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.
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.