this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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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.