AI Art communicates nothing
I don't care about AI 'art'. I mean, I care about the huge ethical problems that come with it - but I do not, in the slightest, care about the actual work that gets produced. It might as well be noise to me. There's no point to any of it.
The reason for that is pretty simple: To me at least, art is about communication. Sharing your thoughts and ideas with the world. AI art does not communicate, it does not add meaning. Because it can't. Because it got produced by a machine designed to regurgitate what it already knows. It doesn't have any intent.
Sure, you can use AI as a "tool". You can change or touch up the things it makes to come closer to your vision. But it's still a net loss of information. You're just doing worse communication. Instead of creating your own message you're taking someone else's and changing it around. You're still being filtered by the AI, your expression is being sanded down. Because the starting point, the thing you used to get here does not contain any information. You're trying to make incremental changes to something that actively communicates nothing in order to turn it into something that fits your message. It won't ever be as effective as if you had just started from scratch to begin with.
At the end of the day, if you only make minor changes, you will still be left with a piece that, at it's core, communicates nothing because most of it was created by a machine that had nothing to communicate.
But if you replace the entire thing, then generating it via AI to begin with was pointless.
Point is, no matter how much you replace, if AI is significant portion of the final work, the final work has a significant portion that communicates nothing and drags down the whole rest of it with it.
The fun in art, at least for me, is having that genuine connection. Sharing a piece of art is sharing a piece of who you are. Consuming said art is connecting with the author. You probably don't know them, and they don't know you, but now you've learned just a tiny bit about who they fundamentally are, as a person. Adding AI generated content into that process just adds noise. It muddies the water.
Sharing your art is difficult. It's putting yourself out there, showcasing an incredibly vulnerable side of yourself with complete strangers. AI is enticing because it adds a filter. It adds glossy perfection over everything, it stops people from making 'bad' art - now everything is mediocre. You don't have to worry, you don't have to expose yourself, because AI is here for you to give you give you a perfectly 'meh' foundation.
In my opinion, that's a huge problem. Because while 'good', polished art is important, "bad" art is even moreso. But AI is actively contributing to the stigmaticization of being bad at art. Because there's this button that can instantly churn out something 'meh', people get a lot of more harsh towards the genuine, "bad" attempts of beginners.
Because they think themselves above it.
AI cannot be authentically bad at art. It will never achieve that. Because earnestly making bad art is very very fundamentally human. It, in some sense shows you someones most authentic self.
They don't know the rules, the conventions, they just do whatever feels right. They don't have a filter yet because they don't know what they're "supposed" to be doing. All the shitty wordpress blogs, the bad rpg maker games, the terrible fanfiction, the 240p vlogs - It tells you so much about their authors, it lets you experience them in a way that's so completely raw it's honestly beautiful.
They wanted to share a piece of themselves with the world, and they did. It's not polished, it's not commercial, but it is deeply personal. Their mistakes, their odd word choices, their imperfections - it tells us so much about the person that made it. As you get better at doing something, you start developing a filter. I know what sounds good, i know what doesn't. I have some sense of what I'm doing when I'm writing these blogposts. I can't help it, I can no longer write the way I did when I started out. I'm not saying I want to go back to how I was doing it back then - I do like my current writing style more, but there is something beautiful about those first terrible posts, those bad stories I wrote. I think being bad at art is a really important part of how we express ourselves, and how we figure what works for us creatively. And AI is doing a big part in trying to take that away by promising everyone guaranteed mediocrity.
Go make bad art. Use awkward wording, draw shitty stick figures, make lots of typos.
It's what makes us human.
Create your own filter, develop your own style. Don't let a robot communicate for you.