FauxLiving

This brand of argument is basically ‘If you can’t do everything perfectly, then it is pointless to do anything especially the thing that you’re suggesting.’

You see this person in every thread on every topic where people discuss things that they can contribute their expertise to. Their message is ‘it is hopeless, your plan won’t work, give up what you’re doing, you don’t stand a chance’.

Honestly, and forgive the langue, but fuck those people. You know what your strengths are and what you’re capable of, not some faceless bot who is, by its own admissions, not in the US.

If you don’t want to participate in the tech landscape as it exists today, there is absolutely nothing wrong about avoiding it entirely and building something else. Companies will not be so complacent about their position in the market if they know there’s a completely Free alternative that does everything that they charge a subscription for.

The people who are doing self-hosting today are exactly like the early adopters of the smartphone or any other technology. There’s always people trying new things and sometimes they succeed.

People who are using privacy focused approaches to personal technology, like self-hosting, are beta testing the ability to use cheap, mass produced hardware and open source software to build a product ecosystem that meets their needs. That progress is enjoyed by anybody in the future who decides they also want to leave the walled gardens of Tech Giantopia.

People use Photoshop to create cat memes and manipulate pictures of Vice President J. D. Vance but that doesn’t mean that the use of Photoshop disqualifies the output from being considered art. Even the cat pictures are art.

If a person decides they want to create an image in the style of a film that they love and they make something that fits their vision then who are we to say that it isn’t art? Do we have the right to examine their entire process to determine that they used only the tools that we approve of and only the methods that we approve of? Are they disqualified for using generative fill to fix some complex shading?

What if they generate a tree, is the rest of the piece now ‘Not Art’ because they used an AI tool?

That’s why this position against generative art doesn’t make any sense. The line you choose to draw between ‘Real Art’ and ‘Not Art’ is always going to be arbitrary and no two people will have the same definition.

I think this is a great example of people confusing their personal tastes with some universal truth about the world. "I don’t like art generated with AI tools’ is perfectly valid. But to simply declare that my personal taste is THE Definition of Art is hubris.

There were images created, in part, by generative AI in some recent Call of Duty game. The person who created the piece was employed professionally by the studio that makes the game.

The premise here is that AI is generating art. That’s simply not true. People make art. AI is a tool not an artist. ‘AI art’ is art made by people using AI tools. The paintbrush doesn’t understand underlying meaning, it is a tool used by a person to create art. A diffusion model doesn’t understand meaning, but it also doesn’t create anything by itself. it is a tool that a person chooses to use.

The person chooses what to generate, what to manually create and how to mix those elements to create a composition that they, a human person, decide is what they want.

It’s no different than using Krita or Photoshop, with their various plugins and image manipulation capabilities (which also don’t understand meaning), to create art.

It’s just a tool, there is no ‘AI art’, it is all created by people.

If I throw a bucket of paint on a canvas and call it art. You can say that it is bad art, but saying that it is not art because the bucket of paint doesn’t understand art is nonsense. The same is true of any other tool that a person chooses to use to make art.

And much like that line, people confuse their personal taste for some kind of universal Truth that has to apply to everyone.