Raw LLM Responses

Ya know, there's an old saying: "You get out what you put in." It might now be possible to get a pretty picture simply by pressing a button. But as an artist I see no point in doing that. The resulting image would mean nothing to me. It might not always be easy to understand or explain, but the final image really isn't the only point. I like the explanation given in the video. It's like saying 'the only point of playing a game is the score you get at the end.' To give a more personal example of what the process of creating art means to an artist, I have a story. I recently started painting with a group of people in the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism). This particular group paints scrolls in the style of illuminated manuscripts to be given out as awards. Each scroll is a unique work of art created for a specific person's achievement. I'm not much of a painter and I don't usually create images in a historical style. But a friend invited me and I thought it would be fun to try. The materials that we worked with were unfamiliar to me. Not exactly the same as what artists in the middle ages would have used, but reasonably close. And the first thing I did was make mistakes with it. I smeared things, mixed strange colors, and put things in the wrong places. But each step of the way I learned something. The group told me a phrase. "Mistakes are period." That is to say the artists that we were using as reference also made those same mistakes. You might not have noticed them before, but plenty of historical works of art have mistakes in them. They couldn't easily erase those mistakes so they just incorporated them into the painting instead. Once I learned how to work with the materials I was able to understand why those historical artists made the decisions that they made. Those old paintings were no longer just pretty pictures to me. All of the little details that I had learned to notice started to tell a story of who the artist was, how they thought about their work, and what decisions they made along the way. By creating my own painting using my own two hands I gained insight into a different era of history and human experience. Creating art is time consuming. It's challenging, unintuitive, and often frustrating. Every artist at some point feels annoyed, dejected, even angry about the things they create. It's almost inevitable. But despite all of that, most of us would never use an AI just to avoid those problems. Sure I could find an AI, train it up on a bunch of historical paintings, press a button and get something similar. But if I did that I would never have had the experience of trying something new. I wouldn't understand the paintings any more that I already did. And I wouldn't have learned anything. By using an AI I would be robbing myself of the chance to explore art. I wouldn't get to create something line by line, re-imagining it and coming to understand it a little better with every stroke. If I used an AI, the images it spat out wouldn't be an exploration or a self expression. They would just be images, no more meaningful than the few moments it took to press a button.