this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2026
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"Everybody wants to be a sleuth" or something, analog to "everyone's a critic".
I wish it was limited to visual artists; just a few minutes ago I read a lengthy & well-written comment right here in the fediverse, to which someone replied "they shouldn't have used AI to write it". Somehow completely ignoring the actual content.
This has been going on for a while. Partially because AI-generated imagery was really bad just a couple of years ago, so people feel competent, otoh it gets harder to detect, which is a challenge... not sure where I'm going with this, but I have a feeling that this is an aspect of human behavior that manifests in other regards, too, and has forever. And that I believe it will pass, although the downside might be that artists will start to create things that deliberately do not look "like they're AI".
I get it though, the state of everything right now really really sucks. When I enjoy content that I later find to be AI generated, I feel like I've been deceived or manipulated and it has me doubting the authenticity of pretty much everything to avoid feeling that way.
I don't know what the solution would be to it at this point either
I don't feel that way.
Almost ten years ago I read something an AI had written "by itself". Apart from the initial paragraph, which was the human-supplied prompt, it read like something a student might have written to get the required number of words for their essay.
I don't see AI making good content, ever. If that changes, I'll re-evaluate my position.
In other words, shitty content is shitty no matter who created it.
One also needs to consider that all AI content has still ultimately been created by humans at some point, and that's where things get murky.
The solution is to not worry about whether it's AI generated. It's a tool; it can be used well by skilled people to create a good output, and it can be used poorly by unskilled people to create a poor output.
Of course that's true for things like programming if used only as a chat-based responsive rubber duck to help debug or investigate potential architecture. People using it to spit out entire projects is terrible though and it's destroying the open source ecosystem by making it difficult to find projects that aren't jank and likely to be immediately abandoned
But in regards to generating any sort of art media, there is no good output or skilled creators because there's no skill or effort put into it. You're not skilled because you put a prompt into a chat bot in the same way you're not a skilled chef for putting in an order at McDonalds.
This is a temporary issue; if a project you are interested in gets abandoned, fork it and maintain it (with AI). The problem is that too many people are rejecting the tool that can mitigate the issue. If history is any indication, this is just growing pains, and won't last long.
I really don't mean this to sound harsh, but what you're saying here is gatekeeping and inaccurate.
I can give you an entire movie studio with everything you need to create a movie, including writers, actors, special effects, etc-- leaving only the directing to you, and you can still output garbage. Just having all the tools at your disposal doesn't make something good quality. However, if we put a skilled director in that same exact situation, and the output will be significantly better. AI can handle much of the process, but that doesn't mean there's no skill or effort involved.
Additionally, writing prompts does involve creativity. Coming up with an idea is a creative process. To lean on your metaphor, coming up with an interesting and delicious dish is the creative aspect of the process, not just cooking it.
"...what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."
Quoting an Adam Sandler movie at me instead of addressing anything I said says more about you than what I said. lol
You're missing the point of why AI output is so obnoxious.
It's like an updated version of the bullshit asymmetry principle: it takes considerably more time and energy to parse AI-produced works (art, text, music etc) than it does for traditional low-quality low-effort shit, because it's produced in large quantities and has a superficial look of being professionally produced.
AI hasn't made shit artists better, but it has enabled them to suck all the oxygen out of the room and make the process of seeking and enjoying good art intractable and infuriating. It also hasn't made good artists better either, because good artists are already better than AI.
I agree that this is a concern, but it's a problem already solved. Do you read every single post on Lemmy? How do you deal with all the garbage, low effort posts?
And while you're focusing on the negative aspects of AI, you might consider the flip side of it. How many good, creative ideas died on the vine because the person who came up with the idea lacked the technical skill to implement it?
I understand that it might not seem this way for those people who attempt to make money on their technical skill, but lowering the bar between idea to implementation is an overall benefit to culture.
I disagree. Anyone working in a skilled profession can attest to the number of people who come up with them saying that they have this great idea for you to work on for free. It's never a great idea. We have our own great ideas, and that's often the motivator for acquiring new skills to make that idea possible.
Lowering the bar between idea and implementation, in a capitalist, surveillance/attention-based, target-marketed world is further incentivizes low-effort, high-engagement practices and likely shrinks the space for high-effort markets.
Meanwhile the tools "lowering the bar" are rent-only or need hardware that is quickly becoming unaffordable. Silicon Valley's only play is enshittification. If it actually is successful it's only a matter of time before they switch from growth mode to profit mode and it's google search all over again but this time you're paying a monthly fee. If you want to have an idea of how that works out ask an adobe user-- and those were products that were already profitable. There is no way people are willing to pay the actual cost of ai, it will need to be extracted. The rest is externalities.
It will always be an arms race. If someone develops a new style that doesn't look like AI, then it's only a matter of time before an AI model can generate that style.
And the future I see for this arms race is eventually it will be better than humans at producing art that doesn't look like AI.
I'm at the point where I think AI generated shit should be judged on its own merit rather than for whether or not it's AI because eventually we won't be able to tell from other factors and any attempts will end up hurting humans more than the AIs (because they have no feelings to be hurt and will just continue while some portion of the humans will get discouraged and stop bothering to try).
Plus, at least with programming, saying code sucks because it's AI generated is weak. If a code submission is shit, there will be technical reasons that it is shit that have nothing to do with who (or what) wrote it.
Arguably though this is how new art styles are often created. What is the current safe, trendy art gets challenged. Andy Worhol painted a grid of Campbell's tomato soup cans which is considered an important piece of American Modern Art. I'm certainly not saying "an upside to AI is that it will force artists to be more creative" anything, moreso that as you said, a pattern of artists rebelling against the norm is a historical cycle rather than something new AI will bring on.
I always found AI art easy to spot. washed out/dull colours with usually heavy lines. That's all I look at. So looking at this artists work it's clear it isn't AI to me at least.
Yes, and when the models change, you won't be able to detect shit. Meaning you'll be accusing actual artists if you aren't careful. This shit is changing, and fast. Don't be complacent