AI art is bad because it means nothing
It’s a great waste of time to spend your precious air on demonstrating how artificial intelligence is not as good as human beings in creating art. Provided enough material and resources, someone can get a machine to produce pictures and videos that are satisfying to look at. Inspecting every output for tiny details indicative of the machine’s inability is pointless.
I fail however to see the utility in judging art entirely by talent and technique. A good technique certainly adds to the value of art, but I don’t seek out art for technique. Above everything else, I want to experience art that makes me feel things. I attentively watch an hobbyist’s documentary even if it uses shoddy visuals and rushed editing because I want to see what it has to say. I gladly view an artist’s comics even if the line art isn’t exactly idyllic because I am interested in the story and the composition. I sit through Scriabin’s music despite how messy it is because it manages to invoke the whole gamut of emotion.
Artificial art doesn’t make me feel anything. I punch words into the prompt and out comes a wonderful landscape of perfect detail whose value is entirely limited to being a wallpaper. I ask it to create me a character with the exact face and the exact clothes and the exact proportions I want and its only purpose is to serve as an avatar, or like a figurine I can put in the corner of my desktop and forget forever. I’ve used tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion and created shit that I could have never done with my own bare hands and I’ve felt nothing, because the art means nothing. Really, that’s all generative AI contributed to the realm of art: a wonderful wallpaper generator. I don’t find it exciting and I don’t find it exactly “replacing” of artists. Guillermo Del Toro said this:
The value of art is not how much it costs and how little effort it requires, it’s how much would you risk to be in its presence? How much would people pay for those screensavers? Are they gonna make them cry because they lost a son? A mother? Because they misspent their youth? Fuck no.
I sat through six hours of the Godfather saga because it is widely reported to be an excellent set of movies, and of course it was. Entirely lived up to my expectations and then some more. Whoever worked on those movies were geniuses and suffered through a painful production process. On the other hand, I would never sit through six hours of AI generated nonsense, even if it was a perfectly crafted masterpiece. It means absolutely nothing regardless of the prompter’s intent and I wouldn’t risk being in its presence. It is as titillating as PowerPoints.
If you don’t care for the replacement of art by pictures and videos from AI, and you proudly tell wounded artists to go cry a river, then you’ve only mentally masturbated to art and have never truly experienced it. Some sleep with art, some sit on their cuck chair in the corner of the room. Whether you’re in the bed or you’re the cuck depends entirely on how much you sound like a babbling toddler when generative AI shakes a set of keys in the air.