this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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It reminds me of what painters said about photography early on. While they toiled for hundreds of hours to paint a realistic image a dude with a box and zero skill beyond maybe some chemistry could snap an even more realistic image. Photography was not considered art for a very long time by the formal art community.
Your analogy doesn’t work. Anyone could take a photograph, just like anyone could paint something, but making it art, eliciting a human reaction, requires skill.
And by the way, not every moment in history when a technological breakthrough threatened a well established craft, can or should be compared to the current state of AI, if anything because it paints a picture where anyone opposing change is some sort of luddite. “Change” is not always a good thing, and there are more than a handful of inconvenient examples: atomic vs conventional weapons, cigarettes vs herbal treatments for anxiety, leaded vs unleaded gasoline for increased engine performance, glass and paper vs plastic in food containers, etc. For each one, incessant marketing campaigns were launched, touting their advantages and how they would improve the world as we knew it. World Expos were organized around these things. People were legitimately excited.
The truth wasn’t quite that. The US found itself in a tight spot when they lost the monopoly on nuclear weapons, which triggered a histeria across the country that lasted for decades, and even nowadays, “nuclear deterrence” conditions geopolitics to the maximum degree. Cigarettes, turned out, weren’t as good to calm nerves as they were killing people. Leaded gasoline, which was the answer given by refineries to the question “what if we stop improving refining processes and start adding literal poison as an additive”. And microplastics are the latest in all the ways humans have found to screw the food chain.
His analogy works perfectly fine and is actually incredibly apt. Photography did threaten a large number of painters livelihoods.
After the grand scale AI is. But that's more a matter of how things are just on a grander scale as we have become more connected in more optimized as time has gone on.
Technological improvements tend to be larger than those that preceded them when it comes to replacement and displacement.
And if you're going to put the bar of art as simply eliciting a human emotion reaction or feeling. Then by your own definition AI generated art is art.
It generates all sorts of emotions, reactions, feelings, Thoughts, Arguments, considerations and philosophizing all across the world.
Ai art has probably been one of the largest points in the last couple hundred years in which this many people have genuinely stopped and considered. What is art.
I'm not a big fan of AI art at all, but I'm also not a big fan of trying to discredit something just because you don't emotionally agree with it. I would wholeheartedly agree that 99.99% of all AI art is low effort slop and absolute trash. But I wouldn't discredit anyone who actually attempts to do something legitimate with it.
Functionally the entire argument against AI art being art is the same one against photography or modern art not being art.
Not every art piece is even physical or tangible in any sense. The art is in the conception or the idea. There is indeed a skill in constructing models as well as using them but ignoring all of that there's still the artistic touch in creating thought provoking or impassioned concepts irrespective of the tangible form they've been given. Although one can most definitely use a medium to impart meaning.
It was never my argument that people who have issues with new technology are necessarily luddites or that AI or really any technology whatsoever is absolutely problem free. Everything has its pros and cons, for example nuclear gave us access to functionally limitless clean (compared to coal and gas) energy as well as more powerful weapons. One unavoidable rule or law of reality is we don't get something for nothing.
Ultimately what is and is not art was, is, and will be an open question each individual has to answer for themselves. Even today an individual is free to view photography not as a legitimate art form or digital art or CGI and so on.
We weren’t talking about constructing models. And where’s the skill in “using” them in this context, when the user is eventually given the exact end product they asked for, and it is as original as rehashing the training set can be?
I see that you went with the nuclear example, because all of the others seem straight up indefensible in comparison.
Problem is, I wasn’t talking about nuclear energy. Even if I did, development of nuclear energy didn’t require creating nuclear weapons at all. Yet they did, and it’s a great example of how technological achievements aren’t always a good thing.
I mean if two painters make similar enough strokes with similar enough paint you get two essentially identical paintings. Hunting the solution space for an NN can be like working through all orderings of a card deck, that's to say very far from as trivial as you're making it sound and about as silly as the example I gave above.
I'm not sure exploring just a few examples in the ocean of essentially infinite examples or analogies does much for us both beyond picking something and arguing which is more accurate. Obviously you're arguing the more useless examples are more accurate and I'm arguing NN have real world use and vakue as shown at least by alpha fold. I would say your basis of argument is more incorrect from the reality we're sharing and I'm well aware of the pros and cons of what we're dealing with.
Neural networks are a valuable technology for humanity, to say otherwise is to be blind to reality. That said there's plenty of actually legitimate arguments one could wage about their current development and use.
Tldr: you be hating too hard, chill my friend.
Who are you responding to?
I mean I don't know who you are personally. . . Like what details about yourself do you expect a stranger to know?
You didn’t address a single one of the points I made. I wrote a philosophical argument about technological adoption not resulting in a net benefit for humanity , historically speaking, and you chose to meander about solution spaces in neural networks and how useful these NNs are in protein folding problems? What?!
This interaction is just… weird. Assuming that you actually read my comments, you don’t seem to be able to synthesize ideas from them and formulate related answers. This last comment of yours is just odd and completely disconnected from the thread as a whole. To be honest with you, it sounds like a bot wrote it.
I literally brought up alpha fold for that exact point. Anyways, I can see you are anti-neural networks no matter what from your history. Are there any other families of algorithms you are prejudiced towards or is that the one and only?
I am not “anti neural networks”. What is this, 2010? Jeez…
AI slop is AI slop, but if you compare it to a film director explaining to a concept artist or director of photography what he wants, then selecting and refining examples and concept art and sketching out a storyboard, there is little difference to someone using AI to make some film. Just that the latter will typically be much worse because anyone can do it now, they won't have studied film making, and AI isn't very good at it so far. But either can be art, or it can be garbage.
Also with advances in hardware and better tools and software and models, we could see a new type of art form or medium. Something like the holodeck in star trek. Like a movie that is more interactive, like a role playing session in VR. Told to you by a narrator but you can interject and steer or derail the narrative. So the "directors" become more like world builders or campaign designers.
The sheer endless tsunami of this dreck makes it meaningless.
I'm not sure more people having more access means things are now worse. Like more people have more means to create art today than 500 years ago and yeah there's a lot of uninspired or derivative content but also there's a lot more legitimate artists making passionate and thought provoking work.
Yeah I imagine what you're saying will come to pass although I think it'll look more like parlor walls from Fahrenheit 451 for the majority. I think my main issue is when a human is totally uninvolved in the process. So far it seems pretty noticeable when there's someone with an actual idea they're trying to create vs there's no mind behind it.
Haha love the reference to Fahrenheit 451. There is also a good illustration in the horror story from _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 with people sinking into some kind of experience stream, similar to wireheading. Or in "Systema Delenda Est" about postbiological life there is the concept of "Elysium" virtual worlds where people go in and never want to come out again, because they live in a narrative that is always perfect for them. Instead of slop you have perfection that is irresistible. Star Trek had Barkley becoming holo-addicted. Cheese Pizza is really bad for you too lol.
You could argue that something like computer games the story is ultimately told by the player and his decisions and actions, and the world should just react. There is a fundamental limit to storytelling in computer games, which only tabletop role playing games solve with an intelligent narrator or game master. I do think LLMs can fill that role but not very well. But better than what open world games offer today. Not better than a well written movie.
I think ultimately the will or mind should be unbounded sans the ability to willfully cause harm to other minds. It's purely due to limitations of technology that we are in our current predicament. The famous prosthetic engineer Hugh Herr made the argument it was not him who was disabled but our technology that was disabled. Now what minds do when they are unbounded by the reality around them is their own responsibility. If you've seen the show pantheon then things could turn out similarly aka minds in multiple embodiments exploring physical and simulated realities or otherwise experiencing whatever they desire without limitations beyond the limitation of willfully causing harm to others.
Ideally minds unchained from limitations wouldn't desire to cause harm anyways, but there's some real jerks out there.
You forget that early photographers were almost exclusively painters.
Funny eh.
Arguably more so chemists but yeah I'm aware. Most / all of their paints were made by hand themselves as well, part of the reason it was a sensible transition to film production and manipulation.
Well painters at that time were definitely chemists.
That is a good argument.
It's more so historical fact. It was denounced for like nearly a century if not longer depending how you're measuring. It's similar to AI in that it decreases the mechanical effort one needs to create content but also itself imposes new required skills to develop that content. There's definitely a hierarchy in AI content and so far at least to myself it's very clear when there is a person actively trying to create something vs a completely automated content pipeline. I would challenge anyone who thinks all AI creations are nothing but slop to create something themselves equal to or better than some of the better works I've seen. Similar to a challenge of a traditional painter to create a compelling photographic composition.
Maybe to add to this I think it's worth noting the creative demand of designing and training a model. It's not without inspired thought. I'm curious to see the code as well. Amongst people who program there can most definitely be beautiful and ugly code in the same way there can be a pleasing or unpleasant movie scene or painting.
I get that you mean this from the perspective of the user, but you can't ignore they are fixing to restart disused nuclear power plants to sustain the required computational power and the datacenters creating drinkingwater supply problems left and right.
Photography never had anywhere near the societarial cost that AI has.
There'll always be a massive difference to me looking at something that comes from a logic machine and something that comes from a human. It's not always about details and graphical fidelity. It's why I have my 4 year old niece's doodles on my fridge, instead of asking an AI to improve them and hang those instead.
To be fair, if we could get more nuclear power plants up and running that would be a good thing. If the AI bubble can push governments to actually get us going nuclear, and then the bubble pops. Those plants won't just get shut down. They're once they're up and running. They're too efficient and the money's already sunk into them.
Good things can happen because of bad reasons. Let's take our wins where we can get them
I think we're having two discussions. There is the discussion about whether or not media created using a neural network with a human prompting it can be considered art. Hypothetically an individual could design, train, and prompt a NN including creating the dataset themselves it was trained on. Would that also be discredited just for the fact part of their process used a NN? What if one also used all clean carbon neutral energy to run and train their NN?
The other discussion is about the issues surrounding people's current choices on how to develop neural networks. I guess you could link them together and say because of these issues anything created using these tools is not art. It would beg the hypothetical of if it would be art if these issues were not there.
I want to be clear that don't feel qualified at all to classify things as art or not (outside of my personal opinion), but you're still letting a logic machine make artistic choices and thusly letting your art (partly) be the result of calculations. Even if it's trained on only your art and your way of working and way of thinking somehow, the process in which it generates output is unaffected.
The only difference between clean and dirty energy is how it affects life on earth. Wastefulness should be avoided either way.
You could argue if you own a windmill you could just burn it's output as it's only wind and this windmill is yours, but it's still better to have a smaller windmill or no windmill at all.
I read this several times but I was unfortunately unable to distill where you're going with this particular paragraph. I think it ties into your first point?
Out of curiosity, have you ever actually played around with an AI to generate pictures? Spin up a local model and give it a try. It's a lot more involved than I think you realize.
It's not hard by any means and you can let it just s*** out the first thing and take that and run with it.
But the actual process of generating something coherent and to your intent. Takes a good deal of skill, understanding how the model works, of the English language and how to construct it appropriately, as well as potentially hours upon hours of corrections, edits and manipulations.
You're moving the mechanical skill of being an artist to a more literary skill of English.
I've noticed most people seem to have never actually attempted to use an ai beyond The really low end free offerings. And thus don't actually realize how complex they can get in usage.
Again, to be clear, it's not hard to generate just a random picture and take it and run. But it's also not hard to draw a stick man.
You know this argument would apply to any digital tool used to make art right? Like Photoshop is using logic and algorithms to create image manipulations and similarly for vector art and video editing. Many effects one doesn't know the actual outcome until it's rendered and you have to go in and skillfully play with the software to get the desired result from the logic manipulations you're not performing by hand. It's not unlike crafting a prompt to get a desired result. An analogy to photography may be how people played chemically with film to get desired results. In an abstract sense one is twisting and dialing knobs of their tool to create art, not cognitively different than one playing with paint, brushes, and canvas to get a desired result.
I'm not inclined to conclude algorithms in blender, lightroom, Krita , after effects or Photoshop are intrinsically different from algorithms used for NN. Like hypothetically one could run through all of these algorithms with a pencil and paper, it would just take a really really long time.
There's a bit of subjectivity in that argument, for instance someone who dislikes rock music could argue the energy used to play or produce it was wasteful.
A large portion of your argument up to now dealt with choices individuals and companies have made in their attempt to develop and power NN and not about the nature of NN's themselves, particularly in contrast to other algorithms we already use to make what most people consider art.
It seemed the argument you were building was anything generated by NN was not art because of those issues. It's maybe a more valid argument if one is speaking about a particular model whose development or use is mired in copyright and environmental controversy but it's not useful to apply that to all NN full stop which is why I posed the hypothetical.
If you use things like generative fill in packages like photoshop I will agree. But tweaking variables in a package like Blender to get a specific outcome for your shader is not the same as having AI generate what is not there at all.
You'd have to come up with exact algorithms you're talking about if you want me to react to that because it's a rather broad term.
I mean, sure. If we entirely ignore total energy used and all the rest of the hubub like employment and sales that these concerts generate.
No I really did mean it as simple as I said it. If the image comes from a logic machine, i'm not interested in it. I'm cirtainly not interested in spending any money on it. Just as i'm not interested in being sold a painting that is a copy of another painting. Or a painting from someone who in fact didn't paint it at all.
So tweaking a variable in one context isn't the same as tweaking a variable in another? I simply don't agree but it would be interesting to see why you feel that's the case.
So you want me to spit out the proprietary algorithms adobe owns for you to know they are using algorithms for their software? Like you want to go through canny edge detection, singular value decomposition and convolutional neural network algorithms to be sure they're both algorithms you could work through on paper?
Almost every single last processor around is deterministic aka you can work through the algorithm step by step by hand if you wanted.
Once again we are having two separate discussions and you keep trying to merge them into one discussion and tbh it's getting annoying to parent you on this. You're free to make the argument that particular actions by particular actors are bad and you're free to make the argument NN are bad but you keep trying to conflate the two and it's now childish since I've pointed out multiple times that it's two separate discussions. Like Sam Altman isn't literally chatGPT or the personification of neural networks, he is a dude separate from NN, you get?
Your final argument means any music, images, movies, or games processed on a computer in any way are not of any interest so essentially everything since 2000. You know your comments are being processed by a logic machine right?
We're literally communicating to one another through many levels of logic processing from your input device to the screen, operating system, to the entire internet and servers between you and I and you say you're disinterested. I call bullshit. If you're that disinterested stop using anything that processes algorithms for you, no electronic or mechanical computers whatsoever DS.
Anyways I'm now assuming you're just straight trolling and wasting my time with pure nonsense.