AI ART: Art or Not?

AI, I am but a simple man, so keep producing ... I need to find if a full version of this exists :

 

I've gotten to the point where I'm more than just disdainful of AI slop, I actively don't give business to companies that use it. It's lazy, it's tone-deaf and it's cheap. You can get good quality affordable custom art on a site like Fiverr. Bottom line- people who don't understand art shouldn't be trying to replicate it.

In other news, my day job company asked me to write a blog post. I guess they had issues with other people they asked either finding time or just doing a terrible job, so they offered to just interview me and listen to my old man stories which I was cool with. Then they came back with this AI written slop and expected me to put my name on it. I said nah I'll rewrite the entire thing. This is a marketing initiative and our marketing director should be aware of the backlash to AI generated things that usually come from a creative human process.

In non-art related news, I was negotiating a payment on some business items with a partner of mine and he clearly used AI as his lawyer, and one of his AI-generated responses admitted I spent ~$5k on a business venture that he was trying to say that he didn't owe me. That admission combined with Texas law put him on the hook for that ~$5k, which was just part of the entire amount.

Don't trust AI, folks. There are billions of idiots on the internet and their online output is being used to train AI on what is factual.

 

what is art? who is an artist?

 

The issue is it isn't original - it builds upon other people's work without asking for permission or giving credit.

DD

 

My issue is that AI Art is not innovative ... like you said ... it builds upon other people's work.

Take an innovative artist like Eddie Van Halen. EVH created a guitar style that was crazy good and innovative. His style got copy catted by a legion of rock guitarists. The copied guitar work was not original and frankly not as good as EVH.

Like those copy cat guitarists, AI Art is very derivative and not as good.

AI Art can take all of Monet's work and create paintings in Monet's style but not of the same quality or originality. This is art for people to put on their walls of their first apartment.

You can not get AI to generate a painting as innovative as Monet, Van Gogh et al .. .or write a poem/sonnet as innovative as Shakespeare ... or write a guitar solo as as innovative as EVH or ...

 

Gore Verbinski had some good thoughts recently about AI in cinema:

https://variety.com/2026/film/global/gore-verbinski-ai-taormina-1236780502/

 

I dare anyone to say this isn't art.

Spoiler

 

Beautiful art :

 

I would watch that show.

 

AI 'art' is gauche af.

 

I am stuck in hurry up and wait at work recently so started messing around with some AI. My clients have been using AI and it's causing a lot of problems because the "plans" generated by AI have a lot of problems and I have to explain to them why this doesn't work when they tell me why don't I just do this .They have also been using AI to do their own code research and gotten into arguments with building officials which I then have to resolve. Often with explaining to clients that what they are getting isn't correct (for example AI often cites the wrong building code). Most often they've been using it to create renderings of their ideas.

So I figured I would give it a try to see what AI produces, how usable it would be and to better talk to my clients about it. I used Gemini which one of my clients has said he uses. I entered in black and white line drawing exteriors of projects that I designed and then prompted AI to create renderings of them at the day or night. Gemini did create some very compelling images quickly but it also changed the projects. In several cases it added things like rooftop patios, and more windows that were not actually there. It also messed up the scale of the buildings with them looking much larger than they actually were. Gemini could create compelling beautiful renderings in a matter of seconds which would take me hours and not as good using Revit and Photoshop but the changes it made to the designs would cause massive problems if I actually used them in presentations to clients, code officials or others for actual business purposes.

 

As a history nerd I've been watching AI recreations of ancient cities and about how people lived in ancient times. Some are very good but a lot are terrible with historical oddities like modern equipment showing up (for example in a recreation about Roman medicine plastic bottles and IV's showing up) many have weird oddities like legs without bodies moving around, items suddenly disappearing or transforming into something else. A lot of the voice overs have odd pronunciations which are jarring since most of them are speaking in Oxford English accents.

Many of these problems are caused by the AI's but they appear to be more a problem of lack of editing and quality control. So while the AI gives a lot of power to create and animate images the real craft of filmmaking / videography is lost. This seems to be the biggest problem that while AI and other tools can give anyone the power to create interesting "art" it doesn't make people skilled.

 

My son plays a Wolfgang. One of his favorite guitars in his collection. I believe he also has an Ernie Ball that was an offshoot of an Eddie collaboration, he also has a Charvel San Dimas which I believe was the original collaboration.

But the crap peavy Frankenstrats and many others suck.


But I totally get the analogy.

 

This is only true of LLM's. This is the majority, but not the whole story for A.I. I'm working on a whole cloth different engine... and the only reason it isn't much farther advanced is because it terrifies me so I'm moving very slowly on purpose. In fact, it wasn't built to be A.I. at all, but it's right there if i want it. I'm working on other aspects/modules of the engine, and it's.... far better than an idiot like me should be able to make. Novelty is easy, the hard part is novelty that appeals to people. Novelty that doesn't collapse into meaninglessness of nothingness or all encompassing snake eating it's own tail version of meaningless. This is tractable but not easy.... there are 7 basic stories, for example, only so many styles of music, they have a shape. Not only that, but by borrowing different shapes from nature, I could, theoretically, produce novel works that are even likely to appeal to humans that have never been made into art, yet.

 

The problem is you don't know what you don't know and you don't know what AI doesn't know. Too many people though view AI created images, essay, music as being a completed work because it might look, read, or sound compelling. Unless you have a background in it, and or willing to spend the time to go through it you aren't aware of what the problems are until it's too late. Or in my case you have clients who believe that just because the AI has produced a building plan that looks like it was something drawn on CAD and a very pretty picture of the outside it works. That is far different than just passing around rough sketches or looking at existing buildings from where then you can start developing a plan and a design that actually works with drawings that can be permitted and built from. The problem is that AI produces very compelling images quickly an because most people don't understand that architects aren't just making pretty pictures they get caught up in the pretty picture. Instead as the human professional we end up wasting a lot of time explaining why the plan and image the client generated by AI doesn't work.

This video goes into it where an actual architecture firm has a competition versus an AI on a house design.

 

The best art is that masterpiece that comes from a master artist.

There is no backstory behind AI ...and therefore humans will never treasure it. Maybe you can appreciate AI art today but then you'll forget about it tomorrow cause you can't connect with the artist itself or the story about how the art was created.