A human premium, and an elevation of human made art was always inevitable. Most "AI art" token spend is TPS reports, and explainer slides, maybe educational materials on the fringes. Maybe there is a chance some forms of AI art becomes its own new medium (like theater vs "the talkies") but it was never going to be a replacement.
Just 3 years of pointless hand-wringing, headlines and breathless interviews for nothing.
"Aaron Sorkin says he will never use AI".
Yes. No one asked him to! But alas, clickbait rules all.
I would argue that modern art has none. Further, I would argue that art is what speaks to people.
That means that an AI generated image which makes people laugh has more soul than whatever the top selling modern artists was in 1995. By my estimation, that makes a lolcat a better piece of art than most modern art.
That is something that I actually think is true. Of course there are great artists who can show us much, much more than what is inside a lolcat. Its just that I haven't seen one of those in a while.
Artists are concerned for their jobs; That I get. Trying to defend art by claiming magical things like it doesn't have any soul is just cope. And frankly, the more I see of that, the less I care about artists and their real problems.
Art is a form of expression and/or communication. It's interesting because it shows us different perspectives, as well as things that overlap with ours. When you see a smiley face on your lawn and think it's a sign by the person you just fell in love with, and then find out the exact same artifact was in fact created by wind sweeping some branches together, you'll feel different about it. Similar for art. Or take jokes. A friend might find a joke of yours funny they might not find funny from a person they dislike. That's not "unfair" or "objectively wrong", just like rejecting the same artifact depending on source. If you don't understand this, you talking about "magic" is the cope.
> Its just that I haven't seen one of those in a while.
So that's the argument for making sure of that? Heh.
> Artists are concerned for their jobs; That I get.
The article isn't about artists being concerned for their jobs. This is about people rejecting slop.
In animation/film production- studios would have a "TD" on hand- a technical director- a programmer on staff to tweak workflows for artists, build new tools etc-
Now my TD chills in VsCode waiting and working for me 24/7 in the form of Claude Code, Kimi Code etc
I can also have my TD embed another TD(Deepseek flash 4.1) into the new tools(making them smarter and more useful) my TD builds for me while I am in active production on the same PC
All of this allows savvy creatives to dream bigger as a single person is capable of anything a "big studio" can do-
So artists need to leverage these new tools and be more ambitious.
Aesthetics are dead- original ideas are it.
For years we have perceived my work (swe) as a safe harbor. With AI boom, tides have changed and now I perceive her work as a much, much more future-proof activity
I say the more the merrier, but artists who use AI in their workflows are going to be pressed about it - with negative connotations - for a while. Transparency is the best solution in my opinion.
What you really need is more people willing to pay a premium to live/work in a unique or famous building like the empire state building, and then more such buildings will be built.
Hopefully with AI we will make things like stonework and indoor plasterwork, hell, even indoor statues, that much cheaper, and we can start creating beautiful places to live.
I even create these things. But that aesthetic has started to imply a kind of throwaway, low value thing
What will be interesting is if models can create more diverse styles than the neutral Claude default we see everywhere
The html there's not really many places to be creative, a navbar with 3 sections, 5 links, a text card, a hero image, etc, all those are the same across thousands of projects - they're structured, there's not really many ways you can be creative about it. So in part seeing that "middle ground" design is indeed a filter for the lowest of the low effort (or not understanding how to prompt properly, or how the final thing comes together).
If you just want to prompt models and have them come up with more diverse styles that's also quite, or more, lazy - it would help if you understood (not you in particular) how the look of a web page comes together, because then you can direct the model properly - and if needed tweak the lose ends because at some point it's just easier and faster to edit the output yourself but you need to know what needs change and how. If you know how an html page comes together into the thing you see in the browser you can spec the model properly.
Or if they do, they'll try and downplay by saying they used AI for some elements, but not most of them.
Ideally, how you create something and what tools you use should be nobody's business, and all it matters would be if they like it or not. But inherent value / merit is a thing, and concern for the provenance of what you buy is also a valid position for the public to take. It's gonna be a while before the balance settles on either AI = bad or AI = who cares.
On my site, we started asking artists to disclose their use of AI starting ~2 years ago. Turns out roughly 1 in 3 lied.
So, I developed an AI detector. It's working pretty well for that. But it's a schlep having to keep up with all the new models. We're processing ~60,000 songs a day at this point, kinda crazy!
Edit: here are some examples for those wondering what I mean: https://imgur.com/a/mK3Iuzq
You can sort of tell they are AI because of the composition stuff but I think they are aight.
Art is as much about the journey as it is about the destination. It’s the friction of someone going through each detail, making a choice. It’s the artist taking time to figure out how they want to convey what they’re feeling and thinking.
The reduction of this friction culminates in the reduction of the piece’s essence.
Mind you, human-painted artwork is a niche beyond expensive art. Not everyone buys the equivalent of Monet paintings. I've been eyeing a painting by a local painter just to realize the prices jumped from $500 to something like $3000 on average. Sucks.
In fact if your old price was already 500 dollars then its already a useless luxury. People think a lot before paying 500 even for actual tools, anyone who has 500 to spend on a non-essential luxury is already doing something most people don't have any need to.
I suspect use of AI to "realize one's artistic vision" will get increasingly more normalized, but I don't know how people will react to end-to-end AI art (which generally doesn't exist yet), things are going to be a really strange once/if human taste gets fully mapped and demystified.
Nonetheless, if there's going to be a premium it has to be discernible in any particular way because software for business is always considered a cost. But what really shows this industry is half a joke, is that now there's no issue in giving 3rd party agents full access to inner code and logic, many times credentials too because these systems are being deployed in CIs. And because there's really no enforcement or punishment for leaks, or endangering users in most areas there's no reason for a premium. There's people pushing thousands of lines / min (and I think even the most professional people out there can't honestly keep up with it) although that isn't in itself meaning the overall security is worse than before, it just means that for the most part it's now un-auditable in any meaningful way.
A lot of people can do that. A lot more people could do it if they tried to.
People who are genuinely out of the box creatives, with a unique blend of original vision, technical skill, emotional and psychological insight, and genre-changing taste, are not common.
EDIT: And AI is also pretty terrible at being consistent too, you have to work quite hard to get a level of "consistency" that you're happy with.
There will always be problems to solve with building software, regardless of the way it is written.
From code to no-code to vibe-code, to even more code. What we are seeing here is more of the same being built.
An example of this is "sandboxes". Everyone was writing "sandboxes" until it there was 1 vulnerability needed to break them and we will keep seeing this with developers vibe-coding infrastructure.
1. How often do you encounter false positives, and does that change things?
2. Have you considered outright prohibiting/banning vs disclosure?
Just want to hear from someone running a platform how they deal with this since I imagine it's very hard to get right.
What’s your site?
If you filled your day with brainrot slop - does it matter the origin. Does it matter if Instagram thirst traps are so with surgery and filters or if the whole meat puppet stuff is skipped
So far it seems like AI video generation will vastly multiply the quantity of crap like this and enable it to be even worse while being cheaper and easier to produce, while not meaningfully improving the status quo for higher quality works.
"Does it matter which you watch?" Well, who said that was the most interesting question in the first place? Who makes slop is not the only way the situation is changing.