Comment by qmmmur
8 days ago
If anything, the ubiquity of AI has just revealed how many people have 0 taste. It also highlights the important role that these human-centred jobs were doing to keep these people from contributing to the surface of any artistic endeavour in "culture".
There is a reason people (used to) study art and train for years. Easy art is often no art because you need that effort and investment, and learning artistic context, to understand and appreciate.
Which is not to say don’t be creative, I applaud all creativity, but also to be very critical of what you are doing.
I've been playing around with T2I/I2V generation to make some NSFW stuff of video-game characters using ComfyUI.
It's pretty easy to get something decent. It's really hard to get something good. I share my creations with some close friends and some are like "that's hot!" but are too fixated on breasts to realize that the lighting or shadow is off. Other friends do call out the bad lighting.
You may be like "it's just porn, why care about consistent lighting?" and the answer for me is that I'm doing all this to learn how everything works. How to fine tune weights, prompts, using IP Adapter, etc. Once I have a firm understanding of this stuff, then I will probably be able to make stuff that's actually useful to society. Unlike that coke commercial.
You can do better than porn which isn't very useful to society.
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Reminds me of that AI coke commercial. I personally didn't notice how shitty it was until I read about it online. (I actually didn't even see the commercial until I read about it online).
But it's impressive that this billion dollar company didn't have one single person say "hey it's shitty, make it better."
It's an intentional new-media ad, so I think they're embracing the flaws rather than trying to hide them.
Also, since it's new media, nobody knows how to budget time or money to fix the flaws. It could be infinitely expensive.
Everything's shitty in its own way. Modern (or even golden age era) movies, with top production values are equivalent of Egyptian wall paintings. They have specific style, specific way to show things. Over the years movie artists just figured out in what specific way the movies should be shitty and the audiences were taught that as a canon.
AI is shitty in its own new unique ways. And people don't like new. They want they old, polished shittiness they are used to.
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The ubiquity of AI has just revealed that there are tons of grifters willing to release the sloppiest thing ever if they thought it could make some money. They would refrain from that if they had at least a glimmer of taste.
It is really no different than music. Millions of people play guitar but most are not worth listening to or deserving of an audience.
Imagine if you gave everyone a free guitar and people just started posting their electric guitar noodlings on social media after playing for 5 minutes.
It is not a judgement on the guitar. If anything it is a judgement on social media and the stupidity of the social media user who get worked up about someone creating "slop" after playing guitar for 5 minutes.
What did you expect them to sound like, Steve Vai?
So in the end it turns out that the art was never so much about creativity as about gatekeeping. And "everyone can make art" was just a fake facade, because not really.
Everyone can, don't worry, art people are snobs even with their own. Now they can just complain about the plebes doing it wrong ALSO.
Of course everyone can make art. Toddlers make art. The hard truth is that getting good technical art skills, be they visual, musical, literary, or anything else is like getting stronger— many people that want to do it are too lazy or undisciplined to do the daily work required to do it. You might be starting too late (Maybe post-middle-age) or don’t have the time to become an exceptional artist, but most art that people like wasn’t made by exceptional artists; there are a lot more strong people than professional athletes or Olympians. You don’t even need a gym membership or weights, and there’s limitless free information about how to do it online. Nobody is stopping anyone from doing it. Just like many, if not most gym memberships are paid for but unused after the first, like, month, many people try drawing for a little while, get frustrated that it’s so difficult to learn, and then give up. The gatekeeping argument is an asinine excuse people make to blame other people for their own lack of discipline.
Classic gatekeeping quote: "Everyone has a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay"
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> Of course everyone can make art. Toddlers make art.
That's my entire point. Artists were fine with everybody making "art" as long as everybody except them (with their hard fought skill and dedication) achieved toddler level of output quality. As soon as everybody could truly get even close to the level of actual art, not toddler art, suddenly there's a horrible problem with all the amateur artists using the tools that are available to them to make their "toddler" art.
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Everyone can make art, but whether it's considered good is another matter.