people aren’t comfortable with their own disinterest in things. they don’t want to make art but they want to want to. they can’t make themselves want to. but that’s not ok with them. but they imagine it would feel good to have made art
i think these people are in a real distressing crisis of identity. they feel like they are supposed to have dreams and ideas and creative urges and they just don’t. they think they want a shortcut to where they’re trying to go, but there’s no such place. but it’s ok to not dream?
i kind of get it. i don’t want to learn guitar, or i’d be doing it. but i want to want to. i have an interest. i have two guitars i fuck around on. but i’m never mad i’m not good at it. i don’t want a shortcut. i don’t want a robot that makes sounds i can say i made
they do tell us this pretty plainly, really, when they call real artists elitists, or elite. they think that status is aspirational. there must be a big gap, where they’re taught that an artist is this valuable thing to be, but not why or how you do it or that you should do it
that’s pretty antithetical to art. the wanting to Be something rather than Do something. you only really get that when you don’t know your own motivation. it doesn’t feel good, we’ve all probably been there, groping in the dark for something you don’t know what
i think these guys are in the long run as harmed as anyone by it – these false answers to questions you’re still trying to figure out how to ask yourself, which are hard enough to answer, and with this interference might become impossible. malign thoughts you will have to unthink
so you end up into this ai art junk because you “want to do art” but you don’t. you don’t. you don’t. or you would. because you can. and you know that, right? or maybe not? because people only ever told you that artistic talent is an amazing rare gift? but artists don’t say that
there’s not a gulf between artists and non-artists. plenty of non-artists love and appreciate art very deeply. the folks into “ai art” get the worst of it all – they don’t make it, they don’t get it, they just look at it and yearn vaguely. i can’t think this is really their fault
i hate all this shit, but i also want to grab by the shoulders every one of these little idiot dweebs who says “i can’t make art without this” and go yes you can, you always could, idiot, you’ve got the same gear as the rest of us. you’re one of god’s shitty little creatures
the foundation of such a method is love. i love you, you fucking dipshit. blocked and reported
in reply to @joewintergreen’s post:
Feels like they want the praise of making Art, because being a capital A Artist has some sort of value, but they don’t want to like… “waste their time on it” being bad/getting better/or the “want to want to”. They want the praise with none of the effort.
At least that’s how some of the over-defensiveness/calling artists Elitists scans to me. They see Artists being put on a pedestal of some sort, the praise, the Engagement on social media, and they want it, but don’t want to give up the hobbies they actually care about.
Honestly, after reading this I think I get it. I too have ideas I’d like to see made actual art in the world; I don’t want to draw them, I’ve tried to learn how to draw before and it’s just not my thing, but I want to have drawn them. It also must be really cool to have people liking your art.
But, of course, if you don’t enjoy the process it’s pointless to go through all the work, but instead of coming to peace with that part of yourself and save money to commission the ideas you can’t get rid off, “AI art” has the appearance of being the cheap/free no effort solution to this dilemma.
I just want to take their hands and tell them that it’s okay to do shitty art for fun, if the idea of getting good at it is too daunting. And that it’s okay to recognize our time is finite and to enjoy other things you actually want to do.
[Cooper watches you walk away] “Joe’s path is a strange and difficult one…” – and I agree 1000% with your thoughts here.
I think part of this is about accepting the finiteness of the self. I am almost certainly well more than halfway through my time on this planet. There are a lot of things I wished I could have done, things I could have learned. And I will manage to do some of them, hopefully the ones that I feel would most fulfill and enrich me as a human being. But the stuff I don’t get around to, I can’t get too sad about. That’s a nearly infinite reservoir of possible regret, and unlike so many of the regrets fate saddles us with, these you can usually simply opt out of.
And it’s certainly not worth pretending that I did actually get around to those things, when I didn’t. That would be like lying that I speak a language or play some instrument that I can’t really… to, what? Impress someone at a party? I want them to be impressed with (well, I’d settle for just “like” / “tolerate”) the person I actually am, not some fabrication.
So I think AI generators are mostly things that help you pretend, pretty unconvincingly, that you are infinite, did everything, knew everything. But the beauty of a life is in its finiteness, its specificities, its utterly unique rainbow scribble across time and space.
I wish I enjoyed drawing, but I don’t. It sucks every time and it never becomes fun or easy. But I do have ideas I want other people to see. So I pay artists to draw for me. Its ethical and surprisingly affordable.
But I totally get it, I get why someone would say “I don’t care about the process, I just want to be seen”. I wish ‘AI art’ wasn’t built on an ethics nightmare or else I’d probably support it just for that one use case.
Fellow Twin Peaks enjoyer spotted
i mean im not gonna lie. i wouldn’t make text-to-image model art, because on the important hand there seems to be no ethical implementation of it and on the less important hand it gives me headaches, but like. i’m not very good at art and i don’t have the energy to make art. i have plenty of ideas- but not enough money to pay people to articulate them as often as i’d like, not enough skill to begin the work of portraying them nearly as well as i’d like, and not enough energy to gain the skill. i DO want a shortcut, i suppose, because i’m not making art for the sake of finishing a piece (if i even finish a piece!) and going “damn, that’s not nearly as good as i wanted it to be”
i really hate playing devils advocate, but for people with a similar dynamic to art like me, i can understand occasionally getting lulled with the siren song of easy art. i dont want to be an artist, i’d say i already am one, even if i’m bad at it. and yet im so very frequently frustrated with my art for it not coming out the way i want. that doesnt justify utilizing AI art, let alone claiming that youre an artist for doing so, but i can see the appeal of that shortcut. i want to bring the ideas i have in my head out onto the page, and the idea art isnt for me has genuinely haunted me for years. i want to want to make art, but i constantly feel roadblocked and incapable of doing so.
i’m still going to keep trying, and no shortcut is worth the harm of AI art, but that doesn’t really change my frustration
here is a reply to someone else’s comment about that frustration https://cohost.org/joewintergreen/post/3593910-i-think-the-ai-art-t#comment-d9107d27-5042-4e2e-8c9b-2bd9c8239053
well, you don’t have to – it’s okay just to not do it if you don’t like doing it. but other than that, imo by practising while also being forgiving of yourself. you won’t ever make what’s in your head; nobody ever does
From the perspective of a hobbyist artist. The Thing-In-The-Mind isn’t really… like… the thing that you describe to others, or can put to a page, or a 3D model, or anything because they’re effectively little more than just vibes.
No artist is just sitting there transcribing a mental picture onto a canvas because it’s not a thing the brain does on a fundamental level. It doesn’t just store and generate static images that you could translate to a jpeg with sufficiently advanced technology.
In comparing what’s on your page with what’s “In your head” you end up generating an idealized form of what’s on the page, changed by the thinking about what you “did wrong”. This mode of thought will never make you feel ‘good enough’ about what’s in front of you.
For me, happiness in art comes when I smack some shapes onto a canvas and pick a rough color palette and go from there, adapting to what feels good and discarding what feels bad, while misery comes when I sit there trying to transcribe my mind’s image onto canvas like a sculptor sculpting a person sitting in front of them.
Of course, having typed all of this out, 3 to 1 odds I just end up doing the latter instead of the prior next time i sit down and try to draw lmao, so, it’s no magic trick, it just helps
Edit: as a last quick thought: a not-small number of people actually don’t have any ‘visual imagination’ at all, and tons of them still produce visual arts. To add to my point about it not being a transcriptive act
I’ve regularly felt the frustration of the images in my head not translating to the page, because I’m just not a details-oriented thinker and visualize more in the broad strokes
though using AI does not appeal to me in that way at all. even if it was something theoretically capable of directly copying what is in my brain to the canvas, the process by which one physically makes something (and not the thing that comes out of the other end) is the actual art, so skipping that is removing the part where you yourself interface with life
even if I never climb the mountain, being instantly taken to the peak would not convey the feeling of having gotten there
i remember once when i was pretty young, realising all at once after some frustration trying to draw, that the picture in my head can literally never happen no matter how good i get, that that’s literally impossible, and the art is whatever actually comes out when i try.
the things people praise and enjoy in art will at least half the time be things the author didn’t consciously intend, but which could only have come from that author.
that realisation for me completely evaporates that type of frustration. it’s been a fundamental truth to me now for long enough that i just never experience that type of frustration anymore. i make things, and they aren’t what i imagined, and that’s the whole point.
this is so important and sometimes also very hard to accept
This is incredibly insightful, but I think it’s missing that the majority of people that I have the displeasure of seeing don’t really think that much beyond they want something to masturbate to. Like really. There’s so many people that really just want an infinite masturbation machine. It’s sad and a little terrifying. I feel like most breakdowns of the AI art thing don’t take into account there’s a uncomfortably massive chunk of people that don’t give a shit about ethics or anything other than a nihilistic self-pleasure.
this is a really interesting point, because I think a lot of those same people would be offended by AI art if they thought it was being used to create “real” art, but they fundamentally refuse to accept porn as art. They think it’s cheap, bereft of spiritual nutrition, embarrassing or degrading in some way. They don’t want to pay for it, they don’t want anyone to be paid for it, they don’t care about the craft of it or the context in which it was produced – they just want to get their rocks off to whatever hyperspecific niche they’re into that day. If they ever subscribed to a patreon or onlyfans or whatever it was done so resentfully.
I think there’s a lot of people who think that just having a good idea makes them something special or unique somehow.
The challenge of making something is a huge barrier to them, denying them their RIGHT to their amazing idea – and AI represents a way where only having an idea is enough for them to make something reality. No real work required!
How many times have you heard someone say “I had that idea first” as if they should be credited with simply thinking about it.
yeah, this doesn’t happen as much now, but i used to always hear people be worried about people stealing their ideas, so they wouldn’t share them. which is obvs ridiculous – nobody will ever make what you imagined, even you; everyone’s version of your idea can coexist
i have a .txt file somewhere from when i was 19 where i wrote out, and forgot about, my idea for a video game called “raft” and it was exactly the video game that now exists called “raft” that someone else has now unrelatedly made. how could i be mad
I still know people who will unironically “poor man’s patent” ideas they think are valuable, intellectual property law has made a mockery of so much of human experience
This thread is honestly one of the most motivational things I’ve read on art and creation.
Big props to everyone here. Wish I’d read and understood it ten years ago
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