{"id":30218,"date":"2024-03-06T03:00:18","date_gmt":"2024-03-06T09:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/?p=30218"},"modified":"2024-03-05T19:19:57","modified_gmt":"2024-03-06T01:19:57","slug":"im-already-tired-of-ai-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2024\/03\/im-already-tired-of-ai-art.html","title":{"rendered":"I\u2019m Already Tired of AI Art"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
This is not a sermon on the ethics of artificial intelligence in general or of AI art in particular.<\/p>\n
There are serious ethical issues with the way AI plagiarizes art and with how some companies \u2013 and some individuals \u2013 use AI to keep from paying artists. Those issues deserve our consideration, particularly as AI grows from its current state as a search engine on steroids to a future when it may approximate or even exceed human intelligence.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t that conversation. This is something simpler, more basic, more personal.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m already tired of AI art.<\/p>\n
<\/a>
As with the pictures in last year\u2019s AI In Spiritual Education: Caveat Emptor<\/a>, do not expect AI illustrations in an essay about the shortcomings of AI. All these are my own photographs.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
I\u2019m about to drop out of a couple of goth and dark academia groups I\u2019m in on social media. I\u2019m not an active member in any of them. I never post in the dark academia groups and I post in the goth groups maybe once a year. I just like to follow them, pick up recommendations for new music and books and movies, and enjoy the pictures.<\/p>\n
Especially the pictures.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m an amateur photographer. I take almost all the pictures you see here on the blog, on Instagram, and anywhere else I post. Technically I\u2019m a professional photographer \u2013 I\u2019ve sold two pictures \u2013 but let\u2019s not kid ourselves.<\/p>\n
I know what I am \u2013 I\u2019m a good photographer. I\u2019m not a great photographer. I\u2019m not dedicated enough \u2013 and I don\u2019t have enough time on top of everything else I\u2019m doing \u2013 to try to become a great photographer. But I am trying to get better. When I see a picture that grabs my attention, I try to figure out how the photographer did it. How much is composition, how much is lighting, how much is post-processing? How much is combining two or more photos to create an image of something that doesn\u2019t exist in the ordinary world?<\/p>\n
How did they do it, what can I learn from it, and how can I do something like it myself?<\/p>\n
There\u2019s an on-going argument among photographers as to how much \u201cPhotoshopping\u201d (I don\u2019t use Photoshop or Lightroom \u2013 they\u2019re too expensive and I don\u2019t like the workflow. I use GIMP, which is free and has more features than I\u2019ll ever need, even though most of my professional photographer friends find it clunky) you can do before what you have should no longer be considered a photograph. I don\u2019t find that debate particularly useful. What are you trying to do? Are you trying to document an event or are you creating art? We can enjoy both.<\/p>\n
At the same time, I want to know what I\u2019m looking at. Is the image a reasonable representation of what I would see with my own eyes if I was there? Have the colors been adjusted to make it more attractive? Is it something that was real but has been edited into something that\u2019s no longer telling the truth? Most fashion models are painfully thin, but sometimes magazines and websites edit their photos to make them look even thinner. Advertising is some of the most malefic magic in the world.<\/p>\n
Or is what you\u2019re seeing something completely made up?<\/p>\n
With AI, I\u2019m looking at something that never existed. And that\u2019s OK \u2013 people have been doing that ever since they started painting animals on cave walls 30,000 years ago. I enjoy Michelangelo and Van Gogh and even Picasso. But when you look at a painting, you know you\u2019re looking at a painting. Paintings are honest.<\/p>\n
AI art pretends to be photographs of people and places that never existed. Or it pretends to be paintings done by real humans. It\u2019s not real. It\u2019s not art. I\u2019m not a luddite \u2013 learning which set of keywords will produce the images you want can\u2019t be compared to developing the skills necessary to make actual human art.<\/p>\n
At the same time, a cool picture is a cool picture. No, that library that looks like it\u2019s part of Dracula\u2019s castle isn\u2019t real, but it\u2019s still fun and interesting. A hot goth outfit is a hot goth outfit, and if a real person hasn\u2019t dressed like that yet, they probably will in the future. It\u2019s entertainment \u2013 stop overthinking everything and just enjoy the pretty pictures.<\/p>\n
And so I did.<\/p>\n
For a while.<\/p>\n
And then the feeds went from an occasional AI picture to an AI picture every day to multiple AI pictures a day. It got old. It stopped being the Victorian drawing room we all wish we had and started being just another AI pic.<\/p>\n
A couple years ago I stopped following one of the goth hashtags on Instagram. It got overloaded with thirst traps promoting Only Fans accounts. I like hot goth girls as much as the next straight guy, and if you can make money on Only Fans good for you. But I followed a goth hashtag for music and fashion, not for almost-porn. What was interesting at first became ordinary and then became annoying.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the same with AI art. It\u2019s moved from interesting to ordinary, and now it\u2019s moving from ordinary to annoying.<\/p>\n
If I have to stop following some groups I\u2019ve enjoyed in order to remove the annoyance, I will. I\u2019m not enjoying them anymore.<\/p>\n
<\/a>
This library exists in the ordinary world. My photo taken in the Old Library, Trinity College, Dublin. 2018.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
I\u2019ve played with a couple of the AI image generators. They can be fun, though I lost interest rather quickly. I get why people who have an interest in fantastical things like them. It\u2019s not like you can go visit the Hellfire Club and take pictures with your phone. Most of this isn\u2019t taking work away from actual artists, because in the absence of AI these pictures simply wouldn\u2019t be made.<\/p>\n
But for all their technical competence (the number of fingers<\/a> aside) they have a quality about them that resembles the crayon pictures drawn by preschoolers that end up on refrigerator doors across suburbia.<\/p>\n
\u201cMommy, see what I made! Isn\u2019t it good?\u201d<\/p>\n
Whatever we really think, we say nice things about children\u2019s indecipherable drawings because we love our children and we want to encourage them to keep practicing at whatever interests them, or to just enjoy it.<\/p>\n
We have no such obligations with adults who use plagiarizing software to create pictures nobody asked for that mock the skill and creativity of actual artists.<\/p>\n
And also, I\u2019m tired of them.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There are serious ethical issues with the way AI plagiarizes art and with how some companies use AI to keep from paying artists. This isn\u2019t that conversation. This is something simpler, more basic, more personal. I\u2019m already tired of AI art. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1129,"featured_media":30224,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[272],"tags":[4445,4448,4475,2589,4],"class_list":["post-30218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-community-2","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-dark-academia","tag-goth","tag-pagan"],"yoast_head":"\nI\u2019m Already Tired of AI Art<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"There are serious ethical issues with the way AI plagiarizes art and with how some companies use AI to keep from paying artists. This isn\u2019t that conversation. 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