Somehow, I can’t let go of the topic of AI in art. Everything I read or hear about it just makes me increasingly angry. It’s mainly the fact that people keep discussing the issue in the context of all the correct analogies, e.g., the luddites, the invention of photography or Deep Blue beating Karparov, but they keep drawing the wrong conclusions. They are opening the history book on the correct page but then go: “yeah, but this time it’s different”. It is not going to be different. Your whining about how bad it all is and how bad it is all going to be is not going to change anything. And that’s mainly because it is not as bad as you think.
First and foremost, this is not going to be a defence of AI slop. As I said last time, nobody wants AI slop. What I take issue with is how low the bar has become for us to call something AI slop. It goes as far as labelling something AI slop, even when AI was not even involved in its making. It’s just the idea that something could have been made with AI that people despise so much that it becomes more important than the work of art itself. The mere existence of generative AI sows so much distrust that people would rather wrong an artist by labelling their hard work AI slop than to experience the disappointment of discovering that the thing they were previously enthusiastic about was AI slop.
To understand this, we need to look at why it matters so much to people if an art piece was created by a human or an AI, because it is a very good reason: Humans creating something involves effort. A real human putting effort into their work gives the work importance and fills it with soul. You can take bird.lol as an example for this. I work a few hours every week on these comics and in this time I make countless decisions. Every little item in the background, every facial expression and every formulation is a decision I made, sometimes consciously and sometimes subconsciously. The comics are an expression of my soul. And because I have to invest a lot of effort to work on all these details, I think really hard about the story as all the decisions I make in that regard will influence many hours of my time in the future.
Now let’s hypothesize I had a comic generator that I just put some vague ideas into and it would generate a new comic strip for me. I could still make up the story just as I do now, but all those tiny decisions would be made by a model, rolling a metaphorical dice that is weighted by what is most plausible. Even if I’d feed this comic generator the exact same story, the panels would no longer be reflections of my soul. But I’d argue that I couldn’t even feed it the same story, because this process of working on those tiny details for hours is what drives the creative process. But while you might take this as the strongest argument for why AI slop is bad (remember, this is not what this is about), I take the ongoing debate about it as yet another indication how pointless it is to do all this because people don’t notice.
There is another part of the artistic process that takes effort: the viewing of an artwork. Actively engaging with a piece of art can be a process that is just as sophisticated as the creation of the artwork itself. If you really dive into an artwork and look at all those tiny decisions the artist had made, it can be like peeking through a window into their soul. Unfortunately, I think most people alive today have never done that. Art is not engaged with, it is consumed. People rush through art galleries, glancing at all the artworks until they have “seen everything” so they can get out of there and have dinner. People try to improve how fast they can read to get through books faster so they can get more stories into their busy day. There’s even subscription services that offer summaries of books so you don’t have to read the whole thing yourself. But the greatest perversion of all this is social media, actively working on shortening peoples’ attention span to a point where an artwork only has less than a second to appeal to them before it is swiped away.
It is no wonder that this is an environment where AI slop thrives. Generative models are really good at producing pieces that are impressive on the first and second look, but fall apart completely on the third and could never hold up to any form of active engagement. However, if most people don’t even give it a second look, they are easily fooled. People don’t like to be fooled so they get upset. But this ultra fast clicking, scrolling and swiping through content was only possible because there was no other way for anyone to produce an impressive art piece without putting in all the work. But this was a way for the viewers of the art piece to judge its quality without putting in all the work. They could just like, upvote or repost anything that looked impressive on first glance without putting in the effort to appreciate its quality. What AI slop has done is to take away that convenience.
As an artist, is that really such a bad situation? Frankly, I don’t know. It might be that these new paradigms will cause more people to look at art more closely, sparking a new wave of engagement. It might also be that people will just accept AI slop at some point and find out that their favourite activities were never about engagement with artists but just pure dopamine addiction. It will probably be a bit of both. To reiterate my point from last week, it is certainly a new situation that artists need to adapt to if they rely on their art financially. Protests, campaigns and proudly stating “no AI was used to create this” will not work. If you’re in it for the money, you have to find out what your customers want from you and give it to them. That’s how capitalism works.
For bird.lol, I don’t use any AI tools (except that one time where I did it as a joke). I hope this blog post makes it clear why. But the same reason is the one I refuse to take your money. The artistic process is what I do this for and that never worked well as a business, even before AI slop was a thing. I wish there was a bigger community for art appreciation where people truly engaged with artworks and gave attention to those that were deep and meaningful. I’m pretty sure that among such a group of people, AI slop would not even be on the agenda.
