byronturncoat

While you're not incorrect that happened and it's not something we should forget, you also can't deny the 80 years of culture shift that have happened since then.

The idea of decentering men and the manosphere are so wildly different in goal, tone, and motivation that I can't seriously believe you think they're equivalent. Nevermind the vast over-inflation of your perceived "torrent" of this content

The definition of "creative" and "art" are, indeed, contested in this discussion. Establishing a definition is, and has always been, a large part of many debates. We don't have to necessarily agree, but at least be able to state our position and discuss from there.

Instead, you did not engage with this concept until now and relied on logical fallacy. When I pointed this out, you did not revise or adapt to show good faith, but decided to pivot to falsely classifying the discussion as just a matter of my opinion with no merit. Now we're finally circling back.

There are a number of necessary qualities missing in AI works to qualify as "art". Let's take photography, as an example. In photography, the camera captures the images for a human, but the "art" is the unique (original), intentional depiction of the scene that captures the artist's perspective. Art conveys the artist's thoughts to others. This is true of CGI as well. It is still the artist using their skills to provide a unique perspective in a digitized world.

AI works lack these qualities. It is impossible to create unique AI art - it isz at best, a collection of derivative parts. Sometimes art is intentionally derivative, yes, but that leads to the next point. AI art cannot carry intentionality that art can. It carries a distillation of intention, tokenizing and associating the intention back to its training set. It disconnects the prompt author from the output in a definitionally important way. It is randomized, not reproducible. It is an approximation of the prompter's thoughts, ideas, and emotions - not a translation. It cannot reflect the human experience in its output, just a statistical guess at them.

> saying AI images cannot be art is largely just a stated conclusion.

Yes, it's called a thesis. I have one, I've stated it, and I've supported it. You're welcome to contribute to the discussion

The colloquial definition of "creative" and "art" are not solely an opinion, it's a tangible thing you can explore and investigate if you're motivated to do so. The inability of LLMs to express creativity is also not an opinion. The differences between film directors and LLM prompters are also real things that we could discuss.

But a meaningful discussion requires good faith, not dismissal to disingenuous argument.

They are logical fallacy and deliberately do not engage in the actual argument. It's an inauthentic engagement.

What other people have said about other, unrelated things has no bearing on what I'm saying about this particular thing. The illogical conclusions of nameless "others" are not an argument against my current conclusions. You're treating me as guilty by association.

You're also making an assumption that AI's acceptance WILL follow, just because the others were later accepted. You can't make that assumption at all.

Neither of these arguments are in good faith.

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not... I hope so.

Assuming you aren't, this is called a "false analogy" or "category error". Pigments are raw materials for painting in the same way that letters are raw materials for writing. Pigments make no claim to be art, never have. AI-generated text, on the other hand, is a fully-realized product that lacks the human intent that makes it art, but can be passed off as "art".

GenAI only exists because it steals from a vast corpus of human creative output. It then regurgitates it back, stripping away the emotion, care, and talent that made it art. No amount of prompting will touch the amount of accumulated skill that the original work required. If you cannot understand why trying to pass off GenAI output as "art" is disrespectful and illogical, I cannot help you.

Someone that pretends prompting is "effort" will always just be that, regardless of how you, personally, set your standards.

To summarize, this is a "you" problem. Just because YOU do not think there's anything special about art, it does not mean there isn't. Your lack of respect for art does not undermine the thing itself. You cannot have your GenAI products included with "art" simply because you want to. You aren't entitled to having your prompt outputs held in the same esteem.

> If somebody spends hours prompting various resources and curating it, is that then "slop"?

In my opinion, yes. Some people may disagree with the term "slop" in this case, but that does not step it all the way up to "art". It can still be non-slop, non-art.

If you use the definition of "creative" in that someone creates, sure, you can make your argument. Most people, however, include a level of imagination and effort in their qualifications of whether something is creative. An AI prompt does not meet the bar of "creativity" for most people. Curating AI slop similarly does not meet this bar. Your personal bar may well be on the floor, but that is not representative of most people, in my experience.

You're using your definition of "creative" and "art" interchangeably, which lacks nuance and respect for art. The reference to the arrival of photography similarly lacks nuance and respect for artists and art.

Art and creativity have a human element, they evoke emotions. As soon as you delegate the process to an LLM, you've disrespected that human element if you try to pass it off as creative or art. You can call it "gatekeeping" if you want to, but I see it as basic respect for other humans and human imagination and effort.

If you write a blog post, yes that is creative. If an AI does it, it's no longer creative, it's derivative (by definition). Selecting AI images for one's blog is technically creativity (akin to decorating), but in the most hollow way possible.

If you compare this scenario to photography and art, it's pretty clear you've not actually participated in that community

Refusing to read AI slop is one logical shade from racism? Not only do you seem to misunderstand "logic", you also seem to misunderstand "racism". I have to believe that this is an attempt to be sensationalist, because I cannot possibly fathom someone actually believing this in good faith. Refusing to read low-effort output of an LLM, a piece of software, on principle and the belief in the inferiority of humans are very far afield.

There is artistry in assembling other art into a single cohesive piece. A film is a collection of the work of artists and performers. Combining AI imagery and AI text together does not make art, because none of the constituent parts are art. A few prompts do not make art.

This reflects many of the same things that I've been feeling. It's almost a feeling of grief at the lost of a career I really loved. Software engineering is starting to be unrecognizable to me.

Even if you're a solid software engineer and do your best to keep up in an AI world, you have to deal with all the indirect impacts that AI has had on collaboration, code quality, management decisions, product decisions, etc.

I don't have a solution and I'm really struggling to figure out what I want to do next. I've been unable to identify something that could provide me with income that hasn't been equally harmed by AI. I'm open to suggestions.

All that being said, I'd join such a support group