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Description
People will always seek to capture, share, and find natural moments and depictions of everyday real life. I will always be here to share whatever images and sounds I gather from the forests of Florida, even when they are boring or similar to others I've captured before. They're part of the story of life on Earth, and the connections they create are too meaningful to discard. Perhaps the mainstream will turn to AI instead of conventional photography/art/sampling, but all the professionals, outsider artists, and other broad-spectrum generalist creatives will continue to use everything as they always have. Human-made art is too good and too versatile to go extinct as a creative methodology.

It's certainly true that AI can blur a number of concepts. My own AI creations, created from my bot Razma (which I wrote in MSL as an mIRC bot which can also invoke custom .jar files), had the style of humor which I and friends had - but that AI was created by one person to exist on one IRC server. This level of "homebuilt generator" is something not many have aspired to. Around the web, you can find fantastic generators for names and stories which, much like my own bot, use codebases which are purely reactive in nature. Rinkworks.com has a good fantasy name generator which supports custom rulesets. You can define the patterns of consonants and vowels, etc. So, it's understood that namelists made with it are either random (and thus unworthy of discussion in a copyright context) or calibrated by the user to such an extent that they reflect the user's creative modus.

I see a lot of terrible, run-of-the-mill AI art. I know some people work hard to get the prompts right, and the poses, and so on, but I still see nothing like the perfectionism which I applied to my own IRC bots and games. A well-made human creation has been worked over its entire surface and to its entire extent. AI certainly falters in this regard. The more specific the request, the more trouble the AI has serving it. You can get a thousand apples, but if you want an apple that's been half-eaten, from the top surface down, by a specific kind of moth larvae, you'll have to paint that yourself.

AI is much like a parrot. It repeats and mashes up things it's heard. So, it can only be as context-sensitive as it's coded or trained to be. However, as AIs improve, and more people begin to practice the kinds of perfectionism I mentioned, more personal touches, quirks and idiosyncracies will become apparent, and more about the finished works will reflect these. I don't think of it as something to fear. In practice, AI handles the "dumb, mindless work" so that the humans can move onward and upward to more specialized skills and thereby achieve a greater level of mastery. All technology works to facilitate this process, but this only works when people use it intelligently. Most people are just spamming AIs with prompts and then settling on what they receive. They didn't decide on the pose, scene, lighting, etc. They just generated some anime girl, tweaked one or two things, and then said "That'll work". This is certainly not the creative approach I want to advocate, but I must also acknowledge that this phenomenon has gotten many people to start being creative. Until now, they never would have tried. They'd just think "I could never do that". I have spent much time teaching people to create art and music so that they can see how easy it really is, and how many tricks and shortcuts there are. Despite all this effort, so many of them are still unwilling to try. If a tool can impart within them the desire to create something nice for posterity, why not use it? I don't know if AI can be an effective bridge between "just generating stuff" and "shaping something purposefully with your own hands" but I do think it's too early to render a judgment about it. AI is still a very sensational topic and so few people can look at it objectively.

I think of it as a tool rather than an instant gratification package. Industrious creatives use or at least try out any tool they can get their hands on. So, while I do think some stigmas against AI are well-founded, they're not the ones people are commonly discussing. They're getting mad and scared about the wrong things. People will always seek to create things themselves, and people will always be looking to appreciate or buy things that are made by humans specifically. Look at how many people spend big bucks for low-quality items just because they're handmade.

* * *

The image is created with jWildfire, and is indeed something I "just generated". Processes for "just generating" things have existed for as long as machines have. It's nothing new.

Description
People will always seek to capture, share, and find natural moments and depictions of everyday real life. I will always be here to share whatever images and sounds I gather from the forests of Florida, even when they are boring or similar to others I've captured before. They're part of the story of life on Earth, and the connections they create are too meaningful to discard. Perhaps the mainstream will turn to AI instead of conventional photography/art/sampling, but all the professionals, outsider artists, and other broad-spectrum generalist creatives will continue to use everything as they always have. Human-made art is too good and too versatile to go extinct as a creative methodology.

It's certainly true that AI can blur a number of concepts. My own AI creations, created from my bot Razma (which I wrote in MSL as an mIRC bot which can also invoke custom .jar files), had the style of humor which I and friends had - but that AI was created by one person to exist on one IRC server. This level of "homebuilt generator" is something not many have aspired to. Around the web, you can find fantastic generators for names and stories which, much like my own bot, use codebases which are purely reactive in nature. Rinkworks.com has a good fantasy name generator which supports custom rulesets. You can define the patterns of consonants and vowels, etc. So, it's understood that namelists made with it are either random (and thus unworthy of discussion in a copyright context) or calibrated by the user to such an extent that they reflect the user's creative modus.

I see a lot of terrible, run-of-the-mill AI art. I know some people work hard to get the prompts right, and the poses, and so on, but I still see nothing like the perfectionism which I applied to my own IRC bots and games. A well-made human creation has been worked over its entire surface and to its entire extent. AI certainly falters in this regard. The more specific the request, the more trouble the AI has serving it. You can get a thousand apples, but if you want an apple that's been half-eaten, from the top surface down, by a specific kind of moth larvae, you'll have to paint that yourself.

AI is much like a parrot. It repeats and mashes up things it's heard. So, it can only be as context-sensitive as it's coded or trained to be. However, as AIs improve, and more people begin to practice the kinds of perfectionism I mentioned, more personal touches, quirks and idiosyncracies will become apparent, and more about the finished works will reflect these. I don't think of it as something to fear. In practice, AI handles the "dumb, mindless work" so that the humans can move onward and upward to more specialized skills and thereby achieve a greater level of mastery. All technology works to facilitate this process, but this only works when people use it intelligently. Most people are just spamming AIs with prompts and then settling on what they receive. They didn't decide on the pose, scene, lighting, etc. They just generated some anime girl, tweaked one or two things, and then said "That'll work". This is certainly not the creative approach I want to advocate, but I must also acknowledge that this phenomenon has gotten many people to start being creative. Until now, they never would have tried. They'd just think "I could never do that". I have spent much time teaching people to create art and music so that they can see how easy it really is, and how many tricks and shortcuts there are. Despite all this effort, so many of them are still unwilling to try. If a tool can impart within them the desire to create something nice for posterity, why not use it? I don't know if AI can be an effective bridge between "just generating stuff" and "shaping something purposefully with your own hands" but I do think it's too early to render a judgment about it. AI is still a very sensational topic and so few people can look at it objectively.

I think of it as a tool rather than an instant gratification package. Industrious creatives use or at least try out any tool they can get their hands on. So, while I do think some stigmas against AI are well-founded, they're not the ones people are commonly discussing. They're getting mad and scared about the wrong things. People will always seek to create things themselves, and people will always be looking to appreciate or buy things that are made by humans specifically. Look at how many people spend big bucks for low-quality items just because they're handmade.

* * *

The image is created with jWildfire, and is indeed something I "just generated". Processes for "just generating" things have existed for as long as machines have. It's nothing new.