You're projecting, and there are plenty of people in crafts who are using AI output as an input to their own works who are having a blast. AI images make amazing collages/photobash inputs, and AI music is useful to sample or use as inspiration for parts you're stuck on. These people just keep quiet about their use because of the witch hunts being persecuted by people who are afraid of change.
AI use in creative fields is similar now to PEDs use in sports, except more ubiquitous.
> You're projecting,
No, I'm actually not. I'm an active creative portrait photographer and I take part in photographic communities with people much, much better than me, I am surrounded by dozens of gigging and working musicians, songwriters and composers in my friend group (and play a couple of instruments myself); I know painters and illustrators of great ability (though I am not that kind of artist).
I listen to what people say and I talk with them about how they feel about it.
> AI images make amazing collages/photobash inputs,
I fully, fully disagree. I think using AI images in this way — for collage or moodboard — is ruining the point. It dilutes the value. I do know some photographers who haven't yet figured this out, unfortunately, but they will. Letting an AI image into your collage or inspiration for another piece of work is just opting out of a creative choice; you might as well place a grey rectangle, because that is what it is.
> and AI music is useful to sample or use as inspiration for parts you're stuck on
AI music is not and cannot be inspirational. It's the absolute opposite of it. And serious musicians know it.
AI content might have some value as placeholder but even then you have to be careful that the prototype does not go into production.
I'm also aware of someone who used AI images to generate a series of test prints for her new alternative process printing practice, precisely to make sure that her test prints never had any accidental value — it makes it essentially compulsory for her to destroy them when they have served their purpose.
I have no particular problem with them being used as a more varied alternative to a step wedge like that, but the point is this:
AI generated creative works have zero value. Anyone who is seriously involved in creativity knows that even replacing something that is working against you with something that has no value either way is probably a bad idea. And putting out work that has this absolute zero value does you more harm than bad work.
It's way better to try and fail than not to try. Think for example of all the ambitious, earnest failures of movies you've seen; would any of them have been materially improved by AI?
> AI use in creative fields is similar now to PEDs use in sports, except more ubiquitous.
You were saying that you thought it was an "amazing" tool, and now you are saying it's like drug-assisted cheating? I think you still have some of the internal work to do.
> photographer
"Photography couldn’t qualify as an art in its own right, the explanation went, because it lacked “something beyond mere mechanism at the bottom of it." -- The Crayon, one of the oldest art magazines.
It turns out humans have been devaluing the newer ways to create art since forever.
> you might as well place a grey rectangle
There are so many literally {color} rectangles hanging in contemporary art museums. Here is a grey one: https://zandergalerie.com/exhibitions/la-couleur-du-renoncem...
This line comparing to photography is a trope, and IMO a category error.
> There are so many literally {color} rectangles hanging in contemporary art museums.
Yes but you understand I wasn’t talking about the colour, right, but the absence of value.
All generative output is grey.
> AI generated creative works have zero value.
Then how have I gotten value from some of them?
You're creating illusory boundaries to protect your ego. AI is not a supernatural category. It's just another thing. It can serve as inspiration the way anything else can.
You are not the arbiter of value in art, as much as you try to claim authority. You're just rationalizing your arbitrary beliefs.
I didn’t claim any authority. I just argued that I am informed and not projecting; I talk to actual working artists.
(My own work is amateur and probably shit; this is not about my creative ego)
You guys do like to read things that are not there so you can argue against them.
I don’t know any artist who has done any self-reflection about their work who thinks generative AI can do much for them at all.
At best it is tools like deep learning in upscaling and noise reduction, selection masking, separations etc. (I don’t mind AI selection tools; quite liked old style AI upscaling but I have moved away from it; I now think work should be produced with its reproduction limits in mind)
Nobody who has put in the creative ideation and self-reflection work and still wants to improve is going to tell you great things about generative AI. Because they know it is empty calories.
> AI music is not and cannot be inspirational. It's the absolute opposite of it. And serious musicians know it.
So, your answer to "people are doing a thing" is to just say "no they're not! NANANANA can't hear you!"
Musicians have claimed to take inspiration from things like water dripping from a leaky faucet and machine sounds, so your claim that AI outputs can't inspire artists is farcical.
You're obviously biased beyond the point of being able to share in a nuanced discourse, the next few years are gonna be SO rough for you, sorry to say. Buckle up.
> Musicians have claimed to take inspiration from things like water dripping from a leaky faucet and machine sounds
I don't think you really understand how this very concept undermines your argument.
If I saw an artist making creative non-AI work critiquing AI, or even using AI to pointedly critique AI, I would feel differently about that.
But I don't think you understand the core concepts here at all.
> You're obviously biased beyond the point of being able to share in a nuanced discourse, the next few years are gonna be SO rough for you, sorry to say. Buckle up.
This AI industry wizard-of-nihilism tosh gets so old. I am sure you think you're wise and informed and on some kind of nihilist high ground for saying it, though.
No wizardry involved friend, it's pretty clear to see from the way things are playing out now and the history of technological innovation/automation. You are 100% an old man waiving his fist at clouds/time, you will go down just like the scribes and the luddites and the buggy drivers and the portrait painters and the elevator operators. You can make arguments for preferring life before the change, but the change is happening and not accepting it is only self destructive.
And you thought you could criticise me on bias? :-) This is little more than tropes fresh from the blender.
(If you read many of my other posts, you will perhaps see that I am a bit more pragmatically engaged with AI than you suggest.)
I go to a lot of craft fairs and I've been seeing people using AI to make their banners or book covers or detail designs on mugs and such. Here are people playing a "support local creators" line and they won't support their own local graphic designers.
There was one booth two shows ago that I particularly remember as it was selling "paintings" of pastoral scenes and wild life, "painted" on to log slices. This is a fairly common craft you might see at such events, but this particular booth was gluing an AI generated image printed on some kind of paper and then slapping it with a coat of texturing medium to give it a paint brush effect.
Disgusting. Selfish. Dishonest. Churlish. This is what craft is becoming. A pink sludge chicken mcnugget of cynical capitalist exploitation.
Why do you care? If it's bad people won't buy it. If people buy it, it's only bad to you
In the craft fair case the issue is the tragedy of the commons.
If people come to think that all craft fairs are choked up with AI slop and Temu (literally) 3D printed flexi-dragons then it does enormous damage to the notion of art fairs as a place to see the work of artistic individuals; the whole category will die.
This could happen much sooner than the slop-producing participants see a financial disincentive to attend, because their costs (time, materials, personal energies) are radically lower.
Like it or not, art communities need to have some chosen standards.
To be fair this is a much bigger concern for people who show at art fairs than people who simply attend, but the people who show at art fairs do need the support of their visitors in this.
Art fairs aren’t just unrestricted competitive capitalism; they are also cultural entities with norms.
Yes, I go to so many because my wife sells her novels at them.
There's also the issue that there is limited space at craft fairs with wait lists for vendors. A dishonest vendor is holding a space a different vendor could have instead.
It's difficult territory because at some level asking people to meet a certain standard to have a stall at a craft fair is, essentially, "gatekeeping".
But art sales are really the only gatekeeping there is in art, and it has to do with there being a literal gate to a limited space. (It's also usually not artists themselves doing the gatekeeping)
People who are engaged in art really ask so little of other people who want to engage with art — the barriers to entry are essentially non-existent except intent and willingness to learn and spend effort. Essentially every kind of expressive art is cheaper than a good computer; every kind of art has someone enthusiastically chipping away on the internet about it.
But when it comes to access to the physical space to sell physical work that is the result of effort and learning, someone does have to say: "this is not the right space for these kinds of things". The question is how do you judge and how do you say it without destroying enthusiasm.
I always laugh at the people talking about AI "democratizing" the arts and "eliminating gatekeeping" when punk and stream of consciousness aesthetic and several other completely open, completely non-virtuoso paths to the arts exist. If only AI could be helping to improve art and media literacy.
Yeah, I mean my slice of the internet is full of video shorts of people using dead ballpoint pens/tetra paks/kitchen ingredients/Temu pasta makers, or silicone baking mats/budget acrylic paint/leaves/laser printer copies to make really cool, unique prints.
The idea that anything about contemporary art needs further democratisation is kind of insane; there is no art form out there that you cannot find someone more or less begging you to learn for next to nothing.
--
Speaking of AI and art literacy: one of the experiments I have been doing is asking local LLMs (Gemma 4 12B specifically) to look at a set of my own photos, describe them, draw parallels, and recommend other photographers. At one point it recommended to me (without any hints except my photos, which are not in any sense reproductions) that I look at the work of a fairly niche, early photographer who actually is my long term favourite; it also recommended someone contemporary whose name had only come up for me once before who is really fascinating.
So I don't discount that AI might have some value in that art history context. I think, analytically, these tools potentially have something to offer on this point, because after all, my influences (conscious and subconscious) are in the training set, and so are those artists' influences. AI ought to be good at revealing influences.
I am a 3D printing maker type nerd (I make my own tools for other creative tasks, rather than as their own outcomes) and I saw an incredible youtube video about 3D printed (flexi-dragon etc.) slop at US craft fairs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbDPzHLDjYY
She is so exasperated by it that she's unable to draw a conclusion, and I think that is actually the biggest problem with creative dishonesty on this scale. It is numbing.
Everyone knows that it is happening, everyone is clear that it is bad. But there is a paradox: serious-minded artists do use tools, of course. They also have an instinct about ways tool use would be dishonest. But they are introspective and they are often aware that their pragmatic use of a tool might be another's dishonesty. And they want to be inclusive, to build their "scene".
So actually there is less speaking out about it directly than there might be. And what that enables is this ever worsening bad-faith use of low-effort tools. The fact that the people selling the flexi dragons at craft fairs just bought them in bulk on Temu is the hilarious exasperating end point of it.
I think AI has made it more urgent for artists to speak out, sooner.
It has made me even more acutely aware that even though I make my own tools for my own creative projects (lo-fi and niche photographic tools, mostly), the fact that bits are 3D printed is probably interesting only to me or to others who want to make their own tools for their own work; the fact that CAD and 3D printing liberated my idea from its prison in my brain is something I must not let myself think is an end goal. The end goal is elsewhere.