I Hate AI Art - A Confession and Apology

Every time I see a piece of digital art with a human in it on the Internet, my first impulse is to count the number of fingers.

If I see five fingers, I smile and admire the art. If I see four or seven or twelve and they're all inconsistently lit and melting into the background, my day is ruined.

I have grown to develop a burning hatred of AI-generated art and everything that it stands for. This is because, to me, AI art stands for laziness, lack of imagination and skill, the technological colonization of the last thing I thought they couldn't take from us - creativity. AI doesn't create; it steals, and it steals without remorse or mercy or discrimination. Every piece of AI-generated art you see represents millions of artists whose pixels have been mashed together in a haphazard way, and those artists have not been paid for all of the derivative works built off their art. It's theft in the name of whatever advantage AI art claims to boast.

(Also, I remain firmly convinced that there are no advantages to AI image generation. What has been done with it? Stripping women without consent, spreading false images of candidates to manipulate voters, that sort of thing. Sounds to me like these AI companies opened the can without thinking about the worms.)

Which leads me to something I must get off my chest: when AI art first started being used, I was caught in the zeitgeist just as much as anyone. I used Craiyon back when it was called Dall-E Mini, and I used the real Dall-E when it became publicly available. You know why? It was fun. It was fun seeing what AI thought a Star Wars movie directed by Wes Anderson would look like. It was fun looking at Van Gogh-style portraits of Mr. Bean. I was clicking away without considering the implications of this technology, the many artistic works that were stolen and reprocessed by an unthinking piece of software because I wanted to see Richard Nixon as a party DJ.

I regret this deeply, and I would like to apologize to the real human artists whose work has been stolen by AI companies that assume they don't need to pay for creative work. You are some of the victims of this experiment, and I have made a vow to the moon and stars I will never use an AI image generator again. Not only that, I make a concerted attempt not to interface with online content that uses AI art. I want to send a signal that I do not think it is cool or okay. Screw AI art.

AI bros (the same bros whose thousand-dollar monkey JPEGs have placed them in dire financial straits) are always wanting to talk about how AI will democratize art and free it from the greedy hands of artists, and how it "actually takes like so much work" and whatnot. First, AI will only democratize art for lazy people who can't draw and don't want to know how and don't care if their "art" is properly lit or has the right number of fingers. Second...work? You sat on your butt and spent ten hours changing random words. In art, work is when you have to put your knowledge of anatomy and lighting to use, not when you type in "and there's a boat" into the prompt box. AI art has no reason to exist, AI image generation was a bad idea, and if you deal in it, I hope you have fun devaluing real human creatives for no reason.

Yeah. I hate AI art.