by api | 2025-05-07 12:34:48+00:00
People said this about photography. It ruined painting, and it did in fact put a lot of portrait painters out of business because in that era the reason you hired them was not for art. It was for a photograph made with brushes.

This is a good read on photography and art. Note that the rhetoric sounds almost identical to today's AI rhetoric.

“If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon supplant or corrupt it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally." - Charles Baudelaire

https://medium.com/@aaronhertzmann/how-photography-became-an...

I don't think AI is a threat to actual art at all. If I want art, I explicitly do not want slop churned out of a model. I want something created by a human being to communicate something. That's the entire point.

Some around here will argue that there have been double blind tests showing that people sometimes can't tell the difference between AI output and human art. That is missing the point too. Knowing who the artist is is part of the artistic experience. If someone deepfake calls you with a model imitating your friend, is it the same as talking to your friend? The parasociality of art is part of it.

It may -- as photography did with portraiture -- be a threat to some of the ways that artists make a living, and I do understand the pushback from that. Back before photography a lot of painters made a living being cameras, and all that work dried up pretty fast. Today AI is replacing all the "filler" churned out by artists. The only silver lining I guess is that artists generally hate this work and it never paid well.

Another thing I expect to happen is: actual AI art. I don't think this has happened yet. There has not yet been an AI equivalent of the Pictoralists.

AI art is art if the AI is used by a human being as a tool to communicate what art communicates, to do what art does. Art, I guess, does many things. It entertains, informs in a way, but also communicates matters of the emotional and spiritual aspect of human existence -- of consciousness -- that can't be communicated well in other ways. If someone uses AI as a tool to do that, it's art.

A lot of what we see today coming out of AI models is I think correctly called "slop" because it is not that. There's no artistic intention or craft behind it.

BTW I'd argue that "slop" exists in the realm of music, literature, painting, and other arts made with traditional methods too. For centuries there's been low-effort smutty pulp fiction, crappy imitative pop music, and gimmicky low-effort painting. Those things are slop made with lower-tech tools. A pretentious gimmicky painting where someone threw some paint at a wall has less artistic merit than a photograph that someone composed with care to communicate something.

Edit: people said this about writing too!

https://www.anthologialitt.com/post/the-god-thoth-and-the-in...

I'm not bashing people for being skeptical of AI and worrying about its effects on the arts. There are, like I said, very valid points, especially about the ability of artists to make a living and the effect AI "slop" can have on the population. I just think we have been here before, many times.