I got an LLM to help me expedite an idea I had for a text editor written in fish with standard utils, and that was great, really exciting to see it come together, and what a great learning expedition too, as I was reading more lines of [bad] code per day than I had in the entire prior 10 years of using fish. I managed to wrestle the LLM to get it right enough, and incremented my way through it. Though, several times, I burned through over 30 back-and-forth with the LLM, just to get it to do simple things correctly. … Long story short, I burned out, fast, deep, and hard, in a month (and stupidly pushed on for a month yet trying get one more feature completed… which it was even more stubborn on). … How fast could I have accomplished similar, by just learning how to do it myself first, without the extra steps of seeing hundreds of ways not to do it? And how fast would it have felt? (answer: almost no time at all, engaged in the moment). Instead of a very long hard slog. And with all that wax-on, wax-off, I’d have it in muscle memory better too. And, it’s fair progress when you already know how, and can indeed just expedite a tedious portion, and check it’s done right, from your explaining how to do it right. It’s much worse when trying to learn from a teacher who is constantly hallucinating and leading you astray.
And that’s for code… that’s one thing… where utility and correctness are typically easily in a greater ratio to creativity. But pure art…
I tried it once there too.
There’s an image, an idea I’ve had, since around 1999, and have drawn several times in several forms… a sort of meek, mad, maker themed, where there’s a body of a sheep (the meek), a tail of a wasp (the mad), and the wings of a butterfly (the maker)… for a sort of wise humility and gentleness, but with a powerful proactive protective aggressive potential, and a beautiful subtle creative proliferative bounty… idk, words, don’t really do it justice… I’ll just show you… so… Here’s a crappy version I doodled in gimp:
and then, after trying (I think over) 30(?) “AI” image generator tools, several of which, trying again for another 30 times, and failing to get any of them to do the artwork anywhere near right, eventually getting to the point where I was feeding them that version of the image and they were still failing to get it right, so at least another 30 itterations yet, and it eventually, with a lot of bickering and rewording of prompts from me, produced:
… which I still had to lop off the 5th leg from.
And, for all that effort… [remember, faffing through hundreds of completely wrong]
Where’s the expressive nuance?
There’s none.
It’s dead.
It’s so dead. Flat. Empty.
And it’s killing us.
So yeah… [excuse the expressive language, but, vital to express:]
“PLAY FROM YOUR FUCKING HEART!”
and to paraphrase
“YOU’RE FUCKING RIGHT! NOT THOSE FUCKERS
ON TVRUNNING AI, TELLING YOU WHAT TO THINK! YOU’RE FUCKING RIGHT!”Thanks Bill Hicks.
We’ll never find quality parity, and if it ever does, then the nightmare dystopia will have manifest itself fully, far beyond the alarm bell of the atrophying skill and beginning of the acceleration of degeneracy to total collapse, for so long as we chase the money and the reductive and the productive and believe the fairy tale lies of marketers trying to take every last thing from us.
How much already, known and unknown, is our expression curtailed by:
Computer says no.Time to relax into persistently thrusting ourselves into our own work of art.
(Interestingly, some significant overlap in this as from what I saw this morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaXNGyqgoMM (crap title, touches on far broader themes). Especially the clip from the writer, starting at 30:52 … Beautiful insight, bolsters the point of the OP).
… Anyway… Let me leave this comment on that friendly rousing note…
PLAY FROM YOUR FUCKING HEART!!!
:)
Whaat? I didn’t read it fully but what?
Something about using an LLM to make art and wanting people to appreciate them for that.
So, how is therapy
Yeah, your version looks cool, and the AI version looks hilarious. It’s like some fever dream.
That isn’t really the point, though. If somebody had the right prompt, they could make something that looked like yours. The point is that you created it. Having to pick up a stylus or a mouse and then drawing onto the screen aren’t obstacles to making the image; they’re part of the process that makes it worthwhile. It isn’t the same experience as begging and cajoling an LLM to make the thing for you.
The process of drawing the version(s) I’ve drawn, deeply fulfilling, improved my abilities.
The process of wrestling an LLM to draw it for me, a Sisyphusian torment, atrophied my abilities.
As somebody that’s absolutely human, “I appreciate the pushback on that”…
No lie though, I’ll still eat at a place even if they use AI on their menu. Not because I don’t notice or frown when I see it but it’s specifically because I’m a fatty and love food.
Why not spend 5 minutes and find a place that has exact same meals, but doesn’t use AI?
Counterpoint to AI YouTube: this shit is fucking awesome
The real ego here is assuming you’re going to be able to tell…
I might not be able to tell every time something is AI. That’s true.
But if a person has put zero effort making sure it doesn’t look like AI, then I have every right to call that out.
If you cheat, at least be smart about it and not get caught.
Pretty hard not to notice on posters. All the same vibe, font, colour scheme, layout. It’s like a preset beat on a keyboard, instantly recognizable and soulless.
I’m not as good with recognizing Ai other stuff but with music but I’ve come to realize if the musak is making you angry, it’s Ai.
The reason Ai music makes you angry, is because it never resolves properly. Your expecting to hear certain musical phrases all returning back to the tonic or root of the chord signature and it never does. Its like musical blue balls.
Same with all of it! Ai articles are the same! “Jesus, this guy just keeps saying the same thing! Get to the point!”
The blatant ones maybe, but you can be certain you have seen AI generated posters and didn’t notice they were AI.
Not a huge fan of Ai either but this behaviour is silly to me. Who cares if a flyer was made using AI.
Memes in niche communities on Lemmy get hundreds of votes (and like 30 people complaining in the comments) when they’re obviously AI made.
I think it’s fine to use anywhere where people would use stock footage before. Not in art and music but for a flyer or a quick internet meme why the hell not.
It’s not as though the technology will disappear if I don’t like it.
Who cares if a flyer was made using AI.
Hundreds of parents were persuaded to pay up to £35 a ticket for an event which promised “surprises at every turn”.
Eager families who turned up at an industrial area in Whiteinch described it as “little more than an abandoned, empty warehouse”.
A handful of embarrassed actors tried to make the best of some sad-looking props and a bouncy castle.
The promised chocolate fountains and “chocolatey delights” were conspicuously absent.
Children were instead offered a half-cup of lemonade and a small ration of jelly beans.
So, it’s definitely what I’d call a “Red Flag” when gauging whether a vendor will be overpromising and underdelivering.
It’s just stupid to think you can always tell or that someone who does a bad photoshop is am amazing artist.
It’s more an issue of effort and intent. AI is a signal that the vendor is going to do things in the laziest and cheapest manner possible. A hand-drawn flyer down with crayons and love indicates the person running the event put some god damned elbow grease into it. Slop ad-copy is a clear indication that they’re just hustling.
Last summer an author with the same name self-published 17 novels that were listed on Amazon, with one of them - Operation Inoculation - described as a “conspiratorial journey into vaccination truths”.
The author’s biographical information describes him as an “enigmatic wordsmith from the bustling streets of Glasgow” and a “rising star of the literary world”.
It continues: “With each stroke of his pen, Billy Coull crafts narratives that blur the lines between reality and fiction, leaving readers enthralled by the unpredictable twists and turns that lie ahead.”
A reviewer of one of the books was not convinced, describing it as “absolute nonsense” full of “gibberish sentences” which had “all the hallmarks of being written by AI”.
AI charlatans who want fame and success with none of the effort.
Oh my god. THIS is what that image came from? Amazing.
Lots of people care, what kind of an ignorant statement is that? No one is saying that bad art is amazing art, we’re saying that bad art is still art and Ai slop isn’t art at all. And just like music where the artist turns out to have been hiding how shit they are, it’s possible that a lot of people will like something until they get new information and the go “ew, no thanks, actually.”
The technology will definitely struggle to survive if we don’t buy into the bullshit “inevitability” argument. Why is capitalism always “the market drives the innovation” until it’s something stupid that a billionaire wants and then it’s “too bad, fuck you”?
It’s so tiring having to explain colour to grey people.
Most people don’t care if the chicken shop owner used Ai for their fliers or not.
The flier is not really the product anyway.
People give art meaning . Remove the people, remove the meaning.
Ads were always disgusting, but now they are rancid too.
Just remember it’s the high art of small fast food fliers and corporate emails we’re talking about here.
This post may just inspire me to finally open Gimp and make some truly horrendous comics.
I love horrendous comics, if the premise is entertaining and you keep working on it then you’ll get better at it too.
But then it wouldn’t be bad art anymore.
Truly the worst outcome
I can only upvote you once. But imagine I held down on the screen for a reaaally long time when I did it.
Do it. We want to see them.
You should also check out Krita. David Revoy, artist of Pepper and Carrot, has a ton of great tutorials on using it.
What’s the main difference between the two? Also I will likely be literally drawing stick figures, so this might just be academic at this point.
I actually used to have a lot of fun making art in Photoshop back in HS, but it’s been a long time.
I think if you use a pen the dynamic controls work better, and brushes are less of a pain to set up. I prefer to draw in krita and then fuck around in gimp.
If you’re used to Photoshop, Krita is way easier to use, the UI is almost exactly the same. Unlike Gimp, it doesn’t try to re-invent the doorknob.
Krita is a powerful, free and open source, digital animation tool where Gimp is a mainly focused on image manipulation.
Check it out, it’s pretty cool and it’s got a huge community behind it. It’s also free.
Follow up question: I made something but when I try to post it here it fails with an error message of “too many pixels.” I assume the file size is too big? I didn’t really know what to set the dimensions to when I made the file. I tried making it a lower quality jpeg but it doesn’t seem to be helping.
Any idea what’s wrong or how to fix this on either Lemmy’s end or in Krita?
So, I looked into it and .world uses the defaults for photo-rs. Looking at the default config file for photo-rs these appear to be the image hosting limits.
[media.image] max_width = 10000 max_height = 10000 max_area = 40000000 max_file_size = 40Not sure. I’ll check and report back.
I think krita classifies itself as a digital painting software. It does have animation tools in it.
I know I will be in the minority - but I still believe AI has its place.
It should definitely not replace pictures taken of food items - but it can do a light retouch job on the pic.Yes, it is fine to ad some simple images to a powerpoint. Those images would otherwise be stolen from google search.
Technically they totally were, and going to be…
The problem is, AI doesn’t exist. The industry combined several different items under one umbrella, so they can sell you shit while talking about something useful.
There are many good applications for different “machine learning” systems, and we had them for decades, and they’re evolving separately. But then there is LLM. And for LLM specifically, the inevitable unavoidable huge cost in computational power and in toll it takes on humanity makes it’s not worth it, for any application, ever. It’s essentially a toy, a chat bot that is designed to trick humans into believing they’re reading a coherent speech.
There is no good application for LLM considering all what it does.You can avoid using it. You can dislike it - but llms are here to stay for good.
Eventually they will figure out a better technology, but home run models not going to go away.
They do empower people who are not tech savvy to do things - and to make things nobody would ever paid a professional to do or make.
Some of that is obvious slop but there are things that deserve existing.but llms are here to stay for good
If we believe salespeople that is, and when did they lied amirite? No, they wouldn’t disappear completely, nothing that exists does. But I firmly believe that the second the bubble popps, this shit will go the way of nft.
Because this myth of usefulness and empowering is just it, myth. It makes some utter shit that nobody needs, and it wastes everyone’s time making everyone’s lives marginally worse.Home run models never go away. Even if you have some basic knowledge - generating some pictures, then manually editing it can save you days of work.
Not everyone will give this up - and some people can’t afford to pay for human labor to replace their missing skills.
I don’t think i want to visit place that slap a banana with glue to board, put a million dollars price tag, and called that thing art either to be fair.
My point is your art must be good first, it is fine if it worse than ai though.
deleted by creator
The global “art” scene is a money laundering scheme.
Specifically talking about so called “high art” rather than your typical social media or personal website artist
![Your bad art is better than AI slop [Sophie Labelle]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c2feca8b-da2b-4e53-9ec3-04b436e86a0d.webp){kind=link}