GenAI ‘art’ is bad.

Having an idea =/= creating art.

This is difficult to explain, but read any book on creativity or the artistic process and you will understand that ideas are essentially worthless. Art is the struggle of executing those ideas.

A film director's job isn't to have an idea, it's to have a working relationship with his human staff who then interpret his ideas through their own experiences. What makes a movie's direction stellar isn't the director’s ideas, it's that he knows how to direct his staff to accomplish those ideas.

If you're a disabled person who is missing both arms or who can't sing because you have no vocal chords; and you then go and create ‘art’ that would have required those things using GenAI - you have removed yourself from the piece and the output is a dishonest work that neither represents nor is faithful to your lived experience and who you are, you would be embarrassed because it would be none the clearer that you couldn’t have possibly made this.

If that same person however uses their relationships with other humans to accomplish something that would require those capacities - you would have no reason to feel embarrassed of the output, because those relationships to other people are a part of who you are. People want to work for you. That says something about you and makes the final work yours.

Can a person with no arms draw? If not - then a drawing made by AI only ever serves to emphasize the disability of this person, nothing has been created in a way that is influenced by the person’s being. If instead that same person overcame his disability and learned to paint with their feet or by holding the brush with their mouth, the outcome is art because the result says something about the person who made it. Maybe they become really good at it, and then the art speaks for itself and says “this person overcame his disability and became a great artist.”

All artists struggle with disabilities, lack of resources, lack of money, lack of tools, the country they were born in. The art you make will be influenced by that. That's the point. To leave behind traces of who you were and where you were.

How is GenAI different from automated pipelines like scanning human bodies into a 3D Modelling software? Isn’t the human’s intent enough to make something good even if AI does the heavy lifting?

The problem is that GenAI doesn't “do heavy lifting”. It removes the human from the work. Body scans and 3D models require a person actively working on them. The tools used to make them don't create the work for you.

What if a person who lost their speech had a recording of their voice and trained an AI to use it to sing?

There is a difference between a mute person writing a song and commissioning someone to sing it, using text to speech with auto-tune Vocaloid style, and having an AI do the entire thing automatically.

The first two examples are tasteful and undeniably artistic. The third example is embarrassing, I would be embarrassed to listen to it, and the person would probably be embarrassed by the output. They didn’t struggle to make it, they didn’t create a voice from silence. The song was sung not by him, but by no one.

Having an idea isn't creating art, executing the idea is. I don't want to consume art that isn't executed by what we currently define as human beings. I'm not worried about GenAI replacing human artists because GenAI simply can not make good artistic work.

GenAI cheapens products, I don't want to use products that use AI in their marketing, I don't want to watch movies that were made using GenAI. Not because I think GenAI is morally wrong - but because it's fundamentally always going to be bad due to lacking the human element.

All of this is just my personal opinion on why GenAI 'art' is bad - this doesn't get into the actual practical problems I have with AI which is that it is an unjustifiable waste of resources that contaminates the internet and the real world.

So here’s the pitch for GenAI, a program which in no way actually creates art - because an artistic work is something that fundamentally requires human struggle in order to be art - and on top of that it just actively damages the environment?

GenAI hasn't solved a single problem that wasn't already solved. Writing? A solved problem before GenAI. Music? A solved problem before GenAI. Drawing? You get the picture.

I've thought about this a lot - being both a programmer and artist. I love innovation and technology. A 3D modelling software allows for 3D models to exist. It creates a medium for people to express themselves. A machine that automatically assembles canvases allows for painters to express themselves.

GenAI doesn't allow for people to express themselves, GenAI expresses itself.

And there's a reason why I'd rather talk to a person instead of a chatbot.