Art was never separate from the person and the culture that created it. It was its soul. Now our lives are flooded with soulless creations night and day--the product of lazy minds and an amalgamation of stolen already-bland cultural works.
For 3 years now, I've gotten into arguments with both AI bros and artists about this. The main point of art is its cultural space (its creator, the zeitgeist etc.).
A human premium, and an elevation of human made art was always inevitable. Most "AI art" token spend is TPS reports, and explainer slides, maybe educational materials on the fringes. Maybe there is a chance some forms of AI art becomes its own new medium (like theater vs "the talkies") but it was never going to be a replacement.
Just 3 years of pointless hand-wringing, headlines and breathless interviews for nothing.
"Aaron Sorkin says he will never use AI".
Yes. No one asked him to! But alas, clickbait rules all.
I recently had an idea for procedural music that would be a fusion of classical ideas of Process ala Glass/Reich/Hisaishi with music making techniques and possibly the interactivity of video games. No idea if it'll work it was more a shower thought than a deep creative endeavour that I'm attached to but my point is that art is art and AI will just be a tool in the end for true artists.
This is such a lazy "gotcha" argument, and a prevalent one at that. Some people seem to think that anyone who is upset about the massive deluge of garbage AI has enabled was somehow perfectly happy with the previous status quo. "Things were already bad so who cares if we make them worse?" is a sentiment that seems does have some wider acceptance in the software world, but not everyone feels this way.
No it is not lazy. But if you devoured the marvel slop or gray's anathomy in which production no human intelligence was utilized, what difference does it make if the slop is AI made?
If you filled your day with brainrot slop - does it matter the origin. Does it matter if Instagram thirst traps are so with surgery and filters or if the whole meat puppet stuff is skipped
> If you filled your day with brainrot slop - does it matter the origin. Does it matter if Instagram thirst traps are so with surgery and filters or if the whole meat puppet stuff is skipped
So far it seems like AI video generation will vastly multiply the quantity of crap like this and enable it to be even worse while being cheaper and easier to produce, while not meaningfully improving the status quo for higher quality works.
"Does it matter which you watch?" Well, who said that was the most interesting question in the first place? Who makes slop is not the only way the situation is changing.
I would argue that modern art has none. Further, I would argue that art is what speaks to people.
That means that an AI generated image which makes people laugh has more soul than whatever the top selling modern artists was in 1995. By my estimation, that makes a lolcat a better piece of art than most modern art.
That is something that I actually think is true. Of course there are great artists who can show us much, much more than what is inside a lolcat. Its just that I haven't seen one of those in a while.
Artists are concerned for their jobs; That I get. Trying to defend art by claiming magical things like it doesn't have any soul is just cope. And frankly, the more I see of that, the less I care about artists and their real problems.
The soul is whatever story the buyer puts into it. A few years ago, people attributed soul to NFTs, but I think in the long run, humans will
ultimately be able to generate more pervasive stories. There are thousands of artists in towns continuing to generate them.
NFTs were just a supposed new way to claim ownership over works of art. NFTs themselves were not a new artform in itself. I doubt anyone claimed that NFTs had some kind of artistic value, just by virtue of being an NFT.
people who complain about modern art almost always know essentially nothing about art. Usually heavy overlap with those that complain about anything that is different from what they like/grew up with
As a human artist/film director/animator/musician etc I view "AI" as just another tool in my toolbox and what a tool it is!
In animation/film production- studios would have a "TD" on hand- a technical director- a programmer on staff to tweak workflows for artists, build new tools etc-
Now my TD chills in VsCode waiting and working for me 24/7 in the form of Claude Code, Kimi Code etc
I can also have my TD embed another TD(Deepseek flash 4.1) into the new tools(making them smarter and more useful) my TD builds for me while I am in active production on the same PC
All of this allows savvy creatives to dream bigger as a single person is capable of anything a "big studio" can do-
So artists need to leverage these new tools and be more ambitious.
I must admit the prevalence of AI generated images has challenged me to be more attentive to detail, I even started looking for small artists I can commission for stuff on my walls, been going to expos a little more... I'm happy if this gives artists a small lifeline away from the more mercantile aspects that AI is conquering.
I discuss it a lot with my wife who happens to be a painter.
For years we have perceived my work (swe) as a safe harbor. With AI boom, tides have changed and now I perceive her work as a much, much more future-proof activity
A lot of us saw this one coming a while ago. Many, many artists of all kinds have already put up "AI-free" (or similar) badges on their work. I think it will be more significant in the fine arts world, however local art fairs could be affected as well.
I say the more the merrier, but artists who use AI in their workflows are going to be pressed about it - with negative connotations - for a while. Transparency is the best solution in my opinion.
People trying to use AI in their creative process but not as their creative process might be the biggest losers for a while. Right now there are a lot of negative gut reactions to having any AI associated with art at all
There's one thing worse than "designed by AI" and it's "designed by committee".
I wish more buildings were designed by AI. There's so much depressing architecture.
If the AI is tasked with "Build a building as cheap as possible with as much floor area as is legally permissible", then it too will make dull buildings.
What you really need is more people willing to pay a premium to live/work in a unique or famous building like the empire state building, and then more such buildings will be built.
That is a good point. However, from time to time we do spend very large sums on certain buildings and what we get for it isn't proportionally more beautiful; in fact it often looks worse.
Hopefully with AI we will make things like stonework and indoor plasterwork, hell, even indoor statues, that much cheaper, and we can start creating beautiful places to live.
I’ve started to see (and react negatively) to a kind of “Claude design”. Apps, slides, images share the same aesthetic, and even after aggressive prompting it reverts to a the mean.
I even create these things. But that aesthetic has started to imply a kind of throwaway, low value thing
What will be interesting is if models can create more diverse styles than the neutral Claude default we see everywhere
Because that's not the point. Before you could waste, without kidding, hours in meetings discussing css alignments, flows that didn't make sense but the upper levels were pretty serious about it - "Our QA and test groups say this is of the utmost importance", even when the QA and test groups were the same, 3 or 4 people that insisted on it.
I think most people, but at least I, could always deliver things inside schedules (not even set by myself) without a problem, even with those "adjustments" and changes of mind, and doubly so if I could just have the same leeway that now seems to be in place.
Nonetheless, if there's going to be a premium it has to be discernible in any particular way because software for business is always considered a cost. But what really shows this industry is half a joke, is that now there's no issue in giving 3rd party agents full access to inner code and logic, many times credentials too because these systems are being deployed in CIs. And because there's really no enforcement or punishment for leaks, or endangering users in most areas there's no reason for a premium. There's people pushing thousands of lines / min (and I think even the most professional people out there can't honestly keep up with it) although that isn't in itself meaning the overall security is worse than before, it just means that for the most part it's now un-auditable in any meaningful way.
The software part is quickly being solved but I honestly believe the more creative aspects will still see large demand. LLMs have a certain stink to their UI, being creative is a hard skill, which AI has yet to master.
Most of what gets called creative isn't creative at all. Often it means "Produce a content product which approximately matches commercial genre expectations with just enough of a twist to stand out a little."
A lot of people can do that. A lot more people could do it if they tried to.
People who are genuinely out of the box creatives, with a unique blend of original vision, technical skill, emotional and psychological insight, and genre-changing taste, are not common.
For so-called "AI" to have creativity, we'd first have to work out what that even means for ourselves right? What is creativity in the first place? I'm unconvinced it's just turning up the "temperature" or fiddling with some pertubing parameters.
EDIT: And AI is also pretty terrible at being consistent too, you have to work quite hard to get a level of "consistency" that you're happy with.
There will always be problems to solve with building software, regardless of the way it is written.
From code to no-code to vibe-code, to even more code. What we are seeing here is more of the same being built.
An example of this is "sandboxes". Everyone was writing "sandboxes" until it there was 1 vulnerability needed to break them and we will keep seeing this with developers vibe-coding infrastructure.
Similar trajectory to "human premium" for human-authored text (when we started using synthetic AI-generated text in pre-training, around 2023 for maybe llama-3?). AI text is OK (kind of like a low nutrient content food) but labs still pay a premium for high quality domain-specific data silos. As far as the consumer, pattern-breaking media will always have a place, slop videos follow a similar distribution and so there's naturally pushback against seeing the same thing, over and over even if it's not inherently crap (just as in AI-authored text).
Feels like approximately 80-90% of AI generated art, writing, games, tools, etc come under that category now. Very few people seem willing to come out and say "yeah, I got Claude/ChatGPT/Codex/Gemini to make this".
Or if they do, they'll try and downplay by saying they used AI for some elements, but not most of them.
I can imagine that being a reaction to the negativity and backlash from a substantial (or very active) part of the audience, to anything built with AI. I don't imagine that shame for using AI for something, or fear of disclosing it, is self-imposed.
Ideally, how you create something and what tools you use should be nobody's business, and all it matters would be if they like it or not. But inherent value / merit is a thing, and concern for the provenance of what you buy is also a valid position for the public to take. It's gonna be a while before the balance settles on either AI = bad or AI = who cares.
On my site, we started asking artists to disclose their use of AI starting ~2 years ago. Turns out roughly 1 in 3 lied.
So, I developed an AI detector. It's working pretty well for that. But it's a schlep having to keep up with all the new models. We're processing ~60,000 songs a day at this point, kinda crazy!
While there is a lot of slop, it is possible to create art with AI that does not look like slop and is as creative as a human creation. That's really the main cool thing about AI is you can create things you otherwise couldn't, and the better you are the higher the ceiling for the ai art is. It is a bit of a struggle though, as in prompting and finding the right references is difficult to get good results
The issue isn’t the quality or the visual result. It’s not just slop because it looks bad.
Art is as much about the journey as it is about the destination. It’s the friction of someone going through each detail, making a choice. It’s the artist taking time to figure out how they want to convey what they’re feeling and thinking.
The reduction of this friction culminates in the reduction of the piece’s essence.
That's fair but there is a lot of creativity in prompting and finding the right image because on the way to those images there is a lot of experimentation and I came up with the ideas for the images not the AI.
Another area where prices have increased due to AI because a bunch of soulless chronically online people can feel better about themselves.
Mind you, human-painted artwork is a niche beyond expensive art. Not everyone buys the equivalent of Monet paintings. I've been eyeing a painting by a local painter just to realize the prices jumped from $500 to something like $3000 on average. Sucks.
I'm not sure what you're saying. Is the claim that the artist raised the cost of his work 6x because he's getting less work, because people are using AI instead? Maybe I'm in a bubble, but that doesn't seem credible. I'm trying to imagine the person that was thinking that they would hire a local artist to paint them a painting and then discovered AI and instead asked Gemini to do it. Those just seem like two completely separate use cases.
How are the prices a problem? If a person is just looking for a picture not a particular artist or philosophical theories, AI is cheaper. If a person wants to commission an artist, that was always a semi luxury even for cheapest of cheap rate online artists.
In fact if your old price was already 500 dollars then its already a useless luxury. People think a lot before paying 500 even for actual tools, anyone who has 500 to spend on a non-essential luxury is already doing something most people don't have any need to.
We should just admit that human created art is dead. Just like hand coded code. Same thing. AI will soon beat any human in quantity and quality. Just accept it. It is over for humans.
Code has always been seen as purely utilitarian by most people, art is different.
I suspect use of AI to "realize one's artistic vision" will get increasingly more normalized, but I don't know how people will react to end-to-end AI art (which generally doesn't exist yet), things are going to be a really strange once/if human taste gets fully mapped and demystified.
Art was never separate from the person and the culture that created it. It was its soul. Now our lives are flooded with soulless creations night and day--the product of lazy minds and an amalgamation of stolen already-bland cultural works.
For 3 years now, I've gotten into arguments with both AI bros and artists about this. The main point of art is its cultural space (its creator, the zeitgeist etc.).
A human premium, and an elevation of human made art was always inevitable. Most "AI art" token spend is TPS reports, and explainer slides, maybe educational materials on the fringes. Maybe there is a chance some forms of AI art becomes its own new medium (like theater vs "the talkies") but it was never going to be a replacement.
Just 3 years of pointless hand-wringing, headlines and breathless interviews for nothing.
"Aaron Sorkin says he will never use AI".
Yes. No one asked him to! But alas, clickbait rules all.
I recently had an idea for procedural music that would be a fusion of classical ideas of Process ala Glass/Reich/Hisaishi with music making techniques and possibly the interactivity of video games. No idea if it'll work it was more a shower thought than a deep creative endeavour that I'm attached to but my point is that art is art and AI will just be a tool in the end for true artists.
So just like before AI.
This is such a lazy "gotcha" argument, and a prevalent one at that. Some people seem to think that anyone who is upset about the massive deluge of garbage AI has enabled was somehow perfectly happy with the previous status quo. "Things were already bad so who cares if we make them worse?" is a sentiment that seems does have some wider acceptance in the software world, but not everyone feels this way.
No it is not lazy. But if you devoured the marvel slop or gray's anathomy in which production no human intelligence was utilized, what difference does it make if the slop is AI made?
If you filled your day with brainrot slop - does it matter the origin. Does it matter if Instagram thirst traps are so with surgery and filters or if the whole meat puppet stuff is skipped
> If you filled your day with brainrot slop - does it matter the origin. Does it matter if Instagram thirst traps are so with surgery and filters or if the whole meat puppet stuff is skipped
So far it seems like AI video generation will vastly multiply the quantity of crap like this and enable it to be even worse while being cheaper and easier to produce, while not meaningfully improving the status quo for higher quality works.
"Does it matter which you watch?" Well, who said that was the most interesting question in the first place? Who makes slop is not the only way the situation is changing.
the difference is it’s worse
Only more so.
And now it has been exacerbated further
What does it mean for art to have a soul?
I would argue that modern art has none. Further, I would argue that art is what speaks to people.
That means that an AI generated image which makes people laugh has more soul than whatever the top selling modern artists was in 1995. By my estimation, that makes a lolcat a better piece of art than most modern art.
That is something that I actually think is true. Of course there are great artists who can show us much, much more than what is inside a lolcat. Its just that I haven't seen one of those in a while.
Artists are concerned for their jobs; That I get. Trying to defend art by claiming magical things like it doesn't have any soul is just cope. And frankly, the more I see of that, the less I care about artists and their real problems.
The soul is whatever story the buyer puts into it. A few years ago, people attributed soul to NFTs, but I think in the long run, humans will ultimately be able to generate more pervasive stories. There are thousands of artists in towns continuing to generate them.
NFTs were just a supposed new way to claim ownership over works of art. NFTs themselves were not a new artform in itself. I doubt anyone claimed that NFTs had some kind of artistic value, just by virtue of being an NFT.
Modern art refers to art produced roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s.
[delayed]
people who complain about modern art almost always know essentially nothing about art. Usually heavy overlap with those that complain about anything that is different from what they like/grew up with
As a human artist/film director/animator/musician etc I view "AI" as just another tool in my toolbox and what a tool it is!
In animation/film production- studios would have a "TD" on hand- a technical director- a programmer on staff to tweak workflows for artists, build new tools etc-
Now my TD chills in VsCode waiting and working for me 24/7 in the form of Claude Code, Kimi Code etc
I can also have my TD embed another TD(Deepseek flash 4.1) into the new tools(making them smarter and more useful) my TD builds for me while I am in active production on the same PC
All of this allows savvy creatives to dream bigger as a single person is capable of anything a "big studio" can do-
So artists need to leverage these new tools and be more ambitious.
Aesthetics are dead- original ideas are it.
I must admit the prevalence of AI generated images has challenged me to be more attentive to detail, I even started looking for small artists I can commission for stuff on my walls, been going to expos a little more... I'm happy if this gives artists a small lifeline away from the more mercantile aspects that AI is conquering.
I discuss it a lot with my wife who happens to be a painter.
For years we have perceived my work (swe) as a safe harbor. With AI boom, tides have changed and now I perceive her work as a much, much more future-proof activity
That's been the case for over a century. People pay a large premium for the original even when identical copies are available.
A lot of us saw this one coming a while ago. Many, many artists of all kinds have already put up "AI-free" (or similar) badges on their work. I think it will be more significant in the fine arts world, however local art fairs could be affected as well.
I say the more the merrier, but artists who use AI in their workflows are going to be pressed about it - with negative connotations - for a while. Transparency is the best solution in my opinion.
People trying to use AI in their creative process but not as their creative process might be the biggest losers for a while. Right now there are a lot of negative gut reactions to having any AI associated with art at all
There's one thing worse than "designed by AI" and it's "designed by committee". I wish more buildings were designed by AI. There's so much depressing architecture.
If the AI is tasked with "Build a building as cheap as possible with as much floor area as is legally permissible", then it too will make dull buildings.
What you really need is more people willing to pay a premium to live/work in a unique or famous building like the empire state building, and then more such buildings will be built.
That is a good point. However, from time to time we do spend very large sums on certain buildings and what we get for it isn't proportionally more beautiful; in fact it often looks worse.
Hopefully with AI we will make things like stonework and indoor plasterwork, hell, even indoor statues, that much cheaper, and we can start creating beautiful places to live.
one person + ai >> a committee of people
I’ve started to see (and react negatively) to a kind of “Claude design”. Apps, slides, images share the same aesthetic, and even after aggressive prompting it reverts to a the mean.
I even create these things. But that aesthetic has started to imply a kind of throwaway, low value thing
What will be interesting is if models can create more diverse styles than the neutral Claude default we see everywhere
Why aren't we seeing a premium soft "Software made by Humans"?
Because that's not the point. Before you could waste, without kidding, hours in meetings discussing css alignments, flows that didn't make sense but the upper levels were pretty serious about it - "Our QA and test groups say this is of the utmost importance", even when the QA and test groups were the same, 3 or 4 people that insisted on it. I think most people, but at least I, could always deliver things inside schedules (not even set by myself) without a problem, even with those "adjustments" and changes of mind, and doubly so if I could just have the same leeway that now seems to be in place.
Nonetheless, if there's going to be a premium it has to be discernible in any particular way because software for business is always considered a cost. But what really shows this industry is half a joke, is that now there's no issue in giving 3rd party agents full access to inner code and logic, many times credentials too because these systems are being deployed in CIs. And because there's really no enforcement or punishment for leaks, or endangering users in most areas there's no reason for a premium. There's people pushing thousands of lines / min (and I think even the most professional people out there can't honestly keep up with it) although that isn't in itself meaning the overall security is worse than before, it just means that for the most part it's now un-auditable in any meaningful way.
The software part is quickly being solved but I honestly believe the more creative aspects will still see large demand. LLMs have a certain stink to their UI, being creative is a hard skill, which AI has yet to master.
Most of what gets called creative isn't creative at all. Often it means "Produce a content product which approximately matches commercial genre expectations with just enough of a twist to stand out a little."
A lot of people can do that. A lot more people could do it if they tried to.
People who are genuinely out of the box creatives, with a unique blend of original vision, technical skill, emotional and psychological insight, and genre-changing taste, are not common.
For so-called "AI" to have creativity, we'd first have to work out what that even means for ourselves right? What is creativity in the first place? I'm unconvinced it's just turning up the "temperature" or fiddling with some pertubing parameters.
EDIT: And AI is also pretty terrible at being consistent too, you have to work quite hard to get a level of "consistency" that you're happy with.
> "The software part is quickly being solved"
There will always be problems to solve with building software, regardless of the way it is written.
From code to no-code to vibe-code, to even more code. What we are seeing here is more of the same being built.
An example of this is "sandboxes". Everyone was writing "sandboxes" until it there was 1 vulnerability needed to break them and we will keep seeing this with developers vibe-coding infrastructure.
Similar trajectory to "human premium" for human-authored text (when we started using synthetic AI-generated text in pre-training, around 2023 for maybe llama-3?). AI text is OK (kind of like a low nutrient content food) but labs still pay a premium for high quality domain-specific data silos. As far as the consumer, pattern-breaking media will always have a place, slop videos follow a similar distribution and so there's naturally pushback against seeing the same thing, over and over even if it's not inherently crap (just as in AI-authored text).
And consequently a gray area of generated slop trying to pass off as created by people.
Feels like approximately 80-90% of AI generated art, writing, games, tools, etc come under that category now. Very few people seem willing to come out and say "yeah, I got Claude/ChatGPT/Codex/Gemini to make this".
Or if they do, they'll try and downplay by saying they used AI for some elements, but not most of them.
I can imagine that being a reaction to the negativity and backlash from a substantial (or very active) part of the audience, to anything built with AI. I don't imagine that shame for using AI for something, or fear of disclosing it, is self-imposed.
Ideally, how you create something and what tools you use should be nobody's business, and all it matters would be if they like it or not. But inherent value / merit is a thing, and concern for the provenance of what you buy is also a valid position for the public to take. It's gonna be a while before the balance settles on either AI = bad or AI = who cares.
Been a big problem in music.
On my site, we started asking artists to disclose their use of AI starting ~2 years ago. Turns out roughly 1 in 3 lied.
So, I developed an AI detector. It's working pretty well for that. But it's a schlep having to keep up with all the new models. We're processing ~60,000 songs a day at this point, kinda crazy!
Curious on two things
1. How often do you encounter false positives, and does that change things?
2. Have you considered outright prohibiting/banning vs disclosure?
Just want to hear from someone running a platform how they deal with this since I imagine it's very hard to get right.
> Been a big problem in music. On my site, we started asking artists
What’s your site?
How do you handle false positives in the detector?
While there is a lot of slop, it is possible to create art with AI that does not look like slop and is as creative as a human creation. That's really the main cool thing about AI is you can create things you otherwise couldn't, and the better you are the higher the ceiling for the ai art is. It is a bit of a struggle though, as in prompting and finding the right references is difficult to get good results
Edit: here are some examples for those wondering what I mean: https://imgur.com/a/mK3Iuzq
You can sort of tell they are AI because of the composition stuff but I think they are aight.
I don't see how AI was necessary to create these.
It's not needed for a professional designer / photographer etc but now a person who does not have those resources can create them
And any computer program can be written in assembly, so why have other programming languages?
This is comparing apples to oranges.
The killian and polo images are strange. There is a mirror over an sofa in a poor lit room. I said strange, not impossible.
The issue isn’t the quality or the visual result. It’s not just slop because it looks bad.
Art is as much about the journey as it is about the destination. It’s the friction of someone going through each detail, making a choice. It’s the artist taking time to figure out how they want to convey what they’re feeling and thinking.
The reduction of this friction culminates in the reduction of the piece’s essence.
I agree with your thesis, but your link is to marketing images not art.
That's fair but there is a lot of creativity in prompting and finding the right image because on the way to those images there is a lot of experimentation and I came up with the ideas for the images not the AI.
Another area where prices have increased due to AI because a bunch of soulless chronically online people can feel better about themselves.
Mind you, human-painted artwork is a niche beyond expensive art. Not everyone buys the equivalent of Monet paintings. I've been eyeing a painting by a local painter just to realize the prices jumped from $500 to something like $3000 on average. Sucks.
I'm not sure what you're saying. Is the claim that the artist raised the cost of his work 6x because he's getting less work, because people are using AI instead? Maybe I'm in a bubble, but that doesn't seem credible. I'm trying to imagine the person that was thinking that they would hire a local artist to paint them a painting and then discovered AI and instead asked Gemini to do it. Those just seem like two completely separate use cases.
How are the prices a problem? If a person is just looking for a picture not a particular artist or philosophical theories, AI is cheaper. If a person wants to commission an artist, that was always a semi luxury even for cheapest of cheap rate online artists.
In fact if your old price was already 500 dollars then its already a useless luxury. People think a lot before paying 500 even for actual tools, anyone who has 500 to spend on a non-essential luxury is already doing something most people don't have any need to.
Are you saying that artists getting payed more is a bad thing?
We should just admit that human created art is dead. Just like hand coded code. Same thing. AI will soon beat any human in quantity and quality. Just accept it. It is over for humans.
Code has always been seen as purely utilitarian by most people, art is different.
I suspect use of AI to "realize one's artistic vision" will get increasingly more normalized, but I don't know how people will react to end-to-end AI art (which generally doesn't exist yet), things are going to be a really strange once/if human taste gets fully mapped and demystified.
Just like photography killed realistic paintings and vynil killed the need of live music.
And soon, companionship, emotion, community, and sex!