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Peter Schmidt-Nielsen
@ptrschmdtnlsn
I have another theory: It's that once you can make a gajillion of something in seconds its allure is instantly removed. Imagine a world in which this was the *only* piece of AI art, no more (say, it cost a ton to make) – everyone would be talking about "*the* AI art piece".
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Gary Marcus
@GaryMarcus
Generative AI hasn’t created memorable songs, books, and movies, despite insanely large amount of input. Why not? I see three reasons: 1. Everything Generative AI does is derivative and tends to be a kind of average. 2. Generative AI it lacks a deep conceptual x.com/nandodf/status…
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Peter Schmidt-Nielsen
@ptrschmdtnlsn
But as is, jeez, this image doesn't really make that much of an impression on me. Or was it this (very similar one) that I saw all those months ago? They're just a dime a dozen, and none of them sticks out in my mind particularly.
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Paul Graham
@paulg
That was the first AI-generated art that tricked me into thinking it was by a human. At the time. Now it seems obviously AI.
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Peter Schmidt-Nielsen
@ptrschmdtnlsn
Yes, that also for sure has been the trend. To me the most striking version of this trend is to look at 3D graphics people called "photorealistic" from past decades. At the time, they really were somewhat fooled, but then they got used to it, and now it looks laughable.
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keysmashbandit
@keysmashbandit
When really only research previews were available I led a whole seminar where people were getting me to type stuff into gpt-2 on a projector. There's a gpt-3 article published in Latham's Quarterly
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Peter Schmidt-Nielsen
@ptrschmdtnlsn
Right, perfect example. It's unthinkable now. I also remember when in reporting on AI everyone loved to be like "<paragraph on AI> ... and actually AI wrote that whole thing I just said!", and now nobody would ever do that, and not because AI is worse at writing such paragraphs.
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Peter Schmidt-Nielsen
@ptrschmdtnlsn
Absolutely. "slop" is completely relative to abundance. I think there's a fair point to be made that almost all AI art is "slop" in 2025, but if most individual pieces had been painted in 1923 they would have been of enormous importance in art history.
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Vikash Sehwag
@VSehwag_
Sort of like getting cheat codes for your favorite game. Once you have them then it's exciting for a day or two but it will get boring fast.
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J O H N
@johnholowach
Call this the vanilla problem: vanilla used to be a coveted item due to its rarity and unique flavor profile, but as the world developed and the beans became more abundant, it declined until it now means boring.
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Robert Balicki (👀 @IsographLabs)
@StatisticsFTW
Yeah, true. But that is true of any genre. If $pieceOfBadArt was the only art in said genre, it would be groundbreaking. If the Monkees were the only rock music we ever had... The problem with this piece (and similar ones) is that it doesn't reward you if you go deeper. The idea
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sasha
@llallawg
Thinks the thing here is it’s a gimmick. This happens in real art too. You got an artist who has a gimmick and reproduces a thousand of then with small variations, sells them, etc. anyone can reproduce them, no one does. It’s because it is just playing the art world game.
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Max Rovensky
@MaxRovensky
AI is perfect for disposable tiktok brain era slop
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Max Rovensky
@MaxRovensky
One thing about all these Ghibli posts is I see them I think "heh, that's neat" And 2 minutes later I've forgotten I've seen it This is decidedly not what happens when I see works by Studio Ghibli There's a lesson in there somewhere that I'll leave up to you to extract
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Ahmed
@theahmedjaffery
Part of the appreciation of a work is knowing how much effort and thought goes into something. The easier something is or appears to be, the less we value it.
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Evan 📟⌛️
@ubuto23
Alternatively when’s the last time you saw an art piece that stuck with you?
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Josh McClure
@JoshMMcClure
This is why the craftsman homes from yesteryear are so wistfully looked at today; no one is making them. The less there is of something (that's beautiful) the more it's prized. Conversely the more familiar we are with those beautiful things the more they become de rigueur.
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surya
@subygan
Reminds me of a friend who refuses to have chipotle because they give the food too fast, making it mundane. He likes the taste but because it's just too fast. Taste, and satisfaction comes from waiting, savouring the effort that went into the food. Not merely the Ingredients
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Midwest State of Mind
@mwstateofmind
Yes, this is obviously true and we can apply it to our own lives. I know people that moved to Colorado to ski but then never ski again. How can this be? The allure of it is stronger than the actual desire to do it. Or kids that stop drinking as soon as they are legally old enough
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Michael, The Cosmic Paladin
@shyAway_Games
Yeah man. Same thing as mass production. If you only have 1 can of ravioli - it's worth everything. If you have 10 million cans of ravioli - they're, individually, not worth much. People treat AI art as ravioli.
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SwaseyOnSoftware
@SwaseyOnSWDev
Everyone when they first discover AI image generation immediately spits out a bunch of amusing images that literally no one gives a single fck about. Most of the appeal of photorealistic dogs wearing morning jackets or whatever is in having been the one to prompt it.
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Reply guy 😐
@GolerGkA
That's great by itself. AI generation makes slop look like slop. It helps true human creativity stand out
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Jason Ewton
@Jason_Ewton
Poison Progress. A concept I've been developing. TLDR: There is an inflection point where true novelty is lost to an oversaturation of exploitation. "They don't make em like they used to."
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Phil Freo
@philfreo
Good point. Is there some version of AI art you could only get by dedicating a year’s worth of “thinking”/compute to it?
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William p2p/acc
@retrohack3r
I think this is also what gave rise to minimalism: the commoditization of detail. When intricate designs demanded massive human investment to hand craft, people sought out intricate art. Now the dollar store is full of mass produced intricate ceramic yard ornaments.
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Chris Harrsch
@DSChris
I think this applies to scarcity, generally. Though it can occur in different ways (e.g., unique works of an artists, artificial scarcity of a manufacturer)
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mep.c
@mepc0
Good art has always been about reaching beyond the material and into the divine, something which only humans are able to do.
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Gutsee
@gutsee424
I go to a lot of art galleries. If I saw this piece in an art gallery I would geek tf out. But also most art where I moved to recently is absolute trash tier.
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temper
@TemperGame
Well yeah novelty is everything Novelty is human and it's the major thing AI struggles with at every dimension
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Frank Rose
@FrankRose1856
Everybody doesn't have to like the same thing. I can make a piece *I* like. You can make a piece *you* like. I don't have to like yours and you don't have to like mine. We can all be happy.
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Yoway Buorn
@YowayBuorn
Scarcity certainly adds value, but I've still yet to see or hear a single piece of AI art that I would pay for or even "enjoy" more than once. That said, I still hire humans when I need art made, and I've never once been disappointed at the results.
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Cartallica
@CartallicaX1
Everyone has a 4K video recorder in their pocket. Where are the great independent films? When it becomes too easy, no one tries.
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darthur
@darthur
Okay. This is fake then, I guess.
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Dale Cooper, NH Supremacist
@Dbl_R_Diner
I’ve been saying this for the last few years. AI will make meat-made art more valuable, it won’t kill it. A huge part of art is the process and a huge part of enjoying art is empathizing with the artist. In some sense AI art isn’t even art.
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Freddie
@FredSchmidt4
Rarity is a sign of complexity. Humans desire complex things. Hence why we assign value to one offs.
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bryan willman
@bryan_m_willman
Note too that for a great deal of highly valued art, what people care about is the 1st example of some style/tactic/idea. You can't copy Rothko's style and sell the paintings for a fortune now - only the Rothko's matter.
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Momen
@Momen_HQ
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bryan willman
@bryan_m_willman
Given that one definition of Art is "something specially made" then stuff produced by computers in near zero time is by definition not art - it's not special, it's just part of the firehose of output.
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quant
@quant_____
Exactly. I doubt any of the quoted tweet’s reasons would hold up in a blind comparison of AI vs human art.
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Paul
@paul__is__here
Yes, this. Also this is perfectly reasonable -- when art takes a lot of human time to make, that's a costly signal that the artist thought there was something important in it
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Santi
@0xBizk
It is the philosophical disucssion behind art: Is Art the final product or whatever is behind it? Some will say the banana thing is art because it makes you feel something, some others (like me) will argue is not because there is nothing meaningful behind.
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Puncle
@Pubcle
This one gives me a headache, but importantly it's pretty meaningless is a big part of it. There's no wondering at the process, thinking about why the artist decided this, no message, no story, no communication, it's just how the AI generated it to its statistical averages.
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Tris Smith
@tellisdon
Generative methods literature calls this the Bach Faucet problem, h/t
@GalaxyKate
: (possibly also of interest: related writings on 10,000 bowls of oatmeal and perceptual uniqueness)
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Dr Kate Compton
@GalaxyKate
declaring a new term: A Bach Faucet is a situation where a generative system makes an endless supply of some content at or above the quality of some culturally-valued original, but the endless supply of it makes it no longer rare, and thus less valuable
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Donald Hobson
@DonaldH49964496
It's not that no one wants AI art. Plenty of people do. It's that the excitement is widely spread over many pieces of art. Excitement doesn't scale with compute. 2x gpu's produce 2x the art, but the excitement is ~fixed. So each art piece gets less.
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Dene
@denehoffman
Couldn’t agree more. Once you commodify something, it’s no longer a luxury good. A printed poster of the Mona Lisa is worth nothing compared to the original, but if you started making indistinguishable copies of the canvas and then lost track of the original…
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Rory Koehler
@rorykoehler
Put any AI genre copy song beside a classic human made one and you will get your answer. The standout human made songs are standout specifically because they aren’t average but AI is literally a best effort averaging machine.
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Vergil's Muse
@Morgan_Scape
Yeah, I feel if things were a bit different and someone came out with a piece like that and it was a shocking 1 in a 1,000,000 shocking twist by some scientist who spent years to pull it together, it would be seen as a modern marvels
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🍋
@thecursedlemon
This piece isn't really "art" though, it's an exhibition in technical expertise and tickling the senses. It's the equivalent of someone doing noodly shredding on guitar - in almost every instance it's not art, it's just masturbatory and meant to be enjoyed as a raw sensory thing.
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Baris
@PandaBaris
One key factor in the anti-art/intellectualism culture around AI is the belief that something better can be quickly created with AI. But that also applies to other AI art. If someone made an impressive piece of AI art, what's stopping me from trying to guess their prompts?
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Drew
@thedrewreed
I think there's an element of how people love the back stories of the humans who create the work.
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Alastair Thomson
@FinanceDirCFO
Could it be that people admire others doing something they can't do themselves...dancing for the Royal Ballet, singing lead soprano at the opera, writing a hit record... ...something that anyone can do on a laptop in 5 mins doesn't have anything like the same allure...
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g
@gregor744582316
i remember seeing this for the first time, before chatGPT could create proper images. i was blown away when i realised it was AI. now it just reeks of AI slop. funny how views change
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Raketenziesel
@raketenziesel
In my impression literally no one talks about MC Escher and Arcimboldo as endurant high prestige art with the folks of da Vinci, Rubens, Dürer, Vermeer etc ... . It's still nerdy and gimmicky art.
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Ho₿₿es
@Hobbes_00H
Everyone has their own definition of art. I think some combination of “intent” and “effort” are necessary, and that breaks down with AI art. It can be appreciated in different, new ways, just not the traditional ways.
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