Raw LLM Responses

20 years ago, the separation between art and the artist was a common discussion in the art world. People made understandable and legitimate arguments on both sides. It was especially prevalent when there was an artist who was, frankly, not a very good human being, and yet their work is beautiful and thoughtful and enjoyable. Examples would be Jack London, who was deeply racist, or Hunter S Thompson or Hemingway, who were deeply misogynistic. And, today, it is an argument still being applied to artists who are being canceled, like Neil Gaiman. And while you could say that the art is still fascinating because the art is through a human lens, regardless of the quality of the human, or that a few flaws does not ruin everything that an artist has to say, many people just want to enjoy the art for what it is and not think or care about that stuff. And that's fine. That's always been fine. You don't "not understand art" just because you get something out of it while actively trying to avoid thinking or caring about the artist. You can appreciate something for what it is and still appreciate art. It's fine. This was always the case, and it's not a new argument just because AI is around. And now that this argument is being applied to AI slop, it is being presented as objectively true, like it's some kind of new argument that hasn't existed for hundreds of years. Maybe *you*, personally, can't separate art from the artist. That's fine. And there are a lot of people who don't enjoy the idea of art made by AI, and that's fine too. And you can have the opinion that AI art looks like dogshit, and that's fine. But people can enjoy art without caring about the artist who made it, it doesn't make them "wrong about art", not on any kind of objective level. It's just a bad argument. Another flaw in the argument is that there are actual humans behind AI art. I don't mean the training data, I mean the person writing and curating the prompt. Right now, those who market AI really want to emphasize how you can write a sentence and it will poop out a cool piece of artwork. But, contrary to popular belief, AI art is not, or doesn't have to be, just writing a prompt and the computer pooping out one image which you post to the internet. It can take days finding a generation, then fixing it and regenerating parts of the art, in-drawing portions, fixing all its flaws, building it up to generally be what the artist behind the tool wants it to be. It is possible for real human intent to be involved in AI art. And the tools that artists have to express their intent on generated art will only get better, so, even if not now, eventually, perhaps, the medium will be an accepted medium for an artist to express their intent. Imagine if the improvement of our technology in writing prompts to generate art is taken to such an extreme that a computer is capable of creating a piece of art that exactly matches a human's intent after 20 seconds of thought? At what point, between what we have now and that, is AI art no longer slop with no human intent? I feel like that technology will probably be seen, in a lot of ways, even more problematic than AI art today. But it won't be because of human intent. To me, what is much more true, is that AI stans don't understand AI (and neither do most AI haters). It is just a deeply flawed medium on a purely technical level. You might look at one piece of artwork and go, "wow!", but every time you have a series of works that are supposed to depict the same character, it obviously breaks down. It is, right now, pretty much impossible to produce any kind of long form artwork with it, or to produce someone's "OC", or any kind of specific person or character, with any level of consistency, without a lot of work, and that is, at the moment, where the vast majority of artists make their money anyway. The lack of "thought" these things have is very real and obvious and reflects on the art itself, until and unless at least somebody spends a very large portion of time correcting all its mistakes and regenerating hundreds of times. This doesn't look like that's going to change any time soon with current AI techniques. I don't think AI is going to replace most artists any time soon. But I do think eventually it will be a legitimate tool artists can use to create art.