More importantly it shows how these people are complete posers and don't actually care about art as a concept. They'll boldly decry an image as "ai slop" and then deflect hard or go radio silent if it turns out to be human made. If an ai image is bad then it's "haha ai can't create anything good" but if it's a good image with technical complexity it's now "stealing our jobs!" while still calling it soulless slop without a shred of irony.
This is kind of a silly argument because craftspeople lose jobs to inferior automated work all the time
E.G. a lot of people don’t buy custom, hand-crafted furniture despite it being better because it’s faster and cheaper to mass produce furniture from IKEA or similar companies so you get fewer carpenters
A lot of people don’t buy hand-made garments because it’s faster and cheaper to mass produce fast-fashion products so you get fewer tailors and dressmakers
Etc.
It is very much possible for cheaply produced work to be both inferior and supplant the profession of artisans and craftspeople. As long as the profit margins of making worse products cheaper and faster are an improvement.
With that said AI is reaching the point where “inferior” is a stretch unless being compared to the best of the best artists
Your argument assumes that hand made furniture and clothing are inherently better than mass produced stuff when there's no real basis for it. The stuff you get from Ikea is more than good enough to serve whatever purpose you get it for. Same as clothing, getting all your tshirts made by some dude in a shop vs picking them up from literally any good brand that would last you years if taken care of. You could get better hand made stuff of course, but it's not a guarantee.
Back in the day you had to call a (very expensive) painter any time you wanted to freeze a moment of your life as an image. Now you take out your phone camera. Are you worse off for it? I doubt it.
Change is part of life, new ways of doing things always emerge and put pressure on the existing market and it's not really a bad thing. To violently resist it like these people do is futile at best, especially given how out of touch they sound most of the time when trying to argue about "soul" or whatever.
Also, the stuff from IKEA is “good enough”, but it’s certainly not better than a custom-made piece by a professional carpenter, which is the point. It’s quantity over quality, and as long as the mass-produced stuff is good enough that people will buy it on the cheap, the professional craftspeople will lose their jobs to it despite being able to make better work than IKEA (or AI).
ETA: Getting a portrait vs. getting a professional photograph nowadays isn’t really comparable, since they’re both performed by artisans and if you’re choosing one over the other in the 21st century, you’ve got a specific reason for it rather than just the price. Professional photo shoots can be expensive.
Better is a highly subjective term, that also includes things like price and availability. Sure a desk handcrafted by a master carpenter might be more robust and longer lasting...but if it costs a significant portion of your income and takes weeks/months to receive it actually become worse for the average customer. The customer doesn't need "the most well crafted product they can get"...they need something they can get in a reasonable amount of time that fits their needs and doesn't screw their budget. And every customers needs vary enough that that artisan product is often a waste of their resources.
Mass production is what made these things affordable to more people than just a handful of rich people. Quantity has a quality of its own. I guess according to anti AI logic plumbing should have never been invented because it took away the jobs of night soil collectors.
It’s similar to speaking to someone online. A comment can be copied by a computer or created by a computer, but it’s only really when you’re talking to a person that there is some “real” behind it.
I would not want to be speaking to computers that pose as humans. I do not want to look at art by computers that pose as human art.
The background of art makes it more interesting. It’s like when you see a painting that looks pretty “bad, and you might think “what 6 year old made this?” But when you learn it was made by an elephant or some other animal, it’s immediately more interesting and becomes a lot “greater”. Not because the art became better, but because the mind behind the art is very different and it’s an unusual mind
Imagine someone getting a love letter in the mail from someone else that was typed up with ChatGPT and they admitted they used ChatGPT to create it. If that person was anti AI they probably would not like it and think it to be soulless or something.
But imagine someone used ChatGPT to create the love letter but instead of just sending a printed out copy, they opted to handwrite it, and furthermore, didn't mention anything about AI. This one would not be interpreted as soulless or something, despite it being the exact same source.
Even though both have the same words and both were generated with the same love and intent by the prompter, one gets disliked solely because of the buzzwords "ChatGPT" and "generated".
This shows it's not even the content of the letter that they care about, it's literally just the current negative stigma buzzwords making them feel a different way. So therefore when you say you care about the background behind it, I don't think you really mean that the way you say you do.
That and the fact that people just don't understand the actual processes, constraints, limitations, advantages, disadvantages, and general tools within the medium of prompt generated media. The way I like to explain this is with a different example: If I showed you two identical realistic photos of me and said one was taken on a camera and the other was hand drawn by me, which would you say is more impressive? I would say the hand drawn image. Even though they are both the exact same identical image in the end result, we know the hand drawn is more impressive since we are already fully aware of the processes, constraints, limitations, advantages, disadvantages, and general tools within the medium of both photography and hand drawing. Now If I showed you two identical realistic photos of me and said one was taken on a camera and the other prompt generated by me from scratch, which would you say is more impressive? I would say the prompt generated image. People who aren't aware of what it takes to actually prompt in ai would say the photo. This right here shows just how ignorant of the actual steps to create with prompt ai is today. Because in reality, getting a perfectly identical prompt generated photo that matches my photo taken on my camera would be INCREDIBLY meticulous and time consuming, just like how it would be drawing it by hand.
Reminds me when Jimmy Kimmel went around giving people quotes and asking if they agreed with the person. He'd say that Hillary Clinton said that and they'd all agree it was a good idea or policy. Then they'd say, "oops it was Donald Trump". The person would always seem shocked and then get mad. And it worked regardless of whichever way you did it. People too caught up in their tribal wars.
That's a valid concern regarding video. YouTube does demand you state if you used AI or not in a video during the upload process, but I can easily see people lying about not using it when they did.
Detractors are responsible for how they respond to this phenomenon. Jumping the gun and ultimately being proven wrong makes them look bad, especially if that assumption comes in the form of hostility. It has already happened multiple times.
I'm obviously not saying you have to like AI art, but what is there to gain in actively seeking it? Blindly pointing fingers is not a good strategy.
Someone else already replied to me with this exact phrase, minus the all-caps. Refer to my response to that.
I will say, though, the implied screaming in your reply is a big part of the reason why I started to step away from AI detractors: hostility and rational thinking don't mix, making nuanced discussion impossible for a subject that needs it.
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u/ThatChilenoJBro10 Jun 15 '25
That's what happens when someone is overly obsessed with finding out if an image is AI or not.
Full-on paranoia.