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People Hate AI Art

https://mccue.dev/pages/5-8-26-ai-art
97•3dedb728-3f77•2h ago

Comments

kiba•1h ago
How do you know if an artist drew it for you versus an AI? I think social proof and long term observation of artists help.

Approps of nothing, I think art is worth your while to make an investment of effort. I found Drink and Draw and made acquaintance of another maker from a local makerspace(not mine) and an artist. I wasn't technically adept but I want space to learn how to draw and they treated beginner(or at lease those three) with good vibes even though I was a clear beginner.

bluefirebrand•1h ago
I love that silly dinosaur with the emoji thumbs up.

Here's the really funny thing. Crafting the prompt to make the original image probably took more time than that crappy mspaint job.

I'm being serious, think about it. What are the chances that image came out of the first prompt fed to the AI? How much time did it take to craft the prompt to get that weird uncanny valley trex with a thumbs up?

Compare that to googling "trex", grabbing an image. Finding the thumbs up emoji. He didn't even bother removing the white background layer! It probably took two minutes tops to make and I enjoy it more.

drivebyhooting•56m ago
Gemini one shotted it.
apsurd•39m ago
but the author said they used ChatGPT. You're saying you produced the exact same image using Gemini?
emccue•35m ago
Author here. It was the first one. (Not to take away from your point - but i will die shameful if anyone things I "spent time prompting.")
ekianjo•1h ago
You have no idea what "AI art" is these days. And if you think you do, well, you are very naive.
pesus•58m ago
Care to elaborate what it is for us naive fools?
zetanor•54m ago
I think he means that the point of the article is that the doodle is AI-generated.
RcouF1uZ4gsC•1h ago
It seems like there might be just a small vocal minority that hates AI art.

Most people probably don’t care.

I bet there were painters in the 1800s who talked about how people hated photographs and how they were uncanny and creepy compared to paintings.

tehjoker•59m ago
Art without human input is pretty meaningless. It's just pretty colors, even if well executed. I guess there are people that vibe purely on kitch aesthetics. They don't have good taste ofc, but I guess from a capitalist perspective that's a market.

People are confused because since the 1960s literally the CIA intervened to disrupt the transmission of meaning in art, because it was a field dominated by "subversives" who were opposed to capitalism and imperialism. They promoted meaningless post-modern art that was purely aesthetic. So decades later, starved of good examples, people have no idea what art is anymore.

monkpit•54m ago
“Art wasn’t supposed to look nice, it was supposed to make you feel something.”

A weird facsimile of art that has no soul is entirely uninteresting.

krater23•18m ago
Then no one that makes art is in danger. AI is just replacing the 'Art' that is not really art and just some paid painting.
monkpit•52m ago
If you ask me, the rise of the term “slop” in recent years is a sign that a considerable amount of people do care.
happytoexplain•27m ago
>It seems like there might be just a small vocal minority that hates AI art.

Certainly, clearly not

For now.

In the future, I despair that the next generations will adjust. Horrifying, but possibly true.

olivierestsage•58m ago
This post is right over the target. I see others posting that the author is out of touch, so here’s a humble +1 to the view that they’re not. Cathartic stuff here
jatora•57m ago
And just like the author, you offer no rational justification for the argument you are making.
presbyterian•55m ago
Aesthetic taste isn’t (inherently) rational? I don’t need a reason to find something ugly, I can just find it ugly.
Maxatar•49m ago
No one is arguing against that point.
aggakake•47m ago
Demanding a rational explanation for why something is considered tacky is a tacky look
Unai•43m ago
This community is mostly based around sharing ideas, not feelings.
happytoexplain•40m ago
That's a fallacy. This community is rational. Feelings are exactly as rational as ideas. You can use feelings to express irrationality - but as humans, we are 100% composed of feelings. Every rational thought we have is rooted in feelings. It's completely valid and interesting to talk about the feelings of some technology's impact, especially regarding visual art.
Kapura•32m ago
If people think a piece of art is AI, the impression is that you didn't spend any amount of time or effort on creating it (even if you did, which, hilarious if true. you could have been making real art). Further, the vocal anti-AI art people who view it as a product created by grinding down billions of person-hours of experience and work into a sort of uniform slurry which is then fed back to them. They do not appreciate this meal.
soerxpso•22m ago
Half of his recommendations for alternatives take less time to make. You (and the author) are making assumptions about what "people in general" think without any data to back it up. What you've experienced anecdotally in your social circle doesn't necessarily apply everywhere.
emccue•27m ago
I mean, there is rational justification for why people feel the way they do.

It turns into a long tirade about how AI has made the median person's life worse and how they associate generated images with that. It could also be a short tirade.

But the point is more that it is that way, its not important (for the purposes of choosing whether to use AI art in a thing you distribute) _why_ people feel this way though, just that they do.

zapataband1•11m ago
people can like bad art dude, you do you (it's still bad)
etaioinshrdlu•58m ago
It's a fascinating article and trend to me. I've been rather obsessed with the amazing technology of text-to-image generation since 2017, when state of the art was an LSTM+GAN and resulted in a blurry image. Now that the technology basically works great, it's just upsetting to a lot of people. I kind of think of AI like making things out of plastic - works pretty well, but basically always resented. Notice that the article couldn't identify anything wrong with the generated image except for how it was made and how no one got paid.
NDlurker•51m ago
AI images had a cool aesthetic and had kind of unpredictable results until around 2022 or 23. Now that anything can be generated quickly and with little effort, it kind of lost the novelty. I'm sure there are people doing some cool things still, but I mostly lost interest.
Lalabadie•49m ago
The point of the article is to state that if one needs an explanation or a breakdown of why the AI-generated image is upsetting, then that person might not be a good judge of the qualities and impact of an image in the first place.

That's not to say that this same person isn't the perfect target and consumer, as far as OpenAI is concerned.

budududuroiu•49m ago
I personally find AI art both visually pleasing at an unconscious level and vapid at the same time
zapataband1•6m ago
I mean isn't it like the uncanny valley? it's sort of like "the real thing" aka human created artworks that we traditionally love and connect with, but just far enough that it gives us even more disgust that something completely not human created(like an inanimate object) would.
wurtapp•54m ago
I think people who don’t like it genuinely don’t understand it enough to be fascinated by it or have some other issue with it that has nothing to do with the content itself
p_j_w•51m ago
A complete lack of human input and, as such, no genuine human feeling or expression. This sounds like it has everything in the world to do with the “content.”
Our_Benefactors•41m ago
> A complete lack of human input

Obviously a false statement or the image would not be generated in the first place. You will need to significantly move goalposts for this statement to be truthful

bombcar•54m ago
I think the AI Dino is fine. Just don’t claim it as anything but AI.
meander_water•54m ago
I think one of the reasons for sloppy images is that non-artistic people don't have the vocabulary to describe images to be produced in interesting styles.

Yes, you can do image-> text on existing styles, but something always gets lost in translation.

Midjourney probably has the best baseline, and --sref is a really easy way to differentiate

roenxi•46m ago
More even, something AI is quite bad at is combining different imaginative elements.

Compare the AI dinosaur in the article to the commissioned dinosaur. The commission has a vibe created by the eye expression and the glasses. I'd maybe call it chill. The thumb-up is present but it isn't leading the vibe, we might infer that it is something the dino is doing because he is chill. The gesture is only a tiny part of the image, almost an afterthought.

In the original AI image the dinosaur has its thumb up and seems to be really happy. Big smile, relaxed face. Thumb looms large in the foreground. That would be totally normal for this sort of prompt, I don't expect the AIs to have a lot of thoughtful variety on body language.

So what is interesting is getting the AI to generate the commission image - one where the thumb-up looks like a natural consequence of a broader scene - is actually quite hard. The prompter needs to think about all those details of what the character of the dinosaur is and such that make the gesture natural. It might be too hard to one-shot prompt. Image generators don't do that the last time I checked, they just provide what is asked for. Human artists (especially the good ones) will identify that as boring and start adding flourishes to keep people's interest.

People end up hoist on their own petard. "A T-Rex giving a thumbs up" isn't an interesting idea and a good human artist will - instead of following an instruction - give people what they asked for and slip some actually interesting elements in, which usually comes back to more body language and facial expression that is hard to describe.

emccue•22m ago
(do give the artist more commissions. They need to eat and are on my shortlist for stuff like this. Here's a sexy Jar-Jar Binks/Garfield hybrid they made https://bsky.app/profile/dsoart.com/post/3ml2f4aqsf22t)
tokioyoyo•34m ago
Sure, but let me flip the question - how would the user react if they knew the said prompt-crafted image is AI generated? Industry will need to do better to sell it to the young generation, which is usually the tastemaker for the future. It is considered "low class" to use AI-generated images. If the game is "conceal that it was AI-generated", then... lol.
emccue•21m ago
Yeah people seem to think that the issue is that the output isn't "high quality enough," which is a super strange misconception about the role of art even in a commercial setting. Like if it just gets "good" in some mechanical way that people will start to like it.
rlt•53m ago
Most “AI art” is art like “clip art” is art.

This is a phase that will pass.

There will be (and already are) legitimate artists who leverage AI as a creative tool like any other medium/tool (Photoshop, cameras, paint brushes, etc). I respect them even if others immediately dismiss anything AI related.

Kapura•44m ago
when people talk about AI art they aren't talking about using photoshop smart select to remove a lamppost, and it's pretty disingenuous to pretend they might be.

Clip art was created for specific purposes by humans, and continues to find use in those niches.

NDlurker•40m ago
AI has completely replaced clip art at my job. I miss those old clip art CDs from the 90s
aeon_ai•52m ago
Let me propose another alternative.

People generally hate low effort AI slop.

Irrational people hate art made with AI as a tool.

"By invading the territories of art, photography has become art's most mortal enemy." - Said someone who nobody knows because it's a long and dead opinion.

happytoexplain•31m ago
>Irrational people hate art made with AI as a tool.

No, it's OK to care about the source/process. It is not irrational. You may disagree, but it is utterly human - as rational as things get.

axus•52m ago
I don't always hate AI products, I do hate an economy with no work for creative people.
krater23•21m ago
Why? Do you think that artists would mind if there are no programming jobs out there? I expect no because I know much artistic people that now just say 'Cool, AI can now program my website or some other stuff for me'.
emccue•17m ago
What a fascinating take. Framing it like "they wouldn't care if your jobs went away!"

Like wtf? What world is this that you live in?

Kapura•6m ago
people have needed art as long as there have been people. it's hard to argue that websites are equally important.
zapataband1•5m ago
an economy with no work for creative people(or engineers) makes me hate AI products way more
doginasuit•51m ago
People hate AI compositions, especially from a publication. There are many valid uses for AI image generators. My nieces and I have a blast coming up with stories and illustrating them with generated images. It is even better when they hallucinate an extra finger or ear, we can work it into the story.

I also like to use AI as a sort of filter on pictures that I took. Make a photo look like a drawing, for example. It is also incredible for UI mockups and saves me a lot of work.

happytoexplain•42m ago
Right. AI is probably the biggest "umbrella term" we've yet had to wrestle with as a society. AI art as a concept is mostly hideously soulless and anti-human, a disgusting abomination that is rightly reviled, and that's all totally orthogonal to the fact that it's mostly very ugly.

But it's absolutely lovely and heartwarming when my brother uses it to make environment art to go with a D&D campaign for his children.

It's hyper-polarized.

livinglist•48m ago
I don’t hate AI arts in general I just hate those AI arts that I personally think are badly executed with tastes that don’t align with mine.
photonair•47m ago
It's inevitable that AI Art will be used everywhere and haters will get desensitized due to over exposure. There is a right time and place to use real artwork vs ai art as long as someone doesn't try to claim ai art as real.
tardedmeme•40m ago
This is a good prediction that is likely to come true. Almost everything else is already slop and we're desensitized to it. Almost all products in stores, almost all websites, almost all apps, almost all video games are slop. We still recognize the good ones that aren't slop but we're accustomed to most things being slop, we don't get angry at those things, we buy enough of them for them to make a higher ROI than the good things.
emccue•14m ago
"Its the year 2076. I can finally post my AI generated art without people being mad at me. Its a paradise."
chacham15•45m ago
I hate these overly grand clickbaity statements. AI is a tool. You can use it well. You can use it poorly. "AI Slop" is the category of lazy AI tool usage. It is the same with AI code. Do you ask Claude to implement a feature and then not do a manual code review? If so, you're likely to get slop.
emccue•19m ago
In this case use of an AI image, if people can clock it (which is super funny people are thinking "well, what if they can't tell!"), is the issue unto itself.

There is no using AI image generators _well_ if you care how people perceive you and your work.

csallen•42m ago
List of things that the public despised when they were new:

- Cars (expensive toys for the rich that endangered normal ppl and spooked horses)

- Recorded music (similar complaints about it not supporting artists)

- Bicycles (commonly called the devil's work)

- Novels (morally dangerous)

- Headphones / Sony Walkman (anti-social)

I remember when chatting online was nerdy, anti-social, and uncool. Now celebrities casually talk about sliding into each other's DMs.

The initial "it's unfashionable" backlash to new, useful, and threatening technology has been so repetitive and predictable throughout history that it's almost passe now. Most people aren't students of history of course, so history will repeat itself.

But that also means the second act will repeat, not just the first act. And the useful technology will almost certainly become fashionable and accepted once it's more commonplace.

happytoexplain•42m ago
Please, please stop with the AI analogies. Just make your argument on its own terms.

"It's different from X" is no more meaningful than "it's the same as X".

add-sub-mul-div•31m ago
Ironically, nothing makes me question my stance of human supremacy over AI more than the weakness and triteness of human defenses of AI.

Or maybe the defenses are AI generated, who knows.

csallen•29m ago
> It's different from X"

The post doesn't even say "it's different from X". It just says "it's unfashionable," with no comparison or mention of history at all, as if this is the first time a new technology has ever been unfashionable immediately after its release.

> Just make your argument on its own terms.

The argument is incredibly simple and obvious: the "unfashionable" period for useful but jarringly new consumer-facing technology is common, predictable, and short-lived.

chroma_zone•37m ago
They were right about cars, to be fair
krater23•11m ago
Only cars? I would extend the list with bicycles, online chat/dating and at least headphones.
krater23•14m ago
When you ask me, headphones are for much people the sign for beeing antisocial, especially for the people that want to be antisocial. Online chats and online dating are now so much monetized and hyped that I would be happy when we would back to the old times where it was a nerdy thing or when we could remove it from the history completely.

So yes, all things that I accepted first I hate now. The others I was born in, can't tell much about them. Maybe the people are right but accept the shit later.

enthdegree•42m ago
People with low social literacy need to hear more that they have low social literacy. Bad behavior is objectively bad, and just because some people have exuses doesn't make their behavior less bad.
Kapura•30m ago
We need to be OK with shaming people we see as doing anti-social behaviours.
tptacek•40m ago
Corrected: a certain type of very loud and very online person in your audience hates AI art and thinks less of you for using it.

But that doesn't matter, because the game theory they outlined is directionally right. The cohort of people who hate AI art is relatively small. But the cohort of people who love it is even smaller. People can generally spot it, and most people are indifferent to it.

Having said that: I think it's also true that people are generally indifferent to any of the "casual" art in online writing and publications. It's overused and a crutch.

A hero image at the top of a post: good, can be great, do it, make sure it's not AI. But like, a random dinosaur giving a thumbs up in the middle of the post? Don't do that at all.

add-sub-mul-div•36m ago
> Corrected: a certain type of very loud and very online person in your audience hates AI art

The language evolved "slop" for AI art. There's no corresponding new term for good AI art. Pretending it's a minority that hates it is transparent cope.

krater23•31m ago
Good AI art isn't remarkable enough to give it a name. It's much bad AI shit out there, so the people have give it a name.
roenxi•36m ago
We seem to be disregarding the cohort of people who like articles with some visuals more than a text-only article. They exist. Probably not HN readers though, if we're being honest. Adding some images quickly and easily would make them and the writer of the article happy.
apsurd•35m ago
> A hero image at the top of a post: good, can be great, do it, make sure it's not AI. But like, a random dinosaur giving a thumbs up in the middle of the post? Don't do that at all.

That's a weird intentional example to make: spam-adjacent marketing content needs a stock art hero image, but a random dinosaur randomly inserted into a random post shouldn't be done at all?

emccue•25m ago
In this case the random dinosaur is plot relevant albeit just a placeholder, but maybe i'm not following what they are complaining about?
zapataband1•10m ago
chillll dude it's ok to like bad "art"
the_af•8m ago
> Corrected: a certain type of very loud and very online person in your audience hates AI art and thinks less of you for using it.

Correcting your correction: a lot of people have terrible taste. It's not polite to say it, because it's condescending and presumptuous, but it's true nonetheless.

People with good taste will agree with TFA. Your Uncle who sends you cheesy postcards that make you groan; your grandma who watches reality TV; your coworker who always used to forward the whole company chain letters about poor Jessica who's 4 years old and dying of cancer; they will all clap enthusiastically at the GenAI T-rex. That's because they have bad taste and don't know better.

In other words, TFA is right. "Socially illiterate" is a very apt definition.

zb3•40m ago
I don't, to me this AI generated image has more value than this human generated content.
happytoexplain•32m ago
The two sets should be disjoint for any self-proclaimed human being.
periodjet•24m ago
Look at you, happy to set the standard for who is human and who isn’t. Let me guess: you consider yourself “progressive” too.
happytoexplain•20m ago
Why write like this on HN?
emccue•16m ago
Sephiroth posting on main
Kapura•39m ago
I love that this succinctly explains not only that people largely hate this shit, but also gives simple examples of doing better. The photoshopped thumbs up was really good, I love that shit. It is the antithesis of ai slop; the human presence is felt.
raincole•36m ago
It'd be so funny if the first three examples are AI-generated too.

(Not accusing that they are)

Recently Blender removed Anthropic from the sponsors while taking Nvidia and Google's money. This is the epitome of the nature of the anti-AI trend: If you just don't make it obvious nobody cares.

evolighting•35m ago
so called AI Art is OK for those pic themself. but it's far too often abused.

All you get are these pieces of glossy junk, yet they expect you to believe it’s some form of creative work. "People with minor cases of major brain damage", indeed

dr_girlfriend•31m ago
it's creepy and soulless and evil and lacks any artistic value and trained on data stolen from real artists while simultaneously devaluing our work, of course we hate it.
periodjet•29m ago
This trend of “everybody hates AI!” articles from bluesky people is becoming really tiresome. Every week it’s a new variant on that theme, and never substantiated. Major yawn.
operatingthetan•28m ago
I talk to a lot of people not in tech and the divide is clear: they hate AI, they hate AI art, and they hate AI companies. They seem to hate it all less if they are unsure if it's AI, but that's a different discussion.
emccue•26m ago
Yeah so, tech people tend to be in a bubble with regards to AI perception. I implore you to just ask around outside of your immediate sphere. Bring it up, let them talk.
periodjet•17m ago
Awful lot of assumptions being made about me. Maybe you should stick to writing incredibly compelling articles instead.

But maybe I’m just one of those people with “minor cases of major brain damage”.

emccue•5m ago
I think I compelled a lot of emotions with a relatively short one here. (Not that I'm one to defend myself generally; this was just something I felt like I was taking crazy pills on because how can folks not see it?)

> But maybe I’m just one of those people with “minor cases of major brain damage”.

Hey, you said it not me

happytoexplain•25m ago
I'm sorry - you are in a bubble. Humans, on average, hate the idea of genAI art, specifically.
periodjet•21m ago
Again, you are an absurd person for even considering that you can claim to slice our species up into “human” and “not human” based upon your own trite-ass viewpoints. Don’t reply to my posts.
happytoexplain•17m ago
Please consider not writing in the "internet argument" style on HN. I am not categorizing anybody here as "not human" (I'm not sure where you're getting that) - I am describing humans using averages.
bdangubic•8m ago
the post was not written by human :) “humans, on average…” lol

(hallucinated) ai hard at work

zapataband1•9m ago
lol bluesky people? as opposed to what? the white supremacists bots on x.com?

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