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.
This kind of snobbery sucks. You give the same reason for art created by humans without interacting with AI being unreachable as you do for AI created art being bad. Human made art is "not separate from culture" while AI made art is "amalgamation of already bland cultural works".
Overall, the perspective espoused here is bad for art. Art isn't hidden inside effort, you don't find it by saying "don't be lazy", and if it's inseparable from where it came from (which I think is pretty debatable, art travels through time and the world and can find interest), this is as true for what humans make as what AI makes.
I think the last bit gives the game away. This perspective is an otherwise content free way of saying "some art is interesting to me, and some isn't".
Arguing that the artist's own hardwork, and through that their personality and soul, is integral to art is not snobbery: snobbery is stating that "ordinary" art is beneath you.
That last part is what I just said. The original post is saying nothing aside from something that's already true of everyone, and has nothing to do with whether AI can or does make interesting things.
I'm also not sure that art is actually a way that humans talk to each other. That assumes that the point is delivering some information, but a lot of artists talk about it as a compulsion, or something they do for themselves, or as being about understanding the world. I would actually say that many would say that it's definitively not about audience reception. Simultaneously, audiences interpret things of their own accord all the time. Unlike when sending a message, art is often most fully interacted with when you're engaging with things that weren't put there explicitly.
You assume that humans exchange information only consciously. Someone can feel a compulsion to capture the beauty of something, and someone can still read it as “wow, so this is what beauty can be like”. Or they can read something else, human comms are imperfect and that’s part of it.
What do you see in AI art that you love or find interesting so much?
Also, while I disagree about your point on the audience part — if that is your belief, the article and my or anyone else’s opinion should be absolutely irrelevant for artists. They feel compulsion, the do their AI art. Why does it matter if it finds its audience or sells? Make art, put your soul into it, put your LLM’s soul into it if you believe it has it, make it for all the interesting and cool things. Show it to humans, show it to bots, don’t show it and keep it on your hard drive — the audience doesn’t matter if AI/you made something interesting and artistic. So what if someone wants a “human-made” sticker on whatever drawing, an artist’s goal is to make art, no? Not get anyone’s approval. Why does someone’s “snobbery” matter in this regard at all?
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.
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.
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.
To me it means more that art is a window into its creator. I am more interested in exploring how and why a piece of art is being communicated, why certain details were used, how constraints were incorporated. AI is usually boring to me. By generating so much peripheral and extreme detail it removes rather than enhances expression in many cases. I think that's what people mean by missing a soul. It becomes difficult to tell what was intentional expression or a choice of the artist.
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
Because the public never gets the opportunity to be exposed to good art, whether classic or abstract or whatever style. Most what's called "modern art" in the style of early 20th century like Picasso or later Pollock is low quality sewage, but that's what's being fed to the public. That's what everybody grew up with and everybody hates.
The public is underexposed to beautiful and interesting art, but who is to blame?
Art is a form of expression and/or communication. It's interesting because it shows us different perspectives, as well as things that overlap with ours. When you see a smiley face on your lawn and think it's a sign by the person you just fell in love with, and then find out the exact same artifact was in fact created by wind sweeping some branches together, you'll feel different about it. Similar for art. Or take jokes. A friend might find a joke of yours funny they might not find funny from a person they dislike. That's not "unfair" or "objectively wrong", just like rejecting the same artifact depending on source. If you don't understand this, you talking about "magic" is the cope.
> Its just that I haven't seen one of those in a while.
So that's the argument for making sure of that? Heh.
> Artists are concerned for their jobs; That I get.
The article isn't about artists being concerned for their jobs. This is about people rejecting slop.
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.
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
While I agree that people _want_ art by humans, they mostly buy the cheapest possible thing that fits their taste and intention. Take furniture as an example of art component pushed to the premium segment
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.
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
Losing implies that there was something to lose to begin with. AI as a tool for art is new and there hasn’t been an artist who has managed to do something with it to break the internia.
Art is not ‘supposed’ to be easy to do, if one believes that they see something important they can express via AI — they are free to do so and try to say smth to the world, AI tools are relatively accessible. It’s not guaranteed that the world will listen now, but that has always been the case — many great artists never got recognition during their lifetimes including those who worked in novel paradigms.
So no, they’re not losing anything. If the absence of the immediate mass approval of their art is the obstacle, well, then they don’t need to make that art.
Why does how hard something was to make have anything to do with how good the art is? Three chord punk bands were in my view artistically superior to a lot of rock music from before as they made a structural innovation with the power chord.
It doesn’t. Art isn’t ‘supposed’ to be easy or hard, it is also not ‘supposed’ to be economically
viable or non-viable. Creating art was all of these things (hard, easy, profitable etc) in different places and different times. Art is still very hard because art is an expression of a human finding something true about the world they want to pass on. The tools don’t matter. Public recognition, largely, also doesn’t matter for good art (as long as it speaks to someone.) AI tools are easy but public recognition is hard to obtain. Both of these things have nothing to do with the quality of art.
If an artist has something to say with AI, they can just say it, no one is going to imprison them. Artists did that throughout the entire history (sometime even with the threat of being jailed), nothing changed in this regard with AI.
Art is hard not because of the tools but because you have to have something worthwhile to say (most people don’t) and you have to figure out a way how to get another human to listen, and also you have to hope that someone some day will listen because what you’re saying is true, even if it doesn’t sell today or ever.
Commercial and pop art has always existed also. I think it is good as it brings joy to millions of people who don't have the time or money to commission artists.
Sure. If the gripe is that it’s difficult to make money off of AI art, well, it’s difficult to make money off of any art, especially if someone is working with unusual materials and tools. The market will decide if there is demand for it, but the market in general has historically been an extremely poor mechanism for matching artists with the audience who can see and appreciate their art. Art makes a poor product. The starving artist stereotype exists for a reason.
P.s. Pop art actually directly talked about this relationship with the market and it’s interesting because of that, not only because the colors and shapes were fun to look at (but that too).
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.
Because code is not art and the corporate culture doesn't care about artisan code, neither do the users. As long as the software sells, they are happy.
In fact executives demand the opposite: token max to get the features out of the door faster, all in the same of closing that one last sale.
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.
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
I think that this is also a matter of organisation that people can get better at if they understand a bit of how things come into place. If you start by creating a stable theme, with the spacings you want, the colors you want, fonts, sizings, etc, even using an AI, then you can "customise" in full the look of a web-app.
The html there's not really many places to be creative, a navbar with 3 sections, 5 links, a text card, a hero image, etc, all those are the same across thousands of projects - they're structured, there's not really many ways you can be creative about it. So in part seeing that "middle ground" design is indeed a filter for the lowest of the low effort (or not understanding how to prompt properly, or how the final thing comes together).
If you just want to prompt models and have them come up with more diverse styles that's also quite, or more, lazy - it would help if you understood (not you in particular) how the look of a web page comes together, because then you can direct the model properly - and if needed tweak the lose ends because at some point it's just easier and faster to edit the output yourself but you need to know what needs change and how. If you know how an html page comes together into the thing you see in the browser you can spec the model properly.
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.
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.
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!
After reading multuple discussions in this thread and a bunch of others, I feel like people on HN think about art skills in the same way as they think of their software skills.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but skills that allowed one to make software largely made one pretty employable in the last few decades.
Now, art skills do not make you employable. There are narrow industries where you can make money but throughout the entirety of human history, being an artist rarely provided any sort of economic security. Some artists did and do make money. Sometimes it was prestigious but the barrier of entry was insanely high. And yes, getting to their level of skill and sometimes even getting access to the tools (look up how much a decent harp costs) was yet another enormous obstacle. Out of the entire pool of people who had artistic abilities, very few got access to tools and resources to be able to express their abilities. Out of those, even fewer could make money off of it while also doing artistic work that was deeply fulfilling and aligned with their talent. Occasionally, the stars would align and you would be lucky to be born in a time and place where you could get the schooling, the tools, the job that paid well enough and that didn't makwe your soul die because it alined with your natural creativity.
There are a lot of people who (I think) speak of AI as if democratizes access to the tools and therefore in their mind it should follow that there must be some market for their newlyfound creative expression. But if you ever seriously considered art as a career, you know that you will likely not have a market for your skills. It is difficult to make money even as a traditonal artist (as in a painter) or, say, a musician, god help you if you want to do mixed media, if you want to play avant garde jazz, prog rock, or Barocco music, if you want to be an actor, a playwright or a ballet dancer.
Some people (I assume those who are excited about the idea of being able to express themselves) seem to be bummed that the world rejects AI art as 'slop'. I am not going to say anything about effort, laziness, etc, I believe anything can be used to make art, even a toilet put in an exhibition hall (I like Duchamp, I like modern art, I like post-modern art, I like whatever-the-paradigm-we're-in-now-art -- metamodernism? I love art, I did see early pre-ChatGPT experiments with neural networks that moved me), but I have to say something that any aspiring artist must know -- you will not make money off your art. The people who will be making the 'human premium' that the article talks about, will be few, just like there are few of them now. AI artists will not make money of their art. Art is a terrible career choice, now and tomorrow.
It's still worth pursuing, in my opinion (as I said -- I love art), but there is little point of talking about its commercial viability. It will always be shit.
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).
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.
Yeah I understand your point because I've made music and design for 25 years the old "manual way", and there is definitely less friction with AI than there is the manual way.
But what interests me about AI is that it is possible to do things that you couldn't do before particularly in processing images. For these images I took photos of the bottles myself and used other images and the AI can place the camera anywhere in a scene and place objects anywhere in the scene, and things like that. You can create almost any image you can imagine with the right sources and the right prompt, and even here there is some friction because many images do end up looking like slop and you have to prompt it right to get something non-slop like out of it (though not always).
This ability to manipulate and process information is what makes AI interesting to me, although I'm not sure I adequately explained it. It feels like a new tool like Photoshop except across a different dimension. I feel like we've barely scratched the surface of what's possible to create.
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.
Overall, the perspective espoused here is bad for art. Art isn't hidden inside effort, you don't find it by saying "don't be lazy", and if it's inseparable from where it came from (which I think is pretty debatable, art travels through time and the world and can find interest), this is as true for what humans make as what AI makes.
I think the last bit gives the game away. This perspective is an otherwise content free way of saying "some art is interesting to me, and some isn't".
>saying "some art is interesting to me, and some isn't".
That applies to every single human being, including you, except maybe for art scholars.
I'm also not sure that art is actually a way that humans talk to each other. That assumes that the point is delivering some information, but a lot of artists talk about it as a compulsion, or something they do for themselves, or as being about understanding the world. I would actually say that many would say that it's definitively not about audience reception. Simultaneously, audiences interpret things of their own accord all the time. Unlike when sending a message, art is often most fully interacted with when you're engaging with things that weren't put there explicitly.
What do you see in AI art that you love or find interesting so much?
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.
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 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 public is underexposed to beautiful and interesting art, but who is to blame?
Art is a form of expression and/or communication. It's interesting because it shows us different perspectives, as well as things that overlap with ours. When you see a smiley face on your lawn and think it's a sign by the person you just fell in love with, and then find out the exact same artifact was in fact created by wind sweeping some branches together, you'll feel different about it. Similar for art. Or take jokes. A friend might find a joke of yours funny they might not find funny from a person they dislike. That's not "unfair" or "objectively wrong", just like rejecting the same artifact depending on source. If you don't understand this, you talking about "magic" is the cope.
> Its just that I haven't seen one of those in a while.
So that's the argument for making sure of that? Heh.
> Artists are concerned for their jobs; That I get.
The article isn't about artists being concerned for their jobs. This is about people rejecting slop.
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
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.
Art is not ‘supposed’ to be easy to do, if one believes that they see something important they can express via AI — they are free to do so and try to say smth to the world, AI tools are relatively accessible. It’s not guaranteed that the world will listen now, but that has always been the case — many great artists never got recognition during their lifetimes including those who worked in novel paradigms.
So no, they’re not losing anything. If the absence of the immediate mass approval of their art is the obstacle, well, then they don’t need to make that art.
If an artist has something to say with AI, they can just say it, no one is going to imprison them. Artists did that throughout the entire history (sometime even with the threat of being jailed), nothing changed in this regard with AI.
Art is hard not because of the tools but because you have to have something worthwhile to say (most people don’t) and you have to figure out a way how to get another human to listen, and also you have to hope that someone some day will listen because what you’re saying is true, even if it doesn’t sell today or ever.
P.s. Pop art actually directly talked about this relationship with the market and it’s interesting because of that, not only because the colors and shapes were fun to look at (but that too).
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.
In fact executives demand the opposite: token max to get the features out of the door faster, all in the same of closing that one last sale.
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.
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.
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
The html there's not really many places to be creative, a navbar with 3 sections, 5 links, a text card, a hero image, etc, all those are the same across thousands of projects - they're structured, there's not really many ways you can be creative about it. So in part seeing that "middle ground" design is indeed a filter for the lowest of the low effort (or not understanding how to prompt properly, or how the final thing comes together).
If you just want to prompt models and have them come up with more diverse styles that's also quite, or more, lazy - it would help if you understood (not you in particular) how the look of a web page comes together, because then you can direct the model properly - and if needed tweak the lose ends because at some point it's just easier and faster to edit the output yourself but you need to know what needs change and how. If you know how an html page comes together into the thing you see in the browser you can spec the model properly.
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.
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.
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.
Or if they do, they'll try and downplay by saying they used AI for some elements, but not most of them.
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!
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.
What’s your site?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but skills that allowed one to make software largely made one pretty employable in the last few decades.
Now, art skills do not make you employable. There are narrow industries where you can make money but throughout the entirety of human history, being an artist rarely provided any sort of economic security. Some artists did and do make money. Sometimes it was prestigious but the barrier of entry was insanely high. And yes, getting to their level of skill and sometimes even getting access to the tools (look up how much a decent harp costs) was yet another enormous obstacle. Out of the entire pool of people who had artistic abilities, very few got access to tools and resources to be able to express their abilities. Out of those, even fewer could make money off of it while also doing artistic work that was deeply fulfilling and aligned with their talent. Occasionally, the stars would align and you would be lucky to be born in a time and place where you could get the schooling, the tools, the job that paid well enough and that didn't makwe your soul die because it alined with your natural creativity.
There are a lot of people who (I think) speak of AI as if democratizes access to the tools and therefore in their mind it should follow that there must be some market for their newlyfound creative expression. But if you ever seriously considered art as a career, you know that you will likely not have a market for your skills. It is difficult to make money even as a traditonal artist (as in a painter) or, say, a musician, god help you if you want to do mixed media, if you want to play avant garde jazz, prog rock, or Barocco music, if you want to be an actor, a playwright or a ballet dancer.
Some people (I assume those who are excited about the idea of being able to express themselves) seem to be bummed that the world rejects AI art as 'slop'. I am not going to say anything about effort, laziness, etc, I believe anything can be used to make art, even a toilet put in an exhibition hall (I like Duchamp, I like modern art, I like post-modern art, I like whatever-the-paradigm-we're-in-now-art -- metamodernism? I love art, I did see early pre-ChatGPT experiments with neural networks that moved me), but I have to say something that any aspiring artist must know -- you will not make money off your art. The people who will be making the 'human premium' that the article talks about, will be few, just like there are few of them now. AI artists will not make money of their art. Art is a terrible career choice, now and tomorrow.
It's still worth pursuing, in my opinion (as I said -- I love art), but there is little point of talking about its commercial viability. It will always be shit.
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.
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.
But what interests me about AI is that it is possible to do things that you couldn't do before particularly in processing images. For these images I took photos of the bottles myself and used other images and the AI can place the camera anywhere in a scene and place objects anywhere in the scene, and things like that. You can create almost any image you can imagine with the right sources and the right prompt, and even here there is some friction because many images do end up looking like slop and you have to prompt it right to get something non-slop like out of it (though not always).
This ability to manipulate and process information is what makes AI interesting to me, although I'm not sure I adequately explained it. It feels like a new tool like Photoshop except across a different dimension. I feel like we've barely scratched the surface of what's possible to create.
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.
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.
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.