I don't trust anyone who talks about 'creators' instead of artists.
Fuck AI
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
I fucking hate the unquestioned assumption that speed and efficiency are always better and that everyone should strife for them. Maybe i like the process, maybe i like taking things slow and not rushing stuff, be that programming or art or whatever.
Plus in most cases, efficiency doesn't reflect in your bottom line anyways, just the share holders, but we've been so brainwashed to see it as a virtue
It's because of the commodification. They don't recognize art, only content and units of sellable culture. And because of the implication that they expect a cut, unearned.
It's true in the sense that it's fantastic at laying down a template for your ideas, which you can then refine and finesse yourself.
The only issue is what capitalism is doing with it. I use AI a lot for my daily job, but it fills me with dread knowing how limited my future is because of it.
The Luddites didn't smash all those machines because they were afraid of them. They were more than happy to use the fancy new tools to make them more efficient. They just didn't want to sacrifice their standard of living to do it.
AI makes uncreative people pretend to be creative.
It makes them create stuff that looks like shit to the trained eye, but is good or good enough for them, thus they don't have to pay money to an actual professional. That doesn't only relate to art, but to IT stuff as well. If you want it done right, hire a professional.
It's the same with the "but my nephew can do it for a tenth of the price"-folks.
Just an anecdote, but recently, there have been many "crochet" 3D models posted to 3D printing sites. (Many of those are marked as AI-generated, too) Those look nothing like a crochet toy would look like. These models have a yarn-looking "V" pattern applied to every surface of 3D model, but this pattern comes not from crochet, but from hand-knit blankets (as far as I can tell).
I hate those people with a passion. Don't flood my printables, you idiots!
creating something yourself also feels way more satisfying cause you can see your own progress in those creations
Putting effort in it is what makes it art. You as an artist has decided making this piece is worth your time. ”Art” without effort is just disposable slop.
Ai conceptual art is still scraped from artists who physically made the art in the first place . Without humans building art by hand it wouldn't have existed.
I literally saw the word Disney plastered in a language learning ‘AI’ story on YouTube. It wasn’t even Disney related material. That’s how bad and lazy it is at scraping. It’s even scraping the logos from the creators it’s stealing from.
It’s not AI. It hasn’t created anything. So we should stop calling it that.
It’s just plaigerism. Just call it plaigerism. “I plaigerized a story. I plaigerized all the concepts for it” stop pretending you created a damned thing. You’re fooling nobody
(Directed at the original post, not the OP who posted it here)
It actually does cause brain damage. I mentioned it in an essay (What if I paid for all my free software?):
For one, power causes brain damage which renders rich people literally incapable of knowing what is best for others:
“Subjects under the influence of power, he found in studies spanning two decades, acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view.”
“And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, “mirroring,” that may be a cornerstone of empathy.” ―Power Causes Brain Damage, by Jerry Useem for The Atlantic.[16]
I greatly enjoyed your essay and found it thought-provoking. I dug through the references regarding power and its effect on the brain (and loss of empathy), and it was both surprising to find it was researched/established scientifically and not-so-surprising in that it explains so much of these people's behavior.
Cheers
As an artist, I LOVE being told what i should like and not like by an out-of-touch never-been-cool rich asshole. Thanks, dickwad!
This is in fact an insidious form of gatekeeping. It is shutting out people who are excited to learn new skills and become the next generation of creative people by collaborating with other talented humans, receiving apprenticeship, and being rewarded for their labor. Their opportunities and newfound capabilities are being thwarted by the slop machines, and it stinks.
There is no gatekeeper like a Capitalist trying to convince you that Yet More Automation™ is good for everybody!
The number of gatekeeper will never hit zero. The model owners become the new gatekeepers.
It's the reason why we've moved to data centers over physical hardware for people. Control.
The point of art isn't getting it done quickly. It's the journey, the painstaking hours and the satisfaction of the finished piece.
The only people who think making art faster is good are marketing ghouls.
Well said. I mean, the thing produced is literally called a WORK (of art).
curious that every single artist i know hates this shit
Proof once more, as if we needed it, that the people who have traded their humanity for buying into the capitalist mindset, only ever think of things as if they were marketable products, and in terms of outcomes and productivity.
Fuck the creative process, the journey it takes you on, and the necessary introspection and connection to the world that needs to occur for it. Fuck the joy you can find in effort, failure, and in finally having an epiphany. Fuck being able to hone your skills without depending on a corporate tool that can be taken away from you at a minute's notice. All of it be damned, you can now (allegedly) get to the same end result quicker without the effort (or pleasure, or self-discovery, or personal growth). We all know that the end result is what counts, and nothing else.
But yeah, people be mad because meanie artists gatekeep poor ol' Mark, and nothing says "democratising" art like "automating the process out of your hands with corporate approved tools and ideology".
~~Fuck sake.~~
Fuck's sake.
The creative iterations part is funny to me. Sure, it cuts the time-span of each iteration down, potentially, if you are not proficient with what you are doing. However, because of the wild innaccuracies and lack of context of a physical world, you are also doing 5-10x more iterations than you otherwise would have, except you don't get to learn and grow along the way.
Literally turns everything into worker-bee level stuff. Usual shareholder mentality to go for quantity over quality.
I mean they were talking about the McDonald's commercial recently and how everybody is throwing a fit over the fact that it's AI in McDonald's actually finally pulled the advert. The company that created it said that it took three or four times as long to create because they kept having to go back and reprompt and recreate and fix an accurate season errors and issues. And then ended up costing more money and more man hours than utilizing actual actors and creatives to make it happen.
Love that he thinks "if you know how to tell a great story you will love AI." The whole point of AI is to cut out the telling a story part. In reality it's "if you think you have a good idea for a story but don't know how to tell one you'll love whatever the AI spits out." People who know how to do creative things don't need AI to do it for them.
So smart, thank you for blessing us with your words of wisdom, Mr. Rich Person who is also an expert in art!

Tap for spoiler
Creating this slop caused a home in Wisconsin to lose power for 2 minutes. Please send them your thoughts and prayers!
What the fuck would Mark Cuban know about creating art?
People let these business ghouls way the fuck out of their lane.
But the AI also tells stories. So even if your story is great, it will be drowned in thousands of AI slop stories. Publishing houses can already not screen new novels anymore because they are getting flooded with hundreds of AI generated books every day (complete with AI generated, fake authors).
Said by someone who is as creative as a rock.
Cuban used AI to prepare to go on Pablo Torre's podcast and made an ass out of himself, so I don't trust his evaluation of AI's capabilities.
mark has a vested interest in the success of AI. anything he says is for the enrichment of his investments.
don't listen to mark, he's a shill.
I hate upvoting these things but they’re in a f AI community so it’s appropriate
Ah yes of course, the ITERATIONS! Thats all art ever is, it’s all just ITERATIONS!
Just goes to show it wasn't intelligence that made them rich.
Creative iteration is hard work. if it is only taking minutes, it is because it is not creative. Sure, it is hard to sit down and draw or write or do any work, but the best ideas happen during that process
I feel vindicated. A few months/years? ago, everyone was saying Mark Cuban was the exception to the rule "all billionaires suck". I always claimed otherwise, fuck Mark Cuban, he also sucks. And here we are, the guy is just as hated nowadays...
Ai makes it more obvious why very rich people don't deserve their wealth but they will say some of the dumbest shit and act enlightened.
Dear shitheads, creative people don't hate ai because it create what they create, they hate it because it is build with stolen labor and used to push them out of the market. People like new tools that make their life easier... people don't like when big companies steal their labor and push them out of the market.
I don't need AI to replace my creativity and imagination. This is what someone writes when they only care about the end product, and not about the actual creative process.
If AI increases productivity, where's the shovelware? Why haven't we seen a hockey stick graph of code commits/lines/repos?
https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
To be fair, I have used AI to write the story for my Pathfinder campaign, but it usually goes something like this:
- I prompt the AI to give me some ideas
- AI spurts out some bullshit ideas
- while (mentally) debunking the AI ideas I come up with some ideas that actually work
So basically AI doesn't provide anything useful but helps getting the idea process going. Maybe that's some variation on Cunningham's Law?
Artistic mastery isn’t gatekeeping, but I understand the sentiment. It’s nice to have the ability to do rapid prototyping, but I’m against AI being used in place of craftsmanship. “The art advances but the artisan recedes.”
Are you kidding me? AI doesn't make creative people more creative. Actually picking up a crayon or a pencil or whatever your jive is, and actively creating more, makes creative people more creative.
Also, lol, a former Shark Tank host pushing a grift, the jokes write themselves.
Also also, if you want to make art fast, cutting up some construction paper and playing with that is better, and more fun, than using AI by a longshot, and construction paper cutouts are the most basic form of art and one of, if not the first forms of art, that everyone in here has probably ever done.