> In fact it is kind of stupid to insist someone slavishly draw something by hand
I believe they used to call that "art."
I believe they used to call that "art."
The belief that we were living in a golden age of hand-made visual beauty before AI arrived is obvious nonsense.
The golden age of illustration ended when Illustrator arrived. After that, everything became a mess of cliches and clip art, culminating with Google's Material Design, where everything looks simultaneously soulless, heartless, and bland.
AI brought some colour back. A lot of the imagery is kitsch, but illustration has always tended to kitsch, so nothing really changed there.
This is the irony of the anti-AI purity hunt. Most human-made work is crap. It always has been.
AI hasn't suddenly sent the quality of creativity off a cliff. It's commoditised the low standard of most previous hand-made work and made it easier to access.
The high end - the real talent - still stands out. But most people can't afford it, and even fewer people appreciate it.
Yes. That's why it's called slop. And now we're absolutely swimming in it. I guess a small number of people like it, but then there's no accounting for (bad) taste.
It's a shame we made it economically infeasible to ever more produce or pursue.
The value of even mediocre art used to be that it still took a human somewhere hundreds or thousands of hours to reach that skill-level; and its existence indicate true care by the creator or commissioner. Heck, most historic art in cathedrals and historic art museums is crap by modern standards; they simply didn't have the tools and resources to reach high level in the craft.
> "AI hasn't suddenly sent the quality of creativity off a cliff"
No it has. Because there is no point anymore, no economic value, no recognition of the time and effort required. Spend 1000 hours to be called worse than AI. Spend 3000 more to be accused of using AI. Finally spend 100000 more, and finally reach above the slop; only not being paid a dime because AI is 90% good enough. Want to spend those final 300000 to finally get paid for your work? Or do you prefer working minimum wage instead.
Just go to google and use their work as is, and crop out the signature. At-least then you still acknowledge that there actually is a value to creating imagery left. Welcome to the world of slop.