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My shower thought was did you think of this and play it in your mind in his voice?
At first it was a normal reading voice, but the time I got to the end it was definitely syndrome
Art isn't about making something pretty, nor is it really about design, it's about wanting to do or make something with no ulterior motive, or going beyond what you have to go make something inspiring (these are the same thing when you think about it).
Clip art, a lot of corporate design, a lot of architecture and more isn't meant to be art, it's meant to fulfill a purpose and maybe look pretty doing it. That's not what art is.
Cameras largely killed off commissioned portrait because people don't care about the process, they just want a picture of themselves, therefore the portrait wasn't art, it was utility.
That doesn't mean that it's impossible for a portrait to be art, nor that photography isn't art, just that unskilled people were suddenly able to make what they were looking for to a "good enough" standard much more conveniently.
The same can be seen for so many things, including AI being used for clip art or supplementary images in articles. In the case of AI, if all you want is any picture that help support part of an article you're writing, you didn't want art in the first place. If you use AI to help you make a statement, or to match a vision you have in your head, or even do things like poke around at the internals to distort the output, then that is art.
I have a different take.
AI today is basically a mechanical school. AI students are trained to give a specific answer. This is at the heart of how all machine learning works, including generative AI. Even image generators do this.
"Here's a million examples of what the pixelated representation of a hand looks like; now go and make a derivative copy."
This is fine for objective facts, like physics and history. It is useless for art.
Merely drawing a hand is not art, it's an objective truth (do typical humans have 5 or 6 fingers?). But art school is not about objective truths. Art school teaches creativity. Specifically challenging ideas and expression.
AIs can't fundamentally challenge ideas and express themselves because they lack personal experience, personality and individuality.
Society at large has been fooled into thinking that speech (LLM) and other generative AI lead to AGI. But the reality is that these models have more in common with encyclopedias and stock image libraries than intelligence.
I've been saying this for years
I love your take. And extrapolating from it a bit, a lot of what we consider 'artists' weren't really making 'art', as you define it. They were (and mostly still are) drawing/painting, etc pictures as a means to an end. For money; and now they are mad or worried or scared (with reason) about losing their livelihood. Because a cheaper, not necessarily better but certainly with a better cost/benefit ratio, comes along.
The ”AI democratizes art” argument is always a disingenuous one. Art is already the most democratic form of human expression available. There's zero barrier of entry to just express yourself in any of the myriad ways humans have invented, music, drawing, painting, dancing, it's quintessential to humanity. There's no need to democratize something that is already, by definition, universal.
Ask me how I know you're not in the world of art.
First, rude, you don't fucking know me.
Second, just watch this video.
I don't need to know you to infer things about you. Your belief that art has zero barrier of entry is everything anyone who even has brushed the world of art needs to know that you never have.
Oh, I'm sorry, who's going around staking the pencils? Are they too expensive for you? Send me your address and I'll ship you 100 of them and about 50 brushes I don't use. Did someone take away your crayons as a kid and you never got over it? Did you not have the brain power to figure out how to poke at the mud with a stick?
Tell me, where is this barrier for you to pick up anything that makes a mark on something and then go make a mark on something? Who's keeping you from drawing?
You think grabbing anything that makes a mark on something and then making a mark on something is art?
Stop being a dick.
Stop talking about things you don't understand
It doesn’t really feel like “art” in the making. When I’ve used AI to create an image, it doesn’t feel different from using search terms and tags on an imagebooru, or trying to find a piece of clip art for a presentation.
I think there might be fruit for exploration in digital collage, training ones on models in creative ways… I’m not really seeing anyone using these tools to really “do art” though. I’m seeing lots of anime girls, porn, ShrimpJesus Facebook slop, hamfisted political comics, and occasionally an “artist” crowing over like a generic image of a tiger. I’d like to see better, but I’m not.
Also - if you like making art, I don’t understand the appeal of taking out “process.” You type some keywords, you adjust them if you don’t like what you see.
This might be more personal preference, but something that I’ve come to enjoy working with paint is that you have to wait for it to dry. That it splatters and doesn’t always go where you want it. That the image you have in your head will not ultimately be the image you get on the canvas. That sometimes it’s a process of weeks of dialogue between you and the canvas.
A lot of AI art enthusiasts do seem fixated on product, not process. I don’t know if you are really an “artist” if there isn’t some element of “process” that you are involved with.
I'm curious how you feel about something like this https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/19d8uwo/inpainting_is_a_powerful_tool_project_time_lapse/
I disagree with Art having to have a process. Couldn't absence of any process be a process. AI is a tool, just like an iPad.
Is a McDonald's commercial art? Usually no but could it be yes.
I'm conflicted, I appreciate what AI can do. But using AI in any means to advance capitalism disgusts me.
Technology hasn't improved my life in a long time, it's only bought another yacht for some rich asshole.
I don't know any AI artists (as in someone who prompts a model and then calls the result a work of art), although most traditional artists i know have come to incorporate AI one way or another in their process.
You don't really hear about it because it's all intermediate material used during the production phase. For example, as a hobbyist writer, one thing i struggle with is writing action scenes cause i don't have visual memory and i tend to forget a lot about continuity and "spatial realism" ("this guy starts in this corner of the room so there's no way he could grab that object at that point", shit like that). With AI I can generate some kind of "story board" of my scene, which helps me write it much better. It's just laid out visually in front of me and i catch a lot more details.
Sometimes when i'm toying with an idea i'll also have a model generate a few variations on it, with different points of view, writing style, focus etc... Even if the writing is mediocre, it gives me a really good idea of how each version could pan out, and whether an angle works or not. I'll then select the angle that works best and rewrite it entirely from scratch.
There's nothing innovative about it, people have been using assistants to avoid tedious work forever. It's just that before AI you had to, you know, be rich and able to actually pay for the labor.
Everyone is an artist even without AI, based on modern art, as long as you can talk intellectual about it, you can call any kind of scribble or paper scrap an art piece, and sometimes the piece in and of itself is not the art, but the act of convincing other that it is art, is the art itself.
I am art.
Except everyone still appreciates the art that takes effort more than the AI stuff, so they're failing at pulling a Syndrome
Technically, so did Syndrome.
If everyone is syndrome, no one is.
That was his entire point.
machines today can be programmed to make the most intricate sculptures, and recreate the most famous of paintings on mass. and yet, actual artists are still here, because we know that it's not the finished piece that matters the most, it's the journey we went on to be able to draw what's in our minds that matters, it's human expression, painting, drawing, sculpting exactly in the way that we want to, flaws and all. every piece is a self-portrait, if/when AI aquires a self, then we'll have this discussion
If Jean-Michel Basquiat can be a famous artist then it was already meaningless.
Just like cameras ruined real art.
Why art? I prefer if Ai did my boring job instead so I could take more time to paint or create digital art myself. But it usually takes hours to do anything.
If your "art" can be replaced by AI, you were no artist to begin with.
Dude, 90% of genius level mathematics from a few decades ago can be replaced with Wolfram Alpha. Does that make the mathematicians from the past "no mathmaticians to begin with"? Nah.
I'm all for technological advancements and the distribution of art creation, but you have to acknowledge the fact that the current AI image and video generation models are built on theft.
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a mathematician does. A mathematician doesn't do math, a mathematician makes math, so no, WolframAlpha cannot do what average mathematicians from centuries ago did, let alone "genius level" mathematicians from decades ago.
I like your analogy, though, if all the math you can do can be done with WoflramAlpha, then you're not a mathematician. Hell, I have a math degree and I wouldn't even call myself a mathematician even though I can do more than WolframAlpha can. Now, if someone were to use WolframAlpha to develop new math, then I would still call them a mathematician, just like I would still call someone who uses AI to make art an artist.
As for your theft angle, all art is derivative. Good artists copy, great artists steal and all that jazz.
this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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