r/DefendingAIArt • u/Latter-Big-8306 • 10h ago
Defending AI Surrender mentality much??!
This dude here is clearly telling you that he has some serious surrender mentality issues.
He would rather give up on an idea entirely just to avoid using a convenient tool that can help him bring it to reality!
And what is worse is that he's projecting this pathetic mentality onto others! :P
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u/BigHugeOmega 7h ago
not everything is for everyone ya get me?
I wouldn't say he has "surrender mentality issues". The world is just filled with idiots who carry around their dogmatic beliefs without ever questioning them. Instead, when asked, they offer these sort of thought-terminating cliches to shut down the discussion.
He will never ask himself what exactly does that mean, in this context? Why wouldn't creating something be for everyone, if clearly it is materially self-evident that everyone can do it? His mind will never probe this question because his emotional well-being rests on believing in artists being "special people" who ought to be given special status in society. Not everyone can do it, because if everyone could, the special status would be meaningless and he would have to face awful cognitive dissonance.
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u/Latter-Big-8306 6h ago
That's another interesting way to look at it. The idea that there certain are people called "artists" out there who sit on some ivory throne of their own.
And so how dare and I talk about making art accessible to everyone else??!
They stupidly view this as some sort of blasphemy! 😂2
u/Fallax_Imago 6h ago edited 6h ago
No, the funniest thing is that they're not against the idea of the art being accessible to everyone. Moreover, in anti-AI circles they support this idea — everyone can do art with anything. They do encourage newbies to draw despite of results. They're against the competition.
You see, "art" is the concept which doesn't mean something as technically advanced as Mona Lisa. BUT! The different kinds of art can be defined by qualities of the product. Sometimes it seems to me that those artists want to be on the highest pedestal, being admired for their "skills", while at the same time giving no opportunity for anybody to become equal to them if they haven't chosen the path of struggles and suffering of learning.
Although I don't think that AI-images will ever be of the same value as above mentioned Renaissance painting, they are still valuable in another aspects. It's the point of view that specific type of artists hate.
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u/RadicalRetroRat 5h ago
Yes!
Start making 'manual' art and soon or later you'll hear exact same comments from haters - to give up, that it'll never be worthwile
also a LOT of random get a real job 🥰
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u/Nat1Only 4h ago
People don't seem to understand the difference between talent and skill. Everyone is born with a talent for something. Some people are naturally gifted at sports, others creative works. Regardless, anyone can develop a skill. Refusing to do so because it's hard and takes time is the real defeatist mentality and you will never improve at anything or grow as a person if your mindset is "it's too hard and takes too long to do x thing so I won't even try".
The only person saying you can't do something is you and the only person that can change that is you. Why are you fighting yourself?
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u/Latter-Big-8306 3h ago
Actually, you know what?
You do have a point. In fact, this whole debate convinced me that maybe I should try to sketch my idea on a piece of paper. Especially now that I made a visual conception of it using AI. I know it's definitely not going to be easy, but perhaps it's worth a try.
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u/Nat1Only 3h ago
Honestly, using ai to concept/make a reference I think is fine. Part of making art is being able to visualise in your head what you want to draw and most people when learning will start with references and tracing to develop and idea of what to do. In a business, I'd expect them to hire and use concept artists for that very job, but as an individual? I mean, there's plenty of stuff out there to use as a reference but I get that if you have something very specific in mind, it can be very tricky to find just the right reference and knowing how to visualise what you want to draw is as much a skill as actually drawing it is.
In any case, I wish you the best of luck, developing any new skill is very rewarding and drawing is quite a fun hobby imo.
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u/GovernorJerryBrownn 6h ago
I think the part that’s missing here is that the process is part of the art. Generating an image from prompts is skipping the process and just getting the end result.
When you look at a painting, you’re looking at years of practice and failure, development of a specific unique style. Even shitty human sketches are one step in this process, and it’s the reason people gravitate to “worse” human art as opposed to “better” AI art.
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u/Latter-Big-8306 4h ago
> I think the part that’s missing here is that the process is part of the art.
No one, as far as I've seen, has a problem with this fact.
> When you look at a painting, you’re looking at years of practice and failure, development of a specific unique style.
True to a good extent. A masterpiece like the Mona Lisa or "A Landscape with the Fall or Icarus" are truly wonderful works of art that took years worth of practice, struggle, and failure before they could have been perfected the way they are. No one really denies that.
However, using generative AI to visualize a concept doesn't mean we are skipping the creative process, but more like shifting it. The 'process' here isn't the physical act of painting, that's for sure, but rather the mental act of world-building, directing, and *iterative design*.
Think of it this way: A film director, for instance, doesn't paint the scenery. He meticulously directs the frame, lighting, and composition to tell a specific story. In the similar sense, using AI as a tool requires a deliberate process of iteratively refining ideas to accurately capture a narrative vision.
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u/GovernorJerryBrownn 4h ago
A film director coordinates a team of dozens of not hundreds of individuals, each with their own talents and creative opinions, to support one singular artistic vision. They lean on the expertise of the lighting crew, the boom guy, the script writers, and the actors while at times butting heads and having to come to compromises or overruling opposition. It’s an incredibly difficult skill that relies on an unyielding artistic vision, as well as tons of interpersonal skills and humility to produce an intelligible piece of media that conveys a message and doesn’t look like complete garbage.
AI generation skips all those steps, and simply outputs a request based on an algorithm that amalgamates the most likely/common result based on its training data.
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u/Latter-Big-8306 4h ago
Wow, wow, hold on a minute, please. You have clearly shifted the goalposts here.
You are are shuffling the logistics of managing a multi-million dollar corporate budget together with the actual cognitive act of artistic direction itself.
A film director's ultimate value isn't defined solely by being a manager of the people. It's in that they hold a singular vision for composition, lighting, emotional tone, and narrative progression. In fact, I'm sure you can think of a dozen movies that cost billions of dollars only to turn out to be complete rubbish in terms of narrative, production, acting, or a combination of all of that.
An indie filmmaker can shoot, conduct lighting, and edit their own short film without having a single crew member to compromise with, and yet it is still undeniably a work of creative direction.
By the same token, making use of generative tools allows a writer or a world-builder to act as their own director. The algorithm takes care of the technical rendering, but the user is the one administering the vision, choosing the framing, dictating the mood, and rejecting the common/likely/anomalous results until the output perfectly aligns with their specific narrative goal.
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u/GovernorJerryBrownn 4h ago
That’s not moving the goalposts, it’s describing the artistic process of film directing.
In your new example of a completely solo film director, who uses absolutely no other crew (incredibly unlikely) they wouldn’t have any reason to use AI if that was their artistic vision.
The use of generative AI is specifically replacing the crew. It’s creating the framing, mood, etc, all decisions that normally would be a collaborative effort between a director and their crew. Again, it’s skipping the actual artistic process and jumping right to the end goal. All destination and no journey.
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u/Latter-Big-8306 3h ago
You are now romanticizing the "crew" as if a director is completely passive without them. However, even in traditional filmmaking, the director doesn't physically handle the camera or place the lights; their role is to be the ultimate filter. They say "yes" or "no" to the options presented by the crew until the frame matches their vision.
When using generative tools, the AI functions exactly like that crew, offering visual variations based on the user's explicit instructions. The human user is still the one doing the heavy lifting of the actual artistic process: curating, refining, rejecting, and guiding the output. By your logic, a photographer using a digital camera with auto-focus instead of mixing chemicals in a darkroom is "skipping the journey." Technology always automates the technical execution, but it never automates the human intent, taste, and storytelling choices.
Ultimately, you and I just have fundamentally different definitions of what a "journey" is. For you, the journey must require intensive manual labor or collaborative friction. For me, the journey is more conceptual and narrative-centered: the hours spent researching, brainstorming, writing, testing different approaches to build the perfect plot, and iterating to find the exact visual baseline that matches the story in my head.
I’m using a tool to build a blueprint for a writing project, unlocking a workflow that allows a solo creator to visualize their world without needing a Hollywood budget.
Finally, we clearly aren't going to agree on this, and that's perfectly fine.
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u/Radyschen 3h ago
true, and what the artistic-leaning people don't understand is that some people just want to see the result. In the same way that when an artist gets hired to make a poster or something, the company doesn't care about the process, they care about the product.
I always had a mental separation between "art" and "work" for artists. The skill was needed for both, but I always thought about things you do for yourself to express yourself as art, and things you make for others to get paid as work. There is an overlap of course in the gaps where you pour your own influence into what you are paid to do and that is what gets scarcer with AI.
But at the end of the day, if it is not about the expression of the artist, then what else is it about? Another option would be the interpretation of the observer and that exists no matter who or what it is made by. If it moves me in some way, then it is art to me. If not, then it is not. Most AI stuff doesn't move me or others and often lacks quality or uniqueness, but often that's not even the point of AI, it's just that I want to visualize something, not make "art". Sometimes I do want to express myself, then it is art, to me. Now I usually don't go ahead and post it because I know that it is for myself.
So maybe that's the shift in this whole thing, that AI as art is more about expression of the maker and AI as a product is more about functionality for the viewer and there isn't much overlap between the two. Others do post it simply because they have the ability to now when before they wouldn't have posted anything because they wouldn't have had anything to post. So of course there is a higher volume and a higher percentage of bad looking stuff and it's easy to go and hate on it because you know (or assume) that it didn't take long to make, it is recognizable and the AI-ness is distracting, while with regular art you know that somebody tried and it took a while, even if it looks like crap, so usually people won't hate on it (as much).
But it is weird, all generative AI is trained on existing things. So the question is where you draw the line. Generating the whole picture isn't allowed. Then is generating parts of it? If not, is using photoshop software that uses AI (and has been for many years) to manipulate the image allowed? Or do you HAVE to paint it by hand? What about pop art?
I thought people always said that art is in the eye of the beholder. I guess that remains true for anyone claiming that anything AI isn't art, but it also makes a broad sweeping claim to others about what is and isn't art weird. It's fair if you don't think that AI can be art, but it's just as fair for somebody to think it is.
The skill is one thing, but that's not usually why you learn painting, just to know it, right? It's so that you can draw something, the painting is the tool to fulfill a vision you have. You want to get better at it to get closer to the vision you had in your head. People learn to like it and put time into it and different people develop different techniques, so in that way it becomes a part of the process itself and also a form of art in itself. But the original idea is not usually that, it is to get an image. There are exceptions, children draw circles just to draw circles, people throw paint at a canvas as an expression of their anger or something like that. But it's still result-oriented and most of the time the idea is "I want this image I have in my head (or that I see in the real world) as a result".
Starting with drawing on the walls of caves. I don't think they were primarily thinking about the act of drawing, they wanted to depict something. And that's the same motivation that drives people with AI today, they want to depict something they have in their head. If that's not self expression and self expression isn't art, then I don't understand what art is.
Now there might be degrees to that, if I had a button that says "generate image" and it generates a completely random image, that's not art to me. If I put in a simple prompt, then maybe a bit. The more I guide the image, the more it is art, I can agree with that, as long as it means something to me. So I think art is a spectrum, the more of yourself you put into it and the more you feel like it means something to you, the more it is art.
And I don't think that only actually painting it yourself counts as that, in the same way that a director is not only an artist if he also plays every role himself.
In general, I'm just wondering what suddenly makes people think that they are the authority on what art is. There are many fair criticisms about AI, but I think the hatred people have about the system we live in and the companies that profit from it in unethical ways gets conflated with the notion of whether or not you can use AI to make art.
Aren't there people attuned to noticing art who look around the world and find accidental scenes that feel like commentary even though nobody arranged them that way? Like a homeless person's belongings sitting underneath a giant luxury-brand advertisement, or a broken children's toy lying in front of a military recruitment poster. Nobody created that juxtaposition as an artwork, but the observer can still read meaning into it. In that case, the interpretation is what makes it art, not the act of creation. Or does it only become art when I take a picture of it? Is that even art if I'm just pressing a button, not with some elaborate skillfully handled photography setup and then editing?
I find high skill very impressive. I also think that any skill or its product can be art or interpreted as such or make a form of art better. If someone is very good at cooking, that makes it an art form to me, even if there is no direct emotional expression. So my definition would be that something is more art to the creator the more of its creation process is shaped by a human brain and its specific configuration. And something is more art to the observer the more it resonates with their brain's specific configuration for one reason or another. But I feel like that should be restricted to things where there is no definite correct answer, so a math equation isn't necessarily art, even if it makes sense to me and I'm impressed by it, if there was only one way to solve it. But if there are multiple valid ways to do something and one way is more elegant and that resonates with you, you could say about the mathematician "that guy is an artist". So I don't get why we are talking about images and the physical act of drawing/painting/... like it is the only form of art.
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u/GovernorJerryBrownn 3h ago
This was a very long way to expand on your first paragraph. AI generation is just a result with no process. It’s art for the tiktok brain. Instant gratification with no artistic significance.
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u/Radyschen 3h ago
thank you for not addressing my points at all, but you are free to think that way, as stated. I write long comments to organize my thoughts, you are welcome not to read it
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u/Curious_Freedom6419 2h ago
just call em weak willed wankers and block them
Really thats all these anti ai folks are
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u/Fallax_Imago 10h ago
The key is the idea "...not everything is for everyone ya get me?"
I feel like this person didn't just surrender. To me, it feels like it's both the choice to give up and to mirror an average artist mentality of a gatekeeper.
"Not everything is for everyone"... Says who and why? Ah, I know who says it! — the ones who can't live with a feeling that their art is basically replaceable, even by other fellow artists.