- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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I keep seeing this kind of argument, and I understand, but I disagree.
The comparison isn’t between using an ai service and doing it yourself, but rather between using an ai service and commissioning an actual artist. I can afford $20/mo for infinite mediocrity. I cannot afford $20/image (or more depending on the artist).
Of course, there is a flaw in my argument, in that I was assuming that the techbro was being honest. People aggressively pushing dalle or midjourney or whatever aren’t interested in “making art accessible”. They hate art and artists, and want to force creative types to be miserable doing jobs they hate. I have to remind myself that this is the kind of person that the comic is complaining about.
As much as i hate AI generated art, this is a shit argument. You can run an AI on your phone (which you would have anyway) without a subscription. You can also doodle on your phone for free.
Also if you’re not an idiot you can buy a workable smart phone for 100$ if you want
Yeah I feel it would be better if they they have shown the sheer cost of making these models and their upkeep instead.
It’s perfectly fine price to use in cancer treatment. But when they mention AI girlfriends I want to scream.
It’s not even the cost of training the AI. A better argument is that using AI for art is pure fucking laziness in 99.9% of cases.
Also, why have an AI waifu when you can have a real one and touch grass at the same time?
why are you assuming that someone who wants to make art would have a phone anyway? some people are poor
Smart phones are so cheap and plentiful that even most homeless people can afford them.
It’s actually a really safe bet that people have phones even if they have nothing else. You would be right more often then not.
My friend, phones can be very cheap and accessable and most has one. Like one of the comments said below said, you can find a cheap phone for under 100 dollars.
keep in mind that 40% of the global population doesn’t own a smartphone.
that’s billions of people that you’re leaving out of your analysis which doesn’t sound very fair to them. you don’t understand poverty because you’re assuming your living conditions will be the same as theirs.
Do i have to consider every person alive whenever i make a comment? of course, people in poverty will have different ways of doing things and won’t be able to afford things you and I can. I thought this is a given, no?
you have to consider whether the points you make reflect the reality of billions of people on earth. i don’t know what’s so hard about it
You would only need to consider that if it would be applicable to a reason view on the statement being made.
In a topic about AI and smart phones considering every single toddler, child and geriatric for example doesn’t make sense. Considering every single people entirely uninterested in tech would be unreasonable.
So no, no one would find it reasonable that you would need to consider billions of people in a topic that only really makes sense to a fraction of a fraction.
Oh yeah, I forgot everyone is born with inmate talent, time and privilege.
wrong, you’re just too much of a coward to make shitty art and say it’s yours. it’s a hurdle that all of us had to get over
I know what I want to draw, but there’s something missing between that idea and the paper. I can imagine what I want it to look like, in a way, but only as a vague reification of a concept, not as something made of lines and colors, and it’s useless for trying to get it down on paper. I inevitably end up with something so far from my original idea that it’s massively discouraging.
I expect that I’d develop a better eye for this sort of thing if I was to practice it for years, but it’s very difficult to feel motivated to do that when you can’t produce anything remotely like what you were going for.
There are a million free courses to guide your learning and teach you about things like forms and perspective to capture what you want. Unless you have 0 free time whatsoever, anyone, and I do mean anyone, can make art.
If you have people that talk like this around you as an artist I think you need to find different people to be around that is the real take away here.
Also, I have genuinely never in my 29 years of life heard people say anything like this. So this post can kind of fuck off.
“Never happened to me, must not be real.”
Also, I have genuinely never in my 29 years of life heard people say anything like this.
Look at the comment they are replying to.
“innate talent” is a pervasive idea that undercuts years of work and practice. art is HARD and most people just don’t find the doing part to be fulfilling.
everyone wants to make a masterpiece, but no one is born with some kinda artist-gene that gives them the ability to do so as if by magic. outside of savants at least, but that’s a whole other thing lmao
Yes, talent is oversold and used as an excuse to often HOWEVER there ARE differences in people’s skill level and rate of learning. Especially if learning disabilities are involved.
I really really wanna draw regularly. And i practice regularly have for years. Ive gotten much better than couple years ago me but overall my art still sucks (others confirm not just the usual artist hates own work) and it’s mainly because i have a learning disability that affects my spacial reasoning and ability to visualize shapes.
This may come as a surprise to some people but that makes drawing very difficult, i can’t get proportions correct and I struggle to find shapes. My best drawings are ones that i practically traced the initial outline to get the shapes. AI generated art absolutely makes getting an idea out of my head more accessible. And i can then trace the outline of the ai art and draw the rest myself.
I know people hate it but just blindly saying “anyone can draw just do it bro” is basically just as worthless of an argument that ignores reality
I’m an artist with aphantasia. You just might need to learn from someone that thinks like you do, or try different styles of art. There are so many disabled artists making cool stuff, and a learning disability is a barrier, but it can be overcome. I cannot see images in my head whatsoever. No mental picture, no visual memory. I make art just fine, it just took me a little longer to learn what works for me. The important part is that I had a desire to learn and overcome my difficulties, and didn’t let them stop me from trying. Tracing AI art will not teach you the theory or techniques you could learn from another artist, and those are what you need to improve.
this too, it’s a lot like singing in that way. anyone can train their vocal control, but some folks just will have a much harder time with it for all sorts of reasons they can’t control. both sides of that “only some people can do it/anyone can do it” coin can be damaging for their own reasons.
i think it’s really important to talk about these things in a frank way, thank you for contributing to the discussion ^^
I forgot every artist had all of those things in spades
To be blunt, I think the powers behind project 2025 do believe the common man has inmate talent #modernamericanslavery
… but I suspect you meant “innate” talent
Hehe “borrowed”
I have a pretty quick ~$500 phone (snapdragon 8 gen 3) and tried this local AI app once (just something on fdroid, you could probably find it) but the experience was pretty terrible. Like a minute per image on the small local models from 2022. I’m sure you could do better, but my conclusion is that an $800 phone is as useful as a $60 phone for generative ai because you’re going to have to use some remote service anyways.
What does that phrase even mean? Asking something else to make something for you is not artistic, so it can’t be that. People who commission other humans to make things aren’t suddenly artists. If they literally just mean consumption of images, it’s not as if web searching for images has been difficult for the last couple decades at this point. If you don’t care about art at all and just want content, there are lifetimes of things you could look for readily available to indulge. Just start typing and away you go! Literally the only thing that has changed is that now you are accelerating dead internet theory and removing human interaction from what you consume. Of course, if you don’t care about art that is a moot point, since human self-expression and communication never meant anything to you in the first place.
At best, the phrase should be specialized, on demand consumption of niche content is more accessible, not art.
I wholeheartedly agree with you, OOP is mocking the supposed barriers to art that AI users will bring up as an excuse to use AI.
i think they just want it to look impressive without the big effort to learn how to make it look impressive yourself. that kind of accessibility.
thats part of the reason why i doodle around with ai, but you can definetly make it into self expression if you know how to express yourself.
but you can definetly make it into self expression if you know how to express yourself.
tbh, as someone not terribly skilled in pencil drawing, this is how it feels like when i make a mistake but end up liking it. i don’t always have an exact clear picture of what i want to make either.
But it’s your “mistake” (remember, we don’t make those), not something implanted into your head from the outside.
i see your point, though you can technically iron out every detail if you are proficient enough at prompting it, and have a complete picture in your mind.
No, sorry, you don’t see my point. You’re presented by AI with an image that isn’t yours and it overwrites the one that was in your head because it’s vaguely similar. It’s killing your own imagination in favour of an inferior “version”. The one with your “mistake” is yours only, it came from your head and nowhere else and it might lead to something so much better than anything by an AI that you settle for because it’s “good enough”.
Artists understand that art is primarily about self-expression. Non-artists often instead think art is about producing nice pictures. When all nice pictures come with self-expression baked in, the two groups seem to be on the same page, but when a computer makes nice pictures that are completely devoid of self-expression, we find out they’re not on the same page at all.
If what you need is a constant stream of ever-changing imagery that you don’t glance at for more than a second or two before moving on, I’m sure AI is great for that. So are jangling keys and those slime ASMR videos. But if that’s what you want from viewing or making art, you are an alien to me.
I wish we could start arguing about the ethics of compensation for training data and requiring a concrete way to both protect opt-out, as well as compensate those who contribute, rather than argue about a product that absolutely does have a user base (as is continually proven). I don’t think there’s a win against the demand, but you can win the ethics battle and force better regulations.
I don’t think there’s really a “demand” per se. It seems to me like the vast vast majority of AI “art” and text is spam. Many of these users seem to be using cheap/free versions of whatever LLM or image generators.
OpenAI is by far the most popular, but also said that even on the most expensive $200/month plan, they are losing money.
Is this “demand” going to exist if and when they inevitably raise the price?
If and when Facebook makes changes to how they monetize posts, will the shrimp Jesus spammers move on to the next scheme?
Will the businesses using AI for customer service and data entry keep using it if it costs more than using human employees?
This whole “industry” is teetering on a knifes edge.
That viewpoint is extremely short sighted. You’re missing the field for the trees. Open source models that people run on their local hardware with open weights absolutely do exist and function well. As an example of demand, I personally have a DnD group that uses it for token generation. It gives a far deeper sense of immersion for our custom campaigns where we would otherwise not be able to afford to commission custom imagery, and yes these are generated locally on an m1 mac mini. People viewing it as a replacement for custom commissioned art are, at least with its current and foreseeable capabilities, incorrect in their assumption. It’s merely an augmentation and tool that fills niche low-cost low-“risk” voids. I assure you, for example, that there is absolutely some kid out there who has generated an image of either their imaginary friend or custom super hero. This has likely brought them great joy, especially if they’re unable to otherwise embody their idea due to lack of skill or funding. You have to look at the tool from all angles. A car, in isolation, is a multi-ton inheritia machine capable of unspeakable atrocities, yet we cohabitate with them every single day because we understand life is complex, there are benefits to doing so, and a single view of a tool does not reflect it’s reality.
I don’t think “some kid” experiencing “great joy” at AI slop is worth the spam from scammers and environmental impacts.
Also, the majority of people using AI are not running it locally. If people were running it locally, on low power to preserve the environment, with content that artists consented to have trained, to use exclusively for non-commercial use, I wouldn’t have a problem with it.
But that isn’t reality.
Cars are dangerous, yet we live in a society that…
Cars are dangerous, that’s why they can only be used by licensed operators (both for safety and environmental impact), are heavily regulated, and still have problems coming from overreliance that would have been easier to solve before we built infrastructure around them.
It’s why we’ve seen things like walkable cities and public transit come back as popular ideas.
I think you’re aiming for perfect over better, and honestly I don’t think you’re going to make much headway in that effort, especially when you’re disregarding the joy of children but you do you.
I agree with the points about ethics and compensation, however.
So a couple of things. One, he’s right and I agree with him on his first point. There is no such thing as a “ai artist” or a prompt director or whatever you’d like to call it. The machine is not complex enough in use to need a specialized person like that, and I wouldn’t say they were an artist even if it were. Second, I literally follow artists who use ai just for finishing details on their work, sometimes it’s as simple as fur renders that they don’t want to add by hand so they involve an ai renderer to apply the finishing layer, and these are artists I’ve been following since before ai “art” (image generation) existed. So he’s just straight up wrong about there not being a single real artist using ai. It’s a tool, like any other. You can have your negative opinion on it, but it’s honestly useless to be so hostile to something just because it scares you and you don’t understand it, so I’m not going to watch the video past that.
You could run it on your own PC instead
Then instead of a subscription, you’re paying for a gpu and power. Not everyone has the money for a computer, but pretty much anyone can afford a pencil and paper.
