NOTE: This is way longer than I thought it would be so if you actually end up reading any of this I've sorted it by different sections you can skip through. I'm not sure if this is an opinion piece as much as it is venting, but it was intended to be a rant to let out my frustrations so I'm tagging it as venting even though it's formatted like a school essay.
1.) Why I care about this so much (and why we should all care so much about it)
I have been drawing ever since I was able to hold a pencil. I was probably drawing pictures in the womb. In other words, I have been drawing for all 18 years of my existence thus far. Although I'm not good, you don't have to be skilled to be an artist. I consider all people to inherently be artists. We have all created something at some point. So many aspects of the world itself is art. Fossilized dinosaur footprints are art. Natural rock formations are art. Any unintentional or intentional form of expression could be art. That was before AI slop blew up and proved it is possible for people to have absolutely no creativity once so ever. The point is that art is one of the most important things to me. Traditional is without a doubt my favorite, but it's so cool that we have all these different mediums. Traditional, digital, sculpture, woodworking, photography, film, and other entirely different forms of art like literature and music. This rant is going to be focused on visual art, but all forms of art are being affected by this slop epidemic.
Art has always been a key component of our existence. Just take a look at cave paintings, tens of thousands of years later, long after the people who made them have passed, their artistic expression still stands. The strange thing is that even though you may recognize when something is art, you can't really define what art is. It means something different to everyone. But at the core of it, art is expression. Art is something new formed by the elements around it. For people specifically, art is something created by humans. It's an expression of yourself and the things that influence your beliefs, preference, ideology, or something you just think looks cool. Usually for me it's something I think looks cool. But art, in my opinion, isn't the thing being presented. Art is how it's presented. You can have a thought, but your thought alone isn't art. The thought can be turned into art by making it something tangible. You can draw it, write about it, sing about it, or forget about it and go back to sleep.
3.) Generative AI is the death of creativity
One excuse AI bros like to pull is "art is expression and AI is just another thing you can use to express it." This fundamentally misunderstands what AI is and what art is. There is nothing artistic about asking chatgpt to generate you a picture of ronald mcdonald boxing chuck e cheese. You could've drawn ronald mcdonald boxing chuck e cheese, you could've commissioned someone else to draw ronald mcdonald boxing chuck e cheese, but instead you waste precious water and give more money to a corrupt industry so you can spit out an amalgamation of stolen artwork. Congratulations, you have no creativity or regard for the environment. You are also blatantly stealing from real artists by using generative AI because it is built entirely on theft. AI cannot create anything, it combs the internet and steals real human artwork without the artists' consent or knowledge and shoves it all into a blender. It doesn't take any effort or passion. There is nothing more soulless than AI slop.
All parts of the artistic process are what make the final piece personal. The inspiration, the originality, the process of actually creating it, and the trial and error from which you improve your skill over time. You don't learn without making mistakes and making mistakes is integral to being an artist. Arguably, drawing something is more fun than viewing the final result. And when you do get that final result you know what went into it. There is thought behind every aspect of a drawing. Except for Jackson Pollock paintings. But now I unironically think I've been too hard on Jackson Pollock, because at the very least it was a human who mindlessly poured buckets of paint onto a canvas. Jackson Pollock's splattered paint stains on a canvas is more of art than anything AI generates.
4. The artistic process
Art is the result of everything you have seen and experienced in life combined with your own personal viewing of those things and your own personal tastes. There is a difference between artists' using references and direct inspiration from works they appreciate and AI stealing millions of images with no thought or care because it is a soulless algorithm. For example, I love designing creatures. I am very passionate about spiders, so why not design a spidery creature. My favorite species is the red weaver ant mimicking jumping spider, how about we start with something very reminiscent of them. Assassin spiders are also pretty funky, let's take some elements from that, like their elongated chelicerae. What if we combined the scissor jaws of the ant mimic jumper and the extended chelicerae of the assassin spider? How about we modify the carapace to have the long neck-like structure of assassin spiders allowing room for these mighty grippers. Now it's starting to look like a stick bug with a spider body. This is kind of reminding me of mantidflies, let's throw in some mantis claws and long antennae. Now we've got a couple of unique thumbnails, let's work down from that and use our creative input to take certain elements from each design and add brand new elements. Let's keep working our way down until we finally feel satisfied with something. Let's experiment, try adding something we never thought could possibly work and we might end up pleasantly surprised. Maybe we give it wings and a tail. Maybe just the wings. What if we gave him a top hat? Let's start thinking less about aesthetics and more about the science and evolution of our critter here which can influence the design. What does it eat, what environments does it live in, what is its behavior, lifestyle, etc.
This is all a very dialed down and surface level example but I'm just trying to show how human input goes a long way in creating art. AI has none of that. The process of generating AI slop is more like this: type a few words and wait for your AI to merge some related stolen images using a massive data center built in the middle of a small town (don't worry, we only had to demolish half a neighborhood to build it). Maybe it'll take a maximum time of 2 minutes. Ta-da, you have some fresh AI slop you can proudly show it to the world so everyone knows you are a complete loser. Wasn't that so much fun? I'm glad I replaced all my critical thinking with AI. This surely has no terrifying implications for humanity. AI bros are pathetic but it's also really quite sad to see people sell their souls to AI corporations because "It's the future!" "Who cares if we're making earth inhabitable? I'm sure we'll colonize Mars soon." "Human creativity is kind of boring anyway. Why would I draw something when I can just steal from people who already have?"
5.) The only good AI (NOT generative)
There is no place for AI in creative works, period. Generative AI has no place in human society. I do support AI in the medical field being used to help doctors do their job more efficiently like detecting health anomalies early on before they become a problem. You might have heard about AI alerting doctors to a cancer in the early stages of development where they were able to remove it years before it would become serious. That is absolutely incredible and a net positive for humanity. It could save so many lives. But that kind of AI is completely different from generative slop. It shouldn't need to be said, but I have seen AI bros using this as an excuse to defend generative AI despite there being a very obvious distinct difference between the two. I felt like mentioning this because I am specifically ranting about AI in artistic spaces. It's unfortunate that it seems our priority is in advancing generative AI instead of the AI that can save people's lives, but there's so much more money to made in the industry of feeding off artists by stealing their work then their jobs instead of investing money into increasing our species' survival rates from horrible diseases. It's a no brainer, why would we do something good for society when we can become even richer by being evil? That is a trend that has existed ever since homo sapiens became a more sophisticated and civilized people. Greed. I'm not really making any ground breaking revelations here by saying something as wild and unbelievable as billionaires don't have our best interests at heart, but I'm still gonna say it since that's basically what this whole rant is about.
6.) Conclusion
So, where are we now? For me, I feel completely hopeless. I am furious. There is so much corruption and evil rapidly becoming normalized and accepted. There are people who actively support the growing AI slop industry. There are people who don't see any value in human creativity even though everything they rely on to survive is the result of human creativity. Your house? Human innovation. Your clothes? Human innovation. Your education? Human innovation. We are all sitting in a work of art right now. And yet the same people whose entire life has come to this point because of human innovation are the same people who are actively fighting against human innovation. AI cannot create anything. It steals things that have already been created.
There is a lot more that I can say but this is longer than the bee movie script and there is not a single person on the entire planet who is going to read this whole thing, so I'm gonna end it here.
TL;DR: Art is an integral part of humanity and generative AI goes against everything art is. There is no passion, skill, effort, or creativity that comes from AI slop. I have microscopic hope for the future if we continue going down this route.
