I’m suggesting people can communicate with images regardless of who made them. What they’re communicating does not have to resemble what an artist originally intended. Surprised Pikachu face.

You could pick ten nature shots out of some catalog, and tell a story just by arranging them in a certain order. If you later found out one image was generated - how would that change your story?

Can you imagine how funny it would be, if that ‘I don’t want your slop’ image turned out to be made in Midjourney? Not one pixel would change, but half the people celebrating it would declare it never meant anything to them. How could it? It’s not art. Anymore.

Meanwhile, Duchamp put a toilet in a museum. He didn’t make it. He just signed it.

You can also get deep, deep into whateverthefuck you’re into. Is your waifu no longer popular? Well, now anyone can be served a few pieces per day, without demanding a constant deluge of novelty. Is your favorite thing so niche it doesn’t have a tag? Well, endless similar examples are dead easy, and endless distinct examples are not much harder.

Conversely, Cocteau wrote “Film will only become an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.” Cameras: pretty cheap. Things to point them at: haven’t changed much.

If you’re using this tech to replace pencil and paper, it’s a hard sell. If you’re using it to replace Hollywood, it’s a steal.

Local models already won.

Surely Mr. Writey is art to the same degree that every outsourced frame of a cartoon is art. Some no-kidding capital-a Art™ was made as a piss-take. Ask Duchamp.

Better yet, ask Damien Hirst. His piece For The Love Of God is the diamond-encrusted skull of an 18th-century monk. Two pieces quickly appeared in response. One, For The Laugh Of God, is missing a front tooth. The other was a close replica of the skull and its display case, briefly installed in the dumpster behind the auction house.

Neither response is claiming the pattern of the diamonds as the purpose of the work. That’s not what they contributed. Each work, as a whole, is still art.

A more clarifying question might be: who made Koyaanisqatsi? It’s mostly stock footage and b-roll. Y’know, long shots of daily life, sped up or slowed down. It has no actors, no characters, no verbal narrative. It is a film where principal photography is just raw material.

And we say George Lucas made A New Hope. He wrote it, certainly… with apologies to Kurasawa. But to what degree is he responsible for what you see onscreen? He doesn’t act. His direction was famously terrible. Gilbert Taylor did cinematography. The character designs were by Ralph McQuarrie. ILM did the sets and props. Marcia Lucas had final edit. Even if we granted him sole authorship, he didn’t draw those frames; he pointed a camera at some guys. The footage is not the work.

The idea that a text cannot be art requires strange definitions. ‘That’s definitely not art, because they did it with a machine’ is what people said about Tron.

When some weirdo perfects a combination of fetishes shared by seven living persons, insisting self-expression is nowhere to be found is fucking nonsense. His self could not be more expressed. His soul lays bare. There cannot be less personal character in that, than in every identical rote inking of Homer Simpson’s head.

How that freak created his eldritch pornography is an entire iterative process, like any other person using tools. You dismiss that as “nothing but the prompt,” when there’s nothing but the prompt. That’s all there is. That’s the part where a human being expended effort to convey an idea. There is no one else to blame for the horrifying image on your screen, telling you very little about the tools, but more than you ever wanted to know about the person.

And you’re throwing hands with the “process art” movement, or really half of modern art. Marcel Duchamp gave a shovel a silly name and it’s hung in the goddamn Louvre. If intent alone is enough to make something art, how is this the only tool in history that is immune to intent?

How.

Yet absolutely none of that when someone spends five hours editing text to match the image in their head.

Right, people never make art just for money. The animation outsourcing industry loves when you can tell who drew each frame.

If current models never changed again - none of what’s happening would “die.” We already have programs that can turn any image you provide into any image you describe, even if you provide solid noise.

What people do with that tool can be trivial… or it can take immense effort and thought. I don’t understand how an iterative process lasting days could be anything but art. Objecting to where the tools came from can’t change that.

A minute per image, on a pocket computer, sounds like Marty McFly Jr. making a three-second pizza and going "C’mon, c’mon!’

That’s nice.

Meanwhile, the average person only sees results. They do not seem to share your fundamental aversion to how a JPG was made. They didn’t experience whatever grand philosophical journey produced it. It doesn’t need to be artisanal grass-fed human Art.™ It either provokes an emotional response, or not.

If AI slop is a text in the absence of subtext, it is still a text. Comes with death-of-the-author built in. And people can still say something with works they did not make themselves… as you’re doing right now.

What someone practiced can do with nothing, and what a newbie can do with nothing, drastically differ.

These dipshits are trying to communicate that this tech offers half-decent results. Immediately. For no effort. They could surely do better, themselves… if they spent an entire year trying. Opportunity be damned, most people just don’t want to. Developing a skill is a process that sucks. Vanishingly few people learn to paint portraits, and code games, and play piano. But any idiot can now use a program to do a half-assed job of all three.

Experienced artists, programmers, and musicians will recognize the flaws. They can declare the results useless slop. But it’s being generated by people who would do even worse without it.

See also Spiderweb Software’s “Failing To Fail” talk: solo dev used the same assets in every game, and a constant complaint in the forums was that the graphics sucked. So once his sales were decent, he hired an artist to overhaul everything. The next game had the same complaints. He celebrated. Now he knew he could ignore that shit.