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aenvoker | 1 year ago

Right now there is a ton of stigma around AI art. That stigma fuels a ton of poorly-informed rhetoric against it. There is also tons and tons of casual use of AI art being shitposted for funsies everywhere that reinforces that rhetoric that AI art means "Push button. Receive crap. Repeat."

Meanwhile, as someone who has been engaged with the AI art community for years, and spent years volunteering part-time as a content moderator for Midjourney, the process of creating art via AI with intentionality is deeply human.

As an MJ mod, I have seeeeeeen things.... It's like browsing though people's psyche. Even in public portfolios people bare their souls because they assume no one will bother to look. People use AI to process the world, their lives, their desires, their trauma. So much of it is straight-up self-directed art therapy. Pages and pages, thousands of images stretching over weeks, sometimes months, of digging into the depths of their selves.

Now go through that process to make something you intend to speak publicly from the depth of your own soul. You don't see much of that day to day because it is difficult. It's risky at a deeply personal level to expose yourself like that.

But, be honest: How much deeply personal art do you see day to day? You see tons of ads and memes. But, to find "real art" you have to explicitly dig for it. Shitposting AI images is as fun and easy as shitposting images from meme generators. So, no surprise you see floods of shitposts everywhere. But, when was the last time you explicitly searched out meaningful AI art?

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consteval|1 year ago

> But, be honest: How much deeply personal art do you see day to day?

You bring up a good point - very little. But, to be fair, those people aren't necessarily trying to convince me it's art.

I think you're mostly right but I am a little caught up on the details. I think it's mostly a thing of where the process is so different, and involves no physical strokes or manipulation, that I doubt it. And maybe that's incorrect.

However, I will also see a lot of people who don't know how to do art pretending like they've figured it all out. I also see the problem with that. It wouldn't be such a problem if people didn't take such an overly-confident stance in their abilities. I mean, it's a little offensive for that guy mucking around for an hour to act like he's DiVinci. And maybe he's a minority, I wouldn't know, I don't have that kind of visibility into the space.

I think a lot of the friction comes from that. Shitposts are shitposts, but I mean... we call them shitposts, you know? They, the people that make them, call them shitposts. There's a level of humility there I haven't necessarily seen with "AI Bros".

I think, if you really love art, AI can be a means to create a product but it can also be a starting point to explore the space. Explore styles, explore technique, explore the history. And I think that might be missing in some cases.

For a personal example, I'm really into fashion and style. I love clothes and always have. But it's really been an inspiration to me to create clothes, to sew. I've done hand sewing, many machine stitches too. And I don't need to - I could explore this in a more "high-level" context, and just curate clothing. But I think there's value in learning the smaller actions, including the obsolete ones.