• 25 Posts
  • 67 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 17th, 2023

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  • It honestly just seems like you want AI to be a stand in for creative thinking and intention rather than it actually enabling creative processes. Your examples you provide don’t teach those skills. Everyone has ideas. I have ideas of being a master painter creating incredible paintings, I can visually imagine them in my head, AI can shit out something that somewhat resembles that I want. It can train on my own style of [insert medium]. But I am always at the mercy of the output of that tool. It would not be a problem if it were a normal tool like a camera or paintbrush. But when you use a thought limiting tool like AI it gives you limited results in return. It is always going to be chained to the whatever that particular AI has trained on. Artists develop a style over years, it changes from day to day, year to year, AI cannot evolve, yet an artist’s style does just through repetition of creation. AI creates the predictive average of existing works.

    I think the biggest thing here is that AI is a limited tool from the ground up rather than enabling creativity. You can’t train AI to develop a new concept or a new idea, that’s reserved to humans alone. It’s that human intangibility that’s yet to be achieved via AI and until sentience is achieved you’re never going to get that from a limited tool like AI. If sentience is achieved, you’d have to recognize its humanity and at that point prompts are no longer needed, it can create its own work.


  • I always like your posts when I see them here, so I really do value your perspective on this.

    Thank you, I was hoping I wasn’t going to get eaten alive for my comments. That said, the question asked in the original post is why is our banner AI generated? And I think our answer should be: It shouldn’t be, if this is going to be a community made of people for people, then banner should be made from someone from this community not a capitalist AI image generator. I don’t think that should be controversial and illicit responses that are hostile to the question even if OP’s intentions are being questioned.


  • I read your link. I think my main issue is the framing as though AI is just a new tool that people are afraid of similar to the introduction of the camera.

    Even outside of capitalist exploitation, AI generated art suffers from an inherent creative limitation. It’s a derivative and subtractive tool. It can only remix what already exists. It lacks intention and human experience that make art meaningful. The creative process isn’t just about the final image. There’s choices, mistakes, revisions, and personal investment, etc. No amount of super long and super specific prompts can do this.

    This is why a crude MS Paint drawing or a hastily made meme can resonate more than a “flawless” AI generated piece. Statistical approximation can’t imbue a piece with lived experience or subvert expectations with purpose. It is creative sterility.

    I can see some applications of AI generation for the more mundane aspects of creation, like the actions panel in Photoshop. But I think framing creative folks’ objections as an act of self preservation as though we are afraid of technology is a bit of a strawman and reductive of the reality of the situation. Although there are definitely artists that react this way, I admit.

    It is true that new tools reshape art. The comparison to photography or Photoshop is flawed. Those tools still require direct engagement with the creative process. In the link you provided the argument is made for a pro-AI stance using the argument that the photographer composes a shot and manipulating light. In contrast to AI which automates the creative act itself. That’s where their argument falls apart.

    As for democratization goes the issue isn’t accessibility (plenty of free, nonexploitative tools already exist for beginners) and that is something that could be improved. AI doesn’t teach someone to draw, operate a camera, paint, reiterate, conceptualize, and develop artistic judgment. It lets them skip those steps entirely resulting in outputs that are aesthetically polished and creatively hollow. True democratization would mean empowering people to create.