a person who want to make a good AI image can take hours or days improving and tweaking the workflow.
No, no, you’re confusing effort with meaning. This is a literacy problem: I venture to guess you don’t even understand the distinction I’m drawing.
The most complicated comfyUI-whatever is worth less to me than a child’s drawing of their parents because the child’s drawing is communicating love while the generated one is communicating nothing.
I am being a tinge hyperbolic here, but I have yet to see anything made by AI-hornies that was worthy of discussion. The lot of them can’t even explain their own work—at best they can explain their comfyUI workflow because that’s the thing they actually put effort into.
If you want AI art to be taken seriously, you must understand what art is.
You must stop selfishly invading the space other artists inhabit: photography was a paradigm shift, yeah, but it still left room for painters to do their own thing. In the modern day, there is hardly confusion about whether something is or is not a photograph.
You must stop pretending that spectacle is all art aspires to be. So many people complain that they can’t be artists because they can’t draw a professional character portrait—who asked you? Who asked you to do that? Does Minecraft, one of the most beloved games of all time, care that its block textures are all 16x16 color smudges?
One of my favorite youtube channels, Any Austin, has a series where he finds and appreciates the odd, forgotten, unremarkable places in games that players often overlook. Liminal spaces that exist just to fill out the map. A valley between a mountain and a cliff that has nothing in it. The canopy above a forest hallway you’d normally only ever see once because a fast travel point exists just beyond it.
Now, nobody minds that Minecraft is procedurally generated: this is an algorithm in art. But you know what you can’t do in Minecraft? Talk about its liminal spaces. Any spaces like this that it might have can’t be shared unless someone has your world seed, and any questions you might have all have the same answer: “The algorithm just did it like that. I don’t know.” There is no story told in these walls.
This doesn’t mean that Minecraft is bad. This doesn’t mean Minecraft shouldn’t be procedurally generated. But something is lost here.
You must understand this if you want to be taken seriously.
It’s not even a new trope. It had happened forever.
The best indicative for something to be a true art is angry artists saying “that’s not art”.
Once again, your ignorance on how AI art is made is causing the hate. It’s common to hate what we ignore.
You can communicate love with AI art if you want. You can communicate whatever you want, because you can make the art look whatever you want as good as you can do with any other media.
That complex workflow is not for shit and giggles. Is the pencil to make the final image be one way or the other. Same as a photographer would control que exposure or the focus. You can chose what’s on the picture and what’s not. With better accuracy that doing a collage.
Your premise is based on a limitation of the media that it’s not real, thus is a false premise, thus your conclusions are false too.
I get that the hate for AI is mostly an irrational pseudo religious though. So I do not expect to change anyone’s mind. But I will explain things anyway. I have an easy question, is your theory about AI arr falsable? Is there anything that you think could prove you wrong?
The most complicated comfyUI-whatever is worth less to me than a child’s drawing of their parents because the child’s drawing is communicating love while the generated one is communicating nothing.
So, not all art is communicating heartfelt emotion. Is your opposition limited to the encroachment of AI into the space of emotionally communicative art?
What if someone is making art (or maybe you want to use another word) purely for money? Or depraved tentacle porn? If someone is just trying to create a funny comic, is that necessarily art or might it just be a means to the end of getting people to laugh?
You must stop selfishly invading the space other artists inhabit: photography was a paradigm shift, yeah, but it still left room for painters to do their own thing. In the modern day, there is hardly confusion about whether something is or is not a photograph.
Photography completely displaced the segment of visual art whose primary goal was to accurately (what we might now call “photorealistically”) reproduce what could be seen, because it was a better tool for that goal. If you pay a painter for a portrait today, it’s because you want to see the brush-strokes, not because you want the most accurate rendition of your face possible.
I don’t think the displacement of the former kind of portrait painter by photographers is in any way a problem with photography. It was a problem for portrait painters, so I can understand the distress of people who are producing art at risk of being displaced by AI.
So how is it that use of AI is “selfishly invading” but photography was not?
Is your opposition limited to the encroachment of AI into …
My opposition is to demon tech produced by vampires.
If someone is just trying to create a funny comic, is that necessarily art
Yes. Why would you even ask me this.
Depraved tentacle porn is art. —Why are you trying to like debate trick me into recoiling in disgust at what some people spend their time on?
Photography completely displaced the segment of …
None of this is disagreeable, so… uh huh, yup, mhm.
So how is it that use of AI is “selfishly invading” but photography was not?
I’m gonna quote myself here:
Me:
there is hardly confusion about whether something is or is not a photograph.
If it were possible to tell, at a glance, whether something was or was not AI, it would not be causing nearly the social harm that it does. People couldn’t cheat on their essay homework. People couldn’t cheat in art competitions. Any game which used it, you could say “Ah, they took a shortcut there.” Video evidence of a crime could still be trusted.
I mean, there are still big problems with the technology, but being able to tell is like the minimum requirement. I can’t appreciate someone’s brush strokes if there is no way of knowing a brush was struck. It’s socially poisonous.
My opposition is to demon tech produced by vampires.
I’m not going to take you seriously if you don’t discuss this seriously.
Yes. Why would you even ask me this.
Depraved tentacle porn is art. —Why are you trying to like debate trick me into recoiling in disgust at what some people spend their time on?
Because you’ve made a distinction between art and visual media that isn’t art without clarifying it at all - and that’s still the case. Typically pornography is not classified as art. Both these cases describe visual content made (often) not as an emotional expression of the creator, but as a means of making money or sexual gratification. I’m not saying either is evil or disgusting (you’re the one who contends that visual media made without emotion is morally deficient).
I await your clarification on what art is and whether AI images are still immoral if they only displace stuff produced for some other reason than emotional expression.
there is hardly confusion about whether something is or is not a photograph.
There certainly can be - check out people producing photorealistic art today, or the extremely realistic portraits produced before the advent of photography. Photography can be used in the process without being evident in the final image, too.
The fact is that most AI images today can be detected as such by anyone familiar with them. That may not be true forever, and the signs can be covered up by someone with the will, but then, that’s the same as use of photography.
I can’t appreciate someone’s brush strokes if there is no way of knowing a brush was struck.
When I look at brush strokes I’m appreciating it visually because they look nice. If you view two pieces of art on a computer screen (so that you can’t see the 3D aspect) do you respond differently to the brush strokes because one is a photo of an actual oil painting, whereas the other is a piece of digital art made in Krita where the brush strokes are simulated?
I am being serious. Vampires are the aristocratic monster.
Odd that someone really into AI is also some kind of sexual puritan. Why can’t porn be art? You say “typically,” but these are coward’s words. What are your feelings?
The new Superman was made for money. Does this invalidate it somehow?
How does the song go…
“All you read and wear or see and
Hear on tv is a product begging for your
Fat-ass dirty dollar
Shut up and buy”
(you’re the one who contends that visual media made without emotion is morally deficient)
Correction! I think your lack of social awareness is morally deficient. AI is just… annoying.
What is it you people like saying? AI is just the tool? Yeah.
I await your clarification on what art is …
I can’t because you’re looking for me to show you which pixels indicate something is worthy of being graced by the title. There’s no such thing. That was never my problem with it.
If you were really trying to understand, I think you’d recognize I’ve actually explained pretty thoroughly several times already.
that’s the same as use of photography.
Do you mean to imply that if someone took a photograph and pretended to have painted it, that this wouldn’t piss a lot of people off? I think it would.
Interesting how this doesn’t seem to be much of an issue here in the year 2025. I wonder if there are forces at play which prevent this mass photography/painting confusion from materializing.
do you respond differently to the brush strokes because one is a photo …
I might. I dunno.
I’d respond very differently if I knew one of these brush strokes was just the most statistically probable in an infinite series of possible lines—kind of loses its flavor.
Why can’t porn be art? You say “typically,” but what are your feelings?
Porn can be art, but typically it isn’t, and typically when it is it’s called “erotica” or “erotic art”. There’s a distinction you apparently don’t want to talk about, even though you started trying to make an argument about what constituted art.
Weird that you started off saying “you must understand what art is” but now are reluctant to talk about it, even though your conception of it obviously differs greatly from mainstream definitions.
Here’s what I think. I think the vast majority of visual content we interact with is pretty emotionally empty. It’s product packaging, advertising, memes, yes even superhero cinematic universe shlock written to a formula. I think using AI in that area cheats no-one out of anything, and I think that people will always find an artistic outlet for their emotions if that’s what they want. My partner paints as a hobby and I haven’t heard them saying they’re not going to bother because of AI.
Do you mean to imply that if someone took a photograph and pretended to have painted it, that this wouldn’t piss a lot of people off? I think it would.
Art comes from the conscious. Porn comes from the conscious. What distinction are you talking about?
‘Erotica’ is either another word for the same thing, or it’s the “high brow” version women can clink their wine glasses over. I don’t understand what trap has been laid before me.
“you must understand what art is” but now are reluctant to talk about it, …
What I am deliberately avoiding, The Riddler, is a stupid debate over some exact definition whereby you claim this thing doesn’t count, and then I say “the word ‘is’ in this context means,” and then you ironically call me pedantic, and we waste 14 hours intellectually jerking off.
Like, it’s way easier to just say that you are one of the vampire’s familiars trying to trick me with lies. Like, uh … like a lawyer. You know.
I think using AI in that area cheats no-one out of anything,
I will note, this is not an argument in favor of AI. This is just clinical “given up” disease. I think they call that cynicism.
I mean, I personally wouldn’t lose anything; I don’t watch Marvel. You don’t think they’re funny, though? I’m not gonna say I like them, but I’ve almost always laughed.
“Can be, but typically isn’t” isn’t strict in any sense. It’s the opposite of strict, by admitting more than one possibility. We’re still no closer to understanding what it is you think constitutes art, so we can’t have a proper discussion about how, if at all, non-AI generated art fails to be art in that sense, and whether that’s important.
Asking people what they mean by the words the say - especially when it’s a word like art which is literally memed on for being the source of endless debates regarding its nature and definition - is not some kind of juvenile trap; it’s a pre-requisite for having a productive conversation on the subject.
I will note, this is not an argument in favor of AI. This is just clinical “given up” disease. I think they call that cynicism.
The argument in favour is that people want to do it, so just let them get on with it. Simple.
If it were possible to tell, at a glance, whether something was or was not AI, it would not be causing nearly the social harm that it does.
It seems like you’re shifting away from the point of discussion, which was whether AI output can be art, and more towards the general dangers of the technology itself, which is a whole other discussion.
My opposition is to demon tech produced by vampires.
It also seems like this discussion is taking a toll on you. If you are interested in continuing it, there’s no harm in taking a step back and coming back later.
there is hardly confusion about whether something is or is not a photograph.
This proposition is refuted by hyperrealistic paintings such as La hora del té by Magda Torres Gurza. You can see that this is not a photography if you pay attention to the reflections. But certainly not at “first glance”.
It seems like you’re shifting away from the point of discussion, which was whether AI output can be art
Okay, this was 15 hours ago, so I don’t remember who did what exactly, but I do know I was soapboxing, so yeah, we’re gonna cover a lot of bases.
The actual question of whether it’s art is simple: It’s not. It can be used in art, but unto itself, it’s just novel spectacle. Art comes from the conscious.
If it were art, it still wouldn’t be your art. It would be the robot’s art.
It also seems like this discussion is taking a toll on you.
I did have a nap, thanks.
This is just demon tech. Like the demons in Frieren. They say words like “hello” and “thank you” in my holy tongue to manipulate, but they know not what any of my words mean. The words “I love you” serve no purpose other than to stop me from ending its life with the power button.
This proposition is refuted by hyperrealistic paintings
And these are… common? These are clogging up google search results with their hyperrealistic spam? You realize that photography is the loser in this exchange, right? Hyperrealistic paintings are so much cooler than a machine that takes hyperrealistic photos.
The most complicated comfyUI-whatever is worth less to me than a child’s drawing of their parents because the child’s drawing is communicating love while the generated one is communicating nothing.
How can you say what the output of that workflow communicates or doesn’t communicate without seeing it?
The lot of them can’t even explain their own work—at best they can explain their comfyUI workflow because that’s the thing they actually put effort into.
That statement is unsubstantiated. Without knowing the creator of that workflow I venture the following proposition: If the creator put in hours of effort into constructing it, so the AI would produce just the right output, then they clearly had a vision of what they were going for. And If they tried to get a detail just right, then that detail must have meaning to them, or else they wouldn’t bother.
I see another issue with the statement “The lot of them can’t even explain their own work”. Do you think every stroke of the brush has a meaning for a painter? Is every note carefully chosen in a piece of music? Or is it rather a case of “doing what feels right at the moment”? I ask that because I don’t see the difference in playing a few chord progressions on the piano and seeing what fits best, and letting AI generate a few outputs and seeing what fits best.
How can you say what the output of that workflow communicates or doesn’t communicate without seeing it?
I’ve seen plenty.
Is every note carefully chosen in a piece of music?
Are you… being serious?
Look, I’ve been a musician longer than I’ve been any other kind of artist, and yes, I pick all of my notes. That’s the fun part, actually. There is a lot of deliberation over where they should go.
This is what I mean about you people not understanding the artistic process. Music is a language. People in a jam session are speaking words and phrases to each other. There are grammar rules to this language that work one way but in way another not.
If you’re using an LLM, then your jam partners aren’t speaking to you, they’re speaking to a robot. You may as well not even be there. And uh… I dunno, that just seems really fucking lonely.
No, no, you’re confusing effort with meaning. This is a literacy problem: I venture to guess you don’t even understand the distinction I’m drawing.
The most complicated comfyUI-whatever is worth less to me than a child’s drawing of their parents because the child’s drawing is communicating love while the generated one is communicating nothing.
I am being a tinge hyperbolic here, but I have yet to see anything made by AI-hornies that was worthy of discussion. The lot of them can’t even explain their own work—at best they can explain their comfyUI workflow because that’s the thing they actually put effort into.
If you want AI art to be taken seriously, you must understand what art is.
You must stop selfishly invading the space other artists inhabit: photography was a paradigm shift, yeah, but it still left room for painters to do their own thing. In the modern day, there is hardly confusion about whether something is or is not a photograph.
You must stop pretending that spectacle is all art aspires to be. So many people complain that they can’t be artists because they can’t draw a professional character portrait—who asked you? Who asked you to do that? Does Minecraft, one of the most beloved games of all time, care that its block textures are all 16x16 color smudges?
One of my favorite youtube channels, Any Austin, has a series where he finds and appreciates the odd, forgotten, unremarkable places in games that players often overlook. Liminal spaces that exist just to fill out the map. A valley between a mountain and a cliff that has nothing in it. The canopy above a forest hallway you’d normally only ever see once because a fast travel point exists just beyond it.
Now, nobody minds that Minecraft is procedurally generated: this is an algorithm in art. But you know what you can’t do in Minecraft? Talk about its liminal spaces. Any spaces like this that it might have can’t be shared unless someone has your world seed, and any questions you might have all have the same answer: “The algorithm just did it like that. I don’t know.” There is no story told in these walls.
This doesn’t mean that Minecraft is bad. This doesn’t mean Minecraft shouldn’t be procedurally generated. But something is lost here.
You must understand this if you want to be taken seriously.
Artists have always gatekeep art.
It’s not even a new trope. It had happened forever.
The best indicative for something to be a true art is angry artists saying “that’s not art”.
Once again, your ignorance on how AI art is made is causing the hate. It’s common to hate what we ignore.
You can communicate love with AI art if you want. You can communicate whatever you want, because you can make the art look whatever you want as good as you can do with any other media.
That complex workflow is not for shit and giggles. Is the pencil to make the final image be one way or the other. Same as a photographer would control que exposure or the focus. You can chose what’s on the picture and what’s not. With better accuracy that doing a collage.
Your premise is based on a limitation of the media that it’s not real, thus is a false premise, thus your conclusions are false too.
I get that the hate for AI is mostly an irrational pseudo religious though. So I do not expect to change anyone’s mind. But I will explain things anyway. I have an easy question, is your theory about AI arr falsable? Is there anything that you think could prove you wrong?
So, not all art is communicating heartfelt emotion. Is your opposition limited to the encroachment of AI into the space of emotionally communicative art?
What if someone is making art (or maybe you want to use another word) purely for money? Or depraved tentacle porn? If someone is just trying to create a funny comic, is that necessarily art or might it just be a means to the end of getting people to laugh?
Photography completely displaced the segment of visual art whose primary goal was to accurately (what we might now call “photorealistically”) reproduce what could be seen, because it was a better tool for that goal. If you pay a painter for a portrait today, it’s because you want to see the brush-strokes, not because you want the most accurate rendition of your face possible.
I don’t think the displacement of the former kind of portrait painter by photographers is in any way a problem with photography. It was a problem for portrait painters, so I can understand the distress of people who are producing art at risk of being displaced by AI.
So how is it that use of AI is “selfishly invading” but photography was not?
My opposition is to demon tech produced by vampires.
Yes. Why would you even ask me this.
Depraved tentacle porn is art. —Why are you trying to like debate trick me into recoiling in disgust at what some people spend their time on?
None of this is disagreeable, so… uh huh, yup, mhm.
I’m gonna quote myself here:
If it were possible to tell, at a glance, whether something was or was not AI, it would not be causing nearly the social harm that it does. People couldn’t cheat on their essay homework. People couldn’t cheat in art competitions. Any game which used it, you could say “Ah, they took a shortcut there.” Video evidence of a crime could still be trusted.
I mean, there are still big problems with the technology, but being able to tell is like the minimum requirement. I can’t appreciate someone’s brush strokes if there is no way of knowing a brush was struck. It’s socially poisonous.
I’m not going to take you seriously if you don’t discuss this seriously.
Because you’ve made a distinction between art and visual media that isn’t art without clarifying it at all - and that’s still the case. Typically pornography is not classified as art. Both these cases describe visual content made (often) not as an emotional expression of the creator, but as a means of making money or sexual gratification. I’m not saying either is evil or disgusting (you’re the one who contends that visual media made without emotion is morally deficient).
I await your clarification on what art is and whether AI images are still immoral if they only displace stuff produced for some other reason than emotional expression.
There certainly can be - check out people producing photorealistic art today, or the extremely realistic portraits produced before the advent of photography. Photography can be used in the process without being evident in the final image, too.
The fact is that most AI images today can be detected as such by anyone familiar with them. That may not be true forever, and the signs can be covered up by someone with the will, but then, that’s the same as use of photography.
When I look at brush strokes I’m appreciating it visually because they look nice. If you view two pieces of art on a computer screen (so that you can’t see the 3D aspect) do you respond differently to the brush strokes because one is a photo of an actual oil painting, whereas the other is a piece of digital art made in Krita where the brush strokes are simulated?
I am being serious. Vampires are the aristocratic monster.
Odd that someone really into AI is also some kind of sexual puritan. Why can’t porn be art? You say “typically,” but these are coward’s words. What are your feelings?
The new Superman was made for money. Does this invalidate it somehow?
How does the song go…
“All you read and wear or see and
Hear on tv is a product begging for your
Fat-ass dirty dollar
Shut up and buy”
Correction! I think your lack of social awareness is morally deficient. AI is just… annoying.
What is it you people like saying? AI is just the tool? Yeah.
I can’t because you’re looking for me to show you which pixels indicate something is worthy of being graced by the title. There’s no such thing. That was never my problem with it.
If you were really trying to understand, I think you’d recognize I’ve actually explained pretty thoroughly several times already.
Do you mean to imply that if someone took a photograph and pretended to have painted it, that this wouldn’t piss a lot of people off? I think it would.
Interesting how this doesn’t seem to be much of an issue here in the year 2025. I wonder if there are forces at play which prevent this mass photography/painting confusion from materializing.
I might. I dunno.
I’d respond very differently if I knew one of these brush strokes was just the most statistically probable in an infinite series of possible lines—kind of loses its flavor.
Porn can be art, but typically it isn’t, and typically when it is it’s called “erotica” or “erotic art”. There’s a distinction you apparently don’t want to talk about, even though you started trying to make an argument about what constituted art.
Weird that you started off saying “you must understand what art is” but now are reluctant to talk about it, even though your conception of it obviously differs greatly from mainstream definitions.
Here’s what I think. I think the vast majority of visual content we interact with is pretty emotionally empty. It’s product packaging, advertising, memes, yes even superhero cinematic universe shlock written to a formula. I think using AI in that area cheats no-one out of anything, and I think that people will always find an artistic outlet for their emotions if that’s what they want. My partner paints as a hobby and I haven’t heard them saying they’re not going to bother because of AI.
Is your problem AI art or is it lying about art?
Wow, you’ve really thought hard about this.
This is a very strict world view you have.
Art comes from the conscious. Porn comes from the conscious. What distinction are you talking about?
‘Erotica’ is either another word for the same thing, or it’s the “high brow” version women can clink their wine glasses over. I don’t understand what trap has been laid before me.
What I am deliberately avoiding, The Riddler, is a stupid debate over some exact definition whereby you claim this thing doesn’t count, and then I say “the word ‘is’ in this context means,” and then you ironically call me pedantic, and we waste 14 hours intellectually jerking off.
Like, it’s way easier to just say that you are one of the vampire’s familiars trying to trick me with lies. Like, uh … like a lawyer. You know.
I will note, this is not an argument in favor of AI. This is just clinical “given up” disease. I think they call that cynicism.
I mean, I personally wouldn’t lose anything; I don’t watch Marvel. You don’t think they’re funny, though? I’m not gonna say I like them, but I’ve almost always laughed.
“Can be, but typically isn’t” isn’t strict in any sense. It’s the opposite of strict, by admitting more than one possibility. We’re still no closer to understanding what it is you think constitutes art, so we can’t have a proper discussion about how, if at all, non-AI generated art fails to be art in that sense, and whether that’s important.
Asking people what they mean by the words the say - especially when it’s a word like art which is literally memed on for being the source of endless debates regarding its nature and definition - is not some kind of juvenile trap; it’s a pre-requisite for having a productive conversation on the subject.
The argument in favour is that people want to do it, so just let them get on with it. Simple.
It seems like you’re shifting away from the point of discussion, which was whether AI output can be art, and more towards the general dangers of the technology itself, which is a whole other discussion.
It also seems like this discussion is taking a toll on you. If you are interested in continuing it, there’s no harm in taking a step back and coming back later.
This proposition is refuted by hyperrealistic paintings such as La hora del té by Magda Torres Gurza. You can see that this is not a photography if you pay attention to the reflections. But certainly not at “first glance”.
Okay, this was 15 hours ago, so I don’t remember who did what exactly, but I do know I was soapboxing, so yeah, we’re gonna cover a lot of bases.
The actual question of whether it’s art is simple: It’s not. It can be used in art, but unto itself, it’s just novel spectacle. Art comes from the conscious.
If it were art, it still wouldn’t be your art. It would be the robot’s art.
I did have a nap, thanks.
This is just demon tech. Like the demons in Frieren. They say words like “hello” and “thank you” in my holy tongue to manipulate, but they know not what any of my words mean. The words “I love you” serve no purpose other than to stop me from ending its life with the power button.
And these are… common? These are clogging up google search results with their hyperrealistic spam? You realize that photography is the loser in this exchange, right? Hyperrealistic paintings are so much cooler than a machine that takes hyperrealistic photos.
How can you say what the output of that workflow communicates or doesn’t communicate without seeing it?
That statement is unsubstantiated. Without knowing the creator of that workflow I venture the following proposition: If the creator put in hours of effort into constructing it, so the AI would produce just the right output, then they clearly had a vision of what they were going for. And If they tried to get a detail just right, then that detail must have meaning to them, or else they wouldn’t bother.
I see another issue with the statement “The lot of them can’t even explain their own work”. Do you think every stroke of the brush has a meaning for a painter? Is every note carefully chosen in a piece of music? Or is it rather a case of “doing what feels right at the moment”? I ask that because I don’t see the difference in playing a few chord progressions on the piano and seeing what fits best, and letting AI generate a few outputs and seeing what fits best.
I’ve seen plenty.
Are you… being serious?
Look, I’ve been a musician longer than I’ve been any other kind of artist, and yes, I pick all of my notes. That’s the fun part, actually. There is a lot of deliberation over where they should go.
This is what I mean about you people not understanding the artistic process. Music is a language. People in a jam session are speaking words and phrases to each other. There are grammar rules to this language that work one way but in way another not.
If you’re using an LLM, then your jam partners aren’t speaking to you, they’re speaking to a robot. You may as well not even be there. And uh… I dunno, that just seems really fucking lonely.