IDEA: Sir, is it possible we have things completely backwards? Perhaps it is the candles that go in the bath and the woman who goes on the tray.

IDEA: Demographic analysis suggests that women are invigorated by the presence of many thousands of stuffed animals while sleeping. Perhaps the tray is for holding her Squishmallows while she luxuriates in the lavendar-scented bathwater.

The LLM still produces what its user intends it to produce.

The lot of you people always front this idea, figuratively, that the way the robot works is it connects to the user’s brain and then downloads the picture they want to produce, and then simply displays it for them. The act of writing a prompt is merely the interface by which this brain-to-brain connection happens.

I don’t know how else to say this: that is fucking ridiculous. It’s so mind meltingly stupid, I think you’re lying to me.

I have to ask: is AI not supposed to revolutionize the working world? You don’t have to bother yourself with the particulars of writing a good text summary anymore, but also, you’re somehow in full control of what it does? You no longer need to be a trained artist with a good understanding of color theory to produce great works—this is the great democratization of art—but also, the colors chosen were naturally the ones you would have chosen anyway; you are a big, smart boy, after all.

just like one doesn’t think about ever single filler word that’s only there for grammatical purposes in writing

If you had ever written anything worth talking about, you’d recognize that your filler words, or their absense, add a lot of color to your writing.

I think you let the robot write filler words for you because you don’t actually know what they mean. You’ve never thought about them.

This is a phenomenal example because, when I write comments, this one even, I reread them 4, 5, 6, 7 times checking for syntax and grammar errors, brevity, tone, voice, whether I’m being too aggressive, whether I’m not being aggressive enough; but you imagine the filler is just busy work keeping you from jerking off a seventh time.

You seem not to understand that, if you think this filler is so beneath caring about, I’d prefer you just cut it out entirely. Speak like a caveman for all I care. Why would I want you to generate a bunch of filler words when neither you nor I have any idea what they’re doing there?

I’m not even really talking about AI anymore: why are you writing filler words in your responses? Stop. Like, seriously. Cut that shit out. I’ll slap you with the ruler, I swear.

I think it makes sense to compare image genAI to photography.

As a photographer, nope.

Legit, I’m not even reading the rest of what you said. This photography point is so mind numbingly boring at this point.

If I had to guess, the movie gun means that any modicum of time not controlled by him means he gets to pick the movie later, and because she wants to pick the movie, she’ll be more lenient on the other stuff.

But anyway, yeah, I have no fucking idea.

Porn can be art, but typically it isn’t, …

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

I mean, they can do that, but this is on the level of showing me a cool anime they saw.

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.

Critical thinking is work, though. If the computer can skip the thinking for you, when does it happen?

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.

Photographers choose where to point their camera. I’ve used AI generators, they’re like the antithesis of choice. You can’t learn to speak the language of visual mediums if you just let the robot speak it for you.

and say to them, face to face and looking them in the eyes “I do not consider you a human being”.

Is this a challenge? I can knock it out by Friday.

For real though, these people are human beings—of course they are. But they’re removing themselves from their own projects. I want to see more of them in their own work. That’s the whole reason I’m even here; I can generate my own monkey throwing a banana, why would I need to see theirs?

Are you positive they haven’t? Or are you just balking at the idea that skills your grandfather had are fully lost on you.

Not going to school might make a population stupider. What happens when “using the computer” is kind of like “not going to school”?

People said the metaverse was inevitable. Bitcoin was at one time inevitable.

Frankly, I think more impotent rage is needed.

“Go oUtSiDe!” says the guy rocked by an angry mountain. The only mountain I’m climbing is my stairmaster.