Why my Thoughts on AI Art are Complicated...

Introduction

Like a lot of angry artists right now: I am not a fan of AI art, and don't personally consider it "real art". Which makes sense as I love seeing creativity expressed in interesting ways.
BUT on the other hand: AI technology excites me a lot, I keep a close eye on it and do personally use it for various things like coding or general assistance.

Does this make me a hypocrite? What separates the "slop" from the "good" use cases for me? I ask myself these things a lot, but always struggle to find a conclusive answer.
Let's walk through my thought process in an attempt to reach a proper reason for my conflicting thoughts.

The process IS the art

Making art is a deeply creative process: the artist makes choices all the time - consciously or not - these choices are heavily influenced by their own life, social interactions and experiences.

An artist might not actively know why they placed that tree there, what made them order something that way or the reason they used those colours. But, they are the ones that chose to (subconsciously or not). Ask an AI artist and they can't explain why the AI gave that character 6 fingers - users of generative AI aren't making those micro-choices the same way.

Why does AI cross the line?

How come that the step to AI is the real "this is no longer art" step for me and many others? If we look back at history you may notice that GenAI really isn't the first time something like this has happened.

When photography was introduced many painters were mad because instantly being able to take a snapshot of the current moment was considered "cheating". Sound familiar?

We have major parts of our pipelines optimized away all the time - think the transition from traditional to digital animation - completely removing the need to redraw and scan a new picture for every frame was huge, but for the majority of people digital art is still art. So what makes AI any different?

Outsourcing the process

I think what truly marks AI as the "step too far" in your process is… well, that the process is almost completely outsourced! Sure, digital drawing is typically faster or maybe easier than drawing on paper, but you are still the one that is doing the drawing.

A photographer still has to choose the lens, stand out in the mud, and wait for the light to hit just right.
Yet, in most instances, using AI isn't just saving time on your work, it is removing a massive chunk of it.

Why that matters

To me, finding out a piece of art you like was AI generated is like finding out a magic trick is actually done with video editing. It doesn't change the end result, but it completely removes all enjoyment and appreciation I get out of it.

When I interact with some amazing creations, I don't just look at the end product. I see the little details: I notice how that colour choice draws the eye upward, I hear the way the instruments are stacked to make a punchy drop, I rewind animations to look at the smear frames, I ask myself "how/why did they do that?" all the time.
AI art often either doesn't have these touches, or there is no intentionality to them. The answer to all your questions and observations is usually "the model just made it like that". I can't trace it back to an intention, I can't find the humanity in it.

This is why the process matters so much to me and many others. Appreciating not just the end result, but what - and most importantly who - went into it is a massive part of what makes creating special. People can find value in art partly because it connects them to another conscious human experience. There might be humanity behind that AI prompt, but the model blurs it.

Mass consumption

AI media is often "consumed" exactly as generated, there is a decent amount of users that just type in a prompt, get back the results, and post them online without any changes.

In my opinion, a big factor that separates a use case like coding from others is that the output is not the thing being directly looked at for the end user interacting with it. For instance: almost nobody apart from the prompter goes to look at the generated code for some software (if anyone even looks at it at all). But when someone generates a video, 99% of the time that IS the end product intended to be engaged with.

What does the "consumption" aspect mean when placed under scrutiny though?
Do I think using AI for concept art is fine? That isn't used in the final product... What about programmatically generating a 3D model or SVG? Those still feel wrong to me, so it cannot just come down to "it is only meant to be looked at". Let's tackle it from another perspective:

Having control

While I feel humanity is often lost from AI use, there are ways to have more control over AI generated creations; you can write mega detailed prompts (and pray the AI can actually follow them), continuously make tweaks to the generated output and feed it back in to capture your vision, or use it to generate assets and fill out a scene.

Can these be considered actual art then? Sure there is more work being put in, there is an actual process, however it's still kinda like you're just building with pre-generated bricks. That doesn't instantly disqualify it from being art, yet I don't know how to feel about that. If everything is "sooo bad" according to me, I should probably explain what I use AI for myself.

How I use AI

I like using LLMs myself for things like coding, I can ask it questions about the code I'm working on, tab autocompletes finish the lines or functions as I type, heck - sometimes I even vibe code an entire script or app just to solve a niche issue I'm having.

Being able to create quick one-use/private programs to reinstall that thing that keeps getting deleted, compare and remove duplicate images in a folder or remake an entire roster app from scratch because I didn't like the one my school has is really cool!
Though I wouldn't feel comfortable yet releasing something that wasn't at least for the vast majority written or understood by me. Using AI to write code doesn't automatically make it slop, but if you're not careful it can be easy to end up with it.

When I write, it sometimes helps me to bounce back and forth with a model to catch any mistakes, oversights, plot holes or formatting issues.
Yet, I don't want the model to do the writing for me - that ruins it.

What makes it different

I make use of AI for things which are functional and malleable. Code can be beautiful, but it's mostly a means to an end and has to be "correct" to work. And for my writing I can tweak every tiny detail until it's truly "me".

While I think using AI for things like these is acceptable, I have my boundaries and I would hate using GenAI in my process for drawing, video creation, animating, composing, etc. I can't figure out what makes these strictly different.
One feels like a tool, the other like it replaces me... why?

What separates "tool" from "process"

When an LLM writes a bad function or a terrible sentence you just rewrite it. However, AI use for media is commonly destructive, in the sense that tiny edits are harder to make. So if it's just about control: what about something like tracing GenAI? Why do I hate that too?

I think going back to the writing example: if AI writes a sentence - and I don't copy paste it - but rewrite it word for word instead… Did I really "make" that sentence? No, I wouldn't say so, and I think if you took inspiration from an AI generated image and gave it your own spin (while I don't recommend doing that) that does seem fine to me in the stealing department.

The exceptions

What's strange is that even "tool like" AI uses in creative media can upset me. Generated textures in a game are just a tiny part of the whole world, they still don't sit right with me. Musicians use other people's samples all the time, but when those samples are made using AI it detracts value from the song for me too.

On the other hand: advanced brush stabilizers, scanning your mix to find good human made samples or noise/click removal for your recording. All that kind of stuff is fine to me, you don't replace what you do - you enhance it instead.

So what made those earlier examples bad? Either there is something bigger here than "the person creating it being in control", or I may have to come round to AI uses like these being acceptable.

Being your own favourite creator

Interestingly, it seems a lot of people who upload AI generated creative media don't really have a "AI artist" or "AI musician" they look up to or take inspiration from. They would rather say they are their own favourite creator. For example: in a post on the r/SunoAI subreddit, a user asks "Who are your favourite AI artists".
A good number of people replied to this post saying some variation of "me", many Suno users seem to create mainly for themselves.

Fascinating, many AI users are their own favourite creator, on a surface level this makes sense. AI allows them to make what they want without having to spend time learning the craft. On the other hand, plenty of human artists could gloat about everything and everyone that inspires them for hours.
People using AI often take inspiration from human artists or claim to not take inspiration at all, I notice that they don't seem too engaged in the creative community, or anything apart from their own work for that matter. This doesn't go for everyone using GenAI of course, interesting nonetheless.

Really makes me wonder if people in a world full of AI media would still seek out human creation for inspiration. What happens if a person only grows up on AI media? Human art carries traces of the people, cultures and experiences that created it. If future generations primarily consume media generated from existing media, what happens to that chain of inspiration? While I'd love to explore this at a later date. Those are questions so massive I don't think I can get into them right now... (maybe another blogpost???)

Creator or curator?

Let's zoom back out for a bit: No authors, artists, musicians, editors, modelers, developers or any other people were compensated for having their work be trained on. I don't think AI prompters can really be called the creators of the media they generate, when typically loads of the work done comes down to the model.

It's honestly more like a commission if you think about it.

When you commission a human illustrator, you write a brief, they make thousands of micro-decisions you never see, and the finished piece is legally and morally theirs. With GenAI, the model makes those micro-decisions, yet the interface still lets you hit "publish" under your own handle.

Even though commissioning an artist usually means you own the final work that you paid the artist for, I don't believe anyone can truly own AI generated media - if you had to scrape the entire publicly available internet to make your creation machine work, it is my belief that everything it spits out is for everyone.

Reasons people actually (should) hate AI

A massive flag pointing to why AI is almost universally hated by a large group of people is probably the greedy companies trying to make - and save - money using AI.

The hypecycle goes on and on, "CEO says AI helped company fire 40% of the workforce", "We don't need these artists anymore", "We can replicate your favourite musicians using AI". Their end goal is profit, and they do not care if you don't like AI as long as long as they can use it to get richer.

It can be easy to accuse artists and creatives of "being salty because they are getting replaced" - which yeah is a fair thing to be mad about - but it's also pretty reductive of other glaring issues with AI.

Not to mention all the ethical concerns like power/water consumption, threats of AGI, de-skilling, mental health impacts, and more.
I'm not getting into those here. But, these are the things both AI users and AI haters alike should be aware of and look into.

Otherwise let's try to reach a conclusion here.

So… is AI art "real art"?

Well, even after all of this: that's still a tough question...
AI reveals that a lot of people value results way more than process. How you use it (or if/when you think it is okay to use) still depends on your personal values.

I was trying to find a hard line where there is none. Like many people say: "art is subjective" - and yeah - human expression is literally baked into the concept. But to many people, art is just the end result, they don't care what went into it.
If they think that picture looks pretty, it's a good picture. If the song sounds good to them, it's a good song.

While I wouldn't say that is necessarily a "wrong" stance. You can't really try to argue semantics with someone if the thing you are arguing about has a completely different meaning to the other person.

Pointing out imperfections in generations is pretty reductive. A lot of models are more than capable of creating something that looks or sounds conventionally 'good' on the surface - it may not be perfect - but it doesn't look like the quality is going down any time soon.

Writing this has also revealed to me that it also doesn't make sense to scold someone who just wants some media, not necessarily "art". Thumbnails, promotional material, stock images, one off assets; all of these things can be considered art and have value, but to some they are just a means to an end - afterthoughts.

In the end, I shouldn't be the one telling you which forms of expression are valid, I can't tell you if it is all just "slop", you will have to draw your own line. My goal here was not to just give you my conclusion as fact - instead walk you through my thoughts as I figured out why it bothered me for myself.

AI is here to stay - I both believe that it does have its place in society, but that it should be regulated and carefully engaged with. We shouldn't try to be hateful against everything even hinting at the word AI, but we also shouldn't let the thing that makes us human be threatened by it.

Writing this all out has actually shifted my perspective. Hopefully I've convinced some of y'all to join me over here in the nuance corner too.