Sophie Labelle | Instagram | Bluesky
Transcript
four frame comic.
first frame shows a typical AI poster that says : All chatgpt flyers look the same, especially with this font! the text above it reads : I won’t go to your event if the poster was made by AI.
second frame shows a still frame from a Hank Green youtube video. text above reads : I won’t read your post or email and I won’t watch your video if they were made with AI.
third frame shows an AI restaurant poster of burgers and chicken in a window. text reads : I won’t patronize your shop or restaurant if it is advertised with AI.
last frame shows an MS paint window with badly written : Your bad art is better than AI slop. text reads : if you can’t take the time or make the effort to interact with me yourself, then why should I do it?
The restaurant AI slop is the worst… even a shitty cell phone picture of your food is better using AI on your menu… i truly dont understand
I love the high effort approach I saw in Japan, where they make little models of the food and put them in display cases (of course not all restaurants but some)
I would take Word (or LibreOffice Writer) bullet point list with prices and ingredients list over “pretty” AI menu at this point
Online clothes shopping has been rendered completely unviable now.
On amazon, sometimes I want to see the four different colours something is available in, but it’s the exact same image colourised four different ways, so you all you know is that it doesn’t look quite like the picture.
I love this story.
“Yum, slop” is the title of a Reddit post from June 30 that has more than 670 upvotes and features a close-up picture of the Lozanos’ menu display. “I reckon utilizing AI imagery for the storefront menu board doesn’t correlate with a long tenured small business in this neighborhood,” the poster commented.
Another wrote “I’d rather see s—tty photos taken in a light box with a 1 megapixel camera than whatever this AI s—t is supposed to be.” Others called the focaccia in the image akin to a “loofah” or “lung,” said the “Frappuccino” drink looked like it was wearing “fishnet stockings” and wrote that the slaw topping a pulled-pork sandwich reminded them of “the mutated cordyceps from the Last of Us.’’
This post may just inspire me to finally open Gimp and make some truly horrendous comics.
You should also check out Krita. David Revoy, artist of Pepper and Carrot, has a ton of great tutorials on using it.
What’s the main difference between the two? Also I will likely be literally drawing stick figures, so this might just be academic at this point.
I actually used to have a lot of fun making art in Photoshop back in HS, but it’s been a long time.
Krita is a powerful, free and open source, digital animation tool where Gimp is a mainly focused on image manipulation.
Check it out, it’s pretty cool and it’s got a huge community behind it. It’s also free.
I think krita classifies itself as a digital painting software. It does have animation tools in it.
Follow up question: I made something but when I try to post it here it fails with an error message of “too many pixels.” I assume the file size is too big? I didn’t really know what to set the dimensions to when I made the file. I tried making it a lower quality jpeg but it doesn’t seem to be helping.
Any idea what’s wrong or how to fix this on either Lemmy’s end or in Krita?
So, I looked into it and .world uses the defaults for photo-rs. Looking at the default config file for photo-rs these appear to be the image hosting limits.
[media.image] max_width = 10000 max_height = 10000 max_area = 40000000 max_file_size = 40What unit is max file size? KB? MB?
I think if you use a pen the dynamic controls work better, and brushes are less of a pain to set up. I prefer to draw in krita and then fuck around in gimp.
If you’re used to Photoshop, Krita is way easier to use, the UI is almost exactly the same. Unlike Gimp, it doesn’t try to re-invent the doorknob.
I love horrendous comics, if the premise is entertaining and you keep working on it then you’ll get better at it too.
But then it wouldn’t be bad art anymore.
Truly the worst outcome
I can only upvote you once. But imagine I held down on the screen for a reaaally long time when I did it.
Do it. We want to see them.
I mean, we’ve had gimp for free for ages now ffs.
Just ask your nerdy cousin to make something already. You know, that thing they call human interaction? Come to think of it, if you had more human interaction you might also get laid so you don’t have to rely on a shitty ai gf.
Don’t try stuff with your cousin though ffs.
Yeah, I have tried explaining this to people. We have been able to do all of these things for decades with minimal effort (and without destroying the planet while handing it over to fascist billionaires)
The issue: non-nerds have never even heard of a gimp, and the majority of people now do not use a computer. Try finding one young person who does most computing on a laptop, let alone a desktop (no one uses desktops any more. Of my ~15 friends/acquaintances I can think of, I am the only one with desktops). It’s all phonephonephone (a phone loaded with spyware, to boot).
Don’t try stuff with your cousin though ffs.
So Alabama just doesn’t get good graphics design then?
Can I try stuff with their cousin, or is that also off limits?
One man’s trash, is another man’s cousin?
But… if that cousin is hot and pretty into it? Just asking for a cousin
This is the problem… people tried
“I need an icon for my twitch channel”
“I’m an artist, I don’t work for free” /r/choosingbeggers
Nobody said that your nerdy cousin should do it for free. Give him/her $10 or something.
This is why AI art is so incredibly popular
Fuck my nerdy cousin, AI will do a bang-up job for free
AI art is currently free because it’s subsidized by the AI companies who are spending investors’ money to try to buy marketshare and mindshare. When that subsidy ends, you’ll have to pay for it too.
Consider that normal people don’t think like us nerds. They choose the shiny-looking version, not the handmade one.
I think that’s changing. Nerds are often the vanguards, but the rest of the culture catches up later.
This is why all these people are enjoying the smooth motion TVs. Shiny, not human and not better.
I sincerely hope you were omitting an /s there, because I haven’t heard of people who like those.
All my friends parents think they’re amazing. I wish I had a /s to throw in but its the bane of my existence.
Ouch. Glad I don’t watch TV anymore. My sympathies.
Note:
frames one and three should not exist anyway. They are advertising. It was already malign before generative AI.
And Hank Green, despite the morons trying to sound clever by saying he did, did not use an LLM to write the script for the insert segment in that interview. He used a phrase, which was already a common diplomatic phrase, in a completely normal way. The phrase has made its way into ShartGPT outputs because it was already common, and people desperate to seem like they aren’t fooled by LLM output are grasping at straws to find things to point at as ‘tells’ and turning into anti-tech-priests, consulting auguries to check for demons in the words of strangers.
There are no nice, neat tells. There are dozens of models, each with dozens of versions, each with some things that MIGHT serve as a tell, but you can’t keep track of them, and the right prompt will disrupt them enough to ruin the tell, so you can give up. You can’t reliably tell. That’s the whole point. Enjoy living in the derealized, boiling world our annointed leaders have made. Hug your loved ones.frames one and three should not exist anyway. They are advertising. It was already malign before generative AI.
Advertising as a concept is needed, though. Telling someone to come to your house on Friday is technically advertising.
We certainly need to regulate the shit out of mass advertising, but I always found the small flyer on a landline pole very homely.
Inviting someone over is not advertising.
describe or draw attention to (a product, service, or event) in a public medium in order to promote sales or attendance.
Meets the definition. I just want to make sure we make distinctions between general ideas and why we actually hate the concept in the modern day.
Telling someone to come to your house
public medium
An ad is an ad. It being a bad idea doesn’t change that fact 🤷
You don’t see the contradiction in those two concepts? I was hoping you’d take a look and figure it out but let me explain, and hope you get it.
‘Telling someone to come to your house’ specifies someONE to whom you are directing the invitation. Public communication is broadcast communication, not in the sense of radio waves but in the sense of ‘casting’ (throwing out) the media to a ‘broad’ (non-specific) audience. You are trying to combine two contradictory levels of specificity.
You don’t see the contradiction in those two concepts?
No, not really.
I was hoping you’d take a look and figure it out but let me explain, and hope you get it.
Why would I when you didn’t give me the same grace? from what I said upstream
I just want to make sure we make distinctions between general ideas and why we actually hate the concept in the modern day.
Well here we are arguing definitions and ideas and not the reasons within these modern ads are oppressive. Not talking about the algorithmic nature of mass surveillance and privacy breaches needed to power modern ads, but “no this ad is different” surface level thinking. But if you want to talk about it, so be it.
‘Telling someone to come to your house’ specifies someONE to whom you are directing the invitation
Okay. make it a group you’re at. Throw a flyer on a telephone pole. Same deal. We had ads before the interet.
You are trying to combine two contradictory levels of specificity.
I don’t think the levels change the intent and definition of an ad. You want to tell people about a thing, you use something to tell them thing.
Love how derpy they made Hank Green look
Seems like a bit of an overreaction to lump him in here tbh. Didn’t he only use AI to help do research for a single video? And decided to not bother again because it sucked?
I think he was downplaying his use. He said he was getting addicted to the “dopamine” hit it gave him, which sounds like he was using it more than he claims. I don’t believe his scripts weren’t at least partly written by AI.
Also web articles. The moment I see the obvious AI tells I leave and block the website from search results.
I find it really hard to even read AI text. It’s exhausting, like being on Zoom for too long.
It’s something like decision fatigue. You’re constantly having to criticize every word because you know it will make stuff up out of whole cloth. Reading something you’ve verified to have come from a trusted expert or even just a human being is far less stressful.
Yup. AI writing also tends to place emphasis in really weird places and use it waaaay too much. Every single point is the Biggest and Most Profound Thing EVER!!
It also tends to use rhetorical structures that have a flat distribution of importance, surprise, etc. across all sentences. Natural language flows, it knows how to lead you to its conclusion because it has a clear idea of what it wants to say. AI writing tends to be more like an easter egg hunt or a mr beast video in that each sentence changes the direction of the point that’s being made. It kind of ends up jerking you around. I suspect this is because that type of writing has a very small chance of generating into a corner, because it can always pivot. Each individual point stays clear and coherent, but the overall structure ends up disjointed.
Never been more self-conscious of my language as I am right now lol, but I’m not going back to edit anything. It is how it is
Yup.
It’s getting sickening isn’t it.
Which is a good thing.
We shall indeed return to,
(as was put in that star trek movie, something like)
“We believe when you get a machine to do the work of a man you’ve taken something away from the man”
all the faster, having seen where that goes.
… Or we could build skynet and the matrix, 1984 and brave new world, a new, falling into unconscious farmed meatsacks, utterly atrophied of any ability, rendered completely dependent on your abuser. That’s an option too.
How much poison, how fast? Enough to grow insensitive? Enough to get past how sickening it is? Well, many may keep believing it’s all good productivity at their fingertips, at their lips even, upon mere utterances, wishes catered for. Oh, except that bit that was wrong. Oh, and then needing to mend the rest of it too, because none of it was right really. Oh, and then there’s so much more that can be done. Oh, but then none of it is ever done quite correctly too. Oh lets just accept the slop, getting too exhausted by all the extra work. … How soon before we’re all out of the delusions, realising it’s not even fulfilling its marketing’s selling-point claims of helping our productivity.
I got an LLM to help me expedite an idea I had for a text editor written in fish with standard utils, and that was great, really exciting to see it come together, and what a great learning expedition too, as I was reading more lines of [bad] code per day than I had in the entire prior 10 years of using fish. I managed to wrestle the LLM to get it right enough, and incremented my way through it. Though, several times, I burned through over 30 back-and-forth with the LLM, just to get it to do simple things correctly. … Long story short, I burned out, fast, deep, and hard, in a month (and stupidly pushed on for a month yet trying get one more feature completed… which it was even more stubborn on). … How fast could I have accomplished similar, by just learning how to do it myself first, without the extra steps of seeing hundreds of ways not to do it? And how fast would it have felt? (answer: almost no time at all, engaged in the moment). Instead of a very long hard slog. And with all that wax-on, wax-off, I’d have it in muscle memory better too. And, it’s fair progress when you already know how, and can indeed just expedite a tedious portion, and check it’s done right, from your explaining how to do it right. It’s much worse when trying to learn from a teacher who is constantly hallucinating and leading you astray.
And that’s for code… that’s one thing… where utility and correctness are typically easily in a greater ratio to creativity. But pure art…
I tried it once there too.
There’s an image, an idea I’ve had, since around 1999, and have drawn several times in several forms… a sort of meek, mad, maker themed, where there’s a body of a sheep (the meek), a tail of a wasp (the mad), and the wings of a butterfly (the maker)… for a sort of wise humility and gentleness, but with a powerful proactive protective aggressive potential, and a beautiful subtle creative proliferative bounty… idk, words, don’t really do it justice… I’ll just show you… so… Here’s a crappy version I doodled in gimp:
and then, after trying (I think over) 30(?) “AI” image generator tools, several of which, trying again for another 30 times, and failing to get any of them to do the artwork anywhere near right, eventually getting to the point where I was feeding them that version of the image and they were still failing to get it right, so at least another 30 itterations yet, and it eventually, with a lot of bickering and rewording of prompts from me, produced:
… which I still had to lop off the 5th leg from.
And, for all that effort… [remember, faffing through hundreds of completely wrong]
Where’s the expressive nuance?
There’s none.
It’s dead.
It’s so dead. Flat. Empty.
And it’s killing us.
So yeah… [excuse the expressive language, but, vital to express:]
“PLAY FROM YOUR FUCKING HEART!”
and to paraphrase
“YOU’RE FUCKING RIGHT! NOT THOSE FUCKERS
ON TVRUNNING AI, TELLING YOU WHAT TO THINK! YOU’RE FUCKING RIGHT!”Thanks Bill Hicks.
We’ll never find quality parity, and if it ever does, then the nightmare dystopia will have manifest itself fully, far beyond the alarm bell of the atrophying skill and beginning of the acceleration of degeneracy to total collapse, for so long as we chase the money and the reductive and the productive and believe the fairy tale lies of marketers trying to take every last thing from us.
How much already, known and unknown, is our expression curtailed by:
Computer says no.Time to relax into persistently thrusting ourselves into our own work of art.
(Interestingly, some significant overlap in this as from what I saw this morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaXNGyqgoMM (crap title, touches on far broader themes). Especially the clip from the writer, starting at 30:52 … Beautiful insight, bolsters the point of the OP).
… Anyway… Let me leave this comment on that friendly rousing note…
PLAY FROM YOUR FUCKING HEART!!!
:)
Yeah, your version looks cool, and the AI version looks hilarious. It’s like some fever dream.
That isn’t really the point, though. If somebody had the right prompt, they could make something that looked like yours. The point is that you created it. Having to pick up a stylus or a mouse and then drawing onto the screen aren’t obstacles to making the image; they’re part of the process that makes it worthwhile. It isn’t the same experience as begging and cajoling an LLM to make the thing for you.
The process of drawing the version(s) I’ve drawn, deeply fulfilling, improved my abilities.
The process of wrestling an LLM to draw it for me, a Sisyphusian torment, atrophied my abilities.
So, how is therapy
Whaat? I didn’t read it fully but what?
Something about using an LLM to make art and wanting people to appreciate them for that.
I get it, and I do somewhat agree. But at the same time, AI helps me to execute creative tasks I couldn’t normally do and some things I can, but AI saves time.
But I don’t just accept slop. I take the time to polish to get the results I want. It’s still my idea and my vision, I just need a bit of help. This allows me to get results fast and fail faster. I can spend weeks in blender in my spare time building what I want, and I still do for some things.
Why does it matter? Like I understand legitimately selling something as art and it’s AI made is bullshit. But you’re not selling your menu as art, or youkids birthday invitation, and you wouldn’t have paid a graphic designer anything to make it either way. All it’s doing in these cases is narrowing the gap between what a skilled artist can do an a random person. Even as someone who was a graphic designer, if I can spend 30 seconds typing prompts for my kids birthday vs an hour making invitations why wouldn’t I? It isn’t like a I’m screwing a client over by making my son’s birthday invitations in AI. I’m just saving an hour of my day.
They use the shitty ai pics for food and it honestly looks so unappetizing
I don’t think i want to visit place that slap a banana with glue to board, put a million dollars price tag, and called that thing art either to be fair.
My point is your art must be good first, it is fine if it worse than ai though.
The idea is, id rather your band poster be made in msPaint than an AI.
Im not spending millions of dollars for the poster, but the music itself might be a different story
The global “art” scene is a money laundering scheme.
Specifically talking about so called “high art” rather than your typical social media or personal website artist
What if I use AI to generate images that would be as bad as if I did it by hand?
Read the comic again, because the answer is clear.
The market is saying something different. To the outside, you look like an old man screaming at the kids on your lawn.
From my “outside”, you look like a tech bro pushing the new NFT’s.
I spent a little bit but not too much time on this, I hope you enjoy it.
Every generation that decides a new image machine is rotten thinks it noticed first. It didn’t, and there are receipts.
Grant Taylor’s essay “The Soulless Usurper” walks through how the art world greeted early computer art, and the complaints are the same ones being made about generative images right now: mechanically sterile, nobody actually decided anything, a machine getting slipped into a chair reserved for the artist. This you?
Taylor documents sabotaged machines and physical attacks on artists in the late '60s and early '70s, plus a long tail of milder stuff — eye-rolling, flat refusal to call it art at all — running from the medium’s start in the 1960s to the early '90s. His verdict: computer art was “possibly the most maligned art form of the twentieth century.”
Two dates worth holding together. That period is half a century behind us, and the takes aged badly — the plotter drawings critics wouldn’t call art hang in museums now. And the essay came out in 2012, a decade before Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. That’s what makes it useful: Taylor isn’t arguing about AI. He’s describing the previous fight, written before anyone had a stake in how the comparison would land.
Source: Grant Taylor, “The Soulless Usurper: Reception and Criticism of Early Computer Art,” in Mainframe Experimentalism, ed. Higgins & Kahn (UC Press, 2012), p. 18.
Thanks for taking the time to put together this viewpoint and sourcing your argument.
I disagree with the comparison to digital art. Computer generated art takes skill, effort, and an artistic eye to succeed. Not just anyone can pick up a stylus or mouse and make good art, though it is a bit more accessible than some traditional mediums.
AI on the other hand requires no effort or skill on behalf of the creator. Furthermore, any artistic style is just mimicry. AI models have scraped real artists work without permission and is being used to slap together plagiaristic content, no accreditation of any kind to the source.
It took less time than you think for exactly the reason you might guess. I guess I just see a different ‘brush’.
I’m glad you disagree. I’m fortunately old enough to remember being told that digital art wasn’t real art, and do be alive today where nobody cares, oil painting is cool, brushing up your oil painting in GIMP is also cool, using GIMP alone, still cool.
Just take your same argument and fast forward 30 years and you’ll get ahead.
There are undiscovered art forms and new/reset expectations just around the corner. The first real artist (with real artistic genius) to adopt the tools is going to be in every MOMA around the world.
Your mistake is in positing that the MOMA is in any way relevant at this juncture.
You’re conflating ideation with creation.
Critics disliked Van gogh in his time too. And he used all the traditional kit.
Art had a sort of schism once photography took off. Pro-ai art seems to get stuck on one side of it. Traditional art had a long, long run of ‘good art’ being well composed and skillful reproductions of realism: people, places, events—with a few visual metaphors for spice.
But then came photography. And all those people using art to look back in time had options, cheaper and accessible options. The demand for the skill to make precise replicas nearly collapsed.
What has sustained was not the technical method of making art, but the expressiveness of the artist. The spice becomes the meal. Things become more referential, abstract. It envokes states of mind often contextual to the times and circumstances the art was produced, and drawing on concepts outside of the image itself. It’s not just about making pretty pictures from paint, charcoal, or photoshop.
Once you have the dadaists, Duchamps and Pollocks running around, arguments about ‘correct’ techniques to make art are always going to be shortlived. It’s not the advancement of technology that people question. Longish ago most of us collectively decided method didn’t really matter, intention did.
If you scrolled through your camera roll would you consider it art? Can you use ai to quickly copy a technique? Yes. Can it be applied critically to success? Maybe. But if you outsource the practical skill and contextual knowledge that makes good, deliberate art, what are the odds that happens?
I think it is very interesting, that because of photography (and later photo editing) the realistic art has indeed lost part of its core value. Now, if you see a fully photorealistic picture, you will assume it is just a photograph, unless you are told the story of, how some artist spend thousands of hours to make it, after perfecting their skills for years. The effort becomes the defining, important thing, not what the result looks like.
![Your bad art is better than AI slop [Sophie Labelle]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c2feca8b-da2b-4e53-9ec3-04b436e86a0d.webp){kind=link}