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Comment by miyoji

21 hours ago

This bullshit disingenuous false equivalency again.

In both photoshop and painting, the human using the tool decides what strokes to use. That isn't true with AI art. It's not "just another tool" for doing the activity when it does the entire activity for you.

> In both photoshop and painting, the human using the tool decides what strokes to use.

except for the million posters and album covers unironically made with a real photo passed into one of photoshop's "Artistic" filters to make it look like some impressionist painting

It is exactly “another tool”. Just like Abelton with an automated drum machine is another tool for creating music. As the posting shows the tool isn’t doing the entire activity for you. The author is reprompting the tool to generate a result more inline with their vision.

  • It's not "creative" in the sense of incorporating a drum track or photograph into a composition you're developing, it's "creative" in the sense of asking for a vague style and getting it, which is pretty much exactly the tool doing the entire activity. The author explains in detail that it's not their vision, its just a list of styles returned when asked for a list of styles, and they don't actually know what the Memphis Group even is...

    Would you consider me to have "created" Billie Jean if I type "eighties music" into a music search engine and select "Michael Jackson" from the list. Or to have "designed a logo" if I pay a human to design some logos for me and pick one.

    • You can do that exact thing with Ableton if you want. If you want to put in low effort you can do that. You can find beats labeled “1980’s pop” and use presets from other people. You can put in high effort using AI tools and fine tune every aspect of the result if you want. It’s just another tool. You are conflating effort with the tool.

The analogy holds perfectly well. We can "no true Scotsman" this all day long.

Any "real" artist could dunk on PS: "Oh, you didn't have to go out and buy a canvas and paint and brushes. Hell, you probably don't even know how to properly mix paint on a palette! Not only do you not to clean your brushes, you don't even have brushes!"

And the right response is: "Who gives a shit?" The answer is "Some folks, but their opinion decreasingly matters." And the same exact logic applies to AI. You might as well be complaining that Google doesn't pay cartographers to hand draw Google Maps.

> when it does the entire activity for you.

This is total fiction, and has spawned an entire cult of "just give me the prompt" folks that think using AI requires no skill, and anyone using AI is just a "meat proxy". But that's not true, at all, as evidenced by years of commentary on this site with people getting radically different outcomes using AI. We've gone from "stochastic parrots" to "gonna destroy humanity" in 2 years.

AI will do jobs that we used to go to Fiverr for -- it'll eat the bottom of the market, just like automation does elsewhere. The bottom of the market is blog art, clip art, menus, commercial signage, event posters, and the like. That's completely natural, and hating it is shouting into the wind. The local cafe owner was never particularly incentived to have their menus crafted by some local artist.