AI Art Sucks

     Over the past few years, AI has gripped its six-fingered hands on every corner of the internet. Whether its using Chat-GPT to write your essay, being blasted by questionable AI popups every time you google something, or having your feeds infested by piss-colored AI images, you've encountered a product of AI. Through this time AI has gained many supporters and detractors alike. Some see it as a tool to help non-artists convey their ideas, while others deride it for stealing the work of other artists and using it to put them out of a job. 

    You can probably guess what camp I fall into. For the most part, I believe generative AI was a mistake which takes jobs away from real people and causes more harm than good. This might be old school of me, but I think AI should be used to do the things us humans don't want to. Like do boring repetitive factory work or filter sewage water. Sure, making art like music or paintings is a job, but it's also a passion, something which AI can't replicate. The one things humans have which AI can never have is intention. Every word in a story, every note in a song, every detail, no matter how minor, has a reason behind its placement. AI has no intention. It does whatever its told, blindly blending details from different pieces of art into a muddied mess. AI art might look or sound good at first but when you take a closer look the fakeness of it all becomes obvious. Small details like a sixth finger which a human could easily catch go unnoticed by AI because it is fundamentally shallow and cannot create anything complex that requires deeper analysis. 

    Even when given the same prompt, no two artists will draw the same way. If you tell a group of people to draw an apple, for example, then even though they were given the exact same instructions there will still be variation in art style, color, shape, or background details due to the artist's own experiences which make them unique. Without those experiences, all an AI can do is regurgitate the same slop, over and over. There is no reason to copyright AI art because anyone can replicate it with just one prompt. It is not a tool like a tablet or paint program that helps artists express their ideas, but a middleman which removes all human expression from the table.

    I'm more neutral to other kinds of AI, like Gemini or Grok, which focus more summarizing information than creating art. While they're not exactly reliable sources of information (unless you want a side of glue with your pizza), I do think that they're useful for finding sources for a project and stuff like that. Plus, since they rely on updated information sourced from human discoveries to stay relevant, they aren't direct competition to most of the sources they take from.

    Perhaps this take will land me on the wrong side of history. Maybe AI really is the future. But for now, I see a future dominated by AI stories and images as a dystopian nightmare. Our experiences are what make us human, and what makes the art we produce meaningful. After all, in a world where our jobs and our art have been taken over by AI, what reason is there for living?