Currently into:
♟ Maisie Adam won taskmaster series 20.
Sometimes dreams come true. 🙏
♟ I'm looking forward to watching the
Champions of Champions episode this Christmas.
I hope she or Sam wins, they're 2 of my all-time favourite
contestants and I'm rooting against John and Mathew (sorry!)
because they're too good at doing the tasks and
it wouldn't be as funny if they won.
25
I'm writing today about a very, very niche topic that no one has ever heard about, especially online artists. I'm going to share some of my thoughts about AI image generation being used to produce art pieces. I feel like well-meaning artists tend to use ineffective ways to express their disapproval of the technology and end up sabotaging themselves. So, I want to approach this subject (somewhat) articulately even though I'm no expert.
Personally, I'm not interested in using genAI to make drawings, either from scratch or for retouching. Even in the hypothetical futuristic scenario that it became able to replicate my style and what's in my head 100% perfectly with just simple prompts, I wouldn't use it. Because I enjoy the process of drawing, plus I consider it an integral part of art. What I set out to make and what I end up making tend to be completely different, because of the process I follow, and I like that.
Likewise, I'm only interested in seeing art made by people drawing/painting/sculpting etc and not by typing prompts. I enjoy thinking about what an artist's work progress was when I see a work of art. The end result as of itself doesn't appeal to me. So in short, I dislike generative artificial intelligence used in making art.
However, I wish like-minded people were more careful in the arguments they use. Some are straight up wrong or even discreditable. I'm going to give some examples below.
Arguments I wish artists used less when talking about AI art:
Argument 1: AI art is bad because it's souless. I'm not stupid, I understand that most people who say it don't mean it literally, but the existence of souls is a spiritual/religious concept. I personally don't believe in them, a lot of people don't either. As a statement it basically doesn't mean anything and it's useless when trying to make a point!
Argument 2: Human made art is Superior because of the Innate Specialness of Humans. This one is a bit more controversial, but it's another subjective claim that gets us nowhere. What seperates humans from machines? Is there something humans do that no matter the technological advancement machines will never be able to replicate? Just like Argument 1, it's not practical so it's not helpful! It makes for interesting philosophical discussions though!
Argument 3: AI art is bad because it can't draw x right.
What AI is capable of doing is subject to change. Less than 3 years ago I think, it couldn't make human hands have the correct amount of fingers at all. You could tell an image was made by AI just by glimpsing at it. Now it has gotten significantly better at creating hands and while there may be some mistakes, it has become harder to tell.
Maybe in the future it will also be able to fix other errors that we use to spot when an image is made through AI, and AI art will be indistinguishable to non-AI art.
It also raises the question: Like many artists, I personally don't draw hands anatomically correct. It's not a skill I possess. Does that make my art of lesser value? What makes "good" art "good"? Because if you use the argument that gen AI doesn't replicate reality as it is or it doesn't follow some specific art principle and that makes its art bad, then you're also putting down a lot of artists who don't match that criteria too.
What makes art good or bad or what even is art are important conversations. Once again, I need to point out that they're philosophical and they don't have clear, subjective answers. Saying AI is not art because (insert some characteristic it has here) or saying AI is of bad quality/of worse quality than human made art because (insert some characteristic it has here) are not useful arguments!
Arguments I wish artists would focus on more:
A lot of people have already lost their art related jobs due to AI. There needs to be some sort of protection to combat this. This is something that has a clear, negative, tangible impact on people.
AI has a huge negative impact on environent, because of the enormous energy demand of data centres. Those data centres also harm greatly the people that live near them. (However, we also need to be equally critical of the social media industry and others industries that require massive data centres to work too. This was a problem before genAI became popular and available and it wouldn't be solved if AI ceased to exist)
24
The last blog page I made has plenty of entries and it's not convenient to scroll endlessly in order to find old ones, so I made a new page, for August 2025-2027. I don't have anything new to share so I thought it'd be a good idea to fill the empty space with some photos of my bookcase.
is this aesthetically pleasing mom
