On a tour of Mr Wonka’s chocolate factory, a little girl is shown Wonka’s experimental gum and has some. It turns her purple and makes her swell like a blueberry. Vance did the same thing.

Humanity is too ignorant to recognise bad AI art on sight, every time. The trends are only easy to see in mass aggregate. That’s why individual action can’t stop it. We need aggregate action. We need to ban AI art.

Oh, they can make something useful. I can watch Flunky make images with two very different checkpoints, and they have the same artistic style. And the breasts are enormous and heaving. It’s good for gooning to.

I just don’t believe we should have to put up with 99 average AI art users for every Highborn Flunky. I’m willing to give up gooning to Flunky pieces if it means I don’t have to see those awful sepia comics with the dot eyes on Lemmy.

And I’m concerned by men like Sam Altman and Elon Musk. I’m concerned by the energy cost of training, the economic costs to artists, and the effect on average people’s creativity. I would be willing to ban AI art in order to solve those issues. If 99% of humans can’t be responsible with the technology, then we shouldn’t have it. I feel the same way about automobiles, nuclear bombs, tanks, and plastic packaging.

That’s because House is a poser fan of the guy with the moustache

I’m not saying an idiot with a pencil will produce good art, or art that’s worth anyone else’s time. But they will always have the potential to draw something worth their own time. Anyone can engage in a worthwhile artistic endeavour using a pencil. It’s not about quality, or originality, or theming. It’s about intention. Any idiot can communicate what their own ideas with a pencil, on some level.

For example, take Adolf Hitler. He was a terrible artist. He had no understanding of proportion. His paintings don’t make logical sense. And you know what? That suits the man. Hitler was an idiot who couldn’t make logical sense of the world. His paintings reflect his terrible mind. There is that much value in them as an endeavour of self-expression. I can look at a painting by Hitler and say “that’s a Hitler”.

I can also look at an AI generated image by Highborn Flunky and say “that’s a Flunky”, but Flunky is a good artist. Hitler is not. That’s the difference I’m talking about. A painting reflects your soul even if you suck.

The difference between a camera and Stable Diffusion is that a camera makes it hard to convey artistic intent, while Stable Diffusion adds artistic intent that isn’t yours. Making art with a camera is hard, but anyone can know it when they see it. Making art with Stable Diffusion is an endeavour complicated by the fact that the AI is using mass manufactured intent to pass of intentless creations as art. If you fail to convey your intent with a prompt, you don’t get a dull scene, you get trendy bullshit.

And people are way more offended by being shown trendy bullshit by bad artists than boring scenes.

I’ve tried making AI art, and there was definitely skill involved. I understand why prompt engineering can be hard. Every word I added could have unpredictable effects, constrain the space of images that can be generated because of the correlations. Choosing between similes was important.

What I realised was that I was fighting against the model to put my intent in the art. The model was extrapolating things I didn’t want to put in the art based on popularity and trends, and I was having to find workarounds to actually make what I wanted.

A pencil will never inject intent I don’t want into my art. My hand might slip, I might get the proportions wrong. But I’ll never try to draw a criminal and accidentally draw a black person because my pencil was exposed to more black criminals than white.

There are AI artists who can put their intent into their art. But they’re 1% of the people making AI art. Most of the time, a majority of the intention comes from a computer copying trends. And that’s not art. In order to make art, actual meaningful art with these programs, you have to be an expert.

Any idiot with a pencil is an artist. The pencil only does what you tell it. You don’t have to work to make it yours.