How AI slop gives me hope
About the "democratization" of art
Hey everyone!
When thinking about what topics to cover in my newsletters, one thing keeps popping up in my notes: the inevitable Gen AI. I’ve mostly ignored it in here so far — even though every chat and artist roundtable eventually leads to it — because, honestly, I’m a little bored and tired of the conversation. I also don’t want to become another artist ranting about AI.
And I won’t rant today either.
Okay…maybe just a little.
I posted a short story on Instagram a few days ago, and it got a huge pile of responses. Most people agreed with me (well, it is my bubble after all), and there were also the usual suspects who told me to “adapt and move with the times”.
There’s a lot more behind this than that quick, baity little post, so I thought I’d give you some deeper thoughts here (and gladly discuss further in the comments, if you’d like).
Right now, artists can be a pretty nervous and thin-skinned bunch. AI threatens to disrupt an industry that’s always leaning into being a bit precarious. And I know it’s not just professionals — it's threatening to disrupt a hobby that many people cherish, even if that’s just making Pinterest a mess for casual users.
So when the web (and Whatsapp groups) are flooded with AI-generated Ghiblification, toy figures, and whatever the next passing fad is, it can feel like one rock after another thrown at an already bruised group of artists.
The Democratization of Art?
Sam Altman calls this the democratization of art, because it supposedly makes art accessible to everyone (as if it wasn’t already?). But to me, most of it feels like the most boring, lazy, and uninspired kind of content. Stuff designed to go to waste. If this is what the art world looks like after it’s been democratized, I honestly find it... kind of hopeful.
At first, I was offended. Then I was just bored by seeing those generated images everywhere. I definitely can be a part of the thin-skinned bunch as well 😅. I reached a point where I thought: This isn’t even art — there’s zero creativity or invention behind it.
The gen AI video people seem to talk most about right now is not something with a whole new storyline, it’s just someone re-styling a Lord of the Rings cinema trailer. I totally get how much fun it must be to upload a photo of your dog or your kid, or something pop cultural, and press a button. But: there’s no actual creative work in that.
I’m a realist. There won’t be a single day where AI suddenly takes over everything and disrupts industries. It’s already happening. But what reassures me is that a vast majority of people still just runs after trends like sheep, instead of coming up with something on their own, They don’t innovate. And that confirms for me: we will still need creative minds. People who invent, reimagine, push things forward. This is a chance I firmly believe in.
How to deal with all this in a non-salty way?
Of course, there’s more to Gen AI than just content trends: data privacy, copyright issues, philosophical dilemmas, and let’s not forget the outrageous energy consumption. Even if we get the fascination and the upsides, it can still all feel a bit soul-crushing.
You can rage and rant about it—but honestly? I’d rather just channel that energy into: art. I’ve seen artists post their handmade action figures in their own style, and others use cartoons to share funny, sarcastic takes at AI. My own work is mostly not very political or satirical, though I couldn’t help but start scribbling one of my vending machines with a nice AI generator:
I’ll be working on this piece throughout the week—hopefully finished before the fad disappears 😄. If you’d like to follow the process more closely, I’ll be sharing some behind-the-scenes shots on my Patreon soon!
I hope this mindset may help to see things in a little different light. Even though we need to deal with the change that’s inevitable and see how to interpret our profession in the future, I like to keep a constructive view.
Let me know if you’d like to read more takes on AI in the future. I’d really be glad to hear, as I know the internet is already too full of that stuff right now.
Cheers and thanks for reading today!
Stefan
Yeah I feel pretty much the same as you do.
I find that the people who find gen AI most appealing are the ones who have very poor drawing and writing skills (and very poor comprehension skills in the area they suddenly found gen AI to be extraordinarily illuminating to them), not even enough skills to distinguish between powerful art/writing/knowledge and mediocre art/writing/etc. And they're so poor in the field that they aren't even self-aware of how bland and tasteless the generated work is, and how well it's reflected in the lifeless "art" they've generated.
I'm also planning to write about it another time
I found a person online (a friend had forwarded one of this person's articles, but I noticed the ChatGPT credit in the footnotes) who was actually an economist pretending to describe himself as a cartoonist & someone who had written for decades. This person was talking about his enthusiasm for AI and how bored he had been after writing for decades and now AI made it so much fun for him. I said to him that it really shows even more that his work is not interesting, since he admits he was so bored about it. If someone loves thinking about something, they would not be bored writing about it. He even admitted that he could not read complex books without AI, because he said that AI had been immensely helpful to him for understanding such books. He accused me of being anxious when I described his Studio Ghibli style generated AI slop as lifeless & bland, lol. 🤨
I feel sorry for him because people who are most enthralled by AI are the ones who have never made a meaningful essay or art piece in their entire lives. He had a profile on an online newspaper in Australia, but such people have to produce regular bland content on schedules for the mainstream.
Another person who was speaking to me in real life about how wonderful AI was, was saying that it helped her to understand the condition on her leg surgery and how useful it was for learning languages. Well I'd already learnt Latin and now I'm learning Russian, and I have regularly found that it is much more fun & delightful to talk to teachers and other specialists in real life on languages, sciences, arts, and whatnot, than to talk to a gen AI who is bland and gets things wildly wrong about X% of the time.
This indicates to me that generally people who are interested in gen AI:
a) have poor skills in a certain area and don't know how to improve them, so they find gen AI to be extraordinarily impressive even though it produces mediocre slop
b) have not expressed an original opinion or line of thinking in their entire lives, because gen AI is based on probabilities (it produces likely sentences, lines of code or pixels based on probabilities of others' work). If you had an original opinion or original art style that is not in mainstream media, you would find gen AI deeply unimpressive – but such people enthralled by gen AI don't have original opinions or art styles.
c) don't know how to find interesting people in real life who they can learn from on the topics that they are suddenly interested in
So overall I have the same mood as you – I feel even better about the creative industry because there is so much need for people with real creative passion that want to keep sharing things with the world.
an important piece, Stefan. First time I saw AI generated art, I was mad, then critical, then realizing it was gonna happen no matter what. I do experiment with AI and art creation, just to understand it, but I still prefer creating everything by hand.
And yeah, ghibli and toy figure creation in a second is just lazy sludge. Here's to hoping there will be enough people in the world to hire and work with artists.