this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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It’s true. AI images ain’t art. It’s a best guess amalgamation by a computer, made with the stolen remnants of actual art created by actual artists, while not compensating them at all.
It runs on a platform none of us can even afford to run. Cost prohibitive and limits who has access to it.
It’s made by capitalists striving for profit and nothing else. So it’s built with the wrong intentions in mind. Intentions that are immediately at odds with what art is. Yet another limitation of who can participate in it.
Its current state can’t exist without the theft of tons of other actual art to try and imitate, while having no actual context or idea what anything is.
It’s not producing art; it’s producing a way for capitalists to fire and not hire artists so that they can pocket the extra money for their yachts and summer homes.
It’s absolutely everything art isn’t nor ever will be. Art is for everyone. AI is for rich, talentless corporate ghouls.
Not to mention the ecological damage.
it uses less power than a refrigerator. are you going to stop using your refrigerator?
Perhaps I need my fridge more than I need AI generated art.
what if a small artist uses AI to make the money to keep the power for their fridge on?
Being able to food on the table is a priority for all of us and I use a computer for that as well.
The argument was about ecological damage which is also true, especially for running all this hardware to run these models to create said art.
if we're arguing about ecological damage, then the answer is simple - we need to purge roughly 2/3 of humanity from the planet. don't you want to save the planet? get to work.
Maybe a conversation for a different time. Have a good one.
Curtis Yarvin is that you again?..
That’s my secondary issue with it.
My issue is less with AI and more with how capitalism has mucked up an opportunity.
If I ask Taylor Swift to make a song about a chicken eating marshmallows and she does, all the lyrics, music, production, and voice, are me and not Taylor. I made it. Me. That's how AI art works. Even if Taylor was also just copying other artists. All me. I'm so talented my words can only be appreciated in prompts to Taylor. You wouldn't understand. Buy my marshmallow song.
i know people who have used AI art to produce something not possible for a human artist in a short time frame. it was part of a larger product which was more than just art, and wouldn't have had nearly the same impact without the art. it actually does empower small artists if they think outside the box about how to use it.
I think as long as you can keep it at arm’s length and don’t let it permeate your entire process, it can be valuable in triggering things during that ideation and creative process. That’s ultimately how I think tools like this should exist. They should be at your side filling a small percentage of need, with the human artist building something larger from it.
That said, the timeframe for producing things continues to shrink because of unrealistic capitalist demands. So anything that brings a 12-hour process to 1 hour is heralded in as progress by execs, even if it demoralizes the creative team and reduces their personal footprint.
it can also be used just give human made art visual cohesiveness, making multiple images have a unified style.
I like the idea of feeding your art into it to see various styles side by side. Reminds me of the Photoshop editing days.
How does it work ?
Paywalls limit access, cost of hardware to run locally limits access.
Can some people access it, yes, is access limited, also yes.
Strawman? maybe?, it's unclear how it's related and as a singular statement is mostly nonsensical.
It absolutely is not, there are several ongoing lawsuits and repeated strikes about this exact thing.
This i agree with.
I agree with this also.
AI is for profit, not for everyone.
The major difference here is the scale but you'll have to look in to that yourself.
hallelujah.
kill the capitalists, not the technology.
4 Is definitely wrong
7 Yes
And I'm sure all the AI everyone gets to use, are "collateral" products, that were realized, while they keep the goal of creating the AI that will ultimately replace all the employees and make the rich independent of the very annoying human workforce in all areas.
Edit: lemmy kept converting the 4 and 7 to numbered bullet points, converting them to 1. And 2.
That's why the formatting on the numbers is strange, using only blank spaces to separate.
I don’t care how you perceive the term art. This ain’t art. The Meta lawsuit comes to mind. The one where they were caught illegally training their LLM on authors’ works without their permission, using a pirated source, while still trying to argue that it was perfectly fair.
If I use computer software to type up a letter instead of writing it, I’m not benefiting off the backs of everyday joes
If I use a computer to calculate math, I’m not stealing a working Joe’s job
If I use a computer to type a prompt for an image generator and it spits out an image, I’m benefiting off the backs and the works of the unknowing artists the AI vacuumed up
If I use AI to write a book, I’m benefitting off of the authors’ works that Meta never paid any money to, while shadily downloading all of their books from torrent websites
Your comparison here falls flat because AI image generation is a unique scenario. Computers aren’t the issue; corporate AI is.
The AI community had an opportunity to be conflict-free and fair. A public utility that wasn’t created via theft and exploitation. Companies had an opportunity to ask the art community to willingly contribute to it and have something everyone can equally benefit from. Capitalists took that opportunity away and fucked up the entire thing.
Capitalism is the core of the problem and AI art ain’t art.
Edit: a wild article appears.
Literally everything you just said to justify the position that "AI art ain't art" depended either on money or on legal decisions.
Art is all about money? Laws dictate what is and is not art?
Art isn’t all about money. That’s the point. AI requires money and resources that only multi-billion dollar corporations can cough up (which is counter to what art and access to art are about), and they still couldn’t be bothered to have a discussion with artists and come up with an agreement where they actually get compensated (or at least credited??). AI-generated imagery is 100% about profit only. It’s about pushing artists out of the picture—a thing companies have been trying to do for years.
Artists should at least have a say in where their work goes, even if it’s not about them being financially compensated. It’s about having a fair conversation, instead of billionaires dominating the conversation once again.
And yet everything in your comment was about who is "benefiting" from it. Then the very next thing you say in this comment after "art isn't all about the money" is:
So it's not about the money, but gimmie money.
Meta pirated a fuckload of written literature for its training data. Books that those artists sell to make a living as an author. It’s not all about money but sometimes it is, isn’t it? And if you want to speak a language that corporate America understands, it’s money. Should the authors not be compensated?
I am not corporate America, and yet the only language you've been using with me has been "money money pay money."
This was originally about whether AI art was actually art. You started this with:
And
But the only actual argument you've come up with so far is that some artists are not being paid for it.
Okay, so let's imagine a magical world where that happened. Every time an AI generates an image, the fraction of a penny that the image costs is shaved into millions of thin slices and distributed to everyone who holds copyright over anything that was used to create the model. Bigger pieces of that penny are going to companies like Disney or Getty, a few atoms of copper are going to randos on Deviant Art, it's all nice and fair.
Does AI-generated art now count as art in that world, as far as you're concerned? Did it pay enough to buy the title?
I don't think art has to have a price tag on it in order for it to be art, personally. If I went to the Pirate Bay and downloaded a copy of a beautiful movie, let's say Koyaanisqatsi, and didn't pay one cent for it, would it not be art?
Why would it suddenly stop being art because you pirated it? It’s a film made by humans. That’s art regardless of profit.
Meta and other companies made it about money when they stole work specifically to make a profit. How those artists get compensated is a problem for tech to figure out since it dug this hole. Maybe they can look at how streaming artists earn revenue as an example. Even if I was giving my work away for free, I’d like to be made aware if AI tools are using it—for profit or not—so I can opt-in/out.
I define art as something made by a being with consciousness. I choose to not define AI-generated imagery as art because in its current state, it’s made under questionable pretense and solely for profit.
Your whole argument so far has been that AI art isn't art because the copyright holders of the stuff the models were trained on weren't being paid.
Ah, finally a different argument. Though it now simply transfers the question to how one measures "consciousness."
Found art isn't art, then? Or algorithmic art? Photography?
I know someone that does algorithmic art with Python and WebGL. There’s a skill behind it.
Just like there’s art and skill behind the work that runs modern LLMs.
Found art is art. So is algorithmic, multimedia, etc.
Running an LLM and feeding it yours and your friends’ own art to train on? Go for it.
Art generated solely for profit, by billionaires, through piracy methods they’d sue the fuck out of you for using? Trash.
We barely got through one exchange before you wound up right back at "you have to pay for it to be art."
So much for the involvement of consciousness.
Why don’t you have a talk with the capitalists that made it about profit in the first place. Nobody is saying money makes it art. That’s the fucking point. It’s not. Capitalism forced it to be.
Don't bother trying to use logic or the actual definition of art with these AntiAI cultists. "AI art isn't art." is more of a religious chant with them than a well thought out position. Their types also declaired photograpy as "not art" back in the day. The NeoLuddites of today don't remember that and don't even know that they are aping the same misdefinition of art for the same reasons. But they are. Educating them is sort of an uphill battle as it is with any kind of Luddite.
Yup
Photography is art. You have to have an eye for a shot. You capture a moment with a device you’ve spent time learning and adjusting to get it just right. Art takes time. Typing shit into a prompt field is not comparable. But okay.
The funny thing is I’ve been in tech for 20 years. I’m a digital and traditional artist that has been drawing in some form since I was a kid. My dad worked for NASA and was a big influence. I’ve built software that uses AI. So I’m not some dummy that is against all technological advancements. I’m against tech that is used to exploit artists, and tech bros that claim to be artists because they wrote a prompt in 5 minutes.
The word you are thinking of is not 'art' it's 'skill'. A stick man that takes 3 seconds is art. The person who sketched it is an 'artist'. A painting a master works on for a decade is art and the guy who made it is an 'artist'. One takes more skill than the other, but they both get to be called art. Nobody of note is claiming the skills are comparable, but you are trying to gate-keep the terms 'art' and 'artist' pretty hard-core. The same as the people who claimed photograpy wasn't art because all the person did was "have an eye for the prompt... I mean shot. And curate a generated image, i mean capture an image on film and pass it off as their 'art'."
“Skill” is indeed better suited here. The problem is also who holds the keys. The current state of capitalism wants the shortest route to produced assets because it means they can cut even more costs and reduce headcount. Get rid of writers and now artists? That’s more money in their pockets. It’s amazing tech that has been created with the wrong goals in mind, by people that had these conversations behind closed doors, with all key figures excluded—and I haven’t even touched on the environmental impacts.
Art for me has always held unique power because I think of the steps the creator went through and the pivots they made. Why they decided with this color palette; what inspired them; what it means to them. All things that are devoid in AI-generated art. I’m also heavily biased as an artist and former graphic artist—both roles that are very quickly vanishing. I got lucky by pivoting to programming.
Marx predicted that automation would bring about an era where people would work alongside machines to maintain and keep them running smoothly. The human’s job would be made easier. Turns out the real capitalist desire is full on replacement of the worker in a lot of cases and IMO that has tainted the idea of modern day AI.