Games

Much like how Fascism co-opts leftist aesthetics and is the "Socialism of fools" for offering shortcuts and easy answers and a simulacra of a solution to people's problems while ultimately giving them nothing, AI art is the same for art, though obviously I'm being a bit hyperbolic here, I'm not trying to give a moral comparison of the two, or claim that anyone who likes AI art is a fascist, more just in how they affect people personally.

It is the art equivalent of false consciousness, because it is missing a major component of art creation: struggle and self-improvement.

Making mistakes and learning from them is a vital part of learning anything, and when it comes to creative mediums (not just physical art, but writing, music, anything really) it deprives people of that ability. It prevents the people from using it from ever actually improving their skills, leaving them perpetually stunted. If you've ever learned an instrument, you probably know that sort of feeling of getting better at something and feeling good, not because "you can play the guitar" but because you worked hard to learn how to play the guitar. You can't get that from an AI music generator, you can get a quick little tic-tac of dopamine from pressing the "make a thing" button, but it is a poor substitute for actual self improvement and self-expression.

It feels like self expression, but it isn't, it's a shortcut to the final dopamine hit part of self-expression, minus all the friction and effort that comes with actually expressing yourself. And since it is just a short dopamine hit that is easy to get, it ends up addicting and can make actual self-expression feel distasteful, as you need to spend a lot more time and effort to get the same happy brain chemicals.

Expressing yourself requires a willingness to share "yourself" with others and self-discovery. You aren't doing either with AI generated content, it's just a pretty picture that got made after you pressed the pretty picture button. That's not to say that a person can't use AI art as self-expression, but they would need to make it transformative and personal in some way, taking the picture and modifying it themselves, like people do with a collage or remix. Building off of it instead of just using it as is. As is it separates the actual creative process from the prompter, it is a shortcut to feeling the sensation of having "created" something, without the actually struggle of creating something.

I know if you aren't skilled at drawing and you take out pen and paper and draw something it won't look nearly as "good" as AI art, but that is part of the problem, we live in a society that commodifies art, that treats it not as a form of self-expression, but as something we assign value to based on aesthetic, not always monetary value, often social value, so people gravitate towards the thing that lets them skip the actual "self-expression" part and try to jump straight to the "social capital" part. I think this is why almost all people who create AI art do so as a "get rich quick" kind of thing, they see no value in art, no value in self-expression, and only want the reward that comes with being skilled at something without putting the effort in.

Uhh...to try and tie this ramble back to video games; AI art is kind of like if a video game took all the "hard parts" out, removed all the friction. Instead of a tough boss or platforming challenge that you really struggle with and have to learn and improve to beat, it just lets you jump straight to the end of the level as if you beat it, with no actual friction with the game or personal struggle to overcome a challenge. A game that does that probably wouldn't be very mechanically satisfying, because it would deprive you of the core part of "playing" a game. I'm asking you to imagine a game where it shows a platforming challenge and then just warps you to the end of it, or a mean looking boss and then just cuts to the boss being defeated. Maybe it would be kind of funny at first, but the actual "game" part would be non-existent and leave no impact. It wouldn't feel satisfying to complete the game, since you didn't really do anything.

Sorry for the wall of text, I meant to just do a short quick reply and then had a lot more to say on the matter than I thought.

"Art is what an artisan does". There is nothing obscure about what art is, and to pretend otherwise is to yield the definition of "artisan" to capitalists. It has nothing to do with "creativity" and everything to do with labor. A CNC machine can't produce art, but a machinist can certainly use one to create a new configuration of material that has never occurred previously. An LLM can't produce art, but a person using one can apply their narrative and aesthetic sensibilities in the use of the tool to create something. Likewise a paintbrush, a text editor, a recording device, etc. "High art" is the mystification of the creative impulse we should combat. We should not petulantly refuse to engage with the topic at all while suggesting that "art" as a concept cannot be defined materially.