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A cartoonist's review of AI art - The Oatmeal
(theoatmeal.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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I always found this such a silly argument. Imagine eating a pizza and thoroughly enjoying it but changing your perception of taste willingly depending on how it was made. It's admitting you are judging art based on everything except the actual piece, which sounds the opposite of what art is about.
It's like in olden times when they judged a piece depending on the artists birth and status.
Not to say there isn't a lot of slop out there that definitely belongs in the dumpster, but it's hard to take someone seriously when they judge all of it broadly on this kind of basis.
Listening to music and finding out it was made by ai ruins my experience because i imagine the greasy lazy thief behind the grift. I want my music by real musicians with a personal connection to their craft, not a good for nothing trying to make a quick mindless buck, but in any case i have never heard ai music i personally liked it is usually all incredibly bland and lacking personality.
For me, art is in the eye of the beholder (so like his initial emotional reaction, and like what I understand your point to be).
But there are also aspects that are a bit more innate to the art itself. It's sort of like a conversation, for me; if I see a piece of art I think is beautiful, and I've felt something emotional in response to it, I start to try and understand what the artist was trying to say through the work, what story they might be trying to tell, who they might be. It's a connection. They might be expressing their emotions, thoughts, or experiences, and I might be empathising with another human going through that. There's a level of trust from my side that they've put in effort and are being genuine.
If I find out it's AI art... Well, there's no conversation there, is there? Nobody made that picture. Nobody is communicating anything. Nobody is considering how a viewer might feel. Nobody has created anything. A machine has, unfeelingly, mashed a bunch of actual art together, and now the result is in front of me. If I know beforehand, I won't bother looking. If I've felt emotions, I've been lied to and will look away.
You can feel differently, of course. I'm just explaining how I feel about art. I don't enjoy being lied to.
It's a fair point. When I think about it, I come to the conclusion that at first I both consume them the same way, as pictures on a screen. So they start at both the same baseline (my immediate enjoyment) and learning something was done in a more complicated method or has a deeper meaning just adds to that baseline, but it to never will go down for the opposite.
I attribute more value to human made art, just like how I attribute more value to hand painted pieces compared to digital ones. I just don't change my opinion towards the negative.
I also think there's an error when assuming something can't communicate because it was made partly or completely with AI. The GoP uses it to communicate hate for instance, that part mostly transcends the medium imo (even if again, the medium can add to it at times). I see AI as a tool, I don't see it as the AI creating the piece.
Obviously, 3/4 of the scene is smut so it's not like much high level communication is going on most times though lol. I'm selective in what I actually consider art, I wouldn't call most outputs art just to be clear (or what the GOP is doing for that matter).
Pizza tastes better, even retroactively, if you find out someone you love made it for you.
I went over this in an other comment a bit.
Real painting > digital painting > AI
I associate more value depending on skill level. All I'm saying is: if the pizza only taste like shit once you hear the opposite, the bad taste is in your head.
I do get that having the feeling one way leaves place to having the same type of feeling the other way. I guess it feels different though, hard to explain. It's a valid sentiment in the end, it just feels a bit petty from my viewpoint.
AI art is the Tostino's pizza of art.
it looks like pizza, but it doesn't really taste like pizza, and not a single human touched it
Except you can't tell, because it taste the same (as he clearly admits by saying his enjoyment only changes once he learns it's AI).
It's basically willingly entertaining and reinforcing your own placebos.
If it tastes the same to you, your taste glands are dead.
Alright let me make an analog for this - Because context does absolutely matter.
You are buying shoes. (... And have probably already made the connection)
You find a dooooope pair of sneaks. The colors, the lines, the fit. Perfect.
Then you find out your sneakers were made by Ari in a town that has no running water, people shit in ditches, and the median income of a family of 4 buys enough rice to feed 3 people. And then there's Ari. Ari is 7 and has been working for 2 years already.
How those kicks looking? Do they envoke the same joy?
That's an unhinged analogy soaked in emotion. Whatever point you are trying to make, it has nothing to do with the one I'm talking about in the comment.
Unhinged how? Its not far from the truth for some industries and could have been equally ugly not using child labor. The point was to highlight how one might have a different feeling about the same product when it has context. I figured that was clear enough but perhaps I was mistaken, lol.
It's emotional exaggeration the moment you try to compare it to a child imo.
My pizza analogy was spot on, if you want, you can talk about the pizza factory using a lot of energy, then I could explain how the energy grid is at fault. I could explain how one pizza factory services millions at the same time so the impact is actually very small compared to real climate change drivers like cars, planes and shipping boats. There would be place to mention how AI is actually using energy that wasn't necessarily expected and it's worsening the grid which was already shit to begin with and making transition to green energy more difficult.
But you just went hardcore "think of the children" to try and frame AI as the greatest evil. Republican type tactics tbh.
What's funny is no one gives a fuck where their shoes come from but they have been trained to care really really hard about the big bad AI.
Same. Art is in the eye of the beholder. I for example find Pollock just shit but there are those that pay actual money to see what a baby elephant could've made. All that modern art is talentless shit to me. But there are people out there who will vehemently defend it. There people out there who will pay money to go to a talentless art museum and come out feeling smug that they could recognise a piece made by some person who just had the luck to know the right people.
We all have our opinions about art, but they are just that, opinions. People will continue to throw shit at a wall or use period blood to drip onto a canvas and attach some grand message to it in order to call it art, and people will just generate a prompt and paste it into an AI art generator then share whatever looks pleasing to them.
Art is in the eye of the beholder but ai shit is not art... It is just tech corporate spam clogging up the internet.