You will observe the same in right wing political circles - what they crave is not permission to do the thing (the kind of person doing this - typically ablebodied cishet white male - has precious few restrictions on their behavior) but validation that it is a good thing to have done.
Makes me think of that one Twilight Zone episode.
it's more than that, I think - what they want is not so much validation as unqualified agreement, faling in line - recognition that the man doing it is not merely right but the authority of what's right. they want obedience, not permission
They’re so damned pathetic
A lot of actual artists create slop with no soul, and are fine with doing so, because they - and their customers - aren't looking for soul, they're looking for, well, I'll leave that to the imagination of the reader. But being accused of making slop deeply wounds the prompt goblin.
I think there's a difference between the slop made by artists and the slop made by the prompt goblin. The slop made by artists is junkfood. It's a big fat greasy burger that probably isn't very good for you but will absolutely keep you fed. The prompt goblins are putting out inedible grey paste.
Even the most crass commercial slop is made with human intention. It's still an expression of a human's soul, even if the primary element expressed is "I like paychecks", that's still a human emotion AI can only accidentally regurgitate
For sure. Certain corners of the internet - entire subcultures! - would wither and die without slop. But genAI is an anticulture. It's not load bearing for anything except entitlement.
Real slop artists would be able to answer this question, even if it's "this is what gets people's rocks off."
Getting peoples’ rocks off is an entirely valid artistic goal even.
The difference with real art, regardless of the quality of the art, is that with art there's an entire creative process that carries as much - if not more - meaning and value than just what you see at the end. Prompt goblins are just lazy and don't want to be reminded that they're lazy.
This is what comes to mind. But upon reflection, I think Garfield has been embedded in our culture so long, it has become ensouled.
I have far more respect for Garfield Guy - hell, even for Dilbert Guy - than for the greatest of the latent vector space search engine enthusiasts. They created slop but at least they created.
yup
And Garfield guy was *honest* about it. He didn't lie or cover anything up. When asked why he made Garfield, he just said, "Money." Dude was honest and upfront.
This is why I skew away from the argument to taste, "AI art is BAD art, which is why it must be destroyed!" Humans make bad art too, but quality isn't the problem. The problem is the attempt to establish that humans don't deserve to make art at ALL if a machine can do it passably instead.
It is a targeted bunker buster strike to their shriveled heart because they created the knock off mass effect hentai picture to produce human praise, and instead they got owned. The entire transaction was supposed to be premised on them being a special boy, but nobody else got the memo.
Musk and Zuck and Bezos saw the merest whiff of judgment over their agendas as an unacceptable betrayal because that is how they think as well The deal they made in their heads was that they would have everlasting adoration for their every decision. Turns out they forgot to ask anyone else about it
There's a really good @juliusgoat.bsky.social piece about this - that what supremacists crave most is not being perceived as the kind of person who does the thing that they do. The parallels with prompt goblins should be apparent. The thing they want most is to be seen as producers, not consumers.
Dan Ariely said at least one true thing imo. In a piece about lying, he said everyone -- even someone who's done monstrous things -- wants to be able to look in the mirror and think they're a good person, or at least that they had no other option. Some people need that reassurance externally, too.
bsky.app/profile/spav...
(Honest man)
bsky.app/profile/lucy...
You're so spot on. It's not about buying art - they could always buy art - it's about buying the service of being treated like an artist. They've been able to buy whatever they want their whole lives, but they can never buy the right to be Miyazaki, and it's killing them.
A real catch 22, wherein artists are generally viewed as an unnecessary cost instead of added value. Then, trying to be an artist themselves and not receiving the love the desire is confounding.
I mean, it's not an uncommon response to jealousy, to run down and degrade the object of your jealousy. But the second they think they have a chance to take on that role, they jump on it, and are shocked that it has somehow been run down and degraded.
But (and I think @doriantaylor.com gets credit for this phrasing) they are not on the cutting edge of technology, they are retail users of a tool marketed as "doing all of the work for you." And nothing makes them more furious than having that reality pointed out.
There are parallels in fashion. I say this as someone decidedly *not* into fashion: right wing fashion is decidedly derivative, a lot focused on looking the right way (conformity) and like it is expensive (or what a "poor person" thinks looks expensive).
Actual style is often about not looking the "right" in interesting ways and doesn't need to be expensive. Just thoughtful and expressive
I think @dieworkwear.bsky.social wrote something about that recently but I can't find it
I have been trying to figure out why right-wing women converging on a look is so unsettling. I am not talking about the bizarre plastic surgery MAGA women in/adjacent to power are having done. But the more middle class convergence. We all dress like our social groups or somewhat aspirationally.+
When I was moving to Seattle, someone looked me up and down and told me I already had the look down. And we are quite used to people in the professional world have a consistent look (e.g., corporate law, liberal arts professor). But right-wing women are another thing altogether.
Every one of them has pictured themselves as "more of an ideas guy". i.e. "I come up with the ideas, you do all the work, then we split the profits 80/20."
Addendum: there are a fair number of artists who weren't "good" from a conventional craft POV and their "artistic value" comes entirely from the interesting way in which they were uniquely fucked up. But AI slop isn't unique or interesting, which is sort of the whole deal.
I saw an interesting observation that part of why AI images are so immediately recognisable is that they combine a high level of technical detail with a complete lack of compositional understanding. By the time a human artist could paint like that they would have learnt to compose a picture.
With AI "art" I come back over and over to an observation from Roger Ebert: "[bad movie director] knows that better directors tilt their cameras, but he does not know why."
there was actually a really interesting (IMO) thing with the guy who made the sword waifu back on Twitter. he showed off this AI image of a schoolgirl beheading a dragon, some real artists banged out the same concept as a dunk, all very funny the really interesting one was an MSPaint stick figure
because even though it was just barely more than stick figures, you could really see that sense of motion and composition in that stick figure image, while Shad's thing was just a bunch of detailed components in each other's general vicinity
📌
From a technical perspective, I naively would have thought that one of the first things you could teach AI is proper composition rules. If you train it on a lot of [illegally acquired] art with proper composition, why hasn't it pick that up?
Composition happens at a higher level of abstractions and that's the kind of thing LLMs don't do well. Knowing what pixels are statistically likely to show up next to one another does not tell it how to lead the eye or use sightlines and illumination to show what is important about an image.
Also it has been trained on a lot of images with descriptions added by cheap labour in the developing world. Those descriptions probably didn't include any compositional detail.
It doesn't know what composition is because it doesn't know what an image is, all it can do is blobs in relation to other blobs. It's why it struggles so much with the right number of fingers.
If you give two A1s the same training, will their output be the same from the same prompt?
Nope. What they generate is non-determinative. If you give a single model the same prompt twice the output will differ. This is why consistent characters are so hard w AI, & part of why AI video is so computationally expensive.
Shit, even the same model won't output the same image from the same prompt
Gen AI models have a degree of randomness generally that determines the odds that it chooses a less optimal outcome. If you set this value in the settings to zero (or use the same seed for the RNG in two runs) you will actually get the same result (unless the model is hiding it somehow)
Consumer facing models do not generally expose this because it breaks the image of "magic machine" and because always choosing the optimal next action actually breaks how these models operate (like how if you choose the next suggested word on your phone keyboard you eventually get it to repeat)
And they start from random noise each time they can't generate the same image twice.
The funny thing is that right wingers, as a rule, do not understand this. Since the days of Hitler's "degenerate art" exhibition the emphasis has been entirely on photorealistic technique. Real computational artists (people doing actual algoritmic art, not just prompting) hate genAI dorks too.
Oh man i had a conversation with a coworker about a year ago how art that isn’t photorealistic is arguably more important because with the advent of cameras we dont need paintings to capture whats “actually” there but to capture what the artist sees/feels and thats way more expressive
Also this
And in my view, if you want photorealistic art, take a photo.
I... Did the Al prompter actually compare himself to... Steven Spielberg?!? 😳
He did -- and, in his estimation, came out ahead!
I've said it elsewhere before, it's perversely aspirational to them, comparing themselves to Spielberg, because they want to be seen as Spielberg. But NOT Spielberg the auteur, but Spielberg the brand. The name alone that commands status, respect, and millions of dollars confidently attached.
They think you can just bypass all "unnecessary years" of: - honing your craft - networking and forming connections - proving people you can be relied upon to deliver - being someone people would WANT to work with AI is seen as an express elevator in a world full of retractable ladders to them.
Favorably, even
Thus displaying for all to see that they've no clue what a film director does.
To be fair...i.dont actually know what a director -or a producer!- does either. But i know films dont get made without directors and producers running the project. So like... even with that level of knowledge
Indeed.
This is par for the course for the AI promoter. They think they’re some kind of amazing voice in the field of media analysis, but they’re… it’s funny actually to watch. The sense of righteousness while being a total fucking ghoul with a smile.
not only the ways in which they were fucked up but bc it came from human hands which is why generative art is interesting if the code was crafted by the artist, and not if it isn’t if you code a generative art (not “AI”) tool and you use it, that’s art. if i copy it, & run it again, it’s not.
people don’t consider greeting cards made from commercially bought stamps art but if you carve your own stamp from a block, that’s another story
(missing background: making elaborate greeting cards with rubber stamps, embossing die, cut outs, etc is a whole thing.)
There's so much art to it, too! You collect and curate a library of stamps, choose what goes together, choose composition, match colours, apply techniques to create the effect that ties it together. It's far more than the imagined printing an image on a folded bit of cardstock.
You bet your sweet rubber brayer it’s a whole thing.
Case in point: Anthony Kiedis. To a lesser extent: Will Ferrell. Coming in with that spice/
They can’t explain why the AI chose the style that it did or the color selection it made which a real artist would have no trouble with.
The only variants of generative visual ML that I found interesting when all this was new was the stuff that was essentially interactive, requiring the user to steer the process. Stuff like controlnet, tools that reorient / blend objects in images, style transfer, etc
Text prompts alone isn't more creative than commissioning an artist. It's their creativity, not yours.
Exactly. Prompting an AI isn't making art, it's commissioning art. It's like claiming Pope Julius II did the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel instead of Michaelangelo. Except in generative AI's case, "Michaelangelo" is also doing plagiarism.
This is why nothing AI can make will ever hold a candle to The Room or Troll 2.
I imagine there's a similar explanation behind Elon's embarrassing video game streams
"being accused of making slop deeply wounds the prompt goblin" is the best sentence I read all week, also a fantastic opening for a short story.
As was so famously summed up in “it is not enough that the thing be done, the doing of it must also be praised to the heavens to avoid pissy little babies whining everywhere”
I don't remember where I read it but I've seen stories about how, despite all his wealth and fame, Trump was never actually accepted by the upper crust in New York, and it killed him
Oh yeah, the slumlord from Queens? Of course they didn't
Yes, I feel like this conversation has cycled around for my whole life: you can’t say anything any more/ well you can, it’s just that other people can criticise it
Right Winger: . I'm allowed to say that bc of the 1st amendment. In fact, I should be praised for being brave enough to say something so shitty. Trans Person: The Same Right Winger: Well obviously we need to censor that.
Mmm-hmmmm
They want to compel under penalty of law that we all agree their flatulence actually smells like toasty pancakes.
That's basically it yeah
It also highlights their need to be “proven” as creative and intelligent as acknowledged artists and geniuses without ever putting in the hard work to learn
The day after the election, a Trump voter called into Howard Stern He started in hot, complaining about how hard his life was and that's why he voted for Trump Howard was like, you won. You got what you wanted and I hope you're right about everything it still wasn't enough. It's never enough
He was absolutely incensed that Howard wasn’t praising him or publicly saying that Trump voters were the best and brightest and correct all along It was fascinating to listen to
I hate that so much of the time it's the exact thing Lincoln's Cooper Union speech talks about.
Which is why we must always withhold the approval they crave