by gnramires | 2026-01-13 22:12:37+00:00
This is not a super well thought out position, but I've been leaning towards really disliking AI art in general (without having an opinion on any strong policy action yet).

First, art is, I think, one of the most enjoyable activities we have. One evidence is a lot of people forego higher salaries to choose an art job (although being a job carries additional responsibilities and some inconveniences compared to doing it as a hobby). It's a shame to see it diminished, when I believe we should be diverting efforts to automate other stuff.

Second, most AI art I've seen has been quite substandard compared to human art. We still don't know very well what human emotions are, the origin of sentience and qualia, etc.. But I think humans still lead here in having and probably understanding emotions. While for other tasks most implementation detail is irrelevant (e.g. in code, that it works tends to be most important, vs. minute choices in style), in art every detail is particularly relevant. Knowing this, it bothers me usually when I see this art that it doesn't carry the same knowledge of context and nuance a human would have.

Third, There's also the effect of making me question whether each piece of artwork was made by a human or AI, that didn't exist before. It does carry a bit of a magical feeling I think knowing a real person made every piece of artwork prior to 2018 or so (I think algorithmic art[1] is fine in this regard, because it tends to be more clearly algorithmic, and the involvement of the artist in coding is significant), that is now gone or at risk. Even the thought of imagining say their work day or what they had for lunch or talked to coworkers or friends is pleasant to me (at the risk of romanticizing it too much).

I suppose if AI art actually understood human nature, and specially the specific context of each art piece, better than us some of my arguments might be diminished. But the negatives so far seem to outweigh the positives, and I would like to e.g. give preference to content that doesn't use AI art.

(It is, admittedly, also the case that we lost a similar amount of craftsmanship when the industrial revolution happened, and in return we were able to support a larger population, and greater material conditions for most people. Every object now isn't carefully handcrafted. I think it's different because well, now material conditions are relatively abundant, and second there's no such insatiable, significant and irreplaceable demand for art as there were to common industrialized objects (take shoes for example), at least not to the same extent or vital significance. That is, the ability to have a shoe at all far outweighs it being carefully handcrafted, I believe; while experiencing a poorly made AI movie or artwork might be actually worse than none at all (or simply an older human made movie), and it also gets more cumbersome to evaluate for ourselves whether AI was employed or not. Also, while say shoes only last a limited time and need to be constantly produced, good artwork can last indefinitely (using digital storage), and even if you account for cultural change and relevance, can still last a really long time, motivating investing more into it.)

I'm quite sure that if we're still around in 500 or so years, we'll still be enjoying say Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh (probably as a digital reproduction). Current AI art will probably be largely discarded, so seems largely an unwise investment. Actually this kind of applies to code as well. It seems plausible Linux could still be used in 500 years from now (see how we still value finding Unix v4 50 years after), or at least of some interest. Those durable intellectual goods don't seem like wise places to invest anything but the best of us :) (at in the cases it's not disposable)

The arguments above also don't seem to apply say in concept stages, or say for bland corporate diagrams that will be disposed of in 1 day, and which a huge quantity is needed. I think the main criteria I would evaluate is (1) Was it enjoyable to produce (for the artist(s))?; (2) Will it have a significant (artistic) impact on who is experiencing it?; (3) Will it last a long time?

[1] W.r.t. algorithmic art (and digital in general) (take bytebeat[2] for example), which is a field I really love, I am not any kind of absolutist about it. I know there tends to be extremely more degrees of freedom for human expression in an art piece than in an algorithmic piece, so I see it more as a complement and not a substitute for more conventional art. I'd never give up ever hearing human musician player music for bytebeat, just bytebeat is a lovely experimental other dimension of expression. Writing a prompt seems a too few degrees of freedom and context, and too much of an uniform context that is less rich than humans can provide.

[2] https://dollchan.net/bytebeat/