Learning art and honing your craft is a personal journey should be something everyone does in some form, what could go wrong with the commodification of that?

I’m someone who’s been creating generative art for a lot longer than LLM’s have been popular. Training and tuning your model used to be the vast majority of the work and it didn’t tend to yield great results. As a result, I’ve only used them twice before. I’ve written hill climbing algorithms, which are a form of machine learning, but it was completely different in both process and in outcome. My generative projects always use other techniques.

Personally, I find the vaporwave songs that just slow down a commercial jingle and throw a drum loop over it to be so much more creative than most of how people are currently using LLM’s and it’s not about effort. It’s about intentionality. The most intentional of prompts will have references to existing art styles and artists to fine tune what is desired. I think their most creative widespread use has been Midjourney’s Discord bot interface which allows you to iterate on a single prompt over and over to get closer to the intended result. Even then, the impressiveness is entirely in the technical details of how the art was made, not in the movement or in the art itself. It’s postmodern art with nothing to say about art.

No different from AI text in that way, it just dilutes all real content and makes everything shittier

This is an example of what I don’t like about AI. Without AI, this tweet would have just been the comment “Life is not easy as a man”. Ok fine… not a particularly interesting thought, but whatever. So this person decides to jazz it up with an AI image. But they haven’t actually improved the communication or the message. I too think giving people more power to create art is a great thing but typing up some prompts just to create an image to increase engagement to your social media profile isn’t progress to me.

It's good for drafting and concept art sometimes. Its good for your homebrew D&D campaign but not much else.

It isn't a lowered barrier though. Nothing about making AI art helps people learn how to make real art. There is no connection. My big worry is that a lot of kids who could've learned to draw or paint will instead go for the easy route of just typing in prompts instead of actually learning a skill. It will make art feel less accessible, not more.

Though I am really biased, as I really don't like AI art taking about a huge chunk of my work and preventing me from being able to afford food.

I know exactly how I feel about ai "art". It is hideous beyond measure and every place that values anything about art or just human beings needs to shame it and everyone who touches the stuff.

Do not legitimize anything about it. Writing "prompts" is as absurd as augury and less meaningful too. Do not use it for "inspiration" or sketches or suggestions. Poison your actual art work so it fucks their database. Fight this trash at every cost. Every scribble you do on the side of your notebook is worth more than the entirety of Dalle and Midjourney combined.

I'm 100% Luddite on this. If I could smash their datacenters with a brick hammer, I wouldn't stop until my fingers bled.