But they conveniently leave out that it costs money to do anything with AI. It’s more like “open to anyone with a credit card.” The vast majority of people don’t have computers powerful enough to run generative AI models locally, and even then, server farms with a billion GPUs will always produce better results
This means that people have to rely on corporate platforms where you buy tokens that you use to get pulls at the various AI slop slot machines, hoping you get something decent. The mechanics more closely resemble a gacha game than any kind of artistic process
By contrast, learning how to draw, animate or make 3D models costs nothing. There’s free tutorials and tools everywhere, and you can also just pirate commercial ones if you want
i am a professional artist (and maybe this makes me a bit out of touch,) assuming that it’s for personal use and not for profit at all, i would rather have someone take my work into photoshop/gimp/krita/whatever and trace it near directly or make edits to it to fit their vision than have that person go spend money to further refine The Slop Machine. other artists may have differing opinions on this but since generative AI has gotten popular i just simply do not care anymore as long as my work isn’t being fed to train image models. hell, if you’re tracing someone else’s work using tools on paper, that’s still building muscle memory and linework skill and while not the ideal scenario it’s doing more for you than you might think. with generative AI you are paying to generate an image based off countless images that already existed from artists that were not paid for their work to be included in the model. is that…not capitalistic or not at the very least exploitative?
Also a professional artist, and I agree with you. Someone making a collage or a trace from my art, or even just photoshopping it is still practicing creativity. Someone typing a prompt into the art slot machine has no creative process, they aren’t learning anything, experiencing anything, struggling with anything, it’s just empty output. It’s just a “pretty picture” there’s no sense of accomplishment or understanding. One of the most rewarding things in my life is when I draw something and recognise that I flat out wasn’t skilled enough to do that 6-12 months ago.
And this can apply to any hobby or skill, are people so alienated from themselves that even the most basic concepts of satisfaction at self-improvement are seen as outright insults to them?
end-users aren’t necessarily paying into anything other than their own electricity bill. We universally have a problem with the companies profiting at your expense of course, and that might be the more common case.
Those parts of “ai” discourse are tangent to someone’s aptitude or ability to have something that looks how they want it to look and i’m trying to limit myself here to being mad about the position that art is accessible already because everybody can make shitty art that isn’t what they want to make.