Ok so forget about the environmental issues (if you say other art forms do damage as well?), forget about the stealing from other artists (it’s true a lot of great art involves theft), forget about it being impersonal (a lot of good art is), forget about what is and isn’t art— here’s why I think maybe you shouldn’t bother with ai image generation:Â
You’re unlikely to learn or create anything new, you’re just rearranging the internet’s entrails. Making more chaff that’s dead on arrival and fed back into the AI meat grinder, to be torn apart and reassembled by someone else.Â
Nick Cave has a quote about art being great because we create it by pushing against our limitations, failing in ways and overcoming in others. AI is theoretically limitless, and so there is nothing to push against or transcend.Â
Conceiving of some combination of images and making it happen is not a very interesting way of making art to begin with (whether you use AI or do it manually). You won’t discover anything in this creation, it’s just pure execution. Art is informed by its process, the creation of it is intrinsic to the thing itself. You have no medium, no physical or conceptual substance to push against— just someone else’s algorithm. At best you are a curator of images, or an illustrator whose products have little utility. Really just a cog in someone else’s increasingly run-of-the-mill machine, making content indistinguishable from the next guy and training an algorithm to make the world a worse place. Can you use AI as an ingredient in a more complex project? Maybe. But you’ll make better, more interesting art without it. Just because something feels inevitable doesn’t mean it’s not a choice